Former Navy SEAL Robert O'Neill appeared in his first television interview Tuesday night to detail the historic raid in which he shot dead Osama Bin Laden, and told how he was the last person that the elusive al-Qaeda leader ever saw.
In a two-part interview with Fox News, which concludes Wednesday night, O'Neill said: 'If it was light enough, I was the last person he saw.'
Life as a SEAL: Before he joined SEAL Team Six, O'Neill was a member of SEAL Team Two, which continually avoided deployments in the Middle East. He decided to transfer to SEAL Team Six to have more of a role in the operations in Iraq and Afghanistan
He revealed that he looked Bin Laden straight in the eyes before he shot him dead.
O'Neill said: 'He was standing there two feet in front of me, hand on his wife, the face I’ve seen thousands of times. I thought, "We got him, we just ended the war."'
Highly decorated O'Neill also talks about his unlikely journey from delivering pizzas in Butte, Montana to joining SEAL Team Six, the elite group which also staged the dramatic rescue of Captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates.
The Compound where Osama bin laden was killed: O'Neill says his team was given only a vague idea of their mission at first, so they believed they were being dispatched to Libya to capture hen-dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Above, the scene outside Bin Laden's compound after the May 2, 2011 attacks
The 38-year-old also recalls his last phone call to his father, and the emotional letters he wrote to his then-wife and children, certain that he would either be killed or taken prisoner in the risky raid ordered by President Obama on May 2, 2011.
While his three bullets helped bring closure to the many Americans who lost loved ones at the World Trade Centers, the Pentagon, and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, that moment continues to torment O'Neill every day.
Life-long hunter: After making it through SEAL training in 1996, O'Neill was trained as a sniper due to his expertise shooting which he honed hunting with his father back in Montana
The shirt O'Neill wore on the mission pictured left, at the National September 11th Memorial and Museum in New York City
'I'm still trying to figure out if it's the best thing I ever did, or the worst thing I ever did,' O'Neill told Fox News' Peter Doocy Tuesday night.
O'Neill was the SEAL to fire the three bullets that killed the terrorist leader who organized the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
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