In Bin Laden’s Compound, Seals’ All-Star TeamBy ELISABETH BUMILLER

Published: May 4, 2011

WASHINGTON — There were 79 people on the assault team that killed Osama bin Laden,
but in the end, the success of the mission turned on some two dozen men who lan
ded inside the Qaeda leader’s compound, fought their way to his bedroom and shot h
im at close range — all while knowing that the president of the United States was
keeping watch from Washington.

John Moore/Getty Images

A Seal member preparing to capture top insurgents in 2007 near Fallujah, Iraq. M
embers of Team 6 are the elite of the elite.
Multimedia
Map How Osama bin Laden Was Located and Killed.
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y 5, 2011) The men, hailed as heroes across the country, will march in no parade
s. They serve in what is unofficially called Seal Team 6, a unit so secretive th
at the White House and the Defense Department do not publicly acknowledge its ex
istence. Its members have hunted down war criminals in Bosnia, fought in some of
the bloodiest battles in Afghanistan and shot three Somali pirates dead on a bo
bbing lifeboat during the rescue of an American hostage in 2009.
The raid early Monday morning in Pakistan has nonetheless put a spotlight on a u
nit that has been involved in some of the American military’s most dangerous missi
ons of recent decades.
Leon E. Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, said the Seal
commandos went into the mission with only a 60- to 80-percent certainty that Bin
Laden was in the compound. The commandos made the “split-second decision” to shoot
him — the unarmed Qaeda founder had a rifle within reach, an American official sai
d Wednesday — when they found him in his third-floor bedroom.
There was no debate among former Seal members that whoever had shot Bin Laden ha
d done the right thing.
“It’s dark; there’s been a lot of bullets flying around, a lot of bodies dropping; you
r mission is to capture or kill Bin Laden; who knows what he’s got tucked in his s
hirt?” said Don Shipley, 49, a former Seal member who runs Extreme Seal Experience
, a private training school in Chesapeake, Va.
“It happens in an absolute blink of an eye for these guys,” Mr. Shipley said. “And the
re’s that target in front of you. Second chances cost lives.”
Lalo Roberti, 27, a former Seal member who teaches at Mr. Shipley’s school and too
k part in a gruesome rescue mission in Afghanistan in 2005, concurred. “For us to
take a shot, it has to be bad,” Mr. Roberti said. “Especially for the ‘6’ guys.”
Inside the Navy, there are regular unclassified Seal members, organized into Tea
ms 1 to 5 and 7 to 10. Then there is Seal Team 6, the elite of the elite, or, as
Mr. Roberti put it, “the all-star team.”
Former Seal members said this week that the unit — officially renamed the United S
tates Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or Devgru — was chosen for the bloo
dy Bin Laden raid, the most high-profile operation in the history of the Seals,
because of the group’s skills in using lethal force intelligently in complex, ambi
guous conditions.
All Seal members face years of brutal preparation, including a notorious six mon
ths of basic underwater demolition training in Coronado, Calif. During “hell week,”
recruits get a total of four hours of sleep during five and a half days of nonst
op running, swimming in the cold surf and rolling in mud. About 80 percent of th
e candidates do not make it; at least one has died.
For those who succeed, more training and then deployments follow. After several
years on regular Seal teams, Team 6 candidates are taught to parachute from 30,0
00 feet with oxygen masks and gain control of a hijacked cruise liner at sea. Of
those Seal members, about half make it.
Ryan Zinke, 49, a former member of Seal Team 6 who is now a Republican state leg
islator in Montana, said members of Team 6 had a certain personality: “I would say
cocky, arrogant.”
Seals — the term stands for Sea-Air-Land teams — were created by President John F. K
ennedy in 1962 as a way to expand unconventional warfare.
Seal Team 6 came later as a reaction to the botched rescue mission of American h
ostages in Iran in 1980, when the Pentagon saw the need for what became today’s Sp
ecial Operations Command, with a special Navy unit focused on counterterrorism.
Seal Team 6 has historically specialized in war on the seas, but in the decade s
ince the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it has increasingly fought on land in Iraq a
nd Afghanistan.
Its size is classified, but Team 6 is thought to have doubled to nearly 300 sinc
e then. Over all, there are now about 3,000 active-duty Seal members, split betw
een odd-numbered teams in Coronado and even-numbered teams in Virginia Beach.
Team 6, which is based in an area separate from all the others, at the Dam Neck
Annex of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, has many members in their m
id-30s, a decade or more older than the 20-year-olds who populate the military.
“I used to call it the old man’s club,” Mr. Zinke said.
Reflecting on the growing importance of special operations and guerrilla-type wa
rfare, Seal members have risen since the Sept. 11 attacks to higher levels of pr
ominence within the military.
The officer who designed and oversaw the Bin Laden raid, Vice Adm. William H. Mc
Raven, is a Seal member who is soon to take over leadership of the military’s Spec
ial Operations Command from Adm. Eric T. Olson, also a Seal member. Vice Adm. Al
bert M. Calland III, another Seal member, rose to become deputy director of the
C.I.A. from 2004 to 2006. On Wednesday, the Pentagon announced that Vice Adm. Ro
bert S. Harward Jr., also a Seal member, would become deputy commander of United
States Central Command, making him the second highest-ranking American officer
for the Middle East.
Eric Greitens, a former Seal member who has written a book about his experiences
, “The Heart and the Fist,” said that Seals were misunderstood as the nation’s deadlie
st commandos.
Although the gruesome descriptions of the pictures of Bin Laden with a bullet in
his head would appear to underscore that reputation — and help to explain why Pre
sident Obama decided Wednesday not to release them — Mr. Greitens called Seal memb
ers “creative” commandos who understood “that the mission was not only to kill Obama b
in Laden; it was also to bring back as much intelligence as they possibly could.”
The cache the Seal team recovered from the Bin Laden compound included more than
 100 storage devices — DVDs, thumb drives and computer discs — as well as 5 computer
s and 10 computer hard drives.
Despite the mission’s success, former Seal members acknowledged the precariousness
of the raid and the degree of luck involved. “If that thing had gone bad, the con
versation you and I would be having would be completely different,” Mr. Shipley sa
id. “There’s only two ways to go in these operations — zero or hero.”
A version of this article appeared in print on May 5, 2011, on page A12 of the N
ational edition with the headline: In Bin Laden’s Compound, Seals’ All-Star Team..