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

CHAPTER 16 Geronimo

Back in the bedroom, the youngest woman was lying on the bed, screaming hysterically, clutching her calf.

Walt was standing next to the body. It was still dark and it was hard to make out the man’s face. The house was still without power. I reached up and flipped on the light clipped into the rail system on my helmet. The target was now secure and since all the windows were covered, no one could see us from the outside, so the use of white light was safe.

The man’s face was mangled from at least one bullet wound and covered in blood. A hole in his forehead collapsed the right side of his skull. His chest was torn up from where the bullets had entered his body. He was lying in an ever-growing pool of blood. As I crouched down to take a closer look, Tom joined me.

“I think this is our boy,” Tom said.

He wasn’t about to say it was Bin Laden over the radio because he knew that call would be shot like lightning back to Washington. We knew President Obama was listening, so we didn’t want to be wrong.

I went through the checklist in my head.

He was very tall. I figured approximately six foot four inches.

Check.

He was the one adult male on the third deck.

Check.

The two couriers were exactly where the CIA said they’d be.

Check.

The more I looked at his mangled face, my eye seemed to go back to his nose. It wasn’t damaged and seemed familiar. Pulling my booklet out of my kit, I studied the composite photos. The long and slender nose fit. His beard was dark black and there was no trace of the gray that I expected to see.

“Walt and I will run with this,” I said to Tom.

“Roger,” Tom said.

Taking out my camera and rubber gloves, I started taking photos while Walt prepared to take multiple sets of DNA samples.

Will, the Arabic speaker, was in the room treating the leg wound of the woman crying on the bed. We learned later that she was Amal al-Fatah, Bin Laden’s fifth wife. I’m not sure when she got hit, but it was a very small wound. It could have been from bullet fragments or a ricochet.

“Hey, we have a significant amount of SSE on the second deck,” I heard someone call over the troop net. “We’re going to need any extra bodies down here.”

As Tom left the room, I heard him on the command net.

“We have a possible, I repeat POSSIBLE touchdown on the third deck.”

Walt pulled his CamelBak hose from his kit and squirted water on the man’s face.

I started to wipe the blood away from his face using a blanket from the bed. With each swipe, the face became more familiar. He looked younger than I expected. His beard was dark, like it had been dyed. I just kept thinking about how he didn’t look anything like I’d expected him to look.

It was strange to see such an infamous face up close. Lying in front of me was the reason we had been fighting for the last decade. It was surreal trying to clean blood off the most wanted man in the world so that I could shoot his photo. I had to focus on the mission. Right now, we needed some good quality photos. This picture could end up being widely viewed, and I didn’t want to mess it up.

Tossing the blanket away, I pulled out the camera that I’d used to shoot hundreds of pictures over the last few years and started snapping photos. We’d all gotten real good taking these kinds of photos. We’d been playing CSI Afghanistan for years.

The first shots were of his full body. Then I knelt down near his head and shot a few of just his face. Pulling his beard to the right and then the left, I shot several profile pictures. I really wanted to focus on the nose. Because the beard was so dark, the profile shot was the one that really stood out in my mind.

“Hey, man, hold his good eye open,” I said to Walt.

He reached down and peeled back the eyelid, exposing his now lifeless brown eye. I zoomed in and shot a tight photo of it. While I shot pictures, Will was with the women and children on the balcony. Below us, my teammates were collecting all of the computers, memory cards, notebooks, and videos. Outside, Ali, the CIA interpreter, and the security team were dealing with curious neighbors.

Over the radio, I heard Mike talking about the crashed Black Hawk.

“Demo team, prep it to blow,” Mike said.

I knew from the radio traffic that the SEAL in charge of demolition and the EOD tech were on their way to the courtyard.

“Hey, we’re going to blow it,” the SEAL said.

“Roger that,” the EOD tech said. He started taking out charges and putting them around the ground floor of the main house.

“What the fuck?” the SEAL said as the EOD tech unpacked.

Everybody was confused.

“You told me to get ready to blow it, right?”

“Not the house,” the SEAL said. “The helo.”

“What helo?”

The EOD tech thought the SEAL meant they were going to blow the house, which was another one of the contingency plans we had trained for.

News of Chalk One’s crash was still not widespread. People were just finding out about it. In Washington, they weren’t even sure we’d crashed when they watched it on the drone feed. I heard later it looked on the grainy black-and-white video as if we’d “parked” in the courtyard and let the team out. The president and senior staff were confused when it happened, and even asked JSOC what was going on. A quick message to McRaven came back with an answer: “We will now be amending the mission… we have a helicopter down in the courtyard. My men are prepared for this contingency, and they will deal with it.”

Outside, the helicopter crew was done destroying all of the classified gear. Teddy, the senior pilot and flight lead, was one of the last to climb out. Getting to the door, he looked at the almost six-foot drop to the ground. There was no way he wanted to jump and risk injury. Kicking the fast rope out of the cabin, he slid down to the courtyard, which made him the only guy to fast-rope into the compound that night.

The EOD tech and the SEAL got there soon after and started to place explosive charges around the fuselage. Climbing up the tail, the SEAL tried to get charges as close to the tail rotors as possible. Wearing his kit and night vision goggles wasn’t the easiest way to climb up the unstable, narrow section of tail boom. Each time he tried to reach the section propped on the twelve-foot wall, he was afraid it would break under his weight.

Climbing up as high as he could, he placed the charges with one hand. The other hand kept him stable as he balanced precariously over the courtyard. Destroying the communications equipment and avionics was the most important part. With the charges set on the tail, he placed the remaining charges in the main cabin.

Meanwhile, the Black Hawk that hadn’t crashed and the CH-47 carrying the QRF were flying in circles nearby, waiting for us to finish. Fuel was becoming an issue, which meant our time in the compound was shrinking quickly.

“Ten minutes,” I heard Mike say over the radio.

On the third deck, the lights in the room came on, bathing us in the glow of white light. The rolling blackout was apparently over. It was perfect timing and made everything easier.

While I continued shooting pictures, Walt took DNA samples. He dabbed a cotton swab in Bin Laden’s blood. He took another and jammed it in Bin Laden’s mouth to get a saliva sample. Finally, he took out a spring-loaded syringe the CIA gave us to get a blood-marrow sample. We’d been trained to jab it into the thigh to get a sample from inside the femur. Walt jabbed it several times into Bin Laden’s thigh, but the needle wouldn’t fire.

“Here,” I said, handing him mine. “Try this one.”

He took it and slammed my syringe into the fleshy part of Bin Laden’s thigh, but it also didn’t fire.

“Fuck these things,” Walt said, tossing the syringes to the side.

I finished taking a second set of pictures using another SEAL’s camera. We took two DNA samples and sets of photos so that we had identical sets. Walt put one sample in his cargo pocket and gave another to a SEAL in the other chalk. This had been carefully planned so if one of the helicopters was shot down on our flight back to Jalalabad, a DNA sample and set of pictures would survive. We wanted proof to show to Pakistan and the rest of the world we got Bin Laden.

Meanwhile, on the balcony, Will was trying to get confirmation that it was Bin Laden on the floor.

Bin Laden’s wife Amal, who had been wounded in the ankle, was still hysterical and wouldn’t talk. I could hear her whimpering on the bed above me while I worked. The other woman, her eyes puffy from crying, tried to keep a stern face as Will asked her over and over again in Arabic who the dead guy was.

“What is his name?”

“The sheikh,” the woman said.

“The sheikh who?” Will said. He didn’t want to lead her and stuck to open-ended questions.

After she gave Will several aliases, he went over to the kids who were outside on the balcony. They were all sitting silently against the wall. Will knelt down and asked one of the girls, “Who is the man?”

The girl didn’t know to lie.

“Osama bin Laden.”

Will smiled.

“Are you sure that is Osama bin Laden?”

“Yes,” the girl said.

“OK,” he said. “Thanks.”

Back in the hallway, he grabbed one of the wives by her arms and gave her a good shake.

“Stop fucking with me now,” Will said, more sternly than before. “Who is that in the bedroom?”

She started to cry. More scared than anything else, she didn’t have any fight left.

“Osama,” she said.

“Osama what?” Will said, still holding her arm.

“Osama bin Laden,” she said.

Will moved her back outside with the kids and walked back into the bedroom.

“Hey, dual confirmation,” Will said. “Confirmed it with the kid. Confirmed it with the old lady. Both are saying the same thing.”

As Will left the room, Jay showed up with Tom. Seeing the body, he came and stood over it.

“Will confirmed through a woman and a kid that it is UBL,” Tom said.

Kneeling next to his head, I pulled his beard to the left and right so Jay could get the profile shot. I had my SSE card and put it next to his face so Jay could see the real Bin Laden next to the CIA renderings.

“Yeah, that looks like our guy,” Jay said.

Jay immediately left the room to call it in. The rest of us went back to work. Once outside, Jay got on the satellite radio to Admiral McRaven, who was still in Jalalabad. The admiral was keeping President Obama and the rest of the situation room in the White House updated on our progress.

“For God and country, I pass Geronimo,” Jay said. “Geronimo E.K.I.A.”

Over the troop net I could hear the guys on the second deck. They needed more help to gather up all of the intelligence in the media rooms. It was on the second floor that Bin Laden had a makeshift office where he kept his computers and made his video pronouncements.

The rooms were immaculate and organized. Everything had its place. All of his CDs, DVDs, and memory cards were stacked up perfectly. The SEALs focused on grabbing all the electronic media—recorders, memory cards, thumb drives, and computers. The CIA had briefed us on what type of digital voice recorder they thought Bin Laden used and had even showed us one that was similar during our training. The SEALs searching the second floor actually found one exactly like the CIA had predicted. I marveled again at the intelligence team. When Jen had pronounced one hundred percent, I should have believed her.

When we were done with the DNA samples and photos, Walt and another SEAL grabbed Bin Laden’s legs and pulled him out of the room. With all the commotion and activity going on around me, I can still remember watching the guys drag his body down the stairs.

I stayed in the room and started gathering up any intelligence I could find. The office was barren of anything useful. I grabbed a few papers, possibly religious writings, and took some audiocassettes and threw them into a mesh bag. We all carried the lightweight, collapsible bags for this purpose. A quick search of the tiny bathroom with green tile on the walls had revealed nothing of value. I did find a box of Just For Men hair dye, which he must have used on his beard. No wonder he looked so young when we found him.

On the wall between the bathroom and office, I opened up a wooden freestanding dresser. It was about six feet tall with two long doors. Inside were several sets of clothes, including the long shirts, baggy pants, and vests common to the region.

I was shocked by how neat it was. Compared to some parts of his house, which looked like hoarders lived there, his dresser could have passed a Marine Corps Boot Camp inspection. All of his T-shirts were folded into squares and stacked in one corner. His clothes hung evenly spaced.

“This could be my dresser,” I thought.

I grabbed a few shirts and a vest and stuffed them in my bag. I knew we were there to collect mostly electronic media, but since there wasn’t much of that in the room I figured I’d grab this stuff instead. Throwing open the drawers at the bottom, I rifled through his stuff, looking for anything useful. For the most part, his room appeared to be for sleeping.

Before I left, I noticed a shelf that ran above the door. It was just above where he was standing when we got to the third deck. I slid my hand up and felt two guns, which turned out to be an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol in a holster. I took each weapon down and pulled out the magazine and checked the chambers.

They were both empty.

He hadn’t even prepared a defense. He had no intention of fighting. He asked his followers for decades to wear suicide vests or fly planes into buildings, but didn’t even pick up his weapon. In all of my deployments, we routinely saw this phenomenon. The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger a pussy he was. The leaders were less willing to fight. It is always the young and impressionable who strap on the explosives and blow themselves up.

Bin Laden knew we were coming when he heard the helicopter. I had more respect for Ahmed al-Kuwaiti in the guesthouse because at least he tried to defend himself and his family. Bin Laden had more time to prepare than the others, and yet he still didn’t do anything. Did he believe his own message? Was he willing to fight the war he asked for? I don’t think so. Otherwise, he would have at least gotten his gun and stood up for what he believed. There is no honor in sending people to die for something you won’t even fight for yourself.

Over the radio, I could hear updates from the team on the security perimeter.

Ali and the four SEALs spent most of our time on target holding security along the road northeast of the compound. After they were inserted, two assaulters and Cairo, the combat assault dog, did a sweep of the perimeter.

After the patrol, they waited and watched for onlookers to come out and investigate the commotion. Residents heard the helicopters, the intermittent explosions, and gunfire. Wondering what was going on, a few small groups approached the security team.

“Go back inside,” Ali said in Pashto. “There is a security operation under way.”

Luckily for us, the Pakistanis obliged and went back into their houses. A few posted messages on Twitter about helicopters and noise.

Time was getting tight.

Mike was on the radio giving us remaining-time hacks. We’d been in the compound for almost thirty minutes. Each time he came on, my teammates on the second deck asked for additional time.

“We need ten more minutes,” a SEAL on the second deck said. “We’re not even halfway done.”

Mike just repeated the time back calmly. The mission was a balancing act. We all wanted to stay and make sure we didn’t leave anything behind, but the helicopters were running out of fuel and there wasn’t any time to give.

“Post assault, five minutes,” Mike finally said. That meant drop what you’re doing and get to the landing zone within five minutes.

I was done on the third deck, and I started for the door. I felt like I was leaving something undone. We took pride in coming back with every bit of intelligence we could find and collect. There was so much still to do. We all had to face the fact we were leaving areas unsearched, and then put it out of our minds. We all knew the risks of running out of gas or remaining on target too long, giving the local police or military time to react. We got what we came for: Bin Laden. It was time to get out while we still could.

“Hey, consolidate the women and children and get them out of the compound,” Mike said over the radio.

I could hear Will trying to get the women and children to move outside. We didn’t want them to wander over to the helicopter before it exploded. But it was like herding cats, and Will wasn’t making any headway. The women were still sobbing, and the kids were either crying or sitting in a daze. None of them wanted to move.

I didn’t have time to help. I still needed to get over to C compound. I followed the smear of blood from Bin Laden’s body. It left a slippery trail all the way to the first deck, where Walt had put Bin Laden’s body into a body bag. As I climbed down the steps, I could see where they’d dragged the body over Khalid’s body. His son’s white shirt was stained with his father’s blood.

I headed for C1. The others had gotten photos and DNA of al-Kuwaiti. When I got there, his wife and kids were squatting in the corner of the courtyard. I tried to get them up and moving when Mike’s urgent call came across the radio.

“Hey, guys,” he said. “Drop what you’re doing and move to exfil HLZ.”

Low on fuel, the Black Hawk and the C-47 were inbound to pick us up. Using arm signals, I got al-Kuwaiti’s family up and shepherded them into the guesthouse. I knew the charges on the helicopter were going off nearby. This was going to be a big explosion, but the guesthouse was far enough away. They’d be safe if they stayed inside the room.

Once inside, I tried to get across the idea that there was going to be a big explosion, using my hands and making an explosion sound.

“Stay here,” I said in English.

I have no idea if they understood. I backed out of the room and shut the door behind me.

Racing down the rutted driveway, I saw Teddy and the other helicopter crew standing near Mike. They looked funny in their large aviation helmets and Army ACU uniforms. They looked lost and out of their environment, uncomfortable with actually being on the ground.

I looked at Mike as I passed.

“The women and kids are staying in C1,” I said. “There is no way I can move them.”

The SEALs from the second deck were spilling out of the building. We looked like a gypsy camp, or like Santa Claus on Christmas Eve. Guys had mesh bags over their shoulders so full they seemed to waddle more than run. I saw one SEAL carrying a CPU in one hand and a leather gym bag overflowing in the other. The SEALs on the second floor had collected so much intelligence material that they had run out of the collapsible bags that they carried and started taking bags that they found in the house and filling them too. SEALs carried 1950s leather briefcases like they were on their way to the office, and knockoff Adidas athletic bags as if heading home from the gym.

Outside the gate I turned right and sprinted toward the rest of the guys who were beginning to line up in our chalk loads. I could see the snipers had already set up the landing zone. My chalk was going to exfil on the remaining Black Hawk because we had the body. The smaller, more maneuverable aircraft had less of a chance of being shot down. The CH-47 would pick up all the SEALs from Chalk Two as well as Teddy and his crew from the crashed Black Hawk.

All around us, lights in the houses were on. I could see several heads in the windows watching us. Ali was barking in Pashtu for them to go back inside. We started to get a head count. I was missing Will.

“Where’s Will?” I said, moving down the line.

“He was getting the kids and women when I left,” Walt said, standing next to the body, ready to move it to the helicopter.

I started to get on the radio to try and find his location when I saw Will run out of the compound. He was the last one out.

Taking my place near Walt on the body bag, I could make out the Black Hawk coming in right on top of the IR strobe in the field. As the helicopter flared out, I looked down, shielding my eyes from the cloud of dust and debris from the rotors. Once the cloud passed, we picked up the body and took off on a dead sprint toward the waiting helicopter. This was our freedom bird and we weren’t going to miss it.

The field was recently plowed and we stumbled over eighteen-inch mounds of earth as we hustled the one hundred yards to the helicopter, carrying the six-foot-four body. We looked like drunks stumbling and falling our way to the bird.

The dead weight wasn’t easy to carry for any of us, but Walt had a tough time trying to stay upright. Being five foot six inches tall, his stride was much shorter than the rest of us.

Every few steps, he’d fall over one of the mounds. With curse words cascading from his lips, he’d bounce back up and press on.

Racing under the spinning rotors, we threw the body on the deck and quickly climbed aboard. I found a spot up against the back of the pilots’ seats. After the sprint, we were exhausted. My chest was heaving, trying to gulp in air.

“Holy shit, we’re going to pull this off,” I thought.

When we didn’t immediately leap into the sky, I got anxious. In Afghanistan, the helicopter was practically taking off with the last boot still on the ground. The longer we waited, the more I prepared for a rocket-propelled grenade to tear through the door.

“Go, go, go,” I kept thinking. “Come on man, go. GO!”

But the Black Hawk waited. It even throttled back. The pilots didn’t want to take off before the CH-47 arrived. Helicopters liked to fly in pairs. The charges on the downed Black Hawk were seconds away from exploding. The SEAL and EOD tech put the charges on a five-minute timer. That would have been plenty of time if we’d been on schedule.

But we were running late. At this point, we were eight minutes past our planned drop-dead time. We factored in ten extra minutes, but we were about to run out of that too.

We had to assume law enforcement and Pakistani military were inbound and headed to investigate the situation. We were an invading military force who had entered their sovereign territory. I could see the expression on Tom’s face. He was on the helicopter’s intercom radio trying to figure out what was going on. He wanted the pilots to hurry up and lift off.

“Let’s go,” he finally said. “We have to take off right now!”

Less than a minute remained on the explosive charges on the downed Black Hawk. The SEAL who set the charges ran up to Jay and grabbed him. They were both still on the landing zone waiting for the CH-47 to arrive. Jay had been so focused on getting the helicopters in safely, he hadn’t heard his name being called.

“Call off the 47,” the SEAL said to Jay. “You need to get all the birds out of the immediate area, the charge is going to blow in under thirty seconds.”

Jay started to work the radios. He knew the explosion would knock the inbound CH-47 out of the sky and shrapnel would destroy the idling Black Hawk.

I heard the rotors come to life, and the Black Hawk quickly climbed into the sky. Swinging to the northeast, we picked up speed. Seconds after takeoff, I saw a big flash of light. The explosion bathed the cabin in light for a second, before it faded back to black.

The CH-47 flew around to the south and landed after the explosion. The remaining SEALs and the aircrew loaded up on the helicopter. Since they’d burned up so much fuel loitering, the CH-47 didn’t have any to spare. And with the extra weight of the additional SEALs on board, they had just enough gas to head straight back to the base in Jalalabad.

Closing my eyes, I took a deep breath. The cabin was dark. The only lights were from the dashboard in the cockpit, and from where I was sitting, I could just make out a few gauges on the console, including the gas gauge.

Right when I thought I could relax, I noticed the gas gauge was blinking red. I’m not a pilot, but I knew enough to realize that blinking red lights in a cockpit were never a good sign.