Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

SEAL who shot bin Laden speaks out

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • SEAL who shot bin Laden speaks out

    ...

    SEAL who shot bin Laden speaks out
    By Dylan Stableford, Yahoo! News | The Lookout – 12 hrs ago
    SEAL who shot bin Laden speaks out | The Lookout - Yahoo! News

    The Situation Room of the White House on May 1, 2011. (Pete Souza/White House)

    The U.S. Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama bin Laden is speaking out for the first time since the May 1, 2011, raid on the al-Qaida leader's compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

    In an interview with Esquire, the former SEAL—identified as "The Shooter" due to what the magazine described as "safety" reasons—said he's been largely abandoned by the U.S. government since leaving the military last fall.

    He told Esquire he decided to speak out to both correct the record of the bin Laden mission and to put a spotlight on how some of the U.S. military's highly trained and accomplished soldiers are treated by the government once they return to civilian life.

    Despite killing the world's most-wanted terrorist, he said, he was not given a pension, health care or protection for himself or his family.

    "[SEAL command] told me they could get me a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee," he told Esquire.

    Plus, he said, "my health care for me and my family stopped. I asked if there was some transition from my Tricare to Blue Cross Blue Shield. They said no. You're out of the service, your coverage is over. Thanks for your 16 years. Go f--- yourself."

    The problem seems to be that "The Shooter" left the military well before the 20-year requirement for retirement benefits.

    (Esquire)

    According to the magazine, the government provides 180 days of transitional health care benefits, but the Shooter was ineligible because he did not agree to remain on active duty in a support role or become a "reservist." Instead, the magazine noted, he will "have to wait at least eight months to have his disability claims adjudicated."

    The SEAL also gave his account of the historic raid, including the moment he pulled the trigger and shot bin Laden.

    “In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead," he told Esquire. "Bap! Bap! The second time as he’s going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed. He was dead. I watched him take his last breaths. And I remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought: Is this the best thing I've ever done, or the worst thing I've ever done?

    "I'm not religious," he added. "But I always felt I was put on the earth to do something specific. After that mission, I knew what it was."

    He also recalled watching CNN's coverage of the first anniversary of bin Laden's death.

    "They were saying, 'So now we're taking viewer e-mails. Do you remember where you were when you found out Osama bin Laden was dead?' And I was thinking: Of course I remember. I was in his bedroom looking down at his body."

    In September 2012, fellow former SEAL Team 6 member Matt Bissonnette published a controversial book, "No Easy Day," under a pen name about the raid, drawing the ire of both his fellow SEALs and the Pentagon.

    A spokeswoman for Esquire told Yahoo News that the magazine did not pay the SEAL for the interview.
    ================
    Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden - Treatment of Veteran Who Shot bin Laden - Esquire

    What is much harder to understand is that a man with hundreds of successful war missions, one of the most decorated combat veterans of our age, who capped his career by terminating bin Laden, has no landing pad in civilian life.

    Back in April, he and some of his SEAL Team 6 colleagues had formed the skeleton of a company to help them transition out of the service. In my yard, he showed everyone his business-card mock-ups. There was only a subtle inside joke reference to their team in the company name.

    Unlike former SEAL Team 6 member Matt Bissonnette (No Easy Day), they do not rush to write books or step forward publicly, because that violates the code of the "quiet professional." Someone suggested they might sell customized sunglasses and other accessories special operators often invent and use in the field. It strains credulity that for a commando team leader who never got a single one of his men hurt on a mission, sunglasses would be his best option. And it's a simple truth that those who have been most exposed to harrowing danger for the longest time during our recent unending wars now find themselves adrift in civilian life, trying desperately to adjust, often scrambling just to make ends meet.

    At the time, the Shooter's uncle had reached out to an executive at Electronic Arts, hoping that the company might need help with video-game scenarios once the Shooter retired. But the uncle cannot mention his nephew's distinguishing feature as the one who put down bin Laden.

    Secrecy is a thick blanket over our Special Forces that inelegantly covers them, technically forever. The twenty-three SEALs who flew into Pakistan that night were directed by their command the day they got back stateside about acting and speaking as though it had never happened.

    "Right now we are pretty stacked with consultants," the video-game man responded. "Thirty active and recently retired guys" for one game: Medal of Honor Warfighter. In fact, seven active-duty Team 6 SEALs would later be punished for advising EA while still in the Navy and supposedly revealing classified information. (One retired SEAL, a participant in the bin Laden raid, was also involved.)
    .........

    "They [SEAL command] told me they could get me a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee" under an assumed identity. Like Mafia snitches, they would not be able to contact their families or friends. "We'd lose everything."

    Read more: Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden - Treatment of Veteran Who Shot bin Laden - Esquire Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden - Treatment of Veteran Who Shot bin Laden - Esquire
    =================
    Spec Ops Command Isn’t Sweating Osama Shooter’s Magazine Profile
    Spec Ops Command Isn't Sweating Osama Shooter's Magazine Profile | Danger Room | Wired.com
    By Spencer Ackerman
    02.11.13
    6:03 PM

    One of the Navy SEALs depicted in this still from Zero Dark Thirty told his story to Esquire. The U.S. Special Operations Command isn’t so alarmed. Photo courtesy Sony Pictures Publicity

    The U.S. Special Operations Command is sick and tired of its elite forces talking to the media about their secretive missions. Yet it’s not concerned about an epic Esquire piece that purports to profile the SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden dead.

    The command “has no emotions on this article one way or the other,” Col. Tim Nye, the Special Operations Command’s chief spokesman, tells Danger Room.

    Nye didn’t know the Esquire piece, released on Monday, was in the works. He wouldn’t comment on “any classification issues” in the piece, but said that on his initial reading, it contained “very little” about the May 2011 raid that killed the al-Qaida leader “that hasn’t already been made public in other forums.”

    The SEAL himself remains nameless and faceless: Esquire refers to him only as The Shooter. But the magazine ran photos — that The Shooter provided — of his gear, particularly with the patch he wore on his helmet during the raid; discusses his family life; and otherwise pulls back some of the veil of secrecy surrounding the most famous anonymous SEAL in history. He’s “thick, like a power lifter” and covered in “an audacious set of tattoos.”

    This is getting to be a thing with the “quiet professionals” of special operations. Last year another member of the bin Laden raid team, Matt Bissonnette, wrote a book describing the raid that landed him in deep trouble with the Pentagon, although the Defense Department has yet to follow through on a threat to take legal action against him. Other retired SEALs made a campaign ad blasting President Obama over the White House’s own leaks to the press about the raid. Adm. William McRaven, one of the driving forces behind the raid and now the chief of U.S. Special Operations Command, issued an open letter in August telling current and former elite U.S. troops to shut their mouths about their experiences on sensitive missions — a few months after denying that he helped Kathryn Bigelow make Zero Dark Thirty.

    “There is, in my opinion, a distinct line between recounting a story for the purposes of education or entertainment and telling a story that exposes sensitive activities just to garner greater readership and personal profit,” McRaven wrote in August.

    The Shooter isn’t profiting: In fact, he’s out of a job and unsure about his next career move, which is a major theme of the piece. While there’s as much self-promotion in the piece as can be expected of a profile of the guy who killed bin Laden — while not revealing his identity — the article devotes much of its focus to the difficulties he and his colleagues have adjusting to civilian life and a tough economy.

    According to the Esquire piece, The Shooter struck up a relationship with reporter Phil Bronstein shortly after returning from a four-month Afghanistan tour not long after returning from the bin Laden raid. A Washington dinner party in March 2012 was the first time they met, following “several phone conversations and much checking on my journalism background, especially in war zones.” He’s wary of violating operational security, and won’t even confirm whether Bissonnette was really on the raid. But a more fulsome journalistic relationship develops between Bronstein and The Shooter after The Shooter leaves the Navy following a tour in Afghanistan, and much of the piece is devoted to relating details of the raid — seemingly nothing classified — from The Shooter’s perspective.

    For instance: An early alternative to the raid wasn’t just firing a small missile from a drone at bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound (a “hammer throw,” in The Shooter’s phrase), but “bomb[ing] the piss out of the compound with two-thousand-pound ordnance.” SEALs initially thought they were going to an unrelated war zone like Libya when they were called in to discuss an imminent deployment. McRaven is said to have delayed the raid by a day, citing poor weather to his superiors, to prevent it from happening the day of the White House Correspondents Dinner.

    The Shooter is an excitable sort. His favorite word to describe the raid, in retrospect, is “awesome.” He pumped himself up for the raid by listening to the Game and Lil Wayne’s “Red Nation” on the treadmill. Yet The Shooter spends a lot of time reflecting on how the raid seemed doomed. He took to calling his fast-rope team the Martyrs Brigade, as he guessed the house was rigged to explode. If Pakistani troops showed up at the compound, the SEALs’ plan was to surrender, go to jail and wait until Vice President Biden flew to Islamabad to negotiate their release. Not that that reassured The Shooter: “It was either death or a Pakistani prison, where we’d be raped for the rest of our lives.”

    Instead, he was part of a three-person team who ran up to the third floor of the compound, and he himself took the kill shot — on instinct. His generic mission training, for years, involved shooting a lot of dummies with bin Laden visages, and so when he saw the al-Qaida leader, using his youngest wife as a human shield, “That’s him, boom, done.” The compound turned up not just bin Laden’s hard drives (and porn), but duffel bags full of opium. He watched Obama’s announcement of the mission in Afghanistan while eating a sausage, egg, and extra bacon sandwich and thinking: “I wish we could live through this night, because this is amazing. I was still expecting all kinds of funky shit like escape slides or safe rooms.”

    Life after the SEALs hasn’t been as amazing. The Shooter wanted to see his kids grow up, so he retired before the 20 years necessary for his full benefits package to kick in. He’s got to buy health insurance on the open market, but he can’t find a job, and he’s out the $60,000 annual salary he earned as a SEAL. (Former Veterans Affairs official and Iraq/Afghanistan veteran Brandon Friedman tweets that the VA covers five years of health care after separation from the military.) Military transition programs to the civilian job market turn out not to be particularly useful. The Shooter doesn’t want to go into private security — “I don’t have a need for excitement anymore,” he says — and job prospects aren’t turning up.

    Nye said The Shooter’s transition to civilian life is an issue for the Navy, and not Special Operations Command, to address. But he pointed to several command programs designed to ease the adjustment, like its Care Coaliton that aids physically injured elite troops.

    If anything, it’s amazing that The Shooter has stayed nameless and faceless nearly two years after the bin Laden raid. The social pressures for exposure must be enormous, even if special operators wish to remain “quiet professionals.” With his Esquire profile, The Shooter may have figured out a way to balance acclaim and anonymity.
    To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

  • #2
    I feel for the guy, but it doesn't look like its a breakdown in the system but a series of bad judgment calls by the shooter that worked against the systems in-built slow response and inertia.

    Comment


    • #3
      Don't know what he expected nor, given the detailed planning to which he's so routinely accustomed, that his transition to civilian life seems so full of unpleasant surprises. Can't say I'm very sympathetic. He's a grown man who now "can watch his children grow up". If the military isn't offering a severance during forced downsizing then you leave before retirement with nada. If he didn't know that he's very, very stupid. That or he's intentionally trying to play on an unwitting public's naivete.

      He pulled the trigger. Big deal. Lot of men and more than a few women worked to put him in that spot. If not him then a buddy down the hall would have done the same.

      Hope he quickly gets his act together. To be where he was indicates he's a talented guy.

      Adapt. Improvise. OVERCOME.
      "This aggression will not stand, man!" Jeff Lebowski
      "The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what you share with someone else when you're uncool." Lester Bangs

      Comment


      • #4
        I don't particularly feel for the guy. He chose to get out after 16 years but thinks he's owed a pension anyway? Why? The article doesn't say what disabilities he has but everybody know it takes forever to work that. How could he be in that long and not know this? Security for his family? Seriously? If he's that concerned about it what's he doing talking to the media? Besides, he's a freaking SEAL, I'd think that would be like a DIY thing.
        The more I think about it, ol' Billy was right.
        Let's kill all the lawyers, kill 'em tonight.
        - The Eagles

        Comment


        • #5
          If he's that concerned about it what's he doing talking to the media?
          It brings to mind a wise old adage: "Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open one's mouth and remove all doubt"
          sigpic"If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees.
          If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children."

          Comment


          • #6
            Gotta love that OPSEC.

            Comment


            • #7
              As my former First Sergeant (and Denis Leary) put so elequently....Life Sucks; Wear A Helmet.
              “Loyalty to country ALWAYS. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
              Mark Twain

              Comment


              • #8
                Yeah, when I read it my first thought was "Did the guy expect special treatment, or did the writer expect the guy to get special treatment?"

                -dale

                Comment


                • #9
                  I agree with the theme of the posts. He left before his pension by choice, got beaten to the bookshelves, turned down a realistic job offer.

                  The problems with Esquire's bin Laden shooter exposé
                  Writer Phil Bronstein left a few things out of his profile about the heroic, "screwed" former Navy SEAL
                  By Peter Weber | 9:50am EST

                  The problems with Esquire's bin Laden shooter exposé - The Week

                  Esquire had a huge scoop on Monday, posting online an interview with probably the most famous known-unknown man in America: The Navy SEAL who shot and killed Osama bin Laden. The recently retired SEAL, referred to only as the Shooter, revealed some interesting new details about the harrowing bin Laden raid and the death of the al Qaeda leader. He is also, as the article's author, Phil Bronstein, says in the headline, "screwed," left by the Navy with "no pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family." (Watch Bronstein discuss how the Shooter has been forced to live "like a mafia snitch" on NBC's Today above.)

                  Plenty of critics are taking issue with Bronstein's account. First of all, "no servicemember who does less than 20 years gets a pension, unless he has to medically retire," and the Shooter voluntarily left after 16, says Megan McCloskey at Stars and Stripes. But the bigger flaw in Bronstein's buzzy story is that "the claim about health care is wrong." Like every combat veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, the Shooter "is automatically eligible for five years of free healthcare through the Department of Veterans Affairs." Bronstein, who heads up the Center for Investigative Reporting, knows this, but he stands by his story as "both fair and accurate, because the SEAL didn't know the VA benefits existed."

                  "No one ever told him that this is available," Bronstein tells Stars and Stripes, and he didn't include that detail in the article because "that's a different story." That omission isn't just unfair to the Navy and Veterans Affairs administration, veterans' advocate Brandon Friedman tells McCloskey. "When one veteran hears in a high-profile story that another veteran was denied care, it makes him or her less likely to enroll in the VA system."

                  This is hardly the first exposé from members of the SEAL Team 6 that took out bin Laden, and generally speaking, "the U.S. Special Operations Command is sick and tired of its elite forces talking to the media about their secretive missions," says Spencer Ackerman at Wired. But, in this case, says Special Ops spokesman Col. Tim Nye, the command "has no emotions on this article one way or the other." There are actually "several command programs designed to ease the adjustment, like its Care Coalition that aids physically injured elite troops," and several Navy programs to ease the transition from military to civilian life.

                  Whether or not programs are available, the fact that the Shooter has to pay for his own health insurance is still an "explosive revelation," says Aaron Glantz at the Center for Investigative Reporting. It certainly got the attention of senators, who are vowing to look into the long backlog of VA health claims. And if the Shooter didn't know about his five years of free health care, or the special care he is eligible for through Special Forces, he's not alone.

                  Nationwide, VA documents show that nearly 681,000 Iraq and Afghanistan veterans discharged from the military have not sought health care from the VA. According to a study last year from the Urban Institute, 291,000 are uninsured — with neither private health insurance nor VA coverage. [CIR]
                  To sit down with these men and deal with them as the representatives of an enlightened and civilized people is to deride ones own dignity and to invite the disaster of their treachery - General Matthew Ridgway

                  Comment


                  • #10
                    The guy quits four years before his retirement? He apparently has few marketable civilian skills, since the only job he was offered was beer truck driver. He must be at least 34 years old, with 16 years in.

                    He had a military pension coming, if he had finished his 20 - and they probably would have let him do that nice and easy - perhaps they even would have given him some training for a civilian profession.

                    If he wanted the military to reward him - he should have stuck with them, and behaved like a professional. Turning on the hand that feeds you, talking to the press and criticizing your employer - when you need their support?

                    I'm surprised that he was a SEAL, I would have expected better judgment (and more marketable skills) from someone like him (or from any normal person his age).
                    Last edited by USSWisconsin; 12 Feb 13,, 17:21.
                    sigpic"If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees.
                    If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children."

                    Comment


                    • #11
                      Whiskey I agree with you. Coming out and whining is not an option. He decided to go, they let him go.

                      Why would you expect better marketable skills from a professional soldier? They are not trained for that.

                      If he was in some commercial company he could have penalties to pay. For terminating the contract before expiration ;)
                      No such thing as a good tax - Churchill

                      To make mistakes is human. To blame someone else for your mistake, is strategic.

                      Comment


                      • #12
                        Originally posted by Doktor View Post
                        Whiskey I agree with you. Coming out and whining is not an option. He decided to go, they let him go.

                        Why would you expect better marketable skills from a professional soldier? They are not trained for that.

                        If he was in some commercial company he could have penalties to pay. For terminating the contract before expiration ;)
                        I would expect someone who'd been working in their field for 16 ys and had earned an elite position to have gained significant leadership skills. As I understood it, a SEAL needs to be very clever and resourceful, a problem solver. SEAL's aren't regular soldiers, they're trained to work independently as well as in teams and even build their own teams from local guerrilla fighters. I would think someone like that could manage a good paying job. I wonder why he quit before he had located a good position? I doubt they were shoving him out of his job before he started talking to the media. A prospective employer probably wouldn't be too impressed by someone betraying his former employer.

                        How can killing such a scum like bin Laden be so traumatic? The guy was a SEAL, not a civilian. If I was a soldier, I believe I would have a lot more guilt and PTSD about killing a regular enemy soldier in uniform than I would over a terrorist leader/coward like bin Laden.
                        sigpic"If your plan is for one year, plant rice. If your plan is for ten years, plant trees.
                        If your plan is for one hundred years, educate children."

                        Comment


                        • #13
                          Maybe he's a jerk and no one likes him.

                          -dale

                          Comment


                          • #14
                            Publicity campaign prior to the release of a 'tell all book' - a potential book (or some other avenue to market his experiences in the military, specifically the OBL raid, for profit) being the reason behind leaving the Military four years shot of a retirement pension perhaps?
                            Pakistan is not going to be a theocratic state to be ruled by priests with a divine mission - Jinnah
                            https://twitter.com/AgnosticMuslim

                            Comment


                            • #15
                              Knowing how some journalists operate, I wouldn't be surprised if the Esquire writer took the shooter's comments out of context giving them more of a negative spin than the shooter intended. Negative chit chat about personnel matters is common among service members. An outsider listening in would think the military was going to hell in a hand basket. I suspect the shooter is uncomfortable with how he's portrayed in the article. It made him sounds like a whiner...very un-Seal like. I'm reserving my judgement of the shooter until the whole story is told.
                              To be Truly ignorant, Man requires an Education - Plato

                              Comment

                              Working...
                              X