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

to raise my hand to ask a question. I was curious how we were going to be organized. Overall there was a lot of experience in the room. They’d drawn us from different teams. On most teams, the new guy usually carries the ladder and the sledgehammer. But looking around the room, we had all senior guys. It looked like some kind of dream team they were putting together.
    Before I got my hand up, Tom just looked at me and shook his head. I put my hand down. Tom typically never got too spun up. I was usually a little more vocal. My mind was spinning with questions I wanted answered. Not knowing what we were going to do grated on me, especially with the feeling we were just getting jerked around.
    “Let’s worry about the load-out,” Tom said as we left. “And we’ll know more Monday.”
    We all knew what to do and the gear to pack. I went down to the cages and found one of my guys.
    “Hey, brother,” I said. “I need to borrow your sledge.”
    Senior guys grabbing gear like a sledgehammer was rare, which brought even more questions from our teammates.
    “You got it,” he said. “But why again am I giving up my sledge?”
    I didn’t have a good answer.
    “We’re going on an exercise,” I said. “They called a bunch of us into a meeting today and we’re going down to North Carolina. They’re calling it a joint readiness exercise.”
    I wasn’t any more convincing than Mike. My teammate just looked at me with a “what the fuck?” expression on his face.
    Back in our squadron’s storage area, we started loading two ISUs—small, square shipping containers—with our gear. It took most of the day, and by quitting time the containers were filled with tools, guns, and explosives.
    While we packed, speculation was rampant. Some guys figured we’d be in Libya in a few weeks. Others bet on Syria or even Iran. Charlie, who seemed to be mulling over all of the questions and non-answers, came out with the boldest prediction.
    “We’re going to get UBL,” he said.
    Since there is no universal standard for translating Arabic to English, we used the FBI and CIA’s spelling of his name, Usama bin Laden, shortening it to UBL.
    “How do you figure?” I said.
    “Look, when we were asking them about the plan, they said we were going to a place where there is a base with infrastructure,” Charlie said. “If we don’t need any of these things, we’re going back to Iraq or Afghanistan. Somewhere there is an American base. I’d say we’re going into Pakistan and we’re basing out of Afghanistan.”
    “No way,” Walt said. “But if we are, I’ve been to Islamabad. It’s a shit hole.”
    Walt and I had already been on one wild-goose chase looking for Bin Laden and his flowing white robes.

    It was 2007 and I was on my sixth deployment. This time, I was working with the CIA at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost Province.
    Khost Province was one of the places where the hijackers who crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon trained. Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters were constantly in the province, slipping easily in and out of neighboring Pakistan.
    About midway through the deployment, the whole squadron was called back to Jalalabad from multiple bases throughout the country. One of the CIA’s leading sources on Osama bin Laden reported he saw the al Qaeda leader near Tora Bora. It was the same place U.S. forces almost captured him from in 2001.
    The Battle of Tora Bora started on December 12, 2001, and lasted five days. It was believed Bin Laden was hiding in a cave complex in the White Mountains, near the Khyber Pass. The cave complex was a historical safe haven for Afghan fighters, and the CIA funded many of the improvements during the 1980s to assist the mujahedeen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
    U.S. and Afghan forces overran the Taliban and al Qaeda positions during the battle but failed to kill or capture Bin Laden. Now the CIA source said he was in Tora Bora.
    “They saw a tall man in flowing white robes in Tora Bora,” the commander said. “He is back to possibly make his final stand.” This was 2007, and 9/11 was six years behind us. Until this point, there was no credible intelligence to his whereabouts. We all wanted to believe it, but the details weren’t adding up.
    We were going to fly into Tora Bora—which sat on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, between Khost and Jalalabad—and raid his suspected location. It sounded great in theory, but the operation was