Mark Owen’s much awaited book No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden is available now and it provides rich insight into his version of the story of Operation Neptune Spear, the secret military operation in which Osama bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad on May 1, 2011. The book has been authored by a former US Navy SEAL who participated in the operation, writing under the pseudonym Mark Owen, and Kevin Maurer, an experienced embedded journalist. Together, they seek to “set the record straight” about the Abbottabad operation, which had been reported in the media like “a bad action movie”.
The story tells us about how the US special operations team had been preparing for the mission through intensively studying satellite imagery of the Abbottabad compound. Reconnaissance drones had been flying over the location too. The mission had been postponed a number of times until the CIA analyst “who was the main force behind tracking the target to Abbottabad said she was one hundred percent certain [Osama] was there.”
The book documents how two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters and two CH-47 Chinook helicopters, flying from Jalalabad in Afghanistan, had effectively evaded the Pakistani radars and anti-aircraft apparatus that night. The Black Hawks carried the 24-member team that would carry out the raid at the compound while the teams in the Chinooks landed near the compound, acting as a ‘Quick Reaction Force’ in case something went wrong in the mission. They also carried additional fuel for the Black Hawks if required on the way back.
However, the Black Hawk carrying Owen almost crashed at the critical instance when the team had to be fast-roped to bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound and a ‘plan B’ was executed. Owen barely survived the helicopter’s technical failure, thinking he would “die without even getting a chance to do [his] part [in the mission].” It was one of the Chinooks of the Quick Reaction Force that was used later to carry the team of the downed helicopter back to Afghanistan. While the operation was underway, a drone was in place over the compound to keep a check over bin Laden possibly escaping at the last moment. This drone also provided a live-feed of the operation to Washington.
In a detailed narrative of the mission, Owen describes how the team had difficulties in infiltrating the compound and first came under fire from Abu Ahmed al-Kuwaiti at the compound’s guesthouse. Kuwaiti “had proven he wasn’t going down without a fight.” Later, Abrar al-Kuwaiti was encountered and killed in the compound as “his wife Bushra jumped in the way to shield him”. Khalid bin Laden, Osama’s son, was shot down on the second floor of the compound. Later, the team came across Osama bin Laden on the third floor.
However, Owen denies there was any intense “forty-minute firefight” in the Abbottabad raid as reported in the media. Osama bin Laden did not fight back. Perhaps he had lost interest, or faith, in his own message of terror.
“Did he believe his own message? Was he willing to fight the war he asked for? I don’t think so. Otherwise, he would have at least gotten his gun and stood up for what he believed. There is no honour in sending people to die for something you won’t even fight for yourself,” writes Owen. These are important words.
No Easy Day is in many ways a very intimate account. It is a captivating story about the military technology of the US, an extensive intelligence gathering apparatus, the stressful commando training and the operation’s success. But above all, it is a human story that vividly depicts the anxious moments in the operation too, including the episode of a team member misinterpreting the message to blow the crashed helicopter as an instruction to destroy the ground floor of the compound! He reveals the difficult feeling of expecting Pakistani law enforcement agencies arriving on the site any moment, investigating and possibly capturing “an invading military force who had entered their sovereign territory.”
Reading the book clarifies the misconception that Bin Laden was already dead when the SEAL team reached him. The text makes it clear that a member of the commando team had “seen a man peeking out of the door on the right side of the hallway…” and had fired shots. Later, as Owen writes, the team found out that the shots had entered the right side of the man’s head and he was trembling on the floor. The two SEALs who encountered him in this state shot him in his chest and killed him. The commandoes tried to match the profile of the dead body, including height and face with their checklist, took photos and DNA samples. The individual was identified as Osama bin Laden by a scared wife and a child from his family present in the same room. Upon this dual confirmation, the raiding team informed authorities in Washington: “Geronimo: Enemy killed in action.”
However, Owen also states he could not help thinking on the way back “we had failed despite [Osama’s] body at my feet. We weren’t able to get as much intelligence [from the compound] as we could have.” Moreover, he also, very interestingly, recalls how ‘Jen’, the lady who had spent “half a decade” tracking Osama broke into tears when bin Laden’s dead body was at her feet; “she’d beaten Bin Laden on an intellectual level.”
No Easy Day is a gripping account to read. Yet Osama’s death, just like his life, remains shrouded in mystery in many ways. Amidst controversies, it is perhaps a bit early to state the extent to which the version given in the book can be exactly relied upon. However, one thing is quite clear; we live in a world of multiple narratives where ‘truth’ is hard to find and ‘reality’ is not based on actualities, but rather perceptions.
As another September 11 approaches, we reflect upon the day that changed the world in so many ways. President Obama, visiting Ground Zero in June, wrote, “We remember. We rebuild. We come back stronger.” Ironically, the War on Terror seems to be far from over. Just like reconstructing Ground Zero proved to be more difficult than imagined, so it seems is demolishing the architecture of terror that Osama erected. In a difficult war like this, perhaps, it is not easy to figure out who really won.
The writer teaches Sociology at the University College Lahore (UCL). He can be reached at [email protected]