Read Kill Bin Laden: a Delta Force Commander's account of the hunt for the world's most wanted man for Free Online Page A

Berets. With that information, it was time to launch.
    Shrek also had solved the mystery of a strange and eerie monument that had defied identification by our imagery analysts.
    Standing just to the east of the Ahmed home was a large rock formation that appeared naturally left after thousands of years of flowing river water following centuries of melted winter snow snaking down from the mountains. The large rock was roughly the size of eight tractor-trailers all turned on their noses, with their tails straight up, and glued together attheir sides. It appeared on the imagery as a giant rectangular cube with rounded edges.
    A worn footpath wound around the rock and ended at the top, where a small mosque was under construction. The doorway was visible on the east side, a design that allowed an entering Muslim to face to the west—toward Mecca, birthplace of the Prophet Muhammad—to perform his daily prayers.
    Outside the square mosque were the mounded, rock-covered graves of al Qaeda fighters killed during the previous battle of Tora Bora. They were at peace in paradise now, exactly what they wanted. There were at least fifty individual graves, complete with individually carved tree trunks and makeshift limbs of various lengths pointing skyward. Six to ten feet high, these staffs were adorned with red, green, white, tan, or blue scarves, flags, or torn pieces of clothing that the fallen warrior had worn in battle. The colored banners and pennants fluttered and waved peacefully in the wind.
    It crossed our minds that Usama bin Laden might actually be buried in that graveyard, which was already well known locally as an al Qaeda monument and was becoming a popular stop for Muslims desiring to pay their respects to the martyrs.
    It was logical that if Ahmed had provided shelter for bin Laden, and if the ailing al Qaeda leader had succumbed to his wounds and expired, then moving his body several hundred feet to this memorial was not out of the realm of possibility. We pulled out photo imagery from the past year that showed the mosque was constructed several months after the battle.
    This thought, however intriguing, quickly moved into the too-good-to-be-true category. It would have been virtually impossible to hide a burial site of bin Laden that was so accessible to tourists and the faithful.
    Nevertheless, the place was a stark reminder of the cost of war. We were happy that these Tora Bora fighters had paid the ultimate price.

    First blood was spilled on our mission before it really got under way. At midafternoon, we piled into some pickup trucks for the short drive outto the MC-130 Combat Talon aircraft that was waiting for us on the asphalt runway, with her engines already turning. When one of the pickups took a sharp turn, a large piece of equipment shifted in the cargo bed, smacked a young operator named Rip square in the nose and catapulted him out of the bed of the truck. His Kevlar helmet and body armor protected him upon impact with the runway.
    Our medic, Durango, went to work to stop the facial bleeding and mend the wounds enough to get him on the plane, although I think Rip did not know where he was for a few minutes. After we loaded and took off, I made my way over to Rip, who was staring straight ahead, stoic as ever, and holding a bandage on his nose. His dark beard was matted with the thick red blood, adding even more menace to the long wavy hair and piercing eyes. I bent over to his ear and yelled to be heard over the engine roar. “You gonna make it?”
    Rip nodded vigorously in the affirmative, clearly in no mood for small talk.
    “It’s no big deal if you can’t go on. We can leave you on the plane and they’ll bring you back,” I yelled.
    Rip snapped his head up, locked on to my eyes and yelled, “I’ll be okay, and I’m good to go!”
    His manner said more than his mouth. I did not need to hear the words, because his look had delivered the message loud and clear:
Do not dare to leave me out of this