Josh Vriens ducked and crawled into a dark rat hole that had been pecked in a concrete wall by ISIS fighters. He was following a line of other SEALs from Squad 2 as they squeezed one by one through the passage. Their body armor bulged with extra ammunition and their rifles hung at their chests as they shoved backpacks full of sniper gear, then passed the long tube of a Javelin, then boxes of ammunition and missiles, then medical gear, then water, then more ammunition. They emerged on the other side in a sunny courtyard, stood up, walked a few paces, and crouched down to crawl through another hole.
It was May 25, 2017—nearly a month after the murder. That morning, Eddie had announced to the squad that he had a new plan. It was only later that members of Alpha started to suspect that the new plan was at least as twisted as what had happened with the captive. Maybe more so.
The SEALs had driven deep into the city. Through the truck window Vriens watched as they passed the shot-up compound on the edge of the city where Eddie had stabbed the kid, then passed shattered blocks of collapsed houses and burned cars. The noose was tightening. May had brought some of the hardest fighting in the war. Coalition jets pounded the city with hundreds of air strikes. Huge swaths of Mosul were cleared of ISIS but were often so damaged in the process that nothing was left. As the squad motored through the shattered blocks, they passed a steady stream of refugees flowing out: mothers carrying children, old people being pushed in wheelbarrows, gaunt-eyed men who had spent years as captives. The platoon finally parked in a dense urban neighborhood near the heart of Mosul.
Now Vriens and the rest of Squad 2 were making their way through the bowels of a city block to the site of Eddie’s new plan. ISIS had tunneled through a half dozen town houses, knocking rat holes through rooms and courtyards to make a passage hidden from outside eyes. The enemy had been driven out of the block and fallen back into the next neighborhood, but Eddie had found their tunnel network. It led to a pink stucco house that had exactly what the chief was looking for: a high roof that stuck up above most of the neighborhood with a low wall surrounding the roof as cover. The top floor offered a sweeping view toward old Mosul that would give them dozens of angles to shoot into enemy territory. And it wasn’t just closer than the one kilometer they were supposed to stay behind the front line, it was right on top of it. The house was a perfect hunting ground. Eddie told the SEALs to expect great things. Before they ducked into the rat-hole network, he told everyone to turn off their trackers. No one could know they were getting so close.
Vriens ducked down and squeezed through one of the holes, hunched under a bulging sniper backpack, and emerged into a room. Crawling through houses was in some ways spookier than facing enemy fire. ISIS had been in those tunnels just days before, and no one knew what kinds of traps they had left behind. But the prospect of getting right up on the enemy made it worth it to Vriens. All the action the platoon had seen was still not enough for him.
Vriens was following EOD tech St. John Mondragon-Knapp, whom everyone called “Dragon.” He was a big, muscled man with a bristly walrus mustache and a score on the military aptitude tests near the top of the charts. At thirty-three, he was older than most of the men in the platoon but was on his first combat deployment. He had a bohemian twist and had to get a waiver when he joined the Navy for past marijuana use. In his free time he designed tattoos in a notebook and painted decorations on the wings of the Puma. His job as an EOD was to clear hidden explosives. He led the squad through each hole with his eyes scanning for wires or pressure plates and anything that seemed out of place—especially items that a SEAL might be tempted to move. The squad filed past a wheelbarrow propped against a gate that had a grenade fastened to it, primed to blow if anyone tried to go through. He led them past an AK-47 magazine laid out on a table, also attached to explosives, poised to blow if anyone picked it up. They pushed forward, watching every step and handhold, and ducked into another rat hole.
A month after the stabbing, some of the men in Alpha were resigned to live with what Eddie had done. Some were scared of him. Others were more scared of the Navy’s response. But Craig Miller was determined to get Eddie relieved as chief. He had gone looking for Portier within twenty-four hours of the murder and found him at a computer in the TOC. He knew Portier already knew about the murder. It hadn’t taken long for everybody in the platoon to learn what had happened. Eddie seemed proud of it. Portier seemed to have no problem, either. It was not that they went on as if nothing had happened. They went on as if something had happened—something awesome. Eddie went around carrying the murder weapon on his belt. About a week after the murder, a package arrived from Bito. Eddie’s new knife and combat hatchet had finally come. Eddie showed off his new blades to the platoon like an enthusiastic kid. He texted thanks to Bito, saying the knife and hatchet were both “sick!” Eddie signed off by saying about one of Bito’s knives, “I already used it, I’ll send you a pic later.”
Even if Portier already knew, it was Miller’s job as the lead petty officer to report any concerns of the men to the chain of command, and he was going to make sure he did his job right. True, he had already told Portier about the killing minutes after it happened, but things were so confusing then, so chaotic, so emotional, that he wasn’t sure he had made it clear. It was critical that the officer in charge had no doubt that the chief had murdered a prisoner of war.
Along with Miller’s collection of old things—his battered Jeep, his windup Rolex Sub, his fruit trees and honeybees—he also maintained a classic sense of morality. The Sheriff didn’t have any particular religious beliefs. He didn’t believe in heaven or hell. He had read the Greek Stoics and believed the rewards of virtue were immediate and real. If the world was going to be a better place, it wouldn’t be because of some divine being, but because of the daily effort of individuals. In real ways, the future of humanity was built by the small actions of millions of everyday folks, and it could be torn down the same way.
Part of the reason he became a SEAL was to try to be that force of good. But he knew that doing the right thing sometimes came with a cost. Early on in BUD/S, Miller was in a line of students on the beach, trembling as they struggled to hold themselves up in a push-up position for minutes on end. The instructors were walking up and down the sand, harassing the students. They stopped a few SEALs down from Miller, at a young officer who had been chosen as the student officer in charge of the entire BUD/S class. You might as well quit now, they told the officer. It’s only going to get worse. You have no business here. You’re a disgrace. You’re a terrible leader. And worse, your men don’t respect you. Look at your men, not one of them respects you.
Miller knew his officer was a decent guy who was trying his hardest.
“I respect you!” Miller shouted. He was staring down at the sand, his arms burning. It was his Spartacus moment. He did it without thinking. In the moments after, he half-hoped that others in the boat crew would shout that they respected the officer, too. But there was only silence.
“Who said that?” the chief in charge said. He was leaning against the hood of a pickup parked on the beach, dark sunglasses on. He marched over, pulled Miller to his feet, and pushed him back against the truck hard enough that he banged his head on the door. If Miller thought the officer was such a good leader, the chief said, then he could follow that loser. While the other students watched, the chief had Miller and the young officer do flutter kicks, sit-ups, and bear crawls in the sand until they collapsed. A few days later, the officer rang the bell, and for the rest of BUD/S, Miller was marked. Every day he got hammered. The instructors were twice as hard on him. There were points where he was in so much pain he seriously thought he might die. Eventually, it was over and he had a Trident, but he had learned a painful lesson: If you want to stick up for what you believe in, don’t be surprised if you end up all alone, and expect to pay.
In the TOC, Miller laid it all out to Portier. He had seen Eddie stab the prisoner. So had Corey Scott. Maybe some other guys, too. The lieutenant needed to do something. Miller was pretty sure Portier was in Eddie’s camp. Anything Miller said might get back to the chief. So he skipped the talk about setting up a perimeter to keep Eddie from getting other prisoners. Instead he framed his concerns in terms of the whole platoon. Eddie was not doing his job as chief. His actions were selfish and had endangered the mission. Portier needed to do something now before Eddie got the whole platoon pulled from Iraq. He was hoping the SEALs could just quietly pull Eddie out. The platoon could keep working. Eddie would be out of their way.
To Miller’s surprise, Portier didn’t argue. He listened and nodded. He seemed to take everything on board. Miller was right, the lieutenant said. He told Miller he knew he had to do something. He said he would handle it.
It’s in the officers’ realm now, Miller thought as he left. Portier would talk to the officer in charge of the troop, Lieutenant Commander Robert Breisch, who would probably report it to the commander in charge of Team 7. They’d know what to do. Miller could get back to his job of running the platoon. The fix was in the works; he would just have to sit tight. He walked out of the meeting feeling about fifty times lighter.
Then nothing happened. Over the next few weeks, Miller kept looking for signs Eddie was going to get removed, but the rhythms of Mosul continued unchanged. The SEALs went out almost every day at dawn with the ERD soldiers. Eddie told the guys to turn off their trackers and push up to the front lines. The chief spent nearly all of his time on the sniper rifle firing at shadows. The officer in charge seemed to do nothing to rein him in. The one thing Eddie and Portier did to address the stabbing was to order everyone to delete any photos or videos from that day. If Portier was working on a fix, he was being extremely stealthy about it.
SEALs started to notice Eddie going on missions with his new hatchet on his belt. Eddie had promised he would bury the hatchet in someone’s skull. But his first experience with it hadn’t exactly been the type of stuff he could brag to Bito about. He was trying to pull it out of its sheath to show other SEALS, when it slipped and the pointed end jabbed him in the belly, leaving a bloody gash. Eddie often talked about the benefits of having a Purple Heart. The ribbon given for combat wounds not only gave a SEAL cred in the Teams, it also came with lifetime financial benefits. With the cut on his abdomen, Eddie went to the platoon medic, T. C. Byrne, and asked for him to fill out the paperwork for a Purple Heart. It wasn’t the first time Eddie had asked for the Purple Heart paperwork based on minor injuries. Byrne refused, so Eddie went to a medic in a neighboring unit. He told the medic a story that it was a shrapnel wound that had happened while out on a mission that day. The medic checked with Byrne, then checked the records at the SOTF. Sorry, he told Eddie, can’t do it. That’s not a combat wound, your platoon didn’t even go out on a mission that day.
Portier started wearing a hatchet, too. All the guys knew the stories about ax swingers in Team 6. Most of them might have dismissed Eddie as a poseur trying to look like he was part of DEVGRU, but not after the murder. Now the hatchet posed the very real threat that the platoon would get dragged into another bloody mess.
Miller kept an eye on Eddie. He told the Iraqis to keep prisoners away from the chief. But at the end of May, Miller had to fly back to California. His wife was due with their first child, and it was standard for a SEAL to be there. As the day neared, Miller kept watching Portier, expecting Eddie would get removed before he left. It didn’t happen. Miller flew home hoping it would be only a matter of days before Eddie was pulled.
By the time Vriens was pushing his sniper bag through the rat holes, Miller had been gone for more than a week, but Eddie was still there, his tracker turned off, leading the squad to a spot right on the FLOT where he promised they were sure to find good hunting. At the end of the line of rat holes, the squad finally emerged at a spacious ground floor of what had once been a comfortable urban family home. It was the perfect spot, Eddie told them. The inhabitants had fled, leaving with only what they could carry. The family car was still parked in a small courtyard, covered with a mattress. On the third floor, double glass doors opened onto a sunny patio that looked out on a sea of rooftops. The pink walls of the patio were covered with gray pocks from the machine gun fire of an earlier battle. Shards of stucco and broken tile littered the floor.
The patio was open to all of Mosul and the ten thousand potential enemy sniper positions that it hid. Not to worry, said Eddie, the neighborhoods facing the patio had been cleared of ISIS. They were safe. An open stairway with an ornate white railing led up from the patio to the roof. From the top they could look out on the other side of the city, which had not been cleared. That was where Eddie wanted to set up.
The squad ferried loads of gear up to the patio level. Corey Scott put his medical gear in a sitting room by the glass doors and went to help bring up weapons. The other medic, T. C. Byrne, was a few blocks away where the squad had parked the trucks, waiting to respond in case of emergency.
In the sitting room Portier was setting up a small command post. He talked with Eddie about the plan for the day. Eddie wanted to spend all day on the sniper rifle as usual.
Dragon went out the patio doors and up the stairs to the roof to blow loopholes for the snipers, followed by Corey Scott. Ivan Villanueva and a sniper named Chris Shumake, who was slightly senior to Vriens, were just behind. From the stairs they could see deep into the city. A tall minaret as slender and pointed as a pencil rose above the rooftops and haze. At the top of the stairs Dragon was about to turn a corner and walk onto the roof when he suddenly jerked to one side and took a funny step. It was as if a string had suddenly yanked the leg on a marionette. Half of his body jolted forward. His shoulders jolted back. A split second later they heard the crack of a rifle. Dragon had been shot.
The territory Eddie had vouched to the squad as being friendly was, in fact, all ISIS. It had become a running joke that Eddie didn’t always know where the front line was. Suddenly it was no longer funny. Dragon had walked unknowingly up an exposed staircase in front of an entire enemy neighborhood. Now he was lying on the ground at the top of the stairs moaning. The guys who had been behind him dove down the stairs and crouched behind a wall. Enemy snipers knew where they were and probably had crosshairs dialed in on the stairs, just waiting for the rescue team. Next person to pop his head up would likely get drilled.
Scott shouted to the SEALs below that he was putting on a tourniquet and would need cover fire to get down the stairs. Villanueva got up on one knee, raised an MK-48 light machine gun, and started spraying bullets out over the waist-high wall of the patio to provide cover. Chris Shumake stepped in next to him and raised his M-4 rifle. But where was he supposed to fire? He had no idea where the shot had come from. He fixed on the tall minaret in the distance and squeezed off shots as fast as he could. Vriens came rushing out to help. Training kicked in. There was no thought about anything but getting Dragon to safety. His eyes scanned the city, and he fired at any window or roofline that looked like a possible target, squeezing off shots. Eddie stayed safely inside. By that time Dragon had tumbled down the stairs with the help of Scott and was on the ground. He half-crawled across the patio while Scott pulled him by his body armor. As they reached the patio doors, Eddie grabbed Dragon’s shirt and helped drag the bleeding EOD tech the last few feet inside.
Eddie and Scott slid Dragon across the floor to the sitting room and laid him out by a couch. Dragon sat up and muttered that he was okay. Then he collapsed. Eddie was pulling off Dragon’s body armor while Scott swept his hands down the EOD tech’s ribs and belly looking for the wound. When his hands passed by Dragon’s belt they came up red. He had been shot right where the hip meets the pelvis.
From a sniper’s perspective it was a masterful shot. The bullet hit the most vulnerable part of the SEAL that was not protected by body armor. The main veins and arteries for the leg ran right through the hip. There was potential for a big bleed. Scott didn’t see much blood yet, but it was an ugly wound because the blood could be pooling in the abdomen, which meant the medics wouldn’t necessarily see it. There was no good way to wrap a tourniquet to stanch the bleeding so high up on the hip. Worse, Scott couldn’t find an exit wound, which meant the bullet might have ricocheted through the pelvis, tearing up Dragon on the inside.
Vriens was at the door with his rifle still up. He glanced over and could see by the look on Scott’s face that the wound was a problem.
Eddie and Portier saw an even bigger problem. It wasn’t where Dragon had been shot on his body, it was where he’d been shot in the city. Dragon was hit on a roof where Alpha was not supposed to be, on a block where the SOTF had forbidden them to go, way too close to the FLOT on a morning when their trackers were not showing that they were there. Now Dragon needed urgent medical care and a helicopter evac. But if the platoon radioed for help at their location, they were busted. After months of sneaking forward, the platoon had worn down the SOTF commander’s patience. He had warned them over and over not to go closer than about 1,000 meters. He even had them start doing regular check-ins with their location. This might be the last straw.
Vriens saw Eddie grab Dragon by the shirt and speak loudly into his face. You’re going to tell everyone that you got shot back at the trucks, the chief said. You did not get shot here.
Portier paced the living room shouting at Eddie from across the room. If we call this in, they’ll see us, he yelled. They’ll know where we are. We have to get out of here.
Eddie tried to calm Portier down. No problem, he said, we’ll just sneak Dragon out through the rat holes. Eddie turned to the guys. Grab all the gear and get it back to the trucks, he said, and get ready for a long carry.
Portier keyed his mic and radioed his second in command, Tom MacNeil, who was about five blocks away, waiting with the armored trucks.
“Someone’s been shot,” he said. Then he told MacNeil not to call for a helicopter.
MacNeil immediately radioed back. Who had been shot? What was the status? What was the plan? Portier never responded.
Vriens and Gio Kirylo began shuttling the weapons through the long chain of rat holes. When they got back for another load, Scott had his head down over the patient, tuning out everything but his work. He had immobilized Dragon with ketamine and was packing the wound. Eddie was clearly growing impatient. Vriens heard him shout at the medic to just slap a chest seal bandage over the wound so they could get moving.
Eddie and Scott dragged Dragon downstairs, his feet thumping on each step as they went. Dragon was a big man, over two hundred pounds. He was not going to be an easy carry through the tunnels. MacNeil kept coming over the radio asking for a status report. He had a second medic waiting, and the JTAC was ready to spin up a helicopter. They had a landing zone selected in a vacant field nearby. They just needed the go-ahead. There was no reply.
Down on the ground floor Vriens returned from his second supply run and found Scott and Eddie with Dragon, who was laid out on the floor. Vriens looked at the first rat hole he’d have to haul Dragon through, then the second, and the third. Getting him through the maze would take time—time he wasn’t sure Dragon had. Scott agreed. They would have to risk carrying him through the streets. Scott pulled out a fabric litter that looked a bit like a hammock with handles and was getting ready to gather some SEALs to carry it out the front door. Before he had the litter spread out, Eddie lifted Dragon and threw him over his shoulder.
The SEALs watched, dumbfounded. It was something out of a bad action movie and definitely the wrong thing to do with a guy who’d been shot through the middle. Eddie jogged out the main door and into the street. He humped Dragon about two blocks to an intersection where one of the trucks had just pulled up. T. C. Byrne was waiting with his medical gear. The first thing Eddie said when he reached the trucks was not an update about the patient or anything about what had happened at the house. Instead he asked, Do they know where we were?
When Tom MacNeil heard the message on the radio telling him not to call the helicopters, he knew exactly why. Eddie had snuck out of bounds, was now afraid of getting caught, and a wounded teammate was going to pay the price.
Whatever respect MacNeil had once had for Eddie and Portier, there was not a shred left. A few weeks before Dragon was shot, MacNeil had seen something that suggested Miller’s fears about Eddie trying to kill another captive were dead-on.
It happened on a quiet morning when the platoon was not scheduled to go out. ERD got in touch with Eddie and let him know they had another captive. If he would meet the Iraqis in the city, they would hand him over. It was supposed to be a rest day, but around noon, with little in the way of a heads-up, Eddie told Squad 2 to get the trucks ready; they were going into Mosul. Josh Vriens drove Eddie. MacNeil rode in a separate truck. At the time Eddie knew Miller and some of his boy scout buddies in Squad 1 were pissed about the stabbing, but Vriens had been careful to appear to be one of Eddie’s allies. General al-Jubouri got another prisoner for me, Eddie told Vriens as they drove.
“Oh really?” Vriens said, trying to play cool. He had been excited when he heard the squad was going out. The battle for Mosul had been raging all week. ISIS was on the ropes. He was looking forward to another chance to bag some bad guys. Eddie’s announcement was a big letdown. Apparently the plan was to spend all afternoon doing whatever he planned to do with a captive. As much as part of Vriens wanted to torture ISIS fighters, he saw no point. Better to go out and actually try to win the war. He looked at Eddie and thought, What a fucking turd.
The squad parked in a rubbled block within sight of what had been one of the main medical centers in the city, the Al-Jamhuri Hospital. ISIS was holed up in the hospital’s eleven-story tower, from which it sprayed gunfire at fleeing civilians and advancing Iraqi soldiers. Repeated air strikes had failed to dislodge the gunners. As the SEALs pulled up, ERD soldiers were gathered in groups, staging to go forward toward the front line. Iraqi officers in camouflage waved the SEALs’ trucks into a secure area, and Eddie got out to talk to them. Vriens watched through the windshield, wishing he could get out and find a good sniper position.
Eddie radioed the guys with him that he wanted them to stay in the trucks. Only a few guys were coming with him. Eddie pulled out MacNeil. He also brought T. C. Byrne, the Marine Gio Kirylo, and an interpreter. For security, he added senior sniper Chris Shumake. Vriens had to stay in the truck. He watched with simmering rage as Eddie and the others walked half a block down and entered a small mosque.
An ERD Humvee pulled up. An Iraqi soldier got out and pulled out a captive dressed in a loose black shirt. The hands were bound, and the head was covered by a cloth sack. Vriens watched the soldier heft the captive over his shoulder like a sack of flour and jog past with the captive bouncing, then turn into the mosque.
Given what had happened a few weeks before, Vriens figured there was a good chance he would never see the hooded figure alive again. But he also knew there was an obstacle in Eddie’s way that might keep him from doing something truly stupid, even if Miller wasn’t around: The boss was there. The troop’s commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander Robert Breisch, was with the platoon for a week. He had brought with him a senior aide. Both men were shadowing the platoon on every mission. Both had gone with Eddie into the mosque. Eddie may be off his rocker, Vriens figured, but there was no way he would murder a captive in front of a lieutenant commander.
Inside the mosque, the SEALs gathered in a back room that had been pummeled by fighting. The only light came from holes punched in the walls by explosions. The floor was scattered with dirty blankets and dried pools of blood from the wounded. The Iraqi soldier brought the captive in and set him in a chair near the center of the room. MacNeil walked up and stood in front of him with a notebook and a bottle of water. One of the expectations of junior SEAL officers was to be able to question captives on the battlefield for immediate tactical intelligence. That’s what MacNeil had been brought in to do. Maybe the SEALs could gain some info on the hospital for the ERD assault.
Someone in the group pulled the sack off the captive’s head. There was a moment of pause. It was not a military fighter who looked up at them. It was an old man. He had white hair and a close-cropped white beard. He was gaunt, with bags under his eyes. The shape of his skull and the lines of his collarbones showed clearly through his thin skin. It appeared that he had not eaten well in a long time. He looked around without focusing, as if in the chaos he had lost his glasses. His voice was a husky rasp.
Undeterred, MacNeil started to question the prisoner. The guys from Alpha stood off to one side with their hands resting on their rifles. Breisch and his aide stood off to another. “What is your name?” MacNeil asked through the interpreter. “Where do you live? Who do you work for?” The man didn’t answer immediately. Blood was smeared on his head. His left eye was swollen. He seemed dazed. It looked like ERD had already worked him over.
Eddie paced menacingly behind MacNeil, growing impatient. Ask if he’s ISIS, Eddie barked at the interpreter. The man denied it. Eddie muttered and told the interpreter to ask again.
From his guard position, Byrne watched what was happening and looked over at Breisch, waiting for the troop commander to tell Eddie to cool off. Breisch made no move. Shit, Byrne thought, here we go again.
Shumake was standing next to him with his hand on his rifle. He glanced at Breisch, too, and wondered why he wasn’t stepping in.
The platoon didn’t know that Breisch had known Eddie longer than anyone else in Team 7. In 2009, when Breisch was a fresh junior-grade lieutenant in SEAL Team 1, he was put in charge of Eddie’s platoon in Afghanistan after the original lieutenant got his legs blown off. He had little combat experience, so Eddie and the rest of the Good Old Boys took Breisch under their wing. That was the deployment when Eddie had served with Bito and Bito had gone out nearly naked in war paint to scare the locals. It was also the deployment when Eddie claimed he shot through a little girl. Breisch had been in charge for all of it.
After that deployment, Breisch became Eddie’s direct supervisor again when both moved to BUD/S. He knew Eddie had issues there, too. Eddie got in hot water for telling the little girl story. He also got in trouble for striking a student. Rather than throw the book at him, the SEALs quietly moved Eddie. He was shuffled to other assignments in other places where his past could be concealed. Breisch knew, too, that Eddie had fought with a gate guard at Coronado and been arrested for assault. Yet after all those fuckups, Breisch stood behind Eddie. As troop commander, he had picked Eddie for the toughest assignment in Iraq, he later said, because “I had complete trust and confidence in him.”
Breisch had been an enlisted SEAL before becoming an officer, which made him what the military calls a mustang. Often mustangs had extra credibility with troops because they had walked in their shoes. But Breisch sometimes wore his mustang pedigree on his sleeve. He was always reminding the SEALs that he was one of them. His senior enlisted advisor, Brian Alazzawi, thought he acted too much like one of the guys and didn’t do his job as commander. It caused a rift. By the end of the Mosul deployment, Alazzawi and Breisch hated each other and were barely speaking.
The younger SEALs knew none of this as they watched Breisch stand by while Eddie yelled at the prisoner. The old man continued to mutter and give one-word answers. The interpreter kept asking him if he was ISIS. Eddie kept shouting. Then Eddie pulled out the hatchet Bito had sent him.
Shumake looked over at Breisch again. He saw no sign that the commander was going to step in. This was the guy Miller had been expecting to punish Eddie for the stabbing, and everything Shumake saw suggested that Eddie was about to hack the prisoner to death in front of him. Shumake felt he had no power to stop what was happening, but he sure as hell didn’t want to get mixed up in it. He was thinking about edging toward the door when Eddie looked at Shumake and Byrne and told them to get the fuck out. Breisch’s aide left, too.
That left only Eddie, MacNeil, Kirylo, and Breisch with an interpreter and a few Iraqi soldiers.
MacNeil looked at Eddie holding his hatchet—the hatchet Eddie had told Bito he would bury in someone’s skull. This was really, really bad. Breisch wasn’t doing anything to calm Eddie down. MacNeil had not reported Eddie for the stabbing outside of the platoon, believing that Portier and Breisch would take care of it. Now here was Breisch standing by, saying nothing. MacNeil decided it was up to him. He pulled Eddie aside. Look, we aren’t getting anywhere with the yelling approach, he said, so let’s try something different. Eddie grudgingly agreed.
MacNeil sat down across from the prisoner and gave him a bottle of water. The man sucked the whole bottle down. MacNeil ripped open the tough plastic package of an MRE and pulled out some food. He let the man eat. Slowly, he started asking questions again. This time, he got more answers. The man said he used to work at the hospital, which ISIS had taken over. He was an X-ray technician. He had been held by ISIS and forced to work. They gave him barely any food.
Tap.
MacNeil heard something metal knock against the concrete wall. He stopped and looked up. Eddie had walked around behind the prisoner and was leaning against the wall a few feet away. He had his hatchet out. Tap. He hit the hatchet against the wall. Tap. It was as if Eddie was saying, Time’s up, they tried MacNeil’s way, now it’s Eddie’s turn. Tap.
The interpreter, trying to defuse the situation, offered to throw his shoe at the old man—one of the ultimate signs of disrespect in Iraqi culture. Tap. Eddie looked right at MacNeil but said nothing. Breisch did not step in. Tap. MacNeil sensed that the situation was slipping out of control—Eddie might bury the hatchet in the man’s skull at any moment. MacNeil stood up and called both Breisch and Eddie into a side room. Look, there’s no point in killing this guy, he said. What’s our objective? The objective is to get information. Killing him doesn’t add anything to that. We need to tone it down and move forward. After a moment of silence, Breisch agreed. Perhaps realizing that the troop commander was no longer on board, Eddie’s demeanor changed. He put his hatchet back in his belt.
Shumake and Byrne saw an Iraqi soldier carry the old man out of the mosque a few minutes later. They were surprised to see him still alive. Eddie came out with MacNeil and Breisch a while later. Eddie climbed into the truck where Vriens was waiting.
“So what happened?” Vriens asked.
Just some old man, Eddie said, he wasn’t ISIS. He wasn’t a threat.
Vriens thought he heard a note of irritation in the chief’s voice.
After that day MacNeil was done with Eddie. He knew he could not trust him. So when he heard over the radio that someone at the pink house was shot and he should not call a helicopter, he had the SEALs with him call anyway.
T. C. Byrne pulled one of the trucks up as close as possible to Dragon, stopping on the edge of a bomb crater that cut the road in half. He saw Eddie shuffling with Dragon over his shoulder and opened the door so they could pull him inside. Once Dragon was laid out in the back of the truck, Byrne straddled him like a saddle horse and started working while Corey Scott assisted. Another SEAL at the wheel raced through Mosul, leaning on the horn. It was a ten-mile drive back to their small forward operating base. MacNeil had alerted the helicopter crew to have a medevac waiting.
Dragon looked around the truck in a daze and moaned. His eyes rolled wildly.
“Dragon, you’re all right,” Byrne said as he ripped the wrapper off a syringe. “You’re on ketamine. You’re going to be okay, buddy.” Byrne was worried, though. Dragon’s vitals were slipping. His pulse wasn’t right. Byrne suspected internal bleeding. Dragon needed a blood transfusion, but the medic had nothing to give him. Byrne had memorized everyone’s blood type and knew there were no SEALs in the truck who had the right blood. Then Byrne remembered something: He had the right blood. As the truck bounced over the rubble in the road, Byrne pulled out an IV, stuck the needle into his forearm, filled a bag, and gave it to his platoon mate.
The helicopter MacNeil called was spun up and ready when they arrived at their forward operating base. It lifted off with Dragon and Byrne and soared to a hospital at a nearby American air base.
Dragon eventually made a full recovery and remained in the Navy. The wound to the platoon was not as easy to heal. Not everyone had been broken up about Eddie stabbing an ISIS fighter. But when Dragon got shot, it was different. Byrne, who had defended Eddie for months, could not believe the chief had chosen not to call for a medevac and tried to cover his own ass instead of saving a wounded EOD tech. If loyalty was the religion of brotherhood, Eddie had committed an unforgivable sin. The other EOD soldiers were so angry they almost pulled out of Mosul, leaving Alpha on its own.
Eddie went on as if nothing had happened. When the SOTF commander asked later that day how it was possible for a guy to get shot when the platoon was supposed to be a kilometer behind the front lines, Eddie and Portier made up a cover story. It was the partner force’s fault, they said. Some idiot Iraqi soldier probably shot off his gun, not paying attention. The colonel didn’t press the issue. Eddie and Portier never had to divulge their true location. They never had to explain how Eddie had sent Dragon up the stairs in full view of the enemy. They never had to account for not calling in the helicopter. The next day the platoon went back to running missions as if nothing had happened. If Dragon hadn’t managed to dodge a bullet, Eddie and Portier had.
Eddie’s screwup on the roof wasn’t a one-off. Though he had a reputation as an elite badass warrior, it was built largely on his own stories. Beneath that SEAL veneer was a long history of disappointments and screwups that had dogged him for much of his life.
He had grown up the oldest of two boys of a West Point graduate and Army officer who was in many ways the opposite of Eddie. If there was a dangerous end of the Army, his father was at the opposite end. He was studious and fluent in Chinese. He was an understated Irish Catholic who took the boys to church every Sunday and liked to scuba dive on vacation. Eddie spent nearly all of his childhood shuttling between posts in Asia and stints at the Pentagon. Because the family moved often, Eddie became adept at fitting in. He would morph to fit each new neighborhood. He had a charm and good looks that made it easy to make friends. He liked to play soccer. But unlike his parents and his younger brother, he had a rebellious side and a knack for finding trouble.
As a kid, Eddie gravitated toward war movies and heavy metal. He struggled in school. When he was in middle school he was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia. He got put in classes for kids who had trouble learning and eventually fell in with a group of friends he later described as a “wild crowd.”
In high school he started skipping class, smoking weed, and sneaking out of the house. He was also getting into fights. Freshman year he was knocked out by a senior. A couple of years later at a baseball practice he was pitching, got into an argument with a batter, and got dropped by a bat to the side of the head. Hoping to keep him out of trouble, his parents sent him to a private Catholic boarding school in Connecticut. He was soon kicked out for fighting.
Eddie graduated from high school—but barely. He tried community college but didn’t last a semester. He got a job at a grocery store but was fired. He worked construction jobs, and at an animal shelter. He was hanging out with a bunch of directionless older guys. One night in 1999, at age nineteen, he was watching TV with them well past midnight, looked around at the sad scene, and decided he had to find something else. He drove to the first recruiting office he saw, which happened to be for the Navy, and waited the rest of the night for it to open. He enlisted that morning without telling his family.
In the Navy he also struggled. As a young medic he got into a drunken fight with the officer in charge of his platoon and punched him in the face. He was passed over for promotions. After five years in the Navy he had barely progressed in rank.
There’s a saying in the SEALs that some men become SEALs because they can do anything, and some become SEALs because they can’t do anything else. Eddie tried over and over to get into the SEALs and kept getting denied. Besides the marks on his record for assaulting an officer, his test scores weren’t good. His aptitude was only average in most of the categories tested by the military, and well below average in math. But finally he got lucky. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan grinded into their second and third years, the SEALs were expanding and unable to meet recruitment goals. Veterans faced with constant deployments were getting out. The Navy needed more men. And there was Eddie, already trained as a medic, raising his hand to go.
In the SEALs he struggled too. The Teams brought him in as a medic. He failed to make it through the SEALs combat medical training the first time, despite his years of experience. He was separated from his platoon in Afghanistan in 2009 over differences that remain unclear. As a BUD/S instructor he hit a student and was quietly reassigned. He was held back from a deployment to Iraq after trying to run over the gate guard. Through it all, Eddie always had a way of working things out. A lifetime of moving every few years had taught him how to read people and make allies. He knew how to tell what people wanted to hear. SEALs were always looking out for him. They liked him. They wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt.
But behind Eddie’s friendly front was a darker, meaner human being. He quietly trashed many of the SEALs in his so-called brotherhood, saying negative things about several, especially guys he seemed worried he didn’t measure up to. He bitched incessantly about his superiors. He was openly homophobic and talked about how transgender people should be taken out and dropped in the ocean. And he persistently made racist comments. Text messages he sent that he thought few others would see showed a simmering contempt for his fellow man that the guys in Alpha later recognized in Iraq. A few months before deployment, Eddie had texted his old platoon chief, who was now a warrant officer, to ask if he wanted to go to brunch. That day there was a demonstration in San Diego over the police killing of a mentally ill Black man.
The warrant officer joked that he couldn’t go, saying, “I’ll be busy at the riots.”
“Are you going down there?” Eddie texted. Then, perhaps in jest, he added, “Run those niggers over.”
The morning after Dragon was shot, Eddie called the guys together and made an announcement that showed how much he had learned from the miscalculation on the roof of the pink house. They were going into Mosul again, he said, and they were going right back to the same spot. Same squad, same rat holes, same stairs.
The guys were shocked but didn’t say anything. No one wanted to look like a coward. They dutifully drove into the heart of the city and humped their gear back through the tunnels, but many privately thought the chief was going nuts. Going back to the same spot was, to say the least, bad tactics. SEALs are trained to strike unexpectedly, then disappear. Once the enemy knew where a sniper hide was, there was no point in going back. And if the only stairway in and out faced an enemy sniper skilled enough to hit a guy just below the body armor, there was really no point. But to object was close to treason. Eddie was the chief. All the SEAL emphasis on creativity and freedom only applied outside the platoon. Inside the platoon, the chief was God. It was his call. Any SEAL could say they weren’t cool with it, but they’d be benched for sure and would probably have to turn in their Trident after the deployment for insubordination. They would never be a SEAL again.
Going back to the pink house made so little sense that as Vriens crawled through the rat holes again, he was forced to consider a hunch that he had repeatedly tried to dismiss: Maybe Eddie was hoping to get someone killed on the deployment as a way of building his own résumé. At a barbecue right before deployment, Eddie had told the sniper that it wouldn’t be a real deployment unless a SEAL died. Early in the deployment Vriens had nearly been hit with an RPG and Eddie almost immediately ordered him to go back to the same spot. There was no tactical reason to do it, and Vriens had immediately seen it as an order designed to put him in danger to try to bait the enemy. Now they were going back to the staircase where Dragon had just been shot. If there was a good reason, Vriens would do it in a heartbeat, but he couldn’t see any beyond Eddie wanting to get someone zapped. Vriens knew the Navy tended to throw medals at platoons with a bunch of casualties. Was that what this was all about? Did Eddie just want to tell a good story about a Purple Heart, or a knife kill, or the day he threw a SEAL over his shoulder and sprinted down the street? Did he want to be able to post photos of himself solemnly bent over a casket? As Vriens crawled through the rat holes, he shook his head and hoped he was being overly dramatic.
When the squad reached the pink house, they sprinted up the exposed staircase without incident. Eddie and the other snipers set up their rifles and spent several hours peering through loopholes, scanning the streets for fighters. Eddie, as usual, took his fair share of shots at targets no one else saw. After several hours, Eddie asked how many Carl G rockets they had with them. The guys said they thought they had about ten. Eddie had them launch the whole supply through a loophole, hitting random targets in the city. As they did, Eddie had the squad take photos of him smiling with the rocket launcher slung over his shoulder that he could share with friends back home. If ISIS didn’t know the SEALs were back at the pink house at the beginning of the day, the rockets ensured they knew by the end. It was almost certain that if they went back again they would get hit.
The next morning Eddie brought everyone together to brief them on the plan. They were going back to the pink house for a third time. A few hours later, Shumake and Byrne were ferrying gear through the rat holes and both had the same thought: “Why the fuck are we doing this?” Now both shared the growing suspicion that the chief was trying to get someone killed to get a medal. Nothing else made sense. The two sprinted up the stairs and set up on the roof with Eddie and Ivan Villanueva. They had sniper rifles out, but there were no targets. The city was dead. Then a small off-the-shelf hobby drone flew over. It circled several times and buzzed away. The men watched it go with a feeling of dread—ISIS used toy drones to scout. The SEALs had almost certainly been spotted. A minute later, machine gun fire started slapping against the walls of the house. The SEALs hit the deck as bullets thwacked the low cinder block wall around the roof and shards of cement showered down around them. They had to get out of there before ISIS hit them with mortars or rocket-propelled grenades. But the only way out was the stairs where Dragon got shot. And those were getting pelted.
The squad couldn’t call for a Hellfire strike or artillery mission for the same reason they hadn’t been able to call for a medevac for Dragon: It would reveal that they were where they weren’t supposed to be. Eddie hugged the ground, saying little. Shumake looked over at Byrne. Got any ideas? he asked. Byrne remembered that his med kit below in the sitting room had a smoke grenade for signaling helicopters. He yelled down for other SEALs in the sitting room to pop the grenade by the stairway to create a smoke screen.
Thick white smoke started to drift over the patio. Eddie looked at Byrne and shouted for Byrne and Shumake to go first while Eddie and Villanueva laid down cover fire. It was a noble gesture, Byrne thought. In seconds he was on his feet and sprinting down through the smoke. It only occurred to him halfway down that maybe Eddie let him go first to see if he’d get shot. As he ran, Eddie and Villanueva showered gunfire out over the city. As soon as Byrne and Shumake hit the patio below, they dropped behind a low wall and unloaded on the city to cover the chief. Eddie and Villanueva rushed down the stairs, leaving piles of rockets and Javelin missiles on the roof. Eddie later sent Iraqi soldiers back to fetch the gear.
There could easily have been another man down that day. Maybe two or three. The SEAL Teams naturally drew motivated go-getters who wanted to be in combat, and that was certainly true of Alpha. No one shied away from a gunfight. But there was a line between bravery and stupidity. There was no strategic objective at the pink house. They weren’t furthering any mission. They hadn’t even seen any targets. They had lost the element of surprise. They were sitting ducks. The only thing that kept sending them back was Eddie, and no one could quite figure out why.
The platoon’s two squads rotated that night. That meant a few days off for Squad 2. Squad 1 would go out next. That night Eddie walked into the room of the senior Squad 1 members and sat down on the bed. As usual he had Copenhagen in his lip and a spit cup in his hand. Dylan Dille and Dalton Tolbert were there kicking back. Eddie pulled out his smartphone and zoomed in on a map of Mosul.
“Hey, this is where we’re going tomorrow,” he said.
He made no mention of anything that had happened with Squad 2, but on the map he pointed to the pink house.
Tolbert looked at the map. Even though Eddie was trying to hide it, Tolbert knew exactly what had gone down on the roof. The boys in Squad 2 had told him everything. He figured Eddie was hoping Squad 1 had no idea so he could send Tolbert or Dille to walk up the stairs. Then, boom. He wasn’t going to play that game.
When Miller left for the birth of his child, Tolbert had taken over as lead petty officer. And while Miller had tried to be a diplomatic peacemaker who went through the proper channels, Tolbert had zero interest in that. His upbringing had taught him to call out a stupid idea when he saw one.
“That’s where Dragon got shot, dude. No way we’re going there,” he told Eddie.
It was the first time anyone in the platoon had even remotely defied the chief. It was subtle. Any outsider might have missed it. But within the platoon, it was seismic. Someone had challenged Eddie’s authority. Not even the officers had been willing to do that.
Eddie was silent. He could have blown up. He could have yelled. But he had a more effective approach: Make the other SEALs believe they’re acting like cowards. He spit in his cup, then he gave Tolbert an annoyed big brother look that said he thought the sniper was being a bitch. “Don’t worry about it, Dalton. Everything’s going to be fine,” he said.
“Well, someone has to worry about it,” Tolbert shot back.
Eddie smiled warmly and said, “Hey, if it’s too much for you to handle, that’s cool. We’ll leave you back at base.” He spit in his cup again, got up, and walked out.
The next day, for reasons Eddie never explained, he did not make the squad go back to the pink house, but Tolbert didn’t necessarily see it as a win. Eddie might just be holding his fire, waiting to do something to get back at him later. He might not send him up the pink house stairs, but there were plenty of other stairs, other windows, other rooftops. Tolbert joined the growing number of SEALs who were suspicious that Eddie might try to get them killed.
Under his cool demeanor, Eddie was furious. A few days later, Eddie texted his friend and fellow chief Stephen Snead in California. “When you were over here did you get the feeling that some of your guys were pussies and didn’t want to go out? I am starting to get that feeling now and it’s pissing me off!”