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, <i>The Operator</i> ranges across SEAL Team Operator Robert O'Neill's awe-inspiring four-hundred-mission career, which included his involvement in attempts to rescue &quot;Lone Survivor&quot; 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.<br><br>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<i>,</i> 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.<br> <br><i>The Operator </i>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.