Best of the Decade: #9 Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden"

Photo illustration by John Ritter, from Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden"

“Best of the Decade” is a selection of twelve of my favourite New Yorker pieces from the last ten years. Each month I choose a piece and try to say why I’m drawn to it. Today, I’m pleased to post my #9 pick – Nicholas Schmidle’s extraordinary “Getting Bin Laden” (August 8, 2011). 

From the moment I saw the news of bin Laden’s assassination, I wanted to know how it happened. Schmidle’s piece told me in detail after fascinating detail. Here, for example, is his description of James, one of the twenty-three Navy SEALs who carried out the raid:

James, a broad-chested man in his late thirties, does not have the lithe swimmer’s frame that one might expect of a SEAL—he is built more like a discus thrower. That night, he wore a shirt and trousers in Desert Digital Camouflage, and carried a silenced Sig Sauer P226 pistol, along with extra ammunition; a CamelBak, for hydration; and gel shots, for endurance. He held a short-barrel, silenced M4 rifle. (Other SEALs had chosen the Heckler & Koch MP7.) A “blowout kit,” for treating field trauma, was tucked into the small of James’s back. Stuffed into one of his pockets was a laminated gridded map of the compound. In another pocket was a booklet with photographs and physical descriptions of the people suspected of being inside. He wore a noise-cancelling headset, which blocked out nearly everything besides his heartbeat.

The amazing level of specificity in that passage is typical of the entire piece. And it’s all the more impressive when you consider that Schmidle himself didn’t experience any of it. His piece is based entirely on interviews and research. 

Schmidle puts us there with the Navy SEALs in the Blackhawks as they fly towards Abbottabad (“During the next four minutes, the interior of the Black Hawks rustled alive with the metallic cough of rounds being chambered”). 

In a flashback, he puts us with the SEALs in the Nevada desert as they rehearse the mission (“The pilots flew in the dark, arrived at the simulated compound, and settled into a hover while the SEALs fast-roped down”). 

He puts us with President Obama, Vice-President Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and others, in a small office adjoining the Situation Room, as they watch a video feed “showing real-time footage of the target, which was being shot by an unarmed RQ 170 drone flying more than fifteen thousand feet above Abbottabad.” 

He puts us inside the Blackhawk as it crash-lands inside the walls of bin Laden’s Abbottabad compound (“The pilot jammed the nose forward to drive it into the dirt and prevent his aircraft from rolling onto its side. Cows, chickens, and rabbits scurried”). 

And, most crucially, he puts us inside bin Laden’s bedroom at the moment he’s killed (“The first round, a 5.56-mm. bullet, struck bin Laden in the chest. As he fell backward, the SEAL fired a second round into his head, just above his left eye. On his radio, he reported, ‘For God and country—Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.’ After a pause, he added, 'Geronimo E.K.I.A.'—‘enemy killed in action’ ”). 

The piece is beautifully structured in nine sections. The first section immediately plunges us into the mission (“Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden”). 

The next two sections are flashbacks, detailing the planning and preparation for the raid. The pivotal fourth section artfully transitions from the grainy black-and-white crash-landing scene that Obama, Biden, et al., are watching on their screen at the White House to the reality of the crash as it’s occurring in bin Laden’s compound. 

Sections 5 and 6 describe the raid as it rapidly unfolds inside the compound, including the killing of bin Laden’s courier (“The Americans’ night-vision goggles cast the scene in pixellated shades of emerald green. Kuwaiti, wearing a white shalwar kameez, had grabbed a weapon and was coming back outside when the seals opened fire and killed him”), bin Laden’s brother, bin Laden’s son, and bin Laden himself. 

Section 7 tells what happened immediately after bin Laden is killed – the placement of bin Laden’s corpse in a body bag, the collection of flash drives, CDs, DVDs, and computer hardware from bin Laden’s house, the extraction of DNA from bin Laden’s body, the destruction of the damaged Blackhawk, and the SEALs’ escape in a Chinook. 

Sections 8 and 9 cover bin Laden’s burial at sea and Obama’s meeting with the SEALs at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. 

Boldly and bravely executed, the raid on bin Laden is one of the most astonishing military feats of our time. Nicholas Schmidle's "Getting Bin Laden" reports it superbly.