One of President Obama’s earliest kills came in April 2009. Somali pirates had stormed the Maersk Alabama, a U.S. container ship steaming across lawless waters off the Horn of Africa. The American crew of the ship had tried to overwhelm the pirates, who fled on a covered lifeboat, taking with them a 53-year-old hostage: ship captain Richard Phillips. Armed with AK-47s and pistols, the pirates stashed Phillips below deck and threatened to kill him if they didn’t get $2 million in ransom.

Barack Obama, not yet three months into his presidency, had already undergone a crash course in battlefield management. He had authorized drone strikes in Pakistan and sent 17,000 troops into Afghanistan. But until now, he had not experienced the personal immediacy and political risk of a kill operation involving an American hostage—one that would play out largely in public view. Nor had he worked with SEAL Team 6, the elite “tier one” commandos who carry out many of the darkest missions in the shadow wars.

Early on in the standoff, the Navy had requested permission to use force, but the White House held back. Military commanders had already dispatched a small armada to the scene, including a destroyer, the USS Bainbridge, and a frigate, the USS Halyburton. Transport planes ferried in the SEALs, who parachuted into the Indian Ocean with inflatable boats. On April 11, three days after the hostage taking began, Obama agreed to the use of military force—but only if the captain’s life was in imminent danger.

As Obama’s military advisers monitored events in the White House Situation Room, the president popped in for regular updates. SEAL Team 6 snipers were positioned on different ships to maximize the chances of getting off clean shots. At one point, the Navy laid a kind of a trap for the hostage vessel, but the pirates, by sheer luck, “waltzed” around it, according to a source involved in the operation. All the while, the pirates were drifting toward shore. If they were able to reach a Somali beach with their hostage, a rescue operation would be much more difficult. SEAL boats began zooming around the pirates, using “shouldering and blocking” tactics to keep them away from shore.

In the middle of self-serving and greedy electioneering, there was such nobility to the U.S. Navy SEALs rescue of a 32-year-old former fourth-grade teacher from the clutches of brutal Somali pirates (one of whom was named Osman Alcohol). It was like hearing from afar the lost chords of “America the Beautiful.” SEAL Team 6 has become a more vivid symbol of the power of the great American idea than positive GDP statistics. Maybe the Chinese are more willing to bully their workforce out of bed in their spartan corporate dorms to crank out iPhone screens through the weary dawn, but can you ever imagine their leader giving an order for a fleet of military helicopters to set off in the dead of night to a heavily armed African hellhole and snatch back an endangered young do-gooder?

Obama the professor has become Obama the Caped Crusader when it comes to commanding America’s killing machine. The cool temperament that in everyday governing can be aggravatingly “aloof” has turned out to be stunningly well suited to national-security decisions—to those fabled 3 a.m. phone calls. The last time we went into Somalia, we had Black Hawk Down. This time it was a sleek stealth operation that left most of the enemy dead. As Dan Klaidman writes: “From the earliest days of his administration he began pushing his generals to pursue missions that were surgical and narrowly tailored to clearly defined objectives ... What he did not want to do was open up new fronts in the war on terror or get drawn into fighting local insurgencies around the world.”

With these thrillingly successful raids, it’s almost as if Obama has figured out a way to keep dramatizing an alternative presidency, one where he can make the kind of resounding executive decisions that elude him in politics. The paradox of his presidency is that the liberal appeaser has become the ruthless avenger. His metaphor rang clear in the State of the Union when he spoke of the SEALs’ Osama triumph: “All that mattered that day was the mission. No one thought about politics. No one thought about themselves ... The mission only succeeded because every member of that unit trusted each other—because you can’t charge up those stairs into darkness and danger unless you know that there’s someone behind you.”

Early last week, dozens of U.S. national-security officials received a set of classified PowerPoint slides. In October, Somali outlaws had taken two humanitarian-relief workers hostage, including an American woman, and now U.S. commandos were preparing to launch a rescue mission. Officials in Washington were scheduled to review the operation by secure video conference on Tuesday morning. But then word came that the secret meeting was being pushed up to late in the day on Monday. Why the urgency? There were growing concerns about the rapidly deteriorating health of Jessica Buchanan, the American aid worker. U.S. intelligence knew, for example, that her captors were not giving her the antibiotics needed to treat a medical condition she had. But military sources tell Newsweek that it was a separate piece of intelligence that made them decide to move quickly: something they could see. Using sophisticated surveillance techniques, possibly a drone, they were able to peer into the compound where the hostages were being held. They saw Buchanan doubled over in pain, according to two military sources briefed on the matter.

There was little time to lose. Late Monday evening, President Obama signed off on the operation, and hours later about two dozen Navy SEALs parachuted into the predawn darkness of the Somali hinterland. Once on the ground, they hiked for nearly two miles, then burst into the Somalis’ encampment, killed all nine captors, and freed the hostages. There were no casualties among the SEALs. “They hit all their marks,” says one senior administration official. “It was the stuff of Entebbe.”

The Somali raid, for all of its Hollywood drama, is only one of hundreds of daring missions conducted by elite U.S. commandos in recent years. Navy SEALs and other special operators, with the encouragement of President Obama, have become a primary weapon in “denied areas” like Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia. Their ability to go after terrorists, pirates, or other criminals with stealth, precision, and lethal force is in line with Obama’s basic approach to the shadow wars. From the earliest days of his administration he began pushing his generals to pursue missions that were surgical and narrowly tailored to clearly defined objectives—whether rescuing hostages or protecting well-defined American interests. What he did not want to do was open up new fronts in the war on terror or get drawn into fighting local insurgencies around the world.

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.”