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

and I shot through the door of the guesthouse—flashed on the screen. A picture of where Bin Laden’s body had been came on next. I could see the dried blood on the rug.
    I struggled to wrap my mind around it.
    To see these images on prime-time television was hard for me to deal with. The images broke through the tiny compartment in my brain that I’d placed this whole experience in. I had no barrier between home and work now. I’ve always been good at mentally blocking out the “work” I’d done overseas. When I was home, I was home. Seeing these images was like crossing the two streams and it made my head hurt.
    I didn’t sleep well that night. I’d squirreled away a couple of Ambien. There was no way I was going to sleep without them.
    For the next two days, I dodged calls from friends and family. My phone wouldn’t stop ringing. My family was asking me if I was involved. My parents knew I’d been gone, but they didn’t know where.
    Before I left, I had called them and said I was going to train and wouldn’t have phone service. I always tried to keep things vague with them. I had sent my sisters a random text message before we left simply telling them that I loved them both. It wasn’t a red flag at the time, but after the news broke, my sisters knew I must be up to something.
    The day after we got home, I was taking my trash can to the curb when my neighbor from across the street walked over and gave me a huge hug. She knew I was a SEAL and noticed I had been gone for a few days.
    “You never really know what your neighbors do for a living, do you?” she said as she smiled and walked back to her house.
    It was the same for my teammates. One buddy barely got in the door before he was back changing diapers.
    “So I get home and she hands me my kid right away,” my buddy said when we got back to work. “We just shot UBL. Think I can sit down and drink a beer?”
    Another spent the morning after he got home mowing his overgrown lawn. We might have been getting the celebrity treatment in the media, but at home we were just absent husbands.

    When we finally came back to work officially two days later, Jay called us into a meeting in the same conference room where we first heard about the mission. There was concern at the command level about all the leaks revolving around the raid.
    “It is imperative that we stay out of the media,” Jay said. “Let’s all make sure we’re keeping a low profile.”
    I was astonished. We’d kept this whole thing under wraps for weeks. Now, Washington was leaking everything, and we were going to get the lecture for it. It felt like it was only a matter of time before some of our names appeared on the news. We just killed the number one terrorist in the world. The last thing we needed was our names attached to it. We simply wanted to fade back into the shadows and go back to work.
    “With that out of the way,” Jay said, “here is your schedule. Take a week off.”
    “But not a real week off, right,” Walt said.
    I heard a chuckle from some of the others.
    “When does the dog and pony show start?” I said.
    “The agency will be down in a few days,” Jay said. “SecDef is also planning a visit soon. We will pass the word on the schedule once we have it. Enjoy the break.”
    This time I laughed.
    “Come on, everybody wants to touch the magic,” Tom said as we walked out of the conference room.
    The mission hadn’t been that complicated or difficult.
    Weeks and months after the mission, details about the raid were appearing with a renewed focus on the unit. It raised a lot of concerns for our personal safety. Most of us had already invested in home security systems.
    Some of us voiced concerns to Jay and Mike at what seemed like a weekly meeting.
    “What if our names are leaked to the media?” I said.
    ABC News had come out with a ridiculous story about how to spot a SEAL. Reporter Chris Cuomo reported that the SEAL who shot Bin Laden was probably a physically fit white man in his thirties with a beard and longer hair. Then Cuomo did what the other reporters did. They found any SEAL who would talk about us, in this case DEVGRU founder Richard Marcinko.
    “They have gazelle legs, no waist, and a huge upper body configuration, and almost a mental block that says, ‘I will not fail,’” Marcinko told Cuomo.
    Other telltale traits: calloused hands from firing a weapon, shrapnel wounds from previous missions, and big egos.
    “They are basically