Yesterday, as Washington, D.C., got ready for the State of the Union, the man at the center of our story "The Shooter" was on Capitol Hill. We had arranged meetings with nine of the most influential members of the Senate and House to discuss the larger issues of the story — the difficulty soldiers, and especially members of elite Special Operations Forces, have transitioning to civilian life and the inadequacy of the assistance provided to them by our government. Our little traveling party, which included Phil Bronstein, who wrote our story and is executive chairman of the Center for Investigative Reporting, met for breakfast at about 9:15 and ended up hurrying out of the Capitol building just as it was being locked down in preparation for the President.
The Shooter is not as large as I expected. He's one of those guys who is sneaky big. He doesn't stand out. In a suit, you can't see his tattoos and you don't realize how solid he is until you stand next to him.
In every meeting, he hit on the same themes. In the years since 9/11, the toll on members of Tier One Special Operations Forces has become even more brutal than in previous eras. As the way we wage war has transitioned from boots on the ground to tactical, highly targeted strikes, those who do the striking are under unprecedented stresses. Without drama, he described his life as a member of SEAL Team 6: Three hundred days a year away from his family. Four-month deployments during which they performed missions — sometimes multiple missions — virtually every night. When not deployed, constant training — parachute jumps, underwater exercises, skills development, conditioning. The toll on the body, and the psyche, is unending, which makes the requirement of twenty years of service to qualify for pension and retirement benefits an unrealistic expectation in the modern era of war.
In one meeting, the Shooter gave an example of one of his own long-term injuries that stuck with me: He has arthritis in his neck that is the result of wearing heavy night-vision goggles every night for 120 nights in a row, repeated over multiple deployments. He's in his mid-30s.
He spoke of how difficult it was to leave the service. His fellow Team 6 members saw it as something of a betrayal, as quitting the mission. The command structure discourages it to keep force levels up. As a result, even though he gave notice of his intentions a year before his actual departure and signed up for another deployment (to Afghanistan, in winter) after the bin Laden mission, assistance in transitioning from military to civilian life was brief and abrupt. Health benefits for his family ended at midnight of his last day; no pension; no security provisions for him or his family.