For the Navy SEALs Involved, Sunday's Operation Held Great Meaning

Former Navy SEAL Eric Greitens never participated in an operation as strategically, operationally, or tactically complex as the one that killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan on Sunday night, but he told Imus that the brave group of SEALs who carried out the dangerous task had likely been training for months.
 
“They would have gone through every possible contingency, so that they could react on the target,” Greitens said, and used as an example the swiftness with which the team reacted to a downed helicopter at the scene “They were able to quickly react, blow the helo, and still pull everybody off the target. That only comes about because they were practicing that for months.”
 
The group of SEALs that conducted the raid are, Greitens explained, “the nation’s most elite warriors,” all of whom were excited about hitting Bin Laden. What’s more, Greitens added, “They wanted to bring off a treasure trove of intelligence to help roll back the entire Al-Qaeda network.”
 
That nothing went wrong, and that Osama Bin Laden was exactly where intelligence officials and U.S. forces expected he’d be, is owed largely to the professionalism and diligence of the small group of people involved in the operation.
 
“I think they were watching this target for months,” Greitens said “I think they had been developing this target for years. And so by the time it came for them to actually pull the trigger, they were very certain, all up and down the chain of command, that Osama Bin Laden was on the target.”
 
Greitens, author of The Heart and The Fist, could not speculate on whether orders were given to kill Bin Laden, but he noted that Bin Laden had already been declared “hostile,” meaning that troops had permission and authority to kill him unprovoked.
 
Which is exactly what the heroic team of SEALs did, using principles Greitens explained as surprise; speed; and violence of action. “You want to hit the enemy when they’re not expecting it,” he said. “You want to hit them fast, and hit them hard.”
 
One of the main reasons for using this method on Sunday, he noted, was to get in and get out before the Pakistani government could react. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t know what was happening until the United States actually made a phone call and told them what had gone down,” Greitens surmised.
 
Based on his experience as a human being, Greitens believes the people in the neighborhood where Bin Laden was hiding out knew he was there. Based on his experience as a Navy SEAL, he believes the operation has a great deal of meaning for the team involved, beyond the satisfaction of killing public enemy number one.
 
“This was personal for a lot of these guys,” he said. “These are men who have been invested in this fight for nine-and-a-half years. They’ve made tremendous sacrifices, their families have made tremendous sacrifices, they’ve seen comrades taken off the battlefield killed, some of them wounded and disabled. So for them, this was more than just hitting a target. This was really about justice.”
 
And unlike the thousands of Americans who died on 9/11, Bin Laden was not, as Imus pointed out, forced to jump out the window of a burning building. “Apparently he died trying to shield himself with one of his wives,” Imus said. “Which would be the benefit of having more than one wife.”
 
Gotta love silver linings.
 
-Julie Kanfer