Robert O'Neill discusses the moment he shot and killed Osama Bin Laden
Navy Seal Robert O’Neill claims to have fired the shots that ended the life of the al Qaeda leader. In an extract from his new book, he details the final hours of the mission.
Now that we knew we were in Pakistan, we also knew we could get shot down at any minute.
Thoughts start running through your mind: "How does it feel when a helicopter blows up? Do you die instantly or does it crash and you're falling and something cuts your head off? How long does it take to die?"
You're just thinking all these weird, jumbled thoughts. I tried to get my mind off it by looking around and just observing everything around me. We were sitting on these camping chairs, the kind that fold out into little tripods and sell for like $9.99. I was facing forward. The pilots were behind a solid wall, so unlike in a normal helicopter, we were in the back by ourselves.
[Seal team dog] Cairo and Cheese, his handler, were right beside me, on my left. Cairo was always happy to be working. If he hadn't been wearing the still-bloodstained vest with the bullet hole in the front, you'd never know he'd been nearly killed in combat. He looked completely relaxed, like the family dog in the front seat of a pickup truck on the way to a camping trip. Too bad he couldn't stick his head out the window.
Some of the other guys were asleep, which impressed me. No way could I have slept. We were 90 minutes out from the compound. To keep my mind from spinning off somewhere I didn't need it to go, I started counting.
I learned that as a sniper. Counting keeps you cool, keeps your mind engaged, but in idle. I counted zero to a thousand and a thousand to zero, zero to a thousand and a thousand to zero. I must have done that a dozen times before we banked to the south about 80 minutes into the flight. Now we were on our attack run, and as I was counting, just between random numbers, I began to repeat, "Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward, and freedom will be defended."
It was the first line of President George W. Bush's address to the nation on the morning of 9/11. I have no idea where that came from, or how I remembered it verbatim, but I just started saying it in my head, over and over. I could almost hear President Bush's voice over the whirring rotor above me.
And I was thinking: "Holy shit, this is really it. I'm on this mission and we're going to kill this son of a bitch."
WE KNEW the compound like we knew our own front yards. There was a gate near the northeast corner right in front of us. We'd blow that and enter there. It was just a few steps to the gate. Within seconds of jumping from the chopper, the breacher had attached a seven-foot charge of C-6 right down the middle and blew it. The metal gate peeled open like a tin can. Behind it was a solid brick wall.
The breacher said, "Failed breach. This is bad." "No, this is good," I said. "That's a fake door. That means he's in there."
We said we were going to blow the carport. The radio crackled to life. "No, don't blow it, we'll just open it."
Osama bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011.
What the . . . ? I thought, Okay, it doesn't matter how they got in there. I'll find out later. Let's go. The door opened, and an upward thrusting thumb appeared, the universal signal that these were the good guys.
As we entered, I looked to the left. We were walking down the carport, and it was all dawning on me: "Holy shit, 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 savour this."
I could hear gunfire: the distinct sound of an automatic AK-47, and the suppressed semi-automatic 5.56 of the good guys.
Some of the shots were closer than others but several of my guys were shooting. I came around the corner to see one of our guys in the aftermath of a gunfight in front of the main house.
The fight had only lasted two seconds. He shot through a window, and a man and woman were down inside. He was still looking at them while clearing the room as best he could from the outside. I could see them lying dead together. He looked concerned. "I just killed one of the women, too," he said. "She jumped in front of him right as I was shooting. Am I going to be in trouble?"
"Let's not worry about being in trouble," I said. "Let's finish this mission."
Okay, I thought. Now the women are martyring themselves. This is definitely the right place. I didn't think the dead man looked like bin Laden, but I couldn't linger. We still had an entire house to clear.
We entered through the front door of the main building. A few of my guys were already ahead of us and were making their way down the hallway, clearing the rooms as they did. Some guys stayed back to search the two bodies. It was standard tactics and we were all experts.
The floor was a long hallway with rooms off to the sides and a barricaded door on the far end. In a spot like this, you clear the rooms, in order, and spend the least possible amount of time in the hallway.
Bad guys will "spray and pray" down hallways. Even though Allah isn't always around to guide their bullets, they do get lucky sometimes.
On all sides, we could hear women and children crying - we later learned that living with bin Laden in the compound were three of his four wives and 17 children - but that level of habitation was no different than in many of our targets.
There were four rooms. I entered the last one on the far right of the hallway. A little girl was in there, obviously terrified and alone. Even in this tensest possible situation, we couldn't just ignore her. One of the guys took her arm and led her across the hall and into another room already filled with women and children where he handed her over to one of the women.
We were in a fight and looking for the world's most wanted man, and he was making sure a young girl was as safe as possible under the circumstances.
He came back into my room, and we were looking down the hallway where two of our guys were breaching the barricaded door.
After failing to make sufficient headway with a sledge, they stopped to put charges on it. The door obviously led to stairs up to the next level, so we had to just stand in the room and wait until they got it open.
President Obama makes a televised statement on bin Laden's death. Photo / Getty Images
I heard the guy behind me say something about a helicopter crash.
My immediate thought was that one of the Chinooks carrying the reserve squadron 45 minutes behind us had been shot down, so I said, "What helicopter crashed? The reserve team?"
"No, dude," he said. "Our helicopter crashed in the front yard. You walked right past it."
I thought, "Well, shit, now we're never getting out of here because we only have one helicopter. We better get up there and kill him before they blow up the place."
All along we'd been scanning the ceilings, looking for hanging bombs - which is how the bad guys set up a lot of their booby traps, intended to bring the entire house down.
We were surprised we hadn't seen any. Yet.
The breachers blew the charges on the stairwell door and it split open. As we made our way up the stairs I was five or six guys back.
The woman intel analyst had told us that when we got to a set of stairs we should expect Khalid bin Laden, Osama's 23-year-old son, to be there, armed and ready, his father's last line of defense.
"If you find Khalid," she told us, "Osama's on the next floor."
The stairwell was in total darkness, so unless Khalid or whoever was up there had night vision, they could hear us coming but not see us. We could see them, though.
As we were moving up, a figure popped out just above us on the half landing between the first and second floor.
We saw him for just an instant before he darted back behind a banister. He was armed with an AK-47. The point man stopped dead and pointed. I should have grabbed a couple of guys and pulled them back down the stairs to let the advance guys handle the situation in case whoever it was tossed a grenade down on us. The setup risked all of us dying at once. But it was such an awesome moment, I couldn't obey my tactical instincts.
Here were two grown men trying to kill each other, separated by 10 inches and a nice thick banister.
American revellers in Washington celebrate the killing; Pakistani Islamists burn the US flag at a rally. Photo / Getty Images
In that supercharged instant, it would have been easy to forget that we could see and he couldn't.
But the point man thought it through beautifully: Khalid knew somebody was nearby but he didn't know we were Americans for sure.
In no more than a whisper my guy uttered a phrase he'd learned before the mission began. He said it twice, in both of the languages bin Laden's son spoke, Arabic and Urdu. "Khalid, come here."
Khalid, confused by hearing his name called, poked his head around the banister and said, "What?"
That was his final word. The point man shot him in the face.
The bullet entered above the chin and exited out the back of his head. Khalid dropped where he stood. Blood pooled around his head and soaked into his bright white blouse.
The train started moving up the stairs to the second floor with me in the back. Each man stepped over Khalid on the way up, and everybody except the point man started clearing the rooms to the right and left on the second floor.
The point man kept his gun trained on the top of the stairs to the third floor, which was right in front of him with a curtain over the entryway. At some point before I got there, he took a shot at a tall figure behind the curtain, but couldn't see the result.
I moved up behind him and put my hand on his shoulder. There were only two of us left. This was it. The point man stared down the barrel of his gun, never letting his aim leave the curtain. My hand rested on his shoulder. I could halt him or tell him to advance with a touch.
At this point, we were spread way too thin. It was just the two of us there. Whoever was on the third floor knew we were coming, and they were probably putting on suicide vests - as many other, lesser al-Qaeda leaders had done in the past - and barricading themselves in fighting positions with weapons.
Our tactics said we should wait for more guys, or go down and get Cairo to run up ahead of us.
But we didn't have time.
The occupants of the third floor were getting ready to make their stand, and we needed to get up there. The point man was aware of this, and he started to speak, only knowing one of his guys was behind him, not who it was. "Hey, we got to go, we got to go."
Pakistani Islamists burn the US flag at a rally. Photo / AP
I knew what he was thinking because I was thinking it, too: "Okay, this is where the suicide bomber's going to hit us."
And then I had a thought so clear it was like a voice in my head.
"I'm tired of worrying about it, let's just get it over."
It wasn't bravery, it was more like fatigue or impatience - I'm f*****g done with waiting for it to happen.
I squeezed his shoulder. 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 and landing on the floor on top of them. 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'd come there to do.
I turned to the right and looked through a door 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. But it was the guy whose face I'd seen 10,000, 100,000 times.
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. Insurance.
The woman, who turned out to be Amal, the youngest of bin Laden's four wives, kind of fell on top of me. I carried her over to the bed. Her calf was bleeding.
She'd seen the point man coming up the stairs, levelling his gun at her husband, and jumped in front just as the point man pulled the trigger.
She didn't seem to be seriously injured, but was almost catatonic. I don't think we even cuffed her.
For the first time, I noticed a little boy, bin Laden's youngest son, a 2-year-old, tottering on fat little legs 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. He was crying.
I thought, "This poor kid had nothing to do with this. He's just in the middle of a shit storm right now, poor guy."
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 okay?"
He laughed and said, "Now we go find the computers."
I said, "Yeah, you're right. I'm back. Holy shit."
"Yeah, you just killed Osama bin Laden."
Former President Barack Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton Vice-President Joe Biden and the national security team are updated during Operation Crystal Spear. Photo / AP
I was sitting next to another Seal who asked the question that every Seal asked every other Seal when they found out what had happened: "Who got him?"
That's when it started to sink in.
"I did," I said.
He kind of straightened up and said, "On behalf of my family, thank you."
Jonny the sniper - the guy who took the shot that famously saved Captain Richard Phillips in a 2009 attack by pirates in Somalia - was sitting on my other side, which was interesting, because of the seven billion people on the planet, he might have been the only one to even come close to understanding what I was feeling.
He also remembered how, when he'd been struggling with the glare of the spotlight that came with what he'd done, I kept trying to calm him down with a plug of my beer.
Now he returned the favor. A beer can appeared in front of my goggles.
"Here, take one of mine," he said. "Now you know what it's like to be a f*****g hero."
Backlash and doubts
Robert O'Neill went rapidly from hero to zero after claiming he was the man who gunned down Osama bin Laden.
O'Neill went public in 2014 - but his was one of three differing accounts of how bin Laden died in the May 2011 raid, leading to disputes over who fired the fatal shot.
Much of the criticism was directed at the motives of O'Neill, who now draws on his Special Forces work in appearances as a motivational speaker. There was also anger that he had broken Seal code by taking individual credit for a team effort.
But O'Neill's book, which documents his part in more than 400 missions - including the famous rescue of Captain Richard Phillips of the Maersk Alabama after it was hijacked by Somali pirates - is the only account of bin Laden's death that has been sanctioned by the US Department of Defence.
