When I was first around him, as he talked I would always try to imagine the Shooter geared up and a foot away from bin Laden, whose life ended in the next moment with three shots to the center of his forehead. And we would talk for hours about the mission to get bin Laden and about how, over the celebrated corpse in front of them on a tarp in a hangar in Jalalabad, he had given the magazine from his rifle with all but three lethally spent bullets left in it to the female CIA analyst whose dogged intel work and intuition led the fighters into that night. I would come to know about the Shooter's hundreds of combat missions, his twelve long-term SEAL-team deployments, his thirty-plus kills of enemy combatants, often eyeball to eyeball. "That's the reason Al Qaeda has been decimated," he joked, "because she broke my fucking heart." You do not have snipers in the Navy.' But he brought me into his office and it was a pretty sweet deal. "He asked me what I was going to do with my life. To escape, he almost by accident found himself in a Navy recruiter's office. In my yard, the Shooter told his story about joining the Navy at nineteen, after a girl broke his heart. He's played with my kids and my dogs and been a hilarious, engaging gentleman around my wife. We would end up intimately familiar with each other's lives. I didn't know him well enough then to tell whether a glass of his favorite single malt, Lagavulin, was making him less or more edgy. He stood up several times with an apologetic gripe about the heat, leaving a perspiration stain on the seat-back cushion. But the Shooter was sweating as he talked about his uncertain future, his plans to leave the Navy and SEAL Team 6. It was a mild spring day, April 2012, and our small group, including a few of his friends and family, was shielded from the sun by the patchwork shadows of maple trees. The man who shot and killed Osama bin Laden sat in a wicker chair in my backyard, wondering how he was going to feed his wife and kids or pay for their medical care. Note: A correction is appended to the end of this story. This piece was reported in cooperation with CIR. Phil Bronstein is the former editor of the San Francisco Chronicle and currently serves as executive chairman of the Center for Investigative Reporting.
This article was published in the March 2013 issue. (Originally kept anonymous to protect him and his family, "the Shooter" has since the story's publication identified himself as SEAL veteran Robert O'Neill.) In light of the controversial claims in Seymour Hersh's new story on the death of Osama bin Laden, here is "The Shooter," Phil Bronstein's definitive account of the SEAL Team 6 operation that killed the al Qaeda leader, from the March 2013 issue.
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