Though the operation was meticulously planned, there were some surprising snafus. One of the Navy SEAL team helicopters accidentally touched down in an animal pen and was disabled. Fortunately, Panetta writes, Obama insisted on sending a backup helicopter on the raid, a move that proved “brilliantly prescient.”
As SEAL team members were taking photos of bin Laden’s face for authentication back at the US military base in Afghanistan, “others tried to measure the corpse,” he writes. But there was a problem: “No one had thought to bring along a tape measure – proof that no matter how much anyone plans, something is always forgotten.”
So a SEAL who was just over six feet tall “lay down beside the body and determined that it was a few inches taller than he.”
