The Operator

by ROBERT O'NEILL

  *

  WE KNEW THIS WAS THE ultimate mission, and the mood was a lot more serious than normal, but not to the point where we were upset. We still joked a lot, did all the things we’d normally do on deployment. If there was unusual anxiety, it was not because we might go, but because we might not. The better part of the week went by and we were still waiting for a green light. The days dragged. On Friday, we got called to a brief. Pete, the top SEAL Team **** commander, was sitting at the head of the table. Walking in, we knew it would be one of two things: We were going or we weren’t. Not going meant we’d get to go home soon and see our families. And live. Not going also meant that we’d miss out on the chance to make history. We didn’t have to wait long to find out which it was going to be. Without much of a preamble, he said, “The president’s authorized you guys to launch. It’s either going to be tomorrow or Sunday.”

  It felt as though an electric charge had surged around the table. Now we were definitely going. The possible launch nights were the two nights that month with zero illumination from the moon. On Saturday, the mission was pushed to Sunday. The official cause according to the commanders was inclement weather, but we all knew the weather was fine. The real reason was that Obama had been scheduled to attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner, a high profile event broadcast live on C-Span. He didn’t want to cancel at the last moment, or get up and leave in the middle of it, which would have attracted worldwide attention and tipped everyone that something big was up.

  So on Saturday night, Obama behaved as if the Correspondents’ Dinner was just an ordinary event in an ordinary presidential weekend. He sat at the head table in his tux while Seth Meyers of Saturday Night Live gave a hilarious roast. Meyers spent the first few minutes poking fun at C-Span for being unwatchable and unwatched. Then he said, “People think bin Laden is hiding in the Hindu Kush, but did you know that every day from four to five he hosts a show on C-Span?”

  The camera panned to Obama, and his reaction, which you can see on the Internet, is priceless: He slouched his shoulders at a comfortable angle, threw back his head—a handsome smile spreading from cheek to cheek—and chuckled amiably as if this were the best joke of the night. Nobody in that audience could have guessed what must have been going through his mind at that moment. Within twenty-four hours, the world would know either of America’s great triumph in eliminating its most bitter enemy, or its abject humiliation in trying and failing to do so.

  If it had been me, I probably would have said to Meyers, “Fuck you, we’re going to kill him tomorrow.”

  But I wasn’t in Washington, I was in Jalalabad ready to step up into a badass Transformer and fly through the night to Pakistan and whatever fate awaited me.

  I left the briefing intent on doing something I dreaded but now couldn’t avoid: writing letters to my kids, the kind that would only be delivered if I wasn’t ever coming home. The pages would be mostly filled with apologies for missing their weddings and not being around for any of the good and bad times, as well as thank-yous for taking care of each other and their mom. I went to the administrative office to get legal paper and a pen, and as I was walking back I ran into the woman intel analyst who’d basically been the one to track bin Laden down to the compound. She’d been with us through those first briefing sessions in North Carolina and throughout the training, and had flown over with us. Now she was outside pacing tensely. She was an attractive woman, though not exactly Jessica Chastain, who would play her in the movie.

  I said, “Hey, why are you so nervous?”

  She kept pacing. “What the fuck you mean, ‘Why are you nervous?’ ”

  What she meant was: “Isn’t it only too obvious why I’m nervous? We’re about to invade the country of a nuclear-armed ally to take out someone we’re only guessing is there based on years of my work. Why shouldn’t I be nervous? Why aren’t you nervous?”

  I nodded, searching for the right response. “Well, I’m just going to do what we always do. We’re going to get into a helicopter, fly somewhere, fuck with some people, and come back. The flight’s just longer. We do this every night.”

  I thought about it for a moment then said, “You know what, you have to be right, though, so I understand why you’re nervous. Have a great night.”

  Then I walked off.

  Admiral McRaven, the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) chief, would later say that the intelligence that bin Laden was in the compound was presented to him as “at best fifty-fifty.” But as I prepared to board the helicopter that would take me there, I had no doubt about who I’d find once we made our way in. And I owed that certainty to having gotten to know this intel analyst. I was 100 percent convinced bin Laden was there because she was. Although my guess now is that she was probably just 90 percent positive, hence the pregame jitters.

  The way that I decided to deal with the fact that we were launching in less than twenty-four hours was to get on the treadmill and do a long run. As I pounded the rolling belt into submission, I was watching the NFL draft on TV, waiting for the Redskins to get their pick. Yeah, sue me, I’m a Redskins fan. Anyway, I was thinking, Who are they going to pick, are they going to go with a lineman? And then another thought broke in: What does it matter, I’m going to be dead anyway.

  So I wasn’t nervous, just fatalistic.

  I went off and wrote those letters to my family. It was difficult and painful, and I really had to struggle through it. When I finished, I realized I couldn’t give them to a friend because all my friends were going on the mission with me, and we all might die. I had to go searching for someone I sort of knew, and trusted. I came up with a Navy intelligence guy. I gave him all these complicated instructions regarding who got which letter and where to find them. And, of course, I told him that if I lived I wanted those letters right back, because shredding them was the first thing I wanted to do.

  That night—actually it was morning, because we were on a reverse cycle, but it was night for us—we played poker again. I didn’t want to play at first because I thought the guys might break out some beer. We weren’t allowed to drink, but if the beer was there, it might happen. And I wanted to be absolutely clear on this mission. I ended up playing, and not drinking. Maybe that’s why I didn’t win. I had fun anyway.

  After the game we all took Ambien to sleep because everyone was pretty pumped. We usually get Ambien before a mission, but this time we made sure everyone took it. We all needed to be rested. We were sleeping in an open bay area, and that makes it hard to sleep with all the coughing and snoring and whatever, but the Ambien did the job.

  We woke around dusk on Sunday. I had a big breakfast and went to what I knew was going to be a historic brief. It was in a huge hangar, and we had a big crowd for such a super-secret mission—the air crews and mechanics, all the SEALs, the Explosive Ordnance Disposal (EOD) guys, all the Agency people. Admiral William McRaven stepped up and instead of giving us a bunch of technical information, he just spoke off the cuff. He said he had watched Hoosiers the previous night, one of his favorite movies. He talked about a scene in the movie in which tiny Hickory High is about to play for the state championship in a gym bigger than any they’ve ever seen, with bleachers set up for thousands of fans. The Hickory High players are all farm boys used to tossing balls in bushel baskets and shooing cows off the court. They’re looking around at this huge arena with their jaws dropping. The coach tells the smallest kid on the team to get up on the shoulders of the tallest kid and stand in front of the hoop. Then he gives him a tape measure and asks, “What’s the height?”

  “Ten feet, Coach.”

  Now he tells them to measure from the back of the rim to the free throw line. “What’s the distance?”

  “Fifteen feet, Coach.”

  The coach says, “Those are the exact same measurements as your gym back in Hickory, it’s just a bigger building. More people are watching. That’s it. Otherwise it’s the exact same.”

  Then McRaven said to us, “You gu
ys do this every single night. This time the world will find out about it, it’s a bigger stage, but it’s exactly the same.”

  It was the perfect message to send us at that moment. Hearing those words, I loved the guy. McRaven was Navy after all, which is probably one of the reasons we were there instead of Army Special Forces, and why the operation was called Neptune’s Spear—the SEAL trident. The guy had been born to give that speech.

  I was also thinking, I really doubt he watched Hoosiers last night. But I appreciated the analogy. It always seemed to come back to basketball for me.

  After the briefing, we walked back to our individual cubicles and suited up. I hadn’t changed my usual kit for this mission, which I’d pared down over the years for minimum weight and maximum utility. I no longer even carried a knife or a pistol. I had my ceramic body armor, Nalgene water bottle, two protein bars, and my Heckler & Koch 416 automatic rifle with three extra magazines. Even in that hour-long gunfight near the Pakistan border I’d only used one and a half magazines—forty-five bullets. Let’s just say, running out of ammunition wasn’t high on my list of concerns.

  I’d elected not to use the now-famous panoramic night vision goggles. They were new, with four tubes instead of two, and I wasn’t used to them. So I went with PVS-15 night vision goggles. This wasn’t an op for testing new equipment.

  Dressed for battle, we walked out to the fire—a big fire pit where the shooters had congregated from both squadrons. The fire pit had a pyramidal chimney. On its four sides, someone had cut the emblem of each of our squadrons. Cool.

  This time, there were none of the usual jokes and sarcastic taunts. There were hugs and fist bumps and guys saying, “Have a good fight. See you in a few hours.” It was serious for all of us. Even though we had a squadron in reserve—they’d follow forty-five minutes behind us and wait at the staging area during the raid—we knew they might get shot down on the way in. We were the ones with the super-stealth birds. They were flying conventional Chinooks, the kind that got shot down in the Korengal Valley.

  If reinforcements for al-Qaeda showed up or a big gunfight ensued, we weren’t going to get into a Black Hawk Down scenario. Those guys were a Quick Reaction Force to make sure of that. And if our choppers didn’t get through, or if we all got taken out somehow, they’d make a run on the compound and try to get bin Laden. We weren’t going to miss this time.

  Some buses rolled up and their doors hissed open. They were going to transport us to the secure hangar where the modified Black Hawks were warming up. There was just one last thing I had to do. I stepped into one of the B-huts—the cheap plywood housing units—to make a phone call.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said after hearing his familiar hello on the other end. He told me he’d just parked at Walmart to pick up a few things. “Just getting ready to hop on a bird,” I said.

  It was late at night and pitch black in J-bad. In Butte, it was about twelve hours earlier, so almost noon. I’d made a ritual of calling him before I left on my missions. I could tell he was always happy to hear my voice, and that put me in the right frame of mind for what lay ahead.

  He’d always say, “Hey, I wish I was going with you.”

  I’d say, “Yeah, I wish you were, too, Dad.”

  He said it again now. “I wish I could go with you.”

  This time I said, “Don’t worry, Dad. I’m with some great guys.”

  He instantly sensed the difference.

  “Everything okay, son?”

  “Yeah, everything’s good. Hey, Dad, I just wanted to say thanks for everything. Thanks for teaching me how to shoot free throws. Thanks for teaching me how to be a man. It’s nice that we got to know each other as adults.”

  My dad knew I couldn’t tell him what was up. But he knew something was, and it scared him.

  Later, I found out that he sat in his truck for twenty minutes after our call, poleaxed by a feeling of dread.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said. “I’ve got to go to work.”

  He ended the call with, “I love you.” I told him I loved him, too, then hung up and jogged out to the bus. Jonny had been looking for me. I gave him a thumbs-up. He gave me the finger.

  The stealth Black Hawks were at the airfield a mile away. Huge stadium lights had been stood up all around them, the blinding beams facing out so nobody could see the helicopters inside. It worked amazingly well. We all took our last piss—you didn’t want to be thinking about a full bladder in the hours to come—and boarded in teams, with my team in Dash 2, the trail bird. Dash 1 would lead us in. Finally, we lifted off and headed northeast, as if we were going to Asadabad, which was a flight we’d made often. But instead of turning left, which is the way into the Korengal Valley, we turned to the right.

  By the time my dad made his way through the noonday crowd at Walmart, I was flying fast and low in a chopper on a moonless night across the Pakistan border.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Now that we knew we were in Pakistan, we also knew we could get shot down at any minute. Thoughts start running through your mind: How does it feel when a helicopter blows up? Do you die instantly or does it crash and you’re falling and something cuts your head off? How long does it take to die? You’re just thinking all these weird, jumbled thoughts. I tried to get my mind off it by looking around and just observing everything around me. We were sitting on these camping chairs, the kind that fold out into little tripods and sell for like $9.99 at Walgreens. I was facing forward. The pilots were behind a solid wall, so unlike in a normal helicopter, we were in the back by ourselves. Cairo and Cheese, his handler, were right beside me, on my left. Cairo was always happy to be working. If he hadn’t been wearing the still-bloodstained vest with the bullet hole in the front, you’d never know he’d been nearly killed in combat. He looked completely relaxed, like the family dog in the front seat of a pickup truck on the way to a camping trip. Too bad he couldn’t stick his head out the window.

  Some of the other guys were asleep, which impressed me. No way could I have slept. We were ninety minutes out from the compound. To keep my mind from spinning off somewhere I didn’t need it to go, I started counting. I learned that as a sniper. Counting keeps you cool, keeps your mind engaged, but in idle. I counted zero to a thousand and a thousand to zero, zero to a thousand and a thousand to zero. I must have done that a dozen times before we banked to the south about eighty minutes into the flight. Now we were on our attack run, and as I was counting, just between random numbers, I began to repeat, “Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.”

  It was the first line of President George W. Bush’s address to the nation on the morning of 9/11. I have no idea where that came from, or how I remembered it verbatim, but I just started saying it in my head, over and over.

  I could almost hear President Bush’s voice over the whirring rotor above me. And I was thinking, Holy shit, this is really it. I’m on this mission and we’re going to kill this son of a bitch.

  We made another slight turn to the right, and the helicopter door opened. We were two minutes out, looking out at a city—a city with no idea we were coming. We passed very close to a golf course, just out the door, and I thought, How strange. There sure weren’t any golf courses in Afghanistan. The sight drove it home somehow—we were invading a country with golf courses. This was no exercise.

  The compound came into view, looking almost exactly like the training setup. It was dark, as if the power was out, and I had a fleeting thought that maybe our Agency guys had made that happen somehow. The two helicopters split. Dash 1 headed for the point between the two houses where an assault team was going to fast-rope from both sides. This involved sliding down thick, braided ropes, attached to bolted ends inside the helicopter. There are no safety harnesses, we just slide down grasping the rope with our gloves. The heavier guys sometimes use their feet as well. This is dangerous, but allows multiple people to slide down the rope simultaneously, one above the other. As we slid, snipers
would be aiming down out of both sides of the aircraft, anticipating resistance. We flew to our designated spot on the north side to drop off our external security guys. The snipers, Cheese, Cairo, and the interpreter jumped out, and we immediately began to lift up, headed to the rooftop. Then we thumped right back down.

  Our pilot had seen Dash 1 try to hover inside the walls above the courtyard and fail. According to two US officials who praised the skill of the pilot, the chopper lost the lift necessary to hover because it entered a “vortex” condition. At least two factors were at play, they said—hotter than expected air temperature and the compound’s eighteen-foot-high walls. In our North Carolina simulations, the walls, although to scale, were essentially fences, allowing air to flow through them. The solid walls in the compound created a bowl effect that affected the aerodynamics just enough to make a critical difference in the lift of the aircraft. Whatever the cause, the Dash 1 pilot felt the loss of control and adeptly spun the nose to the right, put the tail on top of the southwest wall and eased the nose into the dirt; a controlled crash landing. Had he not been one of the two best pilots in the world, he might have tried to power up, which could have been catastrophic. That would have rolled the bird and killed everyone on board. He made this life-and-death decision instantly. Our pilot saw this and knew that if Dash 1 couldn’t hover inside those walls, neither could we. So he just put us back down. Talk about effective nonverbal communication.

  We hadn’t seen any of this. We’d only overheard the radio transmission, “Dash 1 going down,” but had thought the pilot was saying, “Dash 1 going around,” which we assumed meant they’d taken fire and done a racetrack—a loop up and back for another pass. All we knew for sure was that we were back on the ground, which meant scratching the perfect plan and starting over from right there. We’d rehearsed exactly this. We knew the compound like we knew our own front yards. There was a gate near the northeast corner right in front of us. We’d blow that and enter there. It was just a few steps to the gate. Within seconds of jumping from the chopper, the breacher had attached a seven-foot charge of C-6 right down the middle and blew it. The metal gate peeled open like a tin can. Behind it was a solid brick wall. The breacher said, “Failed breach. This is bad.”