Like a lot of websites, The Moderate Voice ran a post reporting on an Esquire piece about the plight of the shooter who got Osama bin Laden who according to the piece left the service and found himself without benefits, despite serving his country, let along closing the chapter on bin Laden. AFter the Esquire article came out, on Facebook and elsewhere some began to raise questions about some of the info in it. And now a high Navy official basically is saying: it was the shooter’s own choice to leave the military four years before all of his benefits would kick in. Here’s a summary:
The SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden may be missing out on a pension, healthcare for his family, and other benefits, but that’s on him, according to the commander of Naval Special Warfare Command. Rear Adm. Sean Pybus says “the Shooter,” as he was called in the Esquire piece about his plight, received career counseling and knew what he was giving up by leaving the service after 16 years instead of 20. “This former SEAL made a deliberate and informed decision to leave the NAVY several years short of Retirement status,” says Pybus in a statement, reports the Navy Times.
Pybus also says that, despite the Shooter’s early retirement, the Navy would continue to meet with him and discuss transition issues, as it does with all veterans.
This doesn’t chance the importance of the long, gripping piece about the shooter and precisely what happened — and what it looked like — when Navy Seals put an end to bin Laden’s mercilessly brutal terrorist career. But it does negate part of the impact of the plight story: it wasn’t that there was no safety net…if he had stuck it out a bit longer.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.