Recounting the Navy SEAL Team 6 mission that took out 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, SEAL Robert O'Neill, who shot the terrorist leader, told Newsmax TV the entire team on the 2-hour helicopter ride accepted it as a "one-way mission."
"This one was a little bit different because we knew for three weeks we were going after Osama bin Laden," O'Neill told "Saturday Report." "We accepted the one-way mission. We're going in there. We can die, but we're doing it for the people who died in lower Manhattan, people who died in the Pentagon, and the people who were the first to fight al-Qaida on Flight 93 that crashed in Pennsylvania.
"And we thought about those guys, those men and women, the coolest thing about those Americans is they took a vote: 'We're going to vote if we're going to fight.' So we thought about them."
In an extraordinarily telling interview with host Carl Higbie, a fellow former Navy SEAL, O'Neill noted the bravery and calm of the Marines on the secret, overnight mission to Abbottabad, Pakistan.
"Not to brag how cool some of these team guys are," O'Neill told Higbie, "they were like, 'look, we do this every night; we fly somewhere, we mess with some people, this is a longer ride. We're going to be fine.'
"I wasn't quite that cool, but some guys fell asleep on the helicopter ride in: I'm like, 'you're asleep on the ride to bin Laden's house. You have ice in your veins.'"
O'Neill, speaking to critics who felt the operation to get bid Laden was in part acts of "war crimes," noted the care American soldiers took with the bin Laden family during the covert mission.
"I don't think it breeds hate; what I like about it is we're the good guys, and you know this Carl," O'Neill told Higbie.
"But the thing that happened to me in that room after I shot bin Laden, I moved his wife Amal to the side and looked down and his 2-year-old son was there, and as a father, I said, 'this poor kid has nothing to do with this,' and I felt bad for the kid.
"You know what al Qaida would have done to our kids?
"We made sure the kids were not scared, not more afraid than they need to be," he continued.
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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