The Pacer had clearly arranged things to keep the world out, and himself in. He never left the compound—pacing endlessly in the garden or out of sight inside. The other residents also contributed to the suspicious pattern. Analysts were able to determine that the vehicles, a car and a van, were used differently; the van for local tasks and the sedan for chores that required several hours of travel.
The sedan had been the key for getting us to this point: The man who drove it the majority of the time was named Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti. AAK was a Kuwait-born Pakistani Pashtu who was bin Laden’s most trusted courier. Our intelligence had learned al-Kuwaiti’s name and also that he’d taught computer skills to one of the 9/11 hijackers so he could communicate clandestinely with terrorist leaders. Al-Kuwaiti had been with bin Laden at the battle of Tora Bora in December 2001, which had been the closest we’d gotten to killing him. Both men escaped and were believed to have remained in close contact from that point on.
Al-Kuwaiti was extremely careful about any kind of electronic communication. He’d only turn his phone on when he was at least ninety minutes away from the compound by car, and he’d always turn it off at least ninety minutes before returning.
Cautious, but not cautious enough. Our intelligence agencies had been able to track him driving back to Abbottabad. Once they got a look at the odd security features of the compound he’d returned to, they knew they might be on to something.
To be honest, the briefing went on so long—six hours—that we all began to get restless. I realized that if I were ever tempted to divulge classified information, I wouldn’t because it’s so boring. I think all the shooters were thinking what I was: I don’t care how you found him. You say he’s there. Let’s go kill him.
About that: The briefers mentioned that we were not the No. 1 option. One option—“the right thing to do” from an international law standpoint—was a multilateral mission where we’d tell the Pakistanis that we knew bin Laden was there, and we’d go in with them. Everyone in the room simultaneously thought, Yeah, right. You can take that off the table because once we tell the Pakistanis that we know he’s there, he’s gone.
Another option was an air strike on the compound with a B-1 or a stealth bomber. Some Air Force dude had calculated that to make sure the strike killed him—to leave absolutely no doubt—it would require something astonishing, like thirty-two two-thousand-pound bombs. It was insane. With that payload, you’d kill everyone in the city almost. And we’d never be able to recover any DNA, so we’d never know for sure anyway.
A third option was what we called the hammer throw: Arm a drone and wait for The Pacer to pace into the garden, then just chuck one bomb at him. But even if it was a direct hit, we’d seen people who had entire houses collapse on them walk away unhurt.
Then, they said, “There’s you.” The unilateral, boots-on-the-ground option. The riskiest in terms of negative repercussions. And of course, the riskiest in terms of American lives. Our lives.
Admiral William McRaven, the top commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, who gave his account of the mission for the first time five years after the raid, recalled in an interview with CNN that in early April 2011, he presented a plan to the president and his senior advisers in the White House Situation Room for a helicopter raid into the compound. Obama said, “Can you do this?” McRaven recalled.
He replied, “Mr. President, I won’t know if we can do this until I have an opportunity to bring in the SEALs and the helicopter pilots from the 160th (Special Operations Air Regiment) and rehearse it.” McRaven said he’d need about three weeks to be sure.
Obama said, “Okay, you have three weeks.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
A life-size replica of the Abbottabad compound had been constructed using CONEX shipping containers, with fencing that could be removed so it would be less likely to be picked up in satellite imagery. All the measurements were exact, or close to it. Our training would be unusually realistic. They brought in conventional Black Hawks, and we went out every day, fast-roping out of the hovering choppers.
The preferred plan looked like this: When we arrived at the compound, my helicopter, Dash 2, would drop external security just outside the north gate. That would consist of me; two snipers, Jonny and Robby; Mack with the machine gun; Cheese, the dog guy; Cairo the dog; and an interpreter. Cheese, Cairo, and Robby would loop around the compound as the helicopter lifted back up above the main house. That team would fast-rope to the roof, and then jump down to the third-floor balcony, which is where we thought bin Laden was. Jonny, Mack, and I would hold security where we were, looking east and west. The other helicopter, Dash 1, would fast-rope the primary assault team into the courtyard between the main house and the guesthouse. Snipers looking out both doors of the chopper would cover from above as the team roped in. This was the most vulnerable spot of the operation, as Dash 1 could be hit from any angle while hovering.
Of course, the interior of the house couldn’t be exactly replicated because it was unknown, but we had no problem with that. We don’t want to know the interior. Just get there, see what it looks like, and let our tactics take over. Anticipating exact layouts can just confuse the issue. Go in, respond.
As team leader for external security, I was never supposed to be in the house. But as I was watching the scenario play out in training, something seemed off. I talked to Willy, my Master Chief, about it. “This is bin Laden we’re talking about, and we’ve only got a couple shooters. We need as many as we can get in there,” I said. Jonny, who was one of the two snipers on security, was already a team leader. “He doesn’t need me out there to lead him. I need to be on the rooftop team.”
Willy thought that maximizing the number of shooters inside the compound—sharpening the point of Neptune’s spear—made sense. He moved Jonny to security team leader and put me on the rooftop assault team.
Even though we’d assaulted hundreds of compounds much like this one, we trained on this like no other—hours and hours with the sun up and hours more after the sun went down to get used to doing it with night vision—even though darkness had become our native element. To be honest, we were overtraining. I developed tendonitis from fast-roping so much. It was a little frustrating because I knew if it got much worse, I was going to have to pull myself off the mission. We already knew how to fast-rope. We didn’t need to keep doing it. I managed to tough it out, but years later when my biceps just blew up one day while I was bowling—bowling—I was convinced that I had that excessive fast-roping to thank for it.
After we finally called it quits for the day/night, we’d go back to these crummy little barracks. No flat screen—in fact, no TV at all. But there was a nice little game room with Ping Pong tables, pool tables, and a couple of video games. It wasn’t like our regular deployments. We weren’t joking around like we usually did, and nobody felt like drinking. We all believed that the Abbottabad compound, and the main house in particular, was almost certainly going to be rigged to blow as soon as we touched down. I started calling our team, only half-jokingly, the Martyrs Brigade, because if the house blew up when we were on top of it, we were fucked.
That’s if we even got to the house. There was a good chance Pakistani air defense would bring us down before we even hovered in sight of it. Or maybe we’d be surrounded by Pakistani troops and end up spending the rest of our lives in a Peshawar prison, which would be worse than dying.
We talked about it: “This is the last thing we ever do, so let’s get our shit together.”
I got into a discussion with the guy who’d end up being the point man in the assault on the third floor of the compound—of course, we didn’t know that then. We talked the way SEALs never talk: “Once we go on this mission, we aren’t going to see our kids again or kiss our wives. We’ll never eat another steak or smoke another cigar.” We were trying to get down to the truth about why we were still willing to do this when we pretty much knew we were going to die. What we came up with was that we were doin
g it for the single mom who dropped her kids off at school and went to work on a Tuesday morning, and then an hour later decided to jump out of a skyscraper because it was better than burning alive. A woman whose last gesture of human decency was holding down her skirt on the long way to the pavement so no one could see her underwear. That’s why we were going. She was just trying to get through a workday, live a life. She had no desire to fight and no ability to defend herself. Now we were going to fight for her. We were going to fucking kill this guy. We started getting fired up just talking about it.
I don’t think any of us had even a momentary doubt. Everybody wanted to go. This was the big one. This was why we’d signed up. We figured we were all going to die eventually, so why not go out doing something noble?
And who knows, maybe we’d somehow make it back.
In the common room, there was a model on a portable cart, an exact small-scale replica of the compound. Everything down to the trees was identical. We’d stand over that and just run through possibilities: “Okay, here’s the plan, but what if this happens? What if a car leaves the compound? Which helicopter’s going to chase it?” We’d just talk through everything over and over, get some sleep, then start running the scenarios for real, over and over, the next day.
We tried to plan for all the things that could go wrong. Of course, the most obvious was that we’d get shot down as soon as we crossed the Pakistan border. We were invading a country with nothing more than two helicopters. But the higher-ups seemed less worried about that. They said, “Just chill out.”
Okay. But what if the Pakistani police or military showed up while we were inside? If we could avoid it, we sure didn’t want to get in a gunfight with them—we’d be on their soil. Our first plan was that we’d produce bin Laden’s body and a high-level diplomat in Islamabad would negotiate: “We told you, if we found bin Laden we were coming to get him. That’s what we did. We didn’t hurt any of your guys doing it. Now we want our guys out.”
Of course, they probably would have just tried to arrest us. I wasn’t in the meeting, but as our training was nearing an end, I heard that when President Obama was presented with that possibility, he nodded his head and said, “Okay, that’s interesting.” Then he looked at the Air Force chief of staff and said, “What do you need to rain hell on Pakistan—because my guys aren’t surrendering to anybody.”
I was so proud of him. Our guys tend to be extremely conservative politically, but he could have gotten a lot of votes from us that day.
*
AS THE DAYS PASSED, IT began to seem like the president was leaning toward using us as his option. He even authorized staging more helicopters with another thirty or so SEAL Team **** guys and some Rangers nearby to serve as a quick reaction force in case things went south. I couldn’t know for sure, but based on what I was hearing at the time about the president’s resolve, I assumed our military had fighters ready on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and probably bombers overhead, in case there was no other choice but to fight our way out of Pakistan.
We continued training from Sunday through Saturday evening, then we all hauled ass back to Virginia Beach. We’d been training so hard we couldn’t wait to get to the ready room for drinks. We had Saturday night and Sunday off before we flew out to Nevada.
There, we all had to sign a bunch of documents that said not only were we not allowed to discuss what we saw here, we weren’t allowed to discuss what we thought we saw. We actually did stay there, in some barracks. The base didn’t have a gym, but I ran every day while listening to Pearl Jam, which I hadn’t done since just after high school. For some reason, I felt I needed a blast from the past, so I cranked up “State of Love and Trust,” “Corduroy,” Ten, and “Alive.” One of the choruses on “Alive” goes, “I, I’m still alive/ Hey I, but, I’m still alive/ … / Hey I, I, I, I’m still alive.”
At that point the lyrics struck me as wishful thinking.
Finally, we got called to a briefing on the famous mystery helicopters we’d be flying into the compound on. We turned a corner and saw them for the first time. I started laughing. Someone asked, “What’s so funny?”
I said, “Well, I used to say it was a ninety percent chance that we were going to die. Now I think it’s about an eighty percent chance we’re going to live because I didn’t know they were sending us to war on Transformers.” They were some of the coolest things I’d ever seen, and I won’t get more detailed than that. We’d all been grimly determined. Now just looking at them made us far less grim and even more determined.
We only trained there for a few days. Mostly, it was just to get used to the frame of the aircraft. The seats had been removed to make each craft lighter, and there was more room inside than we were used to, so it was kind of refreshing. And they flew great. The mission planners assigned the four best pilots in the Army to fly them—two for each bird. We did a few training runs, and on the last one hit the training target with every explosive we had. We wouldn’t need it again anyway. It was literally and figuratively a blast.
The following Saturday, April 23, we flew home.
“Go be with your families,” the commanders told us. “We haven’t been given the green light yet, but we’re going to Afghanistan to stage. We want to be ready when they call.”
So we had a couple more days with our kids. When I got home, Nicole knew something was up. I’d never been able to tell her much. On deployments, I’d had to send emails from a fake email account, and I couldn’t even see the pictures of our kids she posted on Facebook because I wasn’t allowed to be on Facebook, or Instagram, or Twitter. So my leaving on mysterious missions was old hat. But she knew this one was different. I couldn’t explain why I’d abruptly returned from training and why I was flying out when other teams were already deployed. I could see her registering all that. It was odd. We’d never really had a heart-to-heart about the chance that I’d die doing my job. Even though no one on my team had ever been hurt, we’d lost a lot of friends; a lot of her friends’ boyfriends and husbands. So we both understood there was a chance. But all of that remained unspoken. I knew what was going to happen, but she didn’t, and that made it harder.
Meanwhile, I had just over a day to accomplish a lifetime of loving gestures. Hopeless, obviously. I didn’t want to scare the girls by seeming overly serious or hovering over them, so I went shopping. What do you buy a seven-and a three-year-old in that circumstance? What gift says, “Sorry, your dad’s about to die”? I don’t even remember now what I did get them, just that it wasn’t enough.
As I was leaving the mall, I noticed a Sunglass Hut right there in the middle of the concourse, and I walked up to it. I don’t know why. I looked down and there was a pair of Prada sunglasses for $350—at least $300 more than I’d ever considered paying for sunglasses. I was looking at them and thinking, You really shouldn’t. You’re an E-7 in the Navy. You can’t afford these things. With the extra pay for jumps, dives, demolitions, hazardous duty, and housing allowance, I made quite a bit more than conventional forces—but it still wasn’t enough for Prada. Then I thought, Hell, a week from now I’ll be dead. Or maybe I’ll live through the raid after all and have to steal a car and drive to the embassy in Islamabad. Shit happens. The sun’s going to be out and I’m going to need sunglasses.
I put them on my American Express card. If I never came back, American Express could afford the loss.
The next day, my older daughter went off to school, and I took my younger daughter to Chick-fil-A for a goodbye outing. She was about to turn four, and happened to meet a girl just her age there. Of course, they became instant BFFs. While they played, I sat with the girl’s grandma and made small talk. She had no idea who she was talking to. My attitude was like, I’m just going to finish this chicken sandwich with waffle fries and go try to kill bin Laden. It didn’t seem real—even to me. Nothing was sinking in. All I wanted to do at that moment was get it over with. I didn’t want to be there anymore. I wanted to go.
I took
my daughter home and waited for her older sister to get back from school so I could say goodbye. My about-to-happen departure had me feeling so much respect for my wife. I could kiss the kids and hold it in for the thirty seconds it took to get to my car, then cry the whole way to work. But Nicole had to stand there with these two little blond girls looking at her for strength and not cry. Ever. And she didn’t.
The surreal feeling continued when I got to work. Nobody else there knew why we were going overseas, including high-ranking officers who were somewhat pathetically trying to get involved even though they didn’t know what it was they were trying to get involved in. They just knew it was big and wanted to get their fingers in it. The guys running our op weren’t having it. We boarded the big C-17s, and the commanders wouldn’t let anybody not involved on board, even though our destination could be disguised—we were stopping in Germany first, just as we always did for deployment. We got off at Ramstein, had breakfast, then hung out until it was time to take off for Afghanistan. At Bagram, we switched from a C-17 to a C-130 and made another short flight to Jalalabad. It was weird at first because a SEAL Team **** squadron was there already, in the middle of their deployment. I’m sure they guessed what we were there for, for the same reasons that we had guessed it. They obviously thought they should have gotten the assignment, and they might have been right about that. If I’d been in their spot, I would have been pissed off and probably shown it. But they were good to us.
We had to use alternate barracks that were outside the normal compound, but we worked out in the same gym as them, played poker with them every night, hung out with them, and just shot the shit. As it turned out, they wouldn’t be left out of the mission after all. As we started to build out our plan, because of the president’s aggressive stance we were given the authority to beef up everything. We decided we’d bring the already-deployed squadron across the border with us, about forty strong. They’d wait in the forward staging area on a mountain thirty miles from the compound, in case we needed them to come bail us out of a jam.
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