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

the compound.
    In Afghanistan, we were oblivious to the hand-wringing in Washington. We had daily briefings. Drones flew over the compound keeping watch. We also had to battle the “good idea fairy.” She shows up on all our missions to some degree or another, and she isn’t our friend. The fairy shows up when the head shed has too much time on their hands. Essentially, officers and planners start dreaming up unrealistic scenarios that we may have to deal with on a mission.
    “They want us to take a bullhorn for crowd control now,” the team leader in charge of outer security said. “This ranks right up there with the police light.”
    Earlier, the head shed had floated an idea for the outer security team to take one of Bin Laden’s cars and affix a police light to it to make the activity around the target look like a police operation.
    “So I said, ‘Hey, sir, are we just going to push it out there?’ We aren’t going to have the keys,” the team leader said. “What if the steering wheel locks? Plus, which team has time to push a car out of the driveway and all the way down to the street corner? And let’s not forget that we will now have a flashing police light highlighting our position.”
    “What color are police lights in Pakistan?” I said.
    “No idea,” he said. “That was my next question. Then we got into a half-hour discussion about Ali.” Ali was the CIA interpreter on external security. He spoke Pashtun, which was used in the local area. “The good idea fairy wants him in local civilian clothes. He’s going to be standing between a SAW gunner and me. We’re in uniform, so what does it matter?”
    Logic won out in both battles. We didn’t carry the police light and Ali was in uniform.
    This kind of stuff always happens when planners get into the weeds. The CIA asked us to take a sixty-pound box that blocked cell phone signals. Weight was already an issue, so that good idea died quickly. If we had all the time back we wasted fighting the fairy, we might regain a few years of our lives.

    On the second night, I sat at the fire pit sipping on some fresh coffee with Charlie and Walt. The debate of the day was over where in the body you should attempt to shoot Bin Laden.
    “Try not to shoot this motherfucker in the face,” Walt said. “Everybody is going to want to see this picture.”
    “But if it’s dark and I can only see his head, I’m not waiting for a suicide vest,” Charlie said.
    “These will be some of the most viewed pictures of all time,” I said. “If given the option, all I’m saying is shoot for the chest.”
    “Easier said than done,” Walt said.
    “Remember to aim high,” I said to Walt. “Since you only come up to his nuts.”
    We’d already decided that Elijah Wood had Walt’s role in the movie, since he was no taller than a hobbit.
    Casting the Bin Laden movie was an ongoing joke. Who was going to play whom in Hollywood’s version of the mission? No one was getting Brad Pitt or George Clooney. Instead, we had a red-haired guy on the team so Carrot Top would portray him for sure. At least Walt had Frodo instead of a second-rate comic.
    “You know if this goes, we’ll get Jay his star,” I said.
    Everyone knew that for the officers, like Jay, if the raid was successful it would be a career maker. It would most likely mean Jay would make admiral some day. For the enlisted guys, it really didn’t mean anything; to us it was just another job.
    “And we’ll get Obama reelected for sure,” Walt said. “I can see him now, talking about how he killed Bin Laden.”
    We had seen it before when he took credit for the Captain Phillips rescue. Although we applauded the decision-making in this case, there was no doubt in anybody’s mind that he would take all the political credit for this too.
    We all knew this was bigger than us and bigger than politics. Maybe the officers and politicians would benefit, but that didn’t make us want to do it any less. That was always how things went. Our reward was doing the job, and we wouldn’t have it any other way.
    Near dawn, the fire pit broke up and we all went and tried to get a few hours of sleep. Since we operated at night, the majority of the population on the JSOC compound slept all day.
    I popped two Ambien. No one was getting any rest without sleeping pills. No matter how much we tried to make this mission just like the others, it wasn’t. It had been two days, but it felt like months.
    The third day was