No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account Of The Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden Quotes
"We are not superheroes, but we all share a common bond in serving something greater than ourselves."
"The hunt for a rogue North Vietnamese colonel was the center of my dreams as a child."
"From page one, I knew I wanted to be a SEAL."
"In the surf of the Pacific Ocean during training, I found men who feared failure as much as I did."
"After thirteen consecutive combat deployments, my war is over."
"It's about the brotherhood that ties us together, allowing us to walk into harm's way together."
"This book does not include details of any ongoing missions."
"I've changed names to protect our identities."
"We'd trained in Thailand, the Philippines, East Timor, and Australia."
"The Navy’s counter-terrorism unit was born in the aftermath of Operation Eagle Claw."
"How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time."
"We pushed cars, and on multiple occasions we pushed buses."
"Green Team was about managing stress and performing at your peak level—all the time."
"No Easy Day is the story of the human toll we pay, and the sacrifices we make."
"My hope is one day a young man will read it and become a SEAL."
"We were too busy doing our normal deployment, training, and keeping the wheels on the bus at home to think of much else."
"Everything we could see on the feed was adding up. Most compounds don’t have roving guards."
"If you know how to 'shoot, move, and communicate,' the rest will fall into place."
"The patrol snaked out of the gate and started down the paved road toward the village."
"We really had two families: the guys at work and then family and loved ones left at home."
"We were trained to anticipate an insurgent with a suicide vest or an AK-47 behind any door, ready to attack."
"Policy makers were asking us to ignore all of the lessons we had learned, especially the lessons learned in blood, for political solutions."
"As we approached the first building, I tried the rusty knob of the thick wooden door. Locked."
"He wasn’t a pacifist by any means, but he’d grown up during Vietnam and knew how war impacted people."
"Before long, I heard the familiar sound of an inbound CH-47 Chinook."
"Before I got my hand up, Tom just looked at me and shook his head. I put my hand down."
"My mind was spinning with questions I wanted answered."
"You got it," he said. "But why again am I giving up my sledge?"
"They called a bunch of us into a meeting today and we’re going down to North Carolina."
"We all wanted to believe it, but the details weren’t adding up."
"This was 2007, and 9/11 was six years behind us."
"We tried never to fall in love with a plan, because that breeds complacency."
"Every single contingency was practiced to the point where we were tired of it."
"The mission was straightforward, but the extra preparation helped us mesh."
"This was Bin Laden’s compound. These were his facilitators. Shots were fired, so we knew they were willing to die to protect him."
"I shouldered my rifle and squeezed off several rounds to make sure he was down."
"The floor was slippery from the water and al-Kuwaiti’s blood, which had pooled in the hall and gotten on our boots."
"We have cut off their head, and we will ultimately defeat them."
"There is no honor in sending people to die for something you won’t even fight for yourself."
"Don’t just live, but live for a purpose bigger than yourself. Be an asset to your family, community, and country."
"The leaders were less willing to fight. It is always the young and impressionable who strap on the explosives and blow themselves up."
"We saw dead bodies all the time. It was the kind of ugly we lived with, and we spent no time thinking about once it was finished."
"What good was worrying about fuel going to do? I wasn’t a pilot."