Who shot bin Laden? Former SEALs fill in the blanks - The Washington Post

Who shot bin Laden? Former SEALs fill in the blanks

The Washington Post

By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Published: May 3

Who shot Osama?
He’s out there somewhere, an instant icon in the annals of American conflict,
the ultimate big-game hunter. But an enigma, too, his identity cloaked for now,
and maybe forever.
He is the unknown shooter. The nameless, faceless triggerman who put a bullet
in the head of the world’s most notorious terrorist.
Yet there are clues, and the beginnings of a portrait can be pieced together
from scraps gleaned from U.S. officials. A trio of former Navy SEALs — Eric
Greitens, Richard Marcinko and Stew Smith — helped us fill in the blanks,
drawing from their experiences to develop a kind of composite sketch of an
elusive historic figure in real time.

He’s likely between the ages of 26 and 33, says Marcinko, founder of the
elite “SEALs Team 6” — now known as DEVGRU — that many believe led the assault
on bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. He’ll be old enough to have had
time to hurdle the extra training tests required to join the elite
counter-terrorism unit, yet young enough to withstand the body-punishing rigors
of the job. The shooter’s a man, it’s safe to say, because there are no women in
the SEALs. And there’s a good chance he’s white, though the SEALs have stepped
up efforts to increase the number of minorities in their ranks, Marcinko and
Smith say. A “positive thinker” who “gets in trouble when he’s not challenged,”
Marcinko suspects, a man who “flunked vacation and flunked relaxing.”

He was probably a high school or college athlete, Smith says, a physical
specimen who combines strength, speed and agility. “They call themselves
‘tactical athletes,’ ” says Smith, who works with many prospective SEALs in his
Heroes of Tomorrow training program in Severna Park. “It’s getting very
scientific.”
Marcinko puts it in more conventional terms: “He’ll be ripped,” says the
author of the best-selling autobiography “ Rogue
Warrior .” “He’s got a lot of upper-body strength. Long arms. Thin
waist. Flat tummy.”
On this point, Greitens departs a bit. “You can’t make a lot of physical
assumptions,” says the author of “The
Heart and the Fist: The Education of a Humanitarian, the Making of a Navy
SEAL.” There are SEALs who are 5 feet 4 and SEALs who are 6 feet 5, Greitens
says. In his training group, he adds, there were college football studs who
couldn’t hack it; those who survived were most often men in good shape, but they
also had a willingness to subsume their concerns in favor of the mission.
The shooter’s probably not the crew-cut, neatly shaven ideal we’ve come to
expect from American fighting forces. “He’s bearded, rough-looking, like a
street urchin,” Marcinko supposes. “You don’t want to stick out.” Marcinko calls
it “modified grooming standards.”
His hands will be calloused, Smith says, or just plain “gnarled,” as Marcinko
puts it. And “he’s got frag in him somewhere,” Marcinko says, using the
battlefield shorthand for “fragments” of bullets or explosive devices. This will
not have been the shooter’s first adventure. Marcinko estimates that he might
have made a dozen or more deployments, tours when he was likely to have run
afoul of grenades, improvised explosive devices or bullets.
Chances are he’s keeping score. Smith, who served in the SEALs from 1991 to
1999, got together recently with five Navy SEALs, some of whom he’d served with
and others whom he’d trained. “They were responsible for 250 dead terrorists,”
Smith says. “They know their number.”
But there are terrorists, and then there are TERRORISTS. Bin Laden falls into
the latter category. It’s hard to imagine someone not wanting to take credit for
such a significant kill. Yet revealing SEALs’ identities would make them targets
for al-Qaeda sympathizers and would also make it difficult or impossible for
them to participate in future secret operations.
The identities of other key players in the war against terrorism remain
anonymous. No one has identified the troops who slapped cuffs on Iraqi dictator
Saddam Hussein or named the pilots who dropped the bombs that killed Abu Musab
al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaeda in Iraq. Times have certainly changed. Another
era’s military history-makers were frequently publicly identified — Paul
Tibbets, the pilot of the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped a nuclear bomb on
Hiroshima, wasn’t a mystery. But this is a different kind of war — a kind of
perpetual, amorphous conflict — one much less likely to see a formal declaration
of peace. Also it’s likely the shooter’s superiors would forbid him and his
colleagues to reveal his identity.
“This is playing in the Super Bowl and getting the Oscar all in one breath.
He wants credit,” Marcinko supposes of the shooter who felled bin Laden. “But
only among his peers.” Many SEALs consider themselves “humble warriors,”
Greitens says.
But among his colleagues, the shooter’s identity will be well-known. And
right now, he’s probably in for some locker-room-style ribbing.
“They’re gonna hard-ass him,” Marcinko says. “It’ll be, ‘If I’d have been
there, it’d have been done in 20 minutes instead of 40 minutes.’ ” Smith can
envision the shooter’s pals razzing him about the precise location of the shot.
But, in the culture of the SEALs, it’s not as if he won’t push back. He’ll come
back at them, Marcinko says, with something like: “Talk is cheap. I did it. I
left my mark in the sand.”
There are sure to be awards and honorifics, all done in private. But the
shooter is likely looking for some moments of peace, a way to completely remove
himself from the pressure cooker. “These guys can one day be killing on the
other side of the world and then mowing the grass 24 hours later,” Smith says.
But given the chance, he’ll almost certainly want to get right back into the
action, to feel the rev of adrenaline again. “He keeps going,” Marcinko
predicts. “He wants to prove that it wasn’t a fluke.” He’ll be thinking: “Let me
prove I really did know what I’m doing.”
When the next helicopter is fueled and ready to whirl away, Greitens says,
the Unknown Shooter will “be the first one running for the helo.”