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

A stirringly evocative, thought-provoking, and often jaw-dropping account, The Operator ranges across SEAL Team Operator Robert O Neill s awe-inspiring four-hundred-mission career, which included his involvement in attempts to rescue Lone Survivor Marcus Luttrell and abducted-by-Somali-pirates Captain Richard Phillips and which culminated in those famous three shots that dispatched the world s most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden.

In these pages, O Neill describes his idyllic childhood in Butte, Montana; his impulsive decision to join the SEALs; the arduous evaluation and training process; and the even tougher gauntlet he had to run to join the SEALs most elite unit. After officially becoming a SEAL, O Neill would spend more than a decade in the most intense counterterror effort in US history. For extended periods, not a night passed without him and his small team recording multiple enemy kills and though he was lucky enough to survive, several of the SEALs he d trained with and fought beside never made it home.

The Operator describes the nonstop action of O Neill s deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, evokes the black humor of years-long combat, brings to vivid life the lethal efficiency of the military s most selective units, and reveals firsthand details of the most celebrated terrorist takedown in history.