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| From right to left, Robert O'Neill and Osama Bin Laden (inset - Bin Laden's compound after the May 2, 2011 attacks) |
Details have emerged on how a former Navy SEAL, Robert O'Neill shot the late Osama Bin Laden in cold blood not minding the fact that the latter was unarmed and had shown no signs of resistance on that fateful day when he was surrounded by the American soldiers.
O'Neill appeared in his first television interview Tuesday night to detail the historic raid in which he shot dead Osama Bin Laden, and told how he was the last person that the elusive al-Qaeda leader ever saw.
In a two-part interview with Fox News, which concludes Wednesday night, O'Neill said: 'If it was light enough, I was the last person he saw.'
He revealed that he looked Bin Laden straight in the eyes before he shot him dead.
O'Neill said: 'He was standing there two feet in front of me, hand on his wife, the face I’ve seen thousands of times. I thought, "We got him, we just ended the war."'
Watch video of the interview here
Target: O'Neill was the SEAL to fire the three bullets that killed the terrorist leader (left) who organized the 9/11 terrorist attacks. The shirt O'Neill wore on the mission pictured right, at the National September 11th Memorial and Museum in New York City
Highly decorated O'Neill also talks about his unlikely journey from delivering pizzas in Butte, Montana to joining SEAL Team Six, the elite group which also staged the dramatic rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates.
The 38-year-old also recalls his last phone call to his father, and the emotional letters he wrote to his then-wife and children, certain that he would either be killed or taken prisoner in the risky raid ordered by President Obama on May 2, 2011.
While his three bullets helped bring closure to the many Americans who lost loved ones at the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that moment continues to torment O'Neill every day.
'I'm still trying to figure out if it's the best thing I ever did, or the worst thing I ever did,' O'Neill told Fox News' Peter Doocy Tuesday night.
While O'Neill is proud that he was a 'big part' of the successful mission that brought Bin Laden's reign of terror to an end, he remains hesitant on how that monumental action will impact his life in the long term.
I don't know what's going to happen. I did something I'm going to have to live with every day.
'I don't know what's going to happen,' he said. 'I did something I'm going to have to live with every day.'
Last year, a still-anonymous O'Neill gave his first interview to Esquire, telling how the events of that night led to his marriage unraveling and his early retirement from the SEALs.
But O'Neill spoke with nothing but pride on Tuesday when he detailed the rigorous training that went into joining the elite amphibious Navy squad and the immense sense of satisfaction he got when he was chosen to participate in Operation Neptune's Spear.
O'Neill was with his team in Miami for diving training in 2011 when he and a several other senior SEALs got the call to deploy for a special mission.
At first, military officials only gave the team a vague understanding of the mission, leading them to believe they were going to Libya to capture Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi since it was around the time of the Arab Spring.
The Compound: O'Neill says his team was given only a vague idea of their mission at first, so they believed they were being dispatched to Libya to capture hen-dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Above, the scene outside Bin Laden's compound after the May 2, 2011 attacks
But eventually it dawned on the team that they could be after a much bigger target, someone who had evaded capture for nearly a decade.
The team was trained for the mission on a replica of the Abbottabad compound where it was believed bin Laden was hiding.
The plan was to split the group up, with some SEALs being dropped off inside the walls of the compound, another team outside and others on the roof so that they could raid the house from top to bottom and ensure security from the neighboring community.
According to initial assignments, O'Neill was to be the team leader for the group stationed outside the compound for security.
But when he learned from the CIA agent who discovered the compound that Bin Laden would most likely be on the top floor, he volunteered to give up his leadership position and take up the riskiest part of the raid - being dropped on the roof to engage in a shootout with the notorious terrorist from the third-floor balcony.
O'Neill called the team the 'Martyr's brigade' and that nearly everyone wrote letters home to their family, believing they wouldn't be coming home.
Last words: O'Neill called his dad and wrote his then-wife and children letters, believing Operation Neptune's Spear would be a one-way mission, either ending in his death or capture by the Pakistanis
'The more we trained on it, the more we realized this is going to be a one-way mission,' O'Neill said.
However, he says he and the team looked at the situation positively, believing it was a worthy last act to bring down Bin Laden with them.
'It was more of a we're going to die eventually and this is a good way to go....we’re at war because of this guy and now we’re going to go get him.'
The more we trained on it, the more we realized this is going to be a one-way mission.
In his letters home to his wife and children, O'Neill apologized for dying in what he called the most important military operation 'since Washington crossed the Delaware'.
To his kids, O'Neill says he wrote about their weddings 'wishing them happiness' and to take care of their mother. He also apologized for not being around more when they were growing up, due to his job.
The first thing he did when he got home after the raid was shred those letters. He says he's still not sure if he's happy about the decision to destroy the heartfelt last words, but says they are irrelevant any way since he survived.
'I didn’t want to read them. I didn’t want anyone reading them,' he said. 'Instead of something horrible happening something great happened instead.'
One of the last things he did before boarding a helicopter into Pakistan to carry out the raid on the Abbottabad compound was call his father.
Life as a SEAL: Before he joined SEAL Team Six, O'Neill was a member of SEAL Team Two, which continually avoided deployments in the Middle East. He decided to transfer to SEAL Team Six to have more of a role in the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan
He says he told his father he was just checking in on him, but added how nice it was to get to know him. During the call, O'Neill says he wasn't sad, but more excited about the coming action.
His father on the other hand, was driving to WalMart at the time of the call and realized something was off when he hung up. He could get out of his truck for 20 minutes after the strange call, and was paralyzed with fear as he entered the store. Hours later, the first news reports came in about the raid, and he knew his son was involved.
Before boarding the helicopter, O'Neill says he and the rest of the departing teams were greeted on the tarmac by military officials and their fellow SEALs staying behind for one last long goodbye. He says everyone got in as much hugs as possible, knowing it may be the last for any one of them.
On the way into Pakistan, O'Neill tried to remain calm by counting backwards and fowards in his head and that's when he suddenly remembered President George W Bush's speech after September 11: 'Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended.'
It was those words that O'Neill recalled over and over again in his head in the minutes before the raid, the full details of which he will speak about tomorrow night at 10pm.
In Tuesday's interview, O'Neill also brought Doocy to his hometown of Butte, Montana, taking the reporter around to his favorite bars and restaurants to talk about his childhood full of hunting trips and high school basketball games and how he joined the Navy in the first place.
Life-long hunter: After making it through SEAL training in 1996, O'Neill was trained as a sniper due to his expertise shooting which he honed hunting with his father back in Montana
Heartbroken: O'Neill says he joined the Navy as a way to get out of Montana after a nasty break-up. Pictured above with a former girlfriend
He says he had attended just one year of college in the mid-1990s when he broke up with a girlfriend and wanted to find a way out of town fast.
O'Neill was delivering pizzas at the time, when he walked into a Navy recruitment center, hoping to find directions to the nearest Marines office because they had 'the best uniforms' in the military.
But the recruiting officer convinced O'Neill to join the Navy, saying he could be a SEAL, leaving out how difficult it was to be selected for training in the amphibious division - especially since O'Neill had only a basic knowledge of swimming.
In January 1996, he finally arrived at Navy basic training camp and then went on to SEALs training with it's notoriously hellish conditioning exercises - including a swimming test in which candidates' feet and arms are bound.
But O'Neill says the worst part of training was attempting a 5.5 mile swim against the current, only to be told to do it again the next day which he says was 'probably the meanest thing anyone has ever done to me.'
O'Neill was one the hardened candidates to graduate from SEAL school, and he then went on with his first assignment to SEAL Team Two where he was trained as a sniper thanks to his youth spent hunting with his father.
While his first few years in the military were during times of peace, everything changed the morning of September 11, 2001. At the time he was stationed in Germany, and was checking emails that day when a breaking news bulletin came up on one of the TVs in the operations room.
At war: While O'Neill's career in the Navy started off in relatively peaceful times, that changed with the September 11 attacks. O'Neill was stationed in Germany at the time and remembers the name 'Bin Laden' being thrown around just seconds after the second plane struck the twin towers
Withing 30 seconds of the second plane hitting the World Trade Center towers, O'Neill says he heard the name 'Bin Laden' being thrown around.
'We knew everything had just changed. We didn’t know what was going to happen it was a shot in the gut it was painful and it was infuriating.'
After that, O'Neill and his fellow SEALs were anxious to get to Afghanistan to target the terrorist cells behind the attack, but continually Team Two kept being sent to different operations around the world. That's when he decided to transfer to SEAL Team Six, which was regularly engaged in the Middle East.
By the time he joined the elite squad, the group was carrying out missions six days out of the week, rounding up low-level terrorists mostly guilty of making IEDs.
He says during those missions, he and the others SEALs started to ask where Bin Laden was just out of boredom.
'They would laugh and then we would laugh. They would say "you’re never going to find him."
Speaking success: O'Neill is now a high-profile member of the motivational speaking circuit, openly revealing that he was a SEAL - but until now not declaring that he was involved in the daring raid which killed Bin Laden
It was also before the iconic raid that O'Neill participated in the now famous rescue of American Captain Richard Phillips, who in April 2009 was captured by pirates sailing off the coast of Somalia.
He and the rest of SEAL Team Six were at home in the United States at the time, when they got the call to deploy after the Maersk Alabama was overtaken by the pirates.
O'Neill says he got the call to leave on Good Friday, his birthday, when he was at a pre-school tea party for one of his children.
Before reporting for duty, O'Neill recalls the funny moment he stopped by a 7-Eleven to pick of some tobacco when he got was stuck behind an especially slow man in line.
He says the man bought a USA Today and slammed the newspaper on the counter, getting 'all patriotic' and saying how he wished 'someone would do something about this [captain]'.
'If you hurry up and pay for your stuff we will!' O'Neill recalled thinking.
O'Neill was one of dozens of SEALs who parachuted out over the Indian Ocean to rescue to the captain, as depicted in the move Captain Phillips.
He says the 'movie made it look cool' but it wasn't their plan to kill any of the pirates.
'We weren't going there to kill anyone. We were just trying to get our guy back,' he said.
Culled from DAILY MAIL
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