CHAPTER 6

Fallujah: The Perfect Op That Led to Prosecutions

Glowering over the Euphrates River, Fallujah is a dirty, crowded Iraqi city of some three hundred thousand people. In 2004, it was notorious for killing Americans for sport.

In Fallujah’s basements, they mixed chemicals, in its kitchens they made bombs, in its open-air markets they sold machine guns, and in its mosques they justified it all. Boys were lookouts and couriers, girls snapped photos of American patrols, women assembled fuses, local men trained to fight, and bearded men from abroad, with sweaty wads of cash, paid for it all.

Forty-three miles west of Baghdad, Fallujah was the heart of the “Sunni triangle” and the center of anti-American opposition. It was the headquarters for the insurgency, which used foreign fighters and foreign money (to pay out-of-work Iraqis as much as $600 per attack) to kill Americans and thousands of Iraqi civilians in the name of “Iraqi independence.”

Like Belgium in World War I, Iraq was fast becoming a blood-stained land where distant foreign forces came to war and recruit natives for both sides. Iraq’s neighbors—mainly Iran and its Arab ally, Syria—smuggled in and supplied bomb makers, sharpshooters, and money men. Al Qaeda, which American air power had smashed on the plains and treeless hills of Afghanistan, was eager to face and fight their nemesis in the urban canyons of Iraqi cities, where America’s famed reluctance to kill civilians would diminish its artillery and air power advantages.

Fallujah had not been brutalized in the occupation. Indeed, it had not seen any air strikes during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq, but it got itself into the war by ambushing coalition forces in April 2003. That first battle raged for only a fraction of an hour, but it lingered in the minds of American military commanders. Any real battle for control of the city, they knew, would be a bloodbath. Locals were well stocked with belt-fed machine guns and rocket launchers. Meanwhile American commanders faced intense political pressure to keep American casualties to an absolute minimum. These two realities combined in the minds of U.S. military commanders, and patrols became shorter, quicker, and, soon enough, rarer.

Meanwhile, large numbers of foreign fighters, including al Qaeda elements, flooded into the city to become either murderers or martyrs, as Allah decided.

They were impatient to realize their destiny.

Everyone knew that a blood-drenched house-to-house Armageddon was coming. It was a grim task that few Americans looked forward to. They knew the body count on both sides would be high. The insurgents had months to dig in and booby-trap the city. Once they had fortified their positions in the city itself, they were able to export their activities throughout the area by setting IEDs and staging other attacks on the coalition forces. The coalition forces knew that the city would have to be taken and cleaned out in order to bring peace to Iraq.

As the city and the soldiers waited for the final showdown, four Blackwater employees, including a former SEAL named Scott Helvenston, were sent into Fallujah to retrieve some kitchen equipment left behind by another contractor on March 31, 2004. It was a routine mission that quickly became international news.

It sparked one of the bloodiest battles in a generation of American war fighting and, years later, inspired one of the strangest secret missions of the U.S. Navy SEALs.

* * *

Scott Helvenston, born on June 21, 1965, was the youngest U.S. Navy SEAL in history. After graduating from BUD/S at the age of seventeen, Helvenston deployed with SEAL Team Four and served for two years. Then he was transferred to Coronado, California, where he deployed with SEAL Team One. An outstanding athlete, even among SEALs, he became an instructor at BUD/S, leading physical training every day for four years.

During a routine parachute jump in 1994, his main chute failed and his backup chute only partially inflated. He landed hard. He injured his back, wrist, and ankles, and after months of treatment, he was discharged from the Navy for medical reasons. That hurt more than his injuries.

It was a turning point in his life. He was disappointed and disillusioned. He didn’t know what to do with himself. He had never imagined a life outside of the active-duty SEALs. His SEAL buddies would still share a beer with him. But it wasn’t the same.

Still, he couldn’t allow himself to wallow in despair and regret. He bounced back in 1997 and formed a fitness company, Amphibian Athletics, with the goal of teaching civilians the outdoor fitness skills he once taught SEALs. He was climbing up a cliff of despair by renewing his SEAL-like focus with daily achievements and dogged determination. His SEAL training camps were successful, drawing people from across Southern California, eventually including Hollywood stars. Through his new friends, and an old SEAL buddy, he was hired to coach Demi Moore in the film G.I. Jane.

Then he reinvented himself again, becoming an actor in his own right, appearing in reality shows such as Combat Missions and Man vs. Beast. In Man vs. Beast he raced a chimpanzee on an obstacle course and is said to be the only human to have bested the animal.

Then the Hollywood work petered out and the call of war sounded. He reinvented himself again, as a military contractor. He joined Blackwater, an outfit formed by a former SEAL to train SWAT teams and military units in a special facility in the swamplands on the Virginia–North Carolina state line. The company was originally named Blackwater because of the dark mud in its remote training facility, where government teams could rehearse storming buildings in its fake, purpose-built town using live ammunition. As the company grew, it opened more training facilities and soon became one of the best and the largest private training operations in the world. When the September 11 attacks dragged America into war, Blackwater diversified into supplying guards and trainers to U.S. military operations overseas. Contractors were paid higher salaries than soldiers, but cost Uncle Sam less overall, due to lower training, housing, and supply costs. More important, Blackwater’s network among SEALs and other former commandos brought in skilled personnel who didn’t want to work for the government—but didn’t mind going to war. It didn’t take long for word to reach Helvenston that Blackwater was looking for former operators like him.

He signed up as a security specialist and shipped out to Iraq. He was sent to the hottest part of the “Red Zone,” Fallujah. He was looking forward to it.

Helvenston met three other Blackwater contractors: Jerry “Jerko” Zovko, Wesley Batalona, and Michael Teague on March 31, 2004. It was their first day together and their last.

* * *

Helvenston and others left the staging area outside Fallujah at approximately 10:00 a.m.

The operation was flawed from the start. None of the members of the team had ever worked together before. The four men were driving in two nonarmored SUVs, with only two men per car: one driver and one navigator. The SUVs with foreign nationals stuck out; in fact, they were known as “bullet magnets” because they were easily identified as American. Iraqis rarely, if ever, drive American-made SUVs, preferring their Mercedes or Toyota equivalents.

Both the State Department and the CIA strongly recommended that teams going into Fallujah be no fewer than six men per unit. Because there were only four men and two SUVs, there was only one man to drive and another to navigate Fallujah’s winding and unmarked streets. There was no one to ride shotgun and defend the vehicles if they were attacked. And if the navigator was forced to fight, it was easy to become lost and trapped in a maze of Fallujah’s medieval streets. In a gunfight, shooting and map reading are tough to do simultaneously.

There were other operational shortcomings. Since the operation was apparently organized at the last minute, the routine preoperation intelligence assessment to review the threat level along the travel route was not made available to Helvenston or his ill-fated comrades.

Finally, and in an apparent direct violation of the terms of the Eurest Support Services contract signed by both Blackwater and its partner, Regency Hotel and Hospital, the contractors were supposed to operate only armored vehicles… and the men were not given any such vehicles. None of the vehicles they were riding in were even fitted with bulletproof glass, let alone armored with reinforced steel plates.

This was, apparently, a policy designed to save money. “The original contract between Blackwater/Regency and ESS [Eurest Support Services], signed March 8, 2004, recognized that ‘the current threat in the Iraqi theater of operations’ would remain ‘consistent and dangerous,’ and called for a minimum of three men in each vehicle on security missions ‘with a minimum of two armored vehicles to support ESS movements.’… But on March 12, 2004, Blackwater and Regency signed a subcontract that specified security provisions identical to the original except for one word: ‘armored.’ It was deleted from the contract, allegedly saving Blackwater $1.5 million,” according to a noted Blackwater critic, Jeremy Scahill in his book “Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.”¹ (Blackwater has disputed some of the claims in his work and with good reason.) In addition, the contract wasn’t followed regarding the number of men per vehicle. Only two men per vehicle were available on the day Helvenston was sent into Fallujah.

Helvenston and his colleagues would have to take their chances.

* * *

About a half hour later, on a narrow street, masked gunmen jumped in front of the vehicles and sprayed them with automatic fire. All four men, including Helvenston, were killed almost instantly. They never had time to return fire.²

The windows of the unarmored vehicles were smashed and then doused with gasoline. Then, a burning rag set them ablaze while a group of men with scarves covering their faces, hurled bricks into the blazing vehicles. They danced and sang with joy as the column of black smoke climbed into the sky.

When the fire died, the jihadis ripped the burnt bodies from the vehicles, hooked them on chains, and dragged them through the streets of Fallujah. Ultimately hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Fallujah residents gathered, chanting, “Fallujah is the graveyard of Americans.”

They hung some of the charred bodies from a city bridge over a dirty tributary to the Euphrates. Tipped off by the insurgents, news crews arrived to videotape the tragedy. Their lenses feasted on the atrocity.

American soldiers saw the smoke rising from the city and did not know what had taken place. Yet, like cavalry soldiers in the stockades of the Old West, they knew that a pillar of smoke on the horizon meant that something evil was heading their way.

* * *

As the images of the American bodies dangling from a Fallujah bridge made their way around the world, the coalition’s top civilian leader, Paul “Jerry” Bremer, consulted with senior officials in the White House and military officers in Centcom over a secure video-conference link. The options were debated.

Four days later, a mixed ground-assault force of Army and Marines arrived. Supported by tanks and close air support, a house-to-house battle raged for days in Fallujah. It would prove to be one of the bloodiest battles of that war.

Fallujah was a magnet for jihadis, the place to make your mark as part of your generation. It was a gathering place that few wanted to miss. They came from every part of the Muslim world, from the mountains of Pakistan, the hills of Chechnya, and the villages of Bosnia to the dry reaches of Libya and the slums of Cairo. They came to kill Americans and to die as “martyrs.”

Among them was Ahmed Hashim Abed, a top al Qaeda leader.

Numerous intelligence reports and interrogation memos pointed to Abed as the ringleader responsible for the massacre of the four Americans. He didn’t come to die; he wanted his paradise on this Earth. He slipped away in the chaos of combat. He remained a ghost, a killer who couldn’t be tracked.

Ahmed Hashim Abed was listed as an HVT (High Value Target), a top priority. The SEALs who had served with Helvenston vowed to capture or kill his murderer. They would hunt that deadly ghost for years.

Five years later, in 2009, they found their man.

* * *

Carl Higbie’s platoon, part of SEAL Team Ten, made finding Abed their highest personal priority.

The SEALs had plenty of motivation. Abed was the leader of the group that they knew had killed, dragged, burned, and hanged the body of former Navy SEAL Scott Helvenston and three other Blackwater employees. None of Higbie’s platoon had served with Helvenston. They had either joined after his departure or were East Coast SEALs while Helvenston was on the West Coast, but the bonds of the brotherhood were strong. In addition, the SEALs knew that killers never struck once. They would kill until captured or killed themselves. Finding Abed was also a military necessity.

Higbie was team leader in charge of SEAL Team Ten. Higbie and his team spent months poring over reports and working with snitches. American intelligence databases are vast. It is easy to miss clues if they are scattered across dozens of reports among millions of files. It takes patience and focus to collect and collate information for a single individual. Painstakingly, the SEALs gathered the files and put together the mosaic. Finally, they found Abed—the killer of Helvenston. Now they wanted to swoop in and get him.

Their own chain of command proved to be the toughest obstacle.

* * *

The officer in charge of Higbie’s platoon turned down the mission. Higbie thought he was a career officer serving a short hitch in the SEALs, who hoped to burnish his résumé and move up the ladder. While ambition makes some men bold, it makes more men cautious. The officer was more career cautious than Higbie thought necessary. But Higbie didn’t argue. In the new, professional SEAL teams, enlisted men were not supposed to challenge officers.

Instead, Higbie made revisions.

He thought that a perfect plan would be impossible to turn down. The officer turned it down again. He denied the mission for various reasons real or contrived, in Higbie’s opinion. Higbie wouldn’t give up. He kept making revisions.

Higbie’s officer preferred goodwill missions to ones in which lives were risked. He ordered SEALs to rebuild school walls in Iraqi cities and instituted a program, called “180 Lunches,” in which each SEAL was supposed to have lunch with a different Iraqi civilian every weekday. The enlisted SEALs silently resented this. It wasn’t what they trained for; it wasn’t why they became SEALs. It was like using a Ferrari to deliver the mail. “They would make us go out during the day and make us engage local Iraqi people just to say ‘Hi, how’s it going? We’re American.’ We helped build a fence in downtown Fallujah during broad daylight in 130-degree heat, out in the street. That was the kind of stuff that they made us do.”

Meanwhile, the officer kept denying his approval for an operation to seize a SEAL killer.

* * *

Then Higbie learned that it was not the faceless higher-ups who were turning down his mission plan, as he had been led to believe. He learned that the officer was not even passing his request to the officers above him. It was just dying on a junior officer’s desk.

The Iraqi SEAL base was less than a quarter-mile long. There were few places to hold secret conversations. One night, Higbie and his teammates met in a dark corner to plot a countermove. One teammate had a high-ranking contact in Washington. They decided to take a chance.

“Finally, my buddy went around the chain of command and went way higher in order to get approval for it. Basically they put a lot of pressure on our direct command and they approved it,” Higbie said. When the officer was asked about approving the mission, he “didn’t mention that he had denied it like ten times.”

While going over the cautious officer’s head proved to be the right thing to do in getting the operation approved, it also enraged the officer. That officer would ultimately get his revenge.

These kinds of bureaucratic workarounds have become more common as the SEALs were “professionalized” under Admirals Olson and McRaven. Officers who had come up through the ranks (“mustangs”) were seen by many enlisted SEALs as more likely to put missions ahead of their careers and were more comfortable communicating with enlisted men, who usually came from humbler backgrounds and lacked elite educations. The “college men” on career tracks were seen by Higbie and others as more careful and more schooled at bureaucratic infighting. Higbie was about to find this out the hard way.

* * *

Mission planning soon became a passive-aggressive battle of its own.

Since the operation was approved, the argument shifted to equipment, as the officer in charge withheld the helicopters needed for the mission.

As usual, the officer [whose name is withheld because he remains on active duty] did everything he could to deny Higbie’s ability to get the job done: “He would find reasons why; he would say ‘You don’t have enough assets,’ which is why we had three helos instead of two. Normally we have two helos for that body count [the team needed for the mission]. He said we needed two, so we got two, then they said we need three.”

Securing the equipment for the mission was more difficult than Higbie had anticipated. “It was crazy how much of an ass pain it was to coordinate assets. We ended up getting three helos, and it was like we were trying to get it, trying to get it, trying to get it, and they wouldn’t give it to us. Finally, we had to call the Army, to get a Navy asset in the battle space area, because they [the Navy officer in charge] didn’t want to give us assets for it. That was their little back-door thing to try to keep us from accessing assets and hitting the target.”

Ultimately, the transport and the operation were ready. Higbie thought they were finally going to get the “go” order.

Then the officer threw him another curveball. They would have to dump one of the SEALs assigned and replace him with a combat camera operator, who was ordered to videotape all operations with the team. The combat camera operator was a middle-aged woman with little combat experience. As Higbie knew from previous missions, the camera operator was not physically fit enough to keep up with the SEALs. “We all liked her, but she smoked two packs a day and couldn’t run and couldn’t shoot.” Her presence meant the loss of a gun, and also a loss in speed and agility on the entire team making the assault. She couldn’t defend herself and, Higbie feared, would likely become a liability if things went badly. If she were wounded, someone would have to carry her. If she were taken hostage, she would be a propaganda prize for the enemy.

And, most worryingly, in a gunfight you want as many guns on your side as possible. She shot videos, not bullets. How could she defend herself in a firefight?

When Higbie was absorbing this blow, his superior landed another right cross. The officer told Higbie to cut other SEALs from the operation so that they could include a number of Iraqi police, the Iraqi SWAT. The SEALs were concerned about them, too: “In a gunfight, these guys will turn around and shoot you. It was so counterproductive to me. These guys were awful. I mean, they had been training with SEALs for five years and they still can’t shoot a fucking paper [target] at ten yards.”

The officer, Higbie said, seemed obsessed with the “right ratio” of Americans to Iraqis. “The whole deployment, you can’t go on this op because you don’t have the right ratio. What is the right ratio [between SEALs and Iraqis]? Well it’s not this, just submit another one and we’ll tell you if it’s right.” He would never give Higbie an exact number; they would have to keep guessing while the officer kept changing his mind. Sometimes it was two Iraqis per SEAL, sometimes it was three. On this mission, it was four.

While ratios may seem unimportant, the importance becomes real very quickly in a gunfight. SEALs who train together can almost read each other’s mind in battle. And they have excellent fire control—they can hit targets without killing friendlies. The Iraqis, by contrast, were notorious for shooting civilians and even coalition forces by accident or design. Many SEALs, including Higbie, were reluctant to take them on fire missions. It was too dangerous.

Finally, after a bureaucratic battle of epic proportions, every element of the mission was approved. Zero hour would come several hours after darkness fell.

* * *

In the hangar, the small number of SEALs assembled. Given the few Americans, everyone would have to do two jobs. Higbie was both a team leader and communications guy. “I was carrying three radios, I had four magazines, three on my body and one in the gun. I had two grenades, flashbang, and a shaped charge on my leg. I had a pistol, too. That’s pretty standard. I had my M4 and then the pistol.”

The SEALs, the camerawoman, and the Iraqis boarded three helicopters and roared out into the night. It was an unwieldy combination, but somehow it had to work.

* * *

Some eight miles south of the city of Fallujah, the village of Amiriyat Falujah was basically a walled, fortified complex set up to defend itself from potential invaders.

The aerial surveillance photos were intimidating. Ringed by dunes, the interior was an interlocking series of buildings that would provide ample opportunity for snipers to fire on the SEALs. “It was a fortress,” Higbie said.

The group was dropped by the helicopters just over two miles from the target village. The night was dark, humid, and hot. The SEALs were sweating just standing still. The CH-60 helicopters lifted off in a spray of sand that the SEALs called “rotor wash.” They knew to put their backs to the bird and not watch it dust off.

As the dust cloud cleared, the SEALs listened as the helicopter engines died away in the starry sky.

It was silent, save the wind ruffling their desert camo pants.

The team was shaped in a V pattern, a standard defensive move for a nighttime SEAL movement.

While the land was flat, it was treacherous—with soft, almost quicksand-like soil. Higbie called it “moon dust.” SEALs, heavily laden with weapons and equipment, sank up to their knees. With every step, each SEAL had to pull his boot out of the sucking sand, shift his weight, and then pull the other boot out. During the 2.5-mile trek, each person had to pull his boots out some forty-five thousand times.

It was slow going. The camerawoman and the Iraqis demanded rest stops repeatedly. Higbie scanned the horizon nervously as the non-SEALs took frantic gasps of air. He knew that they were exposed and vulnerable in the badlands.

* * *

Higbie used a careful strategy in “stacking” his air assets. An AC-130 helicopter gunship was silently overhead, almost a mile above the struggling team. Its job was to keep eyes on the team and provide aerial gunfire if needed. Its electric-powered machine guns and cannons could put thousands of rounds downrange in minutes.

Above the AC-130 and five hundred yards ahead was a Predator drone plane.

“The sole reason we had that Predator was so that our commanding officer could see what we were doing. That’s why I pushed it ahead of us instead of keeping it on us. He was like ‘I want to see what you guys are doing right now.’ ” Instead, the Predator showed the terrain ahead, so that the officer who didn’t support the mission was not able to micromanage it. (The officer couldn’t see the video feed from the AC-130.)

This was a little passive-aggressive pushback from Higbie. He didn’t want to give the officer video that could be used against his team later. It would turn out to be a wise strategy.

* * *

The high dune walls of Amiriyat Falujah loomed above the team, blocking out stars and the horizon. Slowly, they scanned for sentries. They heard only the wind and saw only empty sand slopes. They found a narrow gap in the walls and filed through it. Inside the dune walls was a sprawling concrete complex of ramshackle buildings and dusty cars. They heard the hum of the diesel generators. The village seemed asleep.

They approached cautiously and quietly. The target building had been marked by an informer, who used a sign that could be seen only through infrared goggles.

They moved silently along the concrete walls, looking for the infrared sign. When they found it, it was time for action.

The team stood at the front door, discussing the entry plan using only their hands and eyes. Higbie waited outside. “So my job was to deal with the AC-130 and the Predator, and to keep scanning the town to make sure that there was no movement at any time, and I was in charge of making sure no one entered the building without us knowing.”

The Iraqi police were deployed as perimeter guards.

Then the village began to come to life. Doors and windows opened, voices in Arabic wanted to know what was going on. The villagers were armed, and tension was building in their voices. They knew something was up, but they just weren’t sure what it was yet. The operation would have to be completed quickly and efficiently, or it could turn into a bloodbath in a heartbeat.

* * *

The SEALs burst through the door. A SEAL new to the Iraq war, Mathew McCabe, spotted Abed, the target, lunging for a gun. He tackled him.

“This happened for two reasons,” Higbie said. One, inexperience, because he was a new guy and he wasn’t allowed to get experience by our commanding officer. He was hesitant to shoot because, this is the second reason, because the commander told everybody that if they killed somebody, they’d better have a damn good reason.”

The tackle was a risky move. If Abed had been a few seconds faster, the SEAL would be dead. In the normal course of “threat/no threat” analysis Abed would have been instantly shot. As it happened, shooting Abed would have been a better outcome for almost all concerned.

* * *

With Abed in white plastic zip ties behind his back, the team moved rapidly out of the village. They needed to go before the villagers had the chance to wipe the sleep from their eyes and open fire with their automatic weapons.

Higbie radioed the helicopters to land a few hundred yards from the village’s high dune walls. (Retreating over the “moon dust” would have been a death sentence.)

The choppers landed, the team and prisoner were loaded, and helicopters dusted off into the night sky. It was a perfect op, Higbie said. Mission accomplished and no shots fired.

The detention center at Camp Baharia, a nearby SEAL base, was a twenty-foot-long conex box, a shipping container with doors and windows cut out with welding torches.

Higbie turned Abed over to the master-at-arms, a young navy enlisted man on his first deployment overseas.

It was time to celebrate a little. “We debriefed with the helo pilots on site, we gave our high fives, and we say we got this motherfucker.” No alcohol was served, but Higbie treated himself to a hot shower and went to bed.

In the predawn hours, fate soured for the SEALs.

* * *

Higbie was shaken awake and told to report to the officer who never liked the mission. When he arrived, his other teammates were there, ashen faced. The officer was apoplectically angry. He held up Abed’s tunic. It was spotted with blood. “There is going to be an investigation,” the officer said.

Someone had given the prisoner a bloody lip, and criminal charges would be brought.

NCIS arrived the next day.

It was possible, if not probable, that the prisoner gave himself the bloody lip. Al Qaeda operatives knew America’s strict rules on treating prisoners—and they were known to use these rules against their captors. Al Qaeda handbooks, captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan, teach them how to bring false charges while in American custody. It was another case of using America’s assets against her. Just as al Qaeda used America’s planes against her on September 11, 2001, it now used America’s military legal system against her war fighters.

Another, perhaps more likely possibility, is that the young master-at-arms beat up Abed. He later made comments that Higbie took to be an admission of guilt.

NCIS investigated and determined that no SEALs were ever alone with the prisoner and that no evidence or testimony implicated them. Abed fingered the master-at-arms as the culprit. The investigation of the SEALs conduct continued anyway.

NCIS briefed the officer who never liked Higbie’s mission, telling him there was no evidence of wrongdoing. The officer told the NCIS investigator: “I don’t care, find something. I am not going to go down for this.”

* * *

All eight of the accused SEALs quickly got lawyers. Four of them were eventually charged.

The officer insisted on a captain’s mast, an informal disciplinary procedure that doesn’t involve lawyers.

The SEALs, citing naval regulations, demanded a court-martial. Higbie said: “You’re charging us with a serious offense here and we’re not going to take captain’s mast, we’re going to take court-martial, because we know we didn’t do anything wrong.”

The SEALs were separated and sent home. It would take months before the trial began. After the U.S. Army’s Abu Ghraib scandal, Navy commanders were taking no chances with the politicians or the press. They would go strictly by the book, no matter what they privately thought about the charges.

* * *

The trial ultimately took place in Baghdad. Higbie’s testimony was mercifully short. The first thing the prosecutor asked was “Did you abuse this prisoner?”

Higbie was sitting upright, looking straight out, as he addressed the courtroom. “No, sir.”

The prosecutor put his hand on his forehead, looked down, and shook his head. Higbie got the impression that the young prosecutor didn’t like the case or even being made to ask these questions.

The military jury exonerated Higbie and, in a separate tribunal, the other SEALs.

A post on a Facebook page called “Support the Navy SEALs Who Captured Ahmed Hashim Abed” summed it up best: “SEALs 3—Terrorist 0.”

Higbie and his team had captured a notorious killer and defeated the charges brought by a politically correct commander. But the politics and bureaucracy made him lose trust in his leaders. He left the SEALs with sadness. While they were exonerated of all charges, the careers of the other SEALs were also damaged. The trial was a black mark on their records that they would have to explain for the rest of their careers. A Big Navy mentality—designed for regulating life among other American sailors aboard the closed world of ship at sea—treats accusations as evidence that a man can’t get along with teammates. If the accused sailor were more diplomatic, the charge would not have occurred, or so goes the thinking. This attitude isn’t well suited to SEALs who take prisoners on the battlefield. Accusations made by enemy prisoners are a natural product of war and should be treated differently as a result. But the Big Navy culture makes no such allowances for the SEALs when evaluating men for promotion.

In the end, the navy lawyers did what the terrorists could not—effectively end the careers of Higbie and other SEALs.