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

by Robert O'Neill

One SEAL never returns a hostage to her loved ones. One SEAL never liberates a town from torturers. One SEAL never rescues a man behind enemy lines. One SEAL never kills the bad guy everyone has been searching for. When the gun fires, it’s as if we all fire it. I decided, finally, to write this book to bring that truth to readers.

something inside me connected with that obsessive drive to keep striving.

I began to understand something important: If you want to get better at pull-ups, do more pull-ups. That’s it. And that’s what I did.

It’s easy to follow the other sheep and just lie down and quit. Lie down and die. Die of shame and nothing more.

“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.”

Preparation is everything.

Get up in the morning, make your bed, brush your teeth, little victories.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box. There is never a perfect plan. Impossibilities only exist until somebody does it. We thought this way, gave it a shot, and won. Mission success.

You can convince your body to do anything. Things are only impossible until someone does them.

“I should fail you for keeping me down there so long. You untied three of my whammy knots,” he said, then looked up and announced, “O’Neill, pass.”

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?

“The door opened and I said, ‘You dropped this.’ She punched me in the face and closed the door.”

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll just tell Mrs. Luttrell, Marcus’s mom, that we were this close to getting him but we couldn’t because you got tired.” He said, “You know what, you’re right,” and he stood up and started walking.

It wasn’t as scary as the news makes it look and sound, and there aren’t bogey men with suicide vests around every corner.

“Well, snipers kill more people, but assaulters kill more famous people.”

When the time for fighting with precision is over and you need to fuck people up, you turn to the Rangers, who have black belts in fucking people up.

He was standing up there with his gun slung over his shoulder, staring at me like some kind of war god.

“Nobody ever worked for me. They worked with me.”

Here I was in the middle of a gunfight, and I actually rang the damn doorbell.

When things go so right for so long, you stop thinking about ways things can go wrong. This is how success can kill.

If you stand with your back to the wall, looking forward, a few feet ahead and to the right, there’s a smaller wall with the names of our fallen dogs. That’s where they walked: forward and to the right.

Our plan was simple: Don’t fly in, don’t drive in. Hell, we were SEALs. We’d swim in.

“Who did this? Who came last night?” The women responded: “Ninjas, and they came with lions.” That was the headline the next day in Baghdad.

“What do you need to rain hell on Pakistan—because my guys aren’t surrendering to anybody.”

I’m just going to finish this chicken sandwich with waffle fries and go try to kill bin Laden.

If it had been me, I probably would have said to Meyers, “Fuck you, we’re going to kill him tomorrow.”

“Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.”