No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (7 page)

As the helicopter slowed to a hover, I grabbed the rope with both hands and slid down to the ground. We were about thirty feet up, and I could see the ground coming quickly. I tried to slow my descent, but I didn’t want to be so slow that my teammates would crash down on top of me. With all my gear, I landed like a ton of bricks. My legs ached as I brought my gun up and started toward the gate less than one hundred yards away.

As soon as I stepped out from under the helicopter, the rotor wash beat me down. Small rocks pelted my body and dust tore at my eyes. I could barely make out the gate ahead of me. As I started to run toward it, the rotor wash pushed me forward into an uncontrolled sprint. It took every effort to stay on my feet, and I literally skidded to a halt at the locked gate.

The others were close behind me. I snapped the lock off the gate with my bolt cutters, then took point and headed toward a cluster of buildings. The main building was two stories and had the drab architecture of an Eastern-bloc country, made of concrete, and the door was metal. While my teammates covered me, I tried the handle. It was open.

I didn’t know what I would find as I stepped into a long hall. We could start taking fire at any second.

I could see several rooms on either side. As we started to move forward, we saw movement in one of the far rooms. Two hands came out first, followed by several Iraqi guards. They had their hands above their heads and they were unarmed.

My teammates ushered them behind me as I continued down the hall. Inside the rooms, I found their AK-47 rifles. None of the weapons had a round in the chamber. It looked like they’d been sleeping and had woken when they heard the helicopters overhead.

It took a long time to clear the building because of the size. We paid special attention to detail because we were looking for explosives rigged to blow up the dam. We’d never cleared anything this size, so it took a little longer than expected.

No one was injured except for one of the GROM guys who broke his ankle fast-roping to the target.

After we cleared the main building, my platoon chief came up to me.

“Hey, check my radio,” he said. “I am not getting comms.”

When we launched, he had his radio strapped to his back. As he stood in front of me now, I could still see the headphone cord dangling over his shoulder. I looked on his back and the whole pack was gone. All I could see was the cable.

“Your backpack is gone,” I said.

“Gone? What do you mean?” he said.

“It’s gone,” I said.

He hadn’t strapped the backpack to his body armor correctly. Body armor has nylon loops about a half-inch apart on the front and back so that you can secure pouches to the vest. My chief had only laced his backpack through the top and bottom loops, so when he fast-roped down into the rotor wash, it blew his backpack and radio off his back and into the water below the dam. The radio at the bottom of the river wasn’t going to do us much good. The same thing happened to our medic. He lost a bunch of morphine in a similar backpack.

A lot of the gear we were using on the mission was new to us. Just before we deployed, boxes of new stuff had shown up in the team room. The common mantra was “Train like you fight,” which means don’t go into battle with equipment you haven’t used before, preferably extensively. We’d broken that rule, and I knew we’d gotten extremely lucky that it didn’t bite us in the ass. It was our first lesson learned.

That wasn’t the only way we were lucky on the mission. The Iraqis had antiaircraft guns near the dam loaded and ready. Had the guards wanted to fight, they could have knocked the helicopters out of the sky as we fast-roped down.

We learned a million lessons on that mission, from the need for better intelligence about a target to how to secure equipment, and we’d learned them all without losing anybody. Usually the best lessons are learned at the toughest moments, but I didn’t like how much luck had played a role in keeping us alive on that mission, and my perfectionist tendencies took an ego hit.

As the helicopter took off to take us back to Kuwait three days later, I realized that even though each of my teammates on Team Five had different amounts of time and experience in the SEAL teams, we were all still very new to this, and this raid was a first for everyone.

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.