This instant New York Times bestseller--"a jaw-dropping, fast-paced
account" (New York Post) recounts SEAL Team Operator Robert O'Neill's
incredible four-hundred-mission career, including the attempts to rescue
"Lone Survivor" Marcus Luttrell and abducted-by-Somali-pirates Captain
Richard Phillips, and which culminated in the death of the world's most
wanted terrorist--Osama bin Laden.
In The Operator, Robert O'Neill describes his idyllic childhood in
Butte, Montana; his impulsive decision to join the SEALs; the arduous
evaluation and training process; and the even tougher gauntlet he had to
run to join the SEALs' most elite unit. After officially becoming a
SEAL, O'Neill would spend more than a decade in the most intense
counterterror effort in US history. For extended periods, not a night
passed without him and his small team recording multiple enemy
kills--and though he was lucky enough to survive, several of the SEALs
he'd trained with and fought beside never made it home.
"Impossible to put down...The Operator is unique, surprising, a kind
of counternarrative, and certainly the other half of the story of one of
the world's most famous military operations...In the larger sense, this
book is about...how to be human while in the very same moment dealing
with death, destruction, combat" (Doug Stanton, New York Times
bestselling author). O'Neill describes the nonstop action of his
deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, evokes the black humor of
years-long combat, brings to vivid life the lethal efficiency of the
military's most selective units, and reveals details of the most
celebrated terrorist takedown in history. This is "a riveting,
unvarnished, and wholly unforgettable portrait of America's most storied
commandos at war" (Joby Warrick).
