The American town of Virginia Beach is the base for the commandos who killed Osama bin Laden. William Selway pays a visit.
As jets screamed over Naval Air Station Oceana behind his used-car lot in Virginia Beach, Richard DeBerry Jr says he knows a member of Navy SEAL Team Six, the elite, secretive unit that killed Osama bin Laden.
That friendship still won’t get him any details of the nighttime raid. “We’re not even going to try to pick his brain about it — he’s not going to say a thing,” DeBerry, 33, says in an office lined with baseball caps from Navy servicemen who have bought cars. “You get drunk with them and they won’t tell you a thing about what happened on their missions. They don’t even tell their wives.”
The SEAL team are now local heroes, if discreet ones, in Tidewater Virginia, where a complex of military bases includes the Dam Neck compound where part of the unit is based.
The SEALs trace their roots to World War II, when they surveyed beaches and cleared obstacles for Allied amphibious landings. Today, SEALs — the name stands for Sea, Air and Land — perform commando assaults, unconventional warfare, reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering. Such special operations forces have played a key role in Afghanistan.
“You’ve got a process of evolution since Vietnam that has not only created a more professional military but a far more professional group of intelligence operatives and special forces,” says Anthony Cordesman, a national-security analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.
The SEAL strike team flew May 1 in helicopters to bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound under the cover of darkness, and during a 40-minute raid worked its way through the structure, confronting and killing him on a top floor, according to US officials.
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In Virginia Beach, the base of bin Laden’s killers in a heavily guarded compound isn’t marked by name. Its Army counterpart is Delta Force, headquartered at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. The teams are part of the Joint Special Operations Command, which also oversees the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment with helicopters to get the commandos to work and the 75th Ranger Regiment with infantry shock troops to back up the commandos with more firepower.
Around Virginia Beach, a city of about 433,000 dominated by strip malls and suburban sprawl around the military bases, there are no signs of public tribute to the Seals who killed America’s most-wanted man. Service members are loath to discuss it. One tells a reporter that the mention of a bar as a gathering spot for Seals might get it blacklisted by the military, lest it tip off enemies wishing to retaliate.
Around the town dominated by military, their families, and businesses that cater to them, residents say in interviews that their joy at the death of bin Laden is tinged with anxiety as troops are still waging two wars overseas.
Standing on the lawn outside her mobile home, Marilyn Hargiss, 60, recounts her mixed emotions at the news of the terrorist’s death. She says her son-in-law is overseas with the Navy. “I’m proud of our military. They wouldn’t let up and they kept looking until they found him.”
DeBerry, the car dealer, says he has more than half a dozen relatives and friends in uniform. “It’s an uncomfortable feeling,” he says. “What’s going to happen next? We don’t feel this is the end. Not at all, the fire’s just getting started now.”