The team fought their way up two flights of stairs in pitch-blackness, dispatching several fighters along the way.

A tall figure emerged in the green glow of the night vision goggles. It hesitated. Two shots were fired, and the body hit the ground.

That was how Navy Seal Team Six member, Mark Owen, described the last seconds of Al Qaida leader, Osama bin Laden, in the raid on his Abbottabad, Pakistan compound.

I can?t tell you how I met Owen, except that the circumstances are classified, and it took place at an undisclosed location. A number of terrorist groups are seeking retribution for the raid, making Mark and his teammates prime targets.

He and his family now live in the witness protection program buried deep somewhere in the US.

Owen isn?t his real name of course, but a nom de? guerre. In fact, I can?t even tell you what he looks like. His prosthetic make up and wig were so convincing, I doubt his own mother could recognize him.

But there was no doubting the bone-crushing handshake of a Navy Seal.

Spending an hour with ?Owen?, I learned several fascinating details about the raid. Just before launching, the team was told there was a 70% chance the Pakistani Air Force would shoot them down on the way in.

There was also the possibility that their top-secret stealth helicopters would crash on a ground hugging flight through the mountains on the darkest night of the month. Every man was given the option to pass on the mission.

Not one did.

However, that didn?t stop them from joking among themselves about the suicide aspects of their assignment.

What guts!

What was the inside story of the raid?? The most wanted man in the world, the author of the 9/11 attack that killed 3,000 at the World Trade Center, used ?Just for Men?. ?

That was the brand of the hair-coloring agent the Seals discovered in the world?s greatest terrorist?s bathroom, used to make him look younger than he was.

Some of the seals speculated he did this to cut a more threatening figure in his online propaganda diatribes. Others said it was because he had two wives at the site.

The discovery of bin Laden?s secret fortified compound was the result of a decade of tireless investigation by CIA analyst, Maya Lambert. Her role was portrayed in the 2012 film, Zero Dark Thirty, with much embellishment.

The US torture of suspects probably slowed down the hunt, rather than accelerated it, because a glut of false information obscured valuable tips. People will say anything to stop the water boarding, right?

I would.

In the end, it was a junior CIA analyst trolling through ten-year-old archived data gathered in Morocco that uncovered the crucial clue. That was the name of Ibrahim Saeed Ahmed, who turned out to be bin Laden?s personal courier to the outside world.

Constant National Security Agency monitoring of his mother?s phone line in the Persian Gulf led to Ahmed?s location in Pakistan. He was then discretely followed to the mysterious compound in Abbottabad.

Bin Laden successfully hid for so long because he had fallen far off the grid of modern civilization. He never left the building, and didn?t use cell phones or the Internet. Trash was burned on site.

His sole means of communication was via flash drives and DVDs physically carried by Ahmed on an infrequent and unpredictable basis. Bin Laden had effectively jailed himself for five years to stay under the American radar. How ironic.

Since there was no means to verify the identity of the compound?s occupants before the raid, the Seals were the only option. Maya Lambert personally saw them off on their departure from an Eastern Afghanistan base. She too was committed to the mission to the very end.

Even when the helicopter in which Owen was riding crashed because of freak lift conditions, the mission went ahead. Since their carefully crafted and much practiced plan fell apart, they improvised on the spot, a mandatory Seal quality.

They professionally and methodically breached the compound?s outer wall and blew some steel doors off their hinges before they reached their third floor destination.

Owen went to great lengths to explain how the civilians on the site, including bin Laden?s own family members, were kept out of harm?s way.

After dispatching their target, the Seals quickly photographed him, took a DNA sample, and uploaded it via satellite link to Washington DC. Confirmation came back in minutes.

They had gotten their man.

Before the team cleared out, they bagged every possible item of intelligence value. There was so much material that they ran out of bags to carry it. Computers were smashed open and the hard drives pried out to save on space and weight.

Analyzed back home, this data revealed that several new attacks on the United States were in the planning stages.

After blowing up the remains of the crashed helicopter, the entire team piled into the remaining operational one, with only minutes of reserve fuel left. A much-feared counterattack from the Pakistani military never appeared.

After further identification, bin Laden was buried at sea from a US aircraft carrier in the Indian Ocean.

The success of the raid has done much to alter the discussion on the future of military forces, in the US, and around the world.

It turns out that it is strategically and tactically advantageous, and much more cost efficient to field a small number of super warriors, like the Seals, than a large number of cannon fodder.

Every general and admiral I know, and there are quite a few, would love to junk expensive, antiquated Cold War weapons systems whose sole benefit is that they create jobs in battleground congressional districts.

The Army still buys useless, unprotected, IED vulnerable Humvee?s because they are built in Florida, a major swing state in the last six presidential elections.

The Air Force has more wheezing, ancient, fuel inefficient C-130?s than pilots to fly them (we?re now on upgrade number 22) because they were assembled in Georgia, the home state of former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich.

Oh, and the manufacturer, Lockheed Martin (LMT), made sure to buy parts supplied by all 50 states to make it politically ?kill proof.?

Better to spend money on training, cyber warfare, drones, and Special Forces, which will be essential to fight the wars of the future.

?The greatest threat to national security is wasting money in the defense budget,? one brass hat told me, with some irritation.

In fact, the Seals, and the Army?s Delta Force are so effective and destructive that they could well replace entire divisions of the past. It?s a matter of hundreds doing the job of tens of thousands.

Owen went into great detail to explain the incredible difficulty of Navy Seal training. Only small fractions succeed at the 24 week Basic Underwater Demolition/Seal (BUDS) program.

The majority, ?ring the bell,? give up early, and are reassigned elsewhere in the military, without shame.

Mark says he was trained to ?eat the elephant one bite at a time,? and described how he struggled to get through a half year of torture a half day at a time. ?You wake up hoping to make it to lunch without quitting. Then at lunch you focus on getting to dinner without giving up. You then repeat this everyday until you graduate.?

Mark spoke of being dumped a few miles offshore and told to swim home in the icy Pacific. Classes would link arms and lie in the surf for eight hours to get accustomed to hypothermia.

They were tied up and thrown in a swimming pool for ?drown proofing.? For good measure they would then have to push a bus uphill, or repeatedly hoist a telephone pole over their heads.

Modern Seals can not only jump out of a plane at high altitude and blow up anything, they can also hack into computers, disassemble cell phones, and track you down online, no matter where you are.

Spurred on by my Dad?s tales of the old Under
water Demolition Teams (UDT), with whom he had experience during WWII, I once thought about applying to the Seals myself. But in the end, I passed. I didn?t think I could make it through the training. There are not a lot of things I won?t try, but this was one.

Because of their prolonged and extreme training, the Seals always get the toughest missions. Owen also participated in the rescue of Mark Phillips, the captain of the containership, Maersk Alabama, kidnapped by Somali pirates.

The cost of these accomplishments is high. Owen held up his cell phone and said it still contained the numbers of 40 close friends killed in action. He will never delete those contacts.

The Seals? focus on teamwork and leadership is so legendary that it has become an area of interest by American corporate management. Seals will volunteer for once unheard of 10^th, 11^th, and 12^th tours to Iraq and Afghanistan, not because of any extreme patriotism, but because they want to be there to support their buddies.

Unsurprisingly, the divorce rate among Seals is about 90%.

Because of this spectacular record, the Seals are shouldering an ever-larger share of our defense burden.

Their numbers have expanded greatly in the past decade. I can?t tell you how many Seals are in action today because it is classified, but it is a much larger number than you think.

One of the greatest honors I have received in writing this letter is when I was invited by Seal commanders to attend a BUDS graduating class in Coronado, California.

Despite receiving many medals and commendations, Mark comes across as humble and self-effacing. It turns out that the braggarts and big talkers don?t make it through BUDS training.

The son of Christian missionaries in Alaska, Owen is now retired from the forces and is trying to get his life back together.

On complaining about neck pains after his helicopter crash, Mark said the Veterans Administration sent him home with a one-year supply of Motrin. After a hedge fund manager friend volunteered to pay for a private specialist, he was told his neck was ?broken? and sent into surgery the next day.

That sheds some uncomfortable light on the current VA scandal.

When my precious hour was up, I thanked Mark for his service and wished him well.

Mark has published his amazing account of the Abbottabad raid in his book ?No Easy Day.? It is a real page-turner, partially ghost written by a journalist friend. To purchase the book from Amazon, please click here.

It?s All about Discipline and Teamwork

You would never guess Dr. Ben Bernanke was once one of the most powerful men in the world, indeed in all of human history.

There he sat across the table from me in a popular San Francisco Italian restaurant wearing a poorly made grey suit and a cheap pair of shoes, with rubber soles.

Only the occasional interruption from an autograph seeker belied his true importance.

I managed to snare Ben for a couple of hours on his national book tour promoting his just released "The Courage to Act." Out only days, it was already at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list.

Ben is a different guy now. For a start, you can now call him "Ben" instead of "Governor."

Remember those carefully parsed, measured, and deliberate words he used to use to explain Federal Reserve monetary policy and his future intentions? That guy is long gone.

The new Ben is funny, in a subtle, but wickedly clever manner. He is also instructional, thoughtful, even professorial. At the end of the day, Ben Bernanke is now your favorite faculty member.

Ben's big revelation to me was that there were no potential triggers out there for another 2008-09 type financial crisis.

American banks have been recapitalized to the extent that they now have a stronger safety net with which to weather any future volatility. US banks are bigger than ever.

The big global concern right now is with emerging markets, where trillions of dollars worth of US dollar-denominated debt have been borrowed, collateralized by depreciating local currencies.

Another worry is the perceived "Fed put," which is allowing investors to get complacent with their risk-taking.

Bernanke believes that rising income inequality is the biggest structural problem we face. It means that not all are benefiting from an improving economy, a goal of Fed policy.

This has been unfolding for 40 years, and won't be solved in a day, as several presidential candidates are promising.

As a result, the "Horatio Alger" effect, whereby the poorest can rise to success through brains, hard work, and thrift, is now much less likely to occur than in the past.

Bernanke himself is a perfect example of that phenomenon.

Ben and I spoke at length about the dark days of the crash, and he remembered the emails I used to pepper his staff with proposing fixes or patches on an almost daily basis.

Regulation dating from the 1930s had become outmoded and was woefully out of touch with modern-day finance. It was far too lax in the run-up to the crisis.

For example, insurance giant AIG was monitored by the Office of Thrift Supervision, which was utterly clueless when it came to pricing mathematically complex derivatives.

Bernanke warned President Bush as early as 2005 that real estate prices were getting too high and that a crash was coming.

His predecessor, Alan Greenspan, had cautioned during the 1990s that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had a flawed business model that would eventually blow up and take down the financial system with it.

In the end, every major financial institution was tottering on the edge.

Bernanke had the benefit of completing his Ph.D. thesis on the causes and mistakes of the Great Depression, once an arcane area of economic study.

Thanks to the laissez-faire philosophy of the 1920s, the Fed let the money supply collapse, and one-third of all banks went under, some 8,000 in total. This froze the entire credit system.

Eight decades later, Ben, therefore, saw the answer to another looming depression in an inflated money supply, which we saw with QE 1, 2, 3, and 4.

He also helped engineer the $700 billion TARP that bailed out the 20 biggest banks, which he described as "the most successful, but most hated government policy in history."

When it was wound down, the US Treasury made a $15.3 billion profit on the program.

Part of the problem in selling the TARP, and later, President Obama's 2009 $831 billion stimulus budget, was that while the crisis started in New York and Washington, it was slow to reach the hinterlands.

One Republican congressman in Iowa called local car dealers in his district and asked what the big deal was. Ben said, "Just wait," and General Motors filed for bankruptcy months later.

I asked Ben who was his favorite president, as he was appointed by both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. He confirmed that he liked working for the two men, but that Bush was the natural practical joker.

When Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors, Bernanke was required to give a weekly briefing on the state of the economy. Once he committed the grievous sartorial error of wearing tan socks with his trademark grey suit.

Bush complained, stating that the White House had dress standards to maintain.

Bernanke answered that he thought the Bush administration was one of fiscal responsibility, and that he had bought a four-pack of the controversial socks at the Gap for only $10.

When Ben attended the next meeting a week later, he wore the required grey socks with his grey suit. He couldn't help but notice that everyone else at the meeting was wearing tan socks with their navy suits, including the president.

When Bush met Bernanke to discuss his appointment as Chairman of the Federal Reserve in 2006, he asked if he had any political experience.

Bernanke replied that he had served two terms on the Montgomery County, Maryland Board of Education. Bush said, "that was fine."

Bernanke is an extremely intelligent man. You can almost hear the wheels whirring when he is thinking.

I asked him my "gotcha" question.

Wasn't quantitative easing just a means of bridging the demographic chasm of the 2010s, when 85 million baby boomers are retiring? Isn't it just a way to pull growth forward from the 2020s?

He paused for a moment, and then changed the subject.

Finally, I had to ask if Bernanke ever got a chance to read The Diary of a Mad Hedge Fund Trader while Fed Chairman. He diplomatically responded that the "Fed takes great pains to take in all views."

Touch?

To learn more about Ben Bernanke's amazing, "only in America" rise from obscurity, please click the titles "Who Is Ben Bernanke," and "Why Ben Bernanke Hates Me".

To buy "The Courage to Act" at discount Amazon pricing, please click here.

It was with a mixture of nostalgia and awe that I attended the reunion luncheon celebrating the 72nd anniversary of America?s invasion of Guadalcanal. The event was hosted by my former division commander in Desert Storm, Major General Mike Myatt, at the Marines Memorial Association in San Francisco.

I was there to represent the family. My Uncle, Colonel Mitchell Paige, won the first Congressional Medal of Honor of WWII at Guadalcanal; single handedly wiping out 2,000 attacking Japanese in one night with his 30 caliber Brown machine gun (click here for ?Tribute to a True Veteran?).

My dad was there too, as a driver of a Steward light tank. My grandfather served in WWI, and historians tell me that I have a string of military heroes behind me that stretches all the way back to Valley Forge, where the first John Thomas served on George Washington?s staff.

I got plenty of dust under my fingernails myself, but lost a disc in my back from a plane crash, flying support missions for the First Marine Division in the Persian Gulf. Today I have three nephews serving in the Middle East in harm?s way, all in intelligence. So it is safe to say that my family has paid its dues in the defense of our country, and then some.

General Myatt delivered a lecture outlining the desperation and cruel arithmetic of the conflict. The Marines went in with virtually no intelligence and the few primitive maps they could scavenge from National Geographic Magazine against a Japanese army that until then had been undefeated. The US lost 7,000 men, 29 ships, and 600 aircraft. The Japanese lost 30,000 men, 37 ships, and many of their experienced pilots.

Japan never recovered from the blow, and played defense for the rest of the war. It was the single most important battle of the Pacific war. Afterwards, the Marines were sent to Melbourne, Australia for rest, wearing rags, often barefoot, but with weapons in perfect operating condition.

Whenever I give a strategy luncheon in that fair city, I never fail to thank my guests for the hospitality they once extended to my family. Today, a small case at the Melbourne Cricket Ground pays tribute to their sacrifice.

The youngest living Guadalcanal veteran today is 87, and eight of the elderly warriors made it to the reunion. Got to love that Marine health care plan! One 95 year old flew his own plane up from Los Angeles. Once a Marine, always a Marine.

I dined at a table with a van load of veterans from the California Veterans Hospital in Yountville, Napa Valley (click here if you want to, they need you).

One grizzled old sergeant told me that if a friend went missing at night, he was often found tied to a palm tree the next day, tortured to death.? Another time, a surrendering Japanese pulled a hand grenade out of his loincloth and threw it into a sympathetic, but gullible squad, with deadly results. Despite these atrocities, he respected the Japanese today as humble, respectful, and hard working. You don?t find these sentiments among the veterans of other nations at all.

Time has taken a toll on these aging vets more than the enemy ever could. Much of the conversation revolved around the daily aches and pains of living in your late eighties. Pulling out genuine anecdotes was difficult, often resulting in a canned memory dredged from a book or TV documentary produced decades after the event. Some may have been worried that if they did open the door to the past, they would dread what they found.

For a riveting account of the historic battle, please read ?The Pacific? by For a riveting account of the historic battle, please read ?The Pacific? by Hugh Ambrose.? You can purchase the book at Amazon by?clicking here. My uncle Mitch cooperated with Ambrose in the research for the book, which was the basis for the recently released and incredibly realistic HBO series of the same name.