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

This instant New York Times bestseller-a jaw-dropping, fast-paced account (New York Post) recounts SEAL Team Operator Robert ONeills incredible four-hundred-mission career, including the attempts to rescue Lone Survivor Marcus Luttrell and abducted-by-Somali-pirates Captain Richard Phillips, and which culminated in the death of the worlds most wanted terrorist-Osama bin Laden.In The Operator, Robert ONeill 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, ONeill 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 hed trained with and fought beside never made it home. Impossible to put downThe Operator is unique, surprising, a kind of counternarrative, and certainly the other half of the story of one of the worlds most famous military operationsIn the larger sense, this book is abouthow to be human while in the very same moment dealing with death, destruction, combat (Doug Stanton, New York Times bestselling author). ONeill describes the nonstop action of his deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, evokes the black humor of years-long combat, brings to vivid life the lethal efficiency of the militarys most selective units, and reveals details of the most celebrated terrorist takedown in history. This is a riveting, unvarnished, and wholly unforgettable portrait of Americas most storied commandos at war (Joby Warrick).