The SEAL Team 6 member who personally killed Osama bin Laden and saw the Al Qaeda leader’s “brains spilling out over his face” is worried about his own future.
The now-retired “shooter,” as he is called in an exclusive interview with Esquire, is unemployed, has no pension or health benefits and is separated from his wife, the magazine reports.
Pete Souza/AP
President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and other advisers watch the Osama bin Laden raid.
Following his heroism in Abbottabad, the shooter retired from the military after a 16-year career. If he had stayed for 20 years, he would have been eligible for a pension of $2,197.00 per month, the same amount a member of the Navy choir would receive, the Esquire story notes.
Unable to find work, the shooter’s uncle tried to get him a job with Electronic Arts. Who better to advise a video game company than the man who pumped three bullets into Osama bin Laden’s head, but that detail would not be on the shooter’s resume.
Muhammed Muheisen/AP
Pakistani men stand looking at the house where Osama bin Laden was caught and killed in Abbottabad, Pakistan.
“He’s taken monumental risks,” the shooter’s dad told Esquire. “But he’s unable to reap any reward.”
SEAL Team 6 took plenty of risks on that historic night of May 1, 2011.
In conversations with Esquire, the shooter said that he was the last person to see Osama bin Laden alive. He was the one who went through bin Laden’s bedroom door and saw the Al Qaeda leader pushing his youngest wife in front of him in the darkened room. He believes bin Laden may have been using the woman as a shield.
Jonathan Olley/jonathanolley.co.uk
‘Zero Dark Thirty’ is the story of the Osama bin Laden raid.
“In that second, I shot him, two times in the forehead. Bap! Bap!,” the Navy SEAL recounted. “The second time as he’s going down. He crumpled onto the floor in front of his bed and I hit him again, Bap! same place. That time I used my EOTech red-dot holo sight. He was dead. Not moving. His tongue was out. I watched him take his last breaths, just a reflex breath.”
The Al Qaeda leader, the mastermind behind the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, was finally dead.
©Columbia Pictures/courtesy Eve
SEAL Team 6 goes after bin Laden in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’
“His forehead was gruesome,” the shooter told Esquire. “It was split open in the shape of a V. I could see his brains spilling out over his face. The American public doesn’t want to know what that looks like.”
With bin Laden dead and his young wife screaming, the shooter noticed that a young boy was screaming on the other side of the bed. It was bin Laden’s son.
“I didn’t want to hurt him, because I’m not a savage,” he told Esquire. “There was a lot of screaming, he was crying, just in shock. I didn’t like that he was scared. He’s a kid, and had nothing to do with this. I picked him up and put him next to his mother. I put some water on his face.”
Charles Dharapak/ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Obama talks with U.S. Navy Vice Admiral William H. McRaven, commander of Joint Special Operations Command, just days after McRaven led operational control of Navy SEAL Team Six’s successfully mission to kill Osama bin Laden.
Seal Team 6 then flew to the base in Jalalabad where the body was officially identified.
“While they were still checking the body, I brought the agency woman over,” he said. “I still had all my stuff on. We looked down and I asked, ‘Is that your guy?’ She was crying. That’s when I took my magazine out of my gun and gave it to her as a souvenir. Twenty-seven bullets left in it. ‘I hope you have room in your backpack for this.’ That was the last time I saw her.”
STR/PAKISTAN/REUTERS
Osama bin Laden in 1998, three years before the Sept. 11 attacks.
The team then brought the body to Bagram Airfield, where they watched President Obama’s announcement.
“I’m sitting there watching him, looking at the body, looking at the President, eating a sausage-egg-cheese-and-extra-bacon sandwich thinking, ‘How the f— did I get here? This is too much,” he said.
The shooter served one more four-month deployment after the raid, and then retired.
But he is struggling in his attempt to find a new life. He and his wife are separated, and the family lives in fear of reprisals.
“We’re actually looking into changing my name,” his wife told Esquire. “Changing the kids’ names, taking my husband’s name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other.”
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