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

third deck.
    Check.
    The two couriers were exactly where the CIA said they’d be.
    Check.
    The more I looked at his mangled face, my eye seemed to go back to his nose. It wasn’t damaged and seemed familiar. Pulling my booklet out of my kit, I studied the composite photos. The long and slender nose fit. His beard was dark black and there was no trace of the gray that I expected to see.
    “Walt and I will run with this,” I said to Tom.
    “Roger,” Tom said.
    Taking out my camera and rubber gloves, I started taking photos while Walt prepared to take multiple sets of DNA samples.
    Will, the Arabic speaker, was in the room treating the leg wound of the woman crying on the bed. We learned later that she was Amal al-Fatah, Bin Laden’s fifth wife. I’m not sure when she got hit, but it was a very small wound. It could have been from bullet fragments or a ricochet.
    “Hey, we have a significant amount of SSE on the second deck,” I heard someone call over the troop net. “We’re going to need any extra bodies down here.”
    As Tom left the room, I heard him on the command net.
    “We have a possible, I repeat POSSIBLE touchdown on the third deck.”
    Walt pulled his CamelBak hose from his kit and squirted water on the man’s face.
    I started to wipe the blood away from his face using a blanket from the bed. With each swipe, the face became more familiar. He looked younger than I expected. His beard was dark, like it had been dyed. I just kept thinking about how he didn’t look anything like I’d expected him to look.
    It was strange to see such an infamous face up close. Lying in front of me was the reason we had been fighting for the last decade. It was surreal trying to clean blood off the most wanted man in the world so that I could shoot his photo. I had to focus on the mission. Right now, we needed some good quality photos. This picture could end up being widely viewed, and I didn’t want to mess it up.
    Tossing the blanket away, I pulled out the camera that I’d used to shoot hundreds of pictures over the last few years and started snapping photos. We’d all gotten real good taking these kinds of photos. We’d been playing CSI Afghanistan for years.
    The first shots were of his full body. Then I knelt down near his head and shot a few of just his face. Pulling his beard to the right and then the left, I shot several profile pictures. I really wanted to focus on the nose. Because the beard was so dark, the profile shot was the one that really stood out in my mind.
    “Hey, man, hold his good eye open,” I said to Walt.
    He reached down and peeled back the eyelid, exposing his now lifeless brown eye. I zoomed in and shot a tight photo of it. While I shot pictures, Will was with the women and children on the balcony. Below us, my teammates were collecting all of the computers, memory cards, notebooks, and videos. Outside, Ali, the CIA interpreter, and the security team were dealing with curious neighbors.
    Over the radio, I heard Mike talking about the crashed Black Hawk.
    “Demo team, prep it to blow,” Mike said.
    I knew from the radio traffic that the SEAL in charge of demolition and the EOD tech were on their way to the courtyard.
    “Hey, we’re going to blow it,” the SEAL said.
    “Roger that,” the EOD tech said. He started taking out charges and putting them around the ground floor of the main house.
    “What the fuck?” the SEAL said as the EOD tech unpacked.
    Everybody was confused.
    “You told me to get ready to blow it, right?”
    “Not the house,” the SEAL said. “The helo.”
    “What helo?”
    The EOD tech thought the SEAL meant they were going to blow the house, which was another one of the contingency plans we had trained for.
    News of Chalk One’s crash was still not widespread. People were just finding out about it. In Washington, they weren’t even sure we’d crashed when they watched it on the drone feed. I heard later it looked on the grainy black-and-white video as if we’d “parked” in the courtyard and let the team out. The president and senior staff were confused when it happened, and even asked JSOC what was going on. A quick message to McRaven came back with an answer: “We will now be amending the mission … we have a helicopter down in the courtyard. My men are prepared for this contingency, and they will deal with it.”
    Outside, the helicopter crew was done destroying all of the classified gear. Teddy, the senior pilot and flight lead, was one of