The Megyn Kelly Show - 20210531_robert-oneill-on-killing-bin-laden-life-lessons-fr
Aired: 2021-05-31
Duration: 01:55:38


=== Honoring Those Who Died Serving (02:40) ===

[00:00:16]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.
[00:00:28]  Hey everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
[00:00:29]  Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
[00:00:31]  We have an amazing, amazing show for you today.
[00:00:34]  I am honored to bring you Rob O'Neill, better known as the man who shot Osama bin Laden, now retired U.S. Navy SEAL, author of a book called The Operator, which was published in 2017, which I highly recommend to you, and American hero, truly an American hero.
[00:00:52]  That term gets overused in my opinion in today's day and age, but this is the real deal.
[00:00:58]  And we thought what better way to mark and honor Memorial Day than to have a real life American hero on taking us through some of the most Incredible feats of bravery that you'll ever hear about.
[00:01:11]  And it's not just the raid on the bin Laden compound and what happened that night.
[00:01:15]  When you hear what Rob O'Neill and his fellow SEALs have been involved in and the things that he's seen and done, you'll have enormous respect for him and it will make you want to try harder as a human being.
[00:01:26]  And that's the appropriate way to be feeling on Memorial Day, right?
[00:01:29]  I think for too many of us, just a three day weekend, it's an extra day off and it's the kickoff to summer and we have barbecues and we have drinks and we sort of go about our business.
[00:01:39]  We see a lot of American flags, but do we really stop?
[00:01:41]  And think about what it means.
[00:01:44]  Well, we need to.
[00:01:45]  It's about respecting and honoring those who have died while serving our country or thereafter.
[00:01:52]  It's something you can mark, you can go, you can lay flowers at a veterans ceremony or a cemetery, or you can take a moment to educate your kids on what we're doing.
[00:02:02]  What does this day mean?
[00:02:04]  There's a national moment of remembrance everywhere at 3 p.m., whatever your local time is at 3 p.m. on Memorial Day.
[00:02:12]  Just take a minute.
[00:02:13]  and take one moment of, one minute of silence and think about the heroes who made such incredible sacrifices to make this world a safer place for you, for me, for our kids, the strong, the brave, the heroic who gave everything for us.
[00:02:30]  You know, you go about your daily life and you don't think about them and you don't think about the Gold Star families who bear the scars of those sacrifices.
[00:02:37]  So it's a day, yes, to celebrate those who are brave enough to join our military and Who took these risks to celebrate their lives.
[00:02:47]  But it's also a day of somber reflection, a day for profound gratitude.
[00:02:51]  And if you're not feeling that when you listen to Rob O'Neill, then I can't help you.

=== Living Out There in Big Sky (05:50) ===

[00:02:57]  I can't help you.
[00:02:58]  You know, we played a soundbite from Ronald Reagan on Friday, talking about the meaning of Memorial Day.
[00:03:04]  And one of the things he said was freedom is not bought cheaply.
[00:03:08]  And that is 100% true.
[00:03:10]  It's the thing that we should be thinking about on a day like this.
[00:03:12]  And it's something Rob O'Neill has seen firsthand.
[00:03:17]  Proud to bring him to you.
[00:03:19]  60 seconds away.
[00:03:26]  Rob, how are you?
[00:03:28]  I'm doing very well.
[00:03:29]  How are you doing?
[00:03:31]  I'm great.
[00:03:31]  And it is an honor to talk to you this Memorial Day.
[00:03:35]  You are the perfect person.
[00:03:36]  And I'm delighted that you've given us this time this day.
[00:03:39]  Thank you.
[00:03:40]  That means the world to me.
[00:03:41]  Thank you.
[00:03:41]  I'm very excited to talk to you.
[00:03:45]  So here's something I didn't know about Rob O'Neill.
[00:03:48]  Even though I've interviewed you before, I know your story.
[00:03:51]  I'm totally impressed by you, like most sane Americans.
[00:03:54]  I did not know.
[00:03:56]  I guess I knew at one point, but forgot that you were from Butte, Montana, where we actually were.
[00:04:01]  for part of the quarantine last year during coronavirus.
[00:04:04]  I had no idea you were in Butte, Montana for the quarantine.
[00:04:07]  I was not.
[00:04:07]  I was in Tennessee.
[00:04:08]  But yeah, I was actually just in Butte, Montana last week for a golfing event for some friends of mine.
[00:04:15]  And Butte, Montana in the summer, you really can't beat it.
[00:04:18]  The weather there's gorgeous.
[00:04:19]  The people are good.
[00:04:20]  The food's really good.
[00:04:21]  The only issue with the food is they have a tendency to cover everything in gravy.
[00:04:25]  So it's not best for physiques, but everything's wonderful.
[00:04:28]  I was going to say, you say that like it's a bad thing.
[00:04:33]  Well, even when I'm in like New York City or anything, like at breakfast, and I'll order hash browns and ask for gravy, and the diner will say, Why would we have gravy?
[00:04:39]  Like potatoes and gravy.
[00:04:41]  What are we in?
[00:04:42]  China?
[00:04:44]  Why not, madam?
[00:04:46]  Yeah, so we were out in Big Sky for most of it.
[00:04:49]  And then, you know, two months into it, it was like, Okay, we got nothing to do.
[00:04:52]  We haven't seen humans.
[00:04:53]  And somebody recommended that we go to Butte, which, as you know, is totally open air and has this amazing playground, which they were recommending for our kids.
[00:05:03]  And has the.
[00:05:04]  The mining museum, which had opened up by the time we went, I think it was in May by the time we went to Butte.
[00:05:10]  And so we went into the mine and we got the tour and we had some great food and we played at the playground.
[00:05:16]  And it was such a special day.
[00:05:18]  And all three of my kids absolutely loved it, but especially at that time, my then six year old, because of course he spent the whole day that day and thereafter telling everybody he was going to butt.
[00:05:29]  Which doesn't take much.
[00:05:32]  Yeah, we've heard that one before.
[00:05:34]  The mining museum.
[00:05:35]  Is incredible too.
[00:05:36]  I'll still take the tour.
[00:05:38]  I grew up there the first 19 years of my life.
[00:05:40]  And just going up there and seeing what the miners did, how they lived.
[00:05:45]  My grandfather was a miner and how he, it was like 12 hours on, 12 hours off, a mile below the surface.
[00:05:52]  And he always would say, You only need two pairs of pants and two shirts.
[00:05:56]  You know, we wear one in the mine and then it's getting cleaned and you come back up, get some sleep, switch it out, go back into the mine.
[00:06:01]  But just to hear the stories of the work that they used to do and everything from the The copper, the gold, the molybdenum to the ghost stories, to all the stories about the red light district and then the birth of the pork chop sandwich and all that.
[00:06:15]  It's a wonderful city.
[00:06:16]  It was awesome.
[00:06:18]  It is a day that we will never forget.
[00:06:19]  It was one of the highlights of our entire year and I recommend it to everybody.
[00:06:22]  So, and just the people are so nice and beautiful.
[00:06:25]  It's just a different way of living out there.
[00:06:27]  Just sort of, I don't know, I don't want to say good clean living because that assumes too much, but just open air, you know, respect your country, love the flag, do your duty, go to work.
[00:06:39]  Don't complain.
[00:06:40]  It's just, I don't know.
[00:06:41]  It's sort of old school.
[00:06:42]  And I love that.
[00:06:43]  And that's how you grew up.
[00:06:46]  That is.
[00:06:47]  And Megan, I got to be honest, you're the first person I've ever heard in my life say the highlight of the trip to Montana was Beauty.
[00:06:53]  It was.
[00:06:54]  It was great.
[00:06:55]  We have all the pictures of us in the hard hats with the lighting, you know, the lights on our foreheads and going down under and seeing how dark it is and learning about, you know, what happened, even with the animals that they said that I think it was donkeys or it was donkey.
[00:07:08]  I think it was donkeys that they would keep in there to help.
[00:07:10]  Yeah.
[00:07:11]  And they would go blind because they were underground all the time.
[00:07:15]  I'm getting a nod from my chief of staff, Chris Kelly, who you actually met her.
[00:07:20]  She's also my sister.
[00:07:21]  She's in Butte, Montana right now.
[00:07:22]  Yes.
[00:07:23]  When you came on campus.
[00:07:24]  Yes.
[00:07:25]  That's right.
[00:07:25]  Yeah.
[00:07:26]  Very cool.
[00:07:28]  Please tell her I said hello.
[00:07:29]  She can hear you.
[00:07:31]  She's blushing right now.
[00:07:32]  She's a big fan.
[00:07:33]  She's a fan of mine too.
[00:07:34]  So don't worry about it.
[00:07:35]  I talk to her every day.
[00:07:36]  So she gets starstruck once a day.
[00:07:37]  So don't worry about it.
[00:07:39]  So the two of you grew up out there and you did not have helicopter parents.
[00:07:44]  This does not surprise me.
[00:07:45]  None of us really did back then.
[00:07:46]  How old are you now, Rob?
[00:07:48]  I just turned 45.
[00:07:50]  Okay.
[00:07:50]  Yeah.
[00:07:51]  So you're five years younger than I am, but nobody in the seventies or eighties grew up with helicopter parents.
[00:07:55]  And even though your parents weren't helicoptery, you write in your book about how your mom did worry about you.
[00:08:02]  I mean, there's all sorts of ways you can get in trouble in the great outdoors, especially in Montana.
[00:08:06]  And you were out there learning to shoot with your dad, hunting and so on.
[00:08:09]  So it sort of, it comes back later.
[00:08:11]  But your mom, she did keep an eye on you.
[00:08:13]  She did worry for your safety.
[00:08:16]  Yeah, she was good too.
[00:08:17]  And it was speaking of like helicopter parrots, I remember you could, as opposed to getting a group text message, you could tell everyone was where all the bikes were crashed in the front yard.
[00:08:26]  And you could go out back and drink out of the hose.
[00:08:29]  That's our bottled water.
[00:08:30]  And then when the street lights come on, everybody has to go in.
[00:08:33]  That's it.
[00:08:33]  And, you know, we're all fine.
[00:08:35]  I think a couple of cuts and bruises and scrapes and, you know, the occasional fight in the back alley makes you a better person because you learn from adversity and from losing.
[00:08:45]  It's the whole, you know, I've never lost.

=== Mindset Born from Hell Week (15:34) ===

[00:08:47]  I've either won or I've learned type thing.
[00:08:49]  And, you know, we're all, you know, we're, you got your kids with you right now.
[00:08:53]  I have my children too.
[00:08:54]  And, you know, we're all trying to do the right thing, but there was nothing wrong with not wearing a helmet everywhere and, you know, occasionally falling in a mud puddle.
[00:09:01]  Oh my gosh, it's crazy.
[00:09:02]  We never wear helmets.
[00:09:03]  Biking, never.
[00:09:03]  Skiing, never.
[00:09:04]  I mean, it was just, Now, I never even wore a seatbelt.
[00:09:07]  I mean, my parents stuffed us into a VW bug, all three kids and two parents and a dog.
[00:09:11]  No one had a seatbelt on, and both parents were smoking with the windows up.
[00:09:15]  It's like they were trying to hurt us.
[00:09:17]  If you had a bigger sedan, you could fit the little carrier, the baby, in the back window.
[00:09:23]  She's fine right there.
[00:09:23]  That's cool.
[00:09:24]  That's my younger sister, Kelly.
[00:09:26]  She's in there.
[00:09:27]  Exactly.
[00:09:28]  And then we moved up to sort of the big wagon, you know, the sort of Chevy Chase vacation family trucks.
[00:09:33]  Oh, yeah.
[00:09:34]  And you could sit in the way back.
[00:09:36]  It was like, God forbid there was a, you were rear ended.
[00:09:39]  I mean, all of the children would be instantly gone.
[00:09:42]  No one thought about it.
[00:09:44]  I'm pretty sure, I'm surprised there wasn't like an autopilot for the guy driving the van to go back and make a cocktail or something like that, just the way it went.
[00:09:51]  It's not autopilot.
[00:09:54]  Maybe we need to bring that back.
[00:09:56]  So, all right.
[00:09:57]  I think it's interesting in your history because this is sort of true of Scott Kelly, the astronaut.
[00:10:02]  You know, he talks openly about how, if you look at how he did in school, if you look at his early childhood and even later childhood in college, You would not have predicted this guy's going to go on to become a famous astronaut, right?
[00:10:14]  You, I would say it's fair to say it was not totally clear you were destined to become a historical figure because before you joined the SEALs, tell us what your job was.
[00:10:26]  Well, I had a few jobs.
[00:10:28]  Right before I left, I was a miner.
[00:10:29]  I worked at Montana Resources.
[00:10:31]  And by mining, because it is a mining town, I mean, I was the guy that was smart enough to go in, use a shovel, and put the silt back on the conveyor belt.
[00:10:39]  That was pretty much it.
[00:10:40]  Before that, I did.
[00:10:41]  I did odd jobs like delivered pizzas, worked at a furniture store, but one of my favorite jobs was actually I worked at McDonald's.
[00:10:48]  Oh, awesome.
[00:10:49]  And I heard you were delivering taco pizzas, and I was like, I did.
[00:10:53]  I did.
[00:10:54]  I delivered taco pizzas from the Boo Villa, which I think is still open.
[00:10:57]  I drove past it last week, and the taco pizzas were incredible.
[00:11:00]  We were just a bunch of college kids that invented a regular sauce and the ground beef, and then you put on lettuce and cheese, and I guess ranch dressing or sour cream.
[00:11:09]  We called it a taco pizza.
[00:11:10]  So I was, yeah, that was a fun job.
[00:11:12]  It was, yeah.
[00:11:12]  But I mean, I still know my way around the small town because of that job.
[00:11:17]  So I like this, though, because, you know, you can, and how old were you at that point, right before you joined the SEALs?
[00:11:22]  About 17.
[00:11:24]  Yeah.
[00:11:24]  So you go through your first 17 years of life and it's not like, oh, you know, it is as it is with some people, like, oh, yeah.
[00:11:30]  Oh, he's going to go on.
[00:11:31]  He's got an amazing future guaranteed.
[00:11:34]  No, no.
[00:11:35]  It was, even when I told people I was joining the military, which was very, very quick when they found out, because I became, I joined the Navy on accident.
[00:11:43]  I wanted to be a Marine, but when they found out I was trying to be a SEAL, there was no way because I was never a tough guy growing up.
[00:11:50]  I was more of a, I had a sense of humor, which eventually helped me do a lot of the things I did because you need to, if you lose your sense of humor, if your mind goes, your body's going to follow.
[00:11:59]  But I was, you know, when people found out I was, Trying to be a seal, that was one of those things where, well, you're never going to make it, that nobody ever makes it to that.
[00:12:06]  And especially being from landlocked Montana, where I don't think I'd ever been in the ocean.
[00:12:11]  I didn't really, I could keep myself alive in the water, but I didn't know any techniques.
[00:12:15]  I didn't really know how to swim when I joined.
[00:12:16]  So it was one of those one foot at a time positive attitude will get you a lot further if you just, you know, just do it that way.
[00:12:24]  So it was a, because I was actually playing basketball at Montana Tech, which is the small college in Butte, and just had a bad relationship and it was time to leave town.
[00:12:33]  And I just, I was never going to be in the military.
[00:12:36]  I love military movies, but I was never going to join.
[00:12:38]  And all of a sudden, I joined one day.
[00:12:41]  I love this because I read that you had a bad breakup and you were kind of, you know, like the sad dog who can't let go of the bone.
[00:12:48]  You kept following her around.
[00:12:49]  And finally, her dad gently escorted you out of their house.
[00:12:53]  You were not at your strongest.
[00:12:55]  No, Butte's known again for good food, for a little bit of a drink.
[00:12:59]  And I did have a cocktail one night and I decided to walk in to have a word with my ex girlfriend and her dad, who he wasn't a minor.
[00:13:06]  He actually had a supper job.
[00:13:07]  He used to move houses.
[00:13:08]  And when he woke up and found my, I was very, very fortunate.
[00:13:12]  He just escorted me out, politely let me know this is not a good idea, as opposed to just, you know, doing what he could have done to me.
[00:13:19]  But yeah, that was it.
[00:13:20]  And it was more of, and I tell people this now if you're having such a bad time, don't do anything drastic.
[00:13:26]  Just go on an adventure.
[00:13:28]  And for me, it was I can leave tomorrow.
[00:13:31]  I can go in, sign up, and they'll put me on a plane.
[00:13:34]  And I can be, like I said, I wanted to join the Marine Corps.
[00:13:37]  So I'll be in either San Diego Recruit Depot or Paris Island.
[00:13:41]  And that was it.
[00:13:42]  And I went to be a Marine.
[00:13:43]  I thought it was awesome.
[00:13:44]  Like I said, I liked movies.
[00:13:45]  I loved Full Metal Jacket.
[00:13:47]  That just looks cool.
[00:13:48]  And, you know, it looks so hard, Marine Corps boot camp, that I'll forget about all that dumb stuff back in Butte, Montana.
[00:13:54]  And that was it.
[00:13:55]  And I went in to join the Marine Corps, and the Marine wasn't there.
[00:14:00]  And the Navy got on.
[00:14:01]  That changed history, honestly.
[00:14:02]  In a way, that moment changed history.
[00:14:04]  It certainly changed your own history and your destiny at that moment.
[00:14:07]  And it was just, it was being a naive, Either 18 or I think 19 year olds.
[00:14:14]  The reason I went in to see the Navy guy was because two guys that I knew, Ben and Jim, wanted to be Marines, that became Marines that were two years older than me.
[00:14:24]  They went through high school with my older sister, Chris, who's here now.
[00:14:28]  They always wanted to be Marines.
[00:14:29]  And when they came home, they looked like Marines.
[00:14:32]  But they did tell me a joke.
[00:14:34]  They said, You might not know this, but the Marine Corps is actually part of the Department of the Navy, it's just the men's department.
[00:14:41]  And that's why I went into the Navy office because I figured he would, if anyone's going to know where the Marine is, he will.
[00:14:46]  And he's the Marine or the Navy recruiter said, Why do you want the Marine?
[00:14:49]  I said, I want to be a sniper.
[00:14:51]  And he said, Look no further.
[00:14:52]  We have snipers in the Navy.
[00:14:54]  You need to become a SEAL first, but after that, no big deal.
[00:14:56]  I'll send you to sniper school, which was kind of the truth, but he left a lot out.
[00:15:01]  And did not say, Are you a good swimmer?
[00:15:03]  No, he didn't even care.
[00:15:04]  Well, I was standing over him and I thought, I'm kind of naive, but this guy's a professional recruiter.
[00:15:10]  Why is he going to lie to me?
[00:15:12]  And he's just filling a quota.
[00:15:15]  I mean, why wouldn't he?
[00:15:16]  Being a recruiter in Montana, it's a lot easier to recruit for the Army or the Marines than the Navy.
[00:15:21]  So he's just trying to get guys in there.
[00:15:22]  And I signed, and then he actually showed me a video, and I was like, well, okay, I better learn.
[00:15:28]  I have five months before they ship me out.
[00:15:29]  I thought I was going to leave that day, but they put me in what's called the delayed entry program.
[00:15:34]  And so I had five months to kind of, what I would do with my time is try to get in shape, learn customs and courtesies of the Navy, and then There was a pool where I at the college where I still had a student ID, and I was like, Well, I guess I can learn how to swim now.
[00:15:47]  Wow.
[00:15:48]  So you ship off for, is it called boot camp or basic training?
[00:15:52]  Yeah, yeah, it's boot camp in the Navy.
[00:15:54]  And that was in, I went in January of 96 to Great Lakes, Illinois, right outside of Chicago.
[00:15:59]  Mm hmm.
[00:16:00]  And that's where?
[00:16:01]  Is that where the 1 000 push-ups a day were and 1 000 sit-ups a day and all that stuff?
[00:16:05]  No no, that was.
[00:16:06]  That was just boot camp for NAVY.
[00:16:07]  So i'm in there with um, with guys from all over the country uh, and it was, was everyone it?
[00:16:14]  What I learned the first few days in the NAVY, just based just the NAVY, was, um, it doesn't matter what you look like or where you're from uh everyone everyone's, had their first day.
[00:16:23]  If, whether you're the ceo of a company or the guy going through Bin Lad's bedroom, we've all had our very first day somewhere and we've all been afraid, and that's okay.
[00:16:32]  And it was whether, you know, we had guys in there getting out of South Central, leaving the gangs, guys from Long Island, guys from South Florida, and, you know, me from Montana, and we're all there to be in the NAVY.
[00:16:44]  And we learned Navy stuff, how to, you know, how to march, how to fold clothes, how to live on a ship.
[00:16:50]  From there, I did need to take a test there to make it into SEAL training.
[00:16:55]  And from there, they sent me to Coronado.
[00:16:57]  And Coronado is where basic underwater demolition SEAL training is.
[00:17:00]  And that's where the, All the push ups and all the hard stuff, but with the 75 to 80% of every class doesn't make it through.
[00:17:07]  And that's all before Hell Week, where you're doing it, you're getting tied up and thrown into the pool.
[00:17:11]  This is before Hell Week.
[00:17:13]  Yeah, there's three phases of SEAL training.
[00:17:17]  The first, I love how they label them.
[00:17:19]  First phase, I want to say, is about nine weeks, but nine to 11 weeks.
[00:17:23]  And then they call it physical training, which means they're just pounding you.
[00:17:26]  And it's the thousand push ups a day, a thousand sit ups a day, a thousand flutter kicks a day, tying you up, throwing you into pools, two mile ocean swims.
[00:17:34]  From where we would get beat up, it was a mile.
[00:17:37]  To the chow hall.
[00:17:38]  So you get to run six miles a day every day just to eat meals.
[00:17:41]  You know, then log workouts, hundreds and hundreds of pull ups.
[00:17:46]  That's the first part.
[00:17:47]  And when I went through, I want to say the fifth weekend was Hell Week.
[00:17:51]  And Hell Week is where you wake up on Sunday and don't sleep until Friday.
[00:17:57]  And you're training around the clock over and over.
[00:18:03]  We're carrying heavy boats on their heads.
[00:18:05]  They keep us in groups of seven.
[00:18:07]  Just to realize if one person in the team doesn't give their effort, it's going to hurt everyone else.
[00:18:11]  It's teaching you teamwork through negative reinforcement.
[00:18:14]  And well, but this is where the mindset came in.
[00:18:17]  When we first got there, we didn't really know what to do because boot camp is very structured.
[00:18:23]  There's people following you around, yelling you, telling you where to go.
[00:18:26]  This one, SEAL training, they need your class to already know how many people are there, how many people you're missing, and be at the 5 a.m. workout on time.
[00:18:34]  So it's very confusing.
[00:18:35]  And they brought us into a room the very first day.
[00:18:37]  And this instructor said, I know you've seen the movies and read some of the books, regardless of what you've been told.
[00:18:45]  However, this course is not impossible.
[00:18:48]  People graduate, look at me.
[00:18:49]  I'm living proof.
[00:18:50]  So I'll never ask you to do anything impossible, but I will make you do something very hard, followed by something very hard, followed by something very hard, day after day after day for eight straight months.
[00:18:59]  And that sounds like a lot to get from now to eight months from now.
[00:19:02]  But don't think about it that way because that's not how you achieve a long term goal.
[00:19:06]  I want you to do it like this.
[00:19:08]  Wake up in the morning on time.
[00:19:09]  Make your bed the right way and then brush your teeth.
[00:19:12]  You just started off the day with three little victories.
[00:19:14]  Make it to the 5 a.m. workout on time.
[00:19:16]  And as we're beating you up, don't concentrate on the pain.
[00:19:19]  Think about your next goal in life, which is breakfast.
[00:19:22]  After breakfast, make it to lunch.
[00:19:23]  After lunch, make it to dinner.
[00:19:25]  After dinner, do everything you need to do to get back inside that perfectly made bed.
[00:19:29]  And because you took the time in the morning to make your bed the right way, regardless of how bad today was, and it will be bad, tomorrow's a clean slate.
[00:19:37]  Tomorrow is a fresh start.
[00:19:39]  When you feel like quitting, which you will do, not quit right now.
[00:19:42]  That's your emotion.
[00:19:43]  Quit tomorrow.
[00:19:45]  If you can keep quitting tomorrow, you can do anything in life.
[00:19:47]  And that turned out I mean, that's great advice for SEAL training, but that's great advice for life one meal at a time.
[00:19:53]  And that's it.
[00:19:53]  And that's how simple it was.
[00:19:55]  And then we got to the SEAL training part.
[00:19:57]  And I mean, these instructors, if you just pay attention to the life goals, are giving you a So the hell week I mentioned, you don't go to your bed.
[00:20:03]  You just go through the entire week without sleeping.
[00:20:06]  He said, you're about to go to, right before it started, he said, you're about to go to war for the first time.
[00:20:11]  And the enemy is all your doubts, all your fears, and everyone you know back home that told you, you weren't good enough to do this.
[00:20:18]  Keep your head down.
[00:20:19]  Keep moving forward.
[00:20:20]  No matter what, never quit and you'll be fine.
[00:20:22]  It's kind of like the time heals everything.
[00:20:24]  So that was the mindset of getting through the first part of SEALs running.
[00:20:28]  My gosh, because I'm glad you explained that about, you know, the seven guys and how everybody relies on each other.
[00:20:34]  Because one of the things I think when I look at this is, I know we need tough guys in our military, but I think, why is this insanity necessary?
[00:20:41]  Why must we beat them to hell in order to make them SEALs?
[00:20:46]  I think it's to the realization that you can convince your body through your mind to do anything.
[00:20:53]  And even, and it was, you know, because I went through before 9 11, and it was more of just a badge of honor that I went through SEAL training.
[00:21:01]  But then, you know, as I was SEAL Team 2, one of the SEAL teams, and then 9 11, when we were on the mountain, and I'll back up in a minute.
[00:21:08]  But I do jump around.
[00:21:09]  When we were on the mountain to rescue the lone survivor in 2005, Marcus Luttrell, we'd been away.
[00:21:13]  You know, we were awake for a few days.
[00:21:15]  We're on top of a mountain in Konar province.
[00:21:17]  And I remember looking at one of my guys and saying, This is why training is so hard.
[00:21:23]  Because if we were going to quit right now, where are we going to go?
[00:21:26]  We're just here.
[00:21:27]  And that's it.
[00:21:28]  So that was a mindset that we carried into it years later.
[00:21:31]  But that's why the training is so important.
[00:21:34]  I'm not a big fan of cliches, but they do say the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war.
[00:21:41]  I like that.
[00:21:42]  I think that makes sense.
[00:21:43]  I mean, from I know nothing, but just listening to the stories and reading them.
[00:21:50]  I heard you tell the story about how you just, and I've heard this from others as well, like Jocko Willink was on saying, you just, the key to surviving boot camp and buds, the extra crazy training and hell week is just, you just can't quit.
[00:22:06]  You don't have to be the most extraordinary person.
[00:22:07]  You don't have to be the strongest.
[00:22:08]  You don't have to be the fastest.
[00:22:10]  You just have to be the guy who just.
[00:22:11]  Refuses to quit.
[00:22:14]  And you talked about how there was one guy in your unit who put quitting in perspective for you when looking at this quitting bell and the helmets of the guys who had chosen to leave.
[00:22:26]  The famous way, one of the famous things about SEAL training is we all wear a helmet on our head.
[00:22:31]  And it looks like an old school army helmet, like maybe from the 40s.
[00:22:36]  And the two things on there is on the front and back is your last name.
[00:22:41]  And then on the side is your class number.
[00:22:43]  And and SEAL training started at one and it went up.
[00:22:46]  My class was 208, and I think they're right around 340 right now.
[00:22:50]  But there's a bell that all you need to do to make them the only thing easy to do at SEAL training is quit.
[00:22:58]  They make it easy, they encourage it.
[00:23:01]  Um, all you got to do is go to a bell, ring it three times, and then you put your helmet down.
[00:23:06]  There's a line of helmets to go from the bell and it stretches down the what we call the grinder, which is an outdoor concrete slab.
[00:23:12]  Um, and you just put it in line, it's called the quitter's line.
[00:23:15]  And I remember thinking, you know.
[00:23:16]  Because people always ask, Did you ever think about quitting?
[00:23:19]  I'm like, Yes, every second I thought about quitting.
[00:23:22]  But there's no way in hell I'm going to ring that bell and put a helmet with my father's name on it in a quitter's line.
[00:23:28]  And just little things like that that you can talk yourself through it.
[00:23:31]  And again, it's a lot of mental.
[00:23:33]  It's very physical, but it's a lot of mental.
[00:23:35]  And some of the mentality is talking yourself through the pain because the pain will end.
[00:23:40]  But your legacy is forever.
[00:23:42]  Your pride is forever.
[00:23:46]  I love that.
[00:23:46]  I mean, I think that's.
[00:23:48]  That would do it.
[00:23:49]  Like the shame, you don't want to bring shame on your family name, on yourself.
[00:23:53]  You're in this thing with your brothers, but it's just so physically challenging and mentally challenging that what are the numbers again?
[00:24:00]  How many people leave versus how many people who make it through?
[00:24:03]  It's about 75 to 80% fail or quit or get thrown out.
[00:24:09]  There's a myriad of ways to get out, but the majority of people quit, although they'll never admit it.
[00:24:15]  Most people will say, well, the instructors didn't like me or blah, blah, blah.
[00:24:18]  They'll make up excuses.
[00:24:19]  And if you showed up and quit, that's fine.

=== Defending the Maersk from Pirates (16:10) ===

[00:24:22]  I mean, good on you.
[00:24:23]  You tried, you admitted it was too hard.
[00:24:25]  That's great.
[00:24:26]  You don't need to make excuses.
[00:24:27]  I actually had a story when I deployed before 9 11 on a ship as a Navy SEAL.
[00:24:33]  And I was eating one of the meals in the chow hall.
[00:24:35]  And I was sitting there in my camouflage uniform.
[00:24:38]  I had my trident, which is the insignia for naval special warfare.
[00:24:40]  And a sailor came up to me and he sat at my table and he said, Huh, you know, I went to SEAL training.
[00:24:45]  I said, You did?
[00:24:46]  He goes, Yeah, I didn't make it.
[00:24:47]  I said, What happened?
[00:24:48]  He goes, I quit.
[00:24:49]  I was like, Really?
[00:24:50]  You quit, huh?
[00:24:51]  Why is that?
[00:24:51]  And he goes, I don't know.
[00:24:52]  I lost my hooyah, I guess.
[00:24:54]  I don't know.
[00:24:55]  Okay, that's fair.
[00:24:57]  Oh my God, that happened to me too in college.
[00:24:59]  And then I had to go confess it to the priest.
[00:25:02]  Okay, so you made it through.
[00:25:07]  You mentioned Jocko Willing.
[00:25:08]  You know, he and I have a roommate stroll out.
[00:25:10]  Oh, is that right?
[00:25:12]  And just for the record, he is that tough in person.
[00:25:16]  I'm not surprised.
[00:25:17]  I follow him on Twitter, and you get these little updates on how it's pictures of his military watch showing 4 30.
[00:25:24]  Yeah, it's brute force.
[00:25:26]  You know, he's up working out.
[00:25:27]  Oh, yeah.
[00:25:28]  I'm like, oh, my God, go to sleep, Jocko.
[00:25:30]  I have my followers that say, yeah, I'm doing the Jocko Willing workout.
[00:25:33]  I'm like, you realize he's like a top 1% of humanity.
[00:25:36]  It's going to kill you.
[00:25:40]  He can and you cannot, sir.
[00:25:42]  So you finish it up, you make it through, and then that's not enough.
[00:25:45]  You decide to go to sniper school because, of course, back to your original point, this is what you really wanted to do.
[00:25:50]  And it turns out you were pretty good at that.
[00:25:52]  You had pretty good aim.
[00:25:53]  I got good at that.
[00:25:54]  And that was, again, just because of hunting in Montana with my father.
[00:26:00]  We actually graduated because we learned how to hunt together.
[00:26:02]  The same thing, like everything in life, we didn't know how to do any of it.
[00:26:05]  We kind of learned as we went.
[00:26:06]  And so we started buying a long range rifle, and I ended up, he ended up buying me a A 300 Winchester Magnum that I used to hunt elk.
[00:26:13]  And that eventually was the same sniper rifle.
[00:26:15]  And just growing up hunting, I was interested in ballistics.
[00:26:19]  Where does a bullet go?
[00:26:20]  I know it doesn't go straight, it goes up and down like a football.
[00:26:23]  What rains do we do this?
[00:26:24]  How does the wind affect it?
[00:26:25]  So by the time I got the marksmanship, I'd shot before.
[00:26:28]  They did send me to sniper school, and that turned into just a great school for camouflage, for ballistics, for learning how to spot.
[00:26:35]  So I went through that in 1998, I want to say.
[00:26:38]  So I finished SEAL training and sniper school before I even went.
[00:26:42]  Overseas for the first time.
[00:26:43]  And this is all before 9 11, just to keep in mind that we weren't actively involved in that conflict yet, which would dominate the next decade plus of your life.
[00:26:52]  So you're getting your training, you get married, you have two young children.
[00:26:57]  And what year did you get married?
[00:27:00]  I actually got married in 2004.
[00:27:02]  So I was deploying, we were dating a little bit, and then we got married as I was going through selection for SEAL Team 6, which is the tier one counterterror unit.
[00:27:11]  But they were my daughter.
[00:27:13]  So my daughters were born after 9 11, and they've been.
[00:27:16]  They've known everything.
[00:27:17]  I don't talk a lot about them, but they know everything.
[00:27:21]  They've been involved the entire thing.
[00:27:22]  And it's crazy.
[00:27:25]  So I have the mindset to get through stuff.
[00:27:26]  And then I have the emotional attachments to everything going on in the world because of my children.
[00:27:31]  Because, I mean, you know, like anyone, the world is your children.
[00:27:35]  That's right.
[00:27:37]  And you had them as a SEAL knowing that you would be deployed and that you would be leaving them for long periods of time.
[00:27:43]  And that every time you said goodbye could be the last time that you laid eyes on each other.
[00:27:48]  That's true.
[00:27:48]  Yeah, we did.
[00:27:49]  I tell people too that the hardest part of combat, because my first started as a SEAL, it was more of a look at me, I'm cool, and they make movies about us too.
[00:27:56]  We're going to war against Al Qaeda, Iraq, Al Qaeda, Iraq, Afghanistan, ISIS.
[00:28:01]  And the hardest part about combat is not getting shot at or having stuff blow up because that's actually very easy.
[00:28:06]  The hardest part is kissing your kids goodbye for what could be the last time.
[00:28:09]  Realizing, looking at your daughter and realizing this could be it.
[00:28:15]  Coming up after this break, we're going to get into the first warriors in the fight against bin Laden.
[00:28:21]  And that is the people who are on flight 93 on the day of 9 11.
[00:28:25]  And to hear Rob talk about it, I can't tell you the number of times I got chills during this interview.
[00:28:32]  Not just me, my whole team.
[00:28:34]  many times and tears.
[00:28:35]  He's just such an effective spokesperson for what we've been through as a country.
[00:28:40]  He lived it in a way very few did.
[00:28:44]  So anyway, we'll get into the beginning right after this break.
[00:28:51]  So you knew, you knew after 9-11 that you were going to be deployed.
[00:28:55]  I mean, you must have known.
[00:28:56]  And I know I've heard you and others make the point that those guys on Flight 93, that they were the first warriors.
[00:29:05]  In the battle against Al Qaeda and bin Laden and in the war that would come to dominate our country?
[00:29:10]  Yeah, I was actually deployed as a sniper in 2001 to Kosovo.
[00:29:17]  If you recall, there was a lot of bad stuff going on there with ethnic cleansing, and we were bombing and peacekeeping.
[00:29:23]  And they sent us in as sniper, not necessarily snipers, more of observers to make sure we'd hide in the hills and make sure nothing was happening in the cities.
[00:29:31]  We weren't there to shoot, we're there to report.
[00:29:33]  And we got that.
[00:29:34]  So we were deploying out of Germany.
[00:29:36]  We have a unit there down to Kosovo.
[00:29:38]  And I'd gotten back from Kosovo and I was in Germany.
[00:29:41]  We'd got all our gear ready.
[00:29:42]  We're, you know, a couple months into a deployment.
[00:29:44]  I was sending emails in an operations center when I heard breaking news behind me and the North Tower had been hit by a plane.
[00:29:51]  And it's one of those kind of exciting things you turn around, well, what is it?
[00:29:54]  And they said, Yeah, a small plane just hit the North Tower.
[00:29:56]  And I said, Well, that's a really wide tower.
[00:29:59]  That's a huge hole.
[00:30:01]  That's a clear day.
[00:30:03]  That's not an accident.
[00:30:03]  And we're talking about a group of Navy SEALs and then we saw the South Tower explode.
[00:30:08]  Within 15 seconds, one of the guys said, Osama bin Laden, this is for a war.
[00:30:12]  And so now we're, you know, just like everyone, complete chaos.
[00:30:16]  What are we going to do now?
[00:30:17]  Where do we go?
[00:30:18]  Do they know?
[00:30:18]  And then obviously, Flight 93, which stuck with me forever, because we all know what happened with Flight 93.
[00:30:25]  It was heading back to probably the Capitol, and the terrorists let the passengers talk to their families, and they told them, this is a suicide mission.
[00:30:33]  And what I love about 90s, not love, but just what gives me goosebumps, is they were the first Americans to attack, to fight Al Qaeda, and they did it because they voted.
[00:30:43]  Which is the backbone of this society.
[00:30:46]  They voted and then they fought.
[00:30:48]  And that's part of the reason that the reason that we, you know, especially up to the mission to kill bin Laden, where we knew we were going to die too, but we're doing it for them type thing.
[00:30:57]  And it's, you know, that was where we went from, you know, my friend Charlie Sheen and that cool movie Navy SEALs to, okay, now we're going to the mountains and we're fighting these guys and we're going to find them and we're going to kill them.
[00:31:06]  I got the chills too when you said that.
[00:31:08]  Whenever I think about Flight 93, and when my kids are old enough, we're going to go there and we're going to see the memorial.
[00:31:15]  It makes me proud to be an American.
[00:31:16]  I mean, the fact that these regular civilians who had not picked up arms, had not planned on fighting, found a way to bring that plane down and to protect America.
[00:31:26]  I mean, think about the emotional devastation, not to mention the loss of life we would have suffered if they had dropped that plane into the Capitol, into the U.S. Capitol.
[00:31:37]  Oh, yeah.
[00:31:37]  I mean, it's amazing.
[00:31:39]  And just think about, too, these are families going on vacation, business people going to the West Coast.
[00:31:44]  They're not.
[00:31:45]  Tactically savvy people, but they thought of what we can use.
[00:31:49]  They're taking off belts, boiling water in the galley.
[00:31:52]  Like they're thinking like warriors.
[00:31:53]  I'm just, again, I can't think about them and I have a tear in my eye and get goosebumps.
[00:31:58]  Oh, I think they'd be so honored to know somebody like Todd Beamer.
[00:32:02]  That in any way they inspired you, you know, because you picked up that same mission and how seal missions are they all classified?
[00:32:09]  That's what I read.
[00:32:10]  They're all classified, um, not really.
[00:32:13]  Uh, they they they fall under a certain blanket of classification, but there are very, very few that, uh, well, you saw, I mean, the most secretive mission given a different authority other than the military was all over the internet that night, which is the bin Laden raid, yes.
[00:32:29]  So, most of the missions that happen, um, uh, they don't take that's very, very hard to keep.
[00:32:34]  Toothpaste in the tube when they want to, people want to say what other people did.
[00:32:39]  And, you know, President Biden, then Vice President Biden, got some flack for saying Seal Keem 6.
[00:32:44]  And people have asked me, what do you think about that?
[00:32:45]  And I said, you know what?
[00:32:46]  I don't have a problem with that because he's letting our enemies know it doesn't matter where you are, we will find you and we will send people to get you.
[00:32:54]  And that's cool with me.
[00:32:55]  That was the whole reason people don't even know this.
[00:32:58]  They always said, why was it called Seal Keem 6?
[00:33:01]  The reason that Richard Marcinko, who was the commander that founded Seal Keem 6, named it Seal Keem 6 is because at the time, We had SEAL Team 1 and SEAL Team 2.
[00:33:09]  And he invented SEAL Team 6 because the Russians would say, okay, there's 1, 2, and 6.
[00:33:14]  Where the hell are 3, 4, and 5?
[00:33:17]  I like that.
[00:33:17]  I did not know that.
[00:33:18]  Oh, yeah.
[00:33:19]  This is usually a point where I tap my forehead and say, not just a hat rack.
[00:33:26]  That's crazy.
[00:33:27]  I did not know that either.
[00:33:28]  Well, the reason I ask is I heard that they're classified, or at least many of them are.
[00:33:32]  But then I thought, how many SEALs are involved in three missions that wind up major motion pictures like you have been?
[00:33:43]  Obviously, I want to do what happened with Bin Laden.
[00:33:46]  But can we just start?
[00:33:47]  Because you mentioned Marcus Luttrell and that turned into the Lone Survivor movie back in June of 2005.
[00:33:53]  Can you just tell us how did you get involved in that and what did you do in that?
[00:33:57]  Well, I happen to, my wife actually calls me the luckiest unlucky man in the world.
[00:34:04]  It always seems like I'm in a predicament, but I get out of it for some weird reason.
[00:34:07]  And so I've just been there at the right place, right time.
[00:34:12]  And I tell people that too now.
[00:34:14]  One of my favorite things is, Wherever you are, be there.
[00:34:18]  Meaning, it could happen right now.
[00:34:20]  The stuff you worry about rarely happens.
[00:34:23]  It's like, again, I don't mean to jump all over.
[00:34:25]  It's like a year or so ago, we're thinking about the South Carolina primaries.
[00:34:29]  Who's going to be the, is it going to be Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders?
[00:34:32]  We're worried about the election.
[00:34:33]  Then Thursday night, we get hit with a pandemic.
[00:34:35]  You didn't see it coming.
[00:34:37]  But if you're there, you know, stuff can happen.
[00:34:40]  So I just happened to be in Afghanistan and a SEAL team, not six, a different team, wanted to, SEAL team 10, and then SEAL delivery vehicle team, too.
[00:34:49]  They wanted to insert their snipers into the Korangal Valley, which is in the Konar province, to find a terrorist named Ahmad Shah.
[00:34:58]  They flew in there.
[00:34:59]  It's in the movie Lone Survivor.
[00:35:01]  We weren't involved with that.
[00:35:03]  I was actually living in Jalalabad, Afghanistan, which is another completely different story.
[00:35:08]  But I did see some of the guys at the airfield.
[00:35:11]  We actually, some of us rode motorcycles out to the airfield to see them.
[00:35:14]  They told us what was happening.
[00:35:15]  And, you know, we had words with them and then we left and helped them have a good fight.
[00:35:19]  And we went back to our, what we called the safe house.
[00:35:22]  The sun came up, and then one of the army guys came in and said, Hey, your boys just got hit really, really hard that we lost a helicopter.
[00:35:29]  And so we briefed on the story.
[00:35:32]  The four snipers did get hit, three of them were killed.
[00:35:35]  They sent in two helicopters to get them.
[00:35:38]  One helicopter, Turbine 33, was shot down.
[00:35:41]  It killed, I want to say, 18 soldiers.
[00:35:43]  Some of my friends that I just saw the night before were on that.
[00:35:45]  And then they told us, Now we're missing snipers.
[00:35:48]  We have a helicopter down.
[00:35:49]  You guys need to go up there.
[00:35:52]  Figure it out, but we're not going to fly you because they're shooting helicopters down.
[00:35:55]  Figure it out.
[00:35:56]  And so we had to walk around and gather.
[00:35:59]  It wasn't like the base in Jalalabad that it is now.
[00:36:02]  It was Ragtag people here and there.
[00:36:04]  So we gathered anyone we could find, Marines, we had Rangers, Green Berets, Air Force people.
[00:36:10]  And we actually walked into this tent and said, there was like, I think 20 Rangers in there.
[00:36:14]  And we said, hey, here's the situation.
[00:36:16]  I need at least five volunteers.
[00:36:17]  And all 20 dudes got up and they said, it normally takes us 10 minutes to get ready, but we'll be outside in five.
[00:36:23]  And everyone went with us.
[00:36:24]  And we drove as far as we could.
[00:36:26]  And then we hiked when we could no longer drive.
[00:36:30]  And we hiked up the mountain.
[00:36:31]  We did run into, Some Taliban up there.
[00:36:34]  Some of my guys got to the crash site.
[00:36:36]  No one survived.
[00:36:37]  And a couple of days later, we were able to pinpoint where Marcus Luttrell was, went back up the hill.
[00:36:44]  Some Rangers, I think, flew in in helicopters and did pull him out.
[00:36:47]  Big team effort.
[00:36:48]  It makes me proud to be part of that coalition.
[00:36:50]  Just seeing, you know, being a Navy SEAL Team 6 operator, but looking at Marines thinking, God, that guy is cool.
[00:36:55]  Look at that Marine just out here doing his thing.
[00:36:57]  So we got Marcus.
[00:36:59]  It was a tragic time, but we did get Marcus out.
[00:37:02]  And he's a good friend of mine.
[00:37:04]  Just the epitome of what it is to have a will to live.
[00:37:07]  Because he was everything, he was down to his back was broken.
[00:37:12]  He'd been shot, had shrapnel.
[00:37:14]  And I think, I want to say his pants had been blown off by an RPG, which just to get in your mentality, imagine being by yourself, you're that thirsty, everyone's trying to kill you, and you don't have pants.
[00:37:25]  I mean, where do you get morale?
[00:37:27]  How don't you just give up?
[00:37:28]  And he didn't.
[00:37:29]  And he's alive now.
[00:37:31]  How long was he there?
[00:37:34]  Three or four days he was out there.
[00:37:36]  He did get picked up by some villagers.
[00:37:38]  Which says a lot about the villagers too.
[00:37:40]  They have an ancient, not a saying, but a way of life called Pashtun Wali, where if you ask them for help, they will die.
[00:37:49]  They'll fight to the last man to help you.
[00:37:50]  And he asks for help and they help him.
[00:37:52]  It's incredible.
[00:37:53]  So that was the first of so many.
[00:37:56]  And let's flash forward to April of 2009.
[00:37:59]  It was your birthday, April 10th.
[00:38:03]  Tell us where you were when you got a message about something that was breaking that you didn't have to handle.
[00:38:08]  It was my daughter's, it was Good Friday, April 10th, my birthday.
[00:38:13]  And I was at my daughter's preschool for an Easter tea party.
[00:38:17]  They're going to have a quick Easter tea party.
[00:38:19]  The parents come in, we give them cookies and stuff.
[00:38:22]  And then we stand around to have them sip tea.
[00:38:24]  And I was bringing my, I had a pig plate.
[00:38:26]  And I'm bringing my daughter cupcakes and stuff.
[00:38:29]  And I'm walking over to her.
[00:38:30]  And she, I got a message and said that a guy by the name of Captain Richard Phillips had been taken by Somali pirates.
[00:38:37]  And they're calling my team to go get him now.
[00:38:40]  And by now, they mean now.
[00:38:42]  And so there you are at the little tea party with the pink plate, this trained SEAL sniper.
[00:38:48]  I love it.
[00:38:48]  You know, it's like the SEALs, they're just like us.
[00:38:52]  And tell us where you were 15 hours and 46 minutes later.
[00:38:56]  Yeah, 15 hours and 46 minutes later, we had a full head count of Navy SEALs in the Indian Ocean.
[00:39:00]  And we had our boats, all the guys.
[00:39:03]  And a day and a half later on Easter Sunday, we rescued Richard Phillips with some shots of our snipers.
[00:39:08]  And we did that because we were prepared.
[00:39:09]  And that says something about, I was not one of the shooters.
[00:39:12]  On that mission, but we didn't know what we were going to do anyway.
[00:39:17]  On the flight over, we had 15 hours to plan.
[00:39:21]  We thought we thought of anything, everything.
[00:39:23]  We never thought of, in the history of Seal Team 6, a fully engulfed orange lifeboat being towed by a Navy destroyer.
[00:39:30]  So on the flight over, we told everyone.
[00:39:33]  Wait, wait, let me pause you there just because I want to get the audience up to speed because it's been a while since that happened.
[00:39:38]  And there was a movie about this too.
[00:39:40]  So what happened was there was in the Indian Ocean off the coast of Somalia, which is on the northeast coast of Africa.
[00:39:48]  This group of pirates, Somali pirates, had captured the Maersk, right?
[00:39:53]  Was it the Maersk?
[00:39:54]  The Maersk, Alabama.
[00:39:56]  The Maersk, Alabama, which is a U.S. cargo ship.
[00:39:59]  I'm trying to remember my facts.
[00:40:01]  It's a cargo ship.
[00:40:02]  Yeah, it's from Virginia.
[00:40:03]  Yeah.
[00:40:04]  Okay.
[00:40:04]  So it's ours.
[00:40:04]  So we got to go help our guys out.
[00:40:06]  We got to defend it.
[00:40:07]  And we're not going to let it be taken by a bunch of pirates.
[00:40:10]  And then this sort of lifeboat, this smaller, to me, the boat that they wound up in, which was, it wasn't the actual Maersk.
[00:40:17]  It was like this sort of lifeboat off of it, looks just like the little tugboat you get for your kids and you put in the bathtub.
[00:40:22]  I mean, it looked a lot like that thing.
[00:40:24]  Yeah.
[00:40:24]  And they've got Captain Phillips on it.
[00:40:26]  They've got our American, Captain Richard Phillips, on it.
[00:40:29]  He's their hostage.
[00:40:30]  And that's when the SEALs came in.
[00:40:32]  So I don't know.

=== Sharks and Daytime Jumps (07:29) ===

[00:40:33]  I'm amazed that you're on the airplane over there.
[00:40:35]  And you don't, I mean, in my mind, there's some admiral who's like, this is exactly what you're going to do when we get there.
[00:40:40]  That didn't set that one down.
[00:40:42]  The military was really good about that.
[00:40:44]  And I mean, the Navy and the Army, as soon as we get there, not only the captain of the ships, there were three ships there, but even the admiral, who was the battle group commander, gave us tactical authority.
[00:40:54]  And they don't want to plan the mission, they want us to plan it.
[00:40:57]  So we had everybody come up with a plan because we can't necessarily just rush the boat because there's only a very small entrance.
[00:41:04]  And if one guy can't get through, it only takes a second to kill him.
[00:41:09]  Do we ram it with one of our speed boats?
[00:41:11]  How do we do it?
[00:41:11]  So we came up with all these different plans.
[00:41:13]  We narrowed them down to five great plans, everything.
[00:41:16]  I mean, we didn't go there to kill them.
[00:41:18]  We went there to get the hostage.
[00:41:19]  So if it comes to a negotiation, great.
[00:41:22]  And it might work that way because these are not necessarily terrorists.
[00:41:25]  They're criminals.
[00:41:27]  And maybe they just want to go home too.
[00:41:29]  We don't know.
[00:41:29]  But we put our snipers down to watch them.
[00:41:32]  But first of all, how did you have, I understand how the snipers got there and the helicopters, but where did the speed boats come from?
[00:41:39]  No, no, we jumped everything out.
[00:41:40]  We took, we flew from Virginia Beach in two airplanes and had two boats per airplane and we jumped.
[00:41:46]  We jumped the boats out and when we jumped out, all of us.
[00:41:48]  When you say you jumped the boats out, what is that?
[00:41:50]  You dumped them out of the plane?
[00:41:52]  No, no, we, yeah, we dropped them.
[00:41:53]  They had four parachutes each.
[00:41:54]  We have, we, when, when, when it comes to a national mission like that, there are so many people from the sniper back all the way back to the forklift driver who puts the boats on the plane to the parachute riggers who pack the shoes, make sure the boats are rigged so that when we throw them out, the parachutes open to, you know, the administrators.
[00:42:10]  administrative people making sure our wills and powers of attorney are in order.
[00:42:13]  Like there's a, there's a such a huge team behind all of it that we're just the end.
[00:42:18]  I always, I always tell people that we're kind of like, we're kind of like salesmen.
[00:42:22]  There's a huge company behind us putting the buttons on the radio, making sure we have the product.
[00:42:25]  And we're just the salesmen to go to the door.
[00:42:27]  Except the problem with us is the customer's always wrong.
[00:42:32]  That's a great point.
[00:42:34]  Wait a minute.
[00:42:34]  So not to be too naive, but you're telling me that, so you jumped out of, you jumped out of the helicopter 15 hours.
[00:42:40]  No, no, we jumped out of airplanes.
[00:42:42]  Okay, jumped out of an airplane and you have your gun on you.
[00:42:46]  I mean, this is a really dumb question.
[00:42:48]  I know, but like the guns can go in the ocean, they still work.
[00:42:50]  Like you have to hold on to it while you jump.
[00:42:52]  How does that work?
[00:42:53]  The guns will work.
[00:42:54]  We do have different types of bags and stuff to wrap them up in if we need to.
[00:42:59]  But yeah, you can get a gun, it'll be fine.
[00:43:01]  The guns that we use are great.
[00:43:02]  But, you know, if you're jumping out of a plane into the ocean, everything that you think you need better be on your body because, you know, if you keep it in the boat, the boat might, the shoots might not open.
[00:43:11]  Whenever you do anything, Murphy shows up, Murphy's Law, and something's going to go back.
[00:43:15]  So yeah, everything that we need is, it's on us.
[00:43:18]  And then the boat's off.
[00:43:20]  Was there any fear about jumping out of the airplane?
[00:43:22]  No, no, no.
[00:43:24]  No, we've jumped.
[00:43:25]  I have over a thousand jumps in training.
[00:43:27]  It's second nature to us.
[00:43:29]  We do that all the time.
[00:43:31]  No, that's the fun part, leaving the plane.
[00:43:34]  Once your feet hit the water, that's when the work starts.
[00:43:37]  Oh, wow.
[00:43:38]  So, I mean, just again, a technical question, but is there any problem collecting all the guys and getting them into the boats?
[00:43:42]  Are you that accurate in your jumps that you land near the boat and you can get right in?
[00:43:46]  Well, yeah, I was actually what's called the lead jumper.
[00:43:50]  So I'm in the first plane, I jump out, and then I need to get everyone in a line.
[00:43:54]  It's called a stack.
[00:43:55]  And so my job is to find the four boats that jumped out and then lead everyone into them, go take some turns, do an upwind landing so we can.
[00:44:03]  Slow down and put everyone next to the boats.
[00:44:05]  But we have these, we call them training stars.
[00:44:09]  If you train all the time but never do it, there's stuff you're doing in training you don't realize.
[00:44:14]  We've never done this ever in the history of Seal Team Six.
[00:44:17]  This is the first time ever, but we trained on it a lot.
[00:44:20]  But when we're training, it's off the coast of Virginia or North Carolina, and there are safety boats in the water that you can see that are like they spin in circles, kind of mark the drop zone.
[00:44:29]  When you're in the Indian Ocean, there's no safety boats.
[00:44:32]  I couldn't find the boats at first.
[00:44:34]  And me not being as the lead jumper not being able to find them, I need to act like I can see them because everyone behind me, all 100 jumpers behind me, panicking is not going to help.
[00:44:44]  I need to pretend I found them until I really find them.
[00:44:46]  God help us.
[00:44:47]  Because if I don't, then we have a bunch of guys lost in the Indian Ocean.
[00:44:51]  How did you find them?
[00:44:53]  Well, believe it or not, it was a daytime jump.
[00:44:55]  Because in the movies, they do nighttime jumps.
[00:44:58]  I always tell people there's no reason to jump at night into the ocean because if you get lost, you're lost forever.
[00:45:05]  So, just go 50 miles away and jump where they can't see it.
[00:45:08]  But it turned out the sun was shining on the ocean and the boats were in the sunshine.
[00:45:11]  Once I turned to my left and then started doing what we call a downward leg, I spotted them.
[00:45:15]  And after I took a nice deep breath and got the color back in my face, I brought everybody into their boats.
[00:45:19]  All right.
[00:45:20]  So, as long as I'm asking my dumb question, let me ask one of those.
[00:45:23]  Those are great questions.
[00:45:25]  This one's not great, but my children are going to be glad I asked it.
[00:45:28]  Do you ever worry about sharks?
[00:45:31]  That's funny, we all think about it.
[00:45:34]  And one of my new hobbies recently has been.
[00:45:36]  Diving without cages with sharks, just to prove to myself they're actually sharks are polite predators.
[00:45:42]  But people always tend to think about it.
[00:45:45]  I think the movie Jaws, Peter Benchley's Jaws, ruined everybody's ocean experience.
[00:45:49]  Because if you've been in the ocean, you have had a very positive encounter with a shark.
[00:45:55]  You just don't realize it.
[00:45:56]  You're not on the menu.
[00:45:58]  But Indian Ocean is not bad.
[00:45:59]  They have bulls, or not bulls, but whale sharks, which are harmless.
[00:46:03]  I didn't see, I might have seen one, but that's no big deal.
[00:46:05]  But I have been in the water with.
[00:46:07]  Over the course of four days recently, I look at Guadalupe.
[00:46:10]  I was in the water with 31 different great whites, maybe 33.
[00:46:14]  Great whites.
[00:46:15]  I mean, I've done the black reef tip shark thing out in Bora Bora or wherever.
[00:46:21]  And they seemed respectful of the little anchor line I was holding onto, but I wouldn't get in with great whites.
[00:46:28]  We did that.
[00:46:28]  And then that was in Mexico.
[00:46:30]  And then we actually went out to Bimini and were free diving with tigers.
[00:46:35]  And tigers are funny.
[00:46:36]  These sharks actually all have different.
[00:46:39]  Like the great white's very polite and curious.
[00:46:43]  Like a great hammerhead is very smart.
[00:46:47]  The reef sharks are like puppies.
[00:46:49]  The bull sharks are mean.
[00:46:50]  I'll give them that.
[00:46:51]  But then, like, the tiger sharks are clumsy.
[00:46:53]  It's almost like they've been drinking a little.
[00:46:55]  They just want to play with you.
[00:46:56]  It's funny.
[00:46:56]  It's really funny.
[00:46:57]  Wait, so just so I know, out of curiosity, what does a bull shark look like?
[00:47:01]  Just in case.
[00:47:02]  They're just, they look angry.
[00:47:04]  They're just mean.
[00:47:06]  And they give other sharks a bad rap because they're the ones that have a lot of adrenaline.
[00:47:09]  They'll just bite you because they're angry.
[00:47:11]  They're the ones that bite people in, like, Three feet of water.
[00:47:13]  I mean, I've given them a bad name here too.
[00:47:15]  They're just the mean one that shouldn't be.
[00:47:17]  Abby, could you just Google bull sharks, coast of New Jersey, just so I can go in the ocean this summer?
[00:47:24]  They're not in New Jersey.
[00:47:26]  Okay, excellent.
[00:47:26]  Are you just saying that the way I say that to my children?
[00:47:28]  No, no, no, I'm going to Cape Godbury soon.
[00:47:32]  There's a ton of great whites up there and I still swim there.
[00:47:34]  Okay, I mean, we've had no choice but to just lie.
[00:47:37]  We're like, no, there's no sharks.
[00:47:38]  No, the sharks don't come in this shallow.
[00:47:40]  They won't come into this.
[00:47:42]  Meanwhile, they love to come into shallow water.
[00:47:45]  I have a great joke.
[00:47:46]  People will say, Well, how do you know there's sharks in the water?
[00:47:49]  And I say, Well, I have a very scientific test that I do.
[00:47:51]  I get a teaspoon from my kitchen and I walk down to the water, I dip in the water and I taste it.
[00:47:56]  And if it tastes like salt, there's sharks out there.
[00:48:01]  This is somehow not reassuring to me.

=== Scientific Test for Shark Water (15:33) ===

[00:48:02]  Okay, so you guys get Captain Phillips.
[00:48:06]  It's a huge deal.
[00:48:07]  It's a huge win for the United States, for our military, for the SEALs, for you, everybody.
[00:48:11]  And I would imagine at that point you're thinking, this is the biggest mission I've ever been on.
[00:48:14]  This is like, this is it.
[00:48:16]  This is the apex of my military career.
[00:48:18]  And that was the same group, most of the same group on the Bin Laden radio a year later, a year or so later.
[00:48:23]  And what I love about that movie, Captain Phillips, is at the end of the movie, when the snipers take their shots, what you see them do is they put up their bipods, which are the stabilization platforms.
[00:48:34]  And then they leave.
[00:48:34]  They don't say a word.
[00:48:35]  And it just made Navy SEALs look cool.
[00:48:37]  And that's pretty much what it was.
[00:48:39]  I remember one of my friends that was actually in my wedding was the lead sniper.
[00:48:44]  And I saw him after he did that.
[00:48:47]  And I said, Do you realize you just did the most historically significant thing in the history of the SEAL team?
[00:48:52]  And his response was, Yeah, can we go home now?
[00:48:54]  That was it.
[00:48:56]  I would have been like, Go on.
[00:48:58]  Yeah, I'm listening.
[00:48:59]  Right.
[00:49:01]  But yeah, that was it.
[00:49:02]  And we figured that, yeah, it will not get bigger than this.
[00:49:05]  No, right.
[00:49:06]  How could you possibly think it would?
[00:49:08]  And by the way, just not for nothing, but my old agent at CAA, Matt Del Piano, was the guy who saw that story and said, that's got to be a movie.
[00:49:16]  And he was the guy who first thought of that and bought the rights and made it happen.
[00:49:20]  They did a great job.
[00:49:21]  Great job with the movie.
[00:49:22]  A couple years later.
[00:49:23]  Yeah, so now everybody who hasn't seen it has to see Lone Survivor.
[00:49:26]  And was the Captain Phillips movie called Captain Phillips?
[00:49:29]  I'm trying to remember.
[00:49:30]  Captain Phillips, yep.
[00:49:31]  Okay, with Tom Hanks.
[00:49:33]  And then we flash forward to May 2011.
[00:49:37]  By this point, you've been going off to fight wars for six years.
[00:49:40]  So, where were you when you got the call something was about to happen?
[00:49:45]  We had just finished another deployment to Afghanistan, and I was running different stations out of Jalalabad where I had been for the Marcus Luttrell thing, but now they've built it up.
[00:49:57]  And we had different, we're trying to do cross border intelligence for high value targets.
[00:50:03]  Nothing was mentioned there, and we got back from that deployment.
[00:50:06]  We had a few weeks of leave with our families because we just got back from war, and I took my team.
[00:50:12]  To Miami for a training trip where we could hopefully do some diving, but also get some good fellowship camaraderie, if you will.
[00:50:19]  And we were down there after a night of training and we were at happy hour on the beach.
[00:50:25]  And we got a call that a few of us needed to go back to Virginia tonight.
[00:50:29]  And we weren't sure exactly why they wouldn't tell us.
[00:50:33]  And we flew up there.
[00:50:34]  So some of the guys from Miami went up there, a couple guys from another team from like out in Nevada, out in Arizona doing different training were there.
[00:50:41]  And they brought like 28 of us into a room and they said, now, first of all, guys, this is not a drill.
[00:50:48]  This is real.
[00:50:49]  We found a thing and this thing is in a house.
[00:50:53]  And this house is in a bowl between some mountains.
[00:50:56]  These mountains are in a country.
[00:50:57]  And you guys are going to go fly in to this house.
[00:51:00]  You're going to get this thing and you're going to bring it back to us.
[00:51:04]  And we said, well, okay, what's the thing?
[00:51:06]  Well, we can't tell you.
[00:51:07]  Okay.
[00:51:08]  Where's the house?
[00:51:09]  Can't tell you.
[00:51:09]  What country?
[00:51:10]  Can't tell you.
[00:51:10]  How are we getting there?
[00:51:11]  We can't tell you.
[00:51:14]  How much air support?
[00:51:14]  And they said, none.
[00:51:15]  Like, okay, good.
[00:51:16]  That's an answer.
[00:51:17]  So we know there's no air support.
[00:51:19]  And they said, you know, they said, well, and you can't, we're not bringing any support, meaning not support, but Air Force pararescuemen who are combat surgeons or combat controllers, Air Force who are radio, our master radio guys.
[00:51:33]  It's only SEALs.
[00:51:34]  So if you used to know how to do medical stuff, bring it.
[00:51:38]  If you know how to use a radio, bring it.
[00:51:42]  That we were going into Libya for Qaddafi because the Arab Spring had just started in Tunisia, worked its way over to Egypt, into Libya.
[00:51:50]  That's right.
[00:51:50]  And we assume they found Qaddafi, and we're just going to go grab him, bring him back, and maybe he'll get debriefed by intelligence agencies or something.
[00:51:58]  So we're getting our gear ready for a couple of days.
[00:52:01]  And on Friday, they said, okay.
[00:52:03]  Go home, be with your kids, come back on Sunday.
[00:52:06]  We're going to drive you somewhere and we're going to read you in on what's happening.
[00:52:10]  And we're like, okay, cool.
[00:52:12]  Who's going to be at the read in?
[00:52:13]  And they said, probably the vice president, secretary of defense, secretary of the Navy, blah, blah, blah.
[00:52:18]  I'm like, oh my God.
[00:52:19]  And then they're going down the list.
[00:52:22]  They're going down the list and they said, somebody, somebody, CTC pad, blah, Now I didn't say anything, but CTC pad is a counter terror desk, CIA, Pakistan, Afghanistan.
[00:52:34]  And so we went home, saw the kids, came back on Sunday, and we're driving down to a place in North Carolina.
[00:52:41]  And I told my boss next to me, there's four of us in a van.
[00:52:44]  I said, man, this isn't Qaddafi they found bin Laden.
[00:52:47]  And he said, that's exactly what I was thinking.
[00:52:48]  We talked back and forth.
[00:52:50]  We got to a spot, went in, there were armed guards, they locked the doors.
[00:52:54]  And the woman that found bin Laden was there.
[00:52:56]  We'd never met her before.
[00:52:57]  And the commanding officer.
[00:52:58]  The CIA analyst.
[00:52:59]  Yep.
[00:53:00]  And she's real.
[00:53:01]  She's a real person.
[00:53:03]  And that's a movie.
[00:53:04]  That movie was Zero Dark 30.
[00:53:06]  They made it about her.
[00:53:06]  It's so crazy.
[00:53:07]  You've been involved in a lot.
[00:53:08]  Okay.
[00:53:09]  So she comes in.
[00:53:10]  And did you know her?
[00:53:11]  Did you know this is the woman?
[00:53:12]  No idea who they were.
[00:53:13]  And to be fair, it was actually a team of maybe three women.
[00:53:18]  She was the lead one that the movie was about.
[00:53:19]  But it was mostly women that found it a lot, which I think is just cool.
[00:53:23]  It is cool.
[00:53:24]  It's sort of like the hidden figures.
[00:53:26]  It is.
[00:53:27]  Totally.
[00:53:28]  Like I was saying earlier, you don't know who's behind the scenes and they deserve all the credit.
[00:53:32]  But the commanding officer of CLPM 6 came up and we got a room full of.
[00:53:36]  A very experienced Navy SEALs.
[00:53:38]  And he said, The reason you guys are here is this is as close as we've ever been to Osama bin Laden.
[00:53:43]  And we look around the room and it wasn't, there was no high fives or cheers.
[00:53:47]  It was professionals.
[00:53:48]  And we said, Okay, can we go right now?
[00:53:52]  And he said, No, here's why.
[00:53:53]  And then the woman that found bin Laden started briefing us.
[00:53:56]  She was actually the first person I'd ever heard say the word Abadabad.
[00:54:00]  And I remember hearing the word Abadabad come out of her mouth and I thought, I remember thinking, this is serious.
[00:54:05]  Like I've never, that's the first time.
[00:54:06]  And tell people where that was.
[00:54:07]  This Abadabad, Pakistan is a resort town.
[00:54:10]  North of Islamabad, Pakistan.
[00:54:12]  And she kept saying it.
[00:54:13]  And we'd been on targets before, but no one had ever mentioned a city I'd never heard of.
[00:54:17]  And it's like, this is legit.
[00:54:18]  And she explained in depth how she found him to the point where we're like, okay, look, I don't need to know all this.
[00:54:24]  You're way smarter than me.
[00:54:25]  It's obvious.
[00:54:26]  Just let me have a sledgehammer and a gun.
[00:54:28]  Point me in the direction.
[00:54:28]  I'll trust you.
[00:54:30]  More chills coming up in about 60 seconds as we get into what actually happened on the Bin Laden compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, that fateful day, overnight, May 1st into May 2nd, 2011.
[00:54:49]  First of all, were you surprised she said Pakistan?
[00:54:51]  You know, because people had been surmising, but, you know, we were fighting the war in Afghanistan.
[00:54:55]  That's where he had been.
[00:54:56]  And was that a surprise to you?
[00:54:58]  No, not at all.
[00:54:59]  We kind of knew he was in Pakistan.
[00:55:01]  I assumed he was in Canada, Pakistan with the Haqqani network and where I'm in Azalahiri is right now.
[00:55:08]  Like that's where they are.
[00:55:10]  But they kept him in the Bada Beds because it was out of the way.
[00:55:14]  And they had been.
[00:55:15]  They had been doing counterintelligence against Al Qaeda.
[00:55:18]  We made up the cave stuff with the dialysis machine because our intel people knew that if someone came in telling intelligence, it was definitely bin Laden, I saw him, he had a dialysis machine, the intelligence analysts would be thinking, no, you're lying because we made that up.
[00:55:33]  He doesn't have dialysis.
[00:55:34]  I didn't know that.
[00:55:35]  I'm telling you, it's fascinating.
[00:55:38]  No, wait, I want to jump in and say that Admiral McRaven, who was his official title head of special ops?
[00:55:46]  He was the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC.
[00:55:50]  So he ran the whole thing.
[00:55:51]  He's the one that sold it to President Obama.
[00:55:54]  So he was a four star admiral.
[00:55:57]  At the time, I think he was a three star, but I mean, he's getting his four star.
[00:56:01]  There was never a doubt.
[00:56:02]  Like the second he graduated, He was going to be a four star admiral.
[00:56:04]  There's no doubt about that.
[00:56:05]  This guy's crazy good.
[00:56:06]  Like, if you want to feel good about America, go listen to anything that Admiral McCraven has said or written.
[00:56:11]  And here is his description of this moment you're telling us about.
[00:56:16]  He said, and I'm quoting now there were two commanders that I trusted implicitly for a mission like this.
[00:56:21]  And one of them, a Navy SEAL commander and his team, had just gotten back from Afghanistan and were all on leave.
[00:56:27]  That's you.
[00:56:28]  You're one of those guys.
[00:56:29]  I recall the squadron.
[00:56:30]  And frankly, these were not happy campers.
[00:56:33]  I've got them in this classroom and I can see the body language.
[00:56:36]  Then a CIA officer comes out and hands out some non disclosure statements.
[00:56:40]  Then the next agency officer comes out and briefs the target, Osama bin Laden.
[00:56:46]  Oh, I mean, it just must have been such a moment when you, I mean, this is what it's about.
[00:56:52]  We're trying to get this guy.
[00:56:55]  And now you realize you are one of the chosen to actually do it.
[00:57:01]  Why do you think you were?
[00:57:02]  Why do you think you got that tap on the shoulder?
[00:57:05]  There were, again, luck, right place, right time.
[00:57:09]  There were, A number of people who could have done it from different services.
[00:57:13]  It just so happened that we would give off the smallest footprint training because we needed to train to prove to the powers that be that we could go in there.
[00:57:24]  Even President Obama said when we were done, I was never 100% convinced that Osama bin Laden was there, but after seeing you, I was convinced you guys could go in, find out, and get out.
[00:57:35]  And so we were training, we needed to go train for a few weeks to prove to people that we could do it.
[00:57:42]  And so you think the SEALs were chosen?
[00:57:43]  Because I mean, I'm thinking this is not a water situation, right?
[00:57:46]  So why did they use the SEALs?
[00:57:48]  And like, what was it?
[00:57:49]  It was your small footprint?
[00:57:52]  We'd been training in Afghanistan.
[00:57:53]  And sorry, we've been at war in Afghanistan for the longest time.
[00:57:57]  Our Army counterparts, the tier one unit there had been Iraq mostly.
[00:58:00]  And we were just most familiar with the environment that we were just the natural call for it.
[00:58:08]  Plus, our commanders were so good at putting senior SEAL officers.
[00:58:12]  And senior enlisted SEALs in the DC area working in certain places.
[00:58:17]  We had officers at the White House, the National Security Council, the Pentagon, just so when they needed a little back rub saying, hey, you've seen us, we'll do this, we're good.
[00:58:26]  They would have been working on it for years.
[00:58:28]  They've been prepping for this forever.
[00:58:30]  And it just so happened that we were, because, like I said, we were on a training trip.
[00:58:34]  It was natural for the people in Virginia Beach, which is a small community, to see this one squadron leaving to train.
[00:58:39]  So it wouldn't be out of the ordinary.
[00:58:41]  If the team that was there, Started training, people would say, well, what are they training for?
[00:58:46]  If the team that was in Afghanistan stopped going to war and started training, well, what are they training for?
[00:58:51]  We were supposed to be training so no one would notice that we were out of town training.
[00:58:54]  We're just training for the bin Laden raid.
[00:58:55]  And that they just picked us because we were out of the group that got picked.
[00:58:58]  We were the most senior.
[00:59:00]  Okay.
[00:59:00]  All right.
[00:59:01]  So McCraven is the guy who gave Obama the options once the CIA had located where they thought Osama bin Laden was.
[00:59:08]  And they, so what I heard McCraven say and what I've read is that they gave Obama four options.
[00:59:14]  They said, McCraven and his team said, you got, He got four options.
[00:59:18]  You could do a B 2 bomber to blast the whole compound.
[00:59:21]  You could do a drone strike.
[00:59:23]  You could use commando forces or you could use the SEALs.
[00:59:27]  And Obama chose the SEALs on McCraven's recommendation.
[00:59:31]  McCraven says, and quoting again, we were out there for several days rehearsing all aspects of the mission.
[00:59:36]  Then once we were through, I had one more meeting with the president.
[00:59:39]  And he asked me, can you do this?
[00:59:42]  And I said, sir, we can.
[00:59:45]  I'm confident we can do this.
[00:59:47]  And thus began Operation Neptune Spear.
[00:59:51]  which he named in a tip of the hat understanding if you guys got him, it would be one of the biggest things we've ever done to the history of the seals and some symbolism that he was looking at with respect to.
[01:00:03]  The spear.
[01:00:05]  Can you explain that?
[01:00:07]  That was for the spear carried by King Neptune, who rules the seas.
[01:00:11]  And because we're Navy SEALs, we thought we would pay homage to King Neptune.
[01:00:15]  So Neptune's spear, and it just sounds cool.
[01:00:17]  And Bill McCraven came up with it.
[01:00:19]  And regardless of any beliefs or politics, I will follow Admiral McCraven to hell.
[01:00:24]  And I just love, he came up with it.
[01:00:26]  It's just brilliant.
[01:00:27]  Everything just worked out well.
[01:00:28]  Like he said, the ground force commander that he picked, I've known for many, many years.
[01:00:33]  And he had always been the guy that should be the guy that leads the mission on the ground.
[01:00:36]  Admiral McCraven was the guy that should have overall led the mission.
[01:00:39]  And just to be a part of it was, you know, it's one of those this is why we're here, guys.
[01:00:44]  This is what we're doing.
[01:00:44]  They're going to pick us.
[01:00:45]  We're going to go.
[01:00:46]  It was just where was McCraven when the mission was carried out?
[01:00:49]  Well, we all flew to Jalalabad, Afghanistan, the same place that I, for some reason, it's entwined in my history.
[01:00:57]  We're over there at one of our tactical operations centers.
[01:01:00]  We're waiting on the word from President Obama.
[01:01:02]  And so we were just kind of there waiting for the green light.
[01:01:06]  And we had.
[01:01:07]  48 hours to do it, two cycles of zero illumination, which is completely dark, and that's when we're going to go.
[01:01:12]  And once we got the green light, we were actually, before we left, we could have left Saturday.
[01:01:18]  They decided not to because the correspondence dinner was happening.
[01:01:20]  We don't need the cabinet getting up and leaving because the press is there, sums up.
[01:01:24]  So we went on Sunday, and before we left, we're in a hangar, and Admiral McCrave has kind of given us our final talking to before we're actually getting ready to get on the helicopters.
[01:01:35]  And he said, You know, last night, guys, I watched my favorite movie, Hoosiers.
[01:01:41]  And at the end of the movie, when that small town basketball team is playing in that huge arena for the Indiana State Championship, they walk in in awe.
[01:01:48]  They've never left their hometown.
[01:01:50]  They're looking around this huge arena.
[01:01:52]  And Coach had the smallest guy on the team get on the shoulders, the largest guy on the team, and pull out a tape measure.
[01:01:57]  And he said, What's the measurement from the rim to the floor?
[01:02:00]  And he said, 10 feet, Coach.
[01:02:01]  What's the measurement from the back of the rim to the free throw line?
[01:02:04]  He said, 15 feet, Coach.
[01:02:05]  And he said, These are the same measurements as your gym in Old Hickory.
[01:02:08]  It's just a bigger audience.
[01:02:10]  And he looked at us and said, Guys, You do this every single night.
[01:02:13]  It's just a bigger audience.
[01:02:15]  And so we're leaving, and I remember I talked to Admiral McCraven.
[01:02:18]  I said, Admiral, you're so busy with this, I seriously doubt you watched Hoosiers last night.
[01:02:24]  But I got to tell you, you were born to give that speech right now.
[01:02:28]  Oh, wow.
[01:02:30]  Again, chills.
[01:02:32]  He said what worried him most was the unknown, whether the whole place would be booby-trapped, as we had seen some of these Taliban and Al-Qaeda fighters do before at compounds holding important fighters.
[01:02:43]  Al-Qaeda, it's always the number three guy of Al-Qaeda who gets killed.
[01:02:46]  They would booby trap their compounds and so the whole place would blow up.
[01:02:50]  He said, McRaven, he was confident you guys could get past Pakistani integrated air defense.
[01:02:55]  You were in these two helicopters.
[01:02:59]  Were they Black Hawk helicopters, right?
[01:03:00]  That had been modified to be extra stealthy?
[01:03:03]  Yeah, they had been modified by, again, people smarter than me.
[01:03:07]  And after seeing them, people probably smarter than this planet.
[01:03:10]  I don't know how they did it.
[01:03:12]  So he knew that they could get past the Pakistani air defense and that you guys could get you.
[01:03:18]  He could get you to the compound, but nobody was 100% sure.
[01:03:22]  I mean, the CIA analysts believed Bin Laden was there, but nobody knew.
[01:03:26]  And so you wrote in your book about the moonless night, the 90 minute flight on a moonless night from your base in Afghanistan to the compound in Pakistan, 162 miles away.

=== Helicopters Modified to Fly Stealthy (03:09) ===

[01:03:36]  And that, I mean, that 90 minutes must be seared in your memory.
[01:03:41]  Walk us through what you were doing.
[01:03:42]  Well, we see, they were convinced that we could get past the air defense, but they weren't on the plane.
[01:03:48]  We were.
[01:03:49]  So, we could get shot down at any second and not even be angry about it because we're invading a sovereign nation.
[01:03:55]  The house is going to blow up when we get there.
[01:03:57]  If anyone's going to martyr himself, it's bin Laden.
[01:03:59]  There will be a gunfight when we get there.
[01:04:01]  If we run out of fuel, we're going to end our short lives either in a gunfight with the Pakistani police or we're going to.
[01:04:05]  Die in Pakistani prison.
[01:04:08]  It's a one way mission to the point that before we left, this is a very important emotional part.
[01:04:14]  Before we left, I had one of my guys say, because we accepted death.
[01:04:17]  That's it.
[01:04:18]  We're going to die.
[01:04:20]  He said, Don't take this the wrong way because I'm 100% going.
[01:04:24]  Don't worry about that.
[01:04:25]  I'm going.
[01:04:25]  I just need to say it out loud.
[01:04:28]  If we know we're going to die, why are we going?
[01:04:32]  And so we had a conversation and we had a conversation.
[01:04:35]  We said, Okay, well, we're not going after bin Laden.
[01:04:38]  For the fame or the reward or the bravado.
[01:04:42]  We are going after Osama bin Laden for the single mom who dropped her kids off at elementary school on a Tuesday.
[01:04:48]  And 45 minutes later, she jumped to her death out of a skyscraper because that was a better alternative than whatever in the hell was going on inside at 2,500 degrees Fahrenheit.
[01:04:57]  And her last gesture of human decency was holding her skirt as she jumped out of a building and murdered herself.
[01:05:03]  She was never supposed to be in the fight.
[01:05:05]  We're supposed to be in the fight.
[01:05:07]  That's why we're going.
[01:05:09]  Oh my God, dying.
[01:05:11]  Abby and I both have tears in our eyes.
[01:05:13]  Yeah.
[01:05:14]  It's incredible.
[01:05:16]  But you're right.
[01:05:16]  That's the perspective on it.
[01:05:18]  Yeah.
[01:05:18]  And we talked about Flight 93.
[01:05:20]  We talked about Todd Beamer.
[01:05:21]  We talked about the people in the Pentagon who went to work and never came back.
[01:05:24]  And so for us, that made it easier because now with the acceptance of death, there is no fear.
[01:05:31]  But just to ask you prior to that moment, I understand you had written goodbye letters to your kids.
[01:05:36]  Yeah, I did.
[01:05:37]  But the daughter that I just FaceTimed a few minutes ago.
[01:05:42]  She was always there.
[01:05:42]  I always said goodbye to her, but she was seven when I said goodbye to her on this one.
[01:05:46]  But the letter I wrote, I wrote letters to everybody, but the letter I wrote to her was not to the seven year old.
[01:05:51]  It was to the 27 year old, explaining, I'm really sorry I missed your wedding.
[01:05:55]  I know you're beautiful.
[01:05:57]  Thanks for taking care of your sisters and your mom.
[01:05:59]  What we did was noble, explaining the mission to someone eventually that will read it.
[01:06:04]  And then, and tears hitting the page, not even fun to think about now.
[01:06:08]  And then, but it was one of those moments in time that's bigger than me.
[01:06:12]  It's like the Braveheart thing.
[01:06:13]  You know, we could pull myself off this mission anytime I wanted to and live.
[01:06:17]  But, you know, when I'm dying at 95 years old on my deathbed, would I give every single day back for that one night?
[01:06:23]  Yeah.
[01:06:23]  And so we do it.
[01:06:24]  And we went, and even with my father, like I would call him on missions when I was in Iraq or wherever, some in Afghanistan.
[01:06:30]  And he would always say, Man, I wish I was going with you.
[01:06:33]  And I said, I know, Dad, I wish you were too.
[01:06:35]  And on this one, I called him and said, And he didn't know where I was.
[01:06:38]  And he said, I wish I was going with you.
[01:06:39]  And I said, Don't worry, Dad, I'm with some really good guys.
[01:06:42]  And your poor mom, I'm sure, was worried as she always had been.

=== Carrying Bin Laden's Body Out (15:19) ===

[01:06:46]  You're off there.
[01:06:46]  I know you'd won a silver star already.
[01:06:48]  And you were like, don't worry, mom.
[01:06:49]  I won't win any more silver stars.
[01:06:50]  Because when she heard at the commemoration, at the medal ceremony, what you had done, she was like, oh my God, what?
[01:06:56]  And you promised no more silver stars.
[01:06:58]  I'll never get another silver star, I promise.
[01:07:00]  So you're on the flight over there.
[01:07:04]  And you're counting.
[01:07:05]  Talk about the counting and what that led to.
[01:07:08]  Everybody there realized that if you're worrying about, and this is good advice again for life, if you're worrying about something that your worry can't affect, stop worrying.
[01:07:17]  You're wasting your energy.
[01:07:18]  So, us worrying about a missile right now isn't going to stop the missile.
[01:07:22]  So, stop wasting it.
[01:07:23]  So, I'm looking around.
[01:07:25]  Some guys actually put in their earbuds and fell asleep.
[01:07:28]  And I'm looking at my friends sleeping.
[01:07:30]  And I remember looking at some of my best friends thinking, You are asleep literally on the ride to Osama bin Laden's house.
[01:07:36]  You have ice in your veins.
[01:07:38]  What I was doing, though, I learned as a sniper was to count when you're looking through binoculars or a spotting scope and you're bored, just count and change the cadence.
[01:07:48]  You know, one, two, three.
[01:07:50]  Four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, just count to a thousand and start backtracking.
[01:07:53]  Remember counting, you know, to keep your mind occupied.
[01:07:55]  And I was counting.
[01:07:56]  And it's a 90 minute flight.
[01:07:58]  And we have 80 minutes basically to where the pilots who don't get any credit are flying so close to the earth, weaving in and out of everything.
[01:08:05]  We get to 90 or 80 minutes into a 90 minute flight and we bank to the South.
[01:08:08]  And I know it sounds Hollywood, but in my mind, I said, 556, 557, freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward and freedom will be defended.
[01:08:19]  And I have no idea how I remembered that.
[01:08:20]  That's what President Bush said on 9 11.
[01:08:22]  I said, well, forget counting.
[01:08:24]  I'm going to say that over and over freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward and freedom will be defended.
[01:08:29]  And that's when it finally sunk in and hit me.
[01:08:32]  And I said to myself, I'm on this mission and we're going to kill them.
[01:08:36]  And then we did another bank to the south, and we, the air crew, the air crew, here's people that don't get credit.
[01:08:42]  They put their butts on the seats.
[01:08:45]  They could have died with us.
[01:08:46]  They opened the door for us.
[01:08:47]  And imagine if we weren't smart enough to know how to open that door on that super secret helicopter, and we got two helicopters full of Navy SEALs who can't get out.
[01:08:54]  You know what I mean?
[01:08:56]  Again, guys that did their part to get us out.
[01:08:58]  And he opened the door.
[01:09:00]  I remember looking outside.
[01:09:01]  I got Cairo, the dog, the Belgian Malawi next to me.
[01:09:04]  And I look out, there's electricity.
[01:09:06]  I know that we just flew over a golf course.
[01:09:08]  This is not a war zone.
[01:09:10]  And I kind of smiled at my last arrogant smile.
[01:09:12]  And I remember thinking, this is some serious Navy SEAL shit we're about to do.
[01:09:17]  And then, and now.
[01:09:20]  So can it all be.
[01:09:22]  Yeah, no, we got to get to what happened when you went in there.
[01:09:24]  But we do have the President Bush soundbite.
[01:09:27]  Listen.
[01:09:27]  Freedom itself was attacked this morning by a faceless coward.
[01:09:33]  And freedom will be defended.
[01:09:35]  Make no mistake.
[01:09:38]  The United States will hunt down and punish those responsible for these cowardly acts.
[01:09:47]  The resolve of our great nation is being tested.
[01:09:52]  But make no mistake, we will show the world that we will pass this test.
[01:09:58]  So every once in a generation, you get a leader who says exactly the right thing at the right time.
[01:10:03]  And that was one of those moments.
[01:10:04]  Yeah, no doubt about it.
[01:10:08]  I always tell people, you know, I never, ever want another 9 11, but I would love another 9 12 because that was a time when we were all together as a nation and we took off the ridiculous blinders of political correctness and realized that we're on this team and there are people that are at war with us and we can beat them.
[01:10:24]  You have spoken of the now famous photo in the Situation Room that night.
[01:10:30]  You're in the helicopter on your way to the bin Laden compound and President Obama, who made the call to, To put you on this mission is sitting in the Situation Room in the White House with Hillary Clinton, with the Secretary of Defense, Gates, and others.
[01:10:45]  And that photo is just so iconic.
[01:10:48]  What do you make of it, of what that photo captured?
[01:10:51]  See, that photo captured so much because the first point right there is that was not the Situation Room.
[01:10:57]  That was a room adjacent to the Situation Room.
[01:11:00]  And the guy in the middle is a one star general, General Webb.
[01:11:03]  The people in the Situation Room could not get the feed up, so they couldn't see it.
[01:11:07]  General Webb did.
[01:11:08]  And that's the contingency.
[01:11:09]  Well, it didn't go the way it was supposed to be planned.
[01:11:11]  He called people.
[01:11:12]  And President Obama is sitting in the back corner in a folding chair because General Webb offered him his chair.
[01:11:17]  He said, No, no, you're doing the right thing.
[01:11:18]  I'll sit back here, which I think is cool.
[01:11:20]  And so they're watching.
[01:11:22]  And that picture was taken when the helicopter, the first one, I wasn't on the one that went down.
[01:11:27]  The first helicopter crash landed in the front yard, which was the worst thing that could happen scenario for us.
[01:11:32]  And when it crashed, again, Admiral McCraven realizing what I said earlier if you're worrying or freaking out about something, it won't help it.
[01:11:42]  Don't do it.
[01:11:42]  He calmed them down by saying, he didn't even know half the team was dead right now.
[01:11:48]  He said, obviously, we've had a contingency, but don't worry.
[01:11:51]  My guys are prepared to carry on, knowing that would calm them down.
[01:11:54]  But he's like, I don't know what we're going to do.
[01:11:57]  But then the guys got out and started, they took it from there.
[01:12:00]  So that picture right there was the entire cabinet.
[01:12:04]  Watching it unfold.
[01:12:05]  And that was a, it wasn't a crash.
[01:12:07]  The lead pilot, the flight lead, saved everyone's lives by realizing he couldn't hover because it was warmer.
[01:12:11]  There was an updraft.
[01:12:12]  And if he could get the tail to that fence and pin the nose, it wouldn't roll.
[01:12:16]  And he did exactly that.
[01:12:17]  And that's just, that photo says so much.
[01:12:19]  It's one of the most amazing photographs in this nation's history.
[01:12:23]  It's crazy.
[01:12:24]  And they were watching it.
[01:12:25]  They were watching.
[01:12:25]  And now we can watch it, you know, as a result of the technology and the cameras that you guys had and the helicopters, we can watch it.
[01:12:31]  And that's eerie and amazing and really pretty cool too.
[01:12:35]  So, So all of this is happening and you get there, soup to nuts, 15 minutes, right?
[01:12:41]  Inside and outside, like the whole mission, once you got out of those helicopters, 15 minutes long?
[01:12:46]  I think it was about 15 minutes until we killed Bin Laden.
[01:12:49]  We were on the ground for 47 minutes because there was so much stuff in the house.
[01:12:54]  We didn't realize that Bin Laden had been running Al Qaeda from the second floor of that building, three offices.
[01:12:58]  He was running the entire show.
[01:12:59]  When we got in there, we got up to him and got him.
[01:13:02]  But then it was just, there was so much stuff to get.
[01:13:05]  And plus, we had to blow up the helicopter.
[01:13:08]  How many guys are on the ground for this?
[01:13:10]  I think 23 guys.
[01:13:13]  So, well, the plan was 23.
[01:13:14]  We also had two pilots and two aircrew from the first helicopter.
[01:13:19]  Where I remember I didn't know the helicopter crashed when I went through the front carport.
[01:13:23]  I looked to the side and they were standing there.
[01:13:24]  I remember looking at these guys with American flags, like, who are these dudes?
[01:13:27]  Because I didn't know the helicopter crashed.
[01:13:29]  It was very chaotic, first minute until we got in.
[01:13:32]  But just when we got in, because I was initially supposed to be on the team that went to the rooftop, we were going to drop snipers, the dog, an interpreter, and a machine gun outside, and then we were going to put my team on the roof.
[01:13:43]  We were going to jump from the roof down to the balcony and hopefully engage through the glass window to the bedroom.
[01:13:49]  But because they put us down outside, I was like in the back and I got to watch cool guys do cool things.
[01:13:55]  And when we actually got into Bin Laden's house, I was in the back looking down a hallway on the first floor of Bin Laden's house.
[01:14:01]  And I remember just being so proud of my guys, thinking, you know, we could blow up at any time, but look at these guys.
[01:14:06]  No one's being phased by this.
[01:14:08]  They're doing exactly.
[01:14:08]  We're doing everything like we do anything.
[01:14:10]  We're slow as smooth, smooth as fast.
[01:14:12]  Escalate forces you need.
[01:14:13]  And even to the point where, They were moving children from different rooms to be with elder women because we're the good guys and we don't want these kids to be any more scared than they are.
[01:14:24]  Just the stuff that the good guys do that Al Qaeda would not do to us.
[01:14:29]  And so, yeah, and it was methodical.
[01:14:32]  This was by no means one of the most difficult targets we'd ever taken down.
[01:14:35]  We're with some of the best guys in the world and we methodically took the second floor and then went to the third.
[01:14:39]  All right, now I want to go through that.
[01:14:40]  But before we get to that, I understand there was a prearranged word.
[01:14:45]  That you would use to communicate back to Admiral McRaven that you did get Osama bin Laden?
[01:14:52]  And what was that word?
[01:14:53]  The word was, and it's a pro word, it was by no means a nickname.
[01:14:57]  The pro word was Geronimo.
[01:15:00]  And all that Geronimo means is we are in this position now.
[01:15:04]  Geronimo happens to mean we are with bin Laden right now.
[01:15:07]  And Geronimo EKA means we're with bin Laden, enemy killed in action.
[01:15:11]  It was, we know there was obviously.
[01:15:14]  That was the plan, because you don't want to be saying.
[01:15:17]  Oh, we found him.
[01:15:18]  You don't want to communicate more than you have to over the walkie-talkies and so on.
[01:15:22]  Okay, I get that.
[01:15:22]  All right, so you go to the first floor, and I mean, I'm talking about you.
[01:15:26]  You go to the first floor, and how do you get in?
[01:15:30]  It was already open.
[01:15:32]  My guys had breached the front door.
[01:15:34]  I don't even think they needed to go explosive.
[01:15:36]  I think they just opened it.
[01:15:38]  There had been a shootout in the guest room, which is behind us, the south.
[01:15:42]  They killed Abraham, one of the Al Qaeda couriers.
[01:15:46]  They killed Abu Akhmet al-Kuwaiti through the.
[01:15:48]  One of the windows, and his wife, his wife actually jumped on top of him.
[01:15:51]  She was trying to be a human shield, which was another indicator.
[01:15:54]  Yep, this is an indicator that there's somebody important here.
[01:15:57]  So the door was open when I got there, and I had about eight guys in front of me, eight or nine guys in front of me going down a hallway.
[01:16:02]  And, uh, Part of my guys towards the end of the hallway from me was a barricaded door.
[01:16:06]  They were breaching it, hitting it with some tools, and then they went explosive.
[01:16:10]  It opened, and then we found a stairwell.
[01:16:13]  And the woman that found bin Laden said, I don't know what it looks like inside the house, but you will find a stairwell.
[01:16:19]  And on the stairwell, you will find Khalid bin Laden.
[01:16:22]  And he's his 20 year old son.
[01:16:24]  He will be armed.
[01:16:24]  And if you can get rid of Khalid bin Laden, the way she said was, you will get a shot at the big guy.
[01:16:29]  I can't believe she knew that much because it never happened.
[01:16:33]  She was 100% right about everybody in the house.
[01:16:37]  Holy cow.
[01:16:39]  She knew her deal.
[01:16:40]  You saw him going from one to two or two to three?
[01:16:44]  I went up.
[01:16:46]  The guy in front of me took care of Khalid bin Laden.
[01:16:48]  There was about seven guys in front.
[01:16:49]  We stepped over Khalid's body and we got to the second floor.
[01:16:52]  And that's when everybody except one guy went to the right and left.
[01:16:57]  They were clearing the rooms to our right and left because there were more guys in front of you.
[01:16:59]  So all the guys in front of you went and started clearing the rooms on the second floor.
[01:17:03]  You were in the back of the line at that point.
[01:17:04]  I was in the back.
[01:17:05]  But then from there, I turned into what we call the number two man.
[01:17:08]  So, the number one man is now pointing up the last set of stairs at a curtain.
[01:17:12]  It wasn't a door, there was a curtain.
[01:17:14]  And I became the two man, which means I put a hand on his shoulder to kind of let him know he's got a guy behind him.
[01:17:19]  And when I squeeze him, it means we have enough guys in time to go.
[01:17:23]  So, he doesn't need to look back.
[01:17:24]  His eyes are front.
[01:17:25]  He's looking forward to control the threat.
[01:17:27]  My job is to look backwards.
[01:17:29]  And then we didn't have enough guys, though.
[01:17:31]  And he just started talking to me, like, we got to go.
[01:17:33]  Now we got to go.
[01:17:34]  And what he had seen was he saw people behind the curtain moving.
[01:17:39]  And he assumed those are the suicide bombers, but we can beat them if we go now.
[01:17:46]  And he's telling me to go.
[01:17:48]  But you're watching these guys go in and out of these rooms on the second floor, and you still don't know whether they're going to find bin Laden in one of those rooms.
[01:17:54]  Well, we didn't, but I knew for some reason that the woman that found bin Laden said he was on the third floor.
[01:18:01]  I knew we had to get up there, and the guy in front of me wanted to go now.
[01:18:03]  And I was like, you know what?
[01:18:04]  Let's just do it.
[01:18:05]  And I squeezed his shoulder.
[01:18:07]  And for me, it wasn't bravery.
[01:18:08]  It was more of a okay, we're gonna blow up now.
[01:18:10]  Let's, I'm tired of thinking about it.
[01:18:13]  Um, so I squeezed it.
[01:18:15]  I can close my eyes and see those stairs right now.
[01:18:18]  Going up, he went up the stairs, he moved the curtain, and there were people there that he assumed were the suicide bombers.
[01:18:23]  So he, he like, tackled them down the hallway to absorb the explosion.
[01:18:28]  What are you looking at at this point?
[01:18:29]  You're looking at a room or a hallway or something?
[01:18:31]  No, a hallway.
[01:18:32]  We went up the stairs, top of the stairs.
[01:18:34]  He moved the curtain, which is right at the end of the stairs, went into a hallway.
[01:18:37]  He moved down the hallway, and because he went forward, I turned to the right.
[01:18:40]  And that right was right into a doorway, and standing in front of me, three feet away, was Osama bin Laden.
[01:18:47]  And his hands were on his wife's shoulders, and he's sort of pushing her toward me.
[01:18:53]  And he was a very high threat of being a suicide bomber.
[01:18:57]  He had less than a second to convince me not to kill him.
[01:19:00]  I remember looking at him, thinking he's taller than I thought, and he's a lot skinnier than I thought, and his beard is gray, but that's his nose, and that's him.
[01:19:08]  I've seen that picture a thousand times.
[01:19:09]  He is a threat.
[01:19:10]  He's a suicide bomber.
[01:19:11]  I need to treat him as such, and I shot him twice.
[01:19:13]  In the head, and he fell down.
[01:19:14]  I shot him again over the shoulders of his wife Amal, and then he was down.
[01:19:19]  And then I moved Amal, I moved her out of the way.
[01:19:21]  You can sort of get this sixth sense of who's a threat and who's not, and I could tell she wasn't.
[01:19:25]  And so I moved her towards the wall, and I wanted to sit her on the bed away from Bin Laden's body.
[01:19:31]  And as I was moving Amal, I looked down, and Bin Laden's two year old son was there.
[01:19:37]  And I remember thinking, as a father, like the humanity, this kid has got nothing to do with this.
[01:19:43]  And I picked him up and I set him down, another Navy SEAL's.
[01:19:45]  Now we're coming in the room.
[01:19:46]  I could hear bin Laden taking his last breath, I could smell it.
[01:19:49]  And I was standing there, and a guy came up to me, one of my guys, and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, Are you okay?
[01:19:56]  And I said, No, what do we do now?
[01:20:00]  And he smiled and kind of laughed and said, Well, now we find the computers, man.
[01:20:03]  We do this every night.
[01:20:04]  Hundreds of times.
[01:20:05]  We always do this.
[01:20:05]  I said yeah, you're right, i'm back and I said, oh my god.
[01:20:09]  He said yeah, you.
[01:20:09]  He said you just killed Osama Bin Lad.
[01:20:11]  Your life just changed.
[01:20:12]  Let's get to work.
[01:20:13]  Oh my god, did the did you?
[01:20:19]  Did you put him in a body bag right away?
[01:20:21]  Like what?
[01:20:21]  Were you worried somebody was going to take him, you know?
[01:20:23]  Because they would not.
[01:20:24]  His fighters would not want you to have the body.
[01:20:27]  We um, we started.
[01:20:29]  We took pictures.
[01:20:30]  I was actually the guy holding his head together.
[01:20:32]  If the pictures are ever released, those are my gloves in the picture putting his head together.
[01:20:37]  Took pictures of that.
[01:20:38]  Our Arabic speaker was talking to his kids, his daughters, his older daughters, trying to get them to say who it was.
[01:20:45]  We put him in a body bag.
[01:20:47]  Some of us went to the second floor, started clearing out the offices, all kinds of intelligence, anything from papers to hard drives to thumb drives, compact discs, computers, anything we could fit in bags.
[01:20:59]  We started trying to round people up.
[01:21:00]  I went back upstairs and helped three other guys carry his body down the stairs.
[01:21:06]  I heard.
[01:21:07]  The Arabic speaker, he was talking to one of the older daughters.
[01:21:10]  She said in Arabic, Yeah, that's him.
[01:21:12]  And she called him Sheikh Osama.
[01:21:13]  You got Sheikh Osama.
[01:21:14]  And that's when we called the ground force commander, and he said over the radio for God and country, Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.
[01:21:21]  We carried Bin Laden's body out.
[01:21:23]  And actually, when we brought him outside of the compound, the sniper that initiated the fire for Captain Phillips, to save Captain Phillips, we said, Here's your guy.
[01:21:31]  And he looks back, he goes, You're kidding me.
[01:21:32]  He's like, No, we got him.
[01:21:34]  He's like, Let's leave.
[01:21:35]  So the helicopter, they blew up the helicopter that was in the front yard.
[01:21:39]  The helicopter I came in landed.
[01:21:41]  We did.
[01:21:42]  We did that intentionally so that the bad guys couldn't have any intel or anything.
[01:21:45]  Yeah, we wanted to blow it up.
[01:21:46]  Yeah, we blew it up because we didn't want them getting the technology, which sort of worked, but the tail fell over and we saw that.
[01:21:54]  So they didn't get the tail and abruptly sold it to the Chinese because Pakistan is definitely our ally.
[01:21:58]  And then another helicopter came in and we got on that helicopter and then we left.

=== Blowing Up the Front Yard Chopper (02:43) ===

[01:22:05]  And so we're flying out on a mission that we're supposed to be.
[01:22:10]  I was just going to say that there is, you can see in that infrared video that we've seen now, the body bag, the white body bag, or at least it looks white on the camera.
[01:22:18]  And it's crazy even for us to look at that and know that that's Bin Laden in there.
[01:22:21]  That's Osama bin Laden.
[01:22:22]  You think about Obama and you think about McCraven hearing that.
[01:22:25]  It's such a great line for God and country, for God and country.
[01:22:30]  Geronimo, Geronimo, Geronimo.
[01:22:32]  Was that, I mean, is that a thing?
[01:22:34]  Is that the way you say something like that in the military?
[01:22:37]  Or was that an ad lib for God and country?
[01:22:40]  I think that, like I said, the ground force commander who said those words to Mcraven was born to lead this mission on the ground and I I, I bet he had said that in his head a million times since 2001, something like that that he knew what he was going to say when he was the guy to lead it.
[01:22:54]  He'd always been the guy that was going to lead it and everyone knew it.
[01:22:56]  I don't know, I don't know what, I don't know how, but we just knew it would be him.
[01:23:00]  That is the field of one small step for yeah, man and one giant step for mankind, giant leap, uh.
[01:23:08]  So you okay, so keep going you, you get, you get on the helicopters.
[01:23:11]  So now we're not going to believe it.
[01:23:13]  Yeah, and even Admiral McCraven and President Obama was thinking, okay, now we got to get them out, because everyone knows we're here now and Pakistan's got F 16s and they're going to scramble them or something's going to happen.
[01:23:23]  We got to leave and we're flying.
[01:23:26]  And again, we're in a position where worrying about getting shotguns is not going to help.
[01:23:31]  So I'm not going to worry about it.
[01:23:32]  And all the other guys knew that.
[01:23:33]  And we just started our stopwatches.
[01:23:36]  So we're looking at our stopwatches and we know that it's a 90 minute flight.
[01:23:43]  And if we can live for 90 minutes, if we can live for 90 minutes, we can live for 50 years.
[01:23:48]  We get to see our kids.
[01:23:49]  We can do this.
[01:23:51]  But we're not there yet.
[01:23:52]  So you're looking at our watches and it's like, okay, it's been 10 minutes.
[01:23:56]  Now it's been 20 minutes.
[01:23:57]  It's loud in there, but no one's talking.
[01:23:59]  And now it's been 30 minutes.
[01:24:00]  Okay, it's been 40 minutes.
[01:24:02]  And then I love sports analogies.
[01:24:04]  Just because most sports are team efforts.
[01:24:07]  I'm thinking about like watching a no hitter being pitched at Yankee Stadium at the top of the seventh, and the fans are like, you know, I'm not going to say anything, but I don't want to jinx it.
[01:24:17]  Now it's 50 minutes.
[01:24:18]  It's been 60 minutes.
[01:24:19]  It's been 70 minutes.
[01:24:21]  Now it's 80 minutes.
[01:24:22]  And the best sports analogy for this is when Team USA Hockey was beating the Russians in Lake Placid in the Olympics.
[01:24:29]  And you can, they're not supposed to win this game, but they're up by one, and you can hear the crowd in New York 10, 9, 10.
[01:24:35]  Eight, we're nervous.
[01:24:36]  We can still screw this up.
[01:24:37]  And then, in 85 minutes, because we're flying really fast, the pilot came over in that typical monotone voice.
[01:24:43]  Pilots always have a monotone voice because they're trying to keep everyone in the back calm.
[01:24:46]  That's what they're doing.
[01:24:47]  Don't worry, we're calm.

=== Heroes in Every Single Moment (05:01) ===

[01:24:48]  And the pilot came over and said, All right, gentlemen, for the first time in your lives, you're going to be happy to hear this.
[01:24:53]  Welcome to Afghanistan.
[01:24:55]  Oh, that's crazy.
[01:24:57]  And that's a high five.
[01:24:59]  At first, I thought you were going to say, and he said, Do you believe in miracles?
[01:25:04]  See, that would have been better.
[01:25:05]  We should have thought that.
[01:25:07]  But yeah, then we let.
[01:25:09]  I love the piece of this story because now you get there.
[01:25:12]  And by this point, the female CIA analyst and her team must know they're exposed to the information as well.
[01:25:20]  And tell us what you did with her.
[01:25:24]  We landed, the other team landed.
[01:25:27]  We're giving hugs to each other.
[01:25:29]  I talked to the point man, the guy that led me up to the third floor.
[01:25:32]  He and I set aside to a corner, had a few words, a whole, what in the world did we just do type thing.
[01:25:37]  And then he said, there she is.
[01:25:39]  There's the woman, they called her Maya in the movie.
[01:25:41]  And he goes, There she is.
[01:25:43]  And he said, You got to give her something.
[01:25:45]  You own this.
[01:25:46]  So we walked over and I pulled the magazine out of my gun.
[01:25:49]  And I said, You have room for this in your backpack.
[01:25:53]  He said, Yeah, I think I do.
[01:25:54]  And then we walked her over to Bin Laden's body.
[01:25:56]  And in the movie Zero Dark Thirty, at the end, they showed her Bin Laden's body and she got emotional and cried.
[01:26:03]  That's not at all what happened.
[01:26:05]  No.
[01:26:06]  She was so mentally strong.
[01:26:07]  No, no.
[01:26:07]  We walked her over and I remember thinking, This is historic.
[01:26:11]  This is like, this is going down in the history books with Iwo Jima and George Washington crossing the Delaware to fight the Hessians in the Revolutionary War.
[01:26:19]  And she found him.
[01:26:20]  And then I'm looking at her thinking, she gave up her life for this.
[01:26:23]  She never got married because she's working 20 hours a day to find him.
[01:26:26]  And there he is.
[01:26:27]  And then me being the area Navy SEAL, I said, Well, I got to think of something cool to say.
[01:26:33]  This is a lot of pressure now.
[01:26:34]  And we don't know what we said.
[01:26:36]  So, yeah, typical Navy SEAL.
[01:26:38]  This is a lot of pressure.
[01:26:40]  So we walk over there.
[01:26:41]  And you got to excuse my language, but the story doesn't work without it.
[01:26:44]  We looked down and I thought it would have been good enough for this.
[01:26:47]  I said, I pointed up in Lodin.
[01:26:49]  I said, Is that your guy?
[01:26:52]  And she looked down for a second and a half and said, Well, I guess I'm out of a fucking job.
[01:26:59]  And then she left.
[01:27:00]  That was it.
[01:27:01]  No cry.
[01:27:02]  No way.
[01:27:04]  She's never gone public.
[01:27:06]  We don't know who this person is.
[01:27:08]  Do you think she'll ever reveal herself?
[01:27:11]  I don't think she will.
[01:27:12]  And I mean, you know.
[01:27:14]  If she, you know, anyone in their right mind would hire her for any job in the world.
[01:27:18]  But I think that's just not her style.
[01:27:20]  She's just completely cool, completely tough, very smart, smartest person I think I've ever met.
[01:27:24]  And just, you know, she did it and just incredible.
[01:27:27]  And, you know, yeah, I don't think she ever will.
[01:27:30]  Do we know what she's doing now?
[01:27:32]  I have no idea.
[01:27:35]  So she could still be with the CIA.
[01:27:37]  I could be.
[01:27:38]  I talked to her, though, because, you know, the movie's pretty accurate how no one believed her and she got a bunch of grief.
[01:27:43]  And as soon as we got bin Laden, everyone's in an awards ceremony getting awards except for her.
[01:27:47]  And I talked to her at some point.
[01:27:49]  I ran into her in New York and I said, How'd it go down there?
[01:27:52]  She goes, I didn't even get a parking spot.
[01:27:56]  That had to change later.
[01:27:57]  I mean, come on.
[01:27:58]  Five of us doing so, yeah.
[01:28:01]  Okay, the conclusion to our episode is right after this.
[01:28:03]  Don't go away.
[01:28:08]  There's so many heroes in this whole thing.
[01:28:11]  I love that you point out the guys who flew the helicopters.
[01:28:14]  There's so many people who have gone rather unsung in this, and it's to your credit to give the credit away.
[01:28:21]  So, can we just jump forward now?
[01:28:23]  You've done it.
[01:28:24]  By the way, did you ever have a conversation with your mom about, like, did you get to reveal it to her?
[01:28:31]  I did because we brought the body up to Bagram Airfield.
[01:28:37]  So, the The smart guys, the federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies could do the proper DNA test, did confirm it.
[01:28:46]  We're standing there.
[01:28:47]  Bin Laden's body is right next to us as we're eating these sandwiches.
[01:28:51]  He's right here getting tested.
[01:28:52]  And we saw President Obama walk out.
[01:28:54]  We're watching the news.
[01:28:55]  He walked down a red carpet.
[01:28:57]  And I'm standing there and I hear President Obama say, Tonight I can report to the American people and to the world.
[01:29:04]  The United States conducted an operation that killed Osama Bin Laden, the leader of Al Qaeda.
[01:29:09]  I hear President Obama say Osama bin Laden.
[01:29:12]  I look at Osama bin Laden.
[01:29:14]  I take a bite of my sandwich.
[01:29:16]  I thought, how in the world did I get here from Butte, Montana?
[01:29:20]  Right.
[01:29:20]  The taco pizzas not long before.
[01:29:23]  Yeah, right.
[01:29:24]  And so, yeah.
[01:29:25]  So, and then, so obviously everyone knew I did get a chance to call my mom.
[01:29:28]  And I couldn't say anything because I was still in Afghanistan.
[01:29:31]  But I said, Mom, you remember how I said I'd never get a Silver Star?
[01:29:35]  Yeah, I'm sorry.
[01:29:36]  I think I'm probably going to get another one.
[01:29:38]  And she laughed.
[01:29:38]  And I'd always been joking with my mother.
[01:29:41]  Because she sort of knew what happened.
[01:29:43]  And I'd always joke with her, even when I was playing basketball in high school and college, even when I went to the Navy, I always joke with her and say, Mom, don't worry about me.

=== Brotherhood Born in Afghanistan (15:22) ===

[01:29:50]  You don't need to worry because I'm here to do something special.
[01:29:52]  Don't worry about me, blah, blah, blah.
[01:29:53]  And I always joke with her, Hey, you know, we're in Iraq.
[01:29:55]  Don't worry about me, Mom.
[01:29:56]  I'm fine.
[01:29:56]  I'm here to do something special.
[01:29:57]  On this call, I said, Hey, Mom, by the way, you can start worrying about me because I think I just did that special thing.
[01:30:02]  Oh, my gosh.
[01:30:03]  I mean, now that has to be the moment you're like, Now this is the apex.
[01:30:09]  This is the moment.
[01:30:10]  Forget everything.
[01:30:11]  It's surreal.
[01:30:12]  Surreal.
[01:30:12]  And just what an honor to be a part of that amazing team.
[01:30:16]  To be in the presence of that intelligence team, to fly with those pilots, to listen to Admiral McCraven, who, like, if you've never, to your listeners, listen to the speech, Make Your Bed, when he talks to the University of Texas about that.
[01:30:29]  It's got 20 million views on YouTube.
[01:30:31]  Oh, my God.
[01:30:32]  That's the one who I heard.
[01:30:33]  I'm a public speaker.
[01:30:34]  I heard that.
[01:30:34]  I was just jealous.
[01:30:35]  I can't believe I didn't write that.
[01:30:38]  He's got a special gift with them word things.
[01:30:41]  He is incredibly worth it.
[01:30:44]  But hearing you and hearing this story, I mean, this is why.
[01:30:47]  Most of us, I certainly love our US military.
[01:30:52]  You guys are the ones who make me feel everything when I look at that flag.
[01:30:58]  I think about stories like this.
[01:30:59]  I think about courage like you had.
[01:31:00]  I think about the brotherhood.
[01:31:01]  I think about the sacrifice.
[01:31:03]  I feel gratitude.
[01:31:04]  I love our country.
[01:31:05]  I love our flag.
[01:31:06]  I love you guys.
[01:31:07]  I love what you stand for.
[01:31:07]  I love what you make me feel like I'm a part of.
[01:31:12]  You are the ones who make us stand up and say, yes, yes, this is what it means to be an American.
[01:31:18]  This is what the stars and stripes mean, right?
[01:31:20]  It's like, And this is why it is infuriating when people don't see it.
[01:31:27]  And when you see these Gallup polls, the patriotism is at an all time low.
[01:31:31]  And you see people out on the streets this past summer saying America is a failed experiment.
[01:31:36]  And there's shame in some quarters at displaying the U.S. flag.
[01:31:41]  I know.
[01:31:42]  What will you tell me?
[01:31:43]  What do those people need to know?
[01:31:46]  Well, what they need to know, too, first off, is one of the things they're worried about, they say domestic terrorism, they're talking about radicals in the U.S. military.
[01:31:53]  Which is so undermining and so insulting to everyone there because it doesn't matter everything from, well, especially race, doesn't matter when you raise your hand, you're defending each other.
[01:32:04]  When I was getting out of the Navy, one of the big things, so this is back in 2012 was don't ask, don't tell, let's repeal it.
[01:32:11]  I was looking at my guys, I was in Afghanistan, I said, Do any of you guys really care if anyone's gay?
[01:32:17]  No, I don't care what you do, I don't care what you look like or where you're from.
[01:32:21]  We took an oath to defend the Constitution against all enemies, and that's what the military does.
[01:32:25]  And the vast majority is just like that, red, white, and blue.
[01:32:29]  That's what everyone's like, too.
[01:32:30]  And it's a shame to see them try to pit everyone against each other, especially the military.
[01:32:34]  These are great people, men and women.
[01:32:35]  Right now, whoever they're doing what needs to be done.
[01:32:38]  And just morale is huge.
[01:32:41]  Morale is so key, everything from sense of humor to knowing what you're doing and why.
[01:32:44]  And just to throw the sideshow out there for political points, it's sad to see it, especially during this upcoming Memorial Day.
[01:32:54]  It's just you need to remember what's important, and it's the people next to you.
[01:32:57]  Well, and I hate to go this low with you because I just see you as such an elevated guest, but I do have to ask you about the ridiculous woke military ad that the Army put out, which I. Not the one that was spliced and diced with, it was sort of showed our soft ad next to these Russians training and looking tough.
[01:33:17]  That was BS.
[01:33:17]  That was Russian propaganda.
[01:33:18]  But the ad, the American piece of it was real, which I did not know.
[01:33:23]  I was like, wait, no, that has to be put together by Putin.
[01:33:26]  He's just trying to show us as non threatening, which of course is not what Putin thinks.
[01:33:31]  Oh, no.
[01:33:32]  But the American piece of that ad was real.
[01:33:35]  And for those of you at home who haven't seen it, we're going to play it.
[01:33:38]  Listen.
[01:33:40]  This is the story of a soldier who operates your nation's Patriot Missile Defense Systems.
[01:33:51]  Although I had a fairly typical childhood, took ballet, played violin, I also marched for equality.
[01:34:00]  When I was six years old, one of my moms had an accident that left her paralyzed, but she tapped into my family's pride to get back on her feet, eventually standing at the altar to marry my other mom.
[01:34:12]  But as graduation approached, I began feeling like I'd been handed so much in life a sorority girl stereotype.
[01:34:20]  I needed my own adventures, my own challenge.
[01:34:25]  And after meeting with an army recruiter, I found it a way to prove my inner strength and maybe shatter some stereotypes along the way.
[01:34:36]  Okay, so we pulled the highlights from the end.
[01:34:39]  But I mean, look, I'm all for female empowerment.
[01:34:41]  I think my audience understands that.
[01:34:42]  But I don't need to hear about her ballet and her violin and her two moms and her sorority past to be inspired about our U.S. military or to get any young woman, I think, in America to join.
[01:34:53]  Yeah, I don't think that's any part of it.
[01:34:55]  Again, we all have different backgrounds.
[01:34:57]  That's fine.
[01:34:58]  And I'm a libertarian.
[01:34:59]  You do whatever you want as long as you're not hurting anyone else.
[01:35:02]  The problem I see here is this is the gateway to experimentation, which the military doesn't need to be.
[01:35:07]  And what that means is they want to, I'm all about equal opportunity, equal opportunity to show up.
[01:35:12]  And if you can't meet the standards, I'm sorry.
[01:35:14]  You couldn't meet the standards.
[01:35:15]  That's fine.
[01:35:16]  But once you start lowering the standards, that's where the problems come in.
[01:35:19]  You know, I know women right now that I'm thinking of that can kick my butt, and I'm not even making that up.
[01:35:24]  And that's fine.
[01:35:25]  But we don't need to lower the standards just to get more.
[01:35:28]  If the best person flying the S18, if the top five out of 20 happen to be Asian females, fine.
[01:35:36]  I want those five flying the jets because they're the best.
[01:35:38]  And that's what we have to do.
[01:35:40]  Equal opportunity, keep the standard side, but you don't get equal outcomes.
[01:35:43]  And the problem is we're just.
[01:35:44]  They're experimenting on the military for some reason.
[01:35:46]  And even in the military, it's not as tragic in the military.
[01:35:49]  I do know people who are getting out early because of a lot of the political correctness, but most of the young guys, I've got nephews that join the army, they kind of roll their eyes at it and they'll ask me, as the old man now, what's the point of this?
[01:36:00]  I'm like, I don't know.
[01:36:01]  You should be on the range.
[01:36:03]  Trying to get your scope cited in.
[01:36:06]  Can you imagine if you guys, as you were boarding those helicopters, were like, okay, do we have someone who's black, someone who's a lesbian, someone who's trans?
[01:36:15]  Let's make sure you're selecting.
[01:36:17]  There are things that are fine in life, but they're not.
[01:36:20]  It should be eyes closed, who's qualified, go.
[01:36:23]  That's it.
[01:36:24]  And it's not complex.
[01:36:25]  The military is not complex.
[01:36:27]  Like I said, the complexity comes with the intelligence people.
[01:36:29]  Like I said earlier, I'm smart enough to carry a hammer and a gun.
[01:36:32]  Point me in the direction I will go.
[01:36:34]  I can climb the fence.
[01:36:35]  I can go through the window.
[01:36:36]  That's it.
[01:36:37]  It's not complicated.
[01:36:38]  It doesn't matter that I'm from Montana and couldn't swim.
[01:36:40]  I'm just here we are.
[01:36:41]  Well, that's the thing.
[01:36:43]  Everybody has different skills.
[01:36:44]  I mean, you've been pretty clear about Maya playing an awfully important role in finding Bin Laden and having the design of his compound down to the step on which you'd find his son.
[01:36:55]  I mean, this is obviously a brilliant woman.
[01:36:57]  Why are we not okay with different people having different skills and they can make the most of them and they can be equally important in different ways?
[01:37:03]  Why do we have to say that the guys who we need to be the strongest?
[01:37:06]  Physically.
[01:37:07]  And the biggest risk takers when it comes to physical confrontation generally happen to be men.
[01:37:12]  That's fine.
[01:37:12]  That is not diminishing to women.
[01:37:14]  People have feminism completely confused.
[01:37:17]  Their definition of feminism, what it means to empower women, doesn't mirror my own at all.
[01:37:21]  I think most sane people think that, but we're going a different way now.
[01:37:24]  I was shocked to see that from our military.
[01:37:26]  I was shocked to see that they're flying the BLM flag now at our bases, at our military bases, and that this was approved at the highest levels.
[01:37:35]  That's a political message.
[01:37:36]  Why is our military doing politics?
[01:37:39]  I don't understand that either.
[01:37:40]  I think at a certain level, especially the general officer level, you're appointed by certain people in Congress and everything becomes political and you need to toe the party line or the politically correct line or else you're not going to get a job.
[01:37:50]  And at some point, it becomes personal selfishness.
[01:37:54]  What do I need to do to make myself better?
[01:37:56]  What do I need to do in Congress?
[01:37:57]  Same thing to get paid more.
[01:38:00]  How's the pork going to help my district in this infrastructure package so I get reelected?
[01:38:04]  And I mean, the issue is too, and we need to get some of the junior officers to be in charge because We've been pretty good at everything except winning a war.
[01:38:12]  Maybe we're doing something wrong.
[01:38:15]  We had a war that we should have won in 2004, and we're still not out of there.
[01:38:19]  I don't know.
[01:38:21]  Someone wants to get promoted so they bring in something more ridiculous that we need to check the block.
[01:38:24]  We thought it was ridiculous now that before we go to war, I had to go to dental to make sure my cavities were updated.
[01:38:30]  Now you've got to make sure you have all this political science online stuff done before you can go to Syria.
[01:38:38]  Are they making you do sensitivity training?
[01:38:40]  You have to take anti bias training now?
[01:38:42]  Oh, they're doing everything.
[01:38:43]  There's stuff that's so ridiculous.
[01:38:45]  I like that commercial that was just out at the tip of the iceberg.
[01:38:48]  I wanted to believe for a week it was fake.
[01:38:50]  Like, I hope the Russians did this.
[01:38:51]  Because if you think Russia, Iran, and China are looking at us and thinking, there's America leading the way, they're laughing.
[01:38:58]  Oh, my God.
[01:38:59]  When they see the violin and the ballet, meanwhile, it's completely not representative.
[01:39:04]  I mean, the ad and its tone and its approach made the military sound like some sort of effete place you can go, you know, where you're going to see little ballet dancers prancing around.
[01:39:13]  And the American military is exactly the opposite, it is the toughest.
[01:39:16]  Most severe, most threatening, most powerful fighting force in the world.
[01:39:21]  And as you point out, not perfect.
[01:39:23]  History may not be 100% clean, but 99% of the time, we're the good guys.
[01:39:28]  And we are always aiming to do the right thing.
[01:39:31]  We are the good guys and we are the most powerful military in the world.
[01:39:35]  And again, everything is more dramatic online and on, as you know, on cable news, we'll get the most ratings.
[01:39:41]  Most people out there are really doing a great job.
[01:39:43]  Our military, our Air Force, Navy, Marine Corps, it's phenomenal.
[01:39:47]  And as opposed to being afraid of what they're doing, they're more of a roller-ride.
[01:39:50]  Like, are we seriously doing this before we go over there?
[01:39:52]  But I'm very confident.
[01:39:55]  This military was designed to fight bigger militaries, and we could destroy anyone in the world if we want to.
[01:39:59]  The only reason we haven't is because we're the good guys.
[01:40:02]  A lot of the sensitivity training, you know, it's fine on the university campus, even though I disagree with it.
[01:40:07]  Black Lives Matter has been hijacked by Marxists.
[01:40:10]  We know that.
[01:40:10]  Black Lives, yes, matter, but now these white liberal Marxists have taken over.
[01:40:14]  Just keep that out of the military, off the embassies.
[01:40:17]  You know, forward defense, alliance, solidarity, and deterrence.
[01:40:21]  That's what we need to do as a military.
[01:40:23]  What do you think?
[01:40:23]  I think it's interesting you say you're a libertarian because I know you're not a partisan guy.
[01:40:26]  I saw you tweet out Democrats aren't the answer, neither are Republicans.
[01:40:29]  Wise up in response to which I said, Amen.
[01:40:32]  Yes, that's how I feel too.
[01:40:34]  But I was surprised.
[01:40:36]  I will confess, I kind of thought you were a Republican.
[01:40:37]  I thought you were, I think you were Trump supporter, although I don't totally remember my history on that.
[01:40:42]  But what, why do you say neither party is the answer?
[01:40:46]  Well, I'm conservative as far as, you know, do your own thing.
[01:40:49]  The government just keep, you know, stop taking my money to give it to all these social programs.
[01:40:54]  You know, the economy, other stuff, a big business.
[01:40:56]  I think that it's, you know, pay your people what they deserve.
[01:40:59]  I believe in paying my employees more than, you know, just take care of your people.
[01:41:04]  But as far as like the liberal side of it, like I said about don't ask them to tell, fine, whatever, you're good.
[01:41:08]  I don't care.
[01:41:08]  You do what you want to do as long as you're not hurting someone else.
[01:41:11]  I'm fine with that.
[01:41:12]  Don't lie to yourself.
[01:41:13]  Admit what you're doing and do it.
[01:41:14]  It's fine.
[01:41:15]  Just don't affect anyone else.
[01:41:16]  So I'm on both sides.
[01:41:18]  And I've spent a little bit of time in Washington on Capitol Hill.
[01:41:21]  That was one of my first jobs up there.
[01:41:23]  I've just seen, I'm a big believer that a lot of narcissists go there and there's no shame.
[01:41:28]  And politicians will say anything they can to get reelected.
[01:41:30]  So I think the two party system is wrong.
[01:41:32]  And there's got to be, most of us are in the middle.
[01:41:35]  We just don't have the platforms anymore.
[01:41:37]  That's right.
[01:41:38]  Welcome to my show.
[01:41:41]  I got to get you to comment on what you point out about the war, about the war in Afghanistan.
[01:41:48]  We're officially pulling all of our troops out.
[01:41:50]  They're saying it's going to happen in July.
[01:41:52]  And the Taliban is openly saying, we won.
[01:41:56]  The Taliban, we, the Taliban, have won.
[01:41:58]  We've defeated America.
[01:42:00]  What do you make of that?
[01:42:01]  Did they?
[01:42:02]  Did they win?
[01:42:03]  And what do you make of the fact that already there's news just today that the Taliban attacks are picking up there right now?
[01:42:08]  What's going to happen there?
[01:42:09]  Well, we knew that was going to happen, and it doesn't matter what you do, they're going to say they won.
[01:42:13]  You just saw Hamas recently said they beat Israel.
[01:42:15]  That's what they do, and they can shout it from the rooftops, which they will.
[01:42:19]  But we went about it the wrong way.
[01:42:21]  We did it the right way when we invaded, when we bombed them, we kicked them all into Pakistan.
[01:42:25]  The problem that we had is we're not nation builders.
[01:42:28]  We shouldn't have Marines driving through these roads trying to build schools.
[01:42:32]  Hit them hard, maintain a presence of air superiority if they set up the camps to bomb them.
[01:42:36]  Hit them really, really hard, look them in the eye, and say, no.
[01:42:39]  You do that again, we're coming back.
[01:42:40]  We're not going to make peace.
[01:42:41]  We're not going to bring Jeffersonian democracy there.
[01:42:43]  They don't want it.
[01:42:44]  They want their valleys.
[01:42:45]  If the Taliban knew that we were just coming for Al Qaeda, they would have given them to us.
[01:42:49]  They thought we were a paper tiger.
[01:42:51]  But we're not going to stay in there and force them to do it.
[01:42:54]  If we can't teach them to fight in 20 years, they're never going to learn to fight.
[01:42:57]  Yes, the warlords are going to take over again.
[01:42:59]  It's going to happen.
[01:43:00]  It happens every single time back to Alexander the Great.
[01:43:02]  We knew it.
[01:43:03]  We got to be smart about being stupid.
[01:43:04]  We're not going to sit there and turn into the United States.
[01:43:07]  Do you see terrorist attacks going up as a result of this?
[01:43:10]  You know, long haul, once they get there, Back together and get resettled there and don't have to worry about U.S. military on the ground?
[01:43:18]  No, I mean, we're going to maintain a presence and probably an embassy.
[01:43:21]  So we'll have Bagram Airfield.
[01:43:22]  We'll have some stuff in Jalalabad for cross borders.
[01:43:24]  We'll be able to launch jets and bomb them.
[01:43:26]  But I mean, they're already doing this and they're in Yemen, they're in Syria, they're in Iraq, they're in Sudan.
[01:43:30]  Al Qaeda's the whole nail, the jealous of the wall thing.
[01:43:34]  We just get frontside focused on Afghanistan, Afghanistan, Afghanistan.
[01:43:37]  Afghanistan was won in 2004.
[01:43:39]  I was driving motorcycles up and down the street in Jalabad and eating at Swarmers in the bazaar.
[01:43:45]  If you stay long enough, regardless of your intentions, you will be seen as an occupier.
[01:43:49]  And that's where we're at now.
[01:43:50]  I mean, giving them, we don't need to tell everyone when we're leaving.
[01:43:53]  We can do what we want.
[01:43:54]  You can just leave.
[01:43:54]  You don't need to say, and certainly don't say September 11th, we're leaving.
[01:43:58]  Just leave.
[01:43:59]  And you know what?
[01:44:01]  If you know that the Americans are going to protect you, but then we're going to leave and you're going to get massacred.
[01:44:06]  Maybe that's incentive to finally learn how to fight for yourself.
[01:44:09]  Yeah, because that was the original statement by the Biden administration.
[01:44:12]  We're going to leave on September 11th.
[01:44:13]  And then people are like, really?
[01:44:14]  You're giving us a set date, you know, just so you can have a spike the ball moment.
[01:44:17]  And then he moved it to July.
[01:44:19]  Can I just ask you a quick question about Israel?
[01:44:21]  Because as somebody who, you know, we are the good guys.
[01:44:23]  And when you hear the full Rob O'Neill story, you'll hear about how you and other troops, while in that compound, I know you took care of a little girl who was standing there alone.
[01:44:31]  You got her to an adult.
[01:44:32]  Bin Laden's two-year-old son, you put him on the bed and made sure he was out of harm's way as much as he could be.
[01:44:38]  There's been a lot of discussion about whether Israel's response to the Hamas rockets was disproportionate, whether they should have, it was not proportional, I should say, and whether they had an obligation to be more protective of civilians, even though those civilians were put in harm's way by Hamas.
[01:44:55]  That's documented.
[01:44:56]  The people who criticize Israel would say, we don't care that they were put in harm's way by Hamas.
[01:45:00]  Israel is supposed to be the good guys, and Israel should have been not so severe and should have taken extra pains and should have sort of gone easy.
[01:45:07]  Given the number of civilian deaths.
[01:45:09]  So, your thoughts on that?
[01:45:10]  Well, Hamas doesn't have to tell the truth.

=== Gratitude Amidst War Zone Pain (09:57) ===

[01:45:12]  They like to lie, and they know the more Palestinian children that die, the better for their cause because they will get the.
[01:45:18]  I don't know what it is about the media worldwide.
[01:45:20]  They love Hamas.
[01:45:21]  I don't know what the deal is.
[01:45:23]  They hate Israel.
[01:45:24]  They love Hamas.
[01:45:25]  And I mean, figure out how many Hamas is randomly shooting rockets that fall short and kill Palestinian children.
[01:45:30]  That happens all the time.
[01:45:31]  They can blame that on Israel.
[01:45:32]  And then in their media centers and where they're launching missiles, they happen to put them in schools and hospitals and put human shields as children in there, which is horrible.
[01:45:41]  I. Feel horrible for the Palestinian people because most war zones I've been in, there are just people trying to get on with their lives, and that's the Palestinian people.
[01:45:48]  Horrifying.
[01:45:49]  It's Hamas that's the problem.
[01:45:50]  They're going to lie about everything.
[01:45:52]  If Israel was going to do too much, they would level the entire place and kill everyone, which they could.
[01:45:57]  They're the ones, they're the only liberal democracy in the Middle East.
[01:46:01]  They're the only ones really not expanding the way other countries are.
[01:46:04]  They're not the bad guys.
[01:46:05]  All you need to do is tell yourself the truth.
[01:46:08]  If Israel put down their guns and threw them in the Mediterranean Sea tomorrow, there would be genocide.
[01:46:13]  If Hamas did it, there'd be peace.
[01:46:14]  Like, it's not hard to see that.
[01:46:16]  But for some reason, they want to spin everything.
[01:46:18]  And the poor Palestinian children, man, they're just being used by the media, used by Hamas.
[01:46:23]  And yeah, Israeli bombs kill them.
[01:46:25]  And I hate that.
[01:46:25]  I mean, believe me, as someone that's seen war and people at its worst, I wish we could all hold hands and have peace.
[01:46:31]  I would love it.
[01:46:32]  And it's just, it's tragic to see, but it gets spun so bad to the point that makes Israel look like the aggressor.
[01:46:37]  Okay, it's the land thing, but how far back does that go?
[01:46:40]  Yes, the Palestinians were there, but I'm pretty sure Jews were there a long, long time ago, too.
[01:46:45]  And look, I mean, look at Jerusalem.
[01:46:46]  You have Christians, Jews, and Muslims all living in peace.
[01:46:50]  It's very possible.
[01:46:51]  It's Hamas and the radicals that are, you know, it's like people aren't born to hate, they're taught to hate.
[01:46:59]  And that's this part of the problem that Hamas is doing with a lot of these people over there.
[01:47:03]  I mean, we could be close to peace over there.
[01:47:05]  It's heartbreaking to see that honest people are just trying to live through this stuff.
[01:47:09]  I know.
[01:47:10]  And it's just never ending.
[01:47:11]  All right.
[01:47:12]  So let me shift gears and end it with this.
[01:47:14]  You're out of the military now.
[01:47:16]  So, what are you doing?
[01:47:17]  How do you pay the bills when you leave the military?
[01:47:19]  I started as a public speaker.
[01:47:21]  I speak with leading authorities out of Washington, D.C.
[01:47:24]  And it wasn't a show up and tell the bin Laden story.
[01:47:27]  It was more of a what did we learn as a successful team?
[01:47:30]  What traits are common to success?
[01:47:31]  And how does that apply to you?
[01:47:33]  And the very, very basics, you know, keep it simple, is your team will work harder if morale is high, if people know what they're doing and why.
[01:47:39]  Effective communication.
[01:47:41]  You know, when you're done saying what you're saying, stop saying it.
[01:47:44]  And no matter what, never quit.
[01:47:48]  And so I give speeches on that.
[01:47:49]  I did start a foundation called Special Operators Transition Foundation, which helps special operators go from the military to the private sector.
[01:47:57]  Because when I got out, I had no idea what I'm going to do now sell sunglasses or t shirts or whatever.
[01:48:02]  And I learned that.
[01:48:04]  I had traits that I learned working with men and women in special operations that people want to hire.
[01:48:08]  So, my foundation helps those men and women transition to get their second careers.
[01:48:13]  That's awesome.
[01:48:13]  Can I ask you that?
[01:48:14]  Let me follow up on that and I'll give you the floor.
[01:48:16]  But, do you see a lot of PTSD in these warriors?
[01:48:21]  Do you have it?
[01:48:22]  How does that factor in?
[01:48:24]  We skip over that too often.
[01:48:27]  I do.
[01:48:28]  I know I have it, and a lot of people have it.
[01:48:30]  And the problem with PTSD is it normally shows up about six years after the fact.
[01:48:35]  When the realization that what we were doing is not normal.
[01:48:40]  And they've really asked a lot of us.
[01:48:42]  And it comes with everything from thinking depressing thoughts to sometimes nightmares, not necessarily about war, but just on edge.
[01:48:51]  And a lot of guys get into the depression, which leads to self medication that leads down a bad path.
[01:48:55]  So I tell people now that you probably have some form, and the way to handle it is to really talk to someone.
[01:49:03]  And what I mean is, I recommend a therapist, but also if you're having a If you're having a bad day, call someone.
[01:49:08]  And if you're having, you know, because they might be having a good day, but if you're having a good day, call someone because they might be having a bad day and you're having a good day.
[01:49:15]  You know, just it's okay to get it out there that this is not normal to do a lot of stuff we did.
[01:49:20]  So the PTSD is there, but it's manageable.
[01:49:23]  You know, again, with a sense of humor.
[01:49:26]  Yeah, I like that.
[01:49:27]  I like that a lot.
[01:49:28]  And I'm sorry, were you going to say something else that you're doing?
[01:49:31]  I cut you off.
[01:49:32]  No, I just said that the foundation.
[01:49:35]  And then, you know, I obviously wrote the operator.
[01:49:38]  I'm collaborating with Dakota Meyer Medal of Honor.
[01:49:40]  Recipient Marine book that we're hopefully coming out with soon.
[01:49:43]  I have it at the Pentagon, which is the right thing to do if you're going to ever write a book.
[01:49:46]  Make sure you get it approved so you don't give up tactics.
[01:49:49]  That'll come out.
[01:49:49]  And that's more of a what next?
[01:49:51]  Like, what do we do now?
[01:49:52]  Because, like I said earlier, you know, everyone's got their first day, but everyone has their last day.
[01:49:57]  And what do we do now?
[01:49:59]  Like, when people say to me, Oh, of course.
[01:50:01]  Yeah, that'd be great.
[01:50:02]  I'll have Dakota with me too.
[01:50:03]  He's hilarious.
[01:50:04]  But when people say, Well, once a SEAL, always a SEAL, I'll say, No, I was a SEAL, now I'm not.
[01:50:08]  We just, you move on.
[01:50:09]  Like, I was in high school, and now I'm not.
[01:50:10]  And I was a SEAL, now I'm not.
[01:50:12]  We all have to move on.
[01:50:14]  Like you can retire after 20 years in the military at 39 years old.
[01:50:18]  Your life is just starting.
[01:50:19]  What do we do now?
[01:50:23]  So, picking up on something I heard, there's a Fox News documentary that I saw with Peter Doosie shortly when you first came out.
[01:50:33]  And it was a good question and it was an interesting answer.
[01:50:36]  And I wondered if there was an update to it because in that exchange, you said you weren't sure if killing Bin Laden was the best or worst thing to ever happen to you.
[01:50:47]  Yes.
[01:50:47]  My thoughts on that now.
[01:50:48]  Well, at the time, I didn't know what it was because no one's really ever done this before.
[01:50:55]  I remember even someone said, Wow, this is kind of like we hired the guy that killed Hitler.
[01:50:59]  And I said, Well, Hitler killed himself.
[01:51:00]  And he said, Exactly.
[01:51:01]  I'm like, Oh, okay.
[01:51:02]  That's pretty deep.
[01:51:04]  I don't know.
[01:51:06]  It's been the best thing when I donated the shirt that I wore into Bin Laden's bedroom to the 9 11 Memorial Museum in lower Manhattan.
[01:51:15]  And when I donated it anonymously, Just so people could, something tangible that was there.
[01:51:21]  I never wanted to be about me.
[01:51:22]  But when I donated it, they had about 30 family members there.
[01:51:27]  And they said, having a real face, tell, you know, there's a lot of family members.
[01:51:31]  They said, a real face with what happened.
[01:51:32]  There will never be closure, but this helps with the healing.
[01:51:35]  And to see their emotional response, if I can tell more people what happened, I can help more.
[01:51:40]  So that's worth it.
[01:51:42]  But then there's the other side too with the, you know, we get conspiracy theories from the far right wing because they just hate that.
[01:51:52]  That President Obama ordered the mission.
[01:51:54]  And so they want to say it was a fake.
[01:51:56]  It was, you know, it's all like President Trump retweeted something, QAnon, all this nonsense.
[01:52:00]  And people say, like, you're lying.
[01:52:01]  You didn't kill Ben Laden.
[01:52:02]  I'm like, you know what?
[01:52:03]  I. Sometimes wish I didn't.
[01:52:05]  I'm just telling you what happened.
[01:52:06]  So I don't know.
[01:52:06]  I mean, it was great for the world.
[01:52:08]  It was great for the coalition, great to prove that we can do it.
[01:52:10]  But it's, you know, sometimes it'd be better.
[01:52:13]  Sometimes I'd rather just be out, you know, playing really bad golf.
[01:52:16]  Mm-hmm.
[01:52:18]  There was a story I read about a man coming up to you with his grandson.
[01:52:23]  And that man's son had died on 9-11.
[01:52:27]  What did he say to you?
[01:52:29]  He said, my grandson always asked me, why did God do this?
[01:52:34]  And the grandfather said, God didn't do this, the devil did.
[01:52:38]  And he looked at me and said, You, sir, killed the devil.
[01:52:41]  So that was pretty deep.
[01:52:43]  You sure did.
[01:52:44]  And we are grateful.
[01:52:46]  This is a grateful nation, no matter what these morons who are too young to understand anything about our history say in the streets.
[01:52:52]  It is a grateful, America loving nation still.
[01:52:55]  I believe that.
[01:52:55]  And the polls do reflect that the majority of people still feel that way about our country.
[01:52:59]  So, last question on this Memorial Day, as we honor the fallen.
[01:53:04]  Many of whom you've known and served beside.
[01:53:07]  What do you love about America?
[01:53:10]  What I do love about America on Memorial Day, too, is people realize it's not, a lot of people realize it's not just a three day weekend.
[01:53:18]  And it's not for the veterans, it's for the fallen.
[01:53:20]  It's for everyone that died, you know, the 173 women that died in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, all the men that died there as well, that it's not just a three day weekend, but it's also not to be, you know, yeah, have your moment of silence, have a tear, but then when you drink that beer, that glass of wine, Tilt it up, look at the sky and realize that they want you to do that, that they died for the freedom to do that.
[01:53:41]  And they would do the same thing in your shoes.
[01:53:44]  And again, as opposed to going on Twitter when you go outside on Sunday and Monday, look at America, look at the people.
[01:53:51]  Notice the American flag is everywhere you go to, and everyone respects it.
[01:53:54]  It's just not for ratings, just for love of the country.
[01:53:59]  Rob O'Neill, a true American hero.
[01:54:02]  I'm proud to know you.
[01:54:03]  Thank you so much for spending this time with us.
[01:54:06]  Thank you, Megan.
[01:54:06]  And we'll do this again when I get Dakota on here for the next book.
[01:54:10]  You are booked.
[01:54:16]  All right.
[01:54:16]  So I hope that was as meaningful to all of you as it was to me.
[01:54:19]  I can't wait to share this one with my kids and to share the meaning of Memorial Day with them.
[01:54:24]  The privilege it is to be an American, to live in this great country, and to have guys like Rob O'Neill out there defending our freedoms.
[01:54:32]  Right?
[01:54:32]  Take a moment to say thank you, to remember, to be humble, to be grateful. and enjoy your loved ones and your friends and your time together.
[01:54:40]  That's what it's all about.
[01:54:41]  I'm thinking of all of you.
[01:54:42]  I'm very grateful to all of you for listening, and God bless America.
[01:54:47]  Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show.
[01:54:49]  No BS, no agenda, and no fear.
[01:54:53]  The Megyn Kelly Show is a devil-may-care media production in collaboration with Red Seat Ventures.

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