Rob O’Neill, the bin Laden raid, and the problem of selective skepticism
I have one wish for the new year, and I do not expect it to come true. I wish veterans would stop tearing each other down.
That does not mean suspending skepticism or abandoning standards. It means recognizing that something corrosive has taken hold inside veteran media spaces, where credibility has become a weapon and is no longer applied evenly. If a veteran did not serve on the same operation, in the same unit, or under the same chain of command, there should be restraint in how far accusations travel. Precision matters. So does proportionality.
I have dealt with this personally. I have been accused of never being even close to the front lines of Ukraine. This despite the fact that I served there in 2022 and again in 2023, and was later sentenced in absentia by the Russian Federation for doing so. The experience was instructive. Once doubt becomes a tool rather than an inquiry, facts stop anchoring the discussion. What matters instead is who is granted context and who is denied it.
That same dynamic now governs the ongoing effort to relitigate the bin Laden raid.
Rob O’Neill has spent years responding to criticism of his public account of that operation. His critics argue that his recollections contain inconsistencies; O’Neill counters that combat memory is imperfect and that his account aligns with the essential facts of the mission. Reasonable people can disagree about narrative ownership. What deserves scrutiny is the standard being used to judge it.
On the Antihero Podcast, host Brent Tucker has positioned himself as an arbiter of truth in these disputes. His argument is simple and frequently repeated: when a story is true, its details remain stable. Variations in timing, mechanism, or sequence are treated not as human error but as evidence of unreliability. Inconsistencies, he argues, matter.
If that is the rule, it must apply evenly.
Across multiple public appearances, Tucker has described the injury associated with his Purple Heart in materially different ways. The mechanism of injury shifts. The surrounding context changes. The language used to describe severity varies. The causal sequence is not stable. This is not an allegation. It is an observation. And it is the same category of variation Tucker has argued should permanently disqualify the accounts of others.
The issue does not stop with Tucker.
Tucker’s co-host, Tyler Hoover, plays a central role in reinforcing these judgments. Hoover routinely employs body-language interpretation, blink rates, and affect analysis as indicators of deception when evaluating other veterans. These techniques are presented as quasi-forensic despite their well-documented unreliability in both intelligence and legal contexts. More importantly, they are applied selectively.
As previously reported by SOFREP, Hoover was asked to resign from his position as a police officer following internal concerns related to his conduct. No criminal wrongdoing was alleged there but in other circles, the allegations are quite dark for someone who is supposed to be an officer of the law. That episode is part of the public record. What is notable is how it is treated. Hoover’s own professional controversy is rarely, if ever, raised as relevant context when assessing his authority to judge the credibility of others. By contrast, veterans outside the studio are subjected to relentless suspicion, interpretive reach, and speculative analysis.
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This is not about moral equivalence. It is about procedural imbalance.
Long-form podcasts reward confidence and fluency, not documentation. They allow stories to be told without adversarial questioning while demanding forensic rigor from their targets. The result is a closed loop: inward narration is granted latitude; outward narration is stripped of it. Some veterans are interrogated endlessly. Others are allowed to speak uninterrupted.
Figures like Matt Bissonnette have chosen different paths in how they speak about the bin Laden raid. None of those choices should grant immunity, and none should invite open season. What should guide these discussions is consistency, not allegiance or faction. At the end of the day, nobody is disputing that Rob O’Neill was in fact on the mission that killed Osama Bin Laden. Every man in that room can take credit for sending that vile creature to the fiery depths of hell.
Veterans understand better than most that memory under stress is not a transcript. Adrenaline compresses time. Trauma rearranges sequence. Recollection sharpens some details while blurring others. To deny this is to demand a standard no honest combatant can reliably meet.
The danger is not disagreement. It is selective enforcement. When standards are applied only to those we dislike, credibility ceases to function as an evaluative tool and becomes a cudgel. When veterans turn that cudgel inward, the audience learns little about the truth and a great deal about who is protected.
If the measure being used to judge Rob O’Neill is consistency across time and platform, then that measure must apply everywhere. If it does not, then the problem is not with memory. It is with the system that claims the authority to judge it.
That discrepancy is worth noting.
