No Easy Day Read online

  The next day, I went with Will and two of his teammates over to the hangar to meet the pilots. We had already worked with the aircrews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment during our rehearsals.

  We worked with the 160th almost exclusively. In our eyes, they were the best pilots in the world.

  Teddy, a short, fifty-year-old man with close-cropped hair who was the pilot of Chalk One, met us at the hangar door. We walked around the Black Hawk and showed Will the load plan. Then, before we left, we talked about contingencies.

  “If things go bad and I have to make an emergency landing, I am going to do my best to put her down in that open courtyard to the west,” said Teddy.

  We called it Echo courtyard, and it was the largest open area on the compound. A seasoned pilot, Teddy knew that if his helicopter was hit by enemy fire or malfunctioned, this courtyard was his best option.

  “Don’t worry though,” I said. “We’ve had our share of wrecks. If anyone is going to crash it will be Chalk Two.”

  I’d never been in a crash, but seven out of the dozen SEALs on my chalk had been in some form of crash in the past. Only two of the men on Chalk Two’s bird could say the same thing. We joked that the law of averages should keep our bird in the air.

  ______

  The window of opportunity to launch was short. The illumination cycle would start increasing the following week. We wouldn’t have these types of optimal conditions again for a month. Plus, with everything in place, the longer we held off, the greater the concern that the mission would leak. In the three weeks since we started planning, the number of people who knew about the operation had expanded exponentially.

  JSOC was ramping up its activity. McRaven was in Afghanistan, which isn’t news in itself, but the fact that he was heading to J-bad caused a bit of a stir. A Ranger colonel ran daily operations out of our command center in Bagram. Eventually, he was read in on the mission, adding more and more people who knew what was spinning up.

  Back in Washington, the main concern seemed to be confidence in the intelligence. Unlike Jen, her fellow analysts were only about sixty percent certain Bin Laden lived in the compound.

  In Afghanistan, we were oblivious to the hand-wringing in Washington. We had daily briefings. Drones flew over the compound keeping watch. We also had to battle the “good idea fairy.” She shows up on all our missions to some degree or another, and she isn’t our friend. The fairy shows up when the head shed has too much time on their hands. Essentially, officers and planners start dreaming up unrealistic scenarios that we may have to deal with on a mission.

  “They want us to take a bullhorn for crowd control now,” the team leader in charge of outer security said. “This ranks right up there with the police light.”

  Earlier, the head shed had floated an idea for the outer security team to take one of Bin Laden’s cars and affix a police light to it to make the activity around the target look like a police operation.

  “So I said, ‘Hey, sir, are we just going to push it out there?’ We aren’t going to have the keys,” the team leader said. “What if the steering wheel locks? Plus, which team has time to push a car out of the driveway and all the way down to the street corner? And let’s not forget that we will now have a flashing police light highlighting our position.”

  “What color are police lights in Pakistan?” I said.

  “No idea,” he said. “That was my next question. Then we got into a half-hour discussion about Ali.” Ali was the CIA interpreter on external security. He spoke Pashtun, which was used in the local area. “The good idea fairy wants him in local civilian clothes. He’s going to be standing between a SAW gunner and me. We’re in uniform, so what does it matter?”

  Logic won out in both battles. We didn’t carry the police light and Ali was in uniform.

  This kind of stuff always happens when planners get into the weeds. The CIA asked us to take a sixty-pound box that blocked cell phone signals. Weight was already an issue, so that good idea died quickly. If we had all the time back we wasted fighting the fairy, we might regain a few years of our lives.

  ______

  On the second night, I sat at the fire pit sipping on some fresh coffee with Charlie and Walt. The debate of the day was over where in the body you should attempt to shoot Bin Laden.

  “Try not to shoot this motherfucker in the face,” Walt said. “Everybody is going to want to see this picture.”

  “But if it’s dark and I can only see his head, I’m not waiting for a suicide vest,” Charlie said.

  “These will be some of the most viewed pictures of all time,” I said. “If given the option, all I’m saying is shoot for the chest.”

  “Easier said than done,” Walt said.

  “Remember to aim high,” I said to Walt. “Since you only come up to his nuts.”

  We’d already decided that Elijah Wood had Walt’s role in the movie, since he was no taller than a hobbit.

  Casting the Bin Laden movie was an ongoing joke. Who was going to play whom in Hollywood’s version of the mission? No one was getting Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Instead, we had a red-haired guy on the team so Carrot Top would portray him for sure. At least Walt had Frodo instead of a second-rate comic.

  “You know if this goes, we’ll get Jay his star,” I said.

  Everyone knew that for the officers, like Jay, if the raid was successful it would be a career maker. It would most likely mean Jay would make admiral some day. For the enlisted guys, it really didn’t mean anything; to us it was just another job.

  “And we’ll get Obama reelected for sure,” Walt said. “I can see him now, talking about how he killed Bin Laden.”

  We had seen it before when he took credit for the Captain Phillips rescue. Although we applauded the decision-making in this case, there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that he would take all the political credit for this too.

  We all knew this was bigger than us and bigger than politics. Maybe the officers and politicians would benefit, but that didn’t make us want to do it any less. That was always how things went. Our reward was doing the job, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Near dawn, the fire pit broke up and we all went and tried to get a few hours of sleep. Since we operated at night, the majority of the population on the JSOC compound slept all day.

  I popped two Ambien. No one was getting any rest without sleeping pills. No matter how much we tried to make this mission just like the others, it wasn’t. It had been two days, but it felt like months.

  The third day was supposed to be “go day,” but cloud cover delayed our launch. No big deal for us. We always get delayed, so we expected it. Getting delayed was better than getting canceled. McRaven wanted to make sure drones could watch the compound in case Bin Laden left while we were in route, and the cloud cover made that impossible.

  Our daily briefs were held in a long, narrow room with wooden handmade benches running down the middle like a church. At the front of the room were flat-screen TVs for PowerPoint presentations and to show us drone footage or satellite photos.

  Today’s briefing was standing room only. I was seated next to Charlie near the back on one of the benches. I saw several of the SEALs from the other squadron wedged around the model, which still demanded your attention when you saw it. They were studying it intently before the briefing. It was amazing how it sucked you in and you’d find yourself fixated on it.

  A portion of the briefing was about what to do if the mission went drastically wrong and the Pakistani authorities somehow apprehended us.

  The president had already given us the green light to protect ourselves, even if we had to engage the Pakistan military. We were going deep into Pakistan, and we needed a reason other than the truth in case we were detained.

  “OK, guys,” the officer said. “Here is what they came up with. We’re on a search and recovery mission for a downed ISR platform,” he said.

  An ISR platform is what the military calls a drone. Essenti
ally, we were going to have to tell the Pakistani interrogators that the United States Air Force lost a drone.

  We all laughed.

  “That is as good as they can come up with?” someone said from the back of the room. “Why don’t they give us a bullhorn and a police siren just in case?”

  The story was preposterous. We were allies with Pakistan on paper, so if we did lose a drone, the State Department would negotiate directly with the Pakistani government to get it back. The story didn’t wash and would be very difficult to stick to during hours of questioning.

  At least we could laugh at it. Maybe they figured humor would help us endure. The truth is, if we got to that point, no story we could come up with was going to cover up twenty-two SEALs packing sixty pounds of hi-tech gear on their backs, an EOD tech, and an interpreter for a total of twenty-four men, plus a dog, raiding a suburban neighborhood a few miles from the Pakistani military academy.

  At the end of the brief, the commanding officer of DEVGRU came walking in. A captain with silver hair and a mustache, he’d lost his leg in a parachute accident years ago. As he walked to the front of the conference room, I barely noticed the slight hitch in his step from the prosthetic limb.

  The officer briefing us faded into the background as the commander got to the front. All of the laughing and grumbling about the cover story receded, and the room was silent.

  “OK, guys,” the DEVGRU commander said. “Just got off the phone with McRaven. He just talked to the president. The operation has been approved. We’re launching tomorrow night.”

  There were no cheers or high fives. I glanced back at some of the fellas sitting on the benches around me. The guys I’d operated side by side with for years.

  “Holy shit,” I thought. “I didn’t think it was really going to happen.”

  No more briefs.

  No more good idea fairy.

  And most of all, there was no more waiting.

  CHAPTER 12

  Go Day

  I couldn’t sleep.

  I’d spent the last couple of hours trying to get comfortable. But I found no peace on the hard mattress or in my own head. It was go day, and there was no getting around the significance of the mission now.

  Sliding open the camouflage poncho liner hung over my bunk to shield the light, I swung my legs out and rubbed my eyes. After three days of trying not to think about the mission, it was impossible to keep it from my mind now. If everything went as planned, in less than twelve hours we’d be roping into Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan.

  I didn’t feel tired. The only evidence I’d slept was the empty baggie that once held a couple of Ambien and a handful of empty bottles now filled with urine. Since we lived in overflow housing, it was a two-hundred-yard walk to the nearest bathroom. So I saved my empty water or Gatorade bottles to piss in instead. Standard practice. We’d flip on our headlamps and relieve ourselves without every truly waking up.

  I felt fresh physically, but mentally I was amped up. Not on edge, but restless. The “hurry up and wait” routine was grating on my nerves. We were all just happy the wait was almost over.

  Careful to be quiet since some of my teammates were still sound asleep, I slid from the bunk and got dressed. I could hear the faint snores of the others in their rooms. Grabbing my sunglasses, I walked out of the hut and into the daylight. The sun hit me like a sledgehammer. It felt like walking out of a casino in Vegas after playing all night.

  It took me a second to adjust, but soon the late afternoon sun felt good on my face and arms as I started walking toward the chow hall. I looked at my watch. For those of us on the compound on vampire hours, it was morning.

  For the rest of the base, it was the middle of the workday. The constant roar of helicopters provided the sound track. As I walked, a shit-sucking truck passed by after cleaning a bank of Porta-Johns on the camp. The pungent chemical smell of the disinfectant hung in the air as it passed.

  I kept my head down and walked on the gravel that kept the dust down to the first gate. Each unit changed the combination on the gate when they arrived. I fished a slip of paper out of my pocket with the code. My head was still cloudy from the Ambien. Pressing the numbers, I tried the doorknob.

  No luck.

  It took me three tries to get out, but I was finally on my way.

  “Just get through breakfast,” I thought.

  I was back to surviving Green Team. I knew if you focused on the whole thing, you cracked. The only way to survive was getting through the day one meal at a time. Now, hours before the biggest mission of my career, I was just focused on getting to breakfast.

  It was success one step at a time.

  Inside the chow hall, I washed my hands under a blast of cold water. The stench of greasy fried cafeteria food was so thick it clung to your clothes. The chow hall still had old holiday decorations pasted on the concrete wall. A long-faded 1970s poster of the four food groups took up most of the bulletin board next to the menu of the day.

  I surveyed the long stainless-steel buffets. Behind each one, in an apron and hat, was a civilian contractor ready to serve me a scoop of grits or pile bacon on my plate.

  Nothing looked good. The bacon was more fat than meat, and soggy from the grease. But I needed energy. I headed straight for the grill, where a small line was formed. A short-order cook was poised behind the flat top. Scooping up a buttery omelet folded into a greasy mess, he slid it on the plate of the guy in front of me.

  “Four eggs,” I said as the cook looked at me. “Scrambled please. Ham and cheese.”

  While the cook started on my eggs, I got some toast and fruit. The selection was the same on every deployment: large trays of unripe dark orange cantaloupe and honeydew with an almost chemical green color. During my last rotation, I had seen a box in the chow hall marked “FOR MILITARY OR PRISON USE ONLY.” Seemed about right.

  No one joins the military for the food.

  I grabbed two pieces of bread and ran them through the restaurant-grade toaster and piled some pineapple onto my plate. You can’t screw up pineapple. Back at the grill, I picked up my eggs and stopped to scoop some oatmeal and raisins into a bowl.

  I surveyed the tables arranged in long rows in the dining area. The murmur of conversations, coupled with the big-screen TV tucked in the corner tuned to cable news, created a dull roar. I saw a few of my teammates at a table far from the TV and dropped off my tray on my way to get coffee.

  The chow hall was for JSOC personnel only, but not everyone knew about the mission.

  As I sprinkled some pepper on my eggs, I muttered a hello to my teammates, including Charlie and Tom. They returned the greeting, but like me, no one wanted to talk. We were more comfortable alone with our thoughts.

  “How did you sleep?” I said.

  “Like shit,” Charlie said.

  “You take any Ambien?”

  “Two,” he said.

  “Look at the bright side, at least we’re enjoying this glorious breakfast. It’s like the buffet at Hotel del Coronado.”

  The hotel was one of the oldest resorts on the Pacific Coast, not far from where we’d all gone through BUD/S.

  “Right,” Charlie said. “Is that all you can come up with?”

  I was trying to be funny, but it was too early. Charlie always gave me shit about my weak jokes. I knew they sucked, but it was part of the fun.

  Beyond that, there was no talk of home. No talk of the mission. There was nothing more to cover. The food wasn’t good, but you wouldn’t have known by looking at our plates when we were through.

  I doubt any of us really tasted breakfast. It was just fuel for later. After my eggs and fruit, I forced down the bowl of oatmeal and finished a glass of orange juice. Walking back to my room, I was stuffed. I didn’t know when I’d eat next.

  ______

  The rooms were still quiet when I got back. Some of my teammates were trying to sleep until the last minute, but I was too amped. Getting my toothbrush and a bottle of water, car
eful not to grab my piss bottle, I walked out to a thick gravel area off to the side and brushed my teeth and spit on the ground.

  Breakfast, check.

  Brushed my teeth, check.

  Back in my room, I stuffed my toothbrush back into my backpack.

  I’d already laid out my Crye Precision Desert Digital combat uniform. Designed like a long-sleeved shirt and cargo pants, the uniform had ten pockets, each with a specific purpose. The shirt was designed to wear under body armor. The sleeves and shoulders were camouflaged, but the body of the shirt was tan and made of a lightweight material that wicked sweat away. I’d chopped the sleeves off of my shirt because it was hot.

  Sitting on my bed, I started to get dressed. Nothing I did from the moment I started putting on my pants was random.

  Every step was carefully planned.

  Every check was a way to focus and make sure I didn’t forget anything.

  These were the same steps I did before every mission.

  Before I slid my pants on, I rechecked each pocket on my uniform.

  In one cargo pocket, I had my assault gloves and leather mitts for fast-roping. The other cargo pocket had an assortment of extra batteries, an energy gel, and two power bars. My right ankle pocket had an extra tourniquet and my left one had rubber gloves and my SSE kit.

  In a pocket on my left shoulder, I felt the $200 cash I’d use if we got compromised and I needed to buy a ride or bribe someone. Evasion takes money, and few things work better than American cash. My camera, a digital Olympus point-and-shoot, was in my right shoulder pocket. Running along the back of my belt, I had a Daniel Winkler fixed blade knife.