The Operator: Firing the Shots that Killed Osama bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior

by Robert O'Neill

It turns out that this is exactly what the SEAL recruiters are watching for. They want the person who can recognize adversity, understand why his peers are folding, but have the will to say “No. I’m better than this; I’m not following the status quo. Nothing is scary, stress is a choice, I’m moving forward to see what is next.”

I remember early on, after I’d seen what a tough position officer-trainees are in, I spoke to an ensign whose father was an admiral. I said, “Well, this has got to be tough, being an officer, because not only are you afraid of BUD/S but you have to lead everybody.” He said, “Afraid of BUD/S? Why would I be afraid? There’s no point in being afraid. Let that go.” I thought, Wow, that’s a hell of an attitude. It was something of a revelation to me, the first inkling I had that I needed to get over the fear, because fear is self-induced. Of course, it would take a long time for that revelation to sink in fully. In the meantime, I had to get through BUD/S.

When you quit, you have to put your helmet in “the quitter line.” Your helmet has your class number and last name on it. There was no way in hell I was going to put my father’s name in a line of quitters: He was the only one who believed in me.

BUD/S isn’t about winning, it’s about getting your butt kicked over and over again and being able to get up, bend over, and get your butt kicked again. You never knew what was coming next, and if you thought about that, the anticipation only made things worse. In fact, I’d say that fear of what was next was almost inevitably fatal. You just couldn’t survive that kind of thinking. BUD/S was so bad, so hard, that nothing else mattered but doing what was right in front of you. If a guy doesn’t want to be a SEAL more than anything else in life, he can forget it. More than anything. I saw guys who hadn’t made it into SEAL training off the bat so they went to the fleet. Once there, they met a girl, got married, had some babies. Then belatedly they got “their shot.” Too late. If a guy had any priorities other than completing BUD/S, forget it.

Right before Hell Week, Instructor A pulled me aside and said, “You’re about to go to war for the first time and the enemy is all your doubts, all your fears, and everybody you know back home who said you couldn’t do this. Keep your head down and keep moving forward no matter what, never quit, and you’ll be fine.”

He started to read off names in alphabetical order, most ones we didn’t recognize, and the list was long. He read off about 170 names before he was done. We were all still standing. He let us take it in for a moment of heavy silence, then said, “Those are all your quitters. The men standing are the BUD/S Studs from Class 208. Congratulations.” It was very cool of him to do that and something I’ll never forget.

It’s all a well-thought-out strategy. They want to know: Are you a person who can make a mistake under high pressure and forget about it? Or do you dwell on a mistake and then make a bigger mistake? Are your wounded ego and self-doubt going to jeopardize the entire team? We need someone who can make life-and-death decisions rapidly and keep moving no matter what.

level: Ultimately, SEAL commanders are trying to find the people who can realize that all stress is self-induced. Even when bombs are going off and people are trying to kill you. Worrying doesn’t help keep you alive. In fact, it can get you killed. Can you put that bag of bricks down and forget about it, or are you going to let it ruin your day? In CQB especially, it’s very important to understand what your

Yes, I was a new father with a very young wife. But what had all my years of work and training been about if not to avenge the deaths of Neil and all those ordinary Americans who went to work one morning and found themselves forced to decide between being burned alive or jumping from a smashed plateglass window a hundred floors above the street? I can’t tell you how many times the images of those tiny but obviously human figures free-falling helplessly from that burning tower played in my mind. And now, I was finally in a position to do something about it.

Oddly, these were the SEAL Delivery Vehicle guys, members of the submarine unit nobody wanted to be in. Four of their snipers—Michael Murphy, Danny Dietz, Matthew Axelson, and Marcus Luttrell—had drawn this tough mission.

But it was a very terrible feeling to know that I’d killed these children’s parents—essentially, right in front of them. I wanted to make sure the kids were taken care of and not any more frightened than they already were. They’d had nothing to do with any of this, and after all, we were the good guys. The ability to save the lives of noncombatants was one of the most important skills SEAL Team **** offered. When intel pinpoints a terrorist safe house, the leadership can just order up a guided bomb and blow the place apart. Since, as I’ve said, you can always multiply the number of fighters in a safe house by wives, kids, and cousins, the collateral damage in a strike like that can be something like twenty-plus to one. If you drop a payload on a house, you risk killing twenty innocent people for every one terrorist. By contrast, we were precise enough to hit our target without killing innocent people. That’s why we were given latitude—at least, back then. We’d proven we could do exactly what the command needed.

Willy thought that maximizing the number of shooters inside the compound—sharpening the point of Neptune’s spear—made sense. He moved Jonny to security team leader and put me on the rooftop assault team.

I got into a discussion with the guy who’d end up being the point man in the assault on the third floor of the compound—of course, we didn’t know that then. We talked the way SEALs never talk: “Once we go on this mission, we aren’t going to see our kids again or kiss our wives. We’ll never eat another steak or smoke another cigar.” We were trying to get down to the truth about why we were still willing to do this when we pretty much knew we were going to die. What we came up with was that we were doing it for the single mom who dropped her kids off at school and went to work on a Tuesday morning, and then an hour later decided to jump out of a skyscraper because it was better than burning alive. A woman whose last gesture of human decency was holding down her skirt on the long way to the pavement so no one could see her underwear. That’s why we were going. She was just trying to get through a workday, live a life. She had no desire to fight and no ability to defend herself. Now we were going to fight for her. We were going to fucking kill this guy. We started getting fired up just talking about it. I don’t think any of us had even a momentary doubt. Everybody wanted to go. This was the big one. This was why we’d signed up. We figured we were all going to die eventually, so why not go out doing something noble? And who knows, maybe we’d somehow make it back.

mom. I went to the administrative office to get legal paper and a pen, and as I was walking back I ran into the woman intel analyst who’d basically been the one to track bin Laden down to the compound. She’d been with us through those first briefing sessions in North Carolina and throughout the training, and had flown over with us. Now she was outside pacing tensely. She was an attractive woman, though not exactly Jessica Chastain, who would play her in the movie. I said, “Hey, why are you so nervous?” She kept pacing. “What the fuck you mean, ‘Why are you nervous?’ ” What she meant was: “Isn’t it only too obvious why I’m nervous? We’re about to invade the country of a nuclear-armed ally to take out someone we’re only guessing is there based on years of my work. Why shouldn’t I be nervous? Why aren’t you nervous?” I nodded, searching for the right response. “Well, I’m just going to do what we always do. We’re going to get into a helicopter, fly somewhere, fuck with some people, and come back. The flight’s just longer. We do this every night.” I thought about it for a moment then said, “You know what, you have to be right, though, so I understand why you’re nervous. Have a great night.” Then I walked off.

I realized I couldn’t give them to a friend because all my friends were going on the mission with me, and we all might die. I had to go searching for someone I sort of knew, and trusted. I came up with a Navy intelligence guy. I gave him all these complicated instructions regarding who got which letter and where to find them. And, of course, I told him that if I lived I wanted those letters right back, because shredding them was the first thing I wanted to do.

my Heckler & Koch 416 automatic rifle with three extra magazines.

The gun thal killed bin Laden

Counting keeps you cool, keeps your mind engaged, but in idle. I counted zero to a thousand and a thousand to zero, zero to a thousand and a thousand to zero. I must have done that a dozen times before we banked to the south about eighty minutes into the flight.

Our pilot had seen Dash 1 try to hover inside the walls above the courtyard and fail. According to two US officials who praised the skill of the pilot, the chopper lost the lift necessary to hover because it entered a “vortex” condition. At least two factors were at play, they said—hotter than expected air temperature and the compound’s eighteen-foot-high walls. In our North Carolina simulations, the walls, although to scale, were essentially fences, allowing air to flow through them. The solid walls in the compound created a bowl effect that affected the aerodynamics just enough to make a critical difference in the lift of the aircraft. Whatever the cause, the Dash 1 pilot felt the loss of control and adeptly spun the nose to the right, put the tail on top of the southwest wall and eased the nose into the dirt; a controlled crash landing. Had he not been one of the two best pilots in the world, he might have tried to power up, which could have been catastrophic. That would have rolled the bird and killed everyone on board. He made this life-and-death decision instantly. Our pilot saw this and knew that if Dash 1 couldn’t hover inside those walls, neither could we. So he just put us back down. Talk about effective nonverbal communication.

to take digital photos to confirm we’d gotten who we knew we had. Bin Laden’s head was a mess, split wide above his eyebrow like a melon dropped on a tile floor. I bent down and pressed the head back together, trying to restore the features to recognizable condition,