Tag: United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group

The SEAL who killed Osama Bin Laden ,in an interview .

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“wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.

It was a mild spring day, April 2012, and our small group, including a few of his friends and family, was shielded from the sun by the patchwork shadows of maple trees. But the Shooter was sweating as he talked about his uncertain future, his plans to leave the Navy and SEAL Team 6.

He stood up several times with an apologetic gripe about the heat, leaving a perspiration stain on the seat-back cushion. He paced. I didn’t know him well enough then to tell whether a glass of his favorite single malt, Lagavulin, was making him less or more edgy.

We would end up intimately familiar with each other’s lives. We’d have dinners, lots of Scotch. He’s played with my kids and my dogs and been a hilarious, engaging gentleman around my wife.

In my yard, the Shooter told his story about joining the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. To escape, he almost by accident found himself in a Navy recruiter’s office. “He asked me what I was going to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be a sniper.

“He said, ‘Hey, we have snipers.’

..

When I was first around him, as he talked I would always try to imagine the Shooter geared up and a foot away from bin Laden, whose life ended in the next moment with three shots to the center of his forehead. But my mind insisted on rendering the picture like a bad Photoshop job — Mao’s head superimposed on the Yangtze, or tourists taking photos with cardboard presidents outside the White House.

Bin Laden was, after all, the man CIA director Leon Panetta called “the most infamous terrorist in our time,” who devoured inordinate amounts of our collective cultural imagery for more than a decade. The number-one celebrity of evil. And the man in my backyard blew his lights out.

ST6 in particular is an enterprise requiring extraordinary teamwork, combined with more kinds of support in the field than any other unit in the history of the U.S. military.

Similarly, NASA marshaled thousands of people to put a man on the moon, and history records that Neil Armstrong first set his foot there, not the equally talented Buzz Aldrin.
http://www.esquire.com/features/man-who-shot-osama-bin-laden-0313

Journalist Phil Bronstein profiled the man in the March issue of Esquire, calling him only the Shooter — a husband, father and SEAL Team Six member who says he happened to pull the trigger on the notorious terrorist. It’s a detailed account of how the raid unfolded, and what comes after for those involved. The headline splashed across the cover reads, “The man who killed Osama bin Laden … is screwed.”

In a statement the Navy responded: “We have no information to corroborate these new assertions. We take seriously the safety and security of our people, as well as our responsibility to assist sailors making a transition to civilian life. Without more information about this particular case, it would be difficult to determine the degree to which our transition programs succeeded…

“They spent, in the case of the shooter, 16 years doing exactly what they’re trained to do, which is going out on these missions, deployment after deployment, killing people on a regular basis, ” said Bronstein, executive chairman of the Center for Investigative Reporting. “They finally get to the point where they don’t want to do that anymore.”

Bronstein reported that the man left SEAL Team Six in September. His family’s health care coverage ceased. Because he retired before the 20-year mark, he gets no pension.

The Shooter is judicious about the details of his story and hasn’t been involved in dramatic books, movies or video games that will make millions for some. It’s out of loyalty to his work and concern about his family’s safety, Bronstein said. The shooter worries what could happen if his name went public, like Matt Bissonnette, the SEAL whose identity was revealed after he published the book “No Easy Day” using a pseudonym. CNN can’t verify the account in Esquire, or the one in Bissonnette’s book.

http://edition.cnn.com/2013/02/11/us/esquire-navy-seal/index.html?iref=obnetwork

‘What did Navy SEAL Mark Owen see when he and his teammates finally made it to the third floor of Osama bin Laden’s compound? Evidence that the 9/11 mastermind had extreme organizational skills. The personal possessions in bin Laden’s dresser and closet were tightly folded and evenly spaced, as if he were in Marine Corps bootcamp, said Owen. “Somebody there had to have had OCD.”

http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-504803_162-57509108-10391709/what-was-in-osama-bin-ladens-closet/

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