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VIRGINIA BEACH The team of highly trained commandos who pulled off one of the most spectacularly successful special operations in modern military history - the killing of Osama bin Laden - was born out of a painful defeat.
An attempted helicopter rescue of 52 Americans being held hostage in the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran, in 1980 ended in failure and resulted in the deaths of eight American servicemen.
Out of that failure came the creation of SEAL ( SEa, Air and Land) Team 6, a Virginia Beach-based special-forces unit devoted exclusively to anti-terrorism operations.
It was a group of specially trained operatives from SEAL Team 6 that stormed a secret compound in Pakistan over the weekend and killed bin Laden in a daring nighttime raid.
"This is exactly the kind of mission that this kind of unit is maintained for: direct action against a terrorism target," said Joseph Trevithick, a research associate at GlobalSecurity.org, a Northern Virginia-based think tank.
But don't expect to see any victory parades or gala homecomings for those SEALs. Team 6 is one of the most secretive outfits in the entire U.S. military, Trevithick said. All of its operations are classified.
