You’ve probably seen the movies. The guys in night-vision goggles fast-roping into a courtyard in Pakistan, taking out the world’s most wanted man, and vanishing into the darkness before the sun comes up. It’s the kind of stuff that makes for great cinema, but it also creates a lot of weird myths. One of the biggest rumors floating around the internet is that almost everyone involved in that mission—the 2011 raid on Osama bin Laden—is dead.
Honestly? It’s just not true.
People love a good conspiracy. There’s this persistent story that SEAL Team 6 was somehow "wiped out" to keep the truth about the raid from getting out. If you spend enough time on certain corners of Reddit or YouTube, you’ll find people claiming a mysterious helicopter crash took them all out. But when you actually look at the numbers and the names, the reality is a lot less like a thriller movie and a lot more like a complex, ongoing military history.
The Extortion 17 Tragedy and the Confusion
Let’s talk about why people think everyone is dead. About three months after the bin Laden raid, a tragedy did happen. A CH-47 Chinook helicopter, call sign Extortion 17, was shot down in Afghanistan. It was a dark day for the special operations community. Thirty-eight people died, including 15 members of the Gold Squadron of SEAL Team 6.
Because the bin Laden raid was still fresh in everyone's mind, the public assumed these were the same guys.
They weren't.
The raid on Abbottabad was carried out by Red Squadron. The men on Extortion 17 were from Gold Squadron. While they belong to the same parent unit—the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU—they are distinct groups with different operators. To say SEAL Team 6 was "wiped out" because of that crash is like saying an entire NFL team is gone because a few players from a different division got hurt.
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Most of the 23 SEALs who were on the ground in Abbottabad are very much alive.
How Many Operators Are We Actually Talking About?
Trying to pin down a specific number of "living members" is kinda like trying to count grains of sand in a windstorm. SEAL Team 6 isn't a small club of ten guys. It’s a massive organization.
Currently, DEVGRU has about 1,787 authorized personnel.
- Roughly 300 of those are the actual "operators" or shooters.
- The rest are support staff: analysts, tech experts, and logistics gurus.
- The unit is split into color-coded squadrons: Blue, Gold, Red, Silver, Black, and Gray.
If you're asking how many people have ever been in SEAL Team 6 since it was founded by Richard Marcinko in 1980, you're looking at thousands of veterans. Most of them are alive, living quiet lives, and probably coaching their kids' soccer games.
Marcinko himself, the "Rogue Warrior" who started the whole thing, lived a long, loud life before passing away in December 2021 at the age of 81. He wasn't killed on a mission; he died of a heart attack at home. That’s the reality for most of these guys. They do their time, they face incredible danger, and then they retire to write books or start tactical gear companies.
The Faces We Know (And the Many We Don't)
Because of the "Quiet Professional" ethos, most members of the unit never reveal their names. However, a few have become household names, usually because they chose to go public after retiring.
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Robert O’Neill is perhaps the most famous. He’s the guy who claims he fired the shots that killed bin Laden. He’s very active on social media and the speaking circuit. Then you’ve got Matt Bissonnette, who wrote No Easy Day under the pen name Mark Owen. He’s alive too.
Then there are the "plankowners"—the original guys from the 80s. Many are in their 60s and 70s now. Some have passed from natural causes, others from the long-term physical toll that special operations takes on a body. But there has never been a "mass casualty" event that took out the majority of the unit's veterans.
The Danger is Real, But the Conspiracy Isn't
Don't get me wrong, being in SEAL Team 6 is incredibly dangerous. The mortality rate is higher than your average office job, obviously. Between 2014 and 2019, the U.S. military saw over 2,500 active-duty deaths across all branches. For SEALs, many of those deaths happen in training.
Diving accidents, parachute malfunctions, and live-fire drills are often more lethal than the enemy.
But the idea that there's a "curse" on the bin Laden team is just bad math. Out of the 20+ operators on that specific mission, only a small handful have died in the years since, mostly in unrelated combat or training incidents. For example, Brett Marijs and Adam Brown are names often cited in memorial walls, but their deaths occurred at different times and in different places.
Why the Anonymity Matters
The reason you can't get a "master list" of living members is simple: security. Even when they retire, these guys are targets. Foreign intelligence services and terrorist groups have long memories.
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If you were a member of Black Squadron (the unit’s specialized reconnaissance and spy wing), your identity is a state secret for life. Even your family might not know exactly what you did. So, when people ask "how many are left," the Navy isn't going to give you a spreadsheet.
Basically, the "Total Alive" count for SEAL Team 6 is likely in the low thousands when you count all the guys who served from 1980 to 2026.
Actionable Insights for Researching SEAL History
If you're trying to separate fact from fiction regarding special operations casualties, here is how you do it:
- Check the NSW Memorial: The Navy SEAL Museum maintains a memorial wall. If a member dies in the line of duty, their name eventually ends up there. It’s the most accurate record of who we’ve lost.
- Distinguish between KIA and Training Accidents: Many "SEAL deaths" reported in the news are tragic training accidents (like the 2023 Mediterranean helicopter crash) rather than combat.
- Follow the Squadrons: If you hear about a loss, look at which squadron it was. As we saw with Extortion 17, confusing Gold Squadron with Red Squadron is where most of these "all of SEAL Team 6 is dead" rumors start.
- Look for "The Trident": The official Naval Special Warfare magazine often mentions retirements and transitions, giving a better picture of the living veteran community.
The myth of the "doomed" SEAL Team 6 makes for a compelling story, but it does a disservice to the hundreds of men who are still out there, serving or living as veterans. They aren't ghosts; they’re just people who value their privacy.
To get the most accurate picture of the unit's history, focus on verified military records and official statements from Naval Special Warfare Command. Avoid clickbait sites that conflate different tragedies into a single narrative. Understanding the organizational structure of DEVGRU—specifically the difference between administrative support and the various tactical squadrons—is the key to debunking the rumors.