The Man Who Killed Osama Bin Laden- Part One

and his name is Robert O'Neill and he is the man who killed Osama bin Laden the face we are looking at is the last face that Osama bin Laden saw on earth yeah I mean if it was light enough I was definitely last person you saw you trained on targets with his face not him yeah what was it like to kill the actual guy it wasn't it wasn't real it was it was another guy in the house that we shot it didn't sink in it didn't sink in for a while has it sunk in now uh yeah it has now I've thought about it every day for a number of years I'm still trying to figure out if it's the best thing I've ever done the worst thing I've ever done it how could it be the best we accomplished our mission and and I was a big part of it well I was a part of it and how could it be the worst I don't know what's gonna happen and it's something I have to live with every day before the war on terror and the hunt for Osama bin Laden took Rob to the farthest reaches of the globe the quiet mining town of Butte Montana was home this is where his story begins rob O'Neil had a normal childhood he played basketball for Butte Central Catholic High School worked odd jobs around town and was always surrounded by family and friends what's it like coming back to Butte it's always great coming back to it's a great home field this is home this right Club but is everything so familiar has really changed 20 years and so where are you taking me we're going into the freeway for a what's called a watch out now this is the first stop every time I fly in if I fly into Butte we come right here if I find it balls maybe drive from Bozeman on the way over I text everyone saying good job say oh they are thank you and this is your favorite sandwich in the world in the world yeah this is this is the this is the reason to come home it's into Butte is to get one of these Cheers buuuut was a copper blue town in the late 1800s and later grew into Montana's fifth largest city it's just it's a really good town it's a blue-collar town we've got a lot of history with the mines people working hard people playing hard people eating hard a lot a lot of good food here there's great people great attitudes like many Montana natives much of Rob's childhood was spent outdoors loved skiing snowboarding hunting this time the hunt week is nice love fishing really good Mountains for hiking a lot outdoor type stuff shooting how old were you when you first fired a gun I was probably about 13 maybe 12 or 13 write it all the time my dad and I started having em I was too young to hunt you'd have to be a certain age but I could go hunting once he was old enough hunting trips with his father became a favorite pastime we really got into it we go out of every chance we had obviously every every weekend and then if you know permission was given during the week after high school graduation Rob didn't really know what was next I had a job at McDonald's it was my first job I worked in a place called the boo Villa which is a pizza place uptown Butte and bar an awesome best taco pizza in the world I moved furniture for a little while worked in a mine for a few months but rather than follow the path of many who have turned jobs in the mines into a lifelong career Rob wanted something different it was here that he learned to drive a car it was here that he learned to fire a gun and it was here that fate intervened and led him through the doors of a military recruiting office I was in a relationship with the young lady and that went sideways and that was kind of the tipping point time to leave town and it was funny when I got to the Navy 95% of the guys there were there for the same reason [Music] rob O'Neil had one year of college under his belt a job delivering pizzas and only a basic grasp of swimming when a recruiter convinced him to enlist and become a Navy SEAL by January 1996 after five months of intensive swim training Rob found himself in Great Lakes Illinois for Navy boot camp but boot camp was nothing compared to what came next buds for basic underwater demolition SEAL training blitz recruits through some of the most grueling physical punishment anyone can endure most recruits don't even pass the first phase physical conditioning general workouts everyday eventually we're into you know a thousand push-ups a day a thousand sit-ups a day a thousand flutter kicks a day hundreds of pull-ups a bunch of times around the big scary optional course there's obstacles everything the first time you do it you know if it fall out you're gonna break your neck miles and miles of soft sand you're running it all the time it's a mile from where we work out to the galley so you're running six miles a day just to eat and then the other 12 miles on top of that lots of swimming lots of pool drills and then just the instructors messing with you I mean you have to run everybody can't walk anywhere if you're gonna do stuff you're running and then structure the finding drop you and every time you drop it's like 25 push-ups at first and it goes to 35 min 50 as a favor go on there's tests every single day pass or fail like the drown proofing which is pretty famous where they tie your hands behind your back and your feet together throw in the water for 45 minutes at a time probably were like you're exhaling all the air so you can sink kick off the bottom come up and breathe executed f10 to swim the length of the pool floating is hard when you're tied up and make it float for five minutes you can't touch the bottom and then swim down and grab a mask with you teeth and do flips and come up and show them and then they watch out not die and that's where a lot of people lose it because for some reason I guess it's not natural to be tied up in thrown ok there's a five and a half nautical mile to swim for completion 14 mile run at one point we actually did the five and a half mile swim twice in four days there's a Friday that we did it and the instructors didn't like us very much and they said as opposed to swimming with the current we're gonna go down to Mexico and swim back to Coronado because the tides are going that way even though for the past 2002 haven't been so we swam against the current and we hit the timeline where hypothermia was said in the matter what you learned five and a half hours or whatever and they pulled guys maybe 50 meters from the end so we technically didn't finish it so we came in Monday and they were like hey we're gonna have the dive physics class today but instead since we didn't finish the five and a half mile swim we're just gonna do that so go grab your fins and that's probably the meanest thing anyone's ever done every week you have a test of two mileage this one for time I've tested five minutes four mile run for time and the time de creation you go on in between these tests you're doing calisthenics in getting getting your butt kicked part of the way through physical conditioning comes hell week five and a half days of non-stop training twenty hours a day with it most four hours of sleep at night during hell week recruits run more than 200 miles the way that I remember feeling was I know I have a past I know I came from somewhere but that's gone and I have no future I am gonna be in hell for the rest of my life that's what it felt like this is the worst place I've ever been until you get a day off then it's the best thing you're doing because they give you weekends off because you need a term heal so you know the saying is everybody wants to be a frogman on Friday especially when the Sun still up and Sunday night you're like oh boy here we go again and yeah we're just a miserable experience the next phase of SEAL training includes combat diving and scuba where recruits learn to operate above water and deep beneath the surface after that comes land warfare explosives and weapons training and small unit tactics followed by 26 weeks of more advanced SEAL qualification training there never really was a I'm sure I can do it it's just I'm sure I'm not gonna quit and I don't know if that's part of the attitude here I mean I knew I wasn't gonna there was no chance of me quitting they're gonna throw me out or I'm gonna get hurt but I'm not gonna just say you got better and and you know some good advice that was given to me just little things like I had an instructor wants to tell me I'm never gonna ask you to do anything impossible so it'll be really hard but it's not impossible you can do it just don't quit and then another guy said to me I don't understand how you can quit because when you quit you take your helmet off and your names on it and you ring the bell you put the helmet down the helmets are in line and someone who said to me how can you take how can you quit and put a helmet with your father's name in the quitters line it's like that's just good advice 26 weeks into it it's graduation week it's like holy crap I'm gonna make it and he did but the training didn't end at graduation then it was off to parachute school and even more advanced pre-deployment courses you'd survive SEAL training you become a Navy SEAL officially what was your first job my first job we I was assigned to a platoon Bravo platoon and SEAL team two we went to the range and we were shooting Navy qualifications and I was a pretty good shot and I did so well my boss said well this was new guys a good shooter listened to sniper school so during that first we called it a work up which is the training secondly platoon does before deploys they sent me to Camp Atterbury Indiana for Naval Special Warfare Scout Sniper school and I became a sniper and soon the boy from Butte Montana who one year before had been delivering taco pizzas was a Navy SEAL sniper coming up next on the man who killed Osama bin Laden we've said the words Osama bin Laden within 30 seconds by the time Rob was 21 years old he was a Navy SEAL sniper deployed overseas it was a fairly quiet time to serve in the United States military but then in an instant everything changed [Music] I was in the Operations Office at Naval Special Warfare group two which is in Stuttgart Germany and I was catching up on emails and sitting there with a couple of the operations officers things like that and it went to breaking news we have a very tragic alert for you right now an incredible plane crash into the World Trade Center here at the lower tip of Manhattan the first reports were you know a small plane and head and they showed it then it's like wow that's the entire building that wasn't a small plane and then we start saying let's look how clear it is this is something else and we're actually not quite ahead of it another plane just flew into the second tower we saw the second plane hit and instantly like that's it and we've said the words Osama bin Laden within 30 seconds we knew everything had just changed we didn't know what was gonna happen a shot in the gut it was it was surreal it was painful and it was it was infuriating to see the you know the symbol of the greatest nation and gone you know and then he got people dancing the streets overseas he got the footage of Osama bin Laden McKay laughing about it it's just one of those like ok I guess it's on and we're gonna get you Rob and his teammates were itching to get into the fight but if the invasion of Afghanistan began they would have to wait they were gonna send the tier 1 guys in from the Army and SEAL Team 6 as the war started tactics were trickling down from SEAL team 6 because we all we knew at that time anyone knew were Vietnam tactics cuz we hadn't been to war seriously since Vietnam I mean there's you know Grenada Panama Desert Storm which was you know a couple hours so no we only knew what we knew we only knew Vietnam but then there's the guys coming back saying okay this is what guys are doing in gunfights so they honed their craft and continued to train while in the Middle East another storm was brewing this hour American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger that's 2003 and the invasion in Iraq is happening so we're like we're definitely gonna be a part of that and so we were actually the Mediterranean Sea on an amphibious ship and we were gonna go in with the Marines as they invaded but as they headed towards a rank another crisis was flaring up Liberia's civil war had made the country extremely dangerous so President Bush ordered the seals and a group of Marines to evacuate all Americans to safety so we ended up turning around and going to Liberia while everyone else went to war we swam into Liberia and in a survey the beach some rich building and grabbed the Americans out so we missed the war that deployment - and then that was when I figured it was some of those SEAL Team six was there fighting everywhere and that was the decision I made being a member of SEAL Team six is the ultimate goal of many Navy SEALs officially known as the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group or dev great they are the best of the best the proverbial tip of the spear becoming a member however it's no easy feat to get into SEAL team 6 now they're training Navy SEALs to be part of a no-fail team 50% of the Navy SEALs a trap shield team six don't make it that's saying something because these are serious dudes things heated up quickly with SEAL team 6 tasked with hunting down insurgents and high-value targets in Iraq and Afghanistan probably six out of seven nights a week that we would go on that's really where we learn how to fight that's where we got as good as we did because we've learned from the enemy the enemy knew our tactics before we started fighting them in Iraq and they use them against us what would a night where you're working be like the intelligence people worked around the clock so we generally go in there find out what they've been watching all day and based on what they're watching what they found we would pick a place to go come up with a plan brief the plan get on the helicopters were parked right outside fly away and then go into a house find the bad guys take them and their stuff bring them back and find more targets based on what they tell you and then the next nights the same thing how much concern was there that the houses were booby-trapped there's concern that became one of their tactics where they would rigged a house and wait for people to enter and blow it up you just kind of need to look for what doesn't belong here but yeah I mean it's spooky dude I've walked in houses where there were bombs we went in we're face-to-face with a big drum of homemade explosives right in the middle of the room wired you'd say the code word for what means get out of here quietly but abruptly and then people jumping off the roof did you ever think there was a chance you were gonna hold the sheets down to see if somebody had a vest and when you look it's been locked no during those raids it was all low level thugs that were making bombs and killing Americans every one of these guys you take off the street were saving someone's lives because there are people in every branch of the military that had a much more dangerous job that we did because we were able to fight on our terms we got people out there Marines army your Navy is out there driving around in vehicles wondering when they're gonna blow up it was better to target IUD makers because you're taking them off the battlefield coming up next before the bin Laden mission Rob was on the frontline of another crisis that would end up as a Hollywood blockbuster the rescue of Captain Richard Phillips that story and never-before-seen video from that mission when the man who killed Osama bin Laden continues missions executed by Naval Special Warfare group are classified the American people will never hear about most of them but sometimes their actions make headlines back home and the public gets a small glimpse into the lives of seals April 2009 SEAL Team 6 was home in the States when eight thousand miles away the massive container ship Maersk Alabama was hijacked by pirates off the coast of Somalia the dramatic events were portrayed in the Tom Hanks movie captain Phillips the mayor's crew fought back against the Pirates but the Pirates took a lifeboat and escaped with their hostage captain Richard Phillips soon news reached the United States an American was being held captive on a tiny lifeboat in the middle of the Indian Ocean we knew we had a system in place that's kind of our specialty is to rescue people in the ocean the thing unfolded and people were spinning up and we kind of knew that something's gonna happen because they're not the negotiations are coming well and these guys are doing this is getting kind of rugged American Navy ships and helicopters were able to block the life boat carrying captain Phillips and his Somali pirate kidnappers from reaching Somalia even as the Pirates opened fire at the same time the call was made send in the seals Good Friday April 10th which is my birthday and I was at a tea party for Easter and my kids preschool and we were actually sitting the kids down getting them stuff to eat when we got the message and we're going so I had to leave from a preschool classroom to jump into the Indian Ocean to rest there's 7-eleven outside the base and I stopped there to get some items I would want to jump with tobacco and money and stuff like that and I stopped down there's a guy in front of me who was in no hurry whatsoever and I'm kind of her in you know I said it my time to be there one of the things he was buying was a USA Today he slammed it down the paper all patriotic and he was like I'm sure wish someone would do something about this that's kind of fun it's like you know what buddy if you hurry up pay for yourself we will by that time the lifeboat had run out of fuel and the Pirates agreed to have it towed behind the USS Bainbridge but they kept captain Phillips at gunpoint demanding safe passage to Somalia where they could hold him for ransom we thought we thought of everything how to rescue people but no one ever thought of a fully encompass lifeboat being told by a navy cruiser how long from the time at the tea party with the pager went off did you have to get to base we had a full head count in the Indian Ocean everyone accounted for 15 hours 46 minutes after the page the SEALs flew to the Indian Ocean in a c-17 transport plane once on site the back of the c-17 opened and they dropped their boats we have the capability of putting boats out of a plane into the water and then we jump behind we find the boat we get the boat then we drive the boat somewhere then one after another dozens of seals parachuted from the plane to the ocean below including one support staffer who had never jumped from a plane before regardless of the wars we were fighting we were always training back home on the hostage rescue agency trying to maintain our heritage of being proficient in the water which wish we were meanwhile in the lifeboat tension grew with another team of SEAL snipers positioned on the back of the Bainbridge and Captain Phillips life in danger the order came down take the shot execute now the movie made it look cool but that wasn't the plan we weren't going there to kill people we're just going to try and get our guy back the fact that you guys had a full head count 15 hours and 46 minutes after first getting the page what does that say about the guys you work with they're incredible I mean everything from who's flying the airplanes who packed the boats up who rigged the parachutes who trained the tandem masters to jump a guy that's never jumped before simply getting all the stuff to the aircraft in time it's a moment of pride just the efficiency of the US military when it needs to be I mean it makes you realize it if we wanted to take the gloves off and really hurt people that wouldn't be a problem but you have rules we're the good guys coming up next Rob and SEAL team 6 prepare for the mission of a lifetime [Music] as the war in Afghanistan stretched into its tenth year it was easy to think that the world's most wanted terrorists might never be found ain't even got to the point during the wars I would I was a tactic I would tactically question people on target suspects whether or not and we would ask them almost because out of boredom like you know you know whose house is this who's the man of the house who lives here and then we'd say where's us on the Laden and they would laugh and we were left it's like who like you're never gonna find him the CIA was trying to track down Osama bin Laden through a variety of different avenues Mark Bowden is the author of Black Hawk Down and the finish the killing of Osama bin Laden one of the primary threads was thought to be his courier system and an individual who was known who was called al Kuwaiti they followed him as his vehicle returned to this house in a body bag as they watched more and more they realized that they there was a this man called the Pacer who walked around in the garden outside and a lot of the people watching who had seen images of bin Laden from above in the past believed that that was him the big question was how to proceed one of the first options they considered was to bomb the compound which would have killed everyone in it and probably some people living nearby the neighbors are gonna die everyone the house gonna die and then we'll never know if we got him they also prepared the option of a very small missile or bullet if you wish shot from a drone that would target an individual but that was an untested weapon they weren't sure they wanted to risk shooting and missing because if they shot it missed it would tip off a bin Laden if that was him and he'd vanished again they briefly considered a joint effort with the Pakistanis and some American forces and they quickly got rid of that one because the Pakistanis will tell the people in the house were coming and he won't be there then there was us sending in a SEAL team was by far the riskiest option and it wasn't just a risk of losing those men or of collateral damage on the ground there was also the possibility that the truven in the Pakistani airspace would be noticed after much deliberation the call was made we just gotten back from deployment number 11 for me we went to Miami to dive we got the call from there that they were calling back a couple of us not all of us and other guys from other trips have been recalled they're all senior guys and they sat us in a room and they said hey we found a thing and the things in the house and the house is in a bowl and the bowls in the country and you're gonna go to that house and you're gonna get a thing you're gonna bring it back to us that was it we assumed it was Qaddafi because it was the Arab Spring how we getting I can't tell you whereas the country can't tell you what's the thing can't tell you so we assumed we would be flying off a navy ship from the Mediterranean into Libya and then we'd go in there grab Qaddafi and bring him out they told us a couple of things like we're gonna read you in eventually and here's who's gonna be there and they said a few names didn't make sense you know a few of us were talking a couple days later about this person this person why would they be there it's bin Laden if they found him we're gonna get him the CIA had been doing extensive surveillance on the mysterious compound and built a scale model that was an exact replica we knew it was going to be a house we were gonna separate the four teams so we were able to get an idea of what the external part of the target looked like we knew every single part of the exterior every opening every garden every path how high the walls were would practice flying in and then assaulting the plan was to fast room we're gonna fast drove all the guys from - Warren the first helicopter right in front of the main house out of both sides - - would at the same time drop some guys outside of the North End correctional security then put the rest of us on the roof once we were on the roof we could take it from the top and bottom simultaneously we practiced the hit and then we practice leaving and then we do it all again we had to plan down I mean we like we could have watched the date he told us no problem what did the CIA analyst was now famous for being the subject of zero dark thirty to tell you if you want to kill him he's on the third floor hundred percent were you a hundred percent I believe her when you're drawing up the plan in the United States where were you supposed to be initially I was going to be the team leader for external security there was a couple of snipers and a medic and I was gonna be the team leader outside so we were gonna get off our helicopter it was gonna drop us off and the rest of the guys were gonna go to the rooftop the analysts told me if you want to get a shot at bin Laden he's on the third floor so I actually talked myself out of a team leader spot so I could stay on the helicopter and then go to the roof and then that was what we called the martyrs brigade so we've been a volunteer to get on the roof and we were to jump into the balcony and then whenever shootout with the mud from the balcony inside the more we trained on it the more we realized this is gonna be a one-way mission we're gonna go and we're not gonna come back we're gonna die when the house blows up we're gonna die when he blows up nowhere we're gonna be there too long we get arrested by the Pakistanis and we're gonna spend the rest of our short lives in Pakistan prisoner what's it like training for something so hard so intensely when you don't think that you're going to survive the mission well it was worth it because this is it we would have moments we joke around and laugh but tell him something kind of hit you against like all right let's get serious again cuz this is gonna happen innit we're not coming home was that as sad yeah dealing no it was uh it was more of a you know we're gonna die eventually this is a good way to go and it's worth it to kill him because we're he's gonna die with us when you heard that there were some other options did any part of you hope that the president picked one that did not require sending you to possibly die die the thought was there but we wanted to go we really wanted to do this that's this is why we're all here now and just to be some part of something so historic you can't you can't ask for more I mean it would would there have been some sort of relief maybe you know okay we didn't go when they bombed it great but we wanted it bad why it's it that's it doesn't get any better this is this is it this is why we're we're at war because of this guy and now we're gonna go get him [Music] tell me about the letters that you wrote your kids I wrote one to pretty much everybody it was more of an explanation of why we went why it was noble and why I'm not afraid with the best people in the world were going on the most important mission since Washington crossed the Delaware and it's worth it you know just you know so I'm sorry that you're upset you know we I died with with the people I should have died with yeah I'm never sad you know there's a few temperatures in the pages it's weird to the last I mean I'm gonna call people but I'm this letter they're gonna get from the explaining why he had happen did you think they wouldn't understand no they'd all understand the kids probably wouldn't but they don't think eventually they would and that's a piece of paper but they would have for their whole life yeah that piece of paper would be the last advice they ever got yes from there - yes what you say like I talked about their weddings hope you know wishing them happiness take care of their mom you know there's some apologies in there for sorry I'm not around the first thing I did when I got home was shrimp I don't know if I'm happy about that but they're gone why'd you shrug I didn't wanted me to be I don't want anybody pretty why not it didn't happen and I thought it was gonna be well instead of something horrible happen if something great happened instead before you left you also called your dad I did he was the last person I called I was actually in my gear getting ready to launch on something I couldn't tell him and I called him to say goodbye and thanks for everything the interesting part of our conversation I don't know what he's doing as I look back on it I get choked up going into it you know he they might be heading to some deserted island to do something fairly benign if that's ever possible with SEAL Team six guys so I really don't know what he's up to but he's calling me last I know that he's telling me that he's boarding the bird I'm the last when he calls and he's checking in time to thanking me for a lot of things but just check me in I couldn't say what's going on I was like hey sometimes it's nice that we got to know each other something like that something that really got to him and and I wasn't I wasn't trying to be sad and I wasn't sad at the time I was more excited just saying hey because he knew I'd gone somewhere he didn't have any idea where I was and he just he knew something was up and so I think for a while and I have a very busy mind even though I'm out here in a Walmart parking lot where the biggest hazard is parallel parking for me all of a sudden things are hitting me he told me later that he was in his truck at a Walmart at the Walmart right down the street here and after I hung up the phone he couldn't get out his car for 20 minutes there was there was something in the in the tone that got me and then he was walking around the Walmart he ran into his sister who is a nurse what would a better time to run into my sister a practicing registered nurse who knows of course everything she sees me and I looked like him there's two words I love to mispronounce they're called apoplectic and catatonic I'm probably a combination of both and she kind of just takes me to the side what's wrong [Music] looking back now I really do know what's wrong at the time I'm guessing my mind is all over the place but it's you know after 17 years I think it's over for him what we typically say in every phone call is I tell Rob how proud of him I am to this day and that I love him [Music] in this in this call I remember I said I wish I could go with you just would eat just what he needs you know some sixty plus year old guy tagging along on an adventure that he can't even tell me about but it was it's just the emotion now of what I know to be the importance then you know after three years and four months it should get better then it will and then I guess he went home and a few hours later it's more of a you've got to be kidding me type stuff and then he's watching the press conference where he said he remembers watching Geraldo and they're speculating and then as more of is everyone okay and followed by a pride and you know he knows a story better than I did I just remember making that call and then getting on a helicopter that leave we watch outside there was a bonfire going the boss on both sides of the Admiral and the sergeant major were there as was the other seals there's a couple proud words from our bosses and instead of the usual handshake to the other seals what a Michigan minute handshake okay I'd seen a couple minutes and have a good fight now I was hugging everyone we all knew that the chances of dying really high so just hugging the other guys looking at the other my brothers from the other squadron it was just uh you know I can only imagine it's like a feeling in the tunnel for an NFL player before he's about to run on the field for modern thoughts people's like it is time to do my job we drove the helicopters and then we had a minute around there we were sitting there talking guys did their last thing they needed to do before we get on for a long ride then we got in the helicopters when we launched we were the end we were the fists we were the FDNY we were the NYPD we were the American people and when President Bush said freedom will be defended humana for everyone we were everyone coming up tomorrow night on part two of the man who killed Osama bin Laden two minutes out the doors open and it's not a training site in the mountains in the United States I knew there would be a hallway I knew there'd be ones left to the side I knew he'd be a stairwell at the end standing on two feet in front of me with his hands on his wife was the face I'd seen thousands of times uvl my first thought was we got him we got him we just ended the war it would be irresponsible of me not to give everyone else closure I remember a guy standing up in front of me telling me explaining to this friend's daughter why did God do this every single day and he said God didn't do this the devil did this

Channel: Dom mosa

Views: 2,252,052

Rating: 4.6711769 out of 5

Keywords: alyksander, Navy Seals, Navy, SEAL, Osama Bin Laden, killing, UBL, OBL, fox news, interview, part one, Osama, bin, laden, Usama, The man who killed usama bin laden, Bush, News, Army, George, Fox News Radio (Radio Network), Death Of Osama Bin Laden (Military Conflict), DevGru, Seal Team Six, Soldiers, America, Megyn Kelly (TV Personality)

Id: W6YpWSfZ150

Length: 36min 30sec (2190 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 14 2014