I Spy - You Spy - Let's All Play I Spy

[Warph]

Here's The $2 Billion Facility Where The NSA Stores
And Analyzes Your Communications

The NSA's Utah Data Center, located 25 miles south of Salt Lake City.
http://www.rsa.com/rsalabs/node.asp?id=2316


The National Security Agency (NSA) is in the information harvesting business — and business is booming.

That's why the nation's premier covert intelligence gathering organization has been building a million square-foot data mining complex in Bluffdale, Utah, that will house a 100,000 square foot "mission critical data center."
http://nsa.gov1.info/utah-data-center/

The NSA's official mandate is to listen to and decode all foreign communications of interest to the security of the U.S.

But given the fact the NSA already reportedly intercepts 1.7 billion American electronic records and communications a day, it makes sense that they would need to expand operations beyond its sprawling headquarters at Fort Meade, Maryland.
http://clui.org/ludb/site/national-security-agency-nsa-headquarters

The facility, called the Utah Data Center, is located on Camp Williams, a training facility for the Utah National Guard, is already operational.

And boy does it seem like an impressive operation.

One Fox News report says as much as 5 zettabytes — 1 zettabyte = 1 billion terabytes = 1 trillion gigabytes — and with just 1 zettabyte (1024 exabytes) of space, the NSA can store a year's worth of the global Internet traffic (which is estimated reached 966 exabytes per year in 2015).

Here's James Bamford of Wired, author of the book "The Shadow Factory: The NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America":

"Once it's operational, the Utah Data Center will become, in effect, the NSA cloud. The center will be fed data from the agency's eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the U.S."

http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-collecting-phone-records-of-americans-2013-6

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/03/ff_nsadatacenter/all/

http://web.ornl.gov/info/press_releases/get_press_release.cfm?ReleaseNumber=mr20121029-00

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-washington-post-backtracks-on-claim-tech-companies-participate-knowingly-in-the-nsas-data-collection-2013-6

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705363940/Utahs-15-billion-cyber-security-center-under-way.html

Supporting facilities include water treatment facilities, chiller plant, power substations, vehicle inspection facility, visitor control center, and sixty diesel-fueled emergency standby generators and fuel facility for a 3-day 100% power backup capability.  The chiller plant will keep the suped-up system from overheating:

Here's a look at the plans:

Here's what it looks like today:

[Warph]

10 Things You Probably Didn't Know About The Agency That's Spying On You

Verizon is required to provide the secret intelligence agency with all call detail records "on an ongoing daily basis" until the order expires July 19.

[Oooops...
It has been extended tho'it  does not mention Verizon by name, nor make clear how long the extension lasts for, but it is likely to span a further three months in line with previous routine orders from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (Fisa)].

But what exactly is this agency?  Who leads it?  And what is their mission?

It's your turn to learn.

Their headquarters is in a sprawling complex in
Fort Meade, Maryland, just outside of Washington.

The NSA was founded in 1952. Until 1977,
they operated from Arlington Hall, a former
girls school in Arlington, Virginia.

The actual current size of the NSA is classified.
It's square footage is roughly the same size as the
Pentagon, and it has 112 acres of parking spaces.

The mission of the NSA is to acquire and analyze
information in an effort to identify threats to
U.S. interests, and to protect America's information.

Four-Star Army Gen. Keith Alexander heads the NSA.

The Director of the National Security Agency (DIRNSA) is the highest-ranking official in the National Security Agency, which is a Defense Agency within the U.S. Department of Defense. The Director of the NSA also concurrently serves as Chief of the Central Security Service (CHCSS) and as Commander of U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM). As DIRNSA/CHCSS the officeholder reports through the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, and as CDRUSCYBERCOM through the Commander of U.S. Strategic Command, to the Secretary of Defense.

According to 10 U.S.C. § 201 of the United States Code, the DIRNSA/CHCSS/CDRUSCYBERCOM is recommended by the Secretary of Defense and nominated for appointment by the President. The nominee must be confirmed via majority vote by the Senate. In accordance with Department of Defense Directive 5100.20, dated December 23, 1971, the Director of the NSA must always be a commissioned officer of the military services. Because the assignment is currently part of a tri-hatted position, the Director of the NSA is appointed to the grade of a four-star general or admiral during the period of his incumbency. The Deputy Director is always a technically experienced civilian.

The operations inside the walls of the NSA are so secret,
it's jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency" or
"Never Say Anything."

But when President Obama receives his daily intelligence briefing,
it's estimated that as much as 75% of the information comes from the NSA.

Every day, the NSA intercepts and stores billions of emails, phone calls, and other forms of communication.

Last month, it was revealed that NSA hackers harvest 2.1 million
gigabytes of data per hour.

U.S. service members have given their lives in secret missions associated with the NSA. This memorial at the agency's headquarters honors those who "served in silence."

[Warph]

The Most Elite Special Forces In The US
Geoffrey Ingersoll Feb. 26, 2013

http://www.businessinsider.com/most-elite-special-forces-in-the-us-2013-2?op=1

And Don't forget these:

Air Force:
— Tactical Response Force: Kind of like police SWAT teams, except with nuclear bombs. Air Force TRFs protect nuclear missile silos.

— Tactical Air Control Parties (TACP): "Tacs" guide close air support and artillery by radio or other communication, often from behind enemy lines


Army:
— Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR): These are the guys in those infamous black helicopters. Dubbed "The Nightstalkers," they're a group of upper echelon tactical aviators who support operators on the ground.

— Intelligence Support Activity (ISA): Referred to as "The Activity," this Top Secret unit performs Human Intelligence (HUMINT, spies and assets) operations and Signals Intelligence (SIGINT, "listeners").

— Asymmetric Warfare Group (AWG): A group comprised of only about 400 people who specialize in developing methods to counter asymmetric threats. They advise the officers who implement policy in the field.

— Special Reaction Teams: Army version of civilian SWAT teams.


Navy:
— Helicopter Sea Combat Squadron 84: The "Red Wolves" are the Navy's version Army SOAR. They provide heliborne support to Navy SEALs and SWCC operators on the ground.


Marine Corps:
— Radio Recon Platoon: Radio reconnaissance members are specialized warfighters who also provide communications to Marine Corps Recon operators.

— Special Reaction Teams: A Marine Corps version of civilian SWAT teams.

[Warph]

"The Shooter" - The Man Who Shot And Killed Osama bin Laden
Part #1

The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care.

It was a mild spring day, April 2012, and our small group, including a few of his friends and family, was shielded from the sun by the patchwork shadows of maple trees. But the Shooter was sweating as he talked about his uncertain future, his plans to leave the Navy and SEAL Team 6.

He stood up several times with an apologetic gripe about the heat, leaving a perspiration stain on the seat-back cushion. He paced. I didn't know him well enough then to tell whether a glass of his favorite single malt, Lagavulin, was making him less or more edgy.

We would end up intimately familiar with each other's lives. We'd have dinners, lots of Scotch. He's played with my kids and my dogs and been a hilarious, engaging gentleman around my wife.

In my yard, the Shooter told his story about joining the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. To escape, he almost by accident found himself in a Navy recruiter's office. "He asked me what I was going to do with my life. I told him I wanted to be a sniper.

"He said, 'Hey, we have snipers.'

"I said, 'Seriously, dude. You do not have snipers in the Navy.' But he brought me into his office and it was a pretty sweet deal. I signed up on a whim."

"That's the reason Al Qaeda has been decimated," he joked, "because she broke my f***ing heart."

"I remember as I watched him breathe out the last part of air, I thought:
Is this the best thing I've ever done, or the worst thing I've ever done?"
— The Shooter

The Navy SEAL who killed Osama bin Laden used this gear during the May 2011 raid.
Credit: The Shooter

I would come to know about the Shooter's hundreds of combat missions, his twelve long-term SEAL-team deployments, his thirty-plus kills of enemy combatants, often eyeball to eyeball. And we would talk for hours about the mission to get bin Laden and about how, over the celebrated corpse in front of them on a tarp in a hangar in Jalalabad, he had given the magazine from his rifle with all but three lethally spent bullets left in it to the female CIA analyst whose dogged intel work and intuition led the fighters into that night.

When I was first around him, as he talked I would always try to imagine the Shooter geared up and a foot away from bin Laden, whose life ended in the next moment with three shots to the center of his forehead. But my mind insisted on rendering the picture like a bad Photoshop job—Mao's head superimposed on the Yangtze, or tourists taking photos with cardboard presidents outside the White House.

Bin Laden was, after all, the man CIA director Leon Panetta called "the most infamous terrorist in our time," who devoured inordinate amounts of our collective cultural imagery for more than a decade. The number-one celebrity of evil. And the man in my backyard blew his lights out.

ST6 in particular is an enterprise requiring extraordinary teamwork, combined with more kinds of support in the field than any other unit in the history of the U. S. military.

Similarly, NASA marshaled thousands of people to put a man on the moon, and history records that Neil Armstrong first set his foot there, not the equally talented Buzz Aldrin.

Enough people connected to the SEALs and the bin Laden mission have confirmed for me that the Shooter was the "number two" behind the raid's point man going up the stairs to bin Laden's third-floor residence, and that he is the one who rolled through the bedroom door solo and confronted the surprisingly tall terrorist pushing his youngest wife, Amal, in front of him through the pitch-black room. The Shooter had to raise his gun higher than he expected.

The point man is the only one besides the Shooter who could verify the kill shots firsthand, and he did just that to another SEAL I spoke with. But even the point man was not in the room then, having tackled two women into the hallway, a crucial and heroic decision given that everyone living in the house was presumed to be wearing a suicide vest.

But a series of confidential conversations, detailed descriptions of mission debriefs, and other evidence make it clear: The Shooter's is the most definitive account of those crucial few seconds, and his account, corroborated by multiple sources, establishes him as the last man to see Osama bin Laden alive. Not in dispute is the fact that others have claimed that they shot bin Laden when he was already dead, and a number of team members apparently did just that.

What is much harder to understand is that a man with hundreds of successful war missions, one of the most decorated combat veterans of our age, who capped his career by terminating bin Laden, has no landing pad in civilian life.

Back in April, he and some of his SEAL Team 6 colleagues had formed the skeleton of a company to help them transition out of the service. In my yard, he showed everyone his business-card mock-ups. There was only a subtle inside joke reference to their team in the company name.

Unlike former SEAL Team 6 member Matt Bissonnette (No Easy Day), they do not rush to write books or step forward publicly, because that violates the code of the "quiet professional." Someone suggested they might sell customized sunglasses and other accessories special operators often invent and use in the field. It strains credulity that for a commando team leader who never got a single one of his men hurt on a mission, sunglasses would be his best option. And it's a simple truth that those who have been most exposed to harrowing danger for the longest time during our recent unending wars now find themselves adrift in civilian life, trying desperately to adjust, often scrambling just to make ends meet.

At the time, the Shooter's uncle had reached out to an executive at Electronic Arts, hoping that the company might need help with video-game scenarios once the Shooter retired. But the uncle cannot mention his nephew's distinguishing feature as the one who put down bin Laden.

Secrecy is a thick blanket over our Special Forces that inelegantly covers them, technically forever. The twenty-three SEALs who flew into Pakistan that night were directed by their command the day they got back stateside about acting and speaking as though it had never happened.

"Right now we are pretty stacked with consultants," the video-game man responded. "Thirty active and recently retired guys" for one game: Medal of Honor Warfighter. In fact, seven active-duty Team 6 SEALs would later be punished for advising EA while still in the Navy and supposedly revealing classified information. (One retired SEAL, a participant in the bin Laden raid, was also involved.)

With the focus and precision he's learned, the Shooter waits and watches for the right way to exit, and adapt. Despite his foggy future, his past is deeply impressive. This is a man who is very pleased about his record of service to his country and has earned the respect of his peers.

"He's taken monumental risks," says the Shooter's dad, struggling to contain the frustration that roughs the edges of his deep pride in his son. "But he's unable to reap any reward."

It's not that there isn't one. The U. S. government put a $25 million bounty on bin Laden that no one is likely to collect. Certainly not the SEALs who went on the mission nor the support and intelligence experts who helped make it all possible. Technology is the key to success in this case more than people, Washington officials have said.

The Shooter doesn't care about that. "I'm not religious, but I always felt I was put on the earth to do something specific. After that mission, I knew what it was."

"No one who fights for this country overseas, should ever have to fight for a job, or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home."
— President Barack Obama, on Nov. 11, 2011

Others also knew, from the commander-in-chief on down. The bin Laden shooting was a staple of presidential-campaign brags. One big-budget movie, several books, and a whole drawerful of documentaries and TV films have fortified the brave images of the Shooter and his ST6 Red Squadron members.

There is commerce attached to the mission, and people are capitalizing. Just not the triggerman. While others collect, he is cautious and careful not to dishonor anyone. His manners come at his own expense.

"No one who fights for this country overseas should ever have to fight for a job," Barack Obama said last Veterans' Day, "or a roof over their head, or the care that they have earned when they come home."

But the Shooter will discover soon enough that when he leaves after sixteen years in the Navy, his body filled with scar tissue, arthritis, tendonitis, eye damage, and blown disks, here is what he gets from his employer and a grateful nation:

Nothing. No pension, no health care, and no protection for himself or his family.

Since Abbottabad, he has trained his children to hide in their bathtub at the first sign of a problem as the safest, most fortified place in their house. His wife is familiar enough with the shotgun on their armoire to use it. She knows to sit on the bed, the weapon's butt braced against the wall, and precisely what angle to shoot out through the bedroom door, if necessary. A knife is also on the dresser should she need a backup.

Then there is the "bolt" bag of clothes, food, and other provisions for the family meant to last them two weeks in hiding.

"Personally," his wife told me recently, "I feel more threatened by a potential retaliatory terror attack on our community than I did eight years ago," when her husband joined ST6.

When the White House identified SEAL Team 6 as those responsible, camera crews swarmed into their Virginia Beach neighborhood, taking shots of the SEALs' homes.

After bin Laden's face appeared on their TV in the days after the killing, the Shooter cautioned his older child not to mention the Al Qaeda leader's name ever again "to anybody. It's a bad name, a curse name." His kid started referring to him instead as "Poopyface." It's a story he told affectionately on that April afternoon visit to my home.

He loves his kids and tears up only when he talks about saying goodbye to them before each and every deployment. "It's so much easier when they're asleep," he says, "and I can just kiss them, wondering if this is the last time." He's thrilled to show video of his oldest in kick-boxing class. And he calls his wife "the perfect mother."

In fact, the couple is officially separated, a common occurrence in ST6. SEAL marriages can be perilous. Husbands and fathers have been mostly away from their families since 9/11. But the Shooter and his wife continue to share a house on very friendly, even loving terms, largely to save money.

"We're actually looking into changing my name," the wife says. "Changing the kids' names, taking my husband's name off the house, paying off our cars. Essentially deleting him from our lives, but for safety reasons. We still love each other."

When the family asked about any kind of government protection should the Shooter's name come out, they were advised that they could go into a witness-protection-like program.

Just as soon as the Department of Defense creates one.

"They [SEAL command] told me they could get me a job driving a beer truck in Milwaukee" under an assumed identity. Like Mafia snitches, they would not be able to contact their families or friends. "We'd lose everything."

"These guys have millions of dollars' worth of knowledge and training in their heads," says one of the group at my house, a former SEAL and mentor to the Shooter and others looking to make the transition out of what's officially called the Naval Special Warfare Development Group. "All sorts of executive function skills. That shouldn't go to waste."

The mentor himself took a familiar route—through Blackwater, then to the CIA, in both organizations as a paramilitary operator in Afghanistan.

Private security still seems like the smoothest job path, though many of these guys, including the Shooter, do not want to carry a gun ever again for professional use. The deaths of two contractors in Ben-ghazi, both former SEALs the mentor knew, remind him that the battlefield risks do not go away.

By the time the Shooter visited me that first time in April, I had come to know more of the human face of what's called Tier One Special Operations, in addition to the extraordinary skill and icy resolve. It is a privileged, consuming, and concerning look inside one of the most insular clubs on earth.

And I understood that he would face a world very different from the supportive one President Obama described at Arlington National Cemetery a few months before.

As I watched the Shooter navigate obstacles very different from the ones he faced so expertly in four war zones around the globe, I wondered: Is this how America treats its heroes? The ones President Obama called "the best of the best"? The ones Vice-President Biden called "the finest warriors in the history of the world"?

[Warph]

"The Shooter" - The Man Who Shot And Killed Osama bin Laden
Part #2

April 2011: The Mission

The reason we knew this was a special mission, the Shooter said as our interviews about the bin Laden operation began, is because we'd just finished an Afghanistan deployment and were on a training trip, diving in Miami, when a few of us got recalled to the Command in Virginia Beach. Another ST6 team was on official standby—normally that's the team that blows out for a contingency operation. But they were not chosen, to better cloak what was going to happen.

There was so much going on—the Libya thing, the Arab Spring. We knew something good was going to go down. We didn't know how good.

The first day's briefing, they actually kind of lied to us, being very vague. They mentioned underwater cables because of the earthquake in Japan or some craziness. They hinted at Libya. They said it was a compound somewhere in a bowl and we were going to have two aircraft get us there and we don't know how many are inside but we have to get something out. You won't have any air support.

I assumed it was WMD, a nuke, because why else are they sending us to Libya?

Every question the Red Squadron ST6 members asked was answered with, "Well, we can't tell you that." Or: "We don't know."

It was also weird that the entire Red Squadron was in town, but they kicked everyone out of the briefing except those guys who were going, twenty-three and four backups. We'd leave the room to get coffee and stuff, and the other guys were like, "Well, what are you guys doing?" We were telling them, "I have no idea."

The Shooter was a mission team leader. Almost everyone chosen had a one or two ranking in the squadron, the most experienced guys. The group was split into four tactical teams, with the Shooter as leader of the external-security group—the dog, Cairo, two snipers, and a CIA interpreter to keep whoever might show up in the area out of the internal action.

The group left Virginia on a Sunday morning, April 10, to drive to the CIA's Harvey Point, North Carolina, center for another briefing and the start of training. The Master Chief was saying JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] would be there, the Secretary of Defense might be there, the Pak/Afghan CIA desk, too. That's when the wheels started spinning for me: This is big.

I've had some close calls with death, bullets flying past my head. Even just driving, weird stuff. Every time, I would tell my mother, "There's no way I'm going to die, because I'm here to do something." I've been saying that for twenty years. I don't know what it is, but it's something important.

"The mock-up had been dead-on. To actually be there and see the house ..."
— The Shooter

A Pakistan army soldier stands on
top of the house in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where
al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden was killed in 2011.

By Monday the team was assembled in a big classroom inside a one-story building. They actually had security sitting outside. No one else was allowed in. A JSOC general, Pak/Afghan and other D. C. officials, and the ST6 commanding officer were there. The SEAL commander, cool as ever, said, "Okay, we're as close as we've ever been to UBL." And that was it. He kind of looked at us and we looked at him and nodded. There was none of that cheering bullshit. We were thinking, Yeah, okay, good. It's about time that we kill this motherfucker. It was simple.

This is what I came for. Jealousies aside, one of us is going to have the best chance of killing this guy.

During the daylong briefing, the SEALs heard how the government found the compound in Abbottabad, how they were watching it, analyzing it, why they believed bin Laden might be there. He, UBL, had become known as the Pacer, the tall guy in satellite imagery who neither left nor mixed with the others.

It was the CIA woman, now immortalized in books and movies, who gave the briefing. "Yeah," she told us. "We got him. This is him. This is my life's work. I'm positive."

By then, government and military officials had been considering four options. They were either going to bomb the piss out of the compound with two-thousand-pound ordnance, they were going to send us in, do some kind of joint thing with the Pakis, or try what was called a "hammer throw," where a drone flies by and chucks one fucking bomb at the guy. But they didn't want any collateral damage. And they wanted to make sure he was dead and not in a cave or a safe room.

After the group settled into "motel-like" rooms, with common areas that had TVs and a kitchen, the team started strategizing with a model of the compound on a large table. Then they drove to a full-scale mock-up for a walk-through. The next day the helos came and we started doing iteration training based on how we wanted to hit it.

" 'There's a 90 percent chance this is a one-way mission. We're going to die, so let's do this right.' "
— The Shooter

Once I realized what was going on, I actually moved myself to one of the assault teams, even if I was no longer a team leader. We didn't need that many guys on the exterior team, and I'll go fast-rope on the roof with what I started calling the Martyrs Brigade, because as soon as we landed, I figured the house was going to blow up. But we were also going to be the guys in there first to kill him.

One sniper would also be on the roof to lean over and try to take a shot upside down. The rest of the team would rope again down to the third-floor windows and get your gun up fast because he's probably standing there with his gun. If you fell, it would suck.

If the group made it inside, there were other issues. I've been in houses before with IEDs in them designed to blow everything up. They'd hang them in the middle of the room so it's a bigger explosion.

I was usually the guy to joke around when we were planning these things—we all dick around a lot. But I was like, "Hey guys, we have to take this fucking serious. There's a 90 percent chance this is a one-way mission. We're gonna die, so let's do this right."

The discussions went on, almost a luxury. We're used to going on the fly, five, six nights a week on deployment. Here's your target, we're leaving in twenty minutes. Come up with a plan. This compound was pretty easy, though we had no clue about the inside layout.

The group reviewed contingencies: How do we handle cars? What if a helo went down? What do we do if the helo doors don't open? Shit like that.

The first helicopter was going to land in front of the house. We were going to put our external security out and our bird was going to go back up and we'd fast-rope onto the roof. So we'd have one assault team from the other chopper coming up the stairs, and we'd be going down.

It was March 2012, a blossoming time of year in the capital of the free world. The intimate dinner party was already under way at a stylish split-level apartment one block from the Washington Hilton. The hostess was a military contractor, and there was a lobbyist there, along with another young woman, a Capitol Hill veteran.

The Shooter's mentor was behind the kitchen counter, putting a final grill-sauce flair on some huge slabs of red meat when four men, all of them imposing and fit, came through the front door.

The Shooter is thick, like a power lifter, with an audacious set of tattoos. He can be curt and dismissive as his default, but also wickedly funny. It's instantly easy to see why he's considered both a rebellious, pushy pain in the ass by his command and even some of his colleagues, but also a natural leader. An outgoing, charismatic, and determined alpha male in the ultimate alpha crowd.

He and his three friends were all active ST6 members that night, though none of the others present had been on the bin Laden mission.

This was my first face-to-face meeting with the Shooter, following several phone conversations and much checking on my journalism background, especially in war zones. In a corner, pouring drinks, he and I established some rules. He would consider talking to me only after his last, upcoming four-month deployment to Afghanistan had ended and he had exited the Navy. And he would not go public; he would not be named. That would be counter to the team's code, and it would also put a huge "kill me" target on his back.

During the dinner, he told mostly personal stories and took care not to talk in terms of operational security: the deal about the gun magazine and the CIA analyst, the experience of eyeballing bin Laden.

"Three of us were driving to our first briefing on the mission," he said. "We were thinking maybe it was Libya, but we knew there would be very high-level brass there. One of my guys says, 'I bet it's bin Laden.' " Another guy told the Shooter, "If it's Osama bin Laden, dude, I will suck yo' dick."

"So after I shoot UBL, I bring him over to see his body. 'Okay,' I told him, 'now is as good a time as any.' "

The group talked about hairy moments during other missions, stories soldiers and foreign correspondents enjoy swapping. But from the start something was obvious, not just about the Shooter but about his fellow SEALs, too: These men who had heroically faced death and exercised extraordinary violence in almost continuous battle for years on end were fearful of life after war.

This is a problem that is becoming more critical as the "best of the best" start leaving the most extended wartime careers in the history of the United States. And it is a problem not just for these men and their families but for the American government, which has come to rely heavily on a steady stream of Tier One special operators (including the Army's Delta Force and the Air Force's 24th Special Tactics Squadron)—men of rarefied toughness and training like these—to maintain a sense of international security in an asymmetrical battlefield. The American way of war has changed radically in the past decade, so that in the future, "boots on the ground" will more and more mean special operators. Which means that there will be increasing numbers of vets in the Shooter's circumstance: abandoned, with limited choices.

That night, one of the Shooter's comrades, lantern-jawed, articulate, with a serious academic pedigree, told me: "I've seen a lot of combat, been in some pretty grisly circumstances. But the thing that scares me the most after fifteen years in the SEALs?

"Civilian life."