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 with Bronstein develops The Shooter leaves the Navy shortly after his return from 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
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Spec Ops Command Isn't Sweating Osama Shooter's Magazine Profile
