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

by Robert O'Neill

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.