Foreword

It’s about damn time. Finally, we can read, be inspired by, and follow the heroic actions of 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment (Delta Force) while they hunt down Usama bin Laden. Never before has the brave but ultimately doomed effort to find and kill Usama bin Laden been accurately written about. Dalton Fury is uniquely qualified to write this account because he is one of this great nation’s elite soldiers, a Delta Force operator, and he was there. This is only the third time a former member of SFOD-D has written about the world’s premier counterterrorism organization. However, this is the first time that actual combat operations have been detailed in such a compelling and honest manner.

To become a member of Delta Force you first and foremost have to have a great military record—a proven record of excellence. You then have to go through a “selection course” designed to test your every fiber as a soldier. First, you go running through the woods with a sixty-pound bag and weapon on your butt for up to forty miles a day, every day for a month. This course reduces most men to tears of frustration and resignation. If you make it through this course and no more than three in one hundred do, you then have a six-month training course that turns a great soldier into a super one.

Kill Bin Laden is a tribute to all soldiers and especially to the Delta Force operator. The author takes us inside Delta so that we can better appreciate and support those protecting and fighting for us in this war on terror.

The brilliance of Kill Bin Laden is the manner in which the author shares the complexities of combat and shares the credit for successful operations with the entire organization. It is easy to forget when confronted with these “managers of violence”—these supremely talented and staggeringly brave “operators”—that without great intelligence, staff officers, and brilliant logistic operations nothing happens. That without competent and caring leaders, without the best noncommissioned officer corps in the known universe, none of the remarkable accomplishments celebrated in this book could have come to pass. Fury gives the full measure of credit where it rightfully belongs: to his men. It is one of the traits of a great leader.

This spellbinding book is simple, and in that simplicity lies its brilliance. The author does not hide his love for his fellow soldiers, his admiration for their bravery and intellect, and his appreciation for their dedication to each other and to this great nation. It is Fury’s directness, his self-deprecating look at himself while taking the blame for the inevitable mistakes and his unflinching credit to his men during their many successes that rings so true in these pages; you are reading about serious combat from a serious combat leader. Fury is a great soldier and leader. He is also a passionate and articulate writer: Kill Bin Laden is worthy of all three parts of him.

This book is so good, so topical, and so necessary that you need to stop reading this foreword and get to it.

—Colonel David Hunt (U.S. Army, Ret.)