Photo: McTeams Photography(NEW YORK) — Robert O’Neill had been on hundreds of missions as a Navy SEAL, but three inspired Oscar-nominated movies: Captain Phillips, about the rescue of Captain Richard Philips from Somali pirates; Lone Survivor, about a deadly mission-gone-wrong in Afghanistan; and Zero Dark Thirty, about the mission to take down 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.
O’Neill was the SEAL who shot and killed bin Laden, the culmination of a top-secret mission that began with a dogged female CIA analyst’s hunch about bin Laden’s Pakistan hideout, and ended with O’Neill putting three bullets in the terrorist’s head.
Monday, the sixth anniversary of the mission, O’Neill told ABC Radio what he remembered most about the raid. “How cool everybody was…You know, we’re going down a hallway in a house we think is going to blow up, and everyone’s just doing their job.”
O’Neill recalled his partner calling out for bin Laden’s son to get him out of hiding. “He’s his last line of defense,” O’Neill said, recalling the words of the real-life CIA analyst played by Jessica Chastain in Zero Dark Thirty.
Bin Laden’s son turned the corner armed with an AK-47, and the SEAL killed him. Moments later, that same operator dove onto two of bin Laden’s wives, convinced they’d be wearing suicide vests, to give O’Neill his shot at Osama.
“I remember thinking, ‘I really hope that we live through tonight…people need to know what he did,” O’Neill said proudly.
As for the Hollywood versions of his exploits? “I wish they would have asked for my advice.”
O’Neill adds, “I hope you see in the book — there’s things that people do [on missions], I mean, there’s comedy. And then there’s serious [stuff]. There’s tears…Don’t get me wrong, I’ve seen Zero Dark Thirty six times. I’ve seen Richard Phillips [sic], loved it — they made the SEALs look great. I loved Lone Survivor. Awesome. But we could have made them a little better.”
O’Neill’s Navy career is detailed in his new memoir, The Operator.
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