No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden

by Owen, Mark

  Staring into the compound, I considered throwing the rope just so we could get out of the unstable bird. I knew it was a risk, but getting on the ground was imperative. There wasn’t anything I could do stuck in the door of the helicopter. All I needed was a clear spot to throw the rope.

  But the clear spot never came.

  “We’re going around. We’re going around,” I heard over the radio. That meant the original plan to fast-rope into the compound was now off. We were going to circle around to the south, land, and assault from outside the wall. It would add precious time to the assault and allow anyone inside the compound more time to arm themselves.

  My heart sank.

  Up until I heard the go-around call, everything was going as planned. We had evaded the Pakistani radar and antiaircraft missiles on the way in and arrived undetected. Now, the insert was already going to shit. We had rehearsed this contingency, but it was plan B. If our target was really inside, surprise was the key and it was quickly slipping away.

  As the helicopter attempted to climb out of its unstable hover, it took a violent right turn, spinning ninety degrees. I could feel the tail kick to the left. It caught me by surprise and I immediately struggled to find a handhold inside the cabin to keep from sliding out the door.

  I could feel my butt coming off the floor, and for a second I could feel a panic rising in my chest. I let go of the rope and started to lean back into the cabin, but my teammates were all crowded in the door. There was little room for me to scoot back. I could feel Walt’s grip tighten on my body armor as the helicopter started to drop. Walt’s other hand held the sniper’s gear. I leaned back as far as I could. Walt was practically lying on top of me to keep me inside.

  “Holy fuck, we’re going in,” I thought.

  The violent turn put my door in the front as the helicopter started to slide sideways. I could see the wall of the courtyard coming up at us. Overhead, the engines, which had been humming, now seemed to scream as they tried to beat the air into submission to stay aloft.

  The tail rotor had barely missed hitting the guesthouse as the helicopter slid to the left. We had joked before the mission that our helicopter had the lowest chance of crashing because so many of us had already survived previous helicopter crashes. We’d been sure if a helicopter was going to crash it would be the one carrying Chalk Two.

  Thousands of man-hours, maybe even millions, had been spent leading the United States to this moment, and the mission was about to go way off track before we even had a chance to get our feet on the ground.

  I tried to kick my legs up and wiggle deeper into the cabin. If the helicopter hit on its side, it might roll, trapping my legs under the fuselage. Leaning back as far as I could, I pulled my legs into my chest. Next to me, the sniper tried to clear his legs from the door, but it was too crowded. There was nothing we could do but hope the helicopter didn’t roll and chop off his exposed leg.

  Everything slowed down. I tried to push the thoughts of being crushed out of my mind. With every second, the ground got closer and closer. I felt my whole body tense up, ready for the inevitable impact.

  CHAPTER 1

  Green Team

  I could feel the sweat dripping down my back, soaking my shirt, as I slowly moved down the corridor of the kill house at our training site in Mississippi.

  It was 2004, seven years before I would ride a Black Hawk into Abbottabad, Pakistan, on one of the most historic special operations raids in history. I was in the selection and training course for SEAL Team Six, sometimes called by its full name: United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, abbreviated DEVGRU. The nine-month selection course was known as Green Team, and it was the one thing that stood between me and the other candidates moving up to the elite DEVGRU.

  My heart was beating fast, and I had to blink the perspiration out of my eyes as I followed my teammate to the door. My breathing was labored and ragged as I tried to force any extraneous thoughts from my head. I was nervous and edgy, and that was how mistakes were made. I needed to focus, but no matter what was in the room we were about to enter, it paled compared to the cadre of instructors watching on the catwalk.

  All of the instructors were senior combat veterans from DEVGRU. Handpicked to train new operators, they held my future in their hands.

  “Just get to lunch,” I muttered to myself.

  It was the only way I could control my anxiety. In 1998, I’d made it through Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL, or BUD/S, by focusing on just making it to the next meal. It didn’t matter if I couldn’t feel my arms as we hoisted logs over our heads or if the cold surf soaked me to the core. It wasn’t going to last forever. There is a saying: “How do you eat an elephant?” The answer is simple: “One bite at a time.” Only my bites were separated by meals: Make it to breakfast, train hard until lunch, and focus until dinner. Repeat.

  In 2004, I was already a SEAL, but making it to DEVGRU would be the pinnacle of my career. As the Navy’s counter-terrorism unit, DEVGRU did hostage rescue missions, tracked war criminals, and, since the attacks on September 11, hunted and killed al Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan and Iraq.

  But nothing about making it through Green Team was easy. It was no longer good enough for me to be a SEAL. During Green Team, just passing was failing and second place was the first loser. The point was not to meet the minimums, but crush them. Success in Green Team was about managing stress and performing at your peak level—all the time.

  Before each training day, we completed a punishing physical training or PT workout of long runs, push-ups, pull-ups, and anything else the sadistic instructors could cook up. We pushed cars, and on multiple occasions we pushed buses. When we got to the kill house, a purpose-built ballistically safe building made up of hallways and rooms used to practice close-quarters battle, or CQB, our muscles were already tired and sore. The point of doing the PT was to make us physically tired to simulate the stress of a real mission before they tested us in a demanding tactical environment.

  I didn’t have time to steal a glimpse at the instructors as we moved down the hall. This was the first day of training, and everybody’s nerves were running high. We had started CQB training after completing a full month’s worth of high-altitude parachute training in Arizona. The pressure to perform had been evident there too, but once we got to Mississippi it was ratcheted up.

  I shook the nagging aches and pains from my mind and concentrated on the door in front of me. It was made of thin plywood with no doorknob. The door was battered and broken from teams that went before us, and my teammate easily pushed it open with his gloved hand. We paused for a second at the threshold, scanning for targets before we entered.

  The room was square, with rough walls made of old railroad ties to absorb the live rounds. I could hear my teammate enter behind me as I swept my rifle in an arc searching for a target.

  Nothing. The room was empty.

  “Moving,” my teammate called as he stepped into the room to clear around a corner.

  Instinctually, I slid into position to cover him.

  As soon as I started to move, I could hear murmuring above me in the rafters. We couldn’t stop, but I knew one of us had just made a mistake. For a second, my stress level spiked, but I quickly pushed it out of my mind. There was no time to worry about mistakes. There were more rooms to clear. I couldn’t worry about the mistakes I made in the first room.

  Back in the hall, we entered the next room. I spotted two targets as I entered. To the right, I saw the silhouette of a crook holding a small revolver. He was wearing a sweatshirt and looked like a 1970s thug from the movies. To the left, there was a silhouette of a woman holding a purse.

  I snapped a shot off at the crook seconds after stepping into the room. The round hit center mass. I moved toward it, shooting a few more rounds.

  “Clear,” I said, lowering my muzzle.

  “Clear,” my teammate answered.

  “Safe ‘em and let ‘em hang,” one of the instructors said from a
bove.

  No less than six instructors were looking down at us from a catwalk that spidered out over the kill house. They could walk safely along the walkways watching as we cleared the different rooms, judging our performance and watching for any tiny mistakes.

  I put my rifle on safe and let it hang against me by its sling. I wiped beads of sweat out of my eyes with my sleeve. My heart was still pounding, even though we were finished. The training scenarios were pretty straightforward. We all knew how to clear rooms. It was the process of clearing a room perfectly under the simulated stress of combat that would set us apart.

  There was no margin of error, and at that moment I wasn’t sure exactly what we had done wrong.

  “Where was your move call?” Tom, one of the instructors, said to me from the catwalk.

  I didn’t answer. I just nodded. I was embarrassed and disappointed. I’d forgotten to tell my teammate to move in the first room, which was a safety violation.

  Tom was one of the best instructors in the course. I could always pick him out because he had a huge head. It was massive, like it housed a giant brain. It was his one distinct physical trait; otherwise you’d miss him because he was mellow and never seemed to get upset. We all respected him because he was both firm and fair. When you made a mistake in front of Tom, it felt like you let him down. His disappointment with me was plastered across his face.

  No screaming.

  No yelling.

  Just the look.

  From above, I saw him shoot me the “Dude, really? Did you just do that?” look.

  I wanted to speak or at least try and explain, but I knew they didn’t want to hear it. If they said you were wrong, you were wrong. Standing below them in the empty room, there was no arguing or explaining.

  “OK, check,” I said, defenseless and furious with myself for making such a basic error.

  “We need better than that,” Tom said. “Beat it. Do your ladder climb.”

  Snatching up my rifle, I jogged out of the kill house and sprinted to a rope ladder hanging on a tree about three hundred yards away. Climbing up the ladder, rung by rung, I felt heavier. It wasn’t my sweat-soaked shirt or the sixty pounds of body armor and gear strapped to my chest.

  It was my fear of failure. I’ve never failed anything in my SEAL career.

  When I got to San Diego six years earlier for BUD/S, I never doubted I’d make it. A lot of my fellow BUD/S candidates who arrived with me either got cut or quit. Some of them couldn’t keep up with the brutal beach runs, or they panicked underwater during SCUBA training.

  Like a lot of other BUD/S candidates, I knew I wanted to become a SEAL when I was thirteen. I read every book I could find about the SEALs, followed the news during Desert Storm for any mention of them, and daydreamed about ambushes and coming up over the beach on a combat mission. I wanted to do all of the things I’d read in the books while growing up.

  After completing my degree at a small college in California, I went to BUD/S and earned my SEAL trident in 1998. After a six-month deployment throughout the Pacific Rim, and a combat deployment to Iraq in 2003-2004, I was ready for something new. I’d learned about DEVGRU during my first two deployments. DEVGRU was a collection of the best the SEAL community had to offer, and I knew I would never be able to live with myself if I didn’t try.

  The Navy’s counter-terrorism unit was born in the aftermath of Operation Eagle Claw, the failed 1980 mission ordered by President Jimmy Carter to rescue fifty-two Americans held captive at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran.

  After the mission, the Navy identified a need for a force capable of successfully executing those kind of specialized missions and tapped Richard Marcinko to develop a maritime counter-terrorism unit called SEAL Team Six. The team practiced hostage rescue as well as infiltrating enemy countries, ships, naval bases, and oil rigs. Over time, missions branched out to counter-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

  At the time Marcinko established the command, there were only two SEAL teams, so “six” was chosen to make the Soviets think the Navy had more teams. In 1987, SEAL Team Six became DEVGRU.

  The unit started with seventy-five operators, handpicked by Marcinko. Now, all of the members of the unit are handpicked from other SEAL teams and Explosive Ordnance Disposal units. The unit has grown significantly and filled out with numerous teams of operators as well as support staff, but the concept remains the same.

  The unit is part of the Joint Special Operations Command, called JSOC. DEVGRU works closely with other National Missions Force teams like the Army’s Delta Force.

  One of DEVGRU’s first missions was in 1983 during Operation Urgent Fury. Members of the unit rescued Grenada’s governor-general, Paul Scoon, during the U.S.-led invasion of the small Caribbean nation after a Communist takeover. Scoon was facing execution.

  Six years later in 1989, DEVGRU joined with Delta Force to capture Manuel Noriega during the invasion of Panama.

  DEVGRU operators were part of the U.S.-led mission to capture Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid in October 1993, which turned into the Battle of Mogadishu. The fight was chronicled in Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down.

  In 1998, DEVGRU operators tracked Bosnian war criminals, including Radislav Krstic, the Bosnian general who was later indicted for his role in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995.

  Since September 11, 2001, DEVGRU operators had been on a steady cycle of deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, targeting al Qaeda and Taliban commanders. The command got the immediate call to insert into Afghanistan after September 11, 2001, and operators in the command were responsible for some of the high-profile missions like the Jessica Lynch rescue in Iraq in 2003. It was missions like these and the fact that they are the first to get the call that motivated me.

  Before you can screen for Green Team, you need to be a SEAL, and most candidates typically have two deployments. The deployments usually mean the candidate has the necessary skill level and experience, which was needed to complete the selection course.

  As I climbed the rungs on the ladder in the Mississippi heat, I couldn’t help but think about how I’d almost failed the three-day screening process before even starting Green Team.

  The dates for the screening fell during my unit’s land warfare training. I was at Camp Pendleton, California, hiding under a tree, watching Marines build a base camp. It was 2003 and we were a week into our reconnaissance training block when I got orders to report back to San Diego to start the three-day screening process. If I was lucky enough to get selected, I would begin the nine-month Green Team training course. If I was lucky enough to pass, I would join the ranks of DEVGRU.

  I was the only one in my platoon going. A buddy in a sister platoon was also screening. As we drove down together, we both were washing the green paint off our faces. Still dressed in our camouflage uniforms, we smelled of body odor and bug spray after spending days in the field. My stomach hurt from eating nothing but Meals, Ready-To-Eat, and I tried to hydrate, sucking down water as we drove. I was not in the best physical shape, and I knew the first part of the screening was a fitness test.

  The next morning, we were out at the beach. The sun was just peeking over the horizon as I finished the four-mile timed run. After a short break, I joined about two dozen other candidates in a line on a concrete pad. A breeze blew off the Pacific, and there was a little chill in the air from the night before. At any other time, it would have been a pretty morning on the beach. I was already tired from the run, and we still had push-ups, sit-ups, and pull-ups before the swim.

  I easily passed the push-up test, despite the instructors’ nitpicking each rep. Every exercise had to be perfect, or it didn’t count. Rolling onto my back, I prepared for the sit-up test.

  I was really tired as I knocked out the first sit-ups.

  Being out in the field hadn’t helped my stamina. I got into a good rhythm at first, but it was broken when the instructor stopped next to me and started repeating some of the numbers of my reps.

&
nbsp; “Ten, ten, ten,” he said. “Ten, eleven, twelve, twelve.”

  My technique wasn’t textbook. He was repeating the numbers that weren’t perfect. Every time he repeated a number, I was more ashamed. I was getting tired but I wasn’t getting any closer to meeting the test standard.

  “One minute.”

  I was way behind as the call came and was quickly running out of time. If I failed the sit-ups, I was done. Doubt started to creep into my mind. I started to come up with bullshit excuses like I was ill-prepared because I had been training with my unit, rather than preparing for this test.

  “Thirty seconds.”

  With half a minute to go I was ten short of the minimum number. Next to me, another guy had already passed that number and he was knocking out even more as fast as he could go. My mind was spinning and I couldn’t believe I was failing. Forcing the poisonous thoughts from my mind, I focused on technique. Soon, I was making up ground.

  “Ten seconds.”

  I was close. My stomach ached. My breath came in gasps. My fatigue was replaced with fear. I was in shock. I couldn’t fail. There was no way I could go back to my platoon knowing I couldn’t even pass the physical fitness test.

  “Five, four, three …”

  As the instructors called time, I finished my last sit-up. I squeaked by, passing the minimum by two measly sit-ups. I was spent, but I still had to do the pull-ups. Walking to the bar, the near-failure scared some adrenaline into me and I was able to pass the pull-ups without issue.

  The final event was a swim in San Diego Bay. The water was calm. We had wetsuits on, so I couldn’t feel the chill of the water. I started strong. One of the guys screening had been a Naval Academy swimmer and was well ahead of me, but I was in second place. I kept pulling, but it felt like I was going slow. It felt like swimming on a treadmill.

  When I got to the finish line, the instructors told me I’d failed. It turned out everyone except for the academy swimmer failed. That caught the attention of the instructors and they checked the tide schedule. After a quick review of the currents, word came down that we had been swimming against the tide.