As the SEAL team’s stealth helicopter hurtled toward the ground, Bissonnette recalls that a fellow special operator tried to move his legs from the open door, “but it was too crowded” inside, he writes. “There was nothing we could do but hope the helicopter didn’t roll and chop off his exposed leg.”
The helo crash-landed without injuring anyone on the team. But in the 15 minutes between the crash-landing and the special operators reaching bin Laden’s bedroom on the third floor of the compound, Bissonnette writes that he feared that bin Laden “had plenty of time to strap on a suicide vest or simply get his gun.”
In the end, bin Laden was killed with a shot to his face as he peeked around a hallway corner. He fled to his bedroom, where he lay bleeding in a white sleeveless T-shirt, loose tan pants, and a tan tunic. Bissonnette and another special operator trained their lasers on bin Laden, who was “in his death throes,” he writes, “and fired several rounds” into his chest. “The bullets tore into him, slamming his body into the floor until he was motionless.”
