A U.S. Navy SEALs unit, of the same special category that killed Osama bin Laden, has rescued an American and a Dane from pirates who captured them three months ago in Somalia. The Danish Refugee Council said the two were flown to Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti, where doctors said they are in reasonably good health. The American remains in hospital for observation, but both plan to reunite soon with their families.

In a pre-dawn raid on Wednesday the 25^th (early evening Tuesday, U.S. East Coast time), members of the highly-elite SEAL Team Six parachuted into an area near the pirates’ inland nest far from the coastal region around the town of Galkayo—a disputed, outlaw stronghold that's earned the name "kidnap central." Jessica Buchanan, 32, a former fourth grade teacher from Virginia, and Poul Thisted, 60, of Denmark, both employees of the Danish Demining Group (DDG), were abducted there in October. Pirates holding the pair had demanded a ransom of $10 million.

A Djibouti-based U.S. anti-terrorist unit, Joint Special Operations Command Horn of Africa (CJTF-HOA) launched the raid from Galkayo’s airport, near where the aid workers had been abducted. CJTF-HOA includes forces from the U.S. Air Force, Army, Navy, and Marine Corps.

Minutes after delivering his State of the Union address, President Obama called John Buchanan and told him his daughter had been rescued from Somali pirates. Hours earlier, U.S. special forces—the same elite Navy SEAL unit that killed Osama bin Laden—parachuted into the pirate encampment where Jessica Buchanan and her fellow aid worker were being held, rescued them while killing nine captors, and escaped in waiting helicopters.

The raid punctuated four months of fruitless negotiations for the release of Buchanan, an American, and Poul Hagen Thisted, a Dane, who were abducted in October on their way to the airport in Galkayo, a small town in central Somalia. Both Buchanan and Thisted worked for the Danish Demining Group, a division of the Danish Refugee Council, and had just finished a workshop on defusing land mines shortly before the kidnapping. Buchanan, who felt called to Africa as a Christian missionary, had worked there as an educator for five years, first in Kenya and then in Somalia, where she moved with her husband, a Swedish aid worker, three years ago. "She could hardly talk about Africa without tears in her eyes,” said the president of the college she had attended. In perhaps the cruelest irony of the saga, Buchanan and Thisted were apparently betrayed to their captors by a local employee of the Danish aid group for which they worked—one of the last Western organizations still operating in Muslim Somalia.

Buchanan, 32, was a long way from her hometown of Cincinnati. According to a family member who wished to remain anonymous, her journey to Africa began when she enrolled at Valley Forge Christian College in Phoenixville, Pa., shortly after a split with her first husband. Through Valley Forge, Buchanan spent a semester in Nairobi as a student teacher. It was that experience that drew her back to the continent. “She did a semester of student teaching in Africa, and that experience just planted in her a love and passion for Africa," Don Meyer, president of Valley Forge, told CNN.

The more sweat and tears you put into the training, the less blood you’ll shed in time of war.

—Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL motto

Have you ever heard of something called heart-rate variability (HRV)? It’s a real medical phenomenon discovered by a guy named Dr. Charles Morgan of Yale University that’s used to predict which soldiers are likely to perform most efficiently under the stress of combat.

Most people have a large degree of variability in their heart rates during the course of a day. In other words, your heart speeds up and slows down all the time, depending on conditions—like when someone is pointing a gun at your head or you’re lounging by the pool drinking a Dos Equis.

Was it really just four months ago? With Americans fearful about a badly faltering economy, the 2012 presidential race gearing up, and the Middle East being remade daily, the death of Osama bin Laden seems like a distant occurrence—a moment of triumph that would feel out of place today—despite the looming anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

A new documentary premiering on the History Channel on Tuesday, Targeting Bin Laden, unintentionally emphasizes the distance. By canonizing the event’s history, it both celebrates the greatest coup in the war on terror and situates it solidly in the past. If this is how the event will be remembered (and it will face stiff competition from the likes of Hurt Locker director Kathryn Bigelow), Targeting Bin Laden is a useful record of the lead-up to the fateful raid, its execution, and its aftermath, featuring exclusive interviews with key players—including President Obama.

But with Obama sticking strictly to his “no-drama” persona and conveying little emotion during his on-screen moments, the show is stolen by two other figures: Ben Rhodes, the deputy national-security adviser for strategic communications, and Ryan Zinke, a former member of SEAL Team 6 who’s now a Montana state senator.

It’s Rhodes who puts the whole saga in context. “I realized after those helicopters took off that I wouldn’t be sitting in the room where I was if it weren’t for 9/11. I saw those Twin Towers get hit with airplanes ... And that’s when I decided that I wanted to move down to Washington and try to be a part of whatever was going to happen next,” he says. “You’re sitting there thinking through all those things. Your personal story, the story of the country, what’s going to be going through the minds of the people who lost loved ones.”