Osama bin Laden (AP)
Navy SEAL Mark Owen had his H&K 416 rifle laser trained on the front door of the guesthouse in the Pakistani compound where Osama bin Laden had hidden for years.
The latch would not open. There were sheets covering the windows and bars too narrow to slip through. Owen was just peeling off an adhesive strip on a charge to blow the lock when someone inside the house opened fire with an AK-47, bullets whizzing just over Owen’s head.
“The first rounds,” Owen writes, “always surprise the s–t out of you.”
Inside was bin Laden’s courier, Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti, firing indiscriminately through the door and windows.
Owen felt searing pain on his shoulder, likely glass or shrapnel. But he kept working on the charge. They had to get inside. The clock was ticking.
Then a terrifying noise in the dark. The door was opening.
Owen and Will, another member of the team, backed away slowly, stepping over trash and garden tools. There was no cover.
“Through the sweat running down my face and the grit in my eyes from the rotor wash, I could just make out the figure of a woman in the green glow of my night-vision goggles,” Owen writes.
They had been warned to expect suicide vests, even on women.
“She had something in her arms, and my finger slowly started applying pressure to my trigger. I could see our lasers dancing around her head. It would only take a split second to end her life if she was holding a bomb.”
Just as Owen was about to fire, the bundle took shape in the green glow. She was holding a baby. Behind her, more children. All of them were unharmed. The courier was not.
“He is dead,” the woman said in Arabic, gesturing to the body of Kuwaiti on the floor. “You killed him.”
It was May 2, 2011. Not 10 minutes had passed since 22 SEALs had infiltrated bin Laden’s secret compound in Abbottabad to kill or capture the world’s most-wanted terrorist — a tale now recounted in “No Easy Day: The Autobiography of a Navy SEAL” (Penguin) by Owen, a pseudonym used by one of the members of the team.
The Pentagon has threatened legal action over the book, saying the SEAL has violated a confidentiality agreement. Owen just says he wants to set the record straight.
While “No Easy Day” differs in some small touches — bin Laden was shot from a distance in a hallway, for instance, not up close in a bedroom — it doesn’t disagree with the general facts of previous accounts. What it does reveal, in riveting detail, is the tension of that night. How so many little things didn’t go according to plan, but one big one — finally getting justice for the victims of 9/11 — did.
Owen describes the grueling, sometimes boring, months needed to prepare for the operation. When they weren’t studying a to-scale model of the compound, the SEALs would spend an hour brewing the perfect cup of French-press coffee, joking about who would play them in the movie (Carrot Top was chosen for a redhead guy) and trying to dodge “the good-idea fairy” — ideas from Washington, like taking a 60-pound cellphone jammer, that were idiotic.
Finally the mission was a go. Even with Ambien, Owen and his team could barely sleep. Ironically, many dozed on the helicopter ride there; Owen waking with a start when a voice said, “10 minutes.”
For the mission, the SEALs wore about 60 pounds of gear. Owen had on a bulletproof vest mounted with two radios to communicate separately with the men on the ground and headquarters. The $65,000 special night-vision goggles attached to his helmet gave him a massive, 120-degree field of view.
He carried three magazines for his H&K 416 rifle and one hand grenade. Stuffed in his pockets were $200 in bribe money, his Olympus digital camera to photograph bin Laden’s corpse, a fixed blade knife, bolt cutters and a photo ID album of the people living in the compound.
The Navy SEALs, a Pakistani interpreter and a guard dog named Cairo crammed into two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters — “Chalk One” and “Chalk Two.”
The plan was that the SEALs would “fast-rope” onto the roof of Osama’s compound in Abbottabad, where he was living with two wives and children, his adult son Khalid, bin Laden’s courier and his brother and their families.
The SEALs would kill bin Laden and take his body back as proof. Things went wrong from the start.
“Chalk One,” which Owen was in, suddenly started to pitch out of control as it hovered 30 feet above the compound. Not only were they not going to “fast-rope” in, they were going to crash.
“Suddenly the helicopter kicked to the right 90 degrees, and I could feel my stomach drop like a roller coaster. The rotors above me screamed as the Black Hawk tried to claw its way back into the air.
“One minute the ground was rushing up at me. The next minute I was at a dead stop. It happened so fast, I didn’t even feel the impact.”
Miraculously no one was injured. “I dropped from the cabin and landed in the courtyard in a crouch. My teammates were already headed for the gate that led us into the main compound.”
Owen and his team moved to the guesthouse, taking out Kuwaiti, then headed to the main house to hook up with Tom, the leader of a second unit. The house was pitch black, bedsheets covered the windows. The electrical power had been cut.
On the first floor, Kuwaiti’s brother, Abrar al-Kuwaiti, lived. He made the fatal error of peering out of his room. The point man squeezed off a round, wounding him. They opened fire again just as his wife, Bushra leaped in front to shield him. Both were killed.
The SEALs continued up the stairs of the main house. They had to clear the second floor now before they could get to the prize on the third floor. Bin Laden lived with his family there.
“We had no idea what to expect. By now bin Laden or whoever was hiding inside had plenty of time to get a weapon and prepare a defense. Since the only way up was through a spiraling staircase, we could easily get bottlenecked.”
On the second floor lived Khalid, bin Laden’s son. He could easily take out several SEALs stacked below on the landing. It could turn into a bloodbath.
One assaulter “had seen a man quickly poke his head down around the landing. The head peeking around the corner was clean-cut with no beard. It was bin Laden’s son.”
“Khalid,” one of the SEALs whispered. “Khalid.”
Owen says he imagined Khalid thinking, “They know my name?” Curiosity got the better of him, and he stuck his head out rather than reaching for his gun.
The SEALs shot him in the face.
Owen squeezed the shoulder of the point man in front of him. “Take it.”
They mounted the steps to the third floor.
The SEALs feared bin Laden had plenty of time to arm himself with a suicide vest or gun.
Instead, they got another surprise. About 10 feet down the hall in front of him, a man peeked out of a doorway.
“Bop. Bop.” Two shots from the point man. Then quiet. “Unlike in the movies, we didn’t bound up the final few steps and rush into the room with guns blazing. We took our time,” Owen writes.
Inside the room, two women were wailing, standing over a man lying at the foot of the bed.
One of the hysterical women screamed in Arabic and attacked the point man, who swiftly grabbed both women and pushed them to the corner of the room. In case they had on suicide vests, his body would block the impact. “It was a selfless decision made in a split second,” Owen says.
The dying man lying before him wearing “a white sleeveless T-shirt, loose tan pants and a tan tunic. The point man’s shots had entered the right side of his head, Blood and brains spilled out of the right side of his skull.
“In his death throes, he was still twitching and convulsing. Another assaulter and I trained our lasers on his chest and fired several rounds. The bullets tore into him, slamming his body into the floor until he was motionless.”
Mission accomplished, almost.
Now they needed proof that the man in a growing pool of blood, the right side of his skull crushed in, was indeed the man they wanted.
Owen wiped the blood off bin Laden’s face using a blanket. He pulled Osama’s beard to the left and right, getting profile shots.
“Lying in front of me was the reason we had been fighting for the last decade. It was surreal trying to clean the blood off the most wanted man in the world so that I could shoot his photo.”
“ ‘Hey man, hold his good eye open,’ I said to a SEAL named Will. “He reached down and peeled back the eyelid, exposing his now-lifeless brown eye.”
“I think this is our boy,” said Tom, the other team leader.
“He wasn’t about to say it was bin Laden over the radio because he knew the call would be shot like lightning back to Washington. We knew President Obama was listening, so we didn’t want to be wrong.”
For further confirmation they took DNA blood and saliva samples. The only thing they couldn’t collect was a bone-marrow sample. The syringes they were given didn’t work.
Now they needed two verbal confirmations. Will asked one of the children outside on the balcony.
“ ‘Who is the man?’ The girl didn’t know to lie. ‘Osama bin Laden.’ Will smiled.”
Then he grabbed one of the wives in the hallway and shook her. “ ‘Who is that in the bedroom?’ She broke down. ‘Osama,’ she confessed.”
Two SEALs grabbed bin Laden’s legs and pulled him out of the room. “With all the commotion and activity going on around me, I can still remember watching the guys drag his body down the stairs.”
Bin Laden had in his room on a shelf above the door an AK-47 and a Makarov pistol. But they were both empty.
“He had no intention of fighting,” Owen writes.“The higher up the food chain the targeted individual was, the bigger the pussy he was.”
After teammates collected a wealth of computer drives, files, memory cards and videos, it was time to go. Finally, a SEAL named Jay made the announcement over satellite radio to Adm. William McRaven in Jalalabad, who was in direct contact with the president:
“For God and country, I pass Geronimo. Geromino E.K.I.A.”
Osama bin Laden — enemy killed in action.
It took a mere 38 minutes to end the 10-year worldwide manhunt.
Chalk Two was so crowded — Chalk One had to be destroyed in the compound — that Owen’s buddy Will had to sit on bin Laden’s corpse on the way home.
“Holy s–t,” Owen thought as they took off, “we’re going to pull this off.”