Craig Miller scanned the sweaty faces of the SEALs in Alpha platoon, crossed his arms, and allowed a rare, satisfied smile. It was a hot night in the California desert, and they were all pressed into a ramshackle barracks kitchen after a hard week of training—twenty big men yelling and laughing, circling like jackals, shirts off, spilling beer. As he watched the SEALs holler and strut around one of Alpha’s newest members, he felt the pride of a job well done. He knew they were one of the best commando teams in the Navy. With Eddie Gallagher above him and a stable of solid guys below, things were finally coming together.
Miller was Eddie’s second-in-charge, the lead petty officer of Alpha platoon. Everyone in Alpha called him “the Sheriff,” not just because he was the best and fastest gun in all of SEAL Team 7 but because he was a tall Texan who liked to wear cowboy boots and didn’t fuck around when it came to laying down the law. The Sheriff had a slim, powerful build, sharp features, and alert, searching eyes like an eagle. He was strict with everyone, including himself. He believed, at his core, in rules, discipline, and order. There was a right way to do things, and if anyone was going to screw around with regs, there better be a damn good reason.
Miller was twenty-eight years old but appeared to most of his men to have stepped through a wormhole from another era. He drove a sun-bleached Jeep CJ that was older than he was, and that he had repaired top to bottom. He wore a classic windup Rolex Submariner watch that was standard issue for frogmen in the 1960s. He loved old architecture and collected postcards of nineteenth-century courthouses. While many SEALs were focused on their next op, Miller studied SEALs lore and traditions.
Miller’s father had been a SEAL before him, but his father had refused to steer his son toward the Teams. The crucible of SEAL life was so unimaginably intense that Miller’s father believed a man had to reach for it on his own. Miller made up his mind early. He was a high school freshman in 2001 when the towers came down, and from then on was convinced that the nation needed good men to counteract all the bad in the world. Over the next several years he learned to swim and shoot and lug heavy packs while saving up more than $5,000 from summer jobs to buy his own Rolex Sub. The watch was his way of swearing his commitment to the SEALs long before he was old enough to sign papers. He had worn it nearly every day since.
Miller didn’t talk a whole lot, but his taciturn bearing hid an iron will. Few in the platoon knew it, but Miller had barely made it through BUD/S. Halfway through training, he had broken his foot. He could have quit or gotten a do-over on medical grounds. Instead, he laced his boot tighter and pressed on. They can carry me out on a stretcher, he told himself, but I’m not ringing that bell. That determination and his skills with a gun had helped him climb fast in the ranks of the SEALs. His formal evaluations dripped with superlatives. Five years after joining, he was the youngest lead petty officer in Team 7.
Well after the sun went down it was still 100 degrees in the desert. Miller looked on as Eddie and the rest of Alpha’s SEALs crowded around the kitchen table, their shirts off in the heat. They were all sculpted but lean, pro athletes whose chosen sport was combat. They bellowed like ancient warriors around a fire. At the center of the scrum, seated at the table, was Alpha platoon’s newest member, Special Operator Second Class Josh Graffam. His muscles were as tense as a drawn bow. On the table in front of him, the platoon had spread four black pieces of steel. Assembled, they would make a Navy-issued Sig Sauer 9mm pistol.
Six feet away at the other end of the table, also stripped to the waist, sat the newest SEAL from one of Alpha’s sister platoons, Bravo. The new SEAL was a mass of muscle, rising so big and broad above the table that he looked like a shaved grizzly bear. Graffam was five-foot-seven and wiry, a fraction of the size. But that didn’t matter. This was a contest of skill and speed. Spread in front of the bear was the same array of pistol parts. In the middle of the table, a short lunge from both men, stood a magazine holding a single round of ammunition.
It was April 2016—almost a year before Alpha platoon deployed to Mosul. Eddie had become Alpha’s new platoon chief just a few months earlier. The two platoons were at a remote Navy installation called La Posta in the dry, rocky Laguna Mountains fifty miles east of San Diego. They were there for close-quarters combat training: four grueling weeks of high-intensity shooting, room sweeps, and hostage scenarios that drilled into the men both the art and arithmetic of making quick life-and-death decisions at close range.
La Posta had a massive indoor training facility informally known as the Kill House. The building was nearly the size of a Walmart, its interior a warren of rooms and corridors. Each day the platoon ran shooting scenarios over and over in the Kill House while instructors watched with clipboards from catwalks above, like scientists studying rats in a maze. Each night the whole platoon slept in a spartan double-wide nearby—one long room with rows of bunk beds. At one end was a kitchen with an old fridge, a basic stove, and just enough room for two long tables. After a few long weeks of training, someone usually bought a keg.
That night, as the beer flowed, the platoon turned the kitchen into an arena for new-guy initiation games. The games had been going on in the SEAL Teams since the first groups of Navy frogmen generations before, and showed no signs of conforming to contemporary attitudes toward hazing. All freshly minted SEALs coming into a platoon were expected to go through them. There was no formal playbook, only ideas passed down from platoon to platoon with improvisations added by every generation. Games could take any form, but in an intense brotherhood of warriors like the SEALs, where unconventional thinking was prized and platoons had ready access to materials like flash grenades and tear gas, they were rarely dull.
Miller wouldn’t have stood for anything truly abusive, but he loved a good new-guy game. The best games tested resolve and creativity under pressure, which in their line of work was critical. At the same time, of course, a good game had to have the promise of enough pain to make it entertaining.
The game devised by Alpha and Bravo contained all three. Graffam and the shaved grizzly had to assemble their pistols as fast as possible. The first to finish could grab the magazine holding the single round in the center of the table, slam it into his gun, and shoot the other new guy in the chest. It was a test of weapon knowledge and performance under pressure. The single round in the clip was a high-velocity paint round. It was nonlethal, but on bare skin from point-blank range, it was going to hurt like a bitch.
Standing near Miller was the boss of a troop of three platoons in Team 7, Senior Chief Brian Alazzawi. At forty-three, he had been on eight combat deployments, including six to Iraq. The Navy officially frowned on this type of stuff, but even though he was in charge, he was enjoying the game as much as anyone. He was an old-school guy and believed in old frogman traditions. There were limits, sure. Guys didn’t need to get too hurt. Both men were wearing eye protection. But a little pain wasn’t a problem—in fact, it was the point. He expected his SEALs to be hard. They had to be. The job was to kill, sometimes fast and up close. Their language was raw. Their lives were intense. They were the nation’s door kickers and had to be ready to get medieval on whatever crazy mission they were given. They didn’t do nice, or polite, or easy, and if you didn’t like it, you could go back to the regular Navy.
Someone made a wager: Not only would the loser get shot, but his whole platoon would have to pick up all the spent shell casings after close-quarters combat training the next day. It was a chore nobody liked, made worse because every piece of brass they picked up would serve as a reminder that their platoon had gotten beat. And SEALs hated getting beat.
The men from Alpha and Bravo crowded around and howled for the competition to start. The new guys at either end of the table eyed each other, their hands hovering, trembling, ready to grab the pistol parts. Then someone shouted, “GO!”
Hands scrambled for steel. Assembling a gun was something both had done hundreds of times: Slip the black barrel into the hollow underside of the slide, then pull down and back into position. Grab the recoil spring and push forward until the steel pin clicks. Guide the slide onto the main frame that houses the grip. Hit the takedown lever just above the trigger, and snap! All the parts are in place. Then grab that magazine. Straightforward, but not with forty SEALs screaming at you. Both men started to fumble. Their hands shook. Simple movements became blurs.
“Come on, Graffam! Come on!” Miller yelled above the crowd. Eddie was just a few SEALs away, yelling even louder. They had trained the guys hard and suddenly felt like coaches on the sidelines. It was Eddie’s first time being a platoon chief and Miller’s first time as LPO. The win said as much about them as it did about the new guy.
Just past Eddie, Miller could see Alpha’s senior snipers, Dylan Dille and Dalton Tolbert, laughing hysterically. Miller had served side by side with them for five years and they were practically family. Dille was lean and unimposing but deadly accurate in his craft. He had grown up hunting in the Rockies and was one of the top snipers in Team 7. Tolbert was his best friend, an expert shooter, dark hair, short and broad-shouldered. He was part Choctaw and, he liked to joke, all redneck, complete with a wife who was a stripper and a childhood in a trailer park hit by a tornado. Both snipers had joined Alpha with Miller in 2011. The three had come up together in the SEALs. They’d spent hundreds of days deployed together. They’d gone to one another’s weddings. That night they were all clapping and laughing in part because they knew Alpha platoon was finally on track.
At the table, the grizzly had a slight lead, but he was so amped up that he struggled to fit the slide onto its rails. Graffam caught up. He clicked his recoil spring into place and raced to fit the slide onto the frame. Almost done. Was the grizzly catching up? There was no time to look. He hit the takedown lever and with a hard, metallic slap the parts fell into place. He swept his hand over the table and grabbed the mag. Roars shook the crowded kitchen. With a grin, Graffam pushed the magazine into the gun, then pointed the pistol at the massive target at the other end of the table, paused just enough to make the grizzly wince, and fired.
A year or two before that night, it might have made sense to bet against Alpha. Not anymore. Alpha had been known for a number of years as one of the worst platoons in SEAL Team 7. But it had quickly become the best. A big reason for that, they all knew, was Chief Eddie Gallagher.
The modern SEAL Teams operate on a two-year cycle of training and deploying designed to ensure that no matter what is going on in the world, there are always SEAL commandos ready to deploy to a hot zone. The cycle is known as workup. A new platoon forms at the start of the cycle, then during workup members spend six months training in individual specialty skills like sniper craft, underwater explosives, evasive driving, combat medicine, foreign languages, and surveillance. Then they spend six months on unit-level training, practicing how to navigate silently at night as a team, call in air strikes, raid ships, clear houses, rescue hostages, and do all the other things small teams of commandos might be called on to do. Then they spend six months on squadron-level training, where multiple platoons work together on complex battle scenarios with other Naval Special Warfare groups—fast boats and helicopter teams, intelligence and cryptography techs. The two-year workup ends with six months of deployment overseas. Then some new SEALs get mixed in and others leave, and workup starts over again.
During a workup, commanders watch for the best platoons and reward them with the live-or-die, must-succeed missions. Lackluster platoons are given less demanding work, much of it little more than foreign relations. A top platoon might get a covert insert to take out a terrorist cell in Yemen. A struggling platoon might spend six months training partners in Estonia or the Philippines. It says something about the SEALs that the deadliest missions in the most dangerous places are the most sought-after reward, and an assignment to a safe place with friendly people, good food, and gorgeous scenery is seen as punishment.
Alpha had not been awarded a dangerous deployment in years. On their first deployment together, as new guys in 2013, Miller, Dille, Tolbert, and their longtime medic Corey Scott had deployed to a somewhat hairy corner of Afghanistan where they saw regular, if not exactly heavy, combat. But on the next workup things fell apart when new leaders came in. The platoon chief and the officer in charge didn’t get along. Bad blood complicated simple decisions. Without clear leadership the platoon couldn’t find a rhythm. They struggled in training. Among the nine platoons of SEAL Team 7, Alpha consistently finished near the back. Their failures cost them a chance at the high-stakes deployments that all SEALs crave. Instead of Iraq or Afghanistan, they ended up in Guam.
It wasn’t that Alpha was short on solid operators. Miller was the best close-quarters shooter in Team 7. Dille was a top sniper. Tolbert was being groomed for the Navy’s classified antiterrorist unit, the unit once called SEAL Team 6 that now went by the benign-sounding name Development Group, or simply, DEVGRU. Even in an elite force like the SEALs, which only took the best, many of the guys in Alpha stood out. They were smart, motivated, and experienced. The senior guys had deployed twice together; they knew how to operate in near-perfect sync. Alpha was an all-star team. It just hadn’t found the right coach. Eddie changed all that when he took over as their chief. He walked into Alpha’s high bay in the fall of 2015, introduced himself, and announced he was going to make Alpha into the best platoon in Team 7. It was the beginning of a period some of the guys would later call “worst to first.”
The high bay was home base for the platoon. Each platoon in Coronado had one. It was little more than an oversized garage that opened onto a narrow ribbon of asphalt, beyond which lay a creamy stretch of beach and the limitless Pacific. Inside, the high bay looked like Rambo’s toolshed: stacked shelves overflowing with combat gear, including ropes for dropping out of helicopters, rigging for parachutes, scuba gear, and other equipment, all ready to go so that the platoon could get on a plane and drop into a hot zone at short notice. Each man had a closet-sized operator’s cage packed with personal gear. At the back of the high bay the guys had built a man cave of mismatched, ratty, secondhand couches where Alpha gathered at the beginning and end of each day. A painting on the wall of the Bad Karma Chick in her red she-devil bustier looked down on it, her mischievous smirk offering a constant reminder to the platoon of their role in the universe.
When Eddie walked in that first morning, knowing grins ricocheted around the high bay. Eddie had a reputation around Coronado as a hard dude and a proud guardian of the roguish traditions of the SEALs. He liked to fight. He liked to drink. He never shied away from fire. Even at a base full of gunfighters, Eddie had a reputation as a badass. Some of the guys in the platoon had never spoken to him, but almost everyone knew who he was: aggressive, no-nonsense. He had an understated way of communicating, rarely using two words when none would do. He went by several nicknames. Some called him “Fast Eddie.” Some called him “Blade.” Whatever guys wanted to call him, they knew this time workup was going to be different. They had scored.
Many of the senior guys in Alpha knew Eddie personally. He had been their instructor at the BUD/S school just down the beach from the Alpha high bay. When they arrived as students, he was one of the first SEALs they met. It had been a harsh introduction. The SEALs had a word for men who were too weak in body, mind, or character to earn a place in their brotherhood. They called them “turds.” SEALs tended to be terse and black-and-white in their judgments. In the SEALs you were either a good dude or a turd. Good dudes were not only strong and fast, but trustworthy and loyal toward their teammates. Turds were slovenly, lazy, weak, selfish. The only thing more despised than a turd was a coward.
As an instructor, part of Eddie’s job was to make sure no turds got through training and earned the SEAL Trident. To the SEALs the Trident symbolized everything. It was a golden pin featuring an eagle, its talons gripping a pistol and Neptune’s trident, but unlike all other eagle insignias in the United States military, which had their wings spread wide, this one was crouched defensively, wings down, ready to fight. When a new SEAL earned his Trident, the other SEALs bringing him into the fold pounded the metal barbs of the insignia into his chest, signifying a blood brotherhood. The Trident was more important than rank; it literally left a mark that would be there forever, even after SEALs took off the uniform. The SEALs had to make sure no one earned it who could not live up to their standards.
Eddie performed his job as a guardian of that brotherhood with biting intensity. Many of the men still had painful memories of being a student running up the beach as Eddie ran alongside. Eddie loved to run students up the beach. He got the nickname “Fast Eddie” because he could run six-minute miles in soft sand with students trying to keep up. Those who fell behind ended up in the goon squad—the back third of the group. At intervals, the class would stop, and Eddie would punish the goon squad with push-ups, sit-ups, bear crawls, and flutter kicks until they could barely move. Then, because their push-up form was poor, he punished them with more push-ups. He sent them to lie in the bone-chilling surf, their arms locked together as the waves crashed over their heads. Then he would make them run again. If you turds don’t like it, Eddie would shout at them, all you have to do is quit. And you should quit now, because tomorrow is going to be worse. “The only easy day,” he would tell them, “was yesterday.”
Eddie never talked about how he got his other nickname, “Blade,” but he didn’t try to sugarcoat what the SEAL Teams were all about. It wasn’t an exercise club. It wasn’t a way to impress women. It was an elite group of warriors, and the students would be expected to perfect its lethal craft. They had to be killers; they couldn’t ever shy away. They had to be ready to kill with their bare hands.
Eddie liked to tell war stories while he was punishing the students so they understood what they’d be up against. One time in a house raid in Afghanistan, he told students, an enemy came at him and he had to smash the guy’s head in with a toaster. On another day, when he was a sniper, he told students, he had his scope on a high-value Taliban fighter in a village. His team had been watching the guy for days, but the fighter must have known the Americans were tracking him because each time he left his house, he would carry a little girl in his arms as a human shield. The team was growing frustrated. The man was a danger and had to be taken out, but he was taking advantage of the Americans’ rules of engagement, using their own sense of decency against them. One day, Eddie told them, the fighter appeared carrying the little girl as usual and Eddie put him in his crosshairs. If he took the shot, he risked killing the girl. If he didn’t, Americans might die at the fighter’s hands. There was no easy choice.
He looked at his BUD/S students with no hint of feeling or hesitation. I pulled the trigger, he told them. The bullet went right through the girl and hit the target, killing them both. Remember, he told students: It’s war you’re preparing for, and you’ll be forced to make these kinds of decisions.
Day after day Eddie gave the students little rest. The crux of BUD/S was something called Hell Week: five days with almost no sleep, wet, cold, and miserable the whole time, crawling through the sand, paddling rubber rafts out through the surf in the dark, running in wet boots, stumbling under the weight of heavy logs, crawling under barbed wire while instructors fired off automatic weapons and threw flash grenades. Eddie was one of the instructors who made sure that getting through Hell Week would be the hardest thing students ever experienced. He was one of the toughest instructors, and proud of it. “When some of the instructors were hard on students, it seemed like an act,” one of Alpha platoon’s older members, David Shaw, wrote in an evaluation after BUD/S. “With Eddie, it wasn’t an act.”
It wasn’t that Eddie was a mean guy. In fact, a lot of students looked up to him. He was just demanding to a level that was scary. But when it was all over, he was also one of the first to shake the hands of the men who survived and welcome them to the brotherhood.
For students molded in that crucible, Eddie was their first close-up look at a real SEAL and shaped the idea of what a SEAL should be. He became their mentor, their model, their aspiration. Many of the guys in Alpha still felt that way when Eddie walked into the high bay and announced he was their new chief.
Eddie brought the same hard-charging discipline to Alpha that he used in BUD/S. Since he was a platoon chief now and not a BUD/S instructor, his job wasn’t to run guys into the ground until they washed out, but his expectations were still high. Alpha was a group of warriors, he said, and they would focus entirely on preparing for war. He would do what he could to ensure they got the best training and the best opportunities. If they worked hard, he said, they would become the best. And if they were lucky, there would be no more deployments like Guam. They’d be sent right into the middle of whatever shitstorm was kicking up, which is exactly where all the guys in Alpha wanted to be.
A lot of platoons at Coronado took Fridays off during training. Eddie shut that down. Instead Alpha set up an extra day of close-quarters combat practice, kicking in doors and clearing rooms again and again until every step through the threshold and sweep of the rifle was reflex. Eddie described his leadership style as “no bullshit.” He asked a lot and expected it to be done. He didn’t care as much about rules and regulations as he did about being ready for combat. It was something he honed on repeated deployments during the hectic combat surges in Iraq and Afghanistan. He was immediately impressed with Alpha. When he told them about the extra training, there were no complaints. Everyone was down to be the best. He had some of the most accomplished SEALs in Team 7 at his disposal, and after years of being misfits, they were eager to make things happen.
The one criticism Eddie had of the platoon during workup was that they were…nerds. First with the Marines and then in the SEALs, Eddie had come up surrounded by guys who liked to fight hard and party hard. Group drinking binges were a rite of passage. Drunken brawls and late nights at strip clubs became legend. But with Alpha it was different. All of the senior guys were married and tended to go home after work. His lead petty officer, Craig Miller, was so straitlaced he seemed like something out of a Leave It to Beaver time warp. When Eddie said they should go out for beers, Miller often said he had plans with his wife. He would talk about how he was planting fruit trees in the backyard or building a chicken coop. The snipers were just as domestic. They liked to go for trail runs. One of the medics was volunteering at a hospital on the weekends. The man in the platoon who specialized in calling in air strikes was always out rock climbing or mountain biking. Some of the guys seemed to prefer playing videogames to going to the bar. They talked about how drinking during the week hurt their performance. They did yoga. There hadn’t been a single bar fight or drunk driving arrest. The platoon was a bunch of boy scouts. It was a big change from the lifestyle Eddie’s generation grew up in. Sometimes he missed the antics and the camaraderie. But at least, he joked to other chiefs, he wouldn’t have to worry about bailing anyone out of jail.
When Alpha got a new platoon chief, it also got a new commanding officer, Lieutenant Jake Portier, who had been handpicked by Eddie. Eddie was a master of deals. He had a reputation as a good dude and had friends and connections all over the Teams, and it allowed him to get what he wanted. He knew a good lieutenant was critical to a good deployment, so he had looked around until he found Portier, then worked it so he ended up with Alpha.
SEAL platoons, like almost every military platoon everywhere, relied on dual leadership: one officer and one senior enlisted man. The officer gave the commands, but because that officer was almost always a young, inexperienced lieutenant, he relied on an enlisted chief with years of experience who had the know-how and credibility with the troops to make it actually happen. The lieutenant relayed orders, the chief deployed the platoon with a strategy that got it done. It was a time-tested but delicate arrangement because while the lieutenant was technically in command, the chief almost always had more experience and street cred with enlisted SEALs, so he effectively had all the power.
Eddie and Portier had deployed together to the Middle East right before joining Alpha. It was a quiet tour. They were staged as a crisis reaction force in case something bad happened in the region. Nothing bad had happened, so they spent the whole time training and lifting weights. But during that time, Eddie had gotten to know Portier, and he liked what he saw.
Like many SEALs in Alpha, Portier had been one of Eddie’s students in BUD/S. Others in Alpha still remembered what a stud Portier had been in the course. In a timed relay of running, pull-ups, and sit-ups after Hell Week, he had finished first, even beating some of the instructors. He had graduated from Ohio State with an engineering degree and never talked about trying to make a career as a Navy officer. He wanted to do a couple platoons, then get out as soon as the Navy tried to put him behind a desk. Just like Eddie. He seemed to have a proper frogman perspective on Navy regulations, focused more on getting the mission done than making sure every rule was followed.
Jake is like an enlisted guy, Eddie told the rest of Alpha. With him as officer in charge and Eddie as chief, he said, Alpha is going to be a dream team.
Portier was twenty-nine years old, a full decade younger than Eddie. He had next to no experience leading troops in combat. As Mosul neared, Eddie took him under his wing and assured him he would show him the ropes and make him a great officer. In many ways, it was a continuation of the teacher/student relationship they’d had in BUD/S. The Navy, like the rest of the military, has strict rules forbidding fraternization between officers and enlisted troops, created to keep the command structure from being undercut by personal relationships. But the regulation, like so many others, was often ignored in the SEAL Teams. Eddie and Portier would go out for beers together or hang out and barbecue. Eddie never called his commander “sir,” or even “lieutenant.” He called him “Jake.” Senior Chief Alazzawi later said the two were as close as any command team he had ever seen, so close that Portier told Eddie he was going to pop the question to his fiancée before she even knew.
That wasn’t a bad thing, in the eyes of Alpha. Eddie and Portier appeared to click: Eddie was the kind of door-smashing tactician who could make things happen. Portier was a detail-oriented engineer who could manage the bureaucratic red tape to clear a path for Eddie. After years of dysfunctional leadership teams, everything was finally coming together.
The platoon’s mojo showed when Alpha and Bravo arrived at close-quarters combat training in La Posta in the spring of 2016. During the four-week course, instructors ramped up training steadily, starting on the first day with solo shooters clearing one room, then two, then three. They started with no ammunition, then paint rounds, then live ammo. As soon as the platoon was getting confident, instructors blacked out the lights and made them operate with night vision. Eventually training got to the point where the whole platoon would sweep in a coordinated wave through a house filled with a complex and unpredictable mix of armed enemies and civilians, no lights, live rounds.
The instructors’ job was to sweat every detail and mistake. Step through a door with the wrong foot, they would make a note of it. Have your trigger finger in the wrong place, you would hear about it afterward. They marked down every screwup on a whiteboard. Even if things ran smoothly, they’d find something. Bravo platoon often had so many mistakes that they had to stay late to run drills over again. Not Alpha. The extra practice and demand for perfection from Eddie and Miller showed. Often the instructors had little to offer but praise for Eddie and his guys. Once, after a particularly complicated run where the Sheriff and a few guys had cleared several rooms at lightning speed even though half of the platoon was pinned down, the instructors at the debrief had written just three letters on the giant whiteboard: “SAF,” Sexy as Fuck.
The sweaty pack of jackals in the kitchen were still howling as Bravo’s shaved grizzly rubbed a neon-pink spatter of paint on his chest where a welt was rising. The Sheriff laughed. He was proud that his new guy had won. He expected nothing less. The platoons refilled their beer cups as the din of good-natured shit-talking filled the room. Miller could hear his men reminding Bravo that there was going to be plenty of shooting the next day. Be sure to pick up every round, they said.
Bravo wanted a rematch. Two out of three, they shouted. Eddie and Senior Chief Alazzawi stood by as the cries of the pack grew louder. Miller smiled as the snipers in the platoon pushed Alpha’s new guy to do it again. One of the most aggressive SEALs in Alpha, a big, fast, young sniper named Josh Vriens, started shouting, “You got this! You got this!”
The SEALs took apart the pistols and laid them out on the table. The new guys sat down at either end. The platoons crowded in, powered by beer and testosterone.
On the word go the new guys jumped to life. They grabbed the barrels, jammed them into the slides, flung in the recoil springs. But when the takedown lever signaled the final piece in place with a loud snap, it was again Graffam who was holding the magazine. He stood up and smiled. The pack circled. They screamed for their new guy to take the shot. But Graffam lingered. With ceremony, melodrama, and a broad smile he racked back the pistol and slowly lowered it at his target, savoring the victory. The room quieted as the men waited for the shot. Graffam lingered. He was one of the platoon clowns, always joking around. Several of the guys in Alpha snickered.
“Just do it!” Bravo’s grizzly growled, wincing. “Fucking do it!”
Graffam continued to wave the pistol and tease. Suddenly, the grizzly bellowed, hurled the table to one side, and dove at Graffam, fists swinging.
The pack erupted, then collapsed into a melee. Some SEALs tried to pry the belligerents apart; others tried to get a few hits in. At one point, Bravo’s chief, a big brawler with a shaved head, punched Alpha’s assistant officer square in the mouth. The volume soared. Then the chief stepped in and pushed toward Bravo.
“Fuck this!” Eddie roared. “You want to go platoon-on-platoon? I’m not fighting with fucking fists! I’m going to stab motherfuckers!”
Everyone froze. SEALs instinctively trained to search for weapons noticed one of Eddie’s hands was in his pocket. The smile drained from Miller’s face and he looked over at Dille and Tolbert, who looked as stunned as he was.
No one had a problem with brawling. They were a rough crowd in a rough business, and not averse to pain, but suddenly a guy had taken it too far. And it was one of the oldest, most experienced, and most trusted guys there, the guy who was supposed to be the mature one, the chief. An awkward silence spread over both platoons. Was Eddie making a threat or a joke?
A sniper from Bravo whispered to Josh Vriens, “Dude, what the fuck’s up with your chief?” The big sniper shrugged. He viewed Eddie as a badass and a mentor. He wanted to someday be just like him. “No idea,” he whispered back.
Senior Chief Alazzawi stepped between Eddie and the Bravo guys. “Whoa, whoa,” he said. He put his hands up. His thick forearms were covered in dark sailor tattoos that had grown blurry with age. “No one needs to be talking about stabbing anyone.”
A few SEALs stepped back. The Sheriff looked at the young faces ranged around the room and almost felt embarrassed for Eddie. The sudden, aggressive threat had, for the first time, showed Miller a flaw in his chief. Lethal force was the core of their profession, but to flash it outside of combat was bush league—the move of a gangbanger or a street punk, not a trained fighter. It showed lack of control. Maybe it was just bravado, Miller thought. Maybe Eddie was making the threat so that he could claim the title as the biggest badass in the group—the most alpha in Alpha. But over the years Miller had learned that the guys in the SEALs who focused most on being the most badass often were the least. Despite his reservations, Miller said nothing. As lead petty officer his job wasn’t to find flaws in his chief, it was to back him.
Alazzawi pushed the two factions apart. No one was going to stab anyone. Alazzawi was going to make sure of that. But no one was going to report a fight or a threat to use a knife either. Over the generations as a tiny land force in a big Navy full of ship drivers, the SEALs had learned to solve their own problems. The small tribe of frogmen was suspicious of the larger Navy and its antiquated bread-and-water discipline system. They had come to believe little good could come of it. SEALs dealt with things in-house, as SEALs.
Alazzawi ordered the new guys separated. He sent Bravo’s grizzly bear outside the barracks, telling him he needed to cool off and learn to control himself. He told the Bravo chief who threw a punch to apologize. Then he looked at the Alpha junior officer who’d been hit and was bleeding from a split lip. Alazzawi said he needed to accept the apology. The junior lieutenant nodded sheepishly.
“Okay, good,” the senior chief said. He looked around at all the other guys. His eyes connected with Eddie and his officer, Jake Portier, and then with the command team from Bravo platoon. “This never happened.”
The brawl in the kitchen confused a lot of the guys in Alpha, like children noticing for the first time a parent who made a mistake. But that was the most confusing part. Was it a mistake? When Eddie said he’d knife someone, was it an honest threat or a calculated bluff meant to defuse the situation? Was he going to recklessly escalate the fight with lethal violence or was he actually de-escalating it with a little street-gang psychological warfare? Did the threat mean that Eddie was not quite the leader Alpha had hoped for, or just the opposite?
It took Miller a while to realize that the brawl in the kitchen was an omen for the next six months of workup to deployment. Alpha would continue to excel. Eddie would continue to push them, just like he did in BUD/S. But wrinkles started to appear in Eddie’s godlike persona. He would do and say things that no typical frogman would do…. But it was hard to know if he was screwing up or just screwing with his less-experienced SEALs. Maybe he was such a badass that he didn’t have to do things like everyone else.
Whatever the explanation, Eddie never appeared to suffer consequences from above. No one ever yelled at him. No one punished him. Eddie always seemed to find his way out of every fuckup. The SEALs above him seemed bent on smoothing problems over quietly so the platoons could stay focused on the larger mission. The SEALs below him didn’t complain because he was their ticket to a real deployment. It all just faded away. Like Alazzawi said, “This never happened.”
A few days after the brawl in the kitchen, Alpha was back in close-quarters combat drills doing live ammo runs. It was one SEAL at a time clearing rooms. The scenarios were getting progressively gnarlier. What had started as clearing empty rooms with no ammo now included furniture and barriers, live ammo, and life-size cardboard cutouts—some armed enemies, some friendlies. Often the instructors tried to trick the SEALs. A figure with a gun one run might hold a cellphone the next. Accidentally drilling the wrong target was a safety violation—one of the biggest mistakes a SEAL could make. One safety violation, you got written up. Too many, you’d be kicked out of the platoon. Everyone understood the seriousness of what they were doing. They were using real bullets in complex situations. No one wanted to come around a corner into a hallway and accidentally get smoked.
Eddie did not do well. One morning the instructors added a cutout of an unarmed American soldier in a camo uniform. One by one the platoon went through the scenario, sweeping the corners of the room at warp speed, spotting the soldier and scanning his hands for weapons, then moving on. No one shot him. But when it was Eddie’s turn, he shot the soldier right in the chest.
Instructors noted the violation and talked to Eddie about his mistake. But when the platoon ran through another scenario that day, Eddie drilled the same cutout. And when they ran a third scenario, he drilled it again. The senior guys in Alpha watched from the catwalk above. Miller was worried. Either Eddie couldn’t do the drill right or didn’t care. Both were a problem. Miller respected Eddie. He loved what he was doing for the platoon. But he was starting to realize that maybe tactics weren’t Eddie’s strong point. He made a note in his mind that he would have to do more to help his chief.
In the end, Eddie didn’t get in trouble for the bad shots. The instructor in charge of the close-quarters combat had served with Eddie for years. The two were tight. Eddie told the platoon later in the bunkhouse that the instructor had tried to scold him, but Eddie just smiled at the instructor as if to say, Are you really giving Eddie Gallagher pointers on how to shoot? From now on, he told the instructor, I’m going to shoot that cutout every fucking time. The instructor, Eddie said, just shook his head and laughed.
A few days later, Alpha was going through an exercise that tested quick reaction to an unexpected scenario: One by one SEALs had to come through the door ready for anything to happen on the other side. No one knew how many rooms or how many people were waiting. It could be an ISIS bomb factory, or it could be a ladies’ tea party. Each SEAL in Alpha had only seconds to decide how to move and shoot.
That day each SEAL through the door immediately faced three armed enemies at close range. The targets were played by real people. All guns were loaded with paint rounds. Each platoon member had to drop all three combatants in a few seconds, then press forward, rifle raised, through a doorway leading to a second room. There they encountered a SEAL in uniform with no gun who rushed out with his hands up, yelling, “Don’t shoot!” Platoon members were expected to rush past the friendly into the second room, which held three more men: one armed enemy and two unarmed SEALs. The goal was to shoot the enemies and secure the rooms but not harm the SEALs. The whole run was expected to take only seconds.
It was a vital skill. In a real combat scenario, squad members raiding a terrorist cell or rescuing a hostage could easily run into one another, guns drawn. They had to train their reflexes. Mistakes were deadly. The whole platoon went through one by one with few problems. As they finished, they went up to the catwalk to watch their buddies. When it was Eddie’s turn, he shot all the enemy fighters. Then he shot all the SEALs.
The Alpha guys on the catwalk looked down in disbelief. Three safeties in one run. If that had happened to anyone else in the platoon, they’d be toast. When Dylan Dille saw his chief shoot a SEAL with his hands up, the sniper thought to himself, What if the same thing happens in combat? Miller had a sinking feeling as he watched. The first safety violation could have been a fluke. But Miller was starting to wonder if Eddie just couldn’t differentiate. Maybe his default was kill. That could get ugly in a war zone. Afterward, Eddie just laughed about it. Maybe he’s just joking around, Miller thought, but if he is, it’s going to make it a lot harder to get the guys to take this seriously.
Nothing happened to Eddie after the safety violations. Just like nothing had happened the time before. Eddie had been in the military for nearly twenty years. Guys he’d come up with were now the top enlisted senior and master chiefs running the show. Loyalty ran deep, especially with SEALs who had deployed together. If you were seen as a good dude, other dudes would look out for you. No one was going to report a guy like Eddie for showing up late and screwing up in training. And if anyone did report it, chances were that the leaders who would look into it were Eddie’s buddies.
The leadership’s willingness to look the other way seemed to increase as the workup went on. Eddie skipped training and slept through classes. He didn’t show up for drug screenings. He missed a mandatory muster of the whole team because he had flown out to Cabo San Lucas without clearance. It was stuff that would have gotten a normal SEAL flattened. With Eddie nothing happened. The snipers started to joke that the chief was the SEAL equivalent of a made man in the Mafia. Eddie was untouchable. By September 2016 he was openly complaining about the workup to his boss, Alazzawi. “I’m over this training. It’s fucking gay,” he texted. And the instructors, he added, “are a bunch of morons.”
Alazzawi saw it as healthy discontent. Eddie was a natural fighter. He wasn’t the type of guy who wanted to train; he wanted to be in combat.
Miller didn’t mention his concerns about the chief to the platoon. No need to cause drama. If the Sheriff showed confidence in the chief, the other SEALs would have no reason to raise doubts. After all, they weren’t looking for problems. They liked Eddie. He hooked up guys with the best training schools and wrote them glowing recs that would help with their next assignments. As a chief he pushed them to focus on the stuff they’d need in combat but didn’t sweat needless stuff like uniform standards and haircuts. He was their leader, their mentor, and their friend. He would have them over to grill up tri-tip and drink Sculpin IPA. A couple of the guys even went to Bible study at Eddie’s house. He might have his flaws, but he was a good dude. And if the higher-ups were willing to overlook his screwups, it benefited Alpha as much as Eddie. His status as a made man was lifting them all. The Team leadership saw Alpha as hands down the best platoon. With any luck, they would get the pick of assignments. And that was good, because the SEALs were facing a dangerous and virulent new enemy.
In December 2016, with only a few months before deployment, Alpha still didn’t know where they would be going, but at the top of their wish list was the largest concentration of terrorists in the world, the ISIS-held city of Mosul. During workup, the specter of ISIS had grown darker and more real with every passing week. In 2014 militants had taken over a swath of Syria and Iraq the size of Indiana. Since then they had started to expand their reach and influence until they seemed to be everywhere. In November 2015, coordinated ISIS attacks on cafés and a concert hall in Paris killed 130 people. Three weeks later, a married suburban couple inspired by ISIS gunned down fourteen government workers in San Bernardino, California. The grim headlines never seemed to end: ISIS was enslaving women, crucifying Christians, beheading journalists. ISIS was taunting America on Twitter, saying that one day the black ISIS flag would fly over the White House. Alpha was hoping for a chance to take the fight to ISIS territory. After all, they figured, if anyone needed bad karma, it was these assholes.
Eddie sent a text to Senior Chief Alazzawi, pressing him on where the Navy planned to send Alpha.
“Wherever there is trouble,” Alazzawi responded. “Bottom line up front, need smart dudes in the worst place to do great things without people worrying. Where that is is still up in the air. Just know we need to send our best.”
“Cool,” Eddie wrote. “Jake and I are def down to go to the shittiest place if there is for sure action and work to be done. I just don’t want to try and chase it and end up getting a raw deal. We don’t care about living conditions or per diem, we just want to kill as many people as possible.”
That’s what Alazzawi liked about Eddie. He was a hard dude and he loved what he did.
“We trust u guys to be in a fucked up place doing great things,” Alazzawi wrote.
“Fuck yeah, I appreciate you looking out for us,” Eddie replied.
At the very end of December, deployments were announced and Alpha learned that their hard work had paid off. At the beginning of February, they were getting dropped in Iraq. The Iraqi Army was putting together a massive assault force, bigger than anything seen since the U.S. invasion in 2003. The force would roll straight into the city of Mosul. And Alpha would be right there with them.