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

material that they had run out of the collapsible bags that they carried and started taking bags that they found in the house and filling them too. SEALs carried 1950s leather briefcases like they were on their way to the office, and knockoff Adidas athletic bags as if heading home from the gym.
    Outside the gate I turned right and sprinted toward the rest of the guys who were beginning to line up in our chalk loads. I could see the snipers had already set up the landing zone. My chalk was going to exfil on the remaining Black Hawk because we had the body. The smaller, more maneuverable aircraft had less of a chance of being shot down. The CH-47 would pick up all the SEALs from Chalk Two as well as Teddy and his crew from the crashed Black Hawk.
    All around us, lights in the houses were on. I could see several heads in the windows watching us. Ali was barking in Pashtu for them to go back inside. We started to get a head count. I was missing Will.
    “Where’s Will?” I said, moving down the line.
    “He was getting the kids and women when I left,” Walt said, standing next to the body, ready to move it to the helicopter.
    I started to get on the radio to try and find his location when I saw Will run out of the compound. He was the last one out.
    Taking my place near Walt on the body bag, I could make out the Black Hawk coming in right on top of the IR strobe in the field. As the helicopter flared out, I looked down, shielding my eyes from the cloud of dust and debris from the rotors. Once the cloud passed, we picked up the body and took off on a dead sprint toward the waiting helicopter. This was our freedom bird and we weren’t going to miss it.
    The field was recently plowed and we stumbled over eighteen-inch mounds of earth as we hustled the one hundred yards to the helicopter, carrying the six-foot-four body. We looked like drunks stumbling and falling our way to the bird.
    The dead weight wasn’t easy to carry for any of us, but Walt had a tough time trying to stay upright. Being five foot six inches tall, his stride was much shorter than the rest of us.
    Every few steps, he’d fall over one of the mounds. With curse words cascading from his lips, he’d bounce back up and press on.
    Racing under the spinning rotors, we threw the body on the deck and quickly climbed aboard. I found a spot up against the back of the pilots’ seats. After the sprint, we were exhausted. My chest was heaving, trying to gulp in air.
    “Holy shit, we’re going to pull this off,” I thought.
    When we didn’t immediately leap into the sky, I got anxious. In Afghanistan, the helicopter was practically taking off with the last boot still on the ground. The longer we waited, the more I prepared for a rocket-propelled grenade to tear through the door.
    “Go, go, go,” I kept thinking. “Come on man, go. GO!”
    But the Black Hawk waited. It even throttled back. The pilots didn’t want to take off before the CH-47 arrived. Helicopters liked to fly in pairs. The charges on the downed Black Hawk were seconds away from exploding. The SEAL and EOD tech put the charges on a five-minute timer. That would have been plenty of time if we’d been on schedule.
    But we were running late. At this point, we were eight minutes past our planned drop-dead time. We factored in ten extra minutes, but we were about to run out of that too.
    We had to assume law enforcement and Pakistani military were inbound and headed to investigate the situation. We were an invading military force who had entered their sovereign territory. I could see the expression on Tom’s face. He was on the helicopter’s intercom radio trying to figure out what was going on. He wanted the pilots to hurry up and lift off.
    “Let’s go,” he finally said. “We have to take off right now!”
    Less than a minute remained on the explosive charges on the downed Black Hawk. The SEAL who set the charges ran up to Jay and grabbed him. They were both still on the landing zone waiting for the CH-47 to arrive. Jay had been so focused on getting the helicopters in safely, he hadn’t heard his name being called.
    “Call off the 47,” the SEAL said to Jay. “You need to get all the birds out of the immediate area, the charge is going to blow in under thirty seconds.”
    Jay started to work the radios. He knew the explosion would knock the inbound CH-47 out of the sky and shrapnel would destroy the idling Black Hawk.
    I heard the rotors come to life, and the Black Hawk quickly