The Navy SEAL who shot Osama bin Laden dead in the special force's most famous operation can be named today.
The
Navy hero is set to give a full interview to Fox News later this month
and waive his anonymity but MailOnline has established that he is Rob
O'Neill, a highly-decorated veteran who quit after 16 years service.
In
an exclusive interview Rob's father, Tom O'Neill, tells MailOnline,
'People are asking if we are worried that ISIS will come and get us
because Rob is going public. I say I'll paint a big target on my front
door and say come and get us.'
Rob
O'Neill, 38, is a former member of SEAL Team Six who has been portrayed
on screen in Zero Dark Thirty, Captain Phillips and Lone Survivor.
Scroll down for videos
In
action: A rare picture of O'Neill as a serviceman shows him in uniform
in Liberia, where the Navy was involved in operation to stabilize the
war-torn country
Hometown
boy: Rob O'Neill is a native of Butte, Montana, and joined up after he
was jilted by a sweetheart. He remains proud of his roots in the West
New
role: O'Neill is now a regular motivational speaker and spells out a
message about planning and training meaning it is possible to execute
He
is one of the most distinguished members ever of the elite force - but
now faces being frozen out of its circles for revealing its most
closely-held secrets.
O'Neill
was personally congratulated for killing bin Laden - in his account at
close range with three shots to his forehead - during the SEAL raid on
Abbottobad, in Pakistan, on 2 May 2011.
Questions
have previously been raised over the exact narrative of how bin laden
came to die, although the dispute centers on an alternative account
which claims O'Neill shot him once, leaving him mortally-wounded and the
terrorist was killed by two other SEALs with further shots to the chest
rather than forehead.
O'Neill's
decision to speak out was prompted by losing some of his military
benefits by quitting the SEALs after 16 years rather than staying for a
full 20 years of service.
Today details of his extraordinary military record can be disclosed.
O'Neill grew up in Butte, Montana, a former copper mining boomtown that has now fallen on hard times.
Tom
O'Neill lives in a single story home with a garage full of stuffed
animals — including a bear, moose, caribou, big horn sheep and several
deer — shot by the two men. A full stuffed kodiak bear has place of
pride in his living room.
O'Neill
has said the basic reason he became a SEAL was a teenage romance gone
wrong. At 19 he went to a Navy recruiter's office in an attempt to get
over his lost love.
But
his father gave a different story in his exclusive interview with
MailOnline. 'We were going hunting and a friend asked us to take a guy
who was a Navy SEAL with us,' said Tom O'Neill, 65. 'We were expecting
someone who was 6 ft. 8 in. who could lift a house with his bare hands,
but he was this normal guy. And Rob said if this guy could be a SEAL,
then so could he.'
In
total he was deployed on more than a dozen tours of duty in active
combat, in four different warzones, including Iraq and Afghanistan.
In the course of those tours he undertook more than 400 separate combat missions.
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