No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (8 page)

“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.

In December
2006, we were deployed to western Iraq. It was my third deployment at the command. I had spent one rotation working closely with the CIA. It felt good to be back with the guys instead of helping the agency plan and train their Afghan fighters. We worked with a lot of other units, but it was always better with the boys because we were cut from the same cloth.

My troop was working along the Syrian border and in some of Iraq’s nastiest towns like Ramadi, home to al Qaeda Iraq. Our job was to target high-level couriers that brought in foreign fighters and Iranian weapons.

The Marines in Al Anbar asked if we could help conduct an operation to clear and secure a series of houses in a village near the Syrian border. The village was a safe haven for insurgents, and several leaders were staying near the center of the town. The plan was for us to hit the houses at night and then the Marines would surround the village and relieve us in the morning.

Even with the team crowded into a Black Hawk, I was fighting to keep warm.

We had a combat assault dog with us. We used it to detect bombs and help track enemy fighters. I tried to get the dog to sit on my lap to warm me up. Every time I got him close to me, the handler would pull him away.

It was freezing when we landed about four miles from the Iraqi village. Shielding my eyes from the dust, I waited for the helicopters to leave. I could hear their engines fade away minutes later, heading east back toward Al Asad Air Base.

I stamped my feet and rubbed my hands together trying to get the circulation moving while we got organized to move out.

Even though I’d been to Iraq twice before, this third deployment was different. The enemy had evolved. So, like SEALs do best, we adapted. Instead of flying to the X like we did in the past, we’d started to land miles away and patrol in quietly. This way the enemy couldn’t hear the helicopters. We were transitioning from being loud and fast, taking the enemy by surprise, to being soft and slow and retaining the element of surprise for even longer. We could creep through their houses and into their bedrooms and wake them up before they had a chance to fight back.