The Operator: Firing the Shots that Killed Osama bin Laden and My Years as a SEAL Team Warrior - Softcover

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Robert O’Neill was born and raised in Butte, Montana, and lived there for nineteen years until he joined the Navy in 1996. Deploying as a SEAL more than a dozen times, O’Neill participated in more than four-hundred combat missions across four different theaters of war. During his remarkable career, he was decorated more than fifty-two times. Among the honors he received were two Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars with Valor, a Joint Service Commendation Medal with Valor, three Presidential Unit Citations, and a Navy/Marine Corps Commendation with Valor. O’Neill helped cofound Your Grateful Nation, an organization committed to transitioning Special Operations veterans into their next successful career. You can find him at RobertJONeill.com.

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The Operator

CHAPTER ONE

I owe my career as a Navy SEAL to a girl. I’m not the first, and I doubt I’ll be the last.

She was younger than I was, a brunette with the face of a supermodel, great dance moves, and—key to my heart—a quick sense of humor. The first time I tried to kiss her, I closed my eyes too soon and I heard her say, “Uh, what are you doing?”

“I’m gonna kiss you.”

“Not before you ask me out, you’re not,” she said.

“Will you go out with me tomorrow then?”

“Pick me up at seven o’clock,” she said, then gave me a better kiss than I deserved and went home.

The next evening I picked her up at 7:00 sharp and, big spender that I was, drove her to Taco Bell. She ate a large order of Nachos Bellgrande and three soft Tacos Supreme.

Gorgeous girl, perfect figure, and the appetite of a lumberjack. I knew nothing about life, but I thought I was in love.

When I graduated high school in Butte, Montana—the same school my grandfather and father had graduated from—and enrolled at Montana Tech, the local college, this girl was still a junior. It’s just one of those things; you’re not going to date a high school girl when you’re in college. So I stayed away, but I couldn’t keep my mind off her. She went on doing her high school thing, dating and going to dances, which she damn well should have been doing. But I wanted it both ways, me having my fun and her staying on hold. I simmered miserably for weeks, then finally snapped when I heard she’d spent the day with some high school boy. With a couple drinks in me I went to her house to find out what was going on, and promptly made a complete ass out of myself.

Her father, a massive Italian with black hair, a burly mustache, and a square jaw, was famous around Butte for being tough. He owned a company that jacked up entire houses and moved them whole. I was certain he would have no problem moving me. But he took pity. Instead of knocking me flat, which would have been more than justified, he gently but firmly escorted me out the door.

That kindness provoked something of an out-of-body experience. After he released his iron grip from my elbow and sent me reeling into the night, I glimpsed myself as if from a distance. It wasn’t an attractive sight. I realized that if I was acting like this now, it would only get worse. I’d end up as one of those guys who hang around Butte forever, whining about the good old days.

So I knew. I had to go.

In my very limited experience, the way people got out of Butte was by joining the military. Though I’d never really considered it before, in that instant I was committed. The future, or fate, or whatever, kicked into high gear.

*  *  *

THESE DAYS SOME PEOPLE MIGHT call my childhood “free range.” Saturday mornings I was out the door after breakfast and back only when the streetlights amped up. Kids ran in packs in my neighborhood. We ambushed each other with toy guns and played ninja warriors, leaping off rooftops and doing a bunch of other harebrained stuff I’d kill my kids for doing. We all went to see Rambo at the Butte Plaza Mall. That was pretty cool. Everybody wanted to be that guy blowing away evildoers with his M60. But to me, it was all fantasy, no more real than the increasingly sophisticated shooter video games that competed for our attention. The actual military was never huge in my life. I was never going to be in it, so I didn’t think much about it. I just wanted to play, put on camouflage, and pretend to shoot my friends.

At first glance, Butte might not seem like an idyllic place to grow up. It’s a mining town whose best years were in the early twentieth century, when every bullet in every rifle sent Over There during World War I was made of copper—most of it mined in Butte. The population hit a peak of 100,000 in 1920 and by the time I came along had dipped by about two-thirds. The residential areas mingled with pit mines, and the entire town was built on a plateau next to the biggest pit of all, Berkeley Pit, an immense, defunct, open-pit copper mine a mile wide and a third of a mile deep. Between the time it opened in 1955 and its closure on Earth Day 1982, a billion tons of ore and waste rock had been wrenched out of its depths. When the sump pumps shut off for the last time, ground water began a slow rise, leaching acids and heavy metals from the gaping wound in the earth. The water that filled the pit was toxic enough to kill any geese that possessed the poor judgment to splash down there. Eventually, the Berkeley Pit was declared the largest Superfund toxic waste site in the country.

But I was more focused on other features of Butte, specifically metal hoops that hung ten feet above gymnasium floors, and the deer, elk, and antelope that sprinted through the wild Rockies, which rose up like a frozen tsunami on the other side of town.

My dad, the son of a miner, was a stockbroker and my mom was a math teacher (I took her class three times—in seventh and eighth grades and again in high school). My parents divorced when I was six or seven. To me, having two parents who lived apart seemed almost natural. I don’t remember their living together. My dad was always close by and around whenever we needed him, but the usual setup was to go with him every other weekend. That was fine with my siblings and me; all of our friends were near my mom’s house and we liked to have weekends to play outside: kick the can, war, ninjas, or climbing and roof-jumping. We all played together, except the climbing and jumping. Kris, my elder sister, wanted none of that. But I could force my sister Kelley, younger than me by three years, to come along. She desperately wanted to fit in. So up we went on the roof, and off we jumped. These days I’d give my son an earful if he pulled that shit, but being a kid, I didn’t think about the risk. It was just fun. Kelley was my best friend for years; I even made her sign a contract binding her to being my teammate for two-on-two football on the church lawn. She was a damn good receiver and one hell of an athlete all through college.

My older brother, Tom, was a complete dick up until he was in high school. Then some switch flipped and he became awesome. Or maybe I just stopped being so annoying. Whatever. Some magic happened and he became the funniest person I knew, and All-State in cross-country. He taught himself guitar and his first band was called The Fake ID’s. That’s how young they were. He still plays and has his own morning show on a local radio station.

Kris was always the most levelheaded of us, but my mom will disagree. Maybe they were too much alike, and sometimes sparks flew. Kris was always tolerant of me, easy to talk to, and the best laugher I’ve ever known. She was meticulous, got straight A’s forever, and was gentle—when she wasn’t kicking my ass, which she could do up to my junior year in high school . . . possibly longer.

My mom and dad maintained a cooperative, cordial relationship throughout my childhood. If they had any big problems with each other, they never let my siblings or me see it. The split living was actually good for my parents. My mom worked at the junior high, which was next to the high school so she could get us to school and home. She loved being a mom, but she got every other weekend off to go out on the town with her crazy,...