Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL credited with killing Osama bin Laden, snapped a photo of himself wearing the iconic image of another famous former soldier in New York City on Sunday.
Standing next to a New York Police Department car, O’Neill wore a shirt with Sylvester Stallone as John Rambo from the First Blood action series.
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“The only guy with a better mugshot than me is Rocky! In the presence of badasses: Rambo and the NYPD!” O’Neill wrote.
O’Neill served in the military from 1995-2012, reaching the rank of Senior chief petty officer. In 2011, as a member of SEAL Team Six, he took part Operation Neptune Spear in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where the team raided the al-Qaeda leader’s compound and killed him. He retired a year later with two Silver Star honors as well, including four Bronze Star Medals. In 2017, he published a book called The Operator, which chronicled his life in the military as well as recounting the Neptune Spear operation.
He recalled the operation in detail during a 2017 radio interview with Howard Stern.
“I shot an H&K 416,” he said when describing what gun he used to deliver three bullets into bin Laden’s head when he entered his room on the third floor of his compound. “I actually hit him three times because I shot him twice when he was standing and once on the ground, just because it doesn’t take long for a suicide bomber to clack his vest off, so I needed to make sure he was not mobile at all.”
“It didn’t hit at first,” he said, when asked how he felt about completing the mission. “Because we still had a woman in there and his 3-year-old kid was there, and we had to clear the room. I remember looking at that poor kid and thinking, ‘This guy has nothing to do with this fight.’”
O’Neill revealed in a TMZ interview back in February that people consistently recognize him and offer to buy him free drinks whenever he’s seen out at a bar.
“I’m pretty quick with a credit card,” O’Neill said. “They’ve been pretty generous about it.”
The veteran found himself in a bit of trouble mere days after that interview when he was kicked off of an American Airlines flight after the airline staff deemed him too intoxicated to fly.
The flight was scheduled from Nashville to Dallas, and O’Neill was reportedly spotted by attendants as being extremely drunk as the plane was waiting to take off. O’Neill was not arrested, with the local police instead opting to hail a cab and send him to a nearby hotel while the airline booked him a different flight.
