The former Navy SEAL who shot and killed Usama bin Laden tells Fox News’ Peter Doocy in an exclusive interview that it was "just luck" he ended up being the man to pull the trigger.
In part two of “The Man Who Killed Usama bin Laden," airing Wednesday at 10 p.m. ET, Rob O'Neill says it was just chance that he ended up being the shooter in the famous mission at bin Laden's compound in Pakistan in 2011.
He also describes the team's harrowing 90-minute flight back to Afghanistan after completing the raid.
"Eighty-something minutes into it, somebody came over the radio to everybody and said, 'Alright gentleman for the first time in your lives you’re going to be happy to hear this…welcome to Afghanistan,’” he says. “And everyone was like; oh my God…we just did it. We just pulled it off and we got him. And we all lived. We’re all fine. It was insane. So then, there was high-fiving and stuff. Guys were, cause I mean, we got Usama bin Laden and we’re going to live…amazing."
In part one of “The Man Who Killed Usama bin Laden," O’Neill described how he went from a kid growing up in Butte, Montana to become the highly-trained SEAL who pulled the trigger in the famous mission at bin Laden's compound.
O'Neill, who rose up in the ranks to become a member of the Navy's elite SEAL Team 6, had previously been a part of such missions as the rescue of the crew of the Maersk Alabama from Somali pirates, which was depicted in the movie "Captain Phillips."
He described to Doocy how he discovered he was embarking on the mission to kill bin Laden.
“They told us a couple of things like we’re going to read you in eventually and here’s who's going to be there…and they said a few names that didn’t make sense,” O’Neill said. “A few of us were talking a couple days later about this person, this person why would they be there… It’s bin Laden…they found him…we’re going to go get him.”
O’Neill said he and the other SEALs did not think they would survive the mission.
“The more we trained on it, the more we realized…this is going to be a one-way mission,” he said. “We’re going to go and we’re not going to come back. We’re going to die when the house blows up. We’re going to die when he blows up. Or we are going to be there too long and we’ll get arrested by the Pakistanis and we’re going to spend the rest of our short lives in Pakistan prison.”
Despite the risks, O'Neill said he did not hope that President Obama would choose another tactic to take out bin Laden, and he even pushed to become a part of the group that landed at the compound.
He said that the soldiers felt that the mission would be worth sacrificing their own lives, saying "we are going to die eventually, this is a good way to go and it's worth it to kill him. He's going to die with us."
"To be part of something so historic, you can't ask for more...we wanted it bad," he said. "It doesn’t get any better. This is it this is why we're here. We are at war because of this guy and now we are going to go get him."
O'Neill said he believes he was "definitely" the last person bin Laden saw before he died, and he has thought about the mission every day in the years since it happened.
"I’m still trying to figure out if it’s the best thing I’ve ever done or the worst thing I’ve ever done," he said.
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