CHAPTER 16
Geronimo
Back in the bedroom, the youngest woman was lying on the bed, screaming hysterically, clutching her calf.
Walt was standing next to the body. It was still dark and it was hard to make out the man’s face. The house was still without power. I reached up and flipped on the light clipped into the rail system on my helmet. The target was now secure and since all the windows were covered, no one could see us from the outside, so the use of white light was safe.
The man’s face was mangled from at least one bullet wound and covered in blood. A hole in his forehead collapsed the right side of his skull. His chest was torn up from where the bullets had entered his body. He was lying in an ever-growing pool of blood. As I crouched down to take a closer look, Tom joined me.
“I think this is our boy,” Tom said.
He wasn’t about to say it was Bin Laden over the radio because he knew that call would be shot like lightning back to Washington. We knew President Obama was listening, so we didn’t want to be wrong.
I went through the checklist in my head.
He was very tall. I figured approximately six foot four inches.
Check.
He was the one adult male on the third deck.
Check.
The two couriers were exactly where the CIA said they’d be.
Check.
The more I looked at his mangled face, my eye seemed to go back to his nose. It wasn’t damaged and seemed familiar. Pulling my booklet out of my kit, I studied the composite photos. The long and slender nose fit. His beard was dark black and there was no trace of the gray that I expected to see.
“Walt and I will run with this,” I said to Tom.
“Roger,” Tom said.
Taking out my camera and rubber gloves, I started taking photos while Walt prepared to take multiple sets of DNA samples.
Will, the Arabic speaker, was in the room treating the leg wound of the woman crying on the bed. We learned later that she was Amal al-Fatah, Bin Laden’s fifth wife. I’m not sure when she got hit, but it was a very small wound. It could have been from bullet fragments or a ricochet.
“Hey, we have a significant amount of SSE on the second deck,” I heard someone call over the troop net. “We’re going to need any extra bodies down here.”
As Tom left the room, I heard him on the command net.
“We have a possible, I repeat POSSIBLE touchdown on the third deck.”
Walt pulled his CamelBak hose from his kit and squirted water on the man’s face.
I started to wipe the blood away from his face using a blanket from the bed. With each swipe, the face became more familiar. He looked younger than I expected. His beard was dark, like it had been dyed. I just kept thinking about how he didn’t look anything like I’d expected him to look.
It was strange to see such an infamous face up close. Lying in front of me was the reason we had been fighting for the last decade. It was surreal trying to clean blood off the most wanted man in the world so that I could shoot his photo. I had to focus on the mission. Right now, we needed some good quality photos. This picture could end up being widely viewed, and I didn’t want to mess it up.
Tossing the blanket away, I pulled out the camera that I’d used to shoot hundreds of pictures over the last few years and started snapping photos. We’d all gotten real good taking these kinds of photos. We’d been playing CSI Afghanistan for years.
The first shots were of his full body. Then I knelt down near his head and shot a few of just his face. Pulling his beard to the right and then the left, I shot several profile pictures. I really wanted to focus on the nose. Because the beard was so dark, the profile shot was the one that really stood out in my mind.
“Hey, man, hold his good eye open,” I said to Walt.
He reached down and peeled back the eyelid, exposing his now lifeless brown eye. I zoomed in and shot a tight photo of it. While I shot pictures, Will was with the women and children on the balcony. Below us, my teammates were collecting all of the computers, memory cards, notebooks, and videos. Outside, Ali, the CIA interpreter, and the security team were dealing with curious neighbors.
Over the radio, I heard Mike talking about the crashed Black Hawk.
“Demo team, prep it to blow,” Mike said.
I knew from the radio traffic that the SEAL in charge of demolition and the EOD tech were on their way to the courtyard.
“Hey, we’re going to blow it,” the SEAL said.
“Roger that,” the EOD tech said. He started taking out charges and putting them around the ground floor of the main house.
“What the fuck?” the SEAL said as the EOD tech unpacked.
Everybody was confused.
“You told me to get ready to blow it, right?”
“Not the house,” the SEAL said. “The helo.”
“What helo?”
The EOD tech thought the SEAL meant they were going to blow the house, which was another one of the contingency plans we had trained for.
News of Chalk One’s crash was still not widespread. People were just finding out about it. In Washington, they weren’t even sure we’d crashed when they watched it on the drone feed. I heard later it looked on the grainy black-and-white video as if we’d “parked” in the courtyard and let the team out. The president and senior staff were confused when it happened, and even asked JSOC what was going on. A quick message to McRaven came back with an answer: “We will now be amending the mission… we have a helicopter down in the courtyard. My men are prepared for this contingency, and they will deal with it.”
Outside, the helicopter crew was done destroying all of the classified gear. Teddy, the senior pilot and flight lead, was one of the last to climb out. Getting to the door, he looked at the almost six-foot drop to the ground. There was no way he wanted to jump and risk injury. Kicking the fast rope out of the cabin, he slid down to the courtyard, which made him the only guy to fast-rope into the compound that night.
The EOD tech and the SEAL got there soon after and started to place explosive charges around the fuselage. Climbing up the tail, the SEAL tried to get charges as close to the tail rotors as possible. Wearing his kit and night vision goggles wasn’t the easiest way to climb up the unstable, narrow section of tail boom. Each time he tried to reach the section propped on the twelve-foot wall, he was afraid it would break under his weight.
Climbing up as high as he could, he placed the charges with one hand. The other hand kept him stable as he balanced precariously over the courtyard. Destroying the communications equipment and avionics was the most important part. With the charges set on the tail, he placed the remaining charges in the main cabin.
Meanwhile, the Black Hawk that hadn’t crashed and the CH-47 carrying the QRF were flying in circles nearby, waiting for us to finish. Fuel was becoming an issue, which meant our time in the compound was shrinking quickly.
“Ten minutes,” I heard Mike say over the radio.
On the third deck, the lights in the room came on, bathing us in the glow of white light. The rolling blackout was apparently over. It was perfect timing and made everything easier.
While I continued shooting pictures, Walt took DNA samples. He dabbed a cotton swab in Bin Laden’s blood. He took another and jammed it in Bin Laden’s mouth to get a saliva sample. Finally, he took out a spring-loaded syringe the CIA gave us to get a blood-marrow sample. We’d been trained to jab it into the thigh to get a sample from inside the femur. Walt jabbed it several times into Bin Laden’s thigh, but the needle wouldn’t fire.
