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

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.
    As we lined up at the head of the table, I saw all these senior guys with long hair and beards. Tattoos covered most of their arms, and only a few were in uniform. Toward the end of Green Team, we all started growing out our hair and beards. The grooming standards have changed several times over the years, but at this point in the war, people were less worried about your haircut and more worried about your actions on the battlefield. It was a ragtag bunch of professionals. We all came from different backgrounds and we had different hobbies and interests, but what we had in common was a willingness to sacrifice our time and even our lives for a greater good.
    In the team room, the guys made us introduce ourselves and give them a brief bio. Charlie, the bully, was the first to