Ashley Collman
Former Navy SEAL Robert O’Neill appeared in his first television interview 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.”‘
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.
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,’ 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 unravelling 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. 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 neighbouring 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. ‘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 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.’
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.
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.
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 forwards 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.’
O’Neill 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 centre, 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.’
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.
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. 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.”–Daily Mail