Robert "Rob" O’Neill, the U.S. Navy SEAL who is credited with killing Osama bin Laden — at the time the most wanted man on earth — told Cowboy State Daily that in the moments before he put three bullets in the head of bin Laden, O’Neill thought he was the one about to die.
“I remember thinking, ‘We’re going to blow up now and I’m just tired of thinking about it. Go!’” he said.
In an interview with Cowboy State Daily’s Jake Nichols morning radio show Tuesday, O’Neill reflected on the secrecy, intensity and the precarious final moments of one of the most consequential missions in modern military history.
The mission to infiltrate bin Laden’s Abbottabad, Pakistan, compound was dubbed Operation Neptune Spear. And despite meticulous planning for the May 2, 2011, raid, it got off to a sketchy start.
When the SEALs first arrived, O’Neill said that, “Everything went to hell.”
O’Neill had been training for missions against a much different enemy, Somali pirates, when the bin Laden call came. The purpose of the mission was initially kept secret even from the team.
“They sat us in a room and said, ‘This is not a drill. This is really happening. We found a ‘thing,’” he said, explaining that he’d initially assumed the mission was targeting Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi. “The ‘thing’ is in a house. The house is in a bowl between some mountains … and you’re going to go in there and find it and bring it back to us.”
Surprise
After a period of initial preparation, the mission was fully disclosed — and that they were going after Osama bin Laden came as a big surprise.
“We were at a point where Osama bin Laden was a ghost. We’re never going to find him. I didn’t think they were tracking him. I thought we lost him,” O'Neill said, adding that the SEAL team's response was assertive and assured.
“When they told us it was bin Laden, there wasn’t cheers. We’re professionals," he said. "We’d been on 400 combat missions each. Our response was: ‘Cool. We going right now?’”
President Barack Obama was presented by CIA and military advisers with five potential responses, ranging from drone strikes to aerial bombing. After witnessing SEAL Team 6 preparations, the president chose to respond with a helicopter raid by Navy SEALs, said O’Neill.
O’Neill explained how the president told his team he was never 100% certain that bin Laden would be there, “But he said, ‘After seeing you and your team, I was convinced you could go in, find out and come back.’”
Cool Under Pressure
With hundreds of missions beneath his belt, O’Neill was confident.
As an example, he recalled an interaction with the CIA asset who’d led them to bin Laden, a woman referred to as Maya, who was anxiously pacing ahead of the mission start. O’Neill asked her why she was nervous.
“She said, ‘Are you kidding me? Why aren’t you nervous?’” he said. “I told her, ‘Because I do this every night. I fly somewhere. I mess with people. I fly back. This is just a longer flight. I’ll be back in a couple hours.’”
Nor was he the only self-assured SEAL. Recalling moments from the 90-minute helicopter ride to bin Laden’s compound, O’Neill said he was surprised by the cool-headedness of his team.
“I’m looking around at my guys to see what they're doing … and one of my dudes put on his headphones and he was sleeping,” O’Neill said. “My thought was: ‘You’re asleep on the ride to Osama bin Laden’s house. You have ice in your veins.’”
‘We Knew We Were Probably Not Coming Home’
Despite their composure, from the start the mission was tinged with a sense of fatalism, and everyone aboard understood their chances of returning alive were small.
“We knew we were probably not coming home,” said O’Neill.
Their mission would later be venerated in a wave of television and film tributes, including movies like “Zero Dark Thirty.” But the movie that girded Team Six then was an epic war drama of Scottish independence.
“It was almost a ‘Braveheart’ moment,” he said. “Anyone could have taken themselves off the mission at any time. You want to live for sure, you don’t need to go.
“But if you could live those years, and on your deathbed, would you give every single day from then until now for one chance at this guy — and the answer’s yes for everyone.”
‘Your life just changed’
O'Neill explained that despite perfect planning, “everything went to hell.”
Weather and other factors made one of the helicopters emergency land in the front yard of bin Laden’s compound. The team then called an audible, requiring the SEALs to blow open the gate of the compound and enter on the ground level.
He explained how members cleared each level methodically, and by chance it was O’Neill and one other SEAL who stood together on the landing leading up to the compound's top floor, which was demarcated by a translucent curtain.
Behind the curtain, they could see figures moving, who they believed to be suicide bombers. Protocol would have them wait for additional backup before advancing. But with the imminent threat of bombers, they dispensed with protocol and moved in.
“We went up the stairs, he moved the curtain and he tackled two people that he thought were suicide bombers,” O'Neill said about his partner. “He was saying, ‘Those are the suicide bombers, but we can beat them if we go right now.’”
O’Neill said that for him at that point, “it was not bravery. He was brave, (but) I can remember thinking, ‘We’re going to blow up now, and I’m just tired of thinking about it — go!’”
They went up the stairs, pulled back the curtain and the other SEAL tackled two people he thought were suicide bombers, O’Neill said.
“He jumped on a grenade that didn’t go off,” he said, “and how he doesn’t have a Medal of Honor yet I’ll never know.”
There’s bin Laden
Because he and his team partner at the time went different directions through the curtains, O’Neill said that’s when it happened.
Suddenly, O’Neill said he found himself 3 feet away from Osama bin Laden, who was standing behind his wife, using her as a shield. He looked a lot taller and skinnier than expected.
“He’s not surrendering. He’s a suicide bomber and I got to kill him,” O’Neill said about what went through his mind in that moment. “The way you deal with suicide bomber is you shoot them in the head. So, I shot him three times.”
He then moved bin Laden's wife out of the way.
“I even looked down and his 2-year-old son, Hussien, is standing there, and I’m a father and my first thought is: ‘This poor kid has got nothing to do with this. He shouldn’t have seen this,’” O’Neill said.
He described hearing bin Laden make his last exhale, and for a moment he froze before returning to the final mission prerogative of securing computer hard drives, O’Neill said.
Another SEAL said to him, “You just killed Osama bin Laden. Your life just changed. Now get to work.”
Zak can be reached at: Zakary@CowboyStateDaily.com
