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

summer deployment, which meant we were busy. The annual Taliban summer offensive was in full swing. During the winter, the fighting slowed because it was cold and miserable. When an American soldier went missing at the start of the summer, we dropped everything to find him.
    Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl disappeared on June 30, 2009. A Taliban group captured him and quickly moved him closer to the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in hopes of getting him across. Our intelligence analysts tracked every lead after his disappearance, and we launched on several rescue attempts but came up empty. It was a race to get him back before they smuggled him to Pakistan. The fear was that the group that captured him would eventually sell him to other groups like the Haqqani network, a terrorist group allied with the Taliban.
    Less than a month after he disappeared, the Taliban released a video showing Bergdahl, dressed in the baby blue long shirt and baggy pants of the region, sitting in front of a white wall. He was lean, with a long neck and a little scruff under his chin. In the video, he looked frightened.
    One evening just after the first video appeared, we got word they might have a possible location for him.
    “Intelligence says he was likely in this area south of Kabul today,” our troop commander said, pointing at a map of central Afghanistan. “We don’t have much intel to go off of, but this is a priority.”
    We were gathered up for a mission brief at the operations center. Steve and his team were there too. The entire troop was slated to go. The plan was to fly to the “Y,” which means landing just outside of RPG range and then moving into position. It wasn’t as safe as patrolling in, but it wasn’t as dangerous as flying to the X. It was the only way we could assault the target and clear it before the sun came up.
    It was already midnight, which meant we were running out of darkness. So we had to launch immediately.
    “We’ve got one hundred percent illumination tonight, so it will be bright as fuck out there, fellas,” Phil said.
    Typically, we try not to operate when the moon is full. Our night vision works even better, but the high illumination means the enemy could see us too, cutting our advantage in half.
    Tactical patience is key. We typically liked to wait and develop a target, and then hit it with the odds stacked in our favor. We weren’t fighting second graders. The Taliban are good fighters and we already knew the operation had the potential to get squirrelly.
    “Hey guys, we are getting our hands forced a little here,” the troop commander said. “We need to accept a little more risk because of who we’re going after.”

    A cloud of dust covered me as I ran off the ramp of the CH-47 Chinook helicopter. We landed in an open field, and my team’s job was to move west of the target while Steve and his team moved south, creating a loose “L” shape as we moved toward a cluster of compounds where we thought Bergdahl might be held.
    The target was an hour-and-a-half helicopter ride from our base in Jalalabad. There was a house on the edge of the landing zone. Steve’s team took a few steps off the ramp before fighters started spilling out of it. One of the Taliban fighters had a PKM machine gun. I could hear the automatic weapons fire over the rotor noise as I ran.
    Looking over my shoulder back at the helicopters, I saw the tracer rounds, like lasers, cut through the dust cloud and zip past the helicopter. I could just make out Steve’s team diving for cover and instantly maneuvering on the enemy.
    Under effective machine gun fire, one of Steve’s teammates pulled out his pirate gun, a small single-shot grenade launcher. In a one-in-a-million shot, he popped up between machine gun bursts and lobbed a grenade into the house, which landed perfectly inside the door. I heard a muffled explosion and saw smoke start pouring out of the door. The grenade suppressed the fire immediately, giving Steve and his team vital seconds to close on the house without taking any casualties. Stacking next to the door, they cleared the house and killed the remaining fighters.
    “We’ve got movers to the north and to the east,” Phil said over the radio.
    With so much moonlight, I could see like it was daylight. If they could make us out with a naked eye from one hundred meters away, using our night vision we could see them at three hundred meters.
    The field in front of us was perfectly flat,