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

from the southeast and hold station here.”
    I pointed at the courtyard.
    “We’ll rope in and clear this building, which we’re calling C1,” I said.
    It was pretty standard stuff, and it didn’t take Will long to fall into step. For the next several hours, we went over the whole plan and all the contingencies. I told him about all the rehearsals leading up to this point. This was Will’s first taste of the extensive planning the rest of us had been dealing with for weeks. Spending three weeks rehearsing for a mission was very odd. Typically, in Afghanistan or Iraq, we would get tasked with a mission, plan it, and launch in a few hours.
    The head shed—our headquarters staff—continued to work on big-picture planning and coordination. With our gear ready, all we had to do was wait.
    By rule, most of us had attention deficit disorder, or at least we joked that we did. We could focus on things, but not for long, and waiting was the worst. Walt constantly gave me a hard time. I couldn’t even sit through a movie.
    Like the other guys, we all had our own method to our madness when it came to how we set up our gear. Everything was checked and then rechecked. All of the batteries in my night vision and laser sights were fresh. My radios sat on the charger. Everything was neatly set out in order. Boots and socks next to my folded uniform. My kit, a vest that held two ballistic plates and pouches for ammunition and gear, rested next to my H&K 416 at the end of my bed.
    I took my time laying out my gear, but by midnight, or lunchtime for us, we still had hours to kill. During that kind of downtime, we’d go to the gym. Some guys made coffee, but not instant—French press. One guy brought a Pelican case with a press, grinder, and an assortment of coffees that would make Starbucks blush. I’d catch them making the coffee. One cup could take an hour. They’d grind the beans and then press the coffee. With great care, they’d boil the water and then sit by the fire and sip the coffee. It was all a part of their ritual, and the time they spent obsessing about the coffee meant fewer minutes to sit and wait. Every one of us had developed some method for killing time. We had two days before the mission was scheduled to launch, if it was approved.
    The next day, I went with Will and two of his teammates over to the hangar to meet the pilots. We had already worked with the aircrews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment during our rehearsals.
    We worked with the 160th almost exclusively. In our eyes, they were the best pilots in the world.
    Teddy, a short, fifty-year-old man with close-cropped hair who was the pilot of Chalk One, met us at the hangar door. We walked around the Black Hawk and showed Will the load plan. Then, before we left, we talked about contingencies.
    “If things go bad and I have to make an emergency landing, I am going to do my best to put her down in that open courtyard to the west,” said Teddy.
    We called it Echo courtyard, and it was the largest open area on the compound. A seasoned pilot, Teddy knew that if his helicopter was hit by enemy fire or malfunctioned, this courtyard was his best option.
    “Don’t worry though,” I said. “We’ve had our share of wrecks. If anyone is going to crash it will be Chalk Two.”
    I’d never been in a crash, but seven out of the dozen SEALs on my chalk had been in some form of crash in the past. Only two of the men on Chalk Two’s bird could say the same thing. We joked that the law of averages should keep our bird in the air.

    The window of opportunity to launch was short. The illumination cycle would start increasing the following week. We wouldn’t have these types of optimal conditions again for a month. Plus, with everything in place, the longer we held off, the greater the concern that the mission would leak. In the three weeks since we started planning, the number of people who knew about the operation had expanded exponentially.
    JSOC was ramping up its activity. McRaven was in Afghanistan, which isn’t news in itself, but the fact that he was heading to J-bad caused a bit of a stir. A Ranger colonel ran daily operations out of our command center in Bagram. Eventually, he was read in on the mission, adding more and more people who knew what was spinning up.
    Back in Washington, the main concern seemed to be confidence in the intelligence. Unlike Jen, her fellow analysts were only about sixty percent certain Bin Laden lived in