If you google “who shot bin Laden” into a Google search bar, the likeness of former United States Navy SEAL and member of SEAL Team Six (the United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group) Robert J. O’Neill pops up. And, while fellow SEAL Matt Bissonnette would argue otherwise (as would much of the SEAL community as well as the Pentagon for seeking fame), O’Neill was at the very least one of the special operators — the elite of the very ELITE U.S. military membership — directly responsible for killing the man responsible for the most severe terrorist attack in American history.

Along with his fellow SEAL brothers, O’Neill risked life and limb to be in that room and complete a task that, unfinished for years, had haunted the red, white and blue: capture or kill the most wanted man on the globe.

So who better to spill his mind regarding this solemn day?

Here he did it, a year ago, on a FOX News program along with Geraldo Rivera and other network voices:

In case you can’t view the video at the moment, here’s a snippet, in word form (it begins with O’Neill describing the Abbottabad raid itself):

We knew that we were going because of the people that died on 9/11. We knew that they went to work on a Tuesday morning, the skies were blue, they were supporting their families — they weren’t supposed to be casualties in a war on terror, a war that they didn’t know we were fighting. So when we talked about the chances of us not coming back from the mission to kill Osama bin Laden — we knew we probably wouldn’t but we accepted that. Because we were doing it for the people … the jumpers. We’re not allowed to talk about the jumpers now because apparently it’s too realistic … it happened. A lot of them jumped because it’s better than burning alive. We talked about them. That’s why we’re going. That’s why we’re going to do this and we accepted death because we’re going to die anyway, we’re going to die avenging these people.

Highly recommend watching O’Neill say the words in vivid color. It’s extremely powerful.