The Navy SEAL who pulled the trigger on Osama bin Laden and killed the terrorist behind the September 11 attacks says that 15 years later, one decision has continued to haunt him.
On September 11, 2001, four passenger planes were hijacked in the eastern United States and used as weapons.
Two of those planes were flown straight into the towers of the World Trade Center in New York, another tore into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, and a fourth – flight 93 – never reached its target after passengers fought back, crashing instead into a field in rural Pennsylvania.
Nearly 3,000 people were killed and thousands more were injured. Investigators later tied all 19 hijackers to al Qaeda, and Osama bin Laden admitted he was behind the attacks, the FBI reports.
In the years that followed, U.S. intelligence tracked bin Laden to a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where a special operations unit carried out a raid on May 2, 2011, under orders from President Barack Obama.
‘What in the world?’
Robert O’Neill, now 50, was part of SEAL Team Six that night, but when the mission first came into focus, it didn’t arrive with full clarity.
“We first found out about the top-secret mission three weeks before it was executed. The first thing they said was, ‘This is not a drill, this is real,’” he told the New York Post in May 2026.
Even then, O’Neill – who was a proud supporter of Donald Trump – explained that the target wasn’t clearly laid out.
“All they told us was we found a thing in a house in a bowl in this mountain range, and you’re going to go get this thing and bring it back. What is this thing?”
The answer came during a briefing that made the scale of the mission impossible to ignore.
“They said on a Friday, go home and be with your kids, and come back Sunday for a read-in,” he 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?’”
‘Prepared for death’
From there, everything tightened. The team rehearsed repeatedly, knowing exactly how little room there would be for error once they were inside.
“This would be a one-way mission. You’re not afraid you’re gonna die, but you’re prepared for death,” the former SEAL said. “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.”
“You knew that 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***er,” said the Montana-born man, who retired from the military in 2014.
The reality of that choice followed him all the way to departure.
“The hardest part is telling your kids goodbye, because death is coming,” O’Neill said, recalling he was leaving behind a 3-year-old daughter.
‘I just shot bin Laden’
Inside the compound, the operation moved fast, lasting about nine minutes, but one moment stayed fixed.
“There was bin Laden standing there, three feet away,” O’Neill said. “I recognized him immediately. I was impressed with how skinny he was. His beard was sort of grey. His hands were on his wife Amal’s shoulders. I took it as a threat; he could blow himself up.”
He reacted on instinct, relying on the training that had been drilled into him.
“At SEAL Team Six, we shoot you twice in the head right away. I shot him twice and shot him again with my H&K 416. He crumpled on the foot of his bed,” he said.
The reality hit him almost at once, even as the mission continued moving forward.
“I just shot bin Laden – like what the f***? Everything I had ever known, everything I planned, just changed drastically.”
There was no pause and no space to process what had just happened.
“I have to clean his face, hold his head together and take a picture. One of my guys asks, ‘Hey, are you good bro?’ I said, ‘Yes, what do we do now?’”
The response came immediately, and despite the shock he was experiencing, he was pulled back into the task.
“He said go find the computers. ‘You just killed Osama bin Laden, your life is about to f***ing change, now get back to work,’ he told me,” O’Neill shared.
One regret
bin Laden was shot and killed inside the compound, and his body was buried at sea soon after, a decision O’Neill has said he regrets, as the mission has always remained tied in his mind to the people killed on September 11.
“I would have hung him from a bridge in New York City,” he said.
“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 said, adding, “She was never supposed to do that.”
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