No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden

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