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

CHAPTER 9 Something Special in D.C.

I stood in my yard and ran my toes through the grass and looked up into the blue sky.

It was the early spring of 2011. Three weeks before, I had been stumbling over the thick gravel that covers the ground at the American forward operating bases and trying to stay warm through the cold Afghanistan winter. For months, it was nothing but ice, snow, and mud. After constant deployments since September 11, 2001, to one desert country or another, I had grown to appreciate the simple things like a nice green lawn.

I was glad to be home.

The last deployment, for the most part, had been slow. Winter deployments often were, as fighters moved back into Pakistan to wait for warmer weather. My three weeks of leave were winding down, and my troop would be heading to Mississippi to train. I looked forward to getting back on my gun after the break. It was one of those trips where we could still unwind a bit and just relax.

This would be the first trip in a long time that I wasn’t going to be shooting with Steve. His time as a team leader was up. When we returned from the last deployment, he transferred over to Green Team to be an instructor. There was no farewell speech. We got back, put our gear away, and when Steve came back from leave he kicked off as an instructor with the next class.

I was into work early that morning to get in a workout and get my kit together for the trip, when I ran into Steve.

“I need a break,” Steve said. “It has been a good run since Green Team, and with all the new rules it has taken all the fun out of the job.”

“I hear you,” I said. “Got one more rotation as a team leader and then we’ll see.”

Everyone in the squadron was a combat veteran. The average guy had at least a dozen deployments. Even with the pace and the sacrifices of being away from family, most of us kept coming back for more.

“It’s going to be a short break,” I said to Steve. “You’ll be back soon as a troop chief.”

“So we can both learn the art of PowerPoint,” Steve said.

Everything in Afghanistan was getting harder. It seemed with every rotation we had new requirements or restrictions. It took pages of PowerPoint slides to get a mission approved. Lawyers and staff officers pored over the details on each page, making sure our plan was acceptable to the Afghan government.

We noticed there were fewer assaulters on missions and more “straphangers,” each of whom performed a very limited duty. We now took conventional Army soldiers with us on operations as observers so they could refute any false accusations.

Policy makers were asking us to ignore all of the lessons we had learned, especially the lessons learned in blood, for political solutions. For years, we had been sneaking into compounds, catching fighters by surprise.

Not anymore.

On the last deployment, we were slapped with a new requirement to call them out. After surrounding a building, an interpreter had to get on a bullhorn and yell for the fighters to come out with their hands raised. It was similar to what police did in the United States. After the fighters came out, we cleared the house. If we found guns, we arrested the fighters, only to see them go free a few months later. Often we recaptured the same guy multiple times during a single deployment.

It felt like we were fighting the war with one hand and filling out paperwork with the other. When we brought back detainees, there was an additional two or three hours of paperwork. The first question to the detainee at the base was always, “Were you abused?” An affirmative answer meant an investigation and more paperwork.

And the enemy had figured out the rules.

Their tactics evolved as fast as ours. On my earlier deployments, they stood and fought. On more recent deployments, they started hiding their weapons, knowing we couldn’t shoot them if they weren’t armed. The fighters knew the rules of engagement and figured they’d just work their way through the system and be back to their village in a few days.

It was frustrating. We knew what we were sacrificing at home; we were willing to give that up to do the job on our terms. As more rules were applied, it became harder to justify taking the risks to our lives. The job was becoming more about an exit strategy than doing the right thing tactically.

“Good luck,” Steve said. “Who knows what we’ll see next year?”

I laughed.

“BB guns maybe,” I said. “Tasers and rubber bullets?”

The command was small enough that I would still see Steve often, even if we’d miss him on the next rotation to Afghanistan.

I quickly finished getting my kit ready and headed home. It was getting warm in Virginia Beach. Not hot enough to swim in the ocean, but nice enough for short sleeves. I was hustling to get some of the things on my “to do” list done before I left again.

The first one was new mulch for the house.

When I got home, a beat-up old F-150 Ford truck was parked in the driveway. The mulch guy had a tarp laid out with a large mound covering it. He’d load up his wheelbarrow with a pitchfork and deliver a load to one of the flowerbeds and then come back for more. It was a one-man operation.

As he loaded up the wheelbarrow, I walked over to shoot the shit. I’d never met him, but some of my teammates had recommended his work. Spreading mulch was something I should do myself, but with so little personal time, it was easier to pay for it.

“You’re in the teams, right?” the mulch guy said between scoops.

“Yeah,” I said.

From the look of him, he could have been a SEAL except for his long surfer haircut. He was tall and wiry, and he had tattoos covering both arms. He was wearing a ratty surf T-shirt and worn Carhartt pants.

“Figured, you look the part,” the mulch guy said, setting down the wheelbarrow. “I just did Jay’s house. You know him?”

“He’s my boss,” I said. “We’re actually headed out to do some shooting next week.”

Jay was my squadron commander, but I didn’t know him that well. He had taken over the squadron before the last deployment. He didn’t go out on missions with us very often, so I never really worked with him. At his rank he was typically found running the Joint Operations Center (JOC) and helping us jump through hoops to get missions approved.

We sometimes called our officers “temps” because they showed up for a few years before moving on to check another box on their career path. They bounced from one job to another, never spending enough time to build the kind of roots the enlisted guys did. We tended to stay with one team for a lot longer. Jay was my fourth commanding officer since being at the squadron.

“I guess he’s been pretty busy lately,” the mulch guy said.

I was surprised, since we’d been off for the last three weeks. After a deployment, most guys just wanted to hide out. It was normal for someone at Jay’s level to have work relating to mission coordination and planning. It just seemed strange that Jay was already so busy since we had been on leave.

“What are you talking about?”

“I did his yard the other day,” the mulch guy said between loads. “There is something big going on, and he’s been up in D.C.”

“What?” I said, confused. “He’s supposed to go to Mississippi with us in two days.”

At the time, the Arab Spring was raging. Egypt had a new government and protests had sprung up across the Middle East. Civil war had gripped Libya, with rebels calling for NATO support. With hotspots in Syria, not to mention the Horn of Africa and Afghanistan still demanding attention, speculating on what could be spinning up was difficult.

We were briefed weekly on any existing or expected threats worldwide. Our intelligence department went over each region in the world, sometimes with a special emphasis on a certain situation like Libya. The brief usually ended with the latest information and missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The better informed we were, the more prepared we’d be.

It wasn’t uncommon for us to spin up on a mission, conduct rehearsals, only to wait for decision makers in Washington to approve it. Sometimes, like with Captain Phillips, we’d go. But most times, we’d just wait and eventually stand down. Over the years, most of us learned to keep our heads down and focus on the task in front of us, and leave the speculation to others. It saved energy, if nothing else.

I wrote off the mulch guy and was thankful I was a team leader and not an officer. Officers get jerked around ten times more than we do. Either way, I was ready to go have some fun in Mississippi.

This trip to Mississippi wasn’t like the time I spent down there in Green Team. I didn’t have to worry about picking a bottom five or possibly being sent home for improper CQB. We’d spend half the day at the range and the other half running through the kill house working on our skills and making sure everybody was in sync. We had several new guys in our troop, and we had to make sure they were up to speed.

No one really noticed that Jay and Mike, the squadron’s master chief, who is the most senior enlisted SEAL in the unit, weren’t there. But the mulch guy’s words were stuck in my head. I wondered what was so special in D.C.

We came home on a Thursday. On the way to the airport, I got a text message from Mike.

“Meeting 0800.”

Mike was massive like Charlie, with thick arms and a broad chest. He had been stationed at DEVGRU for as long as I was in the Navy. Like Jay, he didn’t go out on many missions.

On the way back, I found out some of the other guys in the squadron received the same message. Charlie called me the night I got back into town.

“You get that text?” he said.

“Yeah. You got any scoop? Heard anything?” I said.

“Nope. I know Walt got it too,” Charlie said. “I guess there is some list.”

Charlie rattled off a few other names from the list. It wasn’t whole teams, but senior guys.

“I can’t wait to find out what this is all about,” I said. “Sounds suspect.”

I got to the command early the next day and changed into my “working” uniform—a Crye Precision tan desert pattern and Salomon low-top running shoes—and dropped my cell phone in my cage.

The meeting was in our secure conference room, which meant no phones. The conference room was on a floor designated as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or SCIF. Pronounced “skiff,” it’s an area used to process classified or top secret information. We had special badges that got us through the security doors. The lead-lined walls kept out electronic listening devices.

Inside the conference room, the four flat-screen TVs were dark. There were no pictures or maps on the wall. No one had any idea what to expect. I grabbed a chair at the circular table in the middle of the room. I saw Walt, Charlie, and Tom, my old instructor from Green Team. He nodded when he saw me.

Tom was Steve’s old boss. It was odd not seeing Steve. I had deployed with him for the past eight years. Even if this was a wild-goose chase and we got jerked around, it was still strange to spin up on something and not have Steve around. I had a feeling when this turned out to be nothing, he would have the last laugh.

There were almost thirty people in the room, including SEALs, an EOD tech, plus two support guys. With us all crowded inside the room, Mike sat down at the table and started the briefing. Jay, the squadron commander, was absent. Mike seemed a little uncomfortable and didn’t provide a lot of detail.

“We are going to do a joint readiness exercise, and we’re going down to North Carolina to train,” Mike said, passing out a list of gear to pack. “I don’t have a lot of information. Just load out your standard assault stuff, and we’ll tell you more Monday.”

I scanned the list. Nothing on the page—guns, tools, and explosives—was unique or gave away what we’d be doing.

“How long are we going to be gone?” one of my teammates asked.

“Unclear,” Mike said. “We leave Monday.”

“Do we have berthing or do we need tents?” Charlie asked.

“Berthing and chow will be provided,” Mike said.

A couple of other guys asked similar questions, but Mike shut it all down. I started to raise my hand to ask a question. I was curious how we were going to be organized. Overall there was a lot of experience in the room. They’d drawn us from different teams. On most teams, the new guy usually carries the ladder and the sledgehammer. But looking around the room, we had all senior guys. It looked like some kind of dream team they were putting together.

Before I got my hand up, Tom just looked at me and shook his head. I put my hand down. Tom typically never got too spun up. I was usually a little more vocal. My mind was spinning with questions I wanted answered. Not knowing what we were going to do grated on me, especially with the feeling we were just getting jerked around.

“Let’s worry about the load-out,” Tom said as we left. “And we’ll know more Monday.”

We all knew what to do and the gear to pack. I went down to the cages and found one of my guys.

“Hey, brother,” I said. “I need to borrow your sledge.”

Senior guys grabbing gear like a sledgehammer was rare, which brought even more questions from our teammates.

“You got it,” he said. “But why again am I giving up my sledge?”

I didn’t have a good answer.

“We’re going on an exercise,” I said. “They called a bunch of us into a meeting today and we’re going down to North Carolina. They’re calling it a joint readiness exercise.”

I wasn’t any more convincing than Mike. My teammate just looked at me with a “what the fuck?” expression on his face.

Back in our squadron’s storage area, we started loading two ISUs—small, square shipping containers—with our gear. It took most of the day, and by quitting time the containers were filled with tools, guns, and explosives.

While we packed, speculation was rampant. Some guys figured we’d be in Libya in a few weeks. Others bet on Syria or even Iran. Charlie, who seemed to be mulling over all of the questions and non-answers, came out with the boldest prediction.

“We’re going to get UBL,” he said.

Since there is no universal standard for translating Arabic to English, we used the FBI and CIA’s spelling of his name, Usama bin Laden, shortening it to UBL.

“How do you figure?” I said.

“Look, when we were asking them about the plan, they said we were going to a place where there is a base with infrastructure,” Charlie said. “If we don’t need any of these things, we’re going back to Iraq or Afghanistan. Somewhere there is an American base. I’d say we’re going into Pakistan and we’re basing out of Afghanistan.”

“No way,” Walt said. “But if we are, I’ve been to Islamabad. It’s a shit hole.”

Walt and I had already been on one wild-goose chase looking for Bin Laden and his flowing white robes.

It was 2007 and I was on my sixth deployment. This time, I was working with the CIA at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province.

Khost Province was one of the places where the hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon trained. Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters were constantly in the province, slipping easily in and out of neighboring Pakistan.

About midway through the deployment, the whole squadron was called back to Jalalabad from multiple bases throughout the country. One of the CIA’s leading sources on Osama bin Laden reported he saw the al Qaeda leader near Tora Bora. It was the same place U.S. forces almost captured him from in 2001.

The Battle of Tora Bora started on December 12, 2001, and lasted five days. It was believed Bin Laden was hiding in a cave complex in the White Mountains, near the Khyber Pass. The cave complex was a historical safe haven for Afghan fighters, and the CIA funded many of the improvements during the 1980s to assist the mujahedeen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

U.S. and Afghan forces overran the Taliban and al Qaeda positions during the battle but failed to kill or capture Bin Laden. Now the CIA source said he was in Tora Bora.

“They saw a tall man in flowing white robes in Tora Bora,” the commander said. “He is back to possibly make his final stand.” This was 2007, and 9/11 was six years behind us. Until this point, there was no credible intelligence to his whereabouts. We all wanted to believe it, but the details weren’t adding up.

We were going to fly into Tora Bora—which sat on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, between Khost and Jalalabad—and raid his suspected location. It sounded great in theory, but the operation was based on a single human source. Single-source intelligence rarely added up. No one could confirm the report, despite dozens of drones flying day and night over Tora Bora. The mission was set to launch a few days after we arrived, but it kept getting delayed.

Every day it was a new excuse.

“We’re waiting on B-1 bombers.”

“The Rangers aren’t in place yet.”

“We’ve got Special Forces heading to the area with their Afghan partner units.”

It seemed to all of us that every general in Afghanistan wanted a piece of the mission. Units from every service were involved. The night before the operation was going to launch, they called Walt and me to the operations center.

“Something came up, and you two are going to work with the PakMil,” the commander said. “If we get squirters toward the border, we need you guys on the PakMil side to coordinate blocking positions.”

“Are we bringing our kit?” I asked.

“Yeah. Bring all your op gear. You may be operating with the Pakis.”

Once on the ground, we got word Walt had to stay in Islamabad because the Pakistanis only allowed one of us to move forward. Since I was senior, the mission fell to me. An intelligence officer and a communications tech joined me.

I spent the better part of a week in a small command center in a U-shaped building made of concrete. I watched feeds from drones doing laps over Tora Bora and monitored the radio.

The night I got into Pakistan, the Air Force started their bombing campaign leading up to the team’s air assault into the area. My teammates landed in the mountains high above Tora Bora and started to search the area for Bin Laden and his fighters.

I frequently called the PakMil into the command center to look at the drone feed. Once, the drones spotted what looked like a camp near the border. I could make out tents and several men with guns walking around the area. The men didn’t appear to be in uniform, but the PakMil officers said it was a border checkpoint.

It was awkward because I didn’t know if I could trust the PakMil officers. Everyone had a different story, and I was stuck in the middle trying to keep it all together. The intelligence officer didn’t help, and I felt like a politician trying to keep my hosts and my bosses across the border happy.

After a few days of this balancing act, PakMil shut down my portion after the operation turned out to be a dry hole. There were no squirters, and the next day we headed home. Back in Islamabad, I met up with Walt. He was ready to go back to Afghanistan.

For all the time and effort, we essentially bombed some empty mountains and my teammates went on a weeklong camping trip. There was no sign of any man in flowing white robes. When we finally got back to Afghanistan a week later, “flowing white robes” became an inside joke for a bad mission.

This training exercise down in North Carolina sounded like another bad mission.

But I wouldn’t know until Monday. Unfortunately, I needed an extra day in Virginia Beach, which meant the whole team was heading down without me. I hoped my delay wouldn’t cost me my slot on the team, just in case it was something big. I stressed to Mike that I could cancel my plans and come down with the team.

“Don’t sweat it,” Mike said. “Just come down Tuesday morning.”

On Monday afternoon, I started texting Walt and Charlie, trying to get some scoop. Both wrote back basically the same message:

“Just hurry up and get down here.”

They would have said something if it was lame. The lack of response meant it was legit. I didn’t sleep Monday night.

I was up before dawn Tuesday morning. Speeding through a pouring rain, I had to force myself to slow down on the rural roads. I knew something good was on tap, but I also didn’t want to slide off the road and wrap my truck around a tree.

The two-hour drive on Tuesday morning felt like eight hours.

Finally rolling up to the gate of the training base around seven A.M., I met the guard. From the outside, it looked innocent except for the screens hung along the fence to block anyone from looking inside.

Giving him my name, which was on the list, I got my laminated security badges and headed to a building where the team was based. I kept my window down after speaking with the guards. The base was tucked into a pine forest. The morning rain brought out the scent of the trees.

I was three hours early, but I didn’t care. I was already a day behind. Not being there almost bothered me more than not knowing. There was no way I was going to wait until late morning to get started. I needed to catch up.

A single-lane cement road led to a gate. Large ten-foot-tall wooden security barriers lined the road, making it impossible to see inside the compound. Pulling through the gate, I started toward the parking lot in front of two 1970s-era two-story concrete buildings.

As I pulled up, I saw two of my buddies walking into one of the buildings. I gave a quick honk and parked in a nearby space. They stopped and waited for me. A light rain was falling, and I hustled over.

“You’re early,” they said. “We just finished breakfast. What time did you get on the road?”

“Early,” I said, skipping right to it. “What do we have?”

I wanted instant gratification.

“You ready?” one said, smiling. “UBL.”

“No fucking way.”

Charlie was right the whole time. I couldn’t believe it. Now all of the talk from the mulch guy made sense. Jay was in D.C. helping plan this mission.

“Yep, UBL,” one guy said. “They found him.”

“Where?” I said.

“Pakistan.”