I don’t usually say this about folks in our military Special Operations community, as they tend to be fairly bright folks. The person in question in this case, in fact, was in SEAL Team 6/DEVGRU/Whatever its real name is, and was supposedly involved in the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. So I know he isn’t a stupid man.
But seriously, I’m not even in the military and EVEN I know that, if you leave short of 20 years, you are not going to be eligible for retirement benefits.
As for whether he was the trigger man who shot Osama bin Laden, we may never know. Still, I believe Matt Bissonette’s story–chronicled in the book No Easy Day. The outcry against Bissonette has not been with regard to his accuracy, but rather his telling of the story. That tells me he is probably on the money.
Whoever this guy is who calls himself “The Shooter”, why can’t he go into security work. I hear that SEALs and Rangers and Special Operators–who leave the service–are fetching pretty high dollars in security work. I’d say that being a veteran of SEAL Team 6–which typically has the best of the best of the SEAL community–would carry an advantage going into such work.
On the Brink with North Korea
The Korean War never really ended. Only a truce prevents the resumption of hostilities. Should those resume, it will be ugly all the way around, with high death tolls among our troops, the South Koreans, and the North Koreans. We could lose more troops in the first month of a resumed Korean War than we lost in the last ten years in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And no one will win.
We will suffer because we lacked the determination to finish the job 60 years ago. Gen. Douglas MacArthur had the right strategy. We could have beaten China and Russia. It would have been ugly, but had we done the job then, there would have been no Vietnam, no Cultural Revolution in China, no slaughter in Cambodia, no Fidel Castro in Cuba, no Che Guevara, and the North Koreans would be part of a free Korea.
It would not have been the end of evil–countries have an uncanny habit of finding excuses to fight each other–but we would have slain the diabolical monster known as Marxist-Leninism, which has killed more people in peacetime than anything else in world history. But Truman lacked the stones.
And China will pay a huge price as well: without their active–and passive–aid of North Korea, MacArthur would have steamrolled North Korea. While we initially had a bad start in that war, we recovered well and were on the way to victory. That is, until China started sending troops across the Yalu River.
Now, China has to deal with a nuclear threat next door, which has a starving population and very unstable leadership in both military and executive levels.
So here we are today.