Inside SEAL Team Six(100)

Four days later al-Qaeda released a statement confirming their leader’s death and vowing revenge.

When President Obama arrived at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, on May 5 to congratulate the team and present them with a Presidential Unit Citation, he said, “I had fifty-fifty confidence that Bin Laden was there, but I had one hundred percent confidence in you guys. You are literally the finest small-unit fighting force that has ever existed in the world.”



I know about a dozen members of the UBL assault team, and I’m enormously proud of them. Though I understand the public’s curiosity, I see no good reason to reveal their identities, which is why I won’t say more here.

The important thing is, SEAL Team Six had extinguished our country’s number one enemy ■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​■​



Soon after the bin Laden hit, the SEALs who went to Abbottabad were back on the job, launching new missions against terrorist threats.

The dangers the brave operators of ST-6 face routinely was tragically and dramatically underscored four months later on August 6, 2011, when seventeen SEALs (all but two were members of ST-6, but none of them had been on the mission to Abbottabad) were among thirty U.S. servicemen killed when the Chinook helicopter they were riding in was shot down during a nighttime mission in the Tangi valley along the Afghan-Pakistani border. From what I know about them, they were amazing men—in other words, typical SEALs.

One of the SEALs who died in the crash had lost part of his left arm and suffered a collapsed lung in Iraq but felt compelled to rejoin his unit.

Another one of the downed SEALs, Jonas Keisall, had told his mother, “If I die on a mission, I’ll die happy because I’m doing something for my country.”

It was a devastating blow to ST-6, and the biggest one-day combat loss to U.S. troops in Afghanistan. But the promise of ST-6 lives on. Right after the accident, the remaining brave operators at Six did what they always do. They picked up their weapons and went right back into combat, fighting the only way they knew how—fiercely, skillfully, and with courage.