No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (12 page)

“Why did you guys have to do that?” Phillips said.

He was suffering from a minor case of Stockholm syndrome and in the shock of the shootings, he didn’t understand what had just happened and why.

Phillips underwent a medical exam and was found to be in relatively good condition. It didn’t take long before the Stockholm syndrome wore off. He was thankful for what my teammates had done. He called his family and was flown to the USS
Boxer
before heading home to Vermont.

The rest of us spent a few more days on the USS
Boxer
, waiting for follow-on orders before moving ashore and then flying home. It felt good to finally save a life instead of just taking guys out. It was cool to do something outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was happy to do something different. But the downside was we got a glimpse of the Washington machine and just how slow the decision-making could be. We were ready to launch on this days before we actually got the call. But the Captain Phillips mission renewed our capabilities and put us on Washington’s radar for other high-profile missions.

My legs
ached and my lungs burned as I raced up the mountain.

It was summer 2009 and we were about eight thousand feet up in the central Afghan mountains two hours south of Kabul. After the Phillips rescue, we returned home, trained for several months, and then deployed on schedule to Afghanistan.

I could see the infrared laser from the aerial drone tracking the movement of eight fighters who ran out of the target compound when we arrived. Our team tore off after them as soon as the helicopter’s ramp hit the ground.

“Alpha Team has visual on squirters,” was all I heard Phil say over the radio.

The fighters were headed for a ridgeline three hundred meters north of the compound. We were trying to cut them off while the rest of the troop took down the compound. As we closed on their position, I looked back to see Phil and the rest of the team close behind. It was our first mission on this deployment, and we were still getting used to the altitude.

Seeing the rest of the team moving into position, I snapped back around and shouldered my rifle. The enemy fighters were setting up a fighting position roughly one hundred and fifty yards away. I could barely keep my laser steady after the five-hundred-meter run in all of my gear, but I managed to lock on to the fighter with a PKM machine gun. Squeezing off multiple rounds, I watched him fall. By then, my teammates arrived and opened fire, dropping two more fighters before the rest disappeared over the ridgeline and out of sight.

Leaving their dead, the remaining fighters raced down the backside of the ridge.

“We have five hotspots moving to the north toward several compounds,” I heard the drone pilot say in my radio. I could see the laser from the drone moving down the backside of the hill.

Phil gave the team a nod, and we were off on another dead sprint to close the distance.

As we crested the top of the ridgeline, we slowed down, careful not to rush into a hasty ambush. I saw three bodies lying there, one with the machine gun and one with an RPG. We were lucky to take out their two biggest guns in the first seconds of the fight.

The dead fighters were dressed in baggy shirts and pants and black Cheetahs, high-top Puma-like sneakers worn by Taliban fighters. It was a running joke in the squadron that if you wore black Cheetahs in Afghanistan, you were automatically suspect. I’ve never seen anyone but Taliban fighters in those sneakers.

From the ridgeline, we could see the surviving fighters tearing down the backside of the hill. Phil snatched the RPG lying next to one of the dead fighters and fired it at the group as they ran off. The rocket landed nearby, and the shrapnel peppered the fighters as they ran.

Dropping the launcher, he turned to me. Over the radio, we were getting calls about close air support, or CAS. An AC-130 gunship was circling above us.

“CAS IS COMING ON STATION,” Phil literally screamed at me from two feet away.

The RPG had knocked out his hearing.

“I can hear you,” I said. “Stop screaming.”

“WHAT?” Phil said.

For the rest of the night, I could hear Phil before I saw him. Every word out of his mouth came in a scream.

We watched from the ridgeline as the AC-130’s 20mm cannon pounded the fighters. Sending the combat assault dog, which Phil had nicknamed the “hair missile,” ahead, we spent the rest of the night chasing down the remaining fighters. All of them were either mortally wounded or dead.

Phil and another assaulter chased a fighter into one of the compounds, while the rest of us started to clear a field of waist-deep grass. The AC-130 was reporting more hotspots. We launched the hair missile and he locked on to the scent of a fighter about fifty feet to my right. I could hear the fighter start screaming as the dog attacked.

Calling the dog off, the assaulters threw hand grenades into the ditch where the fighter waited to ambush us. As they moved up to clear the ditch, I started to move forward.

Even under my night vision goggles, it was difficult to see. The grass was thick and hard to walk through. Behind me, I could hear intermittent gunfire as Phil and another assaulter were in a firefight with a barricaded shooter in one of the compounds. My gun was up and I tried to use my laser to illuminate a path through the grass. I could see burnt patches ahead of me where 20mm shells had hit.

Every step was measured.

I saw a dark shadow at my feet, underneath my night vision goggles. I lifted my foot to step on it, assuming it was a log or a branch, when I heard a man gasp. I jumped back and opened fire. It scared the shit out of me.

Taking a second to confirm I didn’t actually shit myself, I got my nerves under control. I moved up to search the body. He must have been dead before I got there. The weight of my foot on his chest forced the air out of his lungs. The body was singed from the 20mm rounds. After a quick search, I found an AK-47 and a chest rack.

Back
in Jalalabad, we posed for some pictures after the mission. Phil, wearing a black Under Armour skullcap, had the RPG draped over his shoulder. The picture would be a reminder of the time he cut down the enemy with their own RPG and blew out his hearing.

It was a good night’s work and a great start to a lively deployment. That night, we killed more than ten fighters and suffered no casualties. As usual, it was a combination of skill and luck. Without a doubt, the shooter in the ditch would have ambushed us, which proved the value of the combat assault dog.

Since arriving at the unit, my life had been a series of highs from great operations and then days of lows waiting for the next mission. If we weren’t deployed, we were training to deploy. We’d alternate deployments between Iraq and Afghanistan. The pace was nonstop. It didn’t matter if you were single or married with kids. Our whole world was focused on our work. It was our number one priority.

It isn’t smart for me to get too much into families for security reasons, but it is also dishonest to make you think we didn’t have them. We had wives, kids, girlfriends, ex-wives, and parents and siblings all vying for our time. We tried to be good fathers and spouses, but after years of fighting the war it was hard to be present even when we were at home.

We lived with one eye on the news, waiting for the next Captain Phillips story. When we trained, we did it in a way that was as accurate as possible. We were too busy doing our normal deployment, training, and keeping the wheels on the bus at home to think of much else.

For the most part, our families understood the lifestyle. When we’re gone eight to ten months out of the year on training or deployment, they always ended up being the last priority.

They wanted us home.

They wanted us safe.

They knew very little of what was really going on in our lives. They never experienced the satisfaction of knowing that every IED maker or al Qaeda fighter we killed made the world a little safer, or at least made life easier for the soldiers patrolling along the roads in Afghanistan. They might understand it in theory, but they were always left at home to worry.

The families waited for the men in dress uniforms to arrive at their door and deliver the news that we weren’t coming home. The SEAL community has lost a lot of great guys, and DEVGRU alone has lost more than its share. Those sacrifices have not been for nothing. The lessons we learned and the heroic actions of our brothers were not going to be in vain. We knew the risks on deployments and in training. We knew how to live with them, and we understood that we had to sacrifice to do this job. Our families, like my father who hadn’t wanted this lifestyle for me, didn’t always understand.

Just before my high school graduation in Alaska, I told my parents my plan to enlist. My parents weren’t pleased. My mother didn’t let me play with G.I. Joe or other military toys when I was younger because they were too violent. I still joke with my mother that had she let me play with action figures and get it out of my system I might not have joined the military.

Before graduation, I sat in the kitchen and talked on the phone with recruiters. At first, I think my parents thought it was a phase. But soon they realized how serious I was about joining the Navy.

My father sat me down to talk about my plans and about college.

“I just don’t want you in the military,” he finally said.

He wasn’t a pacifist by any means, but he’d grown up during Vietnam and knew how war impacted people. A lot of his friends had been drafted and hadn’t come back. He didn’t want his son to ever go to war. But I didn’t hear the concern in his voice or the nervousness about his only son putting himself in harm’s way. I just heard him tell me what I couldn’t do.

“I’m doing it,” I said. “This is what I want.”

My father never raised his voice. Instead, he reasoned with me.

“Hear me out,” he said. “If you ever listen to anything I say, will you take one piece of advice from me? Try one year of college. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to go back.”

My dad knew that I hadn’t seen much of the world growing up in a small village in Alaska. They were betting if they could talk me into going to school, I’d be exposed to so many new things that I wouldn’t pursue my dreams of becoming a SEAL.

I was accepted to a small college in southern California.

“OK, Dad,” I said. “One year.”

One year turned into four, and with my degree I considered joining the Navy as an officer. I made friends with a former SEAL in school who advised me not to join as an officer. He told me I could always become an officer later, but the enlisted route meant more time as an operator and allowed me to stay in the fight. When I enlisted after college, my father had no objections.

Like all of my teammates, I was driven to be a SEAL. And once I finished BUD/S, I was driven to be the best SEAL I could be. I wasn’t unique. There was a whole command of guys just like me. But like me, they all struggled with balance. We called it “the speeding train”; it was hard to get on, and it was hard to get off, but once you’re there you’d better hang on because you’re in for a ride.

We really had two families: the guys at work and then family and loved ones left at home. I came from a tight family in Alaska. I felt the same way about them as I did about my teammates, like Phil, Charlie, and Steve.

For a lot of guys, keeping the balance between work and family life was fleeting. Many of my teammates suffered through bitter divorces. We missed weddings, funerals, and holidays. We couldn’t tell the Navy no, but we could tell our families no. And we did, often. It was difficult to get time away. Work was always the number one priority. It took everything out of you and gave back very little.

The funny thing was, even when we were on leave before a deployment, I’d see guys at work. We came in to work on gear, work out, or just take care of last-minute issues before we deployed.

The dirty secret of it all is that everyone, including me, loved it. We wanted to get the call every time, which meant everything else in the world took a backseat.