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

CHAPTER 4 Delta

Now back in Baghdad two years later, I was a little more seasoned, but not much. I’d screened for and then completed Green Team, but I was definitely still the new guy. The good part was I had some experience working in the Iraqi capital from my days on Team Five. After the dam mission, my team was sent to Baghdad to help round up former regime loyalists and insurgent leaders.

Delta’s base was in the Green Zone, which sat next to the Tigris River in the center of the city. Soon after I landed, I started to immediately get my bearings. The base was a short distance from the famed crossed swords, erected to celebrate Iraq’s “victory” in the Iran-Iraq war. The sword arch stood on opposite sides of a large parade ground. During the day, you’d see whole units posing for pictures near the pair of hands holding the curved blades. The hands and forearms were modeled on the dictator’s, including his exact thumb print.

Delta’s headquarters was in former Baath Party buildings. I walked inside to check in at the Joint Operations Center. Jon, my new team leader, came up to meet me soon after I arrived. I was brand-new and still had no idea what to expect.

A former Ranger before joining Delta Force, Jon had a thick barrel chest and thick arms. A brown bushy beard that was so long it brushed against the top of his chest covered his face. He looked like a taller version of Gimli, the angry dwarf in The Lord of the Rings.

Jon had joined the Army right out of high school. After years of short haircuts and lots of rules with the Rangers, he dropped his packet for warrant officer school with an eye toward being an Apache helicopter pilot. But, ultimately, he didn’t want to give up his gun. So he screened and got picked up for Delta and had worked his way up the ranks.

“Welcome to paradise,” he said, as we walked toward the team room. “Hot enough for you?”

“At least you guys have AC,” I said. “Last time I was here, I lived in a tent. We didn’t get AC for weeks.”

“A little better living here,” he said, opening the door to our room.

The room was in one wing of the palace. The hallways were wide, with marble floors and high ceilings. I was going to share a room with him and the newest guy on their team. My bunk bed was in the near corner, and I tossed my bags next to it. Jon helped me wheel my gear into the room before showing me around the palace.

The palace had its own gym, chow hall, and pool. In fact, there was more than one pool. Each team had two rooms. There were five guys on the team. One of them was a former British Royal Marine who had dual citizenship. He came to the United States, enlisted, and eventually worked his way into the ranks of Delta. The other guys were like Jon, a mix of former Rangers and Special Forces soldiers. The newest guy was a Ranger who was wounded in Somalia during the “Black Hawk Down” battle. He looked like an Amish guy with a bowl haircut and a patchy beard that never seemed to grow together.

After making small talk, I spent the rest of the night getting my gear in order. First, I unpacked my “op gear” in a cubby in the hallway outside of the room so that if something went down, I’d be able to throw on our gear and be out the door. After that was squared away, I unpacked my clothes and set up my bed. Since we had bunk beds, most of us used the top bunk for storage and hung a poncho liner over the bottom so we had a little privacy.

It was close to dawn when I was finally done. Since we worked vampire hours—sleep all day and work at night—most of the guys were racking out. The room had a couch and a TV. I grabbed a cup of coffee and was watching TV when Jon came over.

“We’ll get you plugged in tomorrow,” Jon said. “Let me know when you need anything.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“We’ve been busy,” Jon said. “This was a rare day off. I’m sure we’ll be out tomorrow night.”

There was no easing into it. Most days, I’d get up in the afternoon and wander out to the pool with my iPod speakers. I’d chill to some Red Hot Chili Peppers or Linkin Park while I stretched out on an air mattress. I’d float a while, getting some sun and relaxing. One of my teammates started to take care of the grass around the pool as a hobby. In a country of sand and dirt, having a little grass to walk on was a real treat. Some days, I could smell fresh cut grass as I floated.

Then I’d eat breakfast and work out in the gym or run. I tried to get to the range as many times a week as possible. By dusk, missions would start spinning up and we’d knock out one operation, two if we were lucky.

I was part of the “roof team,” which meant we rode on pods above the skid on an MH-6 Little Bird. We would land on the roof of a target compound and then assault down. The rest of the force would arrive in armored vehicles and clear the ground floor and assault up.

The Little Bird is a light helicopter used for special operations in the United States Army. It has a distinct egglike cockpit and two pods or bench seats on the outside. On the “attack” variant, the pods or seats are replaced with rockets and machine guns.

Pilots from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (SOAR) flew the helicopters. The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment flies most of the missions for JSOC. We’ve worked together for years and the 160th pilots are the best in the world. Headquartered at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, the 160th SOAR (Airborne) are known as the Night Stalkers, because almost all of their missions are done at night.

I’d worked with Little Birds briefly in Green Team, but in Baghdad I found myself perched on the skid almost every night as the city passed underneath me in a blur.

It was past midnight a few nights after I arrived, and all I could hear was the roar of the engine and the wind. At seventy miles per hour, the wind battered me as my feet dangled off the side of the seat. I knew calm, clear decision-making was the key. But that was hard when it felt like I was riding a roller coaster into a fight.

I tightened the sling on my gun, keeping it pinned to my chest, and checked the safety lanyard that would hopefully keep me attached to the helicopter in the event I slid off my seat. Sitting on the pod, I could see the other Little Bird on our right flank flying in formation in the green hue of my night vision goggles. From the other helicopter, one of the Delta guys saw me looking and flipped me the bird. I returned the salute.

On this hit, we were after a high-level weapons facilitator, just another link in the chain funding the insurgency. He was holed up in a cluster of two-story houses near the center of the city with several fighters and a large weapons cache. Our team was tasked with flying via Little Bird to the roof and assaulting down. Another team would come via a Pandur, an armored truck with .50 caliber machine guns and Mark 19 grenade launchers. They’d wait about half a minute for us to breach the roof door, creating a diversion, before they would breach the bottom floor and we’d clear our way to the middle.

Below me, the city stretched out in a tangle of roads and alleyways built around clusters of squat buildings. Every once in a while, the city would open up into an abandoned lot choked with trash. I was at the front of the pod near the cockpit. On the opposite side was Jon.

“One minute,” I heard the pilot say over my radio. He calmly pointed a single finger out his door and in front of my face to make sure I got the call.

From my position, I could see the copilot pointing a laser at the roof of the target. Night after night, the pilots managed to navigate to the exact rooftop through a sea of thousands. I had no idea how they did it, since everything looked the same to me from above.

I could feel the helicopter start to descend toward the empty rooftop. Coming to a hover, the pilot was able to perform a lip landing by placing the skids on the edge of the rooftop. Instead of fast-roping, we stepped onto the skid and then jumped to the roof. In less than ten seconds, the whole four-man team was on the roof and the Little Bird was gone.

Racing to the door, the breacher set our charge and blew it open. Seconds later, I heard the charge blow on the first floor followed by shots being fired.

Jon was up front as we started down the stairs.

“We’re on the wrong roof,” Jon said, only a few steps inside.

The shooting was coming from the house next door. I heard several small explosions that had to be hand grenades as we ran to the corner of the roof.

“We’re one building too far,” Jon said. We moved to see how we could support our teammates in the building next door.

The houses looked the same from the air and for the first time the pilots had inserted us on the wrong one. We had approached from the south and landed on the building just to the north of our target.

“We need to move to the adjacent building,” Jon said. “We’re not useful staying here.”

The adjacent building was east of the target and three stories tall, which allowed us to cover down at the target house.

“We’ve got an eagle down,” I heard over the radio. That meant someone had been hit.

It turned out one of the Delta operators was shot in the calf. Others had been peppered with shrapnel from the hand grenades.

Insurgents in the house were throwing grenades down the stairwell, slowing the operators’ advance as they finished clearing the first floor and moved toward the second.

The ground team started to work a medevac, and pulled back away from the stairs. We were able to race around the block and clear the three-story building to the east of the target.

Explosions and gunfire echoed through the buildings. From the roof of the building, we started to scan for targets. I could see IR lasers tracking over the windows of the compound as my teammates looked for targets. Every few minutes, one of the insurgents would stick an AK-47 out of the second-floor window and unleash a long burst.

“Allahu Akbar,” they’d scream after spraying rounds down at the assaulters below.

It was a stalemate. The team on the ground couldn’t run up the stairs, and there was no way we could get on the roof to fight down. Over the radio, I heard calls to an Army mechanized infantry unit ten blocks away. The soldiers were providing the outer ring of security.

We always liked to have two rings of security. This night, the near ring was a squad of Rangers, who set up on the corners of the target area. A mile beyond that were M1 tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles, which were armored personnel carriers with a 20mm turret gun.

“Bring up a Bradley,” I heard over the radio.

I could hear the Bradley’s tracks chewing up the asphalt as it approached the house.

“I want you to level the second floor,” the assault leader yelled to the Bradley’s commander perched in the hatch on top of the turret.

Smashing through a stone wall on the south side of the house, it stopped in the courtyard and unleashed a short burst from its 20mm cannon. The rounds easily smashed through the walls of the second floor, tearing large gashes in the concrete.

Pulling back, I saw the assault leader run up to the Bradley.

“Keep shooting,” the commander yelled into the hatch.

“What?” the gunner said.

“I want you to level the whole second floor,” the assault leader repeated. “Level it.”

The Bradley crunched back over the rubble again and started to fire. One of the insurgents screamed “Allahu Akbar!” and started to spray bullets out the window.

This time, there was no letup from the Bradley. Guys started to cheer as the rounds hit in successive explosions. In a few minutes, the Bradley went Winchester, which is the military term for running out of ammunition. We brought up a second Bradley and it shot until it went Winchester as well.

By the time the second Bradley pulled back, a raging fire had erupted on the second floor. Black smoke poured out of the windows and started to billow into the sky. From our position on the roof, we could still hear the insurgents yelling. I was perched on the northeast corner, holding down on the backside of the house. It was hard to see because of the thick black smoke.

Suddenly, I saw a man’s head and torso emerge from a window.

Without thinking, I put my laser on his chest and opened fire. I could see the bullets hit him and he flopped back into the room, disappearing into the smoke.

After my volley of fire, Jon raced over beside me.

“What you got?”

“Saw a guy in the back window,” I said.

“You sure?” he said, scanning the same window with his laser.

“Yeah.”

“You get him?”

“Pretty sure,” I said.

“OK. Stay put.”

Jon went back to his post and I kept searching for new targets. I didn’t have time to dwell on it nor did I have any feelings about it. This was the first person I’d ever shot and with all the time I’d spent thinking about how it would make me feel, it really didn’t make me feel anything. I knew that these guys in the house had already tried to kill my friends on the first floor and they wouldn’t hesitate to do the same to me.

Even after the two Bradleys and the fire, we still heard yelling followed by bursts of enemy fire. Tactically, it didn’t make sense to assault up the stairs.

“They’re going to blow the building,” Jon said.

Jon decided to pull us off the roof rather than expose us to the blast. We joined the others on the ground. I watched as a small breach team, led by one of Delta’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal guys, ran into the first floor to set a thermobaric charge. The charge produces a huge shock wave capable of collapsing an entire building.

A few minutes later, the charge was set and the breach team ran back and took cover next to me. Hunkered behind the Pandur, I could hear him counting down. I waited for the explosion.

Nothing.

Everybody stared at the EOD tech. We all had the same confused look on our faces. I saw Jon walk toward him.

“What the hell?” Jon said.

“The time must have been wrong,” I heard him mumble.

I am sure his mind was running a million miles an hour. He was trying to figure out why the charge didn’t blow.

“Did you dual prime?” Jon asked.

Everybody was trained to dual prime explosives, which meant attaching two detonators to the charge in case one fails. The rule of thumb was simple: One is none. Two is one.

But that didn’t help us now. We had to make a decision. Do we send more guys back into the house to reset the charge, or do we wait it out and see what happens? We had no idea if the insurgents moved downstairs and were now waiting for the assaulters to return, or if the EOD set the wrong time and it would go off unexpectedly with men inside.

Finally, they decided to send the EOD tech back inside to attach a new detonator. Again, the breach team ran back inside. We continued to cover the house, and minutes later the breach team was back behind the Pandur.

“You think it is going to go this time?” Jon asked with a smirk.

“Yeah, I am pretty positive,” the EOD tech said. “Dual primed it.”

On time, the charge exploded and the house crumbled onto itself, sending out a massive cloud covering us in thin, talc-like dust. I watched the cloud rise into the sky and hang in the muggy morning air. By now, the sun was starting to come up.

We moved in to sift through the rubble looking for bodies and weapons. There were at least six dead fighters. Most of the bodies were up on the second floor. Their faces were covered in soot. Jon noticed the sandbags near some of the bodies.

“Hey, look at this. They had the whole second floor barricaded,” he said. “We’re lucky the pilots made a mistake. It probably saved our lives.”

“Why?” I asked.

“If we’d actually landed on the right building,” Jon said, “the four of us would have assaulted into a barricaded position on the second floor. We might have had surprise on our side, but the odds wouldn’t have looked good once we made entry. Without a doubt in my mind, we would have taken more casualties.”

I was quiet. I looked up to Jon and here he was saying we were lucky. A mistake had probably saved our lives. It was nothing but a bit of random luck.

After clearing the rubble, the ride back to the base in the Pandurs was quiet. We were hungry and tired. All of our faces were covered in soot. Usually there was more smack talking and excitement after taking down such a dynamic target. I let what happened start creeping into my mind.

As we rode, Jon’s words kept echoing in my head. Had the mission gone perfectly, we would have landed the Little Bird on the roof and entered the door on the second floor, only to come face-to-face with at least four heavily armed insurgents. A four-on-four gunfight with automatic weapons in a room no bigger than a bedroom never ends well.

By the time we parked back at our base, I had finished my mental gymnastics. I simply blocked out what could have happened and moved on to what I learned: Sometimes something random can save your life. And always dual prime a charge.

At the end of the deployment, I flew back to Pope Air Force Base in North Carolina, where Delta is based. When we got off the plane, members of their unit greeted me just like I was one of their own.

Before I boarded my flight to Virginia Beach, Jon handed me a plaque. It was a copy of a pencil drawing of a Delta operator and a Little Bird. It was framed with green matting and a Delta Force unit coin.

“I want you to have this,” Jon said. “Anybody who runs with this team gets one.”

Master Sergeant Randy Shughart, a Delta sniper, made the drawing, and the original was found after he was killed in Somalia. Shughart was awarded the Medal of Honor during the Battle of Mogadishu. When the Black Hawk crashed, he volunteered to defend the crash site until help arrived. He was killed by a mob of Somalis.

Before the attacks on September 11, Delta and DEVGRU were rivals. We were the two kids at the top of the block, and there was a raging debate over which unit was the best. With the war, there was no more time for rivalry and all that bullshit had gone away. They treated me like a brother during the deployment.

I shook hands with Jon and boarded my flight to Virginia Beach.

Back home at DEVGRU the next day, I met up with Charlie and Steve. They came over to my cage while I unpacked and got my gear back in its proper place. The squadron was just returning from its deployment in Afghanistan. Compared to my trip to Baghdad, their deployment had been relatively slow.

As much fun as I had in Iraq with Delta, it was still good to be back with the boys.

“Sounds like you were busy over there,” Charlie said.

“When are you moving down to Bragg with your Army brothers?” Steve said.

My jokes were weak, and I knew they were talking shit. It was great to be back.

“Ha-ha,” I said. “Good to see you guys too.”

I was looking forward to leave and then a trip to Mississippi to shoot. I knew the only chance I had to shut them up was on the range. Even though we’d all just gotten home, we weren’t scheduled to stay long. Two weeks of leave is all we had before heading out to train. It was a cycle we would repeat for almost a decade.