Forgive me for the mild case of potty mouth language I’m about to inject into the blog post, but …
Robert O’Neill is starting to piss me off.
O’Neill is the former Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden to death on May 2, 2011 — allegedly.
http://abcnews.go.com/International/seal-claims-killed-osama-bin-laden-expected-die/story?id=26830046
He’s now speaking to Fox News about the dangerous mission he and the rest of SEAL Team Six executed in the middle of a moonless night in Pakistan. The order given by the commander in chief was as straightforward as it gets: Kill the world’s most notorious terrorist.
They did it with cool precision.
Now comes O’Neill and at least one other SEAL who offer supposedly conflicting accounts of who — precisely — pulled the trigger on bin Laden.
O’Neill told Fox News that, by golly, he “expected” to be killed on the mission.
He said this in an interview set to air this evening, according to ABCNews.com: “‘We’re going to die when the house blows up. We’re going to die when he blows up. Or we’re going to be there too long and we get arrested by the Pakistanis, and we’re going to spend the rest of our short lives in Pakistani prison,’ O’Neill said in an interview for a Fox News Channel special set to air tonight. ”
Well, duh?
Of course the mission was fraught with maximum peril. That’s supposed to be a serious news flash?
What’s so maddening about all of this, of course, is that O’Neill is breaking a long-standing code among SEALs and, for that matter, special operations forces of all the military branches — and that includes Army Green Berets, Joint Delta Force units, and Air Force commandos. It is that you do not speak openly about these highly classified missions. More to the point, you do not take credit for the successes accomplished by the entire team.
Here goes one of those SEALs, a highly trained warrior who helped execute a mission of intense personal danger to all the men who took part. He’s doing precisely what the code says he shouldn’t do: basking in the glory of a mission that captivated the world.
It was a team effort, correct?