They are now household terms. Heroes.
Quote:There were 79 people on the assault team that killed Osama bin Laden, but in the end the success of the mission turned on some two dozen men who landed inside the al-Qaeda leader's compound, made their way to his bedroom and shot him at close range - all while knowing that the President of the United States was keeping watch from Washington.
The men, hailed as heroes around the country, will march in no parades. They serve in what is unofficially called SEAL Team 6, a unit so secretive that the White House and the Defence Department do not directly acknowledge its existence. Its members have hunted down war criminals in Bosnia, fought in some of the bloodiest battles in Afghanistan and shot dead three Somali pirates on a bobbing lifeboat during the rescue of an American hostage in 2009.
The raid early on Monday in Pakistan has nonetheless put a spotlight on a unit that has been involved in some of the US military's most dangerous missions of recent decades.
Split-second decision
CIA director Leon Panetta said the SEAL commandos went into the mission with only a 60 to 80 per cent certainty that bin Laden was in the compound. Mr Panetta said the commandos made the ''split-second decision'' to shoot him when they found him in his third-floor bedroom.
There was no debate among former SEAL members that whoever had shot bin Laden had done the right thing.
''It's dark; there's been a lot of bullets flying around, a lot of bodies dropping; your mission is to capture or kill bin Laden; who knows what he's got tucked in his shirt?'' said Don Shipley, 49, a former SEAL member who runs Extreme SEAL Experience, a private training school in Virginia.
Mr Shipley was reacting to earlier Obama administration accounts of an extended firefight at the compound, but on Wednesday administration officials revised the narrative, saying that the only shots fired came at the beginning of the raid, from a courier.
''It happens in an absolute blink of an eye for these guys,'' Mr Shipley said. ''And there's that target in front of you. Second chances cost lives.''
Lalo Roberti, 27, a former SEAL member who teaches at Mr Shipley's school and took part in a gruesome rescue mission in Afghanistan in 2005, concurred. ''For us to take a shot, it has to be bad,'' Mr Roberti said.
Inside the navy, there are regular unclassified SEAL members, organised into Teams 1 to 5 and 7 to 10. Then there is SEAL Team 6, the elite of the elite, or, as Mr Roberti put it, ''the all-star team''.
Former SEAL members said the unit - officially renamed the US Naval Special Warfare Development Group - was chosen for the bloody bin Laden raid, the most high-profile operation in the history of the SEALs, because of the group's skills in using lethal force intelligently in complex, ambiguous conditions.
All SEAL members face years of brutal preparation, including a notorious six months of basic underwater demolition training.
'Hell week'
During ''hell week'' recruits get a total of four hours of sleep during 5½ days of non-stop running, swimming in the cold surf and rolling in mud. About 80 per cent of candidates do not make it; at least one has died.
For those who succeed, more training and then deployments follow. After several years on regular SEAL teams, Team 6 candidates are taught to parachute from 9000 metres with oxygen masks and gain control of a hijacked cruise liner at sea. Of those SEAL members, about half make it.
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