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

by Owen, Mark

  “I’m doing it,” I said. “This is what I want.”

  My father never raised his voice. Instead, he reasoned with me.

  “Hear me out,” he said. “If you ever listen to anything I say, will you take one piece of advice from me? Try one year of college. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to go back.”

  My dad knew that I hadn’t seen much of the world growing up in a small village in Alaska. They were betting if they could talk me into going to school, I’d be exposed to so many new things that I wouldn’t pursue my dreams of becoming a SEAL.

  I was accepted to a small college in southern California.

  “OK, Dad,” I said. “One year.”

  One year turned into four, and with my degree I considered joining the Navy as an officer. I made friends with a former SEAL in school who advised me not to join as an officer. He told me I could always become an officer later, but the enlisted route meant more time as an operator and allowed me to stay in the fight. When I enlisted after college, my father had no objections.

  Like all of my teammates, I was driven to be a SEAL. And once I finished BUD/S, I was driven to be the best SEAL I could be. I wasn’t unique. There was a whole command of guys just like me. But like me, they all struggled with balance. We called it “the speeding train”; it was hard to get on, and it was hard to get off, but once you’re there you’d better hang on because you’re in for a ride.

  We really had two families: the guys at work and then family and loved ones left at home. I came from a tight family in Alaska. I felt the same way about them as I did about my teammates, like Phil, Charlie, and Steve.

  For a lot of guys, keeping the balance between work and family life was fleeting. Many of my teammates suffered through bitter divorces. We missed weddings, funerals, and holidays. We couldn’t tell the Navy no, but we could tell our families no. And we did, often. It was difficult to get time away. Work was always the number one priority. It took everything out of you and gave back very little.

  The funny thing was, even when we were on leave before a deployment, I’d see guys at work. We came in to work on gear, work out, or just take care of last-minute issues before we deployed.

  The dirty secret of it all is that everyone, including me, loved it. We wanted to get the call every time, which meant everything else in the world took a backseat.

  I was on my eleventh consecutive combat deployment in 2009. I had worked my way up from a new guy to being Phil’s number two. From 2001, the only break I had was Green Team, if you call that a break. That was eight years straight of either going on missions or training for them. By now, I was smarter and more mature. As I moved up, new guys came in behind me. The new guys now had more combat experience. They were certainly better than I was when I arrived at Green Team. The command as a whole was better. We were primarily focused on Afghanistan. Even with operations in Iraq winding down, our pace never lagged. We all wanted to work, but all of the senior guys were starting to feel the miles.

  Steve had moved up. He was in charge of one of the other teams in our troop. Charlie was an instructor in Green Team.

  It was a summer deployment, which meant we were busy. The annual Taliban summer offensive was in full swing. During the winter, the fighting slowed because it was cold and miserable. When an American soldier went missing at the start of the summer, we dropped everything to find him.

  Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl disappeared on June 30, 2009. A Taliban group captured him and quickly moved him closer to the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan in hopes of getting him across. Our intelligence analysts tracked every lead after his disappearance, and we launched on several rescue attempts but came up empty. It was a race to get him back before they smuggled him to Pakistan. The fear was that the group that captured him would eventually sell him to other groups like the Haqqani network, a terrorist group allied with the Taliban.

  Less than a month after he disappeared, the Taliban released a video showing Bergdahl, dressed in the baby blue long shirt and baggy pants of the region, sitting in front of a white wall. He was lean, with a long neck and a little scruff under his chin. In the video, he looked frightened.

  One evening just after the first video appeared, we got word they might have a possible location for him.

  “Intelligence says he was likely in this area south of Kabul today,” our troop commander said, pointing at a map of central Afghanistan. “We don’t have much intel to go off of, but this is a priority.”

  We were gathered up for a mission brief at the operations center. Steve and his team were there too. The entire troop was slated to go. The plan was to fly to the “Y,” which means landing just outside of RPG range and then moving into position. It wasn’t as safe as patrolling in, but it wasn’t as dangerous as flying to the X. It was the only way we could assault the target and clear it before the sun came up.

  It was already midnight, which meant we were running out of darkness. So we had to launch immediately.

  “We’ve got one hundred percent illumination tonight, so it will be bright as fuck out there, fellas,” Phil said.

  Typically, we try not to operate when the moon is full. Our night vision works even better, but the high illumination means the enemy could see us too, cutting our advantage in half.

  Tactical patience is key. We typically liked to wait and develop a target, and then hit it with the odds stacked in our favor. We weren’t fighting second graders. The Taliban are good fighters and we already knew the operation had the potential to get squirrelly.

  “Hey guys, we are getting our hands forced a little here,” the troop commander said. “We need to accept a little more risk because of who we’re going after.”

  A cloud of dust covered me as I ran off the ramp of the CH-47 Chinook helicopter. We landed in an open field, and my team’s job was to move west of the target while Steve and his team moved south, creating a loose “L” shape as we moved toward a cluster of compounds where we thought Bergdahl might be held.

  The target was an hour-and-a-half helicopter ride from our base in Jalalabad. There was a house on the edge of the landing zone. Steve’s team took a few steps off the ramp before fighters started spilling out of it. One of the Taliban fighters had a PKM machine gun. I could hear the automatic weapons fire over the rotor noise as I ran.

  Looking over my shoulder back at the helicopters, I saw the tracer rounds, like lasers, cut through the dust cloud and zip past the helicopter. I could just make out Steve’s team diving for cover and instantly maneuvering on the enemy.

  Under effective machine gun fire, one of Steve’s teammates pulled out his pirate gun, a small single-shot grenade launcher. In a one-in-a-million shot, he popped up between machine gun bursts and lobbed a grenade into the house, which landed perfectly inside the door. I heard a muffled explosion and saw smoke start pouring out of the door. The grenade suppressed the fire immediately, giving Steve and his team vital seconds to close on the house without taking any casualties. Stacking next to the door, they cleared the house and killed the remaining fighters.

  “We’ve got movers to the north and to the east,” Phil said over the radio.

  With so much moonlight, I could see like it was daylight. If they could make us out with a naked eye from one hundred meters away, using our night vision we could see them at three hundred meters.

  The field in front of us was perfectly flat, and I could see fighters with weapons slung on their backs, racing away from the helicopters. A road ran from north to south across the field, past the compounds and out of the valley. I could just make out two guys on a pair of mopeds racing away. Phil spotted a group of four fighters running west away from the road toward a small house.

  “I’ve got me plus two,” Phil said. “We’ll take the guys to the west. You take the guys on the bikes.”

  Steve’s team cleared the target compound. There was no sign of Bergdahl, but we figured he had to be somewhere nearby. There were too many fighters here, and they w
ere well armed.

  With me were two snipers from our reconnaissance unit, called RECCE, plus the EOD tech. Phil took the dog team and one assaulter.

  As we ran across the field, we practically stepped on top of a fighter hiding in the grass. I didn’t see him at first; one of the snipers made him out and opened fire. As we moved forward, I noticed he was wearing Cheetahs. Guilty.

  Moving forward again, I saw the fighters’ mopeds parked just off the road. I picked up two heads popping up over a hay bale, which had to be four to five feet tall at least, and ten or fifteen feet wide.

  “I’ve got a visual on two pax roughly three hundred meters at twelve o’clock,” I said.

  In military jargon, “pax” are people. The snipers saw them too, and we stopped in the field and took a knee. We needed a quick plan.

  “I’m going to set up on the road and see if I can get a shot,” one of the snipers said.

  He was one of the most experienced snipers at the command. In a previous deployment in Iraq, he had hunted down an Iraqi sniper who was shooting Marines. It took him weeks, but he eventually found the Iraqi sniper holed up in a house. He shot the Iraqi sniper through a missing brick in the wall.

  The road was to the left of the hay bale and had a little rise, giving him some high ground.

  “I’ll take the right flank,” the EOD tech said.

  “OK,” I said. “I’ll take the middle and try and get a hand grenade over the top of the hay bale.”

  I didn’t love this plan, but we didn’t really have a choice. With our fields of fire and Phil’s team to our right flank, we were limited on how we could maneuver to clear around behind the hay bale.

  I trusted the snipers to cover me as I moved up. It was about a two-hundred-meter shot—not easy—but with their scopes and night vision it was not difficult either.

  We quickly moved to our positions.

  “RECCE set.”

  I was carrying a small, extendable ladder on my back. I dumped it in the grass and marked it with an infrared or “IR” chemical light.

  “EOD set.”

  Transferring my rifle to my left hand, I knelt down and took a grenade from my pouch. I slid the pin out and held it in my right hand. I took a deep breath and started to sprint toward the hay bale. I could hear only my breathing and the wind whipping by as I tried to close the distance before the fighters peeked over the top again. About halfway to the hay bale, I heard an AK-47 open fire off my right flank. Phil and his crew must have tracked down the enemy fighters.

  The sprint didn’t take more than a few seconds, but in my mind everything slowed like a television replay. I was less than one hundred feet from the hay bale when a head popped up.

  I was in the open with no cover. I couldn’t freeze. I had to get to the hay bale. I didn’t have the best arm, so I knew I couldn’t clear the hay bale with a throw from this distance. I had to keep closing. A split second later, several rounds from the snipers hit the fighter in the chest, sending him tumbling back like a rag doll.

  One of the rounds ignited the propellant on an RPG rocket strapped to the fighter’s back. As he tumbled back behind the hay bale, I saw sparks and fire shoot out of his backpack. He looked like a giant sparkler.

  Sliding to a stop at the base of the hay bale, I tossed the grenade over the top and rolled away. I heard the crack of the explosion and turned to run.

  Under the cover of the sniper, I linked up with the EOD tech and the other sniper in the field. We maneuvered back to the hay bale while the second sniper covered us. Coming around the left side with our guns at the ready, we found one fighter on his back, the RPG still burning underneath him. There was no sign of the other fighter.

  As we began the search for the missing fighter, a message crackled across the radio.

  “We’ve got a wounded eagle, we’ve got a wounded eagle request immediate medevac.”

  One of the snipers with me was a medic and immediately started moving toward Phil’s team. We still hadn’t found the missing enemy fighter, so I pushed the thought of who might be wounded out of my mind and three of us continued to search.

  I helped the EOD tech gather up the fighters’ guns and mopeds. The fighters had morphine kits and grenades. They were professionals, not some farmers who picked up AK-47s when the crops weren’t in season.

  We never found Bergdahl on that deployment, and as of the summer of 2012 he was still a prisoner. But in my gut, I think he was there at some point. We probably missed him by a few hours, or maybe in the fight they were able to escape.

  After things quieted down, the EOD tech set charges to blow the enemy’s equipment.

  “I’m ready,” the EOD tech said.

  We moved to a safe distance, and he set off the charge, blowing the gear and the fighter’s body to shreds. The charge gashed the hay bale, setting some of it on fire and leaving a black scorch mark on the rest.

  We never found the other fighter’s body, but when we went back to make sure the gear was destroyed, we found three human hands. We guessed the fighter probably crawled into the hay bale and died.

  Before long, I heard the familiar sound of an inbound CH-47 Chinook. It set down just long enough to hustle the patient on board before it was back in flight and moving fast toward the trauma hospital in Bagram, a massive airfield north of Kabul.

  “Alpha 2, this is Alpha 1,” Phil said over the radio. I was Alpha 2. Phil was Alpha 1. It was the first time I’d heard from Phil since we split off to chase the squirters.

  “Hey, man, take care of the guys for me,” Phil said.

  The wounded eagle was Phil. He was sitting on the deck of the helicopter with his pant leg cut open. Blood soaked the deck and his uniform. He was feeling no pain thanks to a heavy dose of morphine.

  I found out later his team had been closing the distance on two heavily armed fighters. They sent the combat assault dog ahead. The fighters saw the dog and opened fire. Phil was hit and the dog was killed. The bullet tore open Phil’s lower leg. He almost bled out and died, but quick work by our two medics not only saved the leg but also his life.

  “Hey, you got it, brother,” I said. “Take care.”

  Walking back to the landing zone to regroup with the troop, the jokes already started.

  “Good job taking out Phil so you can be in charge,” said one of my teammates. “We saw you shoot him in the leg and run over and grab his call-sign patch.”

  Phil wasn’t even at the hospital yet, and the shit-talking had already begun.

  CHAPTER 8

  Goat Trails

  I had to take a leak.

  Since boarding the helicopter thirty minutes before in Jalalabad for the ride to a combat outpost in Afghanistan’s mountainous Kunar Province, the pressure had been building. It was standard procedure for everybody to take a leak before you left. But it was such a short ride, I’d decided to hold it until we got there.

  It was two months after Phil got shot. He was home recovering. We had about three weeks left on our deployment. I had been a team leader ever since Phil was medevaced. We were heading to a remote forward operating base or FOB in one of the most volatile regions of eastern Afghanistan. The FOB was going to be a staging area for an operation we were going to conduct high in the mountains.

  I could feel the CH-47 Chinook helicopter come to a hover and start to descend. A few seconds after the tires hit, the ramp came down and I dashed off the bird, walking under the massive rear engine headed for a ditch about twenty yards from the landing zone. We landed about fifty meters outside the perimeter of the small firebase, so I felt pretty safe standing out in the open.

  I was joined by a few of my teammates who also sought relief. It was pitch-black and no illumination. The mountains towering above me blocked any chance for light. Over my shoulder, the helicopter’s blades beat the ground, creating a dust cloud. The roar of the CH-47’s engines was deafening.

  Standing at the lip of the ditch, I admired the beauty of the steep mountains. Through the gree
n glow of my night vision goggles, it actually appeared quite peaceful. Then my eyes caught the glow of something streaking across the sky. For a split second, I thought I was looking at a shooting star until I realized it was heading right for me.

  WHOOM!

  A rocket-propelled grenade slammed ten feet off the tail ramp of the helicopter, showering my teammates with shrapnel. Before I could react, I saw tracer rounds and more rockets crash around us. I started to move toward a ditch on the other side of the landing zone. Everybody was stunned. In our minds, we were simply using this base as a jumping-off point for our mission. We didn’t expect to make contact until we assaulted the actual compound a few hours later.

  I could hear the whine of the helicopters’ engines change as they took off and flew out of the valley. As the second helicopter lifted off in a hurry, its rotor wash set off one of the trip flares that surrounded the perimeter of the small combat outpost we were planning to stage from. The flares, in theory, were set up to alert the base of an attack, but we were now exposed, illuminated by the flare and in the open. We started to peel back in small teams away from the light as the fighters shifted fire toward the base.

  I tried to get my pants buttoned up while in a dead sprint. I could hear the thump of the first outgoing mortars and then the steady hammering of an American .50 caliber machine gun as the soldiers at the base reacted to the attack. Sliding into a ditch, we watched as the American heavy weapons started raking the ridgeline. It looked like a Bloomin’ Onion at Outback Steakhouse. Guns stuck up on all sides of the base made of Hesco barriers, large wire frames filled with sand.

  Once the flare died out and we had the cover of darkness again, we maneuvered our way back to the main gate and inside the protective wall of the outpost.

  When we got inside the gate, our medics started working on the wounded. No one was hurt badly, but shrapnel from the RPGs hit an Army Ranger, our interpreter, an Afghan soldier partnered with us, and our combat assault dog. The helicopters were loitering nearby, and when the fire stopped, they raced back into the valley to pick up the wounded.