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

overhead.
    It took a long time to clear the building because of the size. We paid special attention to detail because we were looking for explosives rigged to blow up the dam. We’d never cleared anything this size, so it took a little longer than expected.
    No one was injured except for one of the GROM guys who broke his ankle fast-roping to the target.
    After we cleared the main building, my platoon chief came up to me.
    “Hey, check my radio,” he said. “I am not getting comms.”
    When we launched, he had his radio strapped to his back. As he stood in front of me now, I could still see the headphone cord dangling over his shoulder. I looked on his back and the whole pack was gone. All I could see was the cable.
    “Your backpack is gone,” I said.
    “Gone? What do you mean?” he said.
    “It’s gone,” I said.
    He hadn’t strapped the backpack to his body armor correctly. Body armor has nylon loops about a half-inch apart on the front and back so that you can secure pouches to the vest. My chief had only laced his backpack through the top and bottom loops, so when he fast-roped down into the rotor wash, it blew his backpack and radio off his back and into the water below the dam. The radio at the bottom of the river wasn’t going to do us much good. The same thing happened to our medic. He lost a bunch of morphine in a similar backpack.
    A lot of the gear we were using on the mission was new to us. Just before we deployed, boxes of new stuff had shown up in the team room. The common mantra was “Train like you fight,” which means don’t go into battle with equipment you haven’t used before, preferably extensively. We’d broken that rule, and I knew we’d gotten extremely lucky that it didn’t bite us in the ass. It was our first lesson learned.
    That wasn’t the only way we were lucky on the mission. The Iraqis had antiaircraft guns near the dam loaded and ready. Had the guards wanted to fight, they could have knocked the helicopters out of the sky as we fast-roped down.
    We learned a million lessons on that mission, from the need for better intelligence about a target to how to secure equipment, and we’d learned them all without losing anybody. Usually the best lessons are learned at the toughest moments, but I didn’t like how much luck had played a role in keeping us alive on that mission, and my perfectionist tendencies took an ego hit.
    As the helicopter took off to take us back to Kuwait three days later, I realized that even though each of my teammates on Team Five had different amounts of time and experience in the SEAL teams, we were all still very new to this, and this raid was a first for everyone.



CHAPTER 4
Delta
    Now back in Baghdad two years later, I was a little more seasoned, but not much. I’d screened for and then completed Green Team, but I was definitely still the new guy. The good part was I had some experience working in the Iraqi capital from my days on Team Five. After the dam mission, my team was sent to Baghdad to help round up former regime loyalists and insurgent leaders.
    Delta’s base was in the Green Zone, which sat next to the Tigris River in the center of the city. Soon after I landed, I started to immediately get my bearings. The base was a short distance from the famed crossed swords, erected to celebrate Iraq’s “victory” in the Iran-Iraq war. The sword arch stood on opposite sides of a large parade ground. During the day, you’d see whole units posing for pictures near the pair of hands holding the curved blades. The hands and forearms were modeled on the dictator’s, including his exact thumb print.
    Delta’s headquarters was in former Baath Party buildings. I walked inside to check in at the Joint Operations Center. Jon, my new team leader, came up to meet me soon after I arrived. I was brand-new and still had no idea what to expect.
    A former Ranger before joining Delta Force, Jon had a thick barrel chest and thick arms. A brown bushy beard that was so long it brushed against the top of his chest covered his face. He looked like a taller version of Gimli, the angry dwarf in
The
Lord of the Rings
.
    Jon had joined the Army right out of high school. After years of short haircuts and lots of rules with the Rangers, he dropped his packet for warrant officer school with an eye toward being an Apache helicopter pilot. But, ultimately, he didn’t want to give up his gun. So he screened and got picked up for Delta and had worked his way up the