What the costliest day in SEAL Team Six history?

SEAL Team Six

What the costliest day in SEAL Team Six history?

The Tangi Valley, located just 35 miles south of the capital Kabul.

 Afghanistan:

The Tangi Valley, located just 35 miles south of the capital Kabul. The Tangi Valley is a strip of  forbidding terrain in eastern Afghanistan teeming with Taliban and, inaccessible area known for its resistance to foreign invasion. In the 1980s, mujahideen fighters in Logar provinces devastated an entire division of Soviet fighters.

Under cover of darkness on the night of August 6, 2011, Army Rangers began an assault on a Taliban compound in the Tangi Valley. The firefight at the house went on for at least three hours, and the ground team called in reinforcements. As the Chinook CH-47 transport helicopter carrying 30 US troops, 7 Afghan commandos, an Afghan civilian interpreter and a US military dog approached, the insurgents fired on the helicopter and it crashed to the ground, killing all aboard.

The attack on August 6 was the most devastating day in SEAL Team Six history, Of the 30 Soldiers killed, 17 were SEALs. These included 15 operators in the Gold Squadron of DEVGRU “Team Six,” and 2 bomb specialists.

After the investigation to determine the cause of the crash. The resulting report, concluded that a Taliban fighter shot down the Chinook with a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) as the helicopter neared its landing zone.

Others criticized the planning and execution of the mission, including the decision to fly the helicopter into an area where it could be easily shot down and the use of a conventional helicopter rather than one designed for special operations missions. Family members of some of the SEAL Team Six operators killed in the crash, along with some military personnel, claimed that the U.S. government had turned the members of the elite unit into a target by revealing their role in the bin Laden raid. Several months after that historic operation, however, SEAL Team Six suffered heavy losses.

Many of the unit’s operations since the 1980s remain classified, but it was confirmed to have taken part in several high-profile missions over the years, including the U.S.-led invasion of Grenada in 1983, the capture of deposed dictator Manuel Noriega in Panama in 1993 and the arrest of Bosnian war criminals in 1998.

No words describe the sorrow we feel in the wake of this tragic loss. All of those killed in this operation were true heroes who had already given so much in the defense of freedom. Their sacrifice will not be forgotten.

SEAL Team Six, last mission 2012:

On the night of January 25, 2012, an Air Force Special Ops plane carried around two dozen operators from SEAL Team Six, DEVGRU to a location about two miles from the town of Adado in north-central Somalia.

In this place it was a American aid worker Jessica Buchanan and her Danish colleague, Poul Thisted, were working for a nongovernmental organization called the Danish Relief Council when they were kidnapped in late 2011 and held for three months by armed men.

After parachuting down and walking through darkness to the camp, the SEALs managed to surprise the kidnappers, killing all nine of them within minutes. Buchanan and Thisted were evacuated in helicopters to an American base in Djibouti, where they received medical treatment.

Buchanan later describing the moment on the helicopter when one of her rescuers handed her a folded American flag. “I just started to cry,” she say. “At that point in time I have never in my life been so proud and so very happy to be an American.”