- ‘I pulled the trigger twice. Bin Laden’s head split open’
Robert O’Neill, the former US Navy SEAL and special warfare operator who shot Osama Bin Laden allegedly in Abbottabad, described in his book the moments before he shot and killed the Al Qaeda founder.
O’Neill, now adorned with some 52 medals, just published his memoir – The Operator – wherein he describes the mission. “We were in Pakistan and we knew we could get shot down at any minute. Thoughts start running through your mind: ‘How does it feel when a helicopter blows up? How long does it take to die?’”
The team then got out of the copter, blew open the gate, only to find another brick wall. But O’Neill knew it was a sign. “The door opened. As we entered, it was all dawning on me: We’re here, that’s Bin Laden’s house. This is so cool. We’re probably not going to live, but this is historic and I’m going to savor this.”
The SEAL members got into Bin Laden’s hideout, passing by women and children allegedly part of the former Al-Qaeda leader’s family. After killing Bin Laden’s 23-year-old son, the soldiers moved forward, resisting the urge to wait for backup. Here’s how the final confrontation with Bin Laden went down, in O’Neill’s words:
“We swiftly moved up the stairs to the curtain and he pushed it aside. Two women stood there screaming at us. The point man lunged at them, assuming they had suicide vests, tackling both. If they blew up, his body would absorb most of the blast and I’d have a better chance of surviving and doing what we had come there to do.”
“I turned to the right and looked into an adjoining room. Osama bin Laden stood near the entrance at the foot of the bed, taller and thinner than I’d expected, his beard shorter and hair whiter. He had a woman in front of him, his hands on her shoulders. In less than a second, I aimed above the woman’s right shoulder and pulled the trigger twice. Bin Laden’s head split open and he dropped. I put another bullet in his head.”
The woman, who turned out to be Amal, the youngest of Bin Laden’s four wives, fell on top of me. I carried her over to the bed. For the first time, I noticed a little boy, Bin Laden’s youngest son, a two-year-old, tottering in a corner of the room. He’d watched the whole thing, but it was so dark and he was so young he didn’t know what was going on, except that it wasn’t good.
“I picked him up and put him on the bed with the woman. Now other Seals began making their way into the room. I stood there and, kind of frozen, watched my guys do the work I’d seen them do hundreds of times. One of the guys came up to me and asked, ‘Are you OK? Was I? I felt blank. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘What do we do now?’ He laughed and said, ‘Now we go find the computers.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you’re right. I’m back.”
O’Neill’s claim of having killed Bin Laden has been criticised by his fellow SEAL members. Jonathan Gilliam, a former Seal, said in 2014 that it’s ridiculous for O’Neill to claim the credit for the fatal shot as they probably never would know and don’t need to know.” Gilliam also said that by claiming he’s the shooter puts a target on O’Neill’s back, as well as those around him.
“He put a bulls-eye not just on his back but on those around him by identifying himself. I would not want to be anywhere around him, I’m afraid. If I heard he was coming to give a speech at my workplace, I’d call in sick.” Mark Bissonnette, another Navy SEAL part of the mission, also wrote a memoir about killing Bin Laden, but ended up having to dish out nearly $7 million of the book’s revenue as punishment for leaking classified information.
