Awesome article. Super long read, so here are some highlights:
"we turned the corner, saw the helos we'd actually use, and I started laughing. I told the guys, "The odds just changed. There's a 90 percent chance we'll survive." They asked why. I said, "I didn't know they were sending us to war on a fucking Decepticon."
*
"Bin Laden was the only adult male left to find. ... On the third floor, there were two chicks yelling at us and the point man was yelling at them and he said to me, 'Hey, we need to get moving. These bitches is getting truculent.' I remember saying to myself, Truculent? Really? Love that word. ..."
*
"One of the snipers who'd seen the disabled helo approached just before they went into the main building. He said, "Hey, dude, they've got an awesome mock-up of our helo in their yard." I said, "No, dude. They shot one of ours down." He said, "Okay, that makes more sense than the shit I was saying."
*
"...Obama said, Hell no. My guys are not surrendering. What do we need to rain hell on the Pakistani military? That was the one time in my life I was thinking, I am fucking voting for this guy. I had a picture of him lying in bed at night, thinking, You're not fucking with my guys. Like, he's thinking about us."
*
In fact, during the Shooter's Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in the mid-nineties, the torture-chamber menu of physical and emotional resistance and resolve required to get into the SEALs, there was actually a death and resurrection.
"One of the tests is they make you dive to the bottom of a pool and tie five knots," the Shooter says. "One guy got to the fifth knot and blacked out underwater. We pulled him up and he was, like, dead. They made the class face the fence while they tried to resuscitate him. The first words as he spit out water were 'Did I pass? Did I tie the fifth knot?' The instructor told him, 'We didn't want to find out if you could tie the knots, you asshole, we wanted to know how hard you'd push yourself. You killed yourself. You passed.'"
*
There are the now-famous pranks with a giant dildo — they called it the Staff of Power — discovered during training in an abandoned Miami building. SEALs would find photos of it inserted into their gas masks or at the bottom of a barrel of animal crackers they were eating. Goats were put in their personal cages at ST6 headquarters. Uniforms were borrowed and dyed pink. Boots were glued to the floor. Flash-bang grenades went off in their gear.
The area near the Shooter's cage was such a target for outlandish stunts that it was called the Gaza Strip.
Even in action, with all their high state of expertise and readiness, "we're normal people. We fall off ladders, land on the wrong roof, get bitten by dogs." In Iraq, a breacher was putting a charge on a door to blow it off its hinges when he mistakenly leaned against the doorbell. He quickly took off the charge and the target opened the door. We were like, "You rang the fucking doorbell?!" Maybe we should try that more often, the Shooter thought to himself.
The dead can also be funny, as long as it's not your guys. "In Afghanistan we were cutting away the clothes on this dead dude to see if he had a suicide vest on, only to find that he had a huge dick, down to his knees. From then on, we called him Abu Dujan Holmes.
*
"I agree that civilian life is scary. And I've got a family to take care of. Most of us have nothing to offer the public. We can track down and kill the enemy really well, but that's it.
"If I get killed on this next deployment, I know my family will be taken care of." (The Navy does offer decent life-insurance policies at low rates.) "College will be paid for, they'll be fine.
"But if I come back alive and retire, I won't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out for the rest of my life. Sad to say, it's better if I get killed."
*
"That's not normal!" Though she knows that "every time you send your husband off to war, you get a slightly different person back."
*
While they were still checking the body, I brought the agency woman over. 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.
*
The blood is your own, not fake splatter and explosive squibs.
Movies, books, lore — we all helped make these men brilliant assassins in the name of liberty, lifted them up on our shoulders as unique and exquisitely trained heroes, then left them alone in the shadows of their past.
Uncertainty will never be far away for the Shooter. His government may have shut the door on him, but he is required to live inside the consequences of his former career.
One line from the film kept resonating in my head.
An actor playing a CIA station chief warns Maya about jihadi vengeance.
"Once you're on their list," he says, "you never get off."