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Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden - Treatment of Veteran Who Shot bin Laden - Esquire
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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.
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
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.
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.
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