McRaven says honor means upholding America’s core values

Retired Adm. William McRaven is using the release of his new book to make a larger argument about American life: honor, in his view, is not nostalgia but a public obligation. The former commander of U.S. Special Operations Command said honor is “about upholding the values that were baked into our national DNA,” a standard that reaches well beyond military service and into the conduct expected of civic and political institutions.

That message carries weight because McRaven is not speaking from abstraction. He organized Operation Neptune Spear, the special operations raid that killed Osama bin Laden on May 2, 2011, and his name became synonymous with one of the defining missions of the post-9/11 era. The operation began from Jalalabad, Afghanistan, shortly before 10:30 p.m. local time on May 1, 2011, when two helicopters carrying 23 SEALs, an interpreter and a military working dog took off for Abbottabad, Pakistan. The mission unfolded over about 40 minutes, and after the firefight, bin Laden was killed and his body taken into custody.

President Barack Obama announced the death in a televised late-night address on May 1, 2011, calling it the most significant achievement to date in the nation’s effort to defeat al Qaeda. Ten years later, Obama and McRaven publicly revisited the raid and the many people who made it possible, reinforcing a point often lost in the mythology surrounding the operation: it was a collective achievement, not the work of one man alone.

McRaven’s latest book, Duty, Honor, Country & Life: A Tribute to the American Spirit, was published April 21, 2026 and gathers speeches, letters, toasts and poems that he says reflect civility, decency and other time-honored American values. That framing matters now, when public life often rewards aggression, grievance and spectacle over discipline and restraint. McRaven, a retired U.S. Navy four-star admiral who served nearly four decades in uniform and led U.S. Special Operations Command from 2011 to 2014, is offering a different measure of leadership: character tested by service.

His argument also echoes the language of West Point, whose Cadet Honor Code stresses integrity and the development of leaders of character. McRaven’s famous 2014 University of Texas commencement speech, “Make Your Bed,” made him widely known beyond military circles; this new volume extends that voice into a broader national debate over what duty, honor and country should demand from the people and institutions entrusted with public power.