n a v y s e a l s 9 INTRODUCTION Shortly after midnight on May 2 2011 Sohaib Athar heard a loud clattering near his home in Abbottabad Pakistan Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad he tweeted to his followers A few minutes later he added A huge window shaking bang Athar was witnessing the culmination of an exhausting 10-year search for al Qaeda terrorist and 9 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden American intelligence authorities be lieved they had finally located him in a high-walled compound in Abbottabad United States president Barack Obama decided that a raid was the best way of capturing or killing him For this task he chose a squadron from one of America’s elite special op erations forces SOFs the Naval Special Warfare Development Group or DEVGRU more commonly known as SEAL Team Six After several weeks of preparation everything was finally ready Two Black Hawk he licopters flown by the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment Airborne took off from a base in Afghanistan near the Pakistani border They carried 24 SEALs and a com bat dog Several other choppers were on high alert to provide backup if necessary The operation was kept secret from the Pakistani government for fear that someone would tip off bin Laden During the 90-minute flight the helicopter pilots hugged the contours of the ground to avoid radar detection Planners had taken great pains to come up with the most ef fective strategy But they hadn’t accounted for one thing When one of the helicopters began its descent over the compound the high walls kept the downwash from the ro tors from properly diffusing The copter rapidly lost altitude Moments later it crashed ZzZ The Abbottabad compound kept Osama bin Laden hidden from the public for years
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n a v y s e a l s 11 ACTIVE IN ALL ENVIRONMENTS SEALs are the U S Navy’s special operations force The term is an acronym for Sea Air and Land indicating the three operational environments of its members SEALs fall under the administration of the U S Special Operations Command SOCOM and are one of America’s primary weapons in the global fight against terrorism Warriors similar to SEALs go back many centuries During the period of the Byzantine Empire 330 1453 men would some times swim out to enemy warships at night to cut the anchor chains setting the vessels adrift They had to hold their breath for several minutes and had only primitive tools to perform their missions At other times the Byzantines used small fast moving ships to scout out enemy forces and launch lightning fast commando-style raids They frequently were in conflict with Muslim forces who adopted similarly covert or secretive tactics against them and other Christian forces During the peri od of the Crusades Muslim soldiers would disguise themselves and their ships and then pull alongside Crusader vessels and swarm aboard to kill their enemies In the 1940s American forces needed to scout out poten tial obstacles before landing on the beaches of Japanese-held islands in the Pacific Ocean In August 1942 volunteers from the army and navy known as the Scouts and Raiders gathered at the Amphibious Training Base in Little Creek Virginia Within two months they were on their way to North Africa to support the Allied offensive known as Operation Torch At first the Scouts and Raiders carried out their dangerous missions armed with little more than a K-Bar knife giving them the nickname naked SEALs skillfully operate in shallow waters unreachable by ships and submarines
