By Dalton Fury
Sustained, intense combat brands the mind. It’s almost impossible to erase.
The images of combat that come to mind most often? They’re rarely of a neutralized target—even if that target was Usama bin Laden.
A single fuzzy headshot of UBL was circulated within hours after the deed was done, passed from one former JSOC operator to the next through an internet based pseudo-underground commo line, it didn’t take much imagination to figure out what happened. It was him—right down to the bullet hole near the eye socket, the beard matted in blood and sweat, the face oddly tilted, already bruised and distant.
For me, it was a direct message from JSOC, from the SEALs, from the CIA and military intelligence analysts, from the helicopter flying 1/160th Night Stalkers, and from the 24 Special Tactics Squadron. After a decade of hunting Usama Bin Laden, the message was obvious and even personal. I was relieved and thankful. For nine years I thought about the other Delta operators with me in Tora Bora, and the missed opportunity to kill Bin Laden. I immediately thought, “Mission accomplished!”
And then, like any other operator, I moved on.
After a ten-year manhunt, the SEALs who took part in the raid had raised the night vision goggles on their helmets with their non-firing hand a thousand times easy. They knew the sounds, smells, and images of death.
On any hit, operators typically remember the mates lost first, then the mates on target that they counted on to cover their six, then maybe the close calls. They rarely think of a past target, even if he was UBL. Another day in the life of a Tier One operator. Business.
Images like the kill shot, secretly shared among a tiny community, remain a source of public interest. “Call of Duty” and images of war are the closest most come to seeing what SEAL Team Six experienced last year. When headline news stories break, those individuals are out looking for more—more images, more information. Someday, either the high court will put an end to protecting images of UBLs death, or someone will leak a short video clip to YouTube.
For special operations team members, after the satisfaction of success wears off—and it does wear off—we are left with the scars of a decade of war.
We remember the buddies we couldn’t save because we weren’t good enough operators that day.
We remember the dead and maimed women and children, caught up in a man’s world.
We remember the missed birthdays and anniversaries.
But the images wanted by others? We rarely go back to them. Special operators carry heavier loads.
DALTON FURY is the author of the New York Times bestseller Kill Bin Laden: A Delta Force Commander’s Account of the Hunt for the World’s Most Wanted Man (read an excerpt) and Delta Force Thriller series that chronicles the disgraced but resilient Kolt “Racer” Raynor. The series was launched with Black Site (read an excerpt). Tier One Wild (read an excerpt), the second book in the series, will be available October 2012.
Dalton Fury was the senior ranking military officer at the Battle of Tora Bora. As a Delta troop commander he led ninety-one other Western special operations commandos and support personnel and helped author, along with some of Delta’s most talented sergeants, the tactical concept of the operation to hunt and kill bin Laden.