TL;DR
Admiral William McRaven’s memoir of a life in special operations, from a childhood in France through SEAL training to the capture of Saddam Hussein, the Captain Phillips rescue and the bin Laden raid. He later commanded U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill.
William McRaven’s first book after Make Your Bed was the one most readers had been waiting for: the full story.
Sea Stories came out from Grand Central Publishing in May 2019 and became a New York Times bestseller. It’s a career memoir told the way the title promises, as a series of stories.
What is Sea Stories about?
It starts with a kid.
It opens in 1960 at an American officers’ club in France, where McRaven’s father was stationed, and follows a military kid who liked sneaking into places he wasn’t supposed to be. It covers SEAL training, where 33 of the 155 men who started his class finished, and his early years in the teams.
One of the earlier operations is a 1990 mission during Desert Shield to intercept an Iraqi tanker. It’s the kind of story that never made the news and that he clearly enjoys telling.
The second half moves through his commands. McRaven writes about the capture of Saddam Hussein, the 2009 rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates and, at the end, the May 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. Reviewers singled out that final section as the strongest in the book.
In it he describes, among much else, how the team confirmed the height of the man they’d killed: a SEAL of known height lay down beside the body. Plenty of the stories are small and funny. McRaven doesn’t take himself too seriously, and that keeps a book full of dangerous missions readable.
Who is William McRaven?
McRaven commanded Joint Special Operations Command from 2008 to 2011 and U.S. Special Operations Command at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa from 2011 to 2014. He retired as a four-star admiral after more than 37 years and became chancellor of the University of Texas System. He’d written Spec Ops, a study of special operations raids, back in 1995, and after Sea Stories came The Hero Code and The Wisdom of the Bullfrog.
He has written more books than most retired admirals: Spec Ops in 1995, then Make Your Bed, Sea Stories, The Hero Code and The Wisdom of the Bullfrog.
What did critics say about Sea Stories?
Kirkus found much of the book anecdotal and named the bin Laden chapter its strongest. Publishers Weekly was warmer, and singled out the same chapter.
McRaven reads the audiobook himself. Since retiring he has joined the boards of ConocoPhillips and Palantir, and in 2024 he received a $50 million Courage and Civility Award from Jeff Bezos.
What can a memoir writer learn from Sea Stories?
It shows how to build a memoir from episodes instead of a chronology.
Each chapter is a story that could stand on its own, the kind an officer has told at a hundred dinners. Strung together, they become a life.
That structure suits many retired leaders. The stories they already tell at reunions and retirement dinners are the raw material. The work is choosing which ones belong, cutting the ones that only made sense to the people who were there, and putting the rest in an order that carries a stranger from the first page to the last without needing a map of the author’s career.
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