I think if I were comparing the memoir to the film, I would center on Roland's cynical letter on page 197-198: "Let him who thinks War is a glorious, golden thing, who loves to roll forth stirring words of exhortation, invoking Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country... realise how grand and glorious a thing it is to have distilled all Youth and Joy and Life into a foetid heap of hideous putrescence!" Roland is referring to the deaths of allies, not the death of an enemy, but his outrage here does seem applicable to the sense of exhausted, mournful anti-climax that I and others felt upon hearing news that we had long since stopped expecting to hear: that Osama bin Laden had been killed. There was very little to celebrate at that moment. The decade-long span of deaths had been too great. To be frank, I disagree with you that Zero Dark Thirty "is meant to stir up feelings of pride in our nation and give the viewers a sense of accomplishment as a united nation." No doubt the film elects, maturely, to leave this kind of disturbing reaction provisionally available to viewers. I've heard reports of people cheering in the theater when the killing of bin Laden is depicted, like dedicated football fans (with their similarly inexplicable sense of personal triumph in "their" team's achievement), epitomizing the "bloodthirsty armchair patriotism" described by Brittain (167). But I think only a foolish, inattentive, or politically unsalvageable viewer could take this kind of unmixed satisfaction from the film. The death itself is portrayed too matter-of-factly to justify that sort of reaction, the aftermath is too equivocal, and the human and psychic cost depicted is too great. (Compare to the gleeful, bloodthirsty cartoon vengeance in the other "historical" revenge movie in theaters right now, Django Unchained, which is as interesting and even more problematic in its own ways). When bin Laden is killed in the film, Maya - an attempt to condense a nation's revenge obsessions and ambivalences into a single imagined persona- confirms his identity by observing the body, and then, in the final shot of the movie, seems to psychologically break down before our eyes. (I can't remember if she actually sheds tears or not.) I don't know if this moment is dramatically earned by the rest of the film, but it does convey the hollowness of admitting, as we must, that the cruelties and terrors depicted in the film amount to mere meat: a dead old man, "Honour and Praise and Valour and Love of Country" emblemized by "a foetid heap of hideous putrescence."