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

CHAPTER 2 Top Five/Bottom Five

My lungs burned and my legs ached as I ran back from the ladder in the humid Mississippi summer. The pain was less physical and more about pride. I was screwing up. The pressure I was putting on myself was worse than anything I’d hear from the instructors. The mistake I’d made in the kill house was a result of losing focus, and I knew that was unacceptable. I knew I wouldn’t be in the course much longer if I couldn’t block out the pressure and focus on the tasks at hand. Candidates could get cut from the course on any given day.

I ran back and stood outside the house. I could hear the crack of rifle fire inside as other teams cleared rooms. We had a few minutes to catch our breath before going back in for yet another iteration.

Tom had climbed down from the catwalk and was outside when I got back. He pulled me aside.

“Hey, brother,” he said. “It was exactly the right move in there. You covered your buddy, but there was no ‘moving’ call.”

“Check,” I said.

“I know back in your old command you guys did things your way and maybe you didn’t need the call there,” Tom said. “But here, we want textbook CQB and we want the verbage we asked for. If you are lucky to complete this training and go to an assault squadron on the second deck, trust me, you won’t be doing basic CQB. But here, under pressure, you need to prove to us that you can do even the most basic CQB. We have a standard, and you can’t move without a moving call.”

The “second deck” was where all of the assault squadrons worked at the command back in Virginia Beach. During our first days in Green Team, we were told we were not allowed to go up to the second floor of the building. It was off-limits until graduation.

So, getting to the second deck was the goal. It was the prize.

I nodded and slid a new magazine into my rifle.

That night, I grabbed a cold beer and spread my cleaning kit out on the table. I took a long pull and savored the fact I survived, another bite out of the proverbial elephant. I was one step closer to the second deck.

During our CQB block of training, we lived in two large houses located near the shooting ranges and kill house. They were basically massive barracks beat to hell after hundreds of SEAL and Special Forces training rotations. The rooms were filled with bunk beds, but I spent most of my time downstairs in the lounge area. There was a pool table and a 1980s big-screen TV usually tuned to a sporting event. It was more background noise as guys cleaned their weapons or shot pool and tried to unwind.

The SEAL community is small. We all know each other or have at least heard of one another. From the day you step onto the beach to start BUD/S, you are building a reputation. Everybody talks about reputation from day one.

“Saw you on the ladder today,” Charlie said to me as he racked up the balls for another game of pool. “What did you fuck up?”

Charlie was big in both stature and wit. He was a huge man with hands the size of shovels and giant shoulders. Standing about six foot four inches tall, he weighed in at two hundred and thirty pounds. His mouth was as big as his body. He kept up a steady stream of smack talk, day and night.

We called him “the Bully.”

A former deck seaman, Charlie grew up in the Midwest and joined the Navy after graduation. He spent about a year chipping paint and brawling with his crewmates in the fleet before going to BUD/S. The way Charlie told it, being out in the fleet was like being in a gang. He told stories about fights on the ship and in port or on cruise. He hated being on the ships and wanted nothing more than to become a SEAL.

Charlie was one of the top candidates in the class. He was consistently smart and aggressive, and it didn’t hurt that his last job before Green Team was as a CQB instructor for the East Coast SEAL Teams. The kill houses came naturally to him. And he was a crack shot to boot.

“No move call,” I said.

“Keep it up and you’ll be back in San Diego working on that tan,” he said. “At least you’ll be ready for next year’s calendar.”

SEALs are based in two places—San Diego, California, and Virginia Beach, Virginia. A healthy rivalry existed between the two groups, based mostly on geography and demographics. The difference between the teams is minimal. Teams on both coasts did the same missions and had the same skill set. But West Coast SEALs have the reputation of being laid-back surfers and the East Coast guys are thought of as Carhartt-wearing rednecks.

I was a West Coast SEAL, so hanging with Charlie meant a steady diet of digs, especially about the calendar.

“Right, Mr. May?” Charlie said, snickering.

I didn’t appear in it, but some of the teammates put out a calendar a few years back for charity. The pictures were cringe-worthy shots of guys without shirts on the beach or near the gray-hulled ships in San Diego. The move may have helped feed the poor or fight cancer, but it brought on years of mocking from the East Coast teams.

“No one wants to make a calendar of pasty white East Coast guys,” I said. “I am sorry if we have our shirts off enjoying the sunny San Diego weather.”

It was a battle that would never end.

“We’ll settle this on the range tomorrow,” I said.

My fallback was always shooting. I didn’t have the wit to go up against Charlie or the other smooth talkers in Green Team. It was widely known that my jokes were always weak. It was better to beat a quick retreat and then do my best to outshoot those guys the next day. I was an above-average shot, since I’d pretty much grown up with a gun in my hand during my childhood in Alaska.

My parents never let me play with toy guns because by the time I was finished with elementary school I was carrying a .22 rifle. From an early age, I knew the responsibility of handling a firearm. For our family, a gun was a tool.

“You need to respect the gun and respect what it can do,” my father told me.

He taught me how to shoot and be safe with my rifle. But that didn’t mean I didn’t learn that lesson the hard way before it completely stuck with me.

After one hunting trip with my father, it was freezing out, too cold to stand outside and clear our rifles. I joined the rest of my family in the house. My mother was in the kitchen preparing dinner. My sisters were at the kitchen table playing a game.

I pulled off my gloves and started to clear my rifle. My father had taught me how to clear the chamber several times, emphasizing safety. First, take out the magazine and then work the action to eject any rounds before looking in the chamber and then dry firing in a safe direction into the ground.

On this particular occasion, I wasn’t paying attention and I must have chambered a round, and then I slid the magazine out. Pointing the gun toward the floor, I took it off of safe and squeezed the trigger. The bullet exploded from the barrel and buried itself into the floor in front of the wood stove. I hadn’t been paying attention because I was trying to warm up. The boom echoed throughout the house.

I froze.

My heart was beating so hard it hurt my chest. My hands were shaking. I looked at my father, who was looking at the tiny hole in the floor. My mother and sisters came running over to see what happened.

“You OK?” my father asked.

I stammered a yes and checked the rifle to make sure it was clear. With my hands still shaking, I put the rifle down.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I forgot to check the chamber.”

I was more embarrassed than anything else. I knew how to handle my rifle, but I’d gotten careless because I was more focused on getting warm. My father cleared his own rifle and hung up his coat. He wasn’t angry. He just wanted to make sure I knew what happened.

Kneeling down next to me with my rifle, we went through the steps again.

“What did you do wrong? Talk me through it,” he said.

“Take the magazine out,” I said. “Clear the chamber. Check it. Take it off of safe and pull the trigger in a safe direction.”

I showed him how to clear it properly a couple of times, and then we hung the gun in the rack near the door. It takes only one time to screw things up. And I learned from it. It was a huge lesson, and I never forgot again.

Just like I never forgot another “moving, move” call after that day in the kill house.

Our daily schedule in Green Team during the CQB portion started at dawn. We worked out as a class each morning. Then, for the rest of the day, half of the thirty-man class would go to the range and the other half would go to the kill house. At lunch, we’d switch.

The ranges were some of the best in the world. This wasn’t your basic range where you shot at targets from a line. No, we’d race through obstacles, fire from the skeletons of burnt-out cars, and do a set of pull-ups before racing to shoot a series of targets. We always seemed to be moving. We already had the basics down, we were learning to shoot in combat. The instructors worked to get our heart rates up so that we had to control our breathing while we shot.

Our training facility had two kill houses. One was made of stacked railroad ties. It had a few long hallways and basic square rooms. The newer house was modular and could be reconfigured to resemble conference rooms, bathrooms, and even a ballroom. We rarely saw the same layout more than once. The goal was to throw something new at us each day to see how we handled it.

The pace of training was fast. The instructors didn’t wait for people to catch up. It was a speeding train, and if you didn’t catch on by the first day, you would most likely be heading back to your previous unit in very short order. Like a reality show, each week our numbers grew smaller as guys washed out. It was all a part of preparing us for the real world, and ferreting out the “Gray Man.” He was the guy who blended into the group. Never the best guy, but also not the worst, the Gray Man always met the standards, exceeding them rarely, and stayed invisible. To root out the Gray Man, the instructors gave us a few minutes at the end of the week to perform peer rankings.

We sat at beat-up picnic tables under an awning. The instructors gave each one of us a piece of paper.

“Top five, bottom five, gentlemen,” one of the instructors said. “You’ve got five minutes.”

We each had to make an anonymous list of the five best performers in the class and the five worst. The instructors didn’t see us all hours of the day, so top-five-bottom-five allowed them to get a better sense of who was really performing well. A candidate could be a great shot and do everything perfectly in the kill house, but outside of training he wouldn’t be easy to work with or live with. The instructors took our top-five-bottom-five and compared them with their lists. Our assessment contributed to the fate of a candidate because it drew a clearer picture of the student.

At the beginning, it was kind of obvious who the bottom five were in the class. It was easy to see the weak links. But as those guys started to disappear it wasn’t so easy to pick the bottom five anymore.

Charlie was always in my top five. So was Steve. Like Charlie, Steve was an East Coast SEAL. I used to hang out with Steve and Charlie on the weekends and during our training trips.

If Steve wasn’t working, he was reading, mostly nonfiction with an emphasis on current events and politics. He also had a decent stock portfolio, which he monitored on his laptop during the few hours of downtime. Not only was he an outstanding SEAL, he could talk politics, investing, and football at the same level.

He was thick, not lean like a swimmer but more like a linebacker. Charlie used to joke that Steve looked like a groundhog.

He was one of the few who routinely kicked my ass with a pistol. At the end of each day, I would always check his score to see if he beat me. Like Charlie, Steve had been a CQB instructor for the East Coast teams before coming to Green Team. He had three deployments, and he was one of the few East Coast guys with any combat experience. At that time, only West Coast teams had deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Steve had deployed to Bosnia in the late 1990s and his team got into a firefight, one of the few before September 11.

Charlie and Steve always seemed to end up on the top of my list. As more and more guys washed out, the task became harder and harder.

“Coming up with bottom five is kicking my ass,” I said to Steve one night.

We were both sitting at the table in the range house cleaning our rifles.

“Who were your bottom five last week?” he said.

I rattled off some names, many of the same guys on Steve’s list.

“I don’t know who to put down this week,” I said.

“Ever think of putting yourself down there?” Steve said.

“I got three names. The last two, I don’t know,” I said. “I guess we could use our own names. I don’t want to throw someone else under the bus.”

I didn’t think either of us was doing badly in the class.

“I’m going to risk it,” Steve said. “We need five names.”

A few weeks earlier, we tried to leave the bottom five blank. As a class, we decided to rebel and stand up to the instructors. It didn’t last long. We spent the rest of the night running and pushing cars for hours, instead of unwinding after a long day of training.

That Friday, I put my own name down on the bottom five. So did Steve. He was willing to stand up for what was right. Steve was a leader in the class, and when he came up with ideas, guys listened.

By the end of the CQB block of training in Mississippi, we had lost about a third of the class. The guys who washed out couldn’t process information fast enough to make the correct split-second decision. It wasn’t that they were bad guys, because a lot would re-screen and make it through on their second try. Those who didn’t would go back to their regular teams, where they’d typically excel.

The rumor around the command was if you passed the CQB block of training, you had a more than fifty-fifty chance of passing Green Team. The instructors heard the same rumor, so when we got back to Virginia Beach, they kept the pressure on, never letting us forget that we were a very long way from being done.

We were only three months into a nine-month training course. The next six months wouldn’t be any easier. After CQB, we went on to train on explosive breaching, land warfare, and communications.

One of the SEALs’ core jobs is ship boarding, called “underways.” We spent weeks practicing boarding a variety of boats from cruise ships to cargo vessels. Although we spent a lot of time in Afghanistan and Iraq, we needed to be proficient in the water. We rehearsed “over the beach” operations where we would swim through the surf zone and patrol over the beach and conduct a raid. Afterward, we’d disappear into the ocean, linking up with our boats offshore.

During the last month of training we practiced VIP security details. Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s first security detail were SEALs from the command. We also attended an advanced course in SERE, or Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape.

The key to the course was managing stress.

The instructors kept everyone tired and on edge, forcing us to make important decisions under the worst conditions. It was the only way the instructors could mimic combat. Success or failure of our missions was a direct reflection of how each operator could process information in a stressful environment. Green Team was different than BUD/S because I knew just passing the swim or run and being cold, all without quitting, wasn’t enough.

Green Team was about mental toughness.

During this time we were also learning the culture of the command. Throughout Green Team, we were on a one-hour recall to simulate what we would experience on the second deck. If recalled, the pager buzzed and we had an hour to get back to work and check in. Every day at six o’clock, we got a test page. The pagers became another source of pressure the instructors used. Several times, we’d get pages before dawn to come into work.

One Sunday around midnight, my pager went off. Still shaking the sleep from my head, I rolled into the base in time and was told to put on my PT gear and stand by. We were going to have a PT test.

We weren’t supposed to be more than an hour away and couldn’t drink to intoxication. We had to be able to perform when called upon. We could get a page and be on a plane to anywhere in the world within hours.

Soon, my teammates started to arrive. Some seemed like the page had interrupted a trip to the bar.

“Are you drunk right now?” I heard an instructor ask another candidate.

“Of course not. I just had a beer at the house,” he said.

As the hour ticked away, I still didn’t see Charlie.

He rolled in about twenty minutes late. The instructors were pissed. He’d gotten a ticket for speeding on his way, which only delayed him more. Thankfully, it was just a verbal lashing from the instructors and Charlie was able to stay with our class.

With only weeks left in the nine-month training, we started to hear rumors about the draft. To fill out the squadrons, the instructors would rank the whole class and then assault squadron master chiefs would sit around a table and pick new members from my Green Team class.

The individual squadrons were in a constant state of flux as they rotated from deployments overseas to months of training and then months on standby, during which a call to deploy could come at any time.

After the draft, the Green Team instructors posted a list. A whole bunch of my friends, including me, Charlie, and Steve, were going to the same squadron.

“Hey, congrats,” Tom said when he saw me looking at the list. “When I am done with my instructor time I am going back to that squadron to be a team leader.”

SEALs are deployed around the world at any given time. The heart of each squadron are the teams, each led by a senior enlisted SEAL and made up of a half dozen operators apiece. The teams make up troops, which are led by a lieutenant commander. Multiple troops make up a squadron, led by a commander. DEVGRU assault squadrons are augmented by intelligence analysts and support personnel.

When you get to a team, you slowly work your way up the chain. Most of the time, you stay in the same team, unless you get tapped to be a Green Team instructor or work a collateral duty.

The day after the draft, I brought my gear up to the second deck. I followed Steve and Charlie to the squadron team room. The room was large, with a small bar and kitchen area in one corner. Everyone had brought a case of beer, a tradition when you show up at the squadron for the first time.

Our squadron was getting ready to go on standby and then deploy to Afghanistan. Some of my teammates from Green Team were already packing their gear and deploying as brand-new assaulters with their respective squadrons.

Along one wall, the commander and master chief had offices. A massive table took up most of the room, with smaller tables with computers along the perimeter. Flat-screens that were used in briefings hung on one wall. The rest of the wall space was filled with plaques from other units like the Australian SAS and mementos from past missions. A bloody hood and flex-cuffs were mounted on a plaque on the wall after the squadron captured a Bosnian war criminal in the 1990s. Petty Officer 1st Class Neil Roberts’s Squad Automatic Weapon, or SAW, was also hung on the wall. He fell out of a Chinook helicopter after it was hit by two rocket-propelled grenades during Operation Anaconda in Afghanistan and was killed by Taliban fighters at the start of the war.

As we lined up at the head of the table, I saw all these senior guys with long hair and beards. Tattoos covered most of their arms, and only a few were in uniform. Toward the end of Green Team, we all started growing out our hair and beards. The grooming standards have changed several times over the years, but at this point in the war, people were less worried about your haircut and more worried about your actions on the battlefield. It was a ragtag bunch of professionals. We all came from different backgrounds and we had different hobbies and interests, but what we had in common was a willingness to sacrifice our time and even our lives for a greater good.

In the team room, the guys made us introduce ourselves and give them a brief bio. Charlie, the bully, was the first to speak and he barely got out his name before he was met with a chorus of boos and jeers from the senior guys.

“Shut up,” they yelled. “We don’t care.”

It went that way for all of us. But afterward, the guys were shaking our hands and helping us get our gear unpacked. It was all in fun and, besides, everybody was too busy to worry about it. There was a war going on and no time to be wasted with petty new-guy treatment.

I felt at home.

This was the kind of command I’d wanted to be a part of since I joined the Navy. Here, there were no limits on how good you could be and what you could contribute. For me, all of the fear of failure was now replaced with the desire to perform and excel.

What I had learned during the three-day screening more than a year ago was even more true in the squadron: just meeting the standards wasn’t good enough.

As I unpacked my gear, I realized I had to prove myself all over again. Just because I got through Green Team didn’t mean shit. All of the other guys in the room completed the same course. I made a promise to myself that I would be an asset to the team and that I’d work my ass off.