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

he said. “Your buddies are dead. You’re useless to me now.”
    With his hands cuffed and a hood pulled over his head, Musi was led away.
    Gary met Phillips at the fantail. The captain was confused and disoriented as he climbed on board the
Bainbridge
.
    “Why did you guys have to do that?” Phillips said.
    He was suffering from a minor case of Stockholm syndrome and in the shock of the shootings, he didn’t understand what had just happened and why.
    Phillips underwent a medical exam and was found to be in relatively good condition. It didn’t take long before the Stockholm syndrome wore off. He was thankful for what my teammates had done. He called his family and was flown to the USS
Boxer
before heading home to Vermont.
    The rest of us spent a few more days on the USS
Boxer
, waiting for follow-on orders before moving ashore and then flying home. It felt good to finally save a life instead of just taking guys out. It was cool to do something outside of Iraq and Afghanistan. I was happy to do something different. But the downside was we got a glimpse of the Washington machine and just how slow the decision-making could be. We were ready to launch on this days before we actually got the call. But the Captain Phillips mission renewed our capabilities and put us on Washington’s radar for other high-profile missions.



CHAPTER 7
The Long War
    My legs ached and my lungs burned as I raced up the mountain.
    It was summer 2009 and we were about eight thousand feet up in the central Afghan mountains two hours south of Kabul. After the Phillips rescue, we returned home, trained for several months, and then deployed on schedule to Afghanistan.
    I could see the infrared laser from the aerial drone tracking the movement of eight fighters who ran out of the target compound when we arrived. Our team tore off after them as soon as the helicopter’s ramp hit the ground.
    “Alpha Team has visual on squirters,” was all I heard Phil say over the radio.
    The fighters were headed for a ridgeline three hundred meters north of the compound. We were trying to cut them off while the rest of the troop took down the compound. As we closed on their position, I looked back to see Phil and the rest of the team close behind. It was our first mission on this deployment, and we were still getting used to the altitude.
    Seeing the rest of the team moving into position, I snapped back around and shouldered my rifle. The enemy fighters were setting up a fighting position roughly one hundred and fifty yards away. I could barely keep my laser steady after the five-hundred-meter run in all of my gear, but I managed to lock on to the fighter with a PKM machine gun. Squeezing off multiple rounds, I watched him fall. By then, my teammates arrived and opened fire, dropping two more fighters before the rest disappeared over the ridgeline and out of sight.
    Leaving their dead, the remaining fighters raced down the backside of the ridge.
    “We have five hotspots moving to the north toward several compounds,” I heard the drone pilot say in my radio. I could see the laser from the drone moving down the backside of the hill.
    Phil gave the team a nod, and we were off on another dead sprint to close the distance.
    As we crested the top of the ridgeline, we slowed down, careful not to rush into a hasty ambush. I saw three bodies lying there, one with the machine gun and one with an RPG. We were lucky to take out their two biggest guns in the first seconds of the fight.
    The dead fighters were dressed in baggy shirts and pants and black Cheetahs, high-top Puma-like sneakers worn by Taliban fighters. It was a running joke in the squadron that if you wore black Cheetahs in Afghanistan, you were automatically suspect. I’ve never seen anyone but Taliban fighters in those sneakers.
    From the ridgeline, we could see the surviving fighters tearing down the backside of the hill. Phil snatched the RPG lying next to one of the dead fighters and fired it at the group as they ran off. The rocket landed nearby, and the shrapnel peppered the fighters as they ran.
    Dropping the launcher, he turned to me. Over the radio, we were getting calls about close air support, or CAS. An AC-130 gunship was circling above us.
    “CAS IS COMING ON STATION,” Phil literally screamed at me from two feet away.
    The RPG had knocked out his hearing.
    “I can hear you,” I said. “Stop screaming.”
    “WHAT?” Phil said.
    For the rest of the night, I could hear Phil before I