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.