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

CHAPTER 11 Killing Time

The sun was fading as I flashed my ID card to the guard at our base in Virginia Beach. He saw my decal as I pulled closer and waved me through. I passed a long line of cars heading home for the day.

I was a few hours early for our flight, but I was tired of waiting. It had been a long week at home. When we are home too long, we get antsy. It was Easter, and I called my parents to check in. We caught up, but I couldn’t tell them what I was really doing. While the rest of America was coloring Easter eggs, we were sitting on the biggest secret of our lives.

After the dress rehearsal out west, it all came down to the politicians in Washington making a decision. We made one more trip to North Carolina to conduct a last walk-through of the compound, before returning to find out we’d finally gotten orders to move forward and stage in Jalalabad, Afghanistan.

We were all still very skeptical. Nobody was jumping up and down; everybody digested the news in their own way and went about their business. At least we were one step closer to actually roping into the compound.

I parked my truck and grabbed my backpack. I could see some of my teammates walking toward the headquarters. I’m sure we all had the same thoughts running through our minds.

“Holy shit, I can’t believe they actually approved this.”

I think most of us were convinced there was no way this was actually going to happen. In a way, it’s a defense mechanism. That way, if it got turned off at the last minute, we wouldn’t be too upset.

“Yeah, whatever. I’ll believe it when we are airborne,” Walt said, walking with me into the lobby of the building.

“This has a good chance if they are actually sending us over,” I said.

By moving us, they risked more and more leaks. The rest of our command definitely knew something was going on. Even a troop movement of this relatively small size could cause spikes when a bunch of operators came through Bagram on a non-scheduled rotation.

Inside the team room, guys were eating a last-minute snack before the long flight. Some just stood around talking. We were all dressed in jeans and button-up collared shirts, our normal travel attire. We looked like a bunch of guys going on vacation. If we’d been carrying golf clubs instead of rifles and night vision goggles, you might mistake us for a professional sports team.

Other than my equipment for the raid itself, I was traveling light, with only a few changes of clothes, my shower kit, and flip-flops. We weren’t staying long. The plan was to fly over, spend two days getting acclimated, and conduct the mission on the third night.

Buses soon took us from our base to a nearby airport. On the tarmac sat a massive gray C-17 Globemaster. Its engines idled as the Air Force crew did pre-flight checks. Already on board were the helicopter mechanics. Nearby, a group of National Security Agency and CIA analysts kept to themselves.

As we sat down, it felt comfortable, like a place we’d been many times before. This was the same way we always went on deployment. Inside the belly of the aircraft, our equipment and the helicopter crews’ tools were strapped to the deck. Seats lined the walls. I threw my backpack on the deck and fished out my nylon green jungle hammock. Looking around the cargo bay for a place to hang it, I saw my teammates crawling around the plane like ants looking for a comfortable spot to stretch out. We were experts in making the flight as comfortable as possible.

I attached my hammock between two containers holding gear. Other guys claimed spots on top of containers or in the open space between the seats and the cargo. Some of my teammates pumped up camping mattresses, but I was one of the few who used the hammock. It was issued to us for jungle missions, but I liked that it kept me off the cold floor.

We had a nine-hour flight to Germany and after a short layover another eight hours to get to Bagram. Getting as much sleep as we could on the flight was imperative.

The Air Force crew chased us back to our seats to strap in just before takeoff. The only open seat was next to Jen, a CIA analyst. Slipping the buckle of my seatbelt into the clasp, I felt the plane start to taxi to the end of the runway. Minutes later, we raced down the tarmac and quickly climbed into the sky. Once we were level, guys started to pop Ambien and settle in for the long flight.

I wasn’t tired, so I started to talk with Jen. I’d seen her around in North Carolina, but we hadn’t gotten to talk at length since we started planning the operation. I was curious to get her take on things since she was one of the leading analysts that helped in the hunt for Bin Laden.

“Honestly,” I asked Jen. “What are the odds it’s him?”

“One hundred percent,” she shot back, almost defiant.

Recruited by the agency out of college, she’d been working on the Bin Laden task force for the last five years. Analysts rotated in and out of the task force, but she stayed and kept after it. After the al-Kuwaiti phone call, she’d worked to put all the pieces together. I missed the first day’s brief, where Jen laid out how they tracked him to Abbottabad. In the weeks since, she had been our go-to analyst on all intelligence questions regarding the target.

We’d heard the “one hundred percent” call in the past, and each time it made my stomach hurt.

“Be careful with that shit,” I said. “When our intel folks say it is one hundred percent it, is more like ten. When they say ten percent, it is more like one hundred.”

She smiled, undeterred.

“No, no,” Jen said. “One hundred percent.”

“One hundred percent like in 2007,” I said.

Like me, she remembered 2007, when we’d been spun up to chase the guy in white flowing robes. Jen rolled her eyes and frowned.

“That wasn’t a good lead,” she said, even though the lead had come from a CIA source. “That whole thing spun out of control quickly.”

It was nice to hear the CIA take even some of the blame, although you could pretty much throw a stick in 2007 and hit someone responsible for that debacle. That mission had been weighed down by the typical problem of everybody wanting to be involved. Already, the differences between 2007 and now were apparent, which lent more credibility to the current mission.

Jen wasn’t afraid to share her opinion with even the highest officers, including Vice Admiral McRaven. She had made it known in the beginning that she was not a fan of the ground-assault option.

“Sometimes JSOC can be the big gorilla in the room,” she said. “I’d rather just push the easy button and bomb it.”

This was a typical attitude outside of JSOC. There were a lot of haters not only from the big military side but also from the agency. Not everyone trusted us, because they didn’t know us.

“Don’t hold back,” I said. “Love us or hate us, you’re in the circle of trust now. We’re all in this together.”

“You mean the boys’ club,” Jen said. “You guys are just showing up for the big game.”

She was right. This was her baby. Jen and her team spent five years tracking him to get us to where we were now. We were just here to finish the job.

“You guys did all the hard work to get us here,” I said. “We’re happy to have our thirty minutes of fun and be done.”

“I’ll admit, you guys aren’t what I was expecting at all,” she said.

“See, I told you you’re in the circle,” I said.

It was dark when we landed in Bagram. We taxied to a spot far from the main terminals at the base, the ramp opened, and we saw a C-130 with its ramp down and props turning. Bagram is the main NATO base in northern Afghanistan. A massive base just north of Kabul, it had grown into the size of a small city. Thousands of soldiers and civilian contractors called the base home. Little fighting occurred out of Bagram. In fact, it had gotten so safe that now the only danger was getting a ticket for speeding on the base’s streets or for not wearing a reflective belt at night. Spending any time at Bagram would make it tough to keep our secret.

Thankfully, we were headed to Jalalabad. The runway there was too small and couldn’t handle C-17s. JSOC arranged the C-130 to meet us. We didn’t want to risk going to the main Bagram terminal or the chow hall and being seen. A whole troop showing up out of cycle would raise questions.

Gathering our bags and shaking off the Ambien, we walked silently off the back of the C-17 and directly onto the C-130.

While we settled into the orange nylon jump seats that were hung near the front of the plane, Air Force ground crews strapped three of the containers with our gear into the back of the plane. The ramp closed, and we made the one-hour flight to the base in J-bad.

The seats on the C-130 were uncomfortable. If you get stuck in the middle row, you have to rely on the guy behind you to sit up, providing support, or you sink down, crushing your back. If being able to lay out in a hammock in a C-17 was first-class military flying, then the middle seat in a C-130 was economy.

Landing in a C-130, even on a paved runway, was jarring. The wheels are close to the fuselage, so it was like landing a roller skate. Plus, it sounded like the plane itself was hitting the tarmac. I held on to the bar as the plane swung around and stopped at the main terminal. The crew chief lowered the gate, revealing buses waiting to take us to the JSOC compound.

Jalalabad airfield is located just a few miles from the Pakistan border. Home to a number of American units, including a force from JSOC, the base is the main staging area for helicopters operating in northeastern Afghanistan.

Larger than the smaller outposts that dot the valleys along the border, Jalalabad is part of Regional Command East and it’s from J-bad that units along the border get supplies and mail. It is home to about fifteen hundred soldiers as well as a number of civilian contractors. Afghan security forces help guard the base.

The runway splits the base in half. Soldiers live on the south side of the airfield. The JSOC area had its own chow hall, gym, operations center, and a number of plywood huts. The compound was home to Army Rangers, DEVGRU, and support personnel.

Almost all of us had double-digit deployments to J-bad. Walking through the gate, it felt like home.

“What’s up, brother?” Will said to me when we arrived.

He’d already gotten word that he would be part of the raid, and he was eager to get read in on the plan.

After putting our gear away, we met back at the fire pit. Guys on previous rotations had built the brick-and-mortar pit, which had become a de facto town square for the compound. Each deployment we added to it until it looked like the patio of a fraternity house. Shitty couches purchased out in town were usually crowded with guys drinking coffee, smoking cigars, or just bullshitting. The couches rotated as often as we did. Made in Pakistan, the cheap stuffing in the cushions couldn’t handle our two-hundred-pound frames for long.

The SEALs already on their scheduled deployment in Jalalabad got briefed on the plan during our flight over. They heard rumors something was spinning up, but no one knew any details until the brief.

Because Will spoke Arabic, he was the only member of his squadron selected to go with us on the assault. The rest of his teammates would be the quick reaction force or QRF, loaded in two CH-47 helicopters waiting to be called in to help if the team at the compound ran into trouble. They were also tasked to set up a forward air refueling point (FARP) north of the compound. Using the massive CH-47 helicopters, which were basically flying school buses, the QRF would carry inflatable fuel bladders so the Black Hawks carrying the assault teams could stop for much-needed gas on the return flight to Jalalabad.

“You seen the mock-up?” I asked Will.

We went into a briefing room near the operations center and I undid the padlocks. Will helped me lift the wooden cover off.

“Wow. This is nice,” he said, leaning over it to look closely at the mock-up.

Will looked like your average SEAL. He was about five foot ten inches tall with a lean physique. The thing that made him different was the fact that he had taught himself Arabic. He was extremely smart, professional, and a man of few words.

The SEAL teams were a very close-knit community. It felt odd showing up to do this mission when everyone knew the squadron that was already deployed could have pulled it off just as well as we could. The only reason we were tasked with this mission was because we were available to conduct the needed rehearsals to sell the option to the decision makers at the White House. Every squadron at the command was interchangeable. It came down to being at the right place at the right time.

“So, give me the rundown,” Will said.

“OK, we’re in Chalk One,” I said. “Our bird will be the first to approach from the southeast and hold station here.”

I pointed at the courtyard.

“We’ll rope in and clear this building, which we’re calling C1,” I said.

It was pretty standard stuff, and it didn’t take Will long to fall into step. For the next several hours, we went over the whole plan and all the contingencies. I told him about all the rehearsals leading up to this point. This was Will’s first taste of the extensive planning the rest of us had been dealing with for weeks. Spending three weeks rehearsing for a mission was very odd. Typically, in Afghanistan or Iraq, we would get tasked with a mission, plan it, and launch in a few hours.

The head shed—our headquarters staff—continued to work on big-picture planning and coordination. With our gear ready, all we had to do was wait.

By rule, most of us had attention deficit disorder, or at least we joked that we did. We could focus on things, but not for long, and waiting was the worst. Walt constantly gave me a hard time. I couldn’t even sit through a movie.

Like the other guys, we all had our own method to our madness when it came to how we set up our gear. Everything was checked and then rechecked. All of the batteries in my night vision and laser sights were fresh. My radios sat on the charger. Everything was neatly set out in order. Boots and socks next to my folded uniform. My kit, a vest that held two ballistic plates and pouches for ammunition and gear, rested next to my H&K 416 at the end of my bed.

I took my time laying out my gear, but by midnight, or lunchtime for us, we still had hours to kill. During that kind of downtime, we’d go to the gym. Some guys made coffee, but not instant—French press. One guy brought a Pelican case with a press, grinder, and an assortment of coffees that would make Starbucks blush. I’d catch them making the coffee. One cup could take an hour. They’d grind the beans and then press the coffee. With great care, they’d boil the water and then sit by the fire and sip the coffee. It was all a part of their ritual, and the time they spent obsessing about the coffee meant fewer minutes to sit and wait. Every one of us had developed some method for killing time. We had two days before the mission was scheduled to launch, if it was approved.

The next day, I went with Will and two of his teammates over to the hangar to meet the pilots. We had already worked with the aircrews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment during our rehearsals.

We worked with the 160th almost exclusively. In our eyes, they were the best pilots in the world.

Teddy, a short, fifty-year-old man with close-cropped hair who was the pilot of Chalk One, met us at the hangar door. We walked around the Black Hawk and showed Will the load plan. Then, before we left, we talked about contingencies.

“If things go bad and I have to make an emergency landing, I am going to do my best to put her down in that open courtyard to the west,” said Teddy.

We called it Echo courtyard, and it was the largest open area on the compound. A seasoned pilot, Teddy knew that if his helicopter was hit by enemy fire or malfunctioned, this courtyard was his best option.

“Don’t worry though,” I said. “We’ve had our share of wrecks. If anyone is going to crash it will be Chalk Two.”

I’d never been in a crash, but seven out of the dozen SEALs on my chalk had been in some form of crash in the past. Only two of the men on Chalk Two’s bird could say the same thing. We joked that the law of averages should keep our bird in the air.

The window of opportunity to launch was short. The illumination cycle would start increasing the following week. We wouldn’t have these types of optimal conditions again for a month. Plus, with everything in place, the longer we held off, the greater the concern that the mission would leak. In the three weeks since we started planning, the number of people who knew about the operation had expanded exponentially.

JSOC was ramping up its activity. McRaven was in Afghanistan, which isn’t news in itself, but the fact that he was heading to J-bad caused a bit of a stir. A Ranger colonel ran daily operations out of our command center in Bagram. Eventually, he was read in on the mission, adding more and more people who knew what was spinning up.

Back in Washington, the main concern seemed to be confidence in the intelligence. Unlike Jen, her fellow analysts were only about sixty percent certain Bin Laden lived in the compound.

In Afghanistan, we were oblivious to the hand-wringing in Washington. We had daily briefings. Drones flew over the compound keeping watch. We also had to battle the “good idea fairy.” She shows up on all our missions to some degree or another, and she isn’t our friend. The fairy shows up when the head shed has too much time on their hands. Essentially, officers and planners start dreaming up unrealistic scenarios that we may have to deal with on a mission.

“They want us to take a bullhorn for crowd control now,” the team leader in charge of outer security said. “This ranks right up there with the police light.”

Earlier, the head shed had floated an idea for the outer security team to take one of Bin Laden’s cars and affix a police light to it to make the activity around the target look like a police operation.

“So I said, ‘Hey, sir, are we just going to push it out there?’ We aren’t going to have the keys,” the team leader said. “What if the steering wheel locks? Plus, which team has time to push a car out of the driveway and all the way down to the street corner? And let’s not forget that we will now have a flashing police light highlighting our position.”

“What color are police lights in Pakistan?” I said.

“No idea,” he said. “That was my next question. Then we got into a half-hour discussion about Ali.” Ali was the CIA interpreter on external security. He spoke Pashtun, which was used in the local area. “The good idea fairy wants him in local civilian clothes. He’s going to be standing between a SAW gunner and me. We’re in uniform, so what does it matter?”

Logic won out in both battles. We didn’t carry the police light and Ali was in uniform.

This kind of stuff always happens when planners get into the weeds. The CIA asked us to take a sixty-pound box that blocked cell phone signals. Weight was already an issue, so that good idea died quickly. If we had all the time back we wasted fighting the fairy, we might regain a few years of our lives.

On the second night, I sat at the fire pit sipping on some fresh coffee with Charlie and Walt. The debate of the day was over where in the body you should attempt to shoot Bin Laden.

“Try not to shoot this motherfucker in the face,” Walt said. “Everybody is going to want to see this picture.”

“But if it’s dark and I can only see his head, I’m not waiting for a suicide vest,” Charlie said.

“These will be some of the most viewed pictures of all time,” I said. “If given the option, all I’m saying is shoot for the chest.”

“Easier said than done,” Walt said.

“Remember to aim high,” I said to Walt. “Since you only come up to his nuts.”

We’d already decided that Elijah Wood had Walt’s role in the movie, since he was no taller than a hobbit.

Casting the Bin Laden movie was an ongoing joke. Who was going to play whom in Hollywood’s version of the mission? No one was getting Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Instead, we had a red-haired guy on the team so Carrot Top would portray him for sure. At least Walt had Frodo instead of a second-rate comic.

“You know if this goes, we’ll get Jay his star,” I said.

Everyone knew that for the officers, like Jay, if the raid was successful it would be a career maker. It would most likely mean Jay would make admiral some day. For the enlisted guys, it really didn’t mean anything; to us it was just another job.

“And we’ll get Obama reelected for sure,” Walt said. “I can see him now, talking about how he killed Bin Laden.”

We had seen it before when he took credit for the Captain Phillips rescue. Although we applauded the decision-making in this case, there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that he would take all the political credit for this too.

We all knew this was bigger than us and bigger than politics. Maybe the officers and politicians would benefit, but that didn’t make us want to do it any less. That was always how things went. Our reward was doing the job, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

Near dawn, the fire pit broke up and we all went and tried to get a few hours of sleep. Since we operated at night, the majority of the population on the JSOC compound slept all day.

I popped two Ambien. No one was getting any rest without sleeping pills. No matter how much we tried to make this mission just like the others, it wasn’t. It had been two days, but it felt like months.

The third day was supposed to be “go day,” but cloud cover delayed our launch. No big deal for us. We always get delayed, so we expected it. Getting delayed was better than getting canceled. McRaven wanted to make sure drones could watch the compound in case Bin Laden left while we were in route, and the cloud cover made that impossible.

Our daily briefs were held in a long, narrow room with wooden handmade benches running down the middle like a church. At the front of the room were flat-screen TVs for PowerPoint presentations and to show us drone footage or satellite photos.

Today’s briefing was standing room only. I was seated next to Charlie near the back on one of the benches. I saw several of the SEALs from the other squadron wedged around the model, which still demanded your attention when you saw it. They were studying it intently before the briefing. It was amazing how it sucked you in and you’d find yourself fixated on it.

A portion of the briefing was about what to do if the mission went drastically wrong and the Pakistani authorities somehow apprehended us.

The president had already given us the green light to protect ourselves, even if we had to engage the Pakistan military. We were going deep into Pakistan, and we needed a reason other than the truth in case we were detained.

“OK, guys,” the officer said. “Here is what they came up with. We’re on a search and recovery mission for a downed ISR platform,” he said.

An ISR platform is what the military calls a drone. Essentially, we were going to have to tell the Pakistani interrogators that the United States Air Force lost a drone.

We all laughed.

“That is as good as they can come up with?” someone said from the back of the room. “Why don’t they give us a bullhorn and a police siren just in case?”

The story was preposterous. We were allies with Pakistan on paper, so if we did lose a drone, the State Department would negotiate directly with the Pakistani government to get it back. The story didn’t wash and would be very difficult to stick to during hours of questioning.

At least we could laugh at it. Maybe they figured humor would help us endure. The truth is, if we got to that point, no story we could come up with was going to cover up twenty-two SEALs packing sixty pounds of hi-tech gear on their backs, an EOD tech, and an interpreter for a total of twenty-four men, plus a dog, raiding a suburban neighborhood a few miles from the Pakistani military academy.

At the end of the brief, the commanding officer of DEVGRU came walking in. A captain with silver hair and a mustache, he’d lost his leg in a parachute accident years ago. As he walked to the front of the conference room, I barely noticed the slight hitch in his step from the prosthetic limb.

The officer briefing us faded into the background as the commander got to the front. All of the laughing and grumbling about the cover story receded, and the room was silent.

“OK, guys,” the DEVGRU commander said. “Just got off the phone with McRaven. He just talked to the president. The operation has been approved. We’re launching tomorrow night.”

There were no cheers or high fives. I glanced back at some of the fellas sitting on the benches around me. The guys I’d operated side by side with for years.

“Holy shit,” I thought. “I didn’t think it was really going to happen.”

No more briefs.

No more good idea fairy.

And most of all, there was no more waiting.