No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (9 page)

But patrolling to the target wasn’t easy, especially in the cold winter night. The wind cut into our uniforms as we moved toward the village. I was near the front, acting as the point man for my team.

One of the key lessons learned early on in a SEAL’s career was the ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable. It was a lesson I first learned as a kid in Alaska checking the trap line with my dad.

When it got cold in Iraq or during Hell Week in BUD/S, my mind used to wander back to Alaska. I could always hear the roar of the snowmobile as my father and I headed toward the line of traps he kept miles from the village and deep into Alaska’s wilderness.

I remember how it felt like the snowmobile was floating through the fresh powder, and how as we turned it was like being on a surfboard cutting into a wave. The temperature hovered near zero, and our warm breath crystallized in the air.

On one cold winter day in Alaska, I was wrapped tightly in a tan Carhartt snowsuit, winter boots, and gloves. A beaver hat hand-sewn by my mother covered my ears and a scarf protected my face, leaving only my eyes exposed. I was warm except for my hands and feet. We’d been out for hours and I could barely feel my toes.

I tried to wiggle them in my thick wool socks, but it wasn’t helping. Huddled behind my father to block the wind, all I could think about was how cold my hands and feet were. We’d already gotten a couple of marten, a cat-size weasel with a bushy tail like a squirrel and a soft coat of brown fur. My father traded the pelts in the village to make a little extra money or my mother would make hats for my sisters.

But the biting cold took the thrill out of the time I was spending with my dad. Any fun I was having disappeared with the last feeling of warmth in my body.

I’d begged my father to go on the trip.

“Are you sure?” he said. “You know it is going to be cold.”

“I want to go,” I said.

I wanted to hang out with my father and didn’t want to be stuck back at the house. This was guy stuff, and he taught me how to shoot and hunt. As I got older, he trusted me to hunt and fish on my own, and I’d take the family boat up the river for a week at a time. In a way, it was my first taste of “Big Boy Rules” and I thrived. Plus, I wouldn’t have to sit at home with the girls.

I always wanted to be outside. I loved the outdoors, just not all the cold weather. I knew that if my dad let me come with him I couldn’t be the kid complaining about the cold. But now, a few hours into the trip, all I wanted were warm hands and feet.

“Dad,” I screamed into the wind as we drove. “Dad, my feet are frozen.”

My father, dressed in the same snowsuit and hat, slowed to a stop. He turned back and I imagine he saw a small boy with his teeth chattering behind his scarf.

“I’m freezing,” I said.

“We only have a few more traps,” my father said. “Do you think you can make it?”

I just looked at him, not wanting to answer no. I didn’t want to let him down. I stared at him hoping he’d make the choice for me.

“I can’t feel my feet,” I said.

“Get off here and start walking behind the snowmobile. Follow my tracks. I am going to keep going. I won’t be far ahead of you. Stick to the tracks and keep moving because that will keep your feet warm.”

I slid off the back of the snow machine and adjusted the .22 rifle strapped to my back.

“You got it?” my father asked.

I nodded.

He started the engine and headed toward the next trap. I started walking and my feet warmed up.

Outdoorsmen pay thousands of dollars to experience the Alaska tundra, but for most of my childhood all I had to do was walk outside my door.

My family had a sense of adventure not found in most people. When I was five years old, we moved to a small Eskimo village in the interior of Alaska. My parents were missionaries who met in college in California and found that their faith not only allowed them to spread Christianity but also appealed to their sense of adventure.

Besides his missionary work, my father worked for the state. The job required a college degree, and my father was one of the few people in the village that had one.

My mother stayed home with us. She helped with homework and kept my sisters and me on track. I was the middle child between two sisters. We were a tight family because there wasn’t a lot to do in the village. Winters were brutal, so we’d huddle around the kitchen table and play board games.

But calling it a town by normal standards would be generous. We had two stores, together no bigger than a small truck stop, a small school, and a post office. No mall. No movie theater, but you could rent movies at one of the stores. The crown jewel of my town was the runway. It was just large enough to land a 737 jet as well as some of the bigger propeller-driven cargo planes. That made our village the hub of the region. Bush planes would come in and out of town bringing hunters and outdoorsmen from Anchorage to the more remote villages spread along the river.

We lived in a two-story house one hundred yards off the river. The house had a beautiful view of picturesque Alaska. Sometimes when I was lucky, I could see a moose or a bear from my front door. If I wasn’t in school, I was out hunting or fishing. From the time I was a little kid, I was comfortable using a gun and moving in the woods, and being responsible for myself.

During
BUD/S training, I excelled at land warfare. It was really no different than my hunting trips as a kid. With varying backgrounds at BUD/S, guys were stronger in different areas. I did fine in the water too, but I felt most comfortable during the weapons and land warfare training.

So, when I got to DEVGRU, I typically acted as the point man for my assault team. On this cold night in Iraq, the four-mile patrol to the target village took about an hour. It was close to three
A.M.
when we arrived. As we got close, I could see the lights from the Iraqi village flickering across a highway.

It was a dusty shit hole.

Light blue plastic shopping bags blew down the street. The smell of raw sewage from a ditch that ran along the road hung on the wind. I could just make out the biscuit-colored houses, which had a faint green hue under my night vision goggles. The power lines that ran along the highway into Syria sagged. Everything looked ratty and run down.

As we got to the village, the teams started to peel off to their predetermined targets. I led my team to our target building. Creeping up to the gate, I tried the handle. The heavy black iron door creaked open. Pushing it just wide enough to see in, I scanned the courtyard. It was empty.

The front door of the two-story house had a large window covered by an ornate grate. I could see inside the foyer as my teammates’ lasers searched inside from the first-floor windows.

I slowly pushed open the front door of the house. It was unlocked. I paused at the threshold, my rifle at the ready, and waited. Looking over my shoulder, one of my teammates gave me a thumbs-up. I blinked the dust out of my eyes to make sure I could see before stepping inside. I was wearing my cumbersome op gear over a winter jacket as I tried to move like a cat.

“Think quiet,” I told myself.

The foyer was cramped. A small generator sat on the floor. There was a door straight ahead of me and another door to my right. Ignoring the door to the right because it was blocked by a generator, I crept through the door in front of me.

My senses were on fire. I strained to hear any movement up ahead as I scanned the empty room. The smell of kerosene from the family’s heating stove attacked my nostrils.

Every step that I took seemed like a huge crash. We were trained to anticipate an insurgent with a suicide vest or an AK-47 behind any door, ready to attack.

Curtains covered the doorway leading back to the bedrooms. I hated the curtains because at least with a door you felt a little protected. I had no idea if someone was looking under the curtain or was just waiting for my shadow to pass in front so that he could shoot.

This was the endgame. There was no way these rooms would be empty. We had no idea if the occupants had heard us. On my previous deployment with Delta, several of their guys were killed when they entered a house and got ambushed by a fighter hiding behind a sandbag wall. It was a deadly lesson we never forgot and it was always in the back of our minds as we entered a target.

I paused for a second or two, hoping to draw out any impatient ambushers. The light was on in the room behind the curtain. Flipping my night vision goggles up, I slowly pulled the curtain aside.

A long, slender refrigerator stood at the elbow of an L-shaped hallway. I spotted a door ajar and moved to quickly cover it while my teammates flooded the hallway, clearing the other rooms. One of my teammates followed me as we pushed open the door and cleared into a bedroom. There was no talking. Everyone knew his job.

Three mattresses were on the floor and I could barely make out two eyes staring at me from the corner of the dark room. It was a young man with wispy facial hair and dark eyes. He seemed nervous and his eyes kept shifting from side to side as we moved inside.

It struck me as odd that he just sat there staring at me.

There were two women, also awake, staring at the door. I immediately started moving toward the man. I knew something wasn’t right because men usually sleep in a different room. As I passed the women, I held my hand out, waving at them to be calm. The man started to try and talk.

“SHHHH!” I whispered. I didn’t want him to alert any men who might be in another room.

His gaze never left me. I grabbed him by his right arm and yanked him up, pushing the blankets away to make sure he didn’t have a weapon. Holding him against the wall, I pulled the blankets off the women. Sleeping between the women was a small girl, no more than five or six years old. When I moved the blanket off of her, the girl’s mother grabbed her and pulled her close.

I guided the man into the center of the room and secured his hands together with flex-cuffs—plastic handcuffs—and slid a hood over his head. My teammate watched the women while I quickly searched the man’s pockets. I then pushed the man to his knees and shoved his head into the corner. He tried to talk, but I pressed his face against the wall, muffling his voice.

Our troop chief, who was running the mission, popped his head in the door.

“What do you have?” he said.

“One MAM,” I said, which is shorthand for “military-aged male.” “Still need to search the room.”

I walked to the far corner of the room, next to the mattresses, and saw the brown stock of an AK-47. Resting on a pile of small plastic bags was a green chest rack, used to carry extra magazines, and a grenade.

“Got an AK over here,” I said. “Chest rack. Grenade. FUCK!” I was pissed we hadn’t seen the weapons earlier.

My teammate who covered the women hadn’t seen them either when we came into the room.

The man I found in the room was definitely a fighter and a smart one too. He hid his gun, chest rack, and hand grenades just out of reach and well enough for us not to see them on our initial entry into the room.

Everything inside me wanted to shoot this guy right there on the spot. He knew the rules we had to follow and he was using them against us. We couldn’t shoot him unless he posed a threat. If he had any balls, he would have lit us up coming through the door. He knew we were in the house. The man must have heard us come in and thought he could hide with the women.

With the house secure, I led the man to another room to question him. The room’s floor was covered in rugs, and sleeping mats were piled in a heap in the center of the room. A TV on the floor was on, but the screen was just static. Our interpreter stood next to the man as I pulled the hood off. His face was sweaty and his eyes were big as he tried to adjust to the light.

“Ask him why he had grenades and a chest rack,” I told the interpreter.

“I’m a guest here,” the man said.

“Why were you sleeping with the women and children? Guests don’t sleep next to the women.”

“One of them is my wife,” he said.

“But I thought you were a guest here,” I said.

The questioning went on like that for about a half hour. He never got his story straight and the next morning we turned him over to the Marines.

It was frustrating because missions were like this day after day. It was a catch and release system. We’d roll them up and in a few weeks the fighters would be back on the street. I was confident the fighter we found in the bedroom would be released soon. The only way to permanently take them off the street was if they were dead.

We found out later from some of the village elders that the men, including the fighter I encountered in the women’s bedroom, were part of an insurgent cell that rotated between the houses of the village. The guy we captured had gone home that night to stay with his family. Three other guys in his cell were killed that same night after a short firefight with my teammates. My teammates got lucky and got the jump on them before the insurgents reacted. Our troop uncovered guns, mines, and explosives for roadside bombs in the house.