The SEAL Community and Fight Club
Saturday, November 08, 2014
The first rule of Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Fight Club.
Evidently, that is slipping a little for some in the SEAL community.
No one here has weighed in on this yet, but others have elsewhere. Whether it was a night firefight and looked exactly like the last 30 minutes of Zero Dark Thirty, or whether it was over in 90 seconds on the third floor because they hit that building first is not really what is at issue. It isn’t if Navy SEALs defiled the corpse (I would have wrapped him in bacon and put him inside a pig purchased from a Jewish deli in NYC before firing what was left of him out of a cannon) or who fired the shot, or what happened on that day amongst the individuals who touched down in that compound behind enemy lines.
What is salient here is what happened the whole of that night, and that we don’t talk about Fight Club, especially when it involves operations that have Non-Disclosure Agreements and Q-Level clearances. Having been involved in a few things that have had these attached to them, I can tell you that these things are taken seriously. Being in DevGru, Detachment Delta or any other SMU is the Willy Wonka Golden Ticket to Life’s Badass List. If you are on it, the only ones that will know are also exclusive members of this club.
In the audio interview, O'Neill says he believes some details about the bin Laden mission, such as how he was killed, were no longer classified because they had been repeatedly leaked in the aftermath by high-level officials.
"Once anyone says anything at that level, it's not classified," he said.
"...I was told by people that I can't even say I'm a Navy SEAL, so I don't give a f*** what they think."
This is why leadership is important. The Occupant in Chief of the Office of the President got this ball rolling about 15 minutes after the SIPRnet message about the successful completion of the flight back and accordingly, others followed; except the two top people in the SEAL Community, and a bunch of other guys who understood that you don't talk about Fight Club. When the civilians and politicians who don't live by the same code spend their time talking about how "I got Bin Laden" when it blatantly isn't true (in the case of the OinC) it can be maddening and frightening and leads to the unintended consequences inherent in human nature.
This is why civilians don't get many invitations to join Fight Club.
The guy(s) that fired that shot, regardless of who he or they are, should have this story told to Fox News by their sons about 50 years from now. As someone who operates in the shadows of places where the intelligence world and direct action world intersect, the shooter should be able to reflect back on what he did, and in all the cool things that he can never talk about, except for with the other members on the above mentioned list.
Would I like to buy a beer and a cook a steak on my back deck for whoever pressed the Boom Switch and put an end to the number one guy on everyone's Islamist excrement list that certainly deserved it? Hell Yes, beers are on me and how do you like your steak? More than that though, I want that guy or guys to STFU about what went down in that OP.
Because the human nature I was talking about leads us to this:
They should just all smile knowingly and deflect it all back to the "team" and be glad the dude is rotting in hell.
So please, FFS, let's stop talking about Fight Club.