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

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