Month: August 2011

Osama bin Laden killed by U.S. forces

Year
2011
Month Day
May 02

On May 2, 2011, Osama bin Laden, the mastermind behind the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, is killed by U.S. forces during a raid on his compound hideout in Pakistan. The notorious, 54-year-old leader of Al Qaeda, the terrorist network of Islamic extremists, had been the target of a nearly decade-long international manhunt.

The raid began around 1 a.m. local time, when 23 U.S. Navy SEALs in two Black Hawk helicopters descended on the compound in Abbottabad, a tourist and military center north of Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. One of the helicopters crash-landed into the compound but no one aboard was hurt. During the raid, which lasted approximately 40 minutes, five people, including bin Laden and one of his adult sons, were killed by U.S. gunfire. No Americans were injured in the assault. Afterward, bin Laden’s body was flown by helicopter to Afghanistan for official identification, then buried at an undisclosed location in the Arabian Sea less than 24 hours after his death, in accordance with Islamic practice.

Just after 11:30 p.m. EST on May 1 (Pakistan’s time zone is 9 hours ahead of Washington, D.C.), President Barack Obama, who monitored the raid in real time via footage shot by a drone flying high above Abbottabad, made a televised address from the White House, announcing bin Laden’s death. “Justice has been done,” the president said. After hearing the news, cheering crowds gathered outside the White House and in New York City’s Times Square and the Ground Zero site.

Based on computer files and other evidence the SEALs collected during the raid, it was later determined that bin Laden was making plans to assassinate President Obama and carry out a series of additional attacks against America, including one on the anniversary of September 11, the largest terrorist attack ever on U.S. soil, which left nearly 3,000 people dead. Shortly after the 2001 attack, President George W. Bush declared bin Laden, who was born into a wealthy family in Saudi Arabia in 1957 and used his multi-million-dollar inheritance to help establish al Qaeda and fund its activities, would be captured dead or alive. In December of that year, American-backed forces came close to capturing bin Laden in a cave complex in Afghanistan’s Tora Bora region; however, he escaped and would continue to elude U.S. authorities for years.

A break in the hunt for bin Laden came in August 2010, when C.I.A. analysts tracked the terrorist leader’s courier to the Abbottabad compound, located behind tall security walls in a residential neighborhood. (U.S. intelligence officials spent the ensuing months keeping the compound under surveillance; however, they were never certain bin Laden was hiding there until the raid took place.) The U.S. media had long reported bin Laden was believed to be hiding in the remote tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistani border, so many Americans were surprised to learn the world’s most famous fugitive had likely spent the last five years of his life in a well-populated area less than a mile from an elite Pakistani military academy. After the raid, which the U.S. reportedly carried out without informing the Pakistani government in advance, some American officials suspected Pakistani authorities of helping to shelter bin Laden in Abbottabad, although there was no concrete evidence to confirm this.

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George R.R. Martin’s “Game of Thrones” debuts

Year
1996
Month Day
August 01

On August 1, 1996, “A Game of Thrones,” an epic fantasy novel by George R.R. Martin, is released. The book was the first in Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, about feuding medieval noble families on an imaginary continent called Westeros. Although not initially a best-seller, “A Game of Thrones” gained a loyal following, and the “Song of Ice and Fire” series eventually became a huge hit, selling millions of books and spawning a blockbuster HBO series. 

Martin, who was born in 1948 and raised in Bayonne, New Jersey, graduated from Northwestern University in 1970 and earned a master’s degree in journalism from the school the following year. He went on to teach journalism, direct chess tournaments and publish fantasy and science-fiction short stories and novels, although none achieved the success of his “Song of Ice and Fire” series. From the mid-1980s to mid-1990s, Martin worked as a writer-producer in Hollywood, contributing to such TV series as “The Twilight Zone” and “Beauty and the Beast.” He penned scripts that were often deemed too complicated and expensive to produce, an experience that influenced how he developed the “Song of Ice and Fire” saga. 

As Martin told the New York Times: “When I returned to prose, which had been my first love, in the 90s, I said I’m going to do something that is just as big as I want to do. I can have all the special effects I want. I can have a cast of characters that numbers in the hundreds. I can have giant battle scenes. Everything you can’t do in television and film, of course you can do in prose because you’re everything there. You’re the director, you’re the special effects coordinator, you’re the costume department, and you don’t have to worry about a budget.”

Martin originally intended “A Game of Thrones” as the first title in a trilogy; however, his plan expanded into a series that so far also includes “A Clash of Kings” (1999, in the U.S.),“A Storm of Swords” (2000), “A Feast for Crows” (2005) and “A Dance with Dragons” (2011). Two more books are forthcoming. The novels are known for their elaborate plots and large casts of morally complex characters. The HBO series ran from 2011 to 2019. 

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Ernest Hemingway is born

Year
1899
Month Day
July 21

On July 21, 1899, Ernest Miller Hemingway, author of such novels as “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and “The Old Man and the Sea,” is born in Oak Park, Illinois. The influential American literary icon became known for his straightforward prose and use of understatement. Hemingway, who tackled topics such as bullfighting and war in his work, also became famous for his own macho, hard-drinking persona.

As a boy, Hemingway, the second of six children of Clarence Hemingway, a doctor, and Grace Hall Hemingway, a musician, learned to fish and hunt, which would remain lifelong passions. After graduating from Oak Park and River Forest High School in 1917, he worked as a reporter for the Kansas City Star in Missouri. The following year, as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy during World War I, he was wounded by mortar fire and spent months recuperating.

READ MORE: How World War I Changed Literature

During the 1920s, Hemingway lived in Paris, France, and was part of a group of expatriate writers and artists that included F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound. In 1925, Hemingway published his first collection of short stories in the U.S., which was followed by his well-received 1926 debut novel “The Sun Also Rises,” about a group of American and British expatriates in the 1920s who journey from Paris to Pamplona, Spain, to watch bullfighting.

In 1929, Hemingway, who by then had left Europe and moved to Key West, Florida, published “A Farewell to Arms,” about an American ambulance driver on the Italian front during World War I and his love for a beautiful English nurse. In 1932, his non-fiction book “Death in the Afternoon,” about bullfighting in Spain, was released. It was followed in 1935 by another non-fiction work, “Green Hills of Africa,” about a safari Hemingway made to East Africa in the early 1930s. During the late 1930s, Hemingway traveled to Spain to report on that country’s civil war, and also spent time living in Cuba. In 1937, he released “To Have and Have Not,” a novel about a fishing boat captain forced to run contraband between Key West and Cuba.

In 1940, the acclaimed “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” about a young American fighting with a band of guerrillas in the Spanish civil war, made its debut. Hemingway went on to work as a war correspondent in Europe during World War II, and release the 1950 novel “Across the River and into the Trees.”

Hemingway’s last significant work to be published during his lifetime was 1952’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” a novella about an aging Cuban fisherman that was an allegory referring to the writer’s own struggles to preserve his art in the face of fame and attention. Hemingway had become a cult figure whose four marriages and adventurous exploits in big-game hunting and fishing were widely covered in the press. But despite his fame, he had not produced a major literary work in the decade before “The Old Man and the Sea” debuted. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1953, and Hemingway won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1954.

After surviving two plane crashes in Africa in 1953, Hemingway became increasingly anxious and depressed. On July 2, 1961, he killed himself with a shotgun at his home in Ketchum, Idaho. (His father had died by suicide in 1928.)

Three novels by Hemingway were released posthumously—“Islands in the Stream” (1970), “The Garden of Eden” (1986) and “True at First Light” (1999)—as was the memoir “A Moveable Feast” (1964), which he penned about his time in Paris in the 1920s.

READ MORE: Was Ernest Hemingway a Spy?

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