Tag Archives: war

I don’t know how they did it, but Esquire was able to track down and interview the Navy SEAL that waxed Osama bin Laden. Here are some interesting notes pulled from the article.

He joined the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. When the recruiter asked him what he wanted to do, he said he “wanted to be a sniper.”
He gave his gun magazine to the female CIA analyst that we all know from the Movie Zero Dark 30. He had only fired 3 rounds. All lethal shots. All at Osama.
The article mentions how other Seal Team 6 members took turns firing a personal shot into the body after he was killed.
After serving 16 years in the Navy, he has nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family. How is this possible? He’s leaving early, so all coverage stops.
He and his wife are officially separated, but continue to share a house on very friendly, even loving terms, largely to save money.
His wife and kids have trained for emergencies in the home. They have guns and know how to use them.
Out of fear for his family’s safety, and here is the “bolt” bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.
They are planning on changing their names to protect themselves from would-be attackers.
He’s about to leave the Navy and is in financial hardship, and the government isn’t doing much to help.
He was told that if his name was ever released publicly, his family could be moved into witness protection and he could be given a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee. Of course, he’d have to cut off all contact from his family and would never see any of them again. He’d lose everything.
His children to not mention bin Laden’s name and that it’s a curse word. Instead they refer to him as “Poopyface”.
They took an Ambien on their way to Afghanistan, first stopping in Germany.
He wrote letters to his kids before the mission in case he didn’t survive. Tears hit the paper as he wrote. He gave the letters to an intel guy not on the mission, with instructions. He would shred them if he made it back.
The last briefing included a story from the movie Hoosiers.
He did the treadmill while they waited for orders from Obama to go. He listened to “Red Nation” by the rapper Game. “It’s about leaving blood on the ground. We were the Red Team and we were going to leave some blood.”
During the copter ride to the compound he counted to a thousand forward and then backwards to pass the time.
He had to pee really bad so he pissed in a water bottle on the chopper. He realized after he shot bin Laden in the face that he still had a bottle of piss in his pocket.
After killing the target he grabbed bin Laden’s son, placed him next to his mother, and washed his face.
He watched the president’s speech about the raid with bin Laden’s body in view while eating a sausage-egg-cheese-and-extra-bacon sandwich.
When an administration official who asked had the kill shot, the actually shooter spoke up and only said “We all did.”
The dog in the raid actually survived being shot in the chest on a previous mission.
When we first started the war in Iraq, SEALS were using Metallica music to soften people up before we interrogated them. “Metallica got wind of this and they said, ‘Hey, please don’t use our music because we don’t want to promote violence.’ “I thought, Dude, you have an album called Kill ‘Em All.“

Buy Zero Dark Thirty on DVD
Buy books about the raid