A candid account of life in the Navy Seals. I enjoy these books by servicemen who aren't authors and don't pretty up their books. I like the honesty and bad grammar because it's like having a conversation with that person. Rob did a great job relaying struggles, cockiness, training, and camaraderie with his time in the SEALS and missions he participated and led. Great read ( )

Much better then I expected. Very informative. I Highly recommend it. ( )

Excellent read! Robert O'Neil compliments by his writing and actions, all disciplines of our U.S.A armed forces. Proud to be an American =) ( )

I loved OPERATOR, and although I come from a Marine background, I had NO CLUE of what I was in for if I did enlist with the Marines. Thank goodness my brother vowed to kill me if I did sign up! OPERATOR is a novel to read slow and to reflect on how our serving and giving your life for a cause that whether or not the believed in but was duty bound to fight on the side of YOUR country and to keep YOUR buddies safe. I really did chuckle at the author's retelling of Bud/s hell week! Through heart sorrow, and depression about fellow soldiers' deaths that you had gotten to know, I am sure that it was very hard to move in to the troops you were helping get back their country only see them turning around and kill YOU had to be very hard, NOT TO MENTION OUR HOMELESS VETERANS IS A TRAGEDY! ( )

Great overview of the life of a SEAL -- from the relevant parts of his childhood through training (boot camp, BUD/S, and some schools) through working as a Team Two SEAL, to selection and working for Seal Team (bleep -- in the audiobook there was an audible beep every time he said Seal Team Six, presumably due to official censorship, which was amusing because there were contextual references which made it clear, so I assume this was either a joke or poking some fun at censors who literally said ST6 couldn't be mentioned...), to a couple of his most famous missions.

Robert O'Neill is most well known as the ST6 SEAL who shot Bin Laden, but most of the book is about the rest of his career (the actual UBL raid was fairly unremarkable as an actual raid, since they'd been doing exactly the same thing, often with more serious threats and with far less planning, for the previous almost-decade). What was unexpected was how the rest of the unit treated both him and the other "famous" ST6 shooters (those involved in saving Captain Phillips on the Maersk Alabama). It was interesting to read how (obviously very conservative) SEALs were big fans of President Obama due to his aggressiveness in approving and supporting this raid -- probably the biggest single "foreign policy" success of his Presidency, and well worth congratulating.

Also unexpected to me was the extremely low round count he (and some of the other SEALs) used on missions; elsewhere I've read and seen the regular SEALs being much more high-volume than other SOF elements, so maybe ST6 is different, or maybe Afghanistan was particularly different. That he could go out on missions with 4 magazines (120 rounds), no pistol, no knife, etc. comfortably, when conventional forces would be at 7-12 mags and some other units used so much ammo that special resupply-under-fire methods had to be developed, was striking. A lot of this is probably due to ST6 being on "offensive" missions almost always, and usually of very short duration in contact.

As an audiobook read by the author, it was great. It's maybe not the absolute best standalone military history since it doesn't go into the larger conflict or themes, and is very focused on the "how" and not really "why", but as a first-hand account, it's great. ( )