Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden. It was a little more than thirty- six months before the official retirement requirement of twenty years of service. I asked if there was some transition from my Tricare to Blue Cross Blue Shield. You're out of the service, your coverage is over. Thanks for your sixteen years. Either way, his life would not be his own. Instead, he'll buy private insurance for $4. Like many vets, he will have to wait at least eight months to have his disability claims adjudicated. The average wait time nationally is more than nine months, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting. Getty. Pete Souza/The White House. Gates didn't want to do this, Hillary didn't want to do that. The Shooter still thought, We'd train, spin up, then spin down. They'd eventually tank the op and just bomb it. But then the word came to Vice Admiral William Mc. Raven, head of Joint Special Operations Command. The mission was on, originally for April 3. White House Correspondents' dinner in Washington. Mc. Raven figured it would look bad if all sorts of officials got up and left the dinner in front of the press. So he came up with a cover story about the weather so we could launch on Sunday, May 1, instead. There was one last briefing and an awesome speech from Mc. Raven comparing the looming raid and its fighters to the movie Hoosiers. Then they're gathered by a fire pit, suiting up. Just before he got on the chopper to leave for Abbottabad, the Shooter called his dad. I didn't know where he was, but I found out later he was in a Walmart parking lot. I thought there was a good chance of dying. He knew something significant was up, though he didn't know what. Albuquerque and New Mexico's trusted news source. Statewide weather forecasts, live streaming, investigations, entertainment, local events and living. Your source for local news, sports, high school sports and weather in and around Jefferson City, Columbia, Fulton and the Lake of the Ozarks. The latest news video reports from NBC4 TV. News clips, Channel 4 news reports, video from KNBC and sports, entertainment and political reports from NBC Southern. Man's Search for Meaning and over one million other books are available for Amazon Kindle. Your source for local news, sports, high school sports and weather in and around Fulton, Columbia, and Westminister. Infowars.com the home of the #1 Internet News Show in the World. The Shooter could hear him start to tear up. He told me later that he sat in his pickup in that parking lot for an hour and couldn't get out of the car. The Red Team and members of the other squad hugged one another instead of the usual handshakes before they boarded their separate aircraft. The hangars had huge stadium lights pointing outward so no one from the outside could see what was going on. I took one last piss on the bushes. Ninety minutes in the chopper to get from Jalalabad to Abbottabad. The Shooter noted when the bird turned right, into Pakistani airspace. I was sitting next to the commanding officer, and he's relaying everything to Mc. Raven. I was counting back and forth to a thousand to pass the time. It's a long flight, but we brought these collapsible camping chairs, so we're not uncomfortable. But it's getting old and you're ready to go and you don't want your legs falling asleep. Every fifteen minutes they'd tell us we hadn't been painted . We had about another fifteen minutes. Instead of counting, for some reason I said to myself the George Bush 9/1. Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended. I could just hear his voice, and that was neat. I started saying it again and again to myself. Then I started to get pumped up. I'm like: This is so on. I was concerned for the two . The 4. 7's have some awesome antiradar shit on them, too. But it's still a school bus flying into a sovereign nation. If the Pakistanis don't like it, they can send a jet in to shoot them down. Flying in, we were all just sort of in our own world. My biggest concern was having to piss really bad and then having to get off in a fight needing to pee. We actually had these things made for us, like a combination collapsible dog bowl and diaper. I still have mine; I never used it. I used one of my water bottles instead. I forgot until later that when I shot bin Laden in the face, I had a bottle of piss in my pocket. I would have pissed my pants rather than trying to fight with a full bladder. Above the compound, the Shooter could hear only his helo pilot in the flight noise. I thought they'd taken fire and were just moving. I didn't realize they crashed right then. He put our five perimeter guys out, went up, and went right back down outside the compound, so we knew something was wrong. We weren't sure what the fuck it was. We opened the doors, and I looked out. The area looked different than where we trained because we're in Pakistan now. There are the lights, the city. There's a golf course. And we're, This is some serious Navy SEAL shit we're going to do. My foot hit the ground and I was still running . I don't care if I die right now. There was concern, but no fear. Advertisement - Continue Reading Below. I was carrying a big- ass sledgehammer to blow through a wall if we had to. There was a gate on the northeast corner and we went right to that. We put a breaching charge on it, clacked it, and the door peeled like a tin can. But it was a fake gate with a wall behind it. That was good, because we knew that someone was defending themselves. There's something good here. We walked down the main long wall to get to the driveway to breach the door there. We were about to blow that next door on the north end when one of the guys from the bird that crashed came around the other side and opened it. So we were moving down the driveway and I looked to the left. The compound was exactly the same. The mock- up had been dead- on. To actually be there and see the house with the three stories, the blacked- out windows, high walls, and barbed wire β and I'm actually in that security driveway with the carport, just like the satellite photos. I was like, This is really cool I'm here. While we were in the carport, I heard gunfire from two different places nearby. In one flurry, a SEAL shot Abrar al- Kuwaiti, the brother of bin Laden's courier, and his wife, Bushra. One of our guys involved told me, . They're trying to martyr themselves. Another sign that this is a serious place. Even if bin Laden isn't here, someone important is. There the Shooter ran into another team member, who told him, . But the road to Abbottabad was long, starting with the guys who tried and failed to make it into the SEALs in the first place. Up to 8. 0 percent of applicants wash out, and some almost die trying. In fact, during the Shooter's Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training in the mid- nineties, the torture- chamber menu of physical and emotional resistance and resolve required to get into the SEALs, there was actually a death and resurrection. We pulled him up and he was, like, dead. They made the class face the fence while they tried to resuscitate him. The first words as he spit out water were 'Did I pass? Did I tie the fifth knot?' The instructor told him, 'We didn't want to find out if you could tie the knots, you asshole, we wanted to know how hard you'd push yourself. Trial by Fire - The New Yorker. Cameron Todd Willingham in his cell on death row, in 1. He insisted upon his innocence in the deaths of his children and refused an offer to plead guilty in return for a life sentence. Credit Photograph By Ken Light. The fire moved quickly through the house, a one- story wood- frame structure in a working- class neighborhood of Corsicana, in northeast Texas. Flames spread along the walls, bursting through doorways, blistering paint and tiles and furniture. Smoke pressed against the ceiling, then banked downward, seeping into each room and through crevices in the windows, staining the morning sky. Buffie Barbee, who was eleven years old and lived two houses down, was playing in her back yard when she smelled the smoke. She ran inside and told her mother, Diane, and they hurried up the street; that. Willingham told the Barbees to call the Fire Department, and while Diane raced down the street to get help he found a stick and broke the children. Fire lashed through the hole. He broke another window; flames burst through it, too, and he retreated into the yard, kneeling in front of the house. A neighbor later told police that Willingham intermittently cried, . Moments later, the five windows of the children. Within minutes, the first firemen had arrived, and Willingham approached them, shouting that his children were in their bedroom, where the flames were thickest. A fireman sent word over his radio for rescue teams to . One fireman, who had an air tank strapped to his back and a mask covering his face, slipped through a window but was hit by water from a hose and had to retreat. He then charged through the front door, into a swirl of smoke and fire. Heading down the main corridor, he reached the kitchen, where he saw a refrigerator blocking the back door. Todd Willingham, looking on, appeared to grow more hysterical, and a police chaplain named George Monaghan led him to the back of a fire truck and tried to calm him down. Willingham explained that his wife, Stacy, had gone out earlier that morning, and that he had been jolted from sleep by Amber screaming, ! As she was given C. P. R., Willingham, who was twenty- three years old and powerfully built, ran to see her, then suddenly headed toward the babies. Monaghan and another man restrained him. Kameron and Karmon had been lying on the floor of the children. According to the medical examiner, they, too, died from smoke inhalation. News of the tragedy, which took place on December 2. Corsicana. A small city fifty- five miles northeast of Waco, it had once been the center of Texas. Several stores along the main street were shuttered, giving the place the feel of an abandoned outpost. Willingham and his wife, who was twenty- two years old, had virtually no money. Stacy worked in her brother. The community took up a collection to help the Willinghams pay for funeral arrangements. Fire investigators, meanwhile, tried to determine the cause of the blaze. He was tall, with a crew cut, and his voice was raspy from years of inhaling smoke from fires and cigarettes. He had grown up in Corsicana and, after graduating from high school, in 1. Navy, serving as a medic in Vietnam, where he was wounded on four occasions. He was awarded a Purple Heart each time. After he returned from Vietnam, he became a firefighter, and by the time of the Willingham blaze he had been battling fire. Short, with a paunch, Vasquez had investigated more than twelve hundred fires. Arson investigators have always been considered a special breed of detective. The only way to beat it is to think like it. To know that this flame will spread this way across the door and up across the ceiling. I am just the interpreter. Once, he was asked under oath whether he had ever been mistaken in a case. Following protocol, they moved from the least burned areas toward the most damaged ones. I have not made any determination. Upon opening the back door, Vasquez observed that there was just enough space to squeeze past the refrigerator blocking the exit. The air smelled of burned rubber and melted wires; a damp ash covered the ground, sticking to their boots. In the kitchen, Vasquez and Fogg discerned only smoke and heat damage. A central corridor led past a utility room and the master bedroom, then past a small living room, on the left, and the children. Vasquez tried to take in everything, a process that he compared to entering one. Most of the damage there was also from smoke and heat, suggesting that the fire had started farther down the hallway, and he headed that way, stepping over debris and ducking under insulation and wiring that hung down from the exposed ceiling. As he and Fogg removed some of the clutter, they noticed deep charring along the base of the walls. Because gases become buoyant when heated, flames ordinarily burn upward. But Vasquez and Fogg observed that the fire had burned extremely low down, and that there were peculiar char patterns on the floor, shaped like puddles. Vasquez. Sunlight filtering through the broken windows illuminated more of the irregularly shaped char patterns. A flammable or combustible liquid doused on a floor will cause a fire to concentrate in these kinds of pockets, which is why investigators refer to them as . Moreover, the metal springs under the children. Seeing that the floor had some of the deepest burns, Vasquez deduced that it had been hotter than the ceiling, which, given that heat rises, was, in his words, . It contained a spiderweb- like pattern. On the concrete floor of the porch, just outside the front door, Vasquez and Fogg noticed another unusual thing: brown stains, which, they reported, were consistent with the presence of an accelerant. The men scanned the walls for soot marks that resembled a . In the Willingham house, there was a distinct . Examining it and other burn patterns, Vasquez identified three places where fire had originated: in the hallway, in the children. Vasquez later testified that multiple origins pointed to one conclusion: the fire was . Someone had poured liquid accelerant throughout the children. The house, in short, had been deliberately transformed into a death trap. The investigators collected samples of burned materials from the house and sent them to a laboratory that could detect the presence of a liquid accelerant. The sample had been taken by the threshold of the front door. The fire was now considered a triple homicide, and Todd Willingham. Several, like Father Monaghan, initially portrayed Willingham as devastated by the fire. Yet, over time, an increasing number of witnesses offered damning statements. Diane Barbee said that she had not seen Willingham try to enter the house until after the authorities arrived, as if he were putting on a show. And when the children. Another neighbor reported that when Willingham cried out for his babies he . I had the feeling that . Born in Ardmore, Oklahoma, in 1. His father, Gene, who had divorced his mother, eventually raised him with his stepmother, Eugenia. Willingham, who had what the family called the . When he was seventeen, Oklahoma. Stacy and Willingham had a turbulent relationship. Willingham, who was unfaithful, drank too much Jack Daniel. A neighbor said that he once heard Willingham yell at her, . Fogg and Vasquez were present for the interrogation, along with Jimmie Hensley, a police officer who was working his first arson case. Willingham said that Stacy had left the house around 9 A. M. Amber was still in bed, Willingham said, so he went back into his room to sleep. He could no longer hear his daughter! Get out of the house!β βHe never sensed that Amber was in his room, he said. Perhaps she had already passed out by the time he stood up, or perhaps she came in after he left, through a second doorway, from the living room. He said that he went down the corridor and tried to reach the children. In the hallway, he said, . When he made it to the children. Finally, he stumbled down the corridor and out the front door, trying to catch his breath. He saw Diane Barbee and yelled for her to call the Fire Department. After she left, he insisted, he tried without success to get back inside. The investigators asked him if he had any idea how the fire had started. When pressed whether someone might have a motive to hurt his family, he said that he couldn? We had three of the most pretty babies anybody could have ever asked for. Finally, Vasquez turned to Willingham and asked a seemingly random question: had he put on shoes before he fled the house? If the floor had been soaked with a liquid accelerant and the fire had burned low, as the evidence suggested, Willingham could not have run out of the house the way he had described without badly burning his feet. A medical report indicated that his feet had been unscathed. Willingham insisted that, when he left the house, the fire was still around the top of the walls and not on the floor. Vasquez believed that this was impossible, and that Willingham had lit the fire as he was retreating. Vasquez later said of Willingham, . He just talked and he talked and all he did was lie. The children had life- insurance policies, but they amounted to only fifteen thousand dollars, and Stacy. Stacy told investigators that even though Willingham hit her he had never abused the children. Ultimately, the authorities concluded that Willingham was a man without a conscience whose serial crimes had climaxed, almost inexorably, in murder. John Jackson, who was then the assistant district attorney in Corsicana, was assigned to prosecute Willingham. He later told the Dallas Morning News that he considered Willingham to be . Then they arrested him. Because there were multiple victims, he was eligible for the death penalty, under Texas law. Unlike many other prosecutors in the state, Jackson, who had ambitions of becoming a judge, was personally opposed to capital punishment. Webb alleged that Willingham had confessed to him that he took . Even so, several of Stacy. And so, shortly before jury selection, Jackson approached Willingham.
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