The Seal who smiled

American humourist James Thurber’s most famous brainchild was a character named Walter Mitty. He’s just the sort of mousy, mildmannered Nobody who loves to live in heroic daydreams rather than humdrum reality. The psychological impetus behind the Mittesque mindset is easily explained: for a 90-pound weakling, rose-tinted daydreams of being a Navy Seal or a Delta Force daredevil may be infinitely more attractive than the gruelling reality of the work-out that reportedly burns out even the toughest of toughies Team Sixers in just a few years.

What isn’t equally wellknown is the fact that the moniker ‘Team Six’ was chosen to deliberately mislead the enemy at a time when the US Navy had just two Seal teams! But ‘once a Seal’ isn’t always a Seal: they lose their licence to kill after discharge. That probably makes the Walter Mitty mindset even more attractive. In Thurber’s original conception, Walter imagines himself as the pilot of a ‘Navy Hydroplane’ when his wife is complaining that he’s driving too fast! He turns himself into a brilliant surgeon in his mind’s eye while driving past a hospital.

Then he becomes a crackshot being tried for murder only to end up before an imaginary firing squad with “a faint, fleeting smile playing about his lips” . Alas, fantasy is a poor substitute for life. The 40-minute firefight that led to the death of Osama bin Laden was the result of years of painstaking gumshoe work. This seldom breaks into headlines . That makes it anathema to Walter Mitty who has nothing to lose except the incongruity of his life.