A Seal member preparing to capture top insurgents in 2007 near Fallujah, Iraq. Members of Team 6 are the elite of the elite. The New York Times 본사특약

There were 79 people on the assault team that killed Osama bin Laden, but in the end, the success of the mission turned on some two dozen men who landed inside the Qaeda leader’s compound, made their way to his bedroom and shot him at close range ― all while knowing that the president of the United States was keeping watch from Washington.

The men, hailed as heroes across the country, will march in no parades. They serve in what is unofficially called Seal Team 6, a unit so secretive that the White House and the Defense Department do not directly acknowledge its existence. Its members have hunted down war criminals in Bosnia, fought in some of the bloodiest battles in Afghanistan and shot three Somali pirates dead on a bobbing lifeboat during the rescue of an American hostage in 2009. (중략)
There was no debate among former Seal members that whoever had shot Bin Laden had done the right thing.
“It’s dark; there’s been a lot of bullets flying around, a lot of bodies dropping; your mission is to capture or kill Bin Laden; who knows what he’s got tucked in his shirt?” said Don Shipley, 49, a former Seal member who runs Extreme Seal Experience, a private training school in Chesapeake, Va.(중략) “It happens in an absolute blink of an eye for these guys,” Mr. Shipley said. “And there’s that target in front of you. Second chances cost lives.”(중략)

Inside the Navy, there are regular unclassified Seal members, organized into Teams 1 to 5 and 7 to 10. Then there is Seal Team 6, the elite of the elite, or, as Mr. Roberti put it, “the all-starteam.”(중략)

Ryan Zinke, 49, a former member of Seal Team 6 who is now a Republican state legislator in Montana, said members of Team 6 had a certain personality: “I would say cocky, arrogant.”Seals － the term stands for Sea-Air-Land teams － were created by President John F. Kennedy in 1962 as a way to expand unconventional warfare.

Seal Team 6 came later as a reaction to the botched mission to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980, when the Pentagon saw the need for what became today’s Special Operations Command, with a special Navy unit focused on counterterrorism.

Seal Team 6 has historically specialized in war on the seas, but in the decade since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it has increasingly fought on land in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Its size is classified, but Team 6 is thought to have doubled to nearly 300 since then. Over all, thereare now about 3,000 active-duty Seal members, split between odd-numbered teams in Coronado and ven-numbered teams in Virginia Beach.

 

Team 6, which is based in an area separate from all the others, at the Dam Neck Annex of Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach, has many members in their mid-30s, a decade or more older than the 20-year-olds who populate the military.

“I used to call it the oldman’s club,” Mr. Zinke said.(중략) Eric Greitens, a former Seal member who has written a book about his experiences, “The Heart and the Fist,” said that Seal members were misunderstood as the nation’s deadliest commandos. Although the gruesome descriptions of the pictures of Bin Laden with a bullet in his head would appear to underscore that reputation － and help to explain why President Obama decided Wednesday not to release them － Mr. Greitens called Seal members “creative” commandos who knew “to bring back as much intelligence as they possibly could.”(이하 생략)

 

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