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

as I entered. To the right, I saw the silhouette of a crook holding a small revolver. He was wearing a sweatshirt and looked like a 1970s thug from the movies. To the left, there was a silhouette of a woman holding a purse.
    I snapped a shot off at the crook seconds after stepping into the room. The round hit center mass. I moved toward it, shooting a few more rounds.
    “Clear,” I said, lowering my muzzle.
    “Clear,” my teammate answered.
    “Safe ‘em and let ‘em hang,” one of the instructors said from above.
    No less than six instructors were looking down at us from a catwalk that spidered out over the kill house. They could walk safely along the walkways watching as we cleared the different rooms, judging our performance and watching for any tiny mistakes.
    I put my rifle on safe and let it hang against me by its sling. I wiped beads of sweat out of my eyes with my sleeve. My heart was still pounding, even though we were finished. The training scenarios were pretty straightforward. We all knew how to clear rooms. It was the process of clearing a room perfectly under the simulated stress of combat that would set us apart.
    There was no margin of error, and at that moment I wasn’t sure exactly what we had done wrong.
    “Where was your move call?” Tom, one of the instructors, said to me from the catwalk.
    I didn’t answer. I just nodded. I was embarrassed and disappointed. I’d forgotten to tell my teammate to move in the first room, which was a safety violation.
    Tom was one of the best instructors in the course. I could always pick him out because he had a huge head. It was massive, like it housed a giant brain. It was his one distinct physical trait; otherwise you’d miss him because he was mellow and never seemed to get upset. We all respected him because he was both firm and fair. When you made a mistake in front of Tom, it felt like you let him down. His disappointment with me was plastered across his face.
    No screaming.
    No yelling.
    Just the look.
    From above, I saw him shoot me the “
Dude, really? Did you just do that?
” look.
    I wanted to speak or at least try and explain, but I knew they didn’t want to hear it. If they said you were wrong, you were wrong. Standing below them in the empty room, there was no arguing or explaining.
    “OK, check,” I said, defenseless and furious with myself for making such a basic error.
    “We need better than that,” Tom said. “Beat it. Do your ladder climb.”
    Snatching up my rifle, I jogged out of the kill house and sprinted to a rope ladder hanging on a tree about three hundred yards away. Climbing up the ladder, rung by rung, I felt heavier. It wasn’t my sweat-soaked shirt or the sixty pounds of body armor and gear strapped to my chest.
    It was my fear of failure. I’ve never failed anything in my SEAL career.

    When I got to San Diego six years earlier for BUD/S, I never doubted I’d make it. A lot of my fellow BUD/S candidates who arrived with me either got cut or quit. Some of them couldn’t keep up with the brutal beach runs, or they panicked underwater during SCUBA training.
    Like a lot of other BUD/S candidates, I knew I wanted to become a SEAL when I was thirteen. I read every book I could find about the SEALs, followed the news during Desert Storm for any mention of them, and daydreamed about ambushes and coming up over the beach on a combat mission. I wanted to do all of the things I’d read in the books while growing up.
    After completing my degree at a small college in California, I went to BUD/S and earned my SEAL trident in 1998. After a six-month deployment throughout the Pacific Rim, and a combat deployment to Iraq in 2003-2004, I was ready for something new. I’d learned about DEVGRU during my first two deployments. DEVGRU was a collection of the best the SEAL community had to offer, and I knew I would never be able to live with myself if I didn’t try.
    The Navy’s counter-terrorism unit was born in the aftermath of Operation Eagle Claw, the failed 1980 mission ordered by President Jimmy Carter to rescue fifty-two Americans held captive at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, Iran.
    After the mission, the Navy identified a need for a force capable of successfully executing those kind of specialized missions and tapped Richard Marcinko to develop a maritime counter-terrorism unit called SEAL Team Six. The team practiced hostage rescue as well as infiltrating enemy countries, ships, naval bases, and oil rigs. Over time,