Mark Owen - No Easy Day

We lived in a two-story house one hundred yards off the river. The house had a beautiful view of picturesque Alaska. Sometimes when I was lucky, I could see a moose or a bear from my front door. If I wasn’t in school, I was out hunting or fishing. From the time I was a little kid, I was comfortable using a gun and moving in the woods, and being responsible for myself.

During BUD/S training, I excelled at land warfare. It was really no different than my hunting trips as a kid. With varying backgrounds at BUD/S, guys were stronger in different areas. I did fine in the water too, but I felt most comfortable during the weapons and land warfare training.

So, when I got to DEVGRU, I typically acted as the point man for my assault team. On this cold night in Iraq, the four-mile patrol to the target village took about an hour. It was close to three A.M. when we arrived. As we got close, I could see the lights from the Iraqi village flickering across a highway.

It was a dusty shit hole.

Light blue plastic shopping bags blew down the street. The smell of raw sewage from a ditch that ran along the road hung on the wind. I could just make out the biscuit-colored houses, which had a faint green hue under my night vision goggles. The power lines that ran along the highway into Syria sagged. Everything looked ratty and run down.

As we got to the village, the teams started to peel off to their predetermined targets. I led my team to our target building. Creeping up to the gate, I tried the handle. The heavy black iron door creaked open. Pushing it just wide enough to see in, I scanned the courtyard. It was empty.

The front door of the two-story house had a large window covered by an ornate grate. I could see inside the foyer as my teammates’ lasers searched inside from the first-floor windows.

I slowly pushed open the front door of the house. It was unlocked. I paused at the threshold, my rifle at the ready, and waited. Looking over my shoulder, one of my teammates gave me a thumbs-up. I blinked the dust out of my eyes to make sure I could see before stepping inside. I was wearing my cumbersome op gear over a winter jacket as I tried to move like a cat.

“Think quiet,” I told myself.

The foyer was cramped. A small generator sat on the floor. There was a door straight ahead of me and another door to my right. Ignoring the door to the right because it was blocked by a generator, I crept through the door in front of me.

My senses were on fire. I strained to hear any movement up ahead as I scanned the empty room. The smell of kerosene from the family’s heating stove attacked my nostrils.

Every step that I took seemed like a huge crash. We were trained to anticipate an insurgent with a suicide vest or an AK-47 behind any door, ready to attack.

Curtains covered the doorway leading back to the bedrooms. I hated the curtains because at least with a door you felt a little protected. I had no idea if someone was looking under the curtain or was just waiting for my shadow to pass in front so that he could shoot.

This was the endgame. There was no way these rooms would be empty. We had no idea if the occupants had heard us. On my previous deployment with Delta, several of their guys were killed when they entered a house and got ambushed by a fighter hiding behind a sandbag wall. It was a deadly lesson we never forgot and it was always in the back of our minds as we entered a target.

I paused for a second or two, hoping to draw out any impatient ambushers. The light was on in the room behind the curtain. Flipping my night vision goggles up, I slowly pulled the curtain aside.

A long, slender refrigerator stood at the elbow of an L-shaped hallway. I spotted a door ajar and moved to quickly cover it while my teammates flooded the hallway, clearing the other rooms. One of my teammates followed me as we pushed open the door and cleared into a bedroom. There was no talking. Everyone knew his job.

Three mattresses were on the floor and I could barely make out two eyes staring at me from the corner of the dark room. It was a young man with wispy facial hair and dark eyes. He seemed nervous and his eyes kept shifting from side to side as we moved inside.

It struck me as odd that he just sat there staring at me.

There were two women, also awake, staring at the door. I immediately started moving toward the man. I knew something wasn’t right because men usually sleep in a different room. As I passed the women, I held my hand out, waving at them to be calm. The man started to try and talk.

“SHHHH!” I whispered. I didn’t want him to alert any men who might be in another room.

His gaze never left me. I grabbed him by his right arm and yanked him up, pushing the blankets away to make sure he didn’t have a weapon. Holding him against the wall, I pulled the blankets off the women. Sleeping between the women was a small girl, no more than five or six years old. When I moved the blanket off of her, the girl’s mother grabbed her and pulled her close.

I guided the man into the center of the room and secured his hands together with flex-cuffs—plastic handcuffs—and slid a hood over his head. My teammate watched the women while I quickly searched the man’s pockets. I then pushed the man to his knees and shoved his head into the corner. He tried to talk, but I pressed his face against the wall, muffling his voice.

Our troop chief, who was running the mission, popped his head in the door.

“What do you have?” he said.

“One MAM,” I said, which is shorthand for “military-aged male.” “Still need to search the room.”

I walked to the far corner of the room, next to the mattresses, and saw the brown stock of an AK-47. Resting on a pile of small plastic bags was a green chest rack, used to carry extra magazines, and a grenade.

“Got an AK over here,” I said. “Chest rack. Grenade. FUCK!” I was pissed we hadn’t seen the weapons earlier.

My teammate who covered the women hadn’t seen them either when we came into the room.

The man I found in the room was definitely a fighter and a smart one too. He hid his gun, chest rack, and hand grenades just out of reach and well enough for us not to see them on our initial entry into the room.

Everything inside me wanted to shoot this guy right there on the spot. He knew the rules we had to follow and he was using them against us. We couldn’t shoot him unless he posed a threat. If he had any balls, he would have lit us up coming through the door. He knew we were in the house. The man must have heard us come in and thought he could hide with the women.

With the house secure, I led the man to another room to question him. The room’s floor was covered in rugs, and sleeping mats were piled in a heap in the center of the room. A TV on the floor was on, but the screen was just static. Our interpreter stood next to the man as I pulled the hood off. His face was sweaty and his eyes were big as he tried to adjust to the light.

“Ask him why he had grenades and a chest rack,” I told the interpreter.

“I’m a guest here,” the man said.

“Why were you sleeping with the women and children? Guests don’t sleep next to the women.”

“One of them is my wife,” he said.

“But I thought you were a guest here,” I said.

The questioning went on like that for about a half hour. He never got his story straight and the next morning we turned him over to the Marines.

It was frustrating because missions were like this day after day. It was a catch and release system. We’d roll them up and in a few weeks the fighters would be back on the street. I was confident the fighter we found in the bedroom would be released soon. The only way to permanently take them off the street was if they were dead.