on adrenaline. He’d been carrying the pressure of this decision for months.
“We got him,” he said. “And no one got hurt.”
We hugged. Osama bin Laden had been killed. No American lives had been
lost. Barack had taken an enormous risk—one that could have cost him his
presidency—and it had all gone okay.
The news was already traveling across the world. People were clogging the
streets around the White House, spilling out of restaurants, hotels, and apartment
buildings, filling the night air with celebratory shouts. The sound of it grew so
loud and jubilant it roused Malia from sleep in her bedroom, audible even
through the ballistic glass windows meant to shut everything out.
That night, there was no inside or outside, anyway. In cities across the
country, people had taken to the streets, clearly drawn by an impulse to be close
to others, linked not just by patriotism but by the communal grief that had been
born on 9/11 and the years of worries that we’d be attacked again. I thought
about every military base I’d ever visited, all those soldiers working to recover
from their wounds, the many people who’d sent family members to a faraway
place in the name of protecting our country, the thousands of children who’d lost
a parent on that horrible, sad day. There was no restoring any one of those losses,
I knew. Nobody’s death would ever replace a life. I’m not sure anyone’s death is
reason to celebrate, ever. But what America got that night was a moment of
release, a chance to feel its own resilience.