President Barack Obama gave a special gift to Navy SEAL commander Admiral William McRaven after the spectacular raid that resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden.
A tape measure.
According to Business Insider (via MSN), Obama gifted McRaven with the standard toolbox and household item as an inside joke: during the raid, SEAL Team Six needed to take measurements of bin Laden’s corpse to make sure it was the terrorist. One of the measurements was the body’s height: bin Laden was an unusually tall 6’5″.
No one on the assault team, however, had a tape measure, so McRaven ordered one of the SEAL to lay next to the corpse so the observers could gauge the height.
“Seriously, Bill?” Obama recalled joking to the admiral over a secure line during the raid. “All that planning and you couldn’t bring a tape measure?”
Obama wrote in his new memoir, “A Promised Land,” that it was the first moment of levity in a very stressful day.