Make Your Bed: Little Things That Can Change Your Life...and Maybe the World

Chapters 7 and 8 compare different kinds of fear. Though McRaven doesn’t acknowledge this, several of his examples are about misdirected or otherwise unjustified fear. One kind of fear is based in ignorance and received superstitions. Here, the SEAL instructors training McRaven and other recruits to swim in the open ocean played on their conviction that the water off the coast of California teemed with dangerous sharks. In reality, sharks almost never attack humans—there were only four unprovoked shark attacks in California in 2022, none of which resulted in fatalities. However, McRaven does not explore this reality—instead, he considers his triumph over the would-be danger a lesson in facing down bullies of all stripes.

In another example of misplaced fear, McRaven returns to the capture of Saddam Hussein. Hussein terrified his subjects when in power as a brutal and repressive dictator who didn’t hesitate to use vicious force to put down dissent. However, it is less clear what made Hussein so personally scary to McRaven, who encountered him as a deposed, captured, and imprisoned man awaiting a war crimes trial. The visual of McRaven repeatedly entering Hussein’s cell to demonstrate his lack of fear is an odd one—an armed free man in charge of some of the most physically intimidating men in the US trying to prove something to a 66-year-old man in deteriorating health who no longer has access to his troops, weapons, or other implements of power. Readers would be forgiven for wondering who the bully is in the scenario.

McRaven is on surer footing when discussing internally-driven fears. For him, the threat of death—something he names as his biggest fear—drove the determination to rise to every occasion with courage and self-respect, and to act out of a sense of honor and nobility. The closest McRaven comes to facing his own mortality is in observing the ceremonies of soldiers’ bodies being brought home for burial. The sight does not provoke questions about the particulars of war, of the military as an institution, or any other large systemic concerns; however, McRaven does point out that the need to face the deaths of loved ones is something almost every person can relate to.