Tuesday, February 12, 2013

Does the Sniper Who Killed Bin Laden Believe in Blowback?

In the profile about him, Phil Bronstein identifies him only as "The Shooter".

The Shooter and the wife seem to know the deal:
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.

When the White House identified SEAL Team 6 as those responsible, camera crews swarmed into their Virginia Beach neighborhood, taking shots of the SEALs' homes.

After bin Laden's face appeared on their TV in the days after the killing, the Shooter cautioned his older child not to mention the Al Qaeda leader's name ever again "to anybody. It's a bad name, a curse name." His kid started referring to him instead as "Poopyface." It's a story he told affectionately on that April afternoon visit to my home.[...]

In fact, the couple is officially separated, a common occurrence in ST6. SEAL marriages can be perilous. Husbands and fathers have been mostly away from their families since 9/11. But the Shooter and his wife continue to share a house on very friendly, even loving terms, largely to save money.

"We're actually looking into changing my name," the wife says. "Changing the kids' names, taking my husband's name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other."

5 comments:

  1. That's interesting that he has his kid referring to Bin Laden as "poopyface".

    One of my kids(4 young girls) came up with a name for the various local policemen that pull over my wife while she drives around in a beat up station wagon. They routinely gave her tickets when one of the little ones would unbuckle themselves(naturally, they hate being confined) and was bouncing around in back unknowing to her(because believe it or not, it's hard to concentrate on driving safely when you have 4 kids under 8 yelling and figeting and having a general good time in the car).

    I don't know how many petty tickets we've paid for having unrestrained youngsters in our old stationwagon...but they've slowed down since I paid to get the windows tinted thankfully.

    Anyway, my older girls even started getting annoyed after they started understanding it was costing us money(they understand money very well despite their age) and the way their nickname for cops came about went something like this:

    "Daddy, we don't like the police anymore."

    "Yea, well I understand and I agree with you."

    "We are going to name them something else Daddy."

    "Oh yeah?"

    The four year old says, "How about dirty panties?"

    I laughed.

    The eight year old says, "No, they will know we are making fun of them, let's just call them panties."

    Since their decision to refer to all cops as "panties" and their understanding of the ticket situation....they are constantly on the lookout for "panties" and even if they are unbuckeled admonish each other to "sit back, there's a panty!".

    Between that and the tinted windows the ticket count has dropped off thankfully.

    On one hand I think about it and laugh...on the other hand it makes me sad that they are already learning that they have to buckle to gov't goons.

    My mother never had to worry about this shit, she used to put me as a baby in a basinet on top of 1/4 plywood that hovered over the engine in the back of an old VW bug in the 70's and was never bothered once.



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  2. I call bullshit. Bin laden has been bin dead for a long time now. The seals may have shot someone, but most likely it wasn't bin laden.

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  3. I'm with you Rob. OBL was a propaganda scarecrow until he was needed to die for more propaganda. They brought Adolf Eichmann back alive. They showed us pictures of Che Guevera's body. OBL gets dumped in the ocean? Get real.

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  4. What I find most fascinating of all is how most of the people who were involved in the raid to kill Bin Laden were themselves killed not too much longer in an ambush. What doesn't make sense is that in order for an ambush to happen, someone has to know ahead of time that they are coming. How did Al Queda types know Seal Team 6 was coming in order to set up the ambush?

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