Skip to footer

'No Easy Day': six top revelations from book on the bin Laden mission

The Navy SEAL Team 6 operators hand-picked to raid Osama bin Laden’s compound in 2011 had some unwelcome surprises waiting for them as they hit the ground, according to Matt Bissonnette in his controversial book “No Easy Day.” The training that went into the mission included key help from female operators, practical jokes, and an audition of sorts for top US officials, who watched it before deciding whether the Special Operations Forces should go ahead with the raid.

6. A near crash-landing almost ended the mission before it began

  • By Anna Mulrine Staff writer

As the SEAL team’s stealth helicopter hurtled toward the ground, Bissonnette recalls that a fellow special operator tried to move his legs from the open door, “but it was too crowded” inside, he writes. “There was nothing we could do but hope the helicopter didn’t roll and chop off his exposed leg.”

The helo crash-landed without injuring anyone on the team. But in the 15 minutes between the crash-landing and the special operators reaching bin Laden’s bedroom on the third floor of the compound, Bissonnette writes that he feared that bin Laden “had plenty of time to strap on a suicide vest or simply get his gun.” 

In the end, bin Laden was killed with a shot to his face as he peeked around a hallway corner. He fled to his bedroom, where he lay bleeding in a white sleeveless T-shirt, loose tan pants, and a tan tunic. Bissonnette and another special operator trained their lasers on bin Laden, who was “in his death throes,” he writes, “and fired several rounds” into his chest. “The bullets tore into him, slamming his body into the floor until he was motionless.”

6 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.