It still astounds me how we eat our young –how poorly we take care of the troops after using them. CJR has an interview with the Seal team member who killed Osama bin Laden:
“No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job,” Barack Obama said last Veterans’ Day, “or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home.”
But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:
Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.
Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon’s butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.
Then there is the “bolt” bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.
“Personally,” his wife told me recently, “I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago,” when her husband joined ST6.
There are so many things wrong with this story….. First of all this guy volunteered….volunteered…..to go into the military. His choice. If he decides to “quit” after 16 years that’s on him. Everybody who joins the military is told on day one that you have to stay in at least 20 years to receive any compensation whatsoever. It also sounds like this guy and his wife have gone off the deep end. A “bolt” bag, knives and guns all over the place, and a “bug out” plan? The children should be removed from this home immediately by CPS. And the husband and wife should be Baker Acted pronto.
No, no, no, no…. this is all wrong. Private mercenaries, paid by our gubmit, get paid a hell of a lot more and have much better benefits. Oh, this guy who capped OBL just deserves normal compensation? He deserves all the gifts that our country can bestow on him, motherfo. I can’t even IMAGINE what would be the aftermath of a mission like that would be like. He is a hero.
Eat a bag of salted dicks….. Asshole….
I’m quite curious why he couldn’t have stayed in the military but asked for a different job – training people, desk job. One would think that a guy who had put in his time in combat situations would have earned the right to ask for another type of assignment for his last couple years until retirement. The article never mentions if he discussed anything like that with his superiors. In the military it’s not just front lines or nothing.
The whole OBL assassination story is suspect. This one seems more plausible than the hyper-detailed semi-fiction that ran in the New Yorker, but still…