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

is the highest honor that can be given to a unit.
    I don’t recall much about the speech. It was straight from the speechwriter playbook:
    “You guys are America’s best.”
    “You are what America stands for.”
    “Thank you from the American people.”
    “Job well done.”
    After the speech, we posed for a few pictures. Biden kept cracking lame jokes that no one got. He seemed like a nice guy, but he reminded me of someone’s drunken uncle at Christmas dinner. Before leaving to give a speech to two thousand soldiers from the 101st, Obama invited the whole team to his residence for a beer.
    “What is the residence?” I asked.
    “I don’t know,” Walt said. “His house. The White House, I guess.”
    “That would be kind of cool,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind going to the residence.”
    Walt just smirked.
    As the bus drove us to the airport, Obama delivered a speech to cheering soldiers in a hangar on the base.
    “We have cut off their head,” he said, “and we will ultimately defeat them … our strategy is working, and there is no greater evidence of that than justice finally being delivered to Osama bin Laden.”
    After that trip, things started to return to normal. We jumped back into our normal schedule, gone for a few weeks and then home for a week. We were back on the speeding train.
    We never got the call to have a beer at the White House. I remember I brought it up a few months later to Walt. We’d just come back from the range and we were walking back into the team room.
    “Hey, did you ever hear anything about that beer?” I asked.
    Walt’s smirk was back.
    “You believed that shit,” he said. “I bet you voted for change too, sucker.”

 
    Epilogue
    Less than a year after the Bin Laden mission, I got off the speeding train.
    I’d spent over a decade of my life sacrificing for this job and country. I gave up everything to live this dream. Long periods spent away from friends and family, missed holidays, and a physical beating on my body that will last the rest of my life. I served with America’s best and made lifelong friends with a group of guys I call my brothers. Since my first deployment as a SEAL and the attacks on September 11, I’d dreamt of being involved in the mission that would kill or capture Osama bin Laden. I was lucky enough to play a role. Now, it is time for someone else to take a turn.
    Very few people can say that they were lucky enough to stay in an operational job their entire SEAL career. From the day I graduated BUD/S, I moved to SEAL Team Five and then on to DEVGRU. I never worked a nonoperational job. In more than a decade as a SEAL, I didn’t have a break, just a steady drumbeat of combat deployments. After finishing my team leader time earlier this year, I was slated to leave my squadron and either be an instructor in Green Team or work one of several other nonoperational jobs within the command. These jobs were far from the battlefield and, to be perfectly honest, probably just the break that I needed. I knew after that short break, I would be itching to get back into the fight. Like everyone at the command, my personal life suffered under the strain of deployments. It was time for my own life to take a priority. As much as I hated leaving the command, it was time for me to move on and end my career as a SEAL.
    Before I left, I met with the commander who welcomed us home after the raid. He was now the acting commander of DEVGRU. I knew that as a well-respected commanding officer, he actually understood the stresses we lived under. We met in his office a few days before I was scheduled to sign out of the command.
    “What can we do to keep you?” the commander said.
    I was honored he wanted me to stay. But I looked him in the eye and humbly shook my head.
    “It’s time for me to move on,” I said.
    Although I felt a certain amount of guilt, like I was leaving my brothers behind to carry the load, I was at peace with my decision. There were newer guys, fresh from Green Team, who were primed and ready to lead the fight. I was simply tired and ready for something new.
    It was strange to leave Walt, Charlie, Steve, and Tom behind. We are all still friends, and all four are still at the command. For their protection, I’m not going to talk much about what the guys are doing now. They are all still sacrificing their lives and time for the good of this country.
    Phil fully recovered from the gunshot wound in his calf. He is still a tier-one prankster