Navy SEAL author cashing in on Special Ops video game
Matt Bisonnette also wrote a book on the bin Laden raid.
There's more than one way to profit from your experience in the military. For Matt Bisonnette, the former Navy SEAL Team 6 member who wrote a book about killing Osama bin Laden, that includes offering consulting services to a big name video game maker.
The Los Angeles Times' Alex Pham reports that Bissonnette is a consultant for Electronic Arts' upcoming Special Forces video game Medal of Honor: Warfighter . For video game sequences based in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the game's Los Angeles developers are putting a premium on authenticity, according to Pham, and are working closely with Bissonnette's consulting firm Silent R. "The team consulted with several special forces soldiers to make sure the settings, weapons and other aspects of the fighting within the game was realistic," reports Pham. "One of those consultants was Bissonnette."
The news of Bissonnette's latest business endeavor comes as he receives a wave of criticism from current and former service members in the Special Ops community for writing No Easy Day , set for release September 11. "When you leave the compound, you leave the secrets there," said Don Mann, a former member of SEAL Team 6 speaking with the Daily Beast's Eli Lake . “As soon as bin Laden was killed, it was known I was a member. I got three lucrative offers. I told them, ‘What I know you would want to know, I am not going to let you know.'"
Roger Castens, a former Army Special Forces officer, expressed similar displeasure with the book's release. “I am on a few list-servs,” he told Lake. “This topic has been a heavy and heated discussion with almost everyone asking WTF?”
It should be said in Bissonnette's defense, his publisher Dutton says , "the majority" of proceeds from the book will go to "unnamed charities that support families of Navy SEALs killed in the line of duty." In addition, there's also the public interest argument that the story deserves to be told from a first person account, given the number of revisions there's been to the official White House account. As Bissonnette writes in the book , "it is time to set the record straight about one of the most important missions in U.S. military history."
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Below, a trailer for Medal of Honor: Warfighter :