How Could America Forsake the Shooter Who Killed Bin Laden?

For security reasons, in the long interview he gave to Esquire magazine, he is called “the shooter.” In fact, he was a sharpshooter for team ST6 of the Navy Seals, of which he was a member. As part of this commando unit, he went on dozens of secret missions involving the murder of enemy leaders in places like the former Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan. How many people did he kill in total? He said he didn’t keep count. But he claims that he and his team played a role in helping the United States withdraw more quickly from Iraq as local leaders who stirred terror in Baghdad or elsewhere in the country were systematically eliminated. As a matter of fact, he is the human version of the killer drones used by President Obama today to get rid of al-Qaida leaders in Pakistan or Yemen.

He joined the Navy Seals at 19 years old. After his girlfriend left him, he scheduled an appointment with a U.S. Navy recruiting sergeant. “That’s the reason al-Qaida has been decimated,” he joked, “because she broke my f—— heart.” It was on April 1, 2011, during diving training in Miami that he convened with his teammates at the Navy Seals’ headquarters in Virginia Beach. Immediately he knew that this time the stakes were high, because a few days later he ended up at a CIA base in Harvey Point, North Carolina. It was especially clear when the general in charge of special operations led the usual briefing before the mission in a conference room closely guarded and secured. The general told them right away what it was all about: “Okay, we’re as close as we’ve ever been to UBL [sic],” which is the acronym that stands for Osama bin Laden. Specifics followed on the Abbottabad estate in Pakistan, in which the terrorist had been almost undoubtedly located. He also provided intelligence on how the house was being watched, the analyzed comings and goings of the residents, and the way in which the house had been mapped out.

“There was no doubt, it was him”

The rest was routine work: training in Nevada with a setting modeled after the house in Abbottabad. Each move was repeated hundreds of times, with specific procedures used for each door, how each door would be forced open or blasted, the possible location of the residents, and their number as well as the number of women and children. Then, off to a base in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, on an uncomfortable C17 airfreighter. Upon arrival, he met Maya, a CIA analyst who had been tracking bin Laden for months, and who would become the heroine of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty,” to be released in 2013. “100 percent, he’s on the third floor,” she said to him. “So get to there if you can.” She said he looked surprisingly calm. The marksman replied that he and his teammates had rehearsed that so many nights already. “We do this every night. We go to a house, we f— with some people, and we leave. This is just a longer flight.”

Through the story he tells Esquire, it sounds like an actual routine mission, even if the target this time was the most wanted enemy of the West, the person responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people. After 90 minutes in a helicopter, which, he feared, could be spotted at any time by the Pakistanis, the assault against the house in Abbottabad was launched. The shooter was not part of the first team that surrounded the building. When he got inside, he could already see corpses on the staircase, women shouting, and children crying. He had only one thing on his mind: reaching the third floor.

”There was bin Laden standing there. He had his hands on a woman’s shoulders, pushing her ahead, not exactly toward me but by me, in the direction of the hallway commotion. It was his youngest wife, Amal…[bin Laden was] way taller than I was expecting… For me, it was a snapshot of a target ID, definitely him. Even in our kill houses where we train, there are targets with his face on them.”

Thanks to his night vision gear, he obviously had the advantage over bin Laden, who could hear noises but couldn’t see anything because it was pitch black in the bedroom. It was at the moment when the terrorist reached for his AK-47 stored on a shelf that the marksman shot him. Two bullets were shot in his head almost consecutively, then a third one shot for safety reasons when the man collapsed to the ground, beside his bed. “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?”

“Who is the one who killed bin Laden? All of us did.”

Upon his return from the mission to the United States, the shooter, as well as his teammates, was congratulated by the president himself during a very private ceremony at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. But when one of President Obama’s advisers asked the following question, “Who is the one who killed bin Laden?” the shooter gave the following reply: “All of us did.”*

But one does not come back unscathed from such a mission which crowned tens of commando operations of the same kind. The shooter does not want to hear any longer about missions whose sole purpose is to kill, which he used to complete without a second thought. In September 2012, he decided to resign from the Navy Seals after serving actively for 16 years. He needed another 36 months to get a pension. But U.S. law is strict in that respect: he is not entitled to receive anything. The very same day of his resignation, he was informed that he and his family would lose medical coverage by the end of the day and that he had just received his last paycheck. Today, according to Esquire, he still hasn’t found a job and wonders how he will be able to pay for his ex-wife’s alimony and feed his children.

“No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job,” said Barack Obama during a ceremony in honor of veterans. The shooter who avenged America for the 9/11 attacks by killing its most wanted enemy is nonetheless today the symbol of utmost ingratitude which countries sometimes exhibit toward those who have risked their lives for them. Moreover, his life is constantly under threat, because even if America has forgotten, the shooter will always be one of the most wanted individuals on the hit list for jihad fighters all over the world, according to a CIA analyst at the end of the movie “Zero Dark Thirty.”

*Editor’s Note: The original quotation, accurately translated, could not be verified.