Eddie drove one of Alpha’s big, armored M-ATVs through a dusty farm field toward the FLOT, trying to get as close to the fighting as possible. The field ran up a gentle rise to a village of a few dozen flat-roofed houses. A vast cemetery stretched beyond the village, its centuries of headstones the only things sprouting out of the bare ground. Beyond the cemetery lay the edge of Mosul. Eddie parked the truck so that the .50-cal machine gun on the roof had a good sweep of the village. His ice-blue eyes scanned for targets.
It was dawn. In the distance the scratchy street-corner loudspeakers of Mosul sounded the morning call to prayer. Tire fires were already burning. The silhouettes of minarets rose up beyond the black smoke. In the growing light an American Apache helicopter gunship cut fast over the flat rooftops. It passed over the village and then over farm fields left unplanted for seasons because of the fighting. There, in the dirt, a line of Iraqi Humvees and six-wheeled armored troop carriers was kicking up a plume of dust as it lurched toward the village. The pop of gunfire echoed over the field, followed by a reply from the village. Then more gunfire, until soon the air was rattling with automatic weapons. Iraqi soldiers scurried forward on foot, using the steel hides of the trucks as cover. A massive Abrams tank clattered alongside, ready to smash through courtyard walls or entire houses to destroy any refuge for ISIS. Eddie’s truck began pounding the village. All around was war. And if there was any other place Eddie Gallagher would have rather been at that moment, it was likely even closer to the action.
Of all of his combat deployments, Mosul was the most intense yet. And to anyone who asked, Eddie said it was the most badass. Laying siege to a city against a savage enemy was a chance he knew he likely would not see again. This was not some Podunk insurgency like so many platoons had experienced in Afghanistan, where the enemy fighters spent most of their time trying to pretend they were civilians. This was all-out war. ISIS was more vicious than anything Eddie had ever encountered. It was clear they were willing to fight to the death. Eddie finally had a chance to experience war like he’d envisioned it watching Platoon as a kid.
If ISIS was completely savage, the other side was almost as barbaric. The Americans might tiptoe around civilian casualties. Not the Iraqi Army. They were hunters. Many had adopted the Punisher logo and put it all over their uniforms. They were going to take back the city no matter what. Many of the Shias in ERD believed that the Sunni residents of Mosul were all ISIS sympathizers. If civilians were killed in the process, that was war.
It was May 3, 2017, the first day of a new offensive. For two months Alpha platoon and its Iraqi allies had slowly punched into Mosul from the south, grinding small bits of the city off block by block. But the fight had bogged down as they closed in on the honeycomb of the ancient city center, which had literally been built to withstand a siege. ISIS was dug in deep.
Full frontal assaults were a tactic for standard infantry. The SEALs always tried to strike where they were least expected. So the coalition was making a surprise run to hit from the west, away from the river, in the desert on the far western side of the city.
The village that was Eddie’s target sat on a patch of high ground with a sweeping view of the western approach to Mosul. The farmhouses offered a clear field of fire across the fallow fields and ancient cemetery. No one trying to go in or out of Mosul could get past. Dozens of ISIS fighters held the strategic outpost and were firing on anyone who used the main road. But days before, Iraqi troops had circled the village, cutting off all escape. They waited as the fighters inside ran low on food, water, and ammunition. On May 3, ERD forces moved in to clear the village. The SEALs were there, as usual, to advise and assist. The Iraqi officer in charge estimated the village would be destroyed by lunchtime.
Eddie scanned with the .50-cal, looking for enemy fighters. The Iraqis’ armored vehicles pressed into the village. He could hear the firing and the occasional punch of a grenade. He saw the smoke rising over the village. But he wasn’t allowed to join the fight directly under the rules of engagement. The best he could do was fire from the flank.
Eddie was about 300 meters away and it likely tore him up to not be closer. Two months into what was probably the most epic urban battle of his generation, he had yet to get in an up-close gunfight. He had not even been within blocks of the enemy, and had never looked an ISIS fighter in the eye. The Marine commanders at the Special Operations Task Force were too hesitant. Too many lawyers and wannabe politicians were still holding the leash. The way to glory and status for the SEALs was by charging aggressively to the front. You didn’t get medals sitting in a truck. There had to be danger and blood. But the brass in charge didn’t see it that way. The American people by 2017 were tired of war; the United States involvement on the ground had to remain limited, quiet, deniable. No one wanted flag-draped caskets. So pipe hitters like Eddie were repeatedly told to stand back and stand by. He was somehow supposed to fight a war from the rear. It was increasingly clear the Pentagon wanted him to remain a spectator in the climax of the war he’d been fighting his whole life. “Dealing with this SOTF sucks,” Eddie texted his boss, Senior Chief Alazzawi, during the deployment. “These guys are a bunch of vaginas and constantly tell us to stop being aggressive.”
There was a saying Eddie sometimes repeated to young SEALs as they made their way through the Teams. “Special operations is a mistress,” it began. “The mistress will show you things never before seen and let you experience things never before felt. She will love you, but only a little, seducing you to want more, give more, die for her. She will take you away from the ones you love, and you will hate her for it, but leave her you never will. If you do, you will miss her, for she has a part of you that will never be returned intact. And in the end, she will leave you for a younger man.”
Eddie had known the mistress for much of his adult life, and he could sense that she was already moving on to the younger men. Chief was the last rank where a SEAL could count on seeing any action. If he stayed in the SEALs he’d almost certainly end up behind a desk. He was nearly eligible for retirement. At the end of it all there would be no victory, no peace accord, no ticker-tape parade. War would go on. Combat wasn’t so much a question of peace but of score. How many bad dudes could a SEAL take out? And here, at the end of Eddie’s career, was Mosul. One last big fight, if he could only figure out a way to get into it.
Craig Miller drove up to a bombed-out building about 500 meters back from Eddie’s position. He pulled into a walled equipment yard and the other trucks from Squad 1 followed. In growing light, the thick steel doors of the M-ATVs creaked open and boots crunched over the gravel. The platoon fanned out and began setting up the lethal symphony they had rehearsed so many times in the past few months: the Puma to scout for targets, mortars to pound them, snipers to pick off fighters, the kamikaze Switchblade drone for surprise strikes, shoulder-launched rockets, and Javelin missiles. If there was a normal rhythm to a massive urban assault against a self-proclaimed terrorist caliphate, then the day started out normally enough. It was how it ended that changed everything.
The platoon would later be asked to detail May 3, 2017, again and again, sometimes under oath. Where had they been? What were they doing? What had they seen? How had it happened? And why? Most of the answers came easy. The memory was often etched in high definition, not just clear but inescapable. But for the bigger question—why?—no one ever offered much of an answer, other than that Eddie was just Eddie.
Miller walked a few steps across the gravel yard and entered the building where the squad had parked. It was bigger than the low farmhouses sprinkled on the outskirts of the city, four stories high with a ten-foot wall surrounding it. Once it had been an office building or some kind of government bureau. But like every inch of the region, it had been conquered and reconquered and was now just a bullet-riddled shell. Everything of value had been stripped. Broken desks and filing cabinets lay in heaps. The windows were smashed. The perimeter wall had holes big enough to drive a tank through. A giant red-and-white steel radio tower that had once stood hundreds of feet above the building lay tangled on the ground. But the building’s high, flat roof still offered a strategic view of the target village, and the perimeter wall provided cover from enemy fire. For a temporary command post, it was perfect.
As Miller walked into the command post, Dylan Dille pulled a mortar tube from the back of his truck and hefted it onto his shoulder. He looked for a spot with some cover and soft ground where he could set up. He crossed an open section of the yard where a massive hole in the perimeter wall opened the courtyard to enemy territory. Without warning the zing of bullets zipped past and slapped a nearby wall. He dashed across the gap.
“Careful, man. I almost got shot,” he yelled back.
Dalton Tolbert was right behind him carrying the heavy baseplate for the mortar. Without hesitating he crossed the same alley, but at a sprint. Both SEALs stepped through a hole smashed in a wall during an earlier battle and found a sheltered spot in a vacant lot for a mortar pit.
Miller walked back out of the building, hooked his thumbs in the chest rig on his body armor, and surveyed the yard. Since Eddie was out in a gun truck doing his Eddie thing, the Sheriff was assuming the duties of chief, as usual. Miller was also increasingly on the lookout for threats. A few days before, he had almost been killed by a grenade dropped from a small, off-the-shelf drone that ISIS had rigged to kill. Miller stood up after the blast unhurt, but it had been a good reminder: ISIS could strike anytime from any direction. He ran through the different threat scenarios. Frontal attack, rear attack, mortar attack, and attack from within the walls by ISIS posing as ERD or a stay-behind fighter hidden in the rubble. He directed two of the four gun trucks to move to strategic corners of the walled yard to protect the approach. He relayed to his ERD partners not to let any unknown Iraqi forces into the compound. Once everything seemed to be in position, he pulled out a sledgehammer and started knocking a new hole in the outer wall so he could pass mortars to Dille and Tolbert without exposing anyone to enemy fire.
As Miller ferried mortars across the yard, he passed by an armored truck where a Marine named Giorgio Kirylo sat studying the screen on a piece of electronic equipment the guys in Alpha universally referred to as “Gio’s nerd box.” Kirylo was a signals intelligence specialist that the SOTF had attached to the platoon because his classified equipment could intercept electronic communications and pinpoint ISIS locations for the platoon to destroy. As he sat in the truck, listening to chatter through oversized headphones, he wore a ball cap that read, “DEATH COMES KNOCKING.”
Kirylo had joined the platoon a few weeks after they arrived in Iraq and had not made a great first impression. He criticized nearly everything the SEALs did, and constantly bragged about his combat experience, as if needing to prove he was more than just a computer geek. He was so loud and obnoxious that the Sheriff had pulled him aside and chewed him out. So had Eddie. Slowly, Kirylo had settled down and become more or less accepted.
One of the JTACs, Joe Arrington, passed Kirylo’s truck and climbed the stairs to the compound roof. The bulky radios he used to call in air strikes jutted from the front of his chest, their stubby black antennas poking above his shoulders like wasp feelers. Right behind him was a second JTAC, Ryan Rynkowski. The SOTF expected the kickoff of the western offensive to get pretty hairy and assigned Rynkowski—who was an Air Force technical sergeant, not a SEAL—to help shoulder the air strike load for a few weeks. It was his first day working with Alpha.
At the top of the stairs both JTACs joined Alpha’s lieutenant, Jake Portier, who was overseeing everything from the roof. Portier stood looking out at the battlefield with the commander of the ERD battalion, a gray-haired and slightly portly man with a mustache and green fatigues named Brigadier General Abbas al-Jubouri, who was directing the attack.
In the yard, T. C. Byrne, the lead medic and dedicated drone flyer, assembled the Puma’s long white wings and launched it by hand like an oversized paper airplane. It skimmed the ground, then buzzed away and climbed slowly upward, circling to 1,000 feet. He set it on autopilot, circling above the city, and walked upstairs so he could relay what the Puma’s camera was seeing to the command team.
Lying prone on the roof not far from the command team was the youngest SEAL in Alpha, Eddie’s gopher, Ivan Villanueva, his finger on the trigger of a MK-48 lightweight machine gun, providing overwatch in case of attack. Beyond the outer wall that surrounded the compound, he could see the fallow fields stretching nearly a kilometer east to the Iraqi soldiers pushing in to clear the ISIS-held village. Near the village he watched Alpha’s two dust-colored SEAL M-ATVs on the flank of the village, providing cover fire for the Iraqis. Eddie was in charge of one. The second was commanded by the squad’s baby-faced assistant officer, Tom MacNeil.
Mosul was MacNeil’s first time in combat. Like Portier, he had started out an admirer of Eddie, impressed by the chief’s experience and resolve. He hoped to learn from him. And Eddie had enthusiastically taken MacNeil under his wing, vowing to raise him right. In combat MacNeil had proved organized and calm, even when things were exploding all around. He didn’t squawk when Eddie turned off the ATAK trackers, and because of that Eddie had taken a shine to him. When one of Eddie’s superiors asked how MacNeil was handling Mosul, Eddie replied he was “crushing it.” But by that morning MacNeil was starting to grow wary of Eddie. What he’d once admired as aggression he was starting to see as recklessness. Eddie kept putting the platoon in pointlessly risky situations where they were either going to get shut down by the SOTF or killed. Just like Miller, MacNeil started quietly taking extra precautions. He practiced calling in medevacs at night before going to sleep. Every time they drove into Mosul, he memorized the locations of vacant lots where medevac helicopters could land.
Standard operating procedure required MacNeil’s truck to stick with Eddie’s for security, so when Eddie drove forward through the bare farm fields to fire on the village, MacNeil had to go with him. As usual, Eddie was going to try to push up as close as he could when the shooting started.
Back at the compound, the mortar pit was up and ready. Dille and Tolbert launched test rounds into an empty field. The Puma flying above spotted the rounds, and the medic piloting the drone relayed the hits to the mortar team so they could adjust.
Then Kirylo, the signals intelligence Marine, picked up some enemy chatter on the nerd box and triangulated the signal. He radioed the lieutenant and passed on the intel: It sounded like there was a group of ISIS fighters holed up in a small house at the northern edge of the village, including the local commander. Portier tried to radio Miller to hit the house with mortars, but Miller’s radio seemed to be on the fritz. It kept cutting in and out, and he didn’t get the message. The lieutenant turned to the JTACs. The skies above Mosul buzzed with aircraft day and night. That morning a pack of Apache helicopters circled just outside the city waiting for a call. Joe Arrington got on the encrypted radio and relayed the grid for the target. It was a one-story house with cinder block walls and only a few rooms. No friendlies nearby. No civilians. Arrington called for two laser-guided Hellfire missiles, both with 100-pound warheads set on a slight delay so that they wouldn’t detonate until they punched through the roof and into the living room. The pilot radioed back confirmation. The package was out for delivery.
From the field where the trucks parked, Eddie and MacNeil watched an Apache sweep in and the missiles streak from its wing. Without a tail of white exhaust, they would have been too fast to see. The missiles crashed right through the roof and the whole place disappeared in a blast. There was no fireball, just a shuttering wave of pressure sending up a cloud that swallowed the house.
The Hellfires were the exclamation point of the assault. Dust and smoke drifted over the village and everything grew quiet. Within minutes ERD soldiers on the ground radioed back to General al-Jubouri that the village was clear. A few ISIS fighters had managed to escape, but most had been killed. ERD planned to sweep through the wreckage to make sure no one was missed, but barring any surprises, that was the end of operations for the day. It was about 10 a.m.
Dylan Dille headed in from the mortar pit to ask if he should pack the gear and get ready to head out. He scooted past the gap in the wall where bullets had nearly clipped him earlier and found his lieutenant in the courtyard conferring with General al-Jubouri. As Dille was about to ask what the plan was, he heard the general tell Portier his troops were bringing a wounded man back from the village. Portier got on the platoon radio and called for a medic. He wanted T. C. Byrne to stop flying the Puma and tend to the wounded Iraqi soldier.
Negative, Eddie cut in over the radio. He had overheard, and told Byrne to stay on the Puma. Even though the battle appeared to be over, Eddie wanted Byrne to look for targets so he could fire a Jav. Let the Iraqis take care of their own, he said.
General al-Jubouri shook his finger. No, he told Portier, his men weren’t bringing in a wounded Iraqi soldier. They were bringing a wounded ISIS fighter. Portier keyed his mic and told the medic to stand down: Never mind, T.C. It’s not ERD. It’s an ISIS guy.
Dille suddenly perked up. In two months of combat and dozens of missions, the platoon had seen plenty of live ISIS fighters from a distance, and a fair number dead, but never a live one up close. This was going to be interesting. Eddie must have heard it, too, because Dille heard him immediately come back over the radio. “No one touch him,” he said. “He’s mine.”
Eddie’s truck did a U-turn in the field and headed back toward the compound, sending up a tail of dust. MacNeil, who had been worried about Eddie getting too close to the front line all morning, now watched mystified as the chief inexplicably drove away from the fight. He had no idea what was going on, or what Eddie meant by “No one touch him, he’s mine,” but with Eddie’s truck leaving, MacNeil’s truck had to follow. Both left their position supporting the Iraqi troops and drove a kilometer back toward the compound.
Miller was walking to his truck to get something to eat when a battered green Humvee with a bullet hole in the windshield rolled into the compound. A gang of Iraqi soldiers hoisting assault rifles sat on the hood and hung off the sides, cheering and waving their guns in celebration. Draped across the hood was a wounded ISIS fighter. With his broken radio, Miller hadn’t heard that the captive was coming, so this was a complete surprise. He strode across the yard to try to figure out what was going on. Like the rest of the guys, he had never seen a live ISIS fighter up close. He stared almost slack-jawed, forgetting what he had been on his way to do.
The Iraqi Humvee pulled in diagonally among the SEAL trucks and stopped. General al-Jubouri stood at the hood in his camouflage fatigues with his arms crossed, the captive spread out before him as if on a platter. The guy was conscious, but barely. He had shaggy, curly hair that was a few months past its last cut. He wore a dirty black tank top and baggy brown bottoms that one of the SEALs described later as “Aladdin pants.” He was so skinny that his scrawny shoulders barely filled his tank top. He was covered head to toe with chalky dust, likely from the Hellfire strike, making him look a bit like a ghost or a statue. The only bright color on him was a fresh white bandage around his left calf with a small but vivid red blossom of blood on the gauze.
Iraqi soldiers pulled the fighter up by his arms and swung him down off the truck. The wound on his calf left a small smear of blood across the hood. As the soldiers lifted him down, he hung heavy and limp like a wet towel. He tried raising his head to see where he was, but he didn’t have the strength. His head flopped forward, then slumped back as the soldiers laid him out in the gravel at the general’s feet.
Word spread through the compound that the Iraqis had a live ISIS captive, and guys from Alpha flocked to see him. The idea of ISIS loomed large. The SEALs had heard so much about the wild-bearded, hardcore fundamentalists who tortured civilians, crucified priests, bombed Western cities, enslaved women, shot families, and were so fierce that they had chased the Iraqi Army out of half of their country. SEALs in full combat gear jostled for a view, eager to see their foe eye to eye.
The fighter in the gravel was not what any of them expected. He was young, tiny, pathetic. The first thing Joe Arrington noticed was that he had no shoes.
Dille pushed in, almost giddy, then stopped in his tracks. The guy was so skinny that when the Iraqi soldiers lifted him off the truck, his wristwatch slid all the way down over his biceps. He had smooth cheeks with no sign of stubble despite a siege that had lasted for days. You gotta be kidding me, Dille thought, this isn’t ISIS, it’s a goddamned kid. He turned to one of the platoon’s interpreters and said, “Man, how old do you think that guy is?”
Iraqis crowded around with the SEALs, taking photos of the kid as he lay in the dirt. Dille felt a simmering disgust. He knew his Iraqi partners well enough that he was sure nothing good was going to happen to the captive. The house where the platoon slept in Hammam al-Alil shared a wall with a house ERD used to hold prisoners. At night the SEALs heard bloodcurdling screams. They could hear men being beaten and forced to bark like dogs, and the rhythmic jolted cries from what they guessed were electric shocks. The Iraqis would probably shoot the kid or, worse, take him back to that room.
Growing up in the Rockies, Dille had learned to hunt only in season, during daylight, and only if the tag matched the right age and sex. The rules were there for everyone’s benefit. That’s how he saw war, too. Lethal force was necessary, but so were rules of engagement. Trying to cut corners might seem like common sense but ultimately, over time, was self-defeating. No doubt this kid didn’t give a shit about rules and would have shot anyone in the platoon that morning. Dille would have happily killed him or dropped a mortar on his house an hour before. But now he was out of season. To kill a captive was not just unprofessional and illegal but revolting, like shooting a bear cub in a zoo.
More Iraqis and SEALs showed up. They formed a wall of curiosity around the captive. Except for the gunshot on his calf, the captive had no other obvious wounds. Even so, he appeared to be in pretty bad shape. He lay limp on the ground, his eyelids drooped over pupils that barely bothered to scan the men crowded over him. His face was gaunt, his lips were going gray, his breathing was shallow.
General al-Jubouri knelt down and gently took the kid’s hand. It was hot in the sun, well over 85 degrees. One of the aides splashed some water on the captive, and the general asked a few questions: Where are you from? How old are you? What ISIS unit are you with? How many fighters? The fighter could only mumble two or three words at a time. The general relayed the answers to an aide, who wrote them in a notebook. He was a local kid, from a neighborhood just a few miles away. He had joined ISIS only recently. There were twenty fighters with him. Five got away. The rest had been killed.
The general dropped the kid’s hand and stood up, brushing off his palms. He turned to Miller, who was watching. “All right. We got fifteen of them,” he said with a grin.
“What are you going to do with him?” Miller asked. Like Dille, he was feeling a twinge of pity for the enemy. It felt so incongruous that he tried to ignore it, but it wasn’t going away.
“We’ll take him back to Baghdad,” the general said, then he winked at Miller.
Miller smiled and nodded like everything was fine, but the wink clearly meant something ominous.
What were the Iraqis really going to do with this kid? Miller tried not to think about it. That was Iraqi business he didn’t want to get mixed up in. The SEALs weren’t in Iraq to act as human rights observers. They couldn’t fix all the country’s problems. The United States had already tried that and failed. They were just there to help kill ISIS. Still, it didn’t feel good to know a kid might suffer for no reason.
T. C. Byrne put the Puma on autopilot when the captive arrived and went down for a look. He wore a helmet camera that he switched on whenever something interesting happened. As he crossed the dusty yard toward the Humvee, he clicked Record. The cam captured the Iraqi soldiers beginning to lift up the captive to put him back on the hood of the Humvee. General al-Jubouri was done interrogating him. They were going to take him away and do whatever they planned to do. The general saw the men and put his finger up, scolding them in Arabic. “No, no, no, no…not in front of them,” he said, referring to the SEALs. “Do not put him on the hood in front of them, not now.” The general knew the Americans had strict rules about how they treated captives and seemed to want to avoid angering his partners.
Just then, the helmet cam captured a gloved hand slapping the general on the shoulder. Eddie had arrived.
General al-Jubouri turned and saw the chief. The two had worked together daily for two months; they had grown close. Eddie respected al-Jubouri because he was not afraid to get after it on the battlefield. Al-Jubouri liked Eddie because the chief was tough on his SEALs, just like al-Jubouri was tough on his soldiers. He called the leader of the SEALs “Chief Ed.” He couldn’t remember the lieutenant’s name.
“Is he ISIS?” Eddie asked. Al-Jubouri said he was. Eddie nodded and said, “I got him, I got him.”
Eddie had on a black ball cap instead of his helmet and a medical bag slung over his shoulder. All the other SEALs in the platoon wore an emergency first-aid pouch across the small of their backs. Not Eddie. He wore a small handmade hunting knife in a black leather sheath, horizontally woven into his belt loops. He pushed through the Iraqis around the captive, knelt down, unzipped the medical bag, and began cutting away the pant leg near the wound on the injured fighter.
Gio Kirylo, the Marine, came over excited. “Eddie’s about to put him out, dude,” Kirylo announced in a loud voice, as if he didn’t want the others to miss out on the fun. “Hey, Eddie, this is from my sig-int strike!” Kirylo shouted, meaning the Hellfires that had been guided by his signals intel equipment. “Let me know if you need help!”
Eddie didn’t respond. He reached down and checked the wounded leg. He pulled the kid onto his side to check the back of his legs for wounds. Byrne’s helmet cam recorded as the kid winced in pain and tried to rise up. Eddie pushed him back down to the dirt. Then the camera clicked off.
Byrne stood above Eddie watching, trying to figure out what was going on. The more he watched, the more concerned he grew. Byrne’s full name was Terence Charles Byrne III and he had one of the more unusual backgrounds in the SEALs. His stepfather was a banker who took the train into Manhattan from their leafy neighborhood in Connecticut. But his birth father was a black-market arms dealer who in the 1980s got mixed up with the CIA and its United Kingdom counterpart MI6 in a scheme to covertly sell high-tech artillery shells to both sides of the war between Iraq and Iran. After his cover was blown, he spent much of the rest of his life hiding out. Byrne had not only inherited his father’s intensity and instinct for adventure, he had, decades later, inherited his war. In Alpha, Byrne was instantly attracted to Eddie’s love for everything kinetic and became one of his biggest backers. He loved the chief’s aggressiveness, his confidence. Byrne planned to go places in the SEALs. He wanted to try out for DEVGRU and thought Eddie’s leadership and connections could help him get there. He was such a disciple of Eddie that in skits the platoon put on before deploying, Byrne appeared repeatedly as Eddie’s boyfriend.
That started to change in Mosul after Eddie kept turning off the trackers and sneaking around. Those decisions fell most heavily on the medics. Byrne figured it would only be a matter of time before Eddie got someone hit by an air strike. It kept him up at night. He memorized everyone’s blood type and ran through rescue procedures again and again, but never said anything to Eddie. He knew if he complained Eddie might just bench him at the safe house. And if he was benched, he wouldn’t be there if anyone got hit. He had deployed to Iraq to work as a medic, so he shut up and did his job.
Now as he and half a dozen other SEALs watched Eddie work, an insistent barrage of questions hit his mind. The first was What the hell is Eddie doing with a med bag in the first place? Eddie had been a platoon medic years ago, but that wasn’t his job with Alpha. No one in the squad had ever seen him even unzip a med bag. The platoon often encountered refugees straggling out of the city, some bleeding and broken from the fighting. Byrne treated them. So did the other medic, Corey Scott. Eddie never offered so much as a Band-Aid. The medics also treated wounded ERD soldiers. Not Eddie. Even with their own team, Eddie did little. Two weeks before, ISIS had fired a rocket-propelled grenade at one of the platoon’s armored gun trucks and hit the open side door where Byrne and an interpreter were standing. The explosion showered the interpreter’s legs with hot shrapnel and blasted Byrne into the back seat, knocking him unconscious. Byrne woke up in such a daze that he wandered out into the street oblivious to the enemy fire. Even in that state, it was Byrne who treated the interpreter’s wounds, not Eddie. Now here was Eddie, working on an ISIS captive. Byrne couldn’t make sense of it.
Byrne watched as Eddie cut away the pant leg. That raised a second question: What the hell are we going to do with this patient? By kneeling down and providing aid, Eddie had put the kid in the custody of the United States Navy. Would that mean after Eddie stabilized him they would have to evacuate him to a hospital? Would he end up in prison in the United States? Were they allowed to turn him back over to the Iraqis? In two years of training, the scenario had never come up.
Then a third question pushed to the fore: Should I help? The captive was struggling to breathe. Judging by the dust covering his body, the medic figured that the supersonic pressure wave from the Hellfire blast that blew out the windows and doors had also punched into the fighter’s lungs, momentarily inflating millions of tiny air sacs to the point of popping, then letting them sag back, shriveled and injured. It was a condition called blast lung. If the kid had blast lung, he was going to need more than a bandage, and the medic wasn’t sure Eddie was up to the task.
Byrne watched Eddie move from the captive’s leg to his neck. The chief used a blade to make an incision for an emergency airway called a cricothyrotomy. It involved cutting a vertical slit down the center of the throat, then inserting a plastic breathing tube. It was the right move, Byrne thought. But Eddie fucked it up. Instead of inserting the tube through the trachea into the airway, Eddie had gotten it stuck between the skin and the cartilage. The kid was moaning in pain. Byrne instinctively knelt down to help. As he did, he clicked on his helmet cam. Now all the work on the captive was being recorded.
Dille was standing next to Byrne, growing increasingly uneasy. Eddie’s declaration over the radio echoed through his head: “He’s mine.” Eddie had told Dille before deployment that if they encountered any wounded enemies, the medics could simply “nurse them to death.” Now Dille wondered if that was what he was seeing. Was Eddie going to slowly kill this kid with medical procedures? He knew the SEAL Teams were full of pirates who cherished the idea of killing the enemy just for the sake of killing. And he knew Eddie liked to act like one. But would he really do it? Dille did not want to find out. He turned and walked away.
Miller stood watching, too mesmerized to look away. On missions Miller tried to be a step ahead of every scenario. He was constantly gaming out threats and devising responses. Now Eddie was providing first aid to a captive ISIS fighter. It was so outside any of the possibilities Miller envisioned that all he could do was stare. The only explanation Miller could come up with was that maybe the whole thing was a preplanned propaganda stunt: ERD would bring in a wounded captive, a SEAL chief would save a young ISIS fighter’s life, then the Iraqi Army would put the kid on Iraqi TV to tell the story. It would give Eddie one more story to tell back in Coronado—the day he saved the ISIS fighter. It seemed laughable, but nothing else made sense.
As Eddie and Byrne worked on the fighter, guys in the platoon drifted away from the scene. The excitement of seeing the enemy was over. Some were turned off by the sight of a scrawny, shoeless kid; others had work to do. General al-Jubouri and Jake Portier walked upstairs into the building to keep an eye on the battlefield. Miller, unable to wrap his head around the general’s wink and Eddie kneeling down to aid the prisoner, wandered away and tried to find something to keep himself busy. He remembered he had not eaten anything all day and went to his truck to find an MRE.
One of the few who stayed was Gio Kirylo, the signals intelligence Marine, who watched and listened as the pair worked.
Dille went back to the mortar pit. He had his rifle up and his hand on the grip. To anyone watching, he looked like he was standing security. In fact, he was lost in thought. What was about to happen? Was Eddie just going to rough up the kid or was he going to kill him? And if he did try to kill him, was anyone in the platoon going to stop it? Would the lieutenant? Would Miller? Dille wondered if he was the only one in Alpha who cared if an ISIS fighter died.
Combat had a lot of long, dull moments, even in a fight as vicious as Mosul. In those idle hours, Dille and Tolbert and a few other guys had often talked about what they would do if they actually got their hands on an ISIS fighter. It was an informal exercise of imagination—a combat version of truth or dare. They had tossed it around repeatedly. What would you really, no shit, do? Would you just shoot him, knowing the Iraqis surely would do worse if you didn’t? Would you do it quickly or slowly? Would you canoe him? Would you use a knife? What if the fighter was a woman? What if the fighter was a kid? It was ghoulish but harmless talk with lots of posturing and gallows humor. Now it was no longer a game.
Byrne loaded a syringe with ketamine and injected it into the captive’s arm. Eddie had cut open the throat without any pain medication. The captive was weak, barely conscious, but clearly suffering. Byrne did not want to admit to the others that he was trying to ease the captive’s pain, so he just told them that ketamine would immobilize the patient to make him easier to work on. Almost immediately, the kid went limp.
Byrne moved to address the breathing problems. If the kid’s lungs had collapsed, Byrne needed to release air filling the spaces between the lungs and chest cavity. He inserted a wide-gauge decompression needle with a one-way valve through the ribs on the left side to let the trapped air out. He wanted a needle on the right side, too, but couldn’t easily reach it. He looked up. The platoon’s youngest SEAL, Ivan Villanueva, was standing just a few feet from the body, next to Kirylo.
It wasn’t surprising to see Villanueva there. Right before deployment, he had gotten arrested for pulling a knife in a bar fight. Eddie had bailed him out and somehow smoothed it over with the command, then made Villanueva his assistant. In Mosul he was almost always right there to do what Eddie asked. Villanueva was like a sponge, eager to soak up as much experience as he could. He had assisted Byrne a half dozen times on other casualties.
“Get down here and help,” Byrne told him. Villanueva knelt next to Eddie, and Byrne led him through how to insert another decompression needle in the right lung.
The platoon’s other medic, Corey Scott, arrived. True to his reputation for not being around, the Ghost had been in a closed armored truck when the captive came in, and had missed the initial commotion. Then someone told him to grab his med bag and get over to the captive. With two medics and an assistant already working the patient, Scott knelt down at the head to monitor vitals. He noted the bandage on the kid’s calf and the decompression needles sticking through his ribs. There were no wounds other than the gunshot on the leg. He felt the pulse on the neck. It was weak but even. He hovered his thumb over the breathing tube in the throat. He could feel steady breaths. The kid wasn’t doing great, but he wasn’t going to die.
Like everyone, Scott was confused about Eddie’s plan. Once Eddie was done working on the kid, what were they going to do? No way they were going to medevac an ISIS fighter. The SEALs didn’t even evacuate wounded ERD soldiers. And no way the Iraqis were going to take care of the kid. Scott had heard the ERD troops talk about murdering and sometimes raping captives. He had listened to the torture through the walls. If Alpha turned the kid over to them, best-case scenario, the Iraqis would just shoot him. Worst-case scenario would be, well, a lot worse.
Byrne tightened a band around the kid’s arm and slapped the skin, searching for a vein to insert an IV. He couldn’t find one. Eddie was kneeling next to Byrne. He was talking, but Byrne was too focused on his work to hear the words. He dug into the med kit for an alternative device called a Fast1—a multipronged, spring-loaded needle designed to punch down into the sternum and deliver fluids directly into the bone. He pushed it into the kid’s chest and connected an IV bag, making sure the drip was barely on. Too much liquid could make the fluid leaking into the lungs even worse.
When the Fast1 was in place, Byrne sat back on his knees and took a breath. He had run through his checklist of care. The kid’s airway was clear. Bleeding was controlled. Circulation was okay. IV was in place. The next step was transport to a hospital. Byrne had no idea if that was going to happen. Eddie or Portier would make that call. But if the kid was medevaced, Byrne would probably have to go with him. That made him remember something. The Puma was still circling on autopilot above the battlefield. The controller and the rest of the gear were still up on the roof. Byrne got up and told Eddie he’d be right back. He instinctively clicked his helmet cam off as he walked away.
Tom MacNeil left the truck where he was talking to the JTACs and went to update General al-Jubouri on the positions of enemy fighters. As he crossed the yard, the junior officer saw Eddie and Corey Scott kneeling by the prisoner. Then he saw Eddie draw out the knife he kept in a black leather sheath across his belt on his back. It was a stubby, handmade blade, only about three inches long. MacNeil recognized it immediately because he and Eddie were roommates, and every night Eddie hung his pants on a nail by MacNeil’s bed. The knife was one of the first things he saw when he woke up each morning. MacNeil walked by without pausing to think why Eddie had his knife out over the prisoner. He wasn’t focused on Eddie; ISIS was still maneuvering on the edge of the city, and he had to relay information to the commander.
Miller found a pouch of combat rations in his truck, ripped it open, and had a few bites. Then he went back to making sure the platoon was ready for whatever happened next on the battlefield. The platoon might be moving farther forward. He was on his way from one truck to another, still chewing a mouthful of food, when he came around the corner of the bullet-riddled Iraqi Humvee. About ten feet away on the ground lay the sedated captive. Eddie was kneeling above the kid’s right shoulder, facing away from Miller. In his hand he had the knife he always carried on his belt. Scott and Villanueva were kneeling across from him. Miller instinctively slowed his walk when he saw the knife. The kid was on ketamine and not moving. What was Eddie doing? Miller watched Eddie put the knife blade down at the base of the kid’s neck, just above the right collarbone. Abruptly, without saying anything, Eddie shoved the blade all the way in.
Miller froze midstep.
He saw Eddie draw the knife out and hold it for a moment. There was almost no blood. Then Eddie pushed the knife in again. It wasn’t a fast stab so much as an insertion: steady, even, intentional. This time blood flooded out—not a spray or a jet, but an eruption from a broad wound. The pump of bright red blood spilled across the kid’s shoulder and onto the dirt. Oh fuck, Miller thought. All he could think to do was keep walking, as if nothing had happened. His face was calm as he passed the chief; his thoughts were on fire.
Scott saw the stabbing from just inches away. The medic was kneeling by the head, monitoring the kid’s breathing. Eddie was next to him. There was no warning. Eddie didn’t say a word. He pulled out the knife and stabbed the kid two or three times, right at the base of the neck. Scott was close enough to reach out and stop it, but he froze. He could have yelled out to Eddie, but he was too shocked to move. Holy shit, he thought. He looked around to see if anyone else was seeing what was happening. Everything became a blur. Eddie got up. He might have stabbed the fighter again in the side; Scott was too shocked to register what was happening. If Eddie said anything, it was lost in the panic.
Villanueva was kneeling just across the body. He was looking in a different direction when movement caused him to turn his head. He saw the chief with his hunting knife out. Without a word, Eddie stuck the knife in the kid’s rib. Then Eddie walked away.
Scott lost it. He was too overwhelmed to think or act. His special operations medical training had readied him for scores of high-stress situations. The one where the platoon chief stabs a sedated POW was not one of them. Villanueva watched Eddie go. If the chief had said anything before or after the stabbing, he couldn’t remember it later. He was as stunned as Scott. Villanueva didn’t say anything or do anything. Blood pumped out of the captive’s neck and saturated the dirt.
Miller saw Scott grab for a medical bag to try to save the kid. Someone put bandages on his neck and his side, though neither Scott nor Villanueva remembered trying to bandage the wound. Maybe, Scott said later, he had done it. He couldn’t remember. But it didn’t really matter, he said, it wasn’t the type of wound you could put a bandage on. The next few minutes for him were a blank. Villanueva eventually stood up and walked away. “Once it’s done it’s done,” he later said. “What do you do at that point?”
Scott was left alone. He’d seen the same issues with Eddie that everyone in the platoon had seen—the pointless gunfire and imaginary targets, the bullshit claims of body counts, the neglected duties. That was all manageable. Even funny. This was different. This was a crime. This was murder. Scott worried that he and everyone else could all go to prison for it. Eddie’s stupidity was going to bring them all down.
Shit, he thought. Now we have a problem.
He knelt by the patient until he died.
Byrne came down from the roof with his Puma gear. He saw the kid lying alone on the sun-bleached gravel, pale and obviously dead. There was a big ball of gauze that someone had hastily stuck on the kid’s neck and a big plastic sticker called a chest seal over the wound. There was another bandage on his ribs. Those bandages had not been there when Byrne left. A spurt of blood had splashed onto the kid’s right shoulder and caked the dirt under his neck. That had not been there either. Something bad had happened.
Dylan Dille came around the wall from the mortar pit. Eddie passed him in the yard as he was walking away from the body. The chief looked strained but exultant, as if he had just beaten his record bench press. Dille saw the body lying abandoned in the yard with blue medical gloves and crinkled bandage wrappers wadded up all around it. Eddie actually did it, Dille thought. This time he wasn’t just talking. He actually somehow nursed that guy to death.
A few steps away was one of the EOD techs, a guy named Josh McCandless. He stood in the yard, staring silently at the body as he pulled nervously on a cigarette. He sensed Dille at his side. Without looking up he muttered, “Dude, that was just a brainwashed kid.”
Dalton Tolbert came out from the mortar pit just behind Dille. He saw Iraqi soldiers coming up to Eddie laughing and smiling, congratulating him like he had done something incredible. Dille and Tolbert stood there, stunned.
Miller walked past at a fast clip, fury showing in his eyes. The Sheriff was trying to hold himself in check by focusing on his duties as a lead petty officer. If he could put them back in order it might help him get a handle on his reeling thoughts. Control what you can control, he thought. Make sure the men are doing their jobs. “Break it down, now!” he barked to the snipers. “We’re getting out of here. This whole thing is fucked.” Dille and Tolbert started packing up the mortar gear.
Miller stomped by the body. Iraqi soldiers he had never seen before were crowding around to take selfies. It was a dangerous situation. Any one of them could be an ISIS sleeper agent. SEALs milling around seemed unconcerned. Gio Kirylo, the Marine who had found the kid’s hideout with his nerd box, dragged the body to a better location, and flashed a smile for a photo. So did the platoon’s young dog handler. Miller saw Ivan Villanueva lifting up the kid’s head by the hair for his own selfie. “Put that shit down!” Miller yelled. Villanueva dropped the head like a hot plate.
Miller was determined to get out of the area as soon as possible. Iraqis were walking around everywhere. One was holding a meat cleaver. Unable to wrap his head around the fact that he had just witnessed a murder, Miller instead latched on to the dangerously poor discipline it sparked. Half of the guys were ignoring their duties to gawk at the prisoner; dozens of unknown, armed Iraqis were in the secure area. They were taking photos of the body and of the SEALs. No one was watching the perimeter. They were vulnerable to attack. Elite Navy SEALs were acting like a bunch of idiots. The officer in charge was nowhere in sight.
The Sheriff stormed into the building and found Jake Portier on the roof. We’ve gotta get out of here, Miller told him. He was seeing red. He wanted to throttle Eddie, but he tried to stow his emotions and frame the whole debacle in terms of professional warfighting. The tactical situation was deteriorating, he said. Too many unknown Iraqis are in the compound. The guys have abandoned their positions and instead of doing his job, the chief is executing a prisoner. Portier nodded as he listened. At the mention of the prisoner he didn’t respond with surprise or outrage. Instead he went down to get a look at the body.
Eddie never gave the platoon any real explanation for what he did. But many of the guys thought they understood the significance of the kill for a guy like Eddie. Eddie loved to tell war stories, even if many of them turned out to be exaggerated or flat-out invented. Eddie also prided himself on being an old-school frogman who knew more about fighting than the officers in the SOTF. For guys like him, the true measure of a SEAL was killing the enemy. And while the Navy over the generations had continually devised ways to add distance and safety to the violence—through artillery, missile cruisers, and unmanned drones—true frogmen still practiced the artisan craft of killing up close. There was nothing closer, more visceral, more badass, than the silent blade of the World War II frogmen and painted green frogmen of Vietnam. To a SEAL chief who liked telling war stories, being able to tell other guys that he had gotten a knife kill on ISIS was probably the ultimate. It would live on as lore at Coronado. It would forever cement his reputation. It was better than Snead’s Silver Star.
That, at least, is how many guys later tried to make sense of it. And it still didn’t make sense.
Even though the platoon knew the larger meaning of a knife kill, they had no idea how much Eddie wanted one. He appeared to have been hoping and planning to kill someone with a knife long before the captive arrived in the yard. In the months leading up to the deployment, Eddie texted an old SEAL friend named Andrew Arrabito. Eddie had served with Bito in Afghanistan when he was with the Good Old Boys. Bito was a crazy dude, Eddie told a few SEALs in Alpha. In Afghanistan, far from any of the Navy’s watchful eyes, Eddie said, Bito had gone way off the reservation. He started wearing a ratty Mohawk and covering half his face in black war paint like a Native American warrior. He’d ride horses through villages wearing only a tribal loincloth. It was psychological warfare. The idea was to strike terror into the locals. Eddie would often tell the guys in Alpha that he and Bito had gone out and done some pretty crazy stuff in Afghanistan, but he wouldn’t elaborate. Bito was one of the guys who called Eddie by the nickname “Blade.” In Afghanistan he wore a big pirate flag patch on his body armor. In recent years Bito had started a boutique knife company called Half Face Blades. Bito’s knives were all engraved with his company’s logo: half of a scowling, Mohawked warrior’s face that looked a lot like the way Bito had dressed in Afghanistan. Eddie wanted to make sure he had one of those special blades for Iraq. A few months before deploying he texted Bito to order one and asked him to put the Good Old Boys logo on it. He also wanted a custom hatchet, similar to the ones some Team 6 guys carried. The order wasn’t done by the time Eddie shipped out, so he insisted that Bito ship the blades to Iraq. “I’ll try and dig that knife or hatchet on someone’s skull!” Eddie texted him.
Bito replied with one word: “Please.”
Eddie waited weeks, but the package hadn’t come. He followed up with Bito multiple times. Finally, just a few days before the prisoner came in, Bito said it was in the mail. Eddie texted, “Can’t wait to get it. Def a good chance to use it here.”
The knife hadn’t arrived when Eddie came face-to-face with the enemy fighter. He only had the custom blade he’d been carrying on his belt for years.
Miller walked out of the compound and into the sun of the yard. The mortar tubes were packed in the truck. The sniper rifles were broken down and put away. The midday heat rippled off the gravel yard. Across the bare farm fields the clutter of houses that had once been a village stronghold smoldered in silence. The Iraqi soldiers who had swarmed in when the captive arrived were almost all gone. The only thing still left from the morning was the dead kid himself, his thin body splayed out in the noon heat like a starfish on the beach. Someone had covered him with a scratchy green army blanket.
The platoon was quiet. They loitered around trying to pretend nothing had happened. Only a few guys had witnessed the stabbing, but the vibe quickly spread that something shady had gone down, and with a body lying in the middle of the yard, it wasn’t hard to guess what.
The mission was over. Alpha just needed clearance from the SOTF to pull out and drive home. Miller paced around. He could not wait to get out of there. Then he saw Jake Portier step out of the building where he had set up the command post. The officer started gathering the guys together. Miller listened, hoping Portier was going to finally do something. For months the lieutenant had gone along with whatever Eddie wanted. Now that the shit had really hit the fan, it was the officer’s job to show leadership. The death of the captive could not just be treated as nothing. Even if the guys were trying to skulk around and ignore it, the commander had to say something, Miller knew. It was too significant. He had to make some kind of statement.
Portier told the guys to gather around. Miller went over to listen. The lieutenant shared his plan of action. The dead enemy was the responsibility of many people. The sig-int Marine, the JTAC, the medics, and Eddie had all played a part. Given what had happened…they were going to take a group photo with the body.
“Come on guys, bring it in, bring it in,” Miller heard the lieutenant tell the platoon. He turned away in disgust.
Dylan Dille was sitting in the front of his armored gun truck staring at nothing, feeling as though he was being sucked through a hole that stretched all the way back to when he first met Eddie. For a long time he had dismissed Eddie as all talk. Over and over again he had seen Eddie on the sniper rifle, plugging away at nothing, yelling out “Got ’em!” He and Tolbert had traded smiles as they listened to Eddie brag at the end of the day about how many bodies he’d dropped. Then there were all those stories from other deployments about killing a guy with a toaster and shooting a little girl that seemed obviously false. Once, while telling the story about how he got the nickname “Blade,” Eddie told some of the guys he had stabbed some Marines in a bar fight and ditched the knife because he was sure he had killed one of them. Dille hadn’t believed that one either. Now he was forced to consider that in every case Eddie might have been telling the truth.
Portier came around the open door of the truck and jolted him out of his thoughts.
“Come on, we’re taking a picture,” the lieutenant said. He was rounding up members and bringing them into the yard. Dille shook his head.
“Come on, get in the picture,” Portier cajoled, as if trying to convince a shy co-worker to get in a picture at an office birthday party.
“I’m not getting in any fucking picture!” Dille shot back.
“Whoa, okay,” Portier said, putting up his hands as if he didn’t see what the big deal was.
Tolbert heard the lieutenant gathering people and quietly disappeared. He still wasn’t sure what had happened, but knew he wanted no part in it. It was almost noon. Even if the kid had died on the battlefield and Eddie hadn’t helped, there was no reason to take a picture with a corpse. They were SEALs, not trophy hunters.
Portier ushered other guys toward the body, saying, “Come on guys, bring it in, bring it in.”
Eddie got down on one knee right behind the kid for a solo shot, threw off the blanket, and lifted the kid’s head by the hair with his right hand, like he was holding the antlers of a prize buck. In his left hand he gripped his custom-made hunting knife. He looked straight into the camera, confident but not smiling, in a classic hunter’s pose.
Then someone dragged the body a few feet to the south, perhaps to set up a better photo, away from all the medical trash and the pool of blood. Portier ushered the platoon in and arranged them in two rows, one standing, one kneeling, like a portrait of a high school soccer team, with Eddie as team captain at the center. In place of the ball was a teenage corpse. On either side of Eddie knelt two of the SEALs who also worked on the body, T. C. Byrne and Ivan Villanueva, each with an M-4 assault rifle resting on his knee. Byrne was ambivalent about the photo, but was determined not to piss off Eddie so that he could continue to go out on missions. Villanueva was compliant as usual. He was too junior to know what was normal and what wasn’t.
Portier pulled in other guys to fill out the second row: the JTACs, Ryan Rynkowski and Joe Arrington, the junior officer Tom MacNeil, and Gio Kirylo.
Portier saw Miller off to the side with his arms folded and told him to get in the photo. Miller pressed his lips together in silent anger. He didn’t want any part of Eddie’s bullshit but didn’t feel like he had a choice. At this point he had witnessed a murder and until he figured out what to do about it, he had to play it cool. He stepped in without a word and purposely moved to the back, next to one of the EOD techs, St. John Mondragon-Knapp. Portier noticed Corey Scott off by the corner of a truck and called the medic over. Scott was quiet as an undertaker. He had not told anyone yet that he had watched Eddie push his knife into the kid’s neck or that he stayed with the kid until he died. He got in the photo but stood off to the side, almost out of the frame, hands in his pockets. When the lieutenant snapped the photo, Scott’s face appeared to be shrouded in shame.
Portier wasn’t done. He had mentioned several times in the previous weeks to guys in the platoon that Eddie was due to reenlist and wanted to make it special. This was the perfect opportunity. All enlisted troops in the military had to reenlist every few years to continue their career. It was a simple process of filling out some paperwork and swearing a quick oath. It could be done in five minutes in an office, and usually was. But the simple act of recommitting to defend and uphold the laws of the nation had increasingly taken on a ceremonial aura. And like other simple ceremonies, the advent of social media had turned it into a spectacle. Some sailors enlisted standing just above the water on the massive anchor of an aircraft carrier. Fighter pilots took the oath while in the cockpit. Divers did it underwater. It was like proposing to Uncle Sam. People wanted to show not only that they were committed but also that they loved what they did. Eddie had a tradition of reenlisting in combat to symbolize the essence of his profession. With the Good Old Boys he had enlisted right next to his sniper rifle in Afghanistan. This time he was taking the oath in front of the dead ISIS fighter.
Portier took out a small black pocket Bible and paper where he had scrawled the enlistment oath. A SEAL held up an American flag behind them. The body was at their feet. Eddie faced the lieutenant, raised his right hand, and began reciting the oath: “I, Edward Gallagher, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God.”
The pool of blood spilled from the captive was drying in the hot sun in the yard. Flies buzzed around. Miller watched from the periphery, disgusted but unable to look away. The words of the oath hit him like a grenade. What had happened was not just bad tactics, or a crime, he realized, but an assault against everything he believed the SEALs stood for. How could Eddie swear to uphold the rule of law right after violating it in cold blood? He was not only taking a life, he was strangling the very values of the SEALs. It was an insult to the reason Miller had joined the Navy. The SEALs were supposed to be the good guys—karma in physical form working to wipe out the evil in the world, and here was Eddie, their pirate leader, acting as savage as any ISIS fighter. Miller thought to himself, This is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever heard in my life.
He looked over and noticed the Air Force JTAC, Ryan Rynkowski, with a similar expression. “You okay with this?” Miller said. The JTAC shook his head. “This is fucking stupid,” he replied.
The ceremony took only about a minute. Afterward, a few guys congratulated Eddie. Others just drifted away. For a long time after, it was quiet. The assault on ISIS had pushed east past the village and was now miles away. But the SOTF had ordered Alpha to stay in place until they were relieved by a Marine special operations platoon. So they sat there for hours. A thick, awkward silence settled in—the kind that saturates a dysfunctional household during the pauses in the yelling. Some guys avoided each other. Others pretended nothing was wrong. They organized gear. They waited in their trucks. They ate MREs out of brown foil pouches. They joked around. Dille flew a small quadcopter drone out over the village to assess the battle damage. Miller asked if Dille would teach him to fly, and for a while they practiced with the drone around the compound.
Then Eddie wanted a turn with the drone. He took over the controls. Byrne’s helmet cam recorded as the chief circled the drone around the yard and zeroed in on the dead kid. He buzzed the corpse over and over again, zooming inches over the body. Gio Kirylo laughed and joked about the corpse as Eddie flew. Eddie said nothing. A lone Iraqi soldier stood in the yard, no more than ten feet from the body, with his hands on his hips. He looked at the drone, then looked back at Eddie in disgust. He picked up a dirty red quilt lying in the yard. As the drone buzzed around his head, he walked over and covered the body.
It was late afternoon when the platoon finally got back to their house. They parked the trucks and started restocking gear and ammunition as usual, but it was obvious something was wrong. One of the medics from Golf platoon came up to help T. C. Byrne unload the medical gear. The two had spent a lot of nights together in the aid station treating wounded Iraqi soldiers and had grown tight. The Golf medic immediately noticed that his friend looked like he’d eaten something bad and asked what was wrong.
“Eddie screwed us today, man,” Byrne told him. “He screwed us big-time.” Byrne looked down at the ground.
“What happened?” the medic asked.
“You promise you won’t tell?” Byrne said. He led the medic to an out-of-the-way corner and laid out everything he knew. Eddie had done something to kill a prisoner. Byrne wasn’t sure what. There might even be video of the murder, he said. Guys in the platoon took photos and videos with the body. The Iraqis had taken a bunch of photos and videos, too. It was only a matter of time before it all got out.
The Golf medic went white. The line between right and wrong could sometimes get fuzzy in Mosul, but killing a POW was way, way over it. And the photos were bound to find their way into the wrong hands. He was probably going to see it all on CNN. When the brass saw the footage, they’d go nuclear. Forget Alpha—everyone was toast. “Man, if people find out, you guys are done, we’re all done,” he said. “You just screwed the SEAL Teams.”
Byrne nodded. “I know, man.”
Josh Vriens noticed everyone was unusually quiet. The big sniper cornered Ivan Villanueva and made him tell him what was going on. Eddie’s gopher told Vriens what he had seen: A teenage ISIS fighter came in as a captive, and Eddie had jacked him up with his knife.
Vriens liked Eddie, but it didn’t temper his reaction.
“That’s so fucking stupid,” Vriens huffed. “If a guy is caught, he’s caught. Go find another one on the battlefield and kill him.” Vriens didn’t always trust Villanueva, whom he saw as young and prone to storytelling. He went to find some of the senior SEALs.
Miller walked into the house where Alpha lived and went to the bedroom he shared with other senior members of his squad. He was still too overwhelmed to put words to how he felt personally, and anyway, it didn’t matter. He knew he had to do something about the murder, but first he had to limit the damage by addressing the platoon. He had to put his foot down. He didn’t want any guys thinking it was open season on war crimes. He was pulling off his body armor and wondering what to say when Dille and Tolbert came in. Their mood was dark.
“It actually happened, I can’t believe it, the torture scenario actually happened,” Tolbert said, as he pulled off his own kit and hung it on a nail.
“Yeah, except whenever we talked about it, no one actually said they’d do it,” Dille said. He looked at Miller. “Any idea what Eddie actually did?”
Just then Corey Scott walked in. The medic looked tired and shaken. He told them he had watched Eddie stab the kid. He was right there. They were working on the guy. The chief didn’t say anything. There was no heads-up, no explanation. Just fucking stabbed him. The kid had been too sedated to move. He wasn’t a threat, Eddie just did it to get wet. Scott was clearly pissed. He had a young kid at home. He was worried he’d get tangled up in what Eddie had done. I don’t want to go to jail for the rest of my life for that guy, he told the other guys.
The room was silent. No one knew how to respond.
It was only one murder in a city where murders were happening every hour of every day, in numbers and at levels of brutality that easily eclipsed the stabbing of a single sedated enemy prisoner. But for the platoon, the kid’s death was an earthquake for two reasons. The first was obvious: It was a crime. SEALs vow to defend and protect the Constitution and uphold the rule of law, and under the rules of engagement set out by the United States military, killing an enemy on the battlefield was a service to the nation, but killing a captive was first-degree murder. The two sometimes might only be separated by minutes, but they were different. There is no eye-for-an-eye. Once a fighter became a captive, SEALs had to treat him with care and respect. Sure, ISIS didn’t play by the same rules, but that was exactly the point. The SEALs and ISIS were different because one had laws and one didn’t. Take away the laws and SEALs weren’t much more than a better-armed version of ISIS.
The second reason that the kid’s death shook the whole platoon was that everyone was now on the hook. As soon as Eddie killed that scrawny little dirtbag, he had forced a choice on all of them. Navy regulations required them to report him. Now they had to decide whether to obey the regulations or not. Would they be loyal to the platoon or to the rule of law? It was one or the other. And neither was a good option.
Doing something meant ratting on another SEAL. Not everyone in Alpha saw stabbing a wounded fighter who probably would have killed them and was going to die anyway as a huge moral outrage. In fact, on the list of tragedies they saw daily in Mosul, it ranked pretty low. But either way they were supposed to report it, which not only violated the frogman’s unwritten code of loyalty but threatened to derail the entire deployment. If they reported Eddie, the whole platoon would likely get benched in Kurdistan while the authorities investigated. No one wanted that. The work was too important and a murder investigation would cloud the rest of their careers. There was a good chance it wouldn’t just be Eddie who was fired. Portier would probably get fired. So might anyone who had been in the photos. Ruining SEAL careers for the sake of an ISIS fighter was hard to swallow.
The easier, more obvious choice was to do nothing. But that was fraught, too. Even if word about the dead kid never got out, which was unlikely given all the photos and videos, doing nothing was a choice that would be with guys for the rest of their lives. Everyone who did nothing would have to live with being Eddie’s accomplice. Year in and year out the guys would grow older, make rank, and raise their children knowing they were complicit in a murder, knowing they had lied to cover up for a cold-blooded pirate. It also meant for the rest of their lives, Eddie would have something on them.
That night Miller called the whole platoon together in the cramped family living room they had converted into their meeting room. He wasn’t thinking at all yet about a year or ten years, or the cost of staying silent. He was thinking about something more immediate: If Eddie had murdered once, he would probably do it again, and Miller needed to keep that from happening. He also needed to keep the practice from spreading to the platoon. So he had to debrief the guys pronto, because Eddie was away at his nightly debrief with the SOTF, and Miller had a small window when he could tell everyone the plan. Once that was squared away, he could think about what to do next.
The guys filed in and filled the room’s battered couches. Others stood along the wall. Only Squad 1 had been out that day. Squad 2 had been on a rest day, and most still had no clue what had happened. Miller got up in front of them, still in his dirty uniform. He had no idea how guys would respond to the news. There was a good chance some would be totally cool with Eddie killing an ISIS captive. He half-expected some to start clapping. For all he knew, guys like Byrne and Villanueva had helped. But he didn’t have time to worry about it. He expected Eddie back any minute. He was going to brief them on the murder as if he was briefing them on a mission. Short, no nonsense.
“So, Eddie killed a prisoner today,” he said in his sternest, most “Sheriff” voice. There was no clapping. Only silence. “No matter how you feel about it morally, this isn’t who we are, and we are not going to do this. It doesn’t do anything for us tactically, it doesn’t do anything to support the mission. It puts all of us at risk. We’re not going to let it happen again.”
He looked around for reactions. No one was smiling. No one was giving him a dirty look. Dille and Tolbert locked eyes with him and nodded. They had his back. As lead petty officer it was Miller’s job to lay out the plan of action. He cleared his throat. “From now on, we need to have a perimeter around Eddie,” he said. “And if the Iraqis bring in another prisoner, we need to intercept it. We can’t let him do something like this again.”
Dille was leaning against the wall. Miller seemed to have said his piece, so the sniper stepped forward. He said he knew some of the younger guys had taken individual trophy shots. “You guys think you’re so badass taking these pictures. You look like a bunch of fucking amateurs. You want to be a cool guy? Then maybe act like you’ve been here before.”
The platoon started to mutter in agreement. What Eddie did was stupid, one said. Selfish, said another. They talked about how it could fuck everything they were doing and agreed to make sure it didn’t happen again. Miller decided not to bring up whether they should report Eddie. He was afraid if he did he might lose the consensus he needed, but at that moment he breathed a sigh of relief; despite all Eddie was doing, Alpha was still united.
Just then, Eddie walked in. The room went silent. Thinking quickly, Miller pretended to be wrapping up a standard after-action briefing for the morning. He reminded the guys to check the fuel and oil in the trucks. Everyone tried to file out in a hurry. Eddie stopped Corey Scott by the door. “Hey, what were you guys talking about?” he asked.
The medic paused. He wanted to avoid Eddie, but he was also pissed about what he had done. “Guys aren’t okay with what happened today,” he said.
Eddie’s brow tightened. “Who’s not okay with it?”
A lot of the guys in the platoon were afraid of Eddie. He was a chief with hundreds of connections in the Teams. He had a huge influence over their futures. Scott wasn’t one of them. He had been diagnosed with kidney damage from a bacteria he had picked up in Afghanistan, and he knew he was getting medically discharged from the Navy after this deployment. In terms of his career, no one could hurt him.
“I’m not going to dime anyone out. As a platoon we’re not okay with it,” Scott said.
Eddie gave a sideways glance, almost an eye roll—a look that said he thought the guys in Alpha, instead of being warriors, were acting like a bunch of politically correct turds. He shrugged. As he walked off, he said to Scott, “Next time I’ll do it when you’re not around.”
Josh Vriens walked into Alpha’s tactical operations center after the meeting. The TOC was a room no bigger than a home office, packed with all the platoon’s computers and communications equipment. It also held a red civilian laptop where everyone in the platoon dumped their photos and helmet cam footage at the end of the day into a communal folder, which they were using to compile footage of their most badass missions and their funniest downtime antics for an end-of-deployment platoon video.
Vriens was still weirded out over what Eddie had done. Fuck ISIS, he thought, he didn’t care if the fighter died. But Miller was right, Eddie’s actions would screw all of them. It was amateur, and for an aggressive guy like Vriens, who wanted to kill as many enemies as possible, it threatened to derail plans. As he walked into the TOC, one of the younger SEALs from Squad 2 had the laptop open and was looking at pictures from the day. Vriens stopped when he saw the screen. A skinny Iraqi kid in a black tank top was splayed out on the ground, covered in dust. His head was being held up by Iraqi soldiers. It was worse than Vriens thought: Someone had actually taken photos of this stuff. Eddie and Portier were in the TOC going over plans for the next day. Eddie looked over as Vriens walked in and saw him staring at the screen. Eddie knew Vriens liked him. Their wives were good friends, and Eddie said he saw the young sniper as a good dude with the proper attitude toward combat, so he didn’t try to hide what he had done.
“Yeah, that’s the dude I stabbed,” Eddie told him. The kid was sedated, but could still feel everything, Eddie said. After stabbing him the first time, he said, “I lifted his head, I looked into his eyes, and stabbed him again.”
Portier was sitting right next to Eddie. “That was freakin’ sick,” Vriens heard the lieutenant say. “I don’t know why guys are pissed, that should be in the platoon video.”
Vriens left with a sinking feeling. Eddie had clearly gone off the rails. And the lieutenant was acting like a fanboy. He didn’t know what to do. For now, like Miller, he decided to go on as if nothing was wrong.
Later that night, when everyone was turning in, Miller was sitting on his bed in the room he shared with the snipers when Eddie walked in and sat down across from him. The chief had Copenhagen packed in his lip and a plastic cup in his hand for spitting. “Hey, what’s going on?” Eddie said casually.
Eddie didn’t usually hang out and make small talk in Miller’s room. Miller knew what the visit was about. Eddie must have realized he had a problem on his hands and was probing to see how big it was. Miller could feel his anger vibrate in every muscle of his body. For months he had maintained an aura of polite professionalism with Eddie and tried to support him despite growing frustration. He had picked up the slack for the chief with no complaints. He was determined to maintain that respect. But he wasn’t going to let this slide. Miller looked at Eddie and told him some guys were pissed about the prisoner.
“Who?” Eddie asked. He looked genuinely surprised and concerned.
Miller wasn’t buying it. He had seen firsthand that Eddie was a master manipulator. Eddie could roar and threaten like a lion. But if he thought the frontal assault wouldn’t work, he dropped any tone of menace and became serious and concerned, or playful and agreeable. Sometimes he reacted like a loving father listening to his child cry about a scraped knee. Sometimes he reacted like an annoyed big brother tired of hearing his kid brother whine. He could use this judo to throw guys off-balance, exploiting their insecurities and emotions. Younger SEALs were left to wonder if they were being weak or naïve or even cowardly. It made them question if they were the problem, not Eddie.
Eddie looked at Miller with an expression of concern, as if perplexed why the young SEALs were disturbed by the death of an enemy. “Who’s not good with it?” he asked again.
Shit, Miller thought, Eddie’s doing that thing. He could feel Eddie coaxing him toward naming guys he knew Eddie would then destroy. He didn’t want to create a split with Eddie, but he didn’t want to throw anyone else on the grenade.
“I’m not good with it,” he said.
Eddie likely realized he had a problem. The Sheriff had the support of the men. It would be hard to marginalize or undercut him. The best way forward would be to keep Miller on his side. Eddie smiled. He looked away slightly and sighed, as if to say, “Give me a break.”
Miller didn’t fold. Killing the captive had put the mission and everyone in the platoon in jeopardy, he told Eddie. It was wrong, and Eddie couldn’t do shit like that again.
Eddie nodded thoughtfully. He spit in his cup. You’re right, he said. But relax, it was ISIS. They would do a lot worse to one of us. If anyone came to ask about what happened, he’d say he was working on the guy and he just died.
He spit in his cup again and got up to leave. For some reason, he turned and said, “And I’m going to get another one.”
“Eddie!” Miller said, shocked.
Eddie smiled and hit Miller on the shoulder, then said, “Quit your worryin’.”
Eddie made little effort to hide the killing. Besides Miller and Scott, he also talked to Dille and Tolbert. He tried to explain to them that killing the ISIS fighter was no big deal. He had done similar things before on other deployments to people who weren’t even enemy fighters. Still, he appeared to know the guys were pissed, so he switched his approach and apologized. I thought you’d be cool with it, he said. He told them next time he would be more careful.
Eventually the chief walked down the hall to the room he shared with the platoon lieutenants.
“How’d it go?” Portier asked when Eddie walked in. He was sitting on his bed. MacNeil was on his own bed a few feet away.
“It was okay, they were upset with what happened today,” Eddie said.
Talk went back and forth between Eddie and Portier about how the victim was just an ISIS fighter. Just as in Vietnam, the chief appeared convinced that if ISIS was going to fight dirty, he’d have to fight just as dirty.
“Imagine what they would have done if they had one of us,” Portier said.
Eddie agreed. “Exactly.”