‘For God and country’

I have jested to friends and family time and again that the reason the worldwide manhunt for Al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, had failed to turn up any substantial lead for 10 years was because they deployed CIA and British SAS men. All they needed was one woman — a jealous wife or girlfriend — who was certain to find him.

Guess who finally tracked down Osama Bin Laden in his safe house in Abbottabad, around 35 miles North of Islamabad, Pakistan?

 I just saw Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow’s documentary-style movie on Mission Geronimo that hunted down Bin Laden. This is her second military movie, after the critically acclaimed and award-winning The Hurt Locker. Seeing the film was the culmination of my obsession with the hunt for Bin laden, who had remained elusive for over 10 years. 

But at long last, on May 2, 2012, months after a woman CIA operative had tracked down Bin Laden, code-named “Geronimo,” in Abbottabad, Pakistan, 24 US Navy Seals plus one dog and a Pashto translator raided his safe house.

 According to an Associated Press report published at codenamegeronimo.com, the mission, which took months of preparation, was over in 38 minutes, commencing with the Seals dropping down from two helicopters and ending with one of the Seals radioing the mission commander, Admiral Bill McRaven, “Geronimo E.K.I.A. (Enemy Killed in Action).”

“We got him,” President Barrack Obama tersely replied, as he watched a live stream of the raid with his National Security team from a White House conference room.

In the succeeding weeks, a deluge of accounts flooded the Internet. I pored over volumes of text, piecing together information from official US statements, off-the-record interviews and other news sources, collating common denominators and ending up with a comprehensive narrative. There were few verified “facts” since military mission details always remain classified. It didn’t matter much because more than the excitement that was brought on by years of CIA sleuthing and months of their agonizing over whether to strike or not and more than the victory of Bin Laden’s neutralization, it was the Navy Seals that fascinated me.

According to an article on bbc.co.uk, The United States Navy’s Sea, Air, Land Teams — commonly known as the US Navy SEALs — are the US Navy’s principal special operations force. They are known for special tactics they have developed through years of missions both local and foreign.

There has got to be superhuman brain wiring in such elite soldiers who are trained and programmed to dispense with human emotions like fear, anxiety, pity; withhold judgment; and focus only on any one mission’s objective. Psychotherapist Carl Jung theorized that there are personalities predisposed to such occupations. Jung outlined 16 personality types, one of which is the Ares type, named after the Greek God of War. This is a take-charge personality, often comfortable with only one means of self-expression: physical prowess, and possession of a singularity of purpose: to battle in order to defend, protect or rescue. Soldiers fall into this category, committing themselves to a lifestyle devoted to this cause — the only one they know.

In the months leading to the SEAL raid (Operation Geronimo) in Abbottabad, the CIA operatives under the leadership of agency director Leon Panetta, had tapped Admiral Bill McRaven as raid mission commander. McRaven is a Navy SEAL who led the Joint Special Operations Command, an army within an army that during the past decade had conducted thousands of operations around the world, mostly in secret.

Marc Bowden, American writer and author of Black Hawk Down, weaved together accounts from President Obama himself and top decision makers of Operation Geronimo and wrote in his November 2012 Vanity Fair article, “McRaven suggested use of his Seal Team and how their special ops would hit the target. McRaven also noted that, no matter how well the operation in Abbottabad was planned, long experience taught that something would go wrong. Something always went wrong, which was why his men’s unrivaled experience would be invaluable.”

On May 2, a moonless night, 24 SEALs clambered out of helicopters down to the ground, charging at the Bin Laden safe house.  Like McRaven had said, what could have gone wrong did. One helicopter, supposed to deliver SEALs on the rooftop and hovering above its target landing site, experienced “a hazardous airflow condition known as a vortex ring state,” according to bbc.co.uk. This was aggravated by higher than expected air temperature causing the helicopter’s tail to graze one of the compound’s walls, damaging its tail rotor and making it roll onto its side. The pilot quickly buried the aircraft’s nose to keep it from tipping over.  But the SEALs, uninjured, carried on.

After 38 minutes, three other men and a woman staying in the safe house in addition to Bin Laden, were killed and three AK-47s, two pistols, computer hard drives, DVDs, thumb drives, and “electronic equipment” were hauled back to US military bases for later analysis. 

President Obama’s terse “We got him” ended the 10-year search for the man responsible for killing over 3,000 Americans during 9/11, and countless others in terrorist attacks across the globe.

Bowden said that the SEAL Team commander told the President that their mission had been “10 years in the making.” The capability he and the other men in the team represented had been honed over all those years of combat. Their skills and tactics had been purchased with the lives of others.

In addition to Jung’s theory on the Ares personality born to pursue lives lived on the edge, I think men of the Ares type — soldiers, firemen and policemen mostly — turn to their profession to simplify their lives. Never is it more purpose-oriented, more singularly focused on one definitive end than when one is in service of defending a nation. Outside of the corps or the troops or the service, we are all deluged by civilian choices — dozens of them every day — from the mundane to the life-altering, most of them hovering in the gray area between good and bad, honorable and sketchy, legal and indictable.

Men in the force are excused from seemingly inconsequential preoccupations of daily civilian life.  They move around in a high-stakes, high returns world (returns in the currency of self-fulfillment and sense of achievement). They don’t bother with what to have for lunch (they eat what they are served); what to wear to a party (they live in regulation olive drabs); what project to concentrate on (they follow orders).  They are tasked with protecting and saving lives and preventing an apocalypse. This is the reason they endure even in the face of daily danger. 

In Bigelow’s movie Zero Dark Thirty, after the execution of Bin Laden, one Navy Seal radios command base saying, “For God and country: Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.” This, along with some other scenes, was Bigelow’s Hollywood spin on the mission and not the way it actually happened. In reality, the SEAL merely said, “Geronimo ID’d. Geronimo E.K.I.A.” But he might as well have said, “For God and country,” because it sure was.

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Thank you for your letters. You may reach me at cecilelilles@yahoo.com.