No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (5 page)

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.