The former Navy SEAL who claims to have fired the fatal shot that killed Osama bin Laden has described exactly what happened on that fateful day, admitting he was convinced ‘death is coming’.
It has been 15 years since Robert O’Neill burst into a remote compound in Pakistan and came face to face with the al-Qaeda leader on 2 May 2011.
He returned home as a hero after unleashing three bullets that left bin Laden ‘crumpled on the foot of his bed’ during the pivotal mission, which was known as Operation Neptun Spear
US forces had been hunting the terrorist leader down for almost a decade in the wake of the devastating attacks on the Twin Towers in September 2001, which killed nearly 3,000 people and left thousands injured.
After evading capture for years, bin Laden was eventually found holed up in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan – and under the orders of former president BARACK OBAMA, SEAL Team Six stormed inside and shot him.
More than a decade on from the day that he pulled the trigger, O’Neill has told how his special forces unit weren’t motivated by ‘the fame or the reward’.
“We were going for the single mom who dropped her kids off at school on a Tuesday morning, then an hour later, jumped out of the World Trade Center, pressing down her skirt as her last act of human decency,” he told the “New York Post”She was never supposed to do that.”
The former military man, 50, explained that the team were first informed of the high stakes operation three weeks before it unfolded, but said they had no idea about how important it was at the time.
“They said on a Friday, go home and be with your kids, and come back Sunday for a read-in,” O’Neill recalled. “I asked, “Who’s going to be at the read-in?’ It was the vice president, the secretary of defence, the secretary of the Navy.
“We’re like, ‘What in the world?'”
After the penny dropped, the elite unit tasked with taking out bin Laden ‘came up with the perfect plan’ before ‘rehearsing it day and night’, while also practising ‘different scenarios’ in anticipation of what reception they might receive.
Emphasizing what was at stake, O’Neill – who previously revealed how much he earned from participating in Operation Neptune Spear – said: “This would be a one-way mission. You’re not afraid you’re going to die, but you’re prepared for death.
“We were going after bin Laden for the first Americans who were forced to fight al Qaeda, to the death, toe to toe, on a Tuesday morning: the passengers on Flight 93.
“Any one of us could pull ourselves out and live for another 50 years.
“But when you’re on your deathbed, if you could give every single day back for one shot at this motherf**ker…The hardest part is telling your kids goodbye because death is coming.”
The author explained that he and his comrades ‘knew there would be a gunfight’ and had braced for a bloody battle, as ‘if anybody was going to martyr his entire family, it’s bin Laden’.
O’Neill said that the entire operation ‘happened in the span of nine minutes’. After bursting into bin Laden’s lair and searching every room to find him, he ended up ‘three feet away’ from the terrorist leader.