Holy shit! We’d done it. We’d lived!
The remaining stealth bird, Dash 2, was still a little bit behind us. When they landed a few minutes after we did, I ran into the point man. He pulled me aside and asked, “Hey, was he hit when you went in the room?”
“I don’t think so. No,” I said. I saw it again in my mind, bin Laden standing there behind his wife, his hands resting on her shoulders, no sign of injury, fear, or pain in his eyes. He was just kind of frozen, the classic deer in the headlights.
The point man slapped my shoulder.
“Well, you own this,” he said. “You got him.”
And then he tilted his head quizzically. “Where was everybody?”
I knew he was asking why it had been just the two of us going up those stairs to the third floor.
“Guys were busy,” I said. “We didn’t have a lot of guys in this mission to begin with.”
“All right, cool, okay,” he said. Then he looked up. “Hey, there she is.” He was pointing at the CIA woman. “You got to give her something, man. You killed bin Laden.”
We walked over to her, and I pulled the magazine out of my gun and held it out to her.
“Hey, do you have room for this?”
There’d been thirty bullets in that magazine when I’d left Afghanistan that night. Now there were twenty-seven.
She looked at me, and I could see it sink in. “I think I can find a space in my backpack,” she said, taking it from me.
In the movie Zero Dark Thirty, a SEAL walks her character over to the body. She sees it for the first time, then walks away. She waits until she boards the C-130 to tear up.
That’s not her at all.
What really happened: The point man and I walked her over to the body bag, which had been opened again, revealing that familiar but now ruined face. Below the neck didn’t look too pretty, either. As I watched her look him over, I was thinking, This is historic. Here’s her life’s work; she just found the most wanted man in history, there he is, it’s all her doing. What’s she going to say?
Stone-cold, stone-faced, she said, “Uh, I guess I’m out of a fucking job.”
And then she walked away.
I admired her brass, but for my part I was starting to feel the euphoria. I was alive, and I’d done this thing that seemed part dream, part Hollywood movie. People were coming up asking, “Who got him?” and everyone was pointing at me. Admiral McRaven came over and put his hand on my neck, like a proud father almost. I admired the guy. When Dash 1 went down before the entry into the house had even begun, it would have been easy to panic. It could have been the beginning of a historic fuckup. But in that moment, it wasn’t going to help to have the people in the White House freaking out. So he’d gotten on a video teleconference with Washington and said, “Okay, there’s an issue, but my men are prepared, so don’t worry.”
Turned out to be true, too.
Anyway we were all standing around laughing and slapping hands and bin Laden was just lying there at our feet through it all. The president had asked McRaven to confirm the body was bin Laden’s. The intel guys hadn’t had time to get DNA comparisons yet. McRaven unzipped the bag and took a look. He knew that bin Laden was tall, about 6′4″, a respectable altitude for an NBA shooting guard. He decided to measure the body right there, just to make sure it was the correct height. It took a few minutes for us to realize that nobody had a tape measure. McRaven looked around until his gaze settled on a particular guy. “Son, how tall are you?” he asked.
The guy replied, “Well, sir, I’m about six-two.”
“Good,” McRaven said. “Come here. I want you to lie down next to the remains here.”
“I’m sorry, sir. You want me to do what?”
McRaven repeated his request.
The guy stretched out next to the body. Sure enough, he was a couple of inches shorter. When McRaven reported back to Obama, the president said, “Let me get this straight, you can destroy one of my two-hundred-million-dollar helicopters, but you can’t afford a ninety-nine-cent tape measure?” Guy’s pretty funny. I heard he later gave McRaven a plaque with a tape measure on it.
Eventually, we zipped Osama back up and put the body on a C-130, then we all flew up to Bagram where everything was laid out—the body, all the intel we’d gathered, all the photos we’d taken on our iPhones. The intel experts—CIA, FBI, and probably some agencies I never even knew existed—were swarming all over it. There was a big TV tuned to Fox News and we were keeping an eye on it. The media had all been recalled to the White House, which was especially odd on a Sunday, so the speculation started going through the roof. Everyone was calling their sources, including some of us, but we didn’t want to confirm it yet. Our bosses were laboring over the final reports from the raid, going through everybody’s stories, trying to nail down all the facts—how many EKIA, how many women were hurt, how many were okay. The White House didn’t want to put something out there and have to go back on it.
As it was, an early report from the White House said bin Laden had been armed and used his wife as a human shield. That was quickly retracted. We only saw his guns—an AK-47 and a pistol hanging above the door of the room where I shot him—after he was dead. According to a Pakistani government report, when local authorities showed up at the compound just about fifteen minutes after we blew up the downed bird and left, Amal told them that bin Laden had been reaching for his gun when American soldiers appeared on the third-floor landing. According to the report, Amal said they’d been awakened by our helicopters, which she at first thought was the rumble of a storm. As she got up to turn on a light, bin Laden shouted, “No!” He knew we were coming for him. Why he hadn’t managed to grab his AK-47 in the ten to fifteen minutes between the time the chopper landed and the time we arrived on the third floor is a mystery, and will remain so.
I also don’t know if he was using his wife as a shield or not, but if he was, it wasn’t an effective strategy since he was at least a foot taller than she was, and I had a clear shot right over her. There was no question I was going to take that shot. This was bin Laden. We had every reason to believe he was wearing a suicide vest and posed a threat, and were fully authorized to take him out. If he’d fallen face-first on the floor with his arms out in front of him where we could see them, I would have cuffed him and put him on the chopper back to J-bad. But that’s about the only way that would have happened.
Anyway, before long some reports began popping up on TV that the mysterious recall of the media to the White House might be about bin Laden. It was confirmed—I don’t know how—before the president even had a chance to speak. We all began looking up at the TV now. Some Army guys brought in big green tubs of food. I grabbed a great big breakfast sandwich with eggs, cheese, and hot sauce, which tasted incredible. I’ll credit that more to my state of mind than the chef, though. I was standing there chewing this delicious sandwich, watching the president of the United States make a surprisingly long walk down a red-carpeted White House corridor to a podium in front of the camera. “Tonight, I can report to the American people and to the world that the United States has conducted an operation that killed Osama bin Laden, the leader of al-Qaeda, and a terrorist who’s responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent men, women, and children.”
As I heard him say Osama bin Laden, I turned my head from the TV and looked at Osama bin Laden. I thought, How in the fuck did I get here from Butte, Montana?
One of our guys piped up, “Hey, Mr. President, would you mind mentioning that no one was hurt, because our families are all watching this.” It took Obama a couple of seconds more, but then he said, “No Americans were harmed.”
We were all thinking, Thank you, now we’re good.
I know now that the instant my dad saw the news alert, he knew I’d been in the middle of it. This time he was certain, and not just that I was involved. When he heard the president say bin Laden had been killed, he knew: It was me. He didn’t guess it. He didn’t believe it. He
knew it—he possessed inexplicable certainty that not only had I been on the mission to get bin Laden, but that I’d personally fired the shot that accomplished the task.
I didn’t get to call Dad, though. We didn’t have access to phones and didn’t want to break mission silence yet. We went back to one of the buildings on the base, a huge chalet-style place with a big pizza oven outside. The cooks made us pizzas, and we just stood around talking about how awesome it all was. There were computers there, so we were checking out all the news sites. The words “SEAL Team ****” were everywhere. We had no idea we’d be linked to the raid so quickly.
It was very strange. SEAL Team **** had been a relatively obscure entity before Captain Phillips. That perfect-for-the-movies rescue had put us on the cultural radar. But this? This was something else entirely. The fascination with who we were and what we’d just done exploded all around us.
At the same time, the cone of silence was descending. We weren’t allowed to debrief anybody. Days later, the secretary of defense, Robert Gates, came to the command in Virginia Beach to meet us and they wouldn’t let anyone in except the guys who’d been on the raid. Everywhere we went it was the same. We were all awarded Silver Stars (sorry, Mom!).
We flew to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, to meet President Obama. As he was being debriefed by our Ground Force Commander, we were sitting in rows of chairs waiting. One of the guys from the helicopter command who’d flown us in, the 160th, came over in front of everybody and gave me a stiff salute. I wanted to say, “Come on, dude.” I knew the other guys would be pissed about it. It was the Somali pirate situation all over again. Jonny had been right. I was learning what it was like to be a fucking hero. Guys closer to me than family, guys who I assumed would be my best friends forever, were giving me the stink eye. I could feel the tension escalating by the minute.
Suddenly this dynamic, impossible-to-miss voice was saying, “Hey, everybody!” I came out of my funk instantly, thinking, Hell, yeah, the president’s here. Vice President Joe Biden came in right beside him. Obama gave a quick talk, basically saying how proud he was of us and how proud he was to be an American, then he presented us with a Presidential Unit Citation.
We had a gift for him: a framed flag that we’d carried on the mission. We’d all signed the back of the frame, using our call signs rather than our names. It was cool, because we could tell that he totally didn’t expect it. He was speechless for a minute, then he said, “What do you think, Mr. Vice President? You think I can find a special place to hang that?”
Biden said, “Yeah, I know a certain presidential library where that would look good.” Obama replied, “Oh, no, this is going in my bedroom.”
It was a nice moment and totally broke the tension. Unfortunately, the good vibes didn’t last. I began to hear secondhand comments, guys talking about me and saying, “With all the extra attention, why is he bragging about it?”
Bragging was the last thing I wanted to do. It would be absurd to brag. We all knew that any one of our guys would have done exactly what I had done, and just as effectively, if he happened to have been in my position. In fact, the point man did something far more heroic than I when he tackled those women we believed to be wearing suicide vests. He’d been willing to sacrifice himself for the success of the mission. But all anyone wanted to talk about was “who got him?” and the word spread so fast there was no way to put a lid on it. I was getting calls from all over the country from people who wanted to thank me, saying things like, “Great shot.” I felt hugely uncomfortable in the spotlight. I’d been part of a team with a code of silence, and now we were known worldwide and I was being singled out. From my teammates, I felt jealousy and disapproval. It just sucked.
I started getting pulled in by my bosses almost weekly. They’d say, “Hey, what are you doing? Who are you telling?”
All I could say was, “I don’t know where this is coming from, man. I just want this to go away.”
As the summer wore on, I was beginning to think that the only way that would happen was if I went away. I’d intended to stay in the Navy for thirty years, but I regretfully started planning to retire after fifteen—which would leave me with no pension and wondering what the hell I was going to do to support my family. That was especially ironic when I got word that there’d been a meeting of our squadron in which people were bashing me for “trying to cash in,” saying I’d already signed a book contract for seventeen million dollars.
It wasn’t true, and I shouldn’t have had to prove myself to anyone. But I was beginning to feel that I needed to prove something. I considered going on one more combat deployment just to show, Hey, I’m like you guys. I’m going back to war. I’m not writing a book. I’m not cashing in.
*
ON THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 5, 2011, in Wardak Province, Afghanistan, a platoon of forty-seven Army Rangers set off in two helicopters to kill or arrest a Taliban leader named Qari Tahir.
The Rangers were inserted into a landing zone in a valley not far from the compound believed to be Tahir’s residence. As the platoon approached, aerial reconnaissance observed two groups of Taliban fighters leaving the compound. One was engaged and eliminated by Apache helicopters. The second group managed to take up defensive positions. Tahir was suspected to be among them. The ground commander decided to send a reserve of seventeen operators to pursue and eliminate the survivors. The SEAL contingent, a military dog, thirteen other Americans, seven Afghan government troops, and an interpreter flew into the valley in a Chinook helicopter, code named Extortion 17. One minute from touching down, RPG grenades hit the chopper, destroying the rear rotor and bringing it down. All thirty Americans, and all thirty-eight men aboard, plus the dog, died in the crash.
It was the worst loss in the history of Naval Special Warfare, and the worst loss of American lives in a single incident of the entire Afghan conflict. So many of my friends had died in an instant it was impossible to process. As a command, we went from planning operations to planning funerals.
I was especially haunted by a memory of one of the fallen SEALs, my friend Robert J. Reeves. His friendship was especially meaningful to me in the summer after the bin Laden mission when I was struggling with all the resulting complications, and uncertain of my future. He and three other SEALs had this big fancy house in Virginia Beach we called “the boy band house” because all of these guys were so damn good-looking. He also had an absolutely gorgeous and extremely sweet girlfriend who always called me her “other Robert J.” One night, Robert and I were sitting at his big dining room table, and he poured himself a glass of wine and offered me one. For some reason, I was in a healthy phase and wasn’t drinking anything so I turned it down. As he sipped alone, he looked at me and said, “You know what? One day a lot of us are going to die on one of those helicopters.”
I know it’s the wrong thing to obsess over, but I’ll always regret not having that last glass of wine with my friend. After the funeral, his girlfriend called me to say, “Now you’re my one and only Robert J.” It just about killed me.
The losses tore us apart—not only personally, but tactically. We knew that that level of combat experience could never be replaced. Senior operators would need to be shifted to different squadrons to backfill leadership positions. I left the squadron I’d served with such pride to go to another, and volunteered to extend my service until August 2012. The new squadron was a breath of fresh air, a chance to get away from the jealousy and recriminations and to remember why I loved being a SEAL again. I even began to reconsider my decision to leave the Navy. Right before Thanksgiving, we left for a deployment in Afghanistan—at Forward Operating Base Shank located up in the mountains to the east.
We stayed in the very same rooms as the fallen, and we overlapped with the squadron’s surviving members, those who purely by chance hadn’t dressed out for the doomed mission. It just sucked to see what the permanent loss of beloved friends was doing to these guys. I’d gone through the selection course with one of them. He was s
itting alone reading a book—which, considering how SEALs usually spend their downtime, was a definite sign of depression. I didn’t even want to try to talk to him about the guys he’d lost, but I hoped I could lighten his mood a little by joking with him. “Hey, Adam,” I said. “Why don’t you have an iPad? Why are you reading a book?” He looked up without a glimmer. “I don’t know. I just like the feel of a book.” That’s all he said to me the entire time. He’d lost so many of his guys, he couldn’t even be there.
So it was tough to begin with, and other things made it worse. Dead of winter in Afghanistan, especially at an altitude of six thousand feet, is fiercely cold. Plus, conditions in Afghanistan had deteriorated. The Forward Operating Base was hit with mortar fire from insurgents every day, and there were “Green on Blue” attacks—assaults on coalition forces by the very Afghan troops we’d been training and supporting.
It was demoralizing to see that so much of what we’d accomplished and sacrificed for had started to come undone. And it was even sadder to realize I’d be spending my second Christmas in a row in Afghanistan, away from my girls. I watched an online video my wife had made of Santa sending our daughters personal greetings. I could so easily imagine the faces and shining eyes of the girls as they watched it. I pictured my oldest daughter enjoying the video with a tolerant smile on her face, only half-believing it. She was in second grade and only seven years old but ahead of her time as far as critical thinking goes. And I could imagine my youngest, who’d turned four a few months before I left for Afghanistan, watching Santa with some concern. The video really played up the whole “naughty or nice” theme, and we all knew the truth: She had her moments. I was sure the naughty/nice calculation would create a minuscule iota of doubt in her mind, but none whatsoever in mine. She has a huge heart and loves to share. I knew she’d get exactly what she wanted for Christmas. Except for her daddy being there to open gifts with her.
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