A Chat With The Navy Seal Who Shot Osama bin Laden
by John Grimaldi
“We went up the stairs. My buddy jumped on the people he thought were wearing suicide vests. He went left, I went right. And that’s when I saw Osama bin Laden standing up taller than I thought.” That’s how former U.S. Navy SEAL Team 6 member, senior chief petty officer Robert O’Neill recalled the moments before he put a bullet in bin Laden’s head. In a recent interview with Rebecca Weber, CEO of the Association of Mature American Citizens, on AMAC’s Better For America podcast, he went on to describe his encounter with the founder of the diabolical terrorist organization, al Qaeda, who was directly responsible for the deaths of hundreds upon hundreds of innocent civilians throughout the world. He upped the ante on September 11, 2001 when his henchmen launched a series of four airline bombings in the U.S., taking the lives of nearly 3,000 victims.
O’Neill continued: “He was skinnier than I thought. He had his hands on his wife, Amal’s shoulder, sort of almost pushing her toward me. And he was a matter of three feet away from me. I assumed he was a suicide bomber because he was a high threat. And so I treated him as such.” O’Neill continued, noting that he had no other choice but to eliminate the threat. “So, I shot him twice in the head and once more on the ground. And then I moved his wife out of the way. I knew other Navy SEALs would be coming in and we, being the good guys, I didn’t want her to get hurt and I didn’t want his young son that was there to get hurt. Some other guys were in there and I kind of froze. And one of my guys looked at me and said, ‘Hey, are you okay?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know’.”
Rob served as a U.S. Navy Seal from 1996 to 2012 on SEAL Team two, SEAL Team Four and SEAL Team Six. During his career, he led more than 400 combat missions all over the world. He has been awarded two Silver Stars, four Bronze Stars with Valor, a Joint Service Commendation Medal with Valor, Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medals with Valor, three presidential unit commendations and three combat action ribbons.
He concluded the interview with his SEAL Team secret for coping with adversity, noting that: “Navy SEAL training is the hardest military training in the world. Eighty-five percent [of volunteers] don’t make it through the very difficult trials starting with a thousand pushups a day, a thousand sit-ups a day, a thousand flutter kicks [a lower abdominal exercise]. It’s a mile to the chow hall from where you’re working out. So, you run six miles a day just to eat on top of an additional 12 miles a day. It’s very, very hard training. But I had an instructor who explained that it’s [all about] mindset. You need to get your mind into it, because if your mind quits, your body is going to follow. If your mind stays in it, you can make your body do anything. But that instructor gave me advice for getting through the training, and it turned out to be great advice for getting through life. He said the course is not impossible and I’m living proof of it. It will make you do something hard, followed by something very hard, followed by something harder, day after day after day. It sounds hard but don’t think about it that way. Do it like this. Wake up in the morning. Make your bed the right way and then brush your teeth. You start the day with three wins. That’s not bad. It gets you to your 4 a.m. workout on time. And as you’re feeling the pain, don’t think about it; concentrate on your next goal in life, which is making it to breakfast. After breakfast, your next goal in life is making it to lunch. And after lunch, your next goal in life is making it to dinner. After dinner, do everything you need to do to get back into that perfectly made bed. And because you took the time for yourself in the morning to make your bed the right way, regardless of how bad today was, and it was probably bad, tomorrow is a clean slate. Tomorrow is a fresh start. So, when you feel like quitting, which you will, do not quit right now, that’s your emotion. Quit tomorrow. And if you can keep quitting tomorrow, you can do anything in life. That’s how you get through.”