This guy is doing what NoBama can't and will not do. I wanna have a beer with this guy.
DENVER - His family didn't know if they'd ever see him again, but Gary Faulkner returned to Colorado early Thursday morning, shortly after midnight, where he was met by his brother and swarmed by a throng of media.
"Man, I'll tell you what, it's so good to be back; back in native soil, and back in good old Colorado," Gary Faulkner said as he walked into the terminal at Denver International Airport.
He got a hug from his brother, Dr. Scott Faulkner, who tried to escort him through the crush of cameras, lights and reporters who peppered him with questions. Bewildered air travelers looked on at the scene moving through the airport.
"I look forward to getting a little sleep here," Gary Faulkner said. "It's been a very long flight and a very long week or so."
Last week, Scott Faulkner told the media at a news conference his brother had sold all of his carpentry tools to finance his sixth trip to Pakistan to hunt down Osama bin Laden. He said he saw his brother off at DIA not knowing if he would ever see him again.
As they were reunited in Denver, Scott Faulkner tried to steal a few moments with his brother Gary, who rose to fame last week when he was arrested in Pakistan with a 40-inch sword, a pistol and night-vision equipment, and told authorities he was out hunting the Al-Qaida leader - a man the U.S. government placed a $25 million bounty on.
It's unlikely Gary Faulkner got close to bin Laden, however. Asked if he had seen bin Laden, the jovial Greeley resident joked that he'd seen him on TV once.
The media followed Faulkner from the moment he stepped off the plane, onto the airport's train, through the main terminal, through the parking lot and to the vehicle waiting to take him home.
During his walk through the airport, Gary Faulkner was smiling and garrulous, but didn't reveal too much information about how close he got to bin Laden, or whether he had information on his whereabouts.
"People don't realize how intense these mountain are. Our mountains are beautiful. We have some beautiful, gorgeous mountains, but we don't have the intensity that the Himalayas are," Gary Faulkner said. "It is so much easier to hide there than it is even in our mountains."
Gary Faulkner says the Rocky Mountains have a lot more wildlife than he saw while in the Himalayas.
"I'd go into the Continental Divide and that's where I'd practice and got acclimated to the cold and to the altitude," Gary Faulkner said. "So, you know, you don't just jump off the deep end and all of the sudden you're there."
When told people were calling him Rambo, Gary Faulkner smiled.
"Rocky Mountain Rambo, that's what we're going to call him," Scott Faulkner joked.
Gary and Scott Faulkner both promise a more organized news conference in the future, but the man who was dubbed the "bin Laden hunter" didn't leave without injecting his take on a political hot topic.
"I got one patriotic thing to say: If it's in your heart to do something that's good for our people - I don't care if they're Spanish, white, black or anything, we're Americans," Gary Faulkner said. "This stuff that's been happening down in Arizona is ridiculous, folks. I mean, we should be ashamed of ourselves. Really."
Scott Faulkner says he plans to check his brother's health on Thursday to see if he needs any treatment for his kidney disease.
