Dylan Dille scanned the medieval maze of old Mosul through the black-rimmed eye of his scope. The senior sniper was hidden about 750 meters away in a pile of rubble across the Tigris River. As he searched the alleyways and street corners, he could feel his heart beat under his body armor and his brow go tense because he knew Eddie was hunting, too, and he would have to try to get the first shot.
It was June 2017, four months into the deployment. Eddie had given up on going back to the roof of the pink house and instead had settled on a new place that the SEALs in Alpha called the Towers. The site was two buildings on the east bank of the Tigris standing side by side across the green water from old Mosul. Around the Towers stood the ruins of a carnival grounds still filled with rides and a weed-choked park where locals once spent holidays. The Towers had high ceilings and curving staircases designed to host lavish celebrations. But the war had left the park waist-high with weeds and littered with unexploded shells, and the Towers were little more than bombed-out gray concrete bones.
At the base of the Towers a modern six-lane concrete bridge had once crossed the river, but it and every other bridge across the Tigris had been destroyed. The center lay broken in two by a massive air strike, as if snapped by a mighty karate chop. The pieces had fallen into the water, leaving two jagged stumps that jutted out over the river.
The battle for Mosul was in its last desperate weeks. Block by block the Iraqi Army had pushed ISIS into one corner of the old city with its back up against the river. Alpha had set up across the river to shoot the enemy in the back. The platoon spent day after day there, harassing ISIS from the rear while the Iraqi Army attacked from the front.
Old Mosul presented the SEALs with a tangle of civilians and enemy targets. They passed and intermingled on the street. Watching through his scope, Dille tried to hunt for details that distinguished the two. He could see the faded floral print on a woman’s hijab as she stepped out of her house, too colorful to be the dress of ISIS. He spotted a man in an old bowling shirt who had been bent over the engine of his car on and off for days but had still not gotten it running. Just a local, he decided. Rarely did he see actual fighters with guns venture out. They were too smart for that. But he hunted for men who seemed out of place: the ones who crossed the street with too much purpose for a besieged city where there was nowhere to go. In his scope he could see the sweat on their faces, their darting looks. Some of them walked while gripping tightly the arm of a child, their clenched fingers around the small arm, showing that they were using a local boy as a shield. It was a confusing, complex tangle, but a sniper watching long enough could tease apart threads and find the targets.
Unfortunately, Dille quickly learned that his chief had no interest in taking the time to establish who was who. The first morning the snipers arrived at the Towers, the chief climbed up the curving stairway to the top floor of the north building and set up a tripod and a small folding chair in the middle of a room with a blown-out wall. He almost immediately started shooting one round after another. Boom. Boom. Boom. Dille scrambled to his own rifle and checked the chief’s angle to try to line up his scope so he could see what Eddie was shooting at. He spotted a sandbank along the river where a narrow alley came down to the water. About fifty people had gathered to wash in the water. Dille saw the crowd scatter amid the shooting and sprint back into the city. Dille’s angle didn’t give him a full view of ground level on the riverbank, so he wasn’t sure if Eddie had hit anyone, but about one thing he had no doubt: These people weren’t legit targets.
At the same spot a few days later, Dille saw three women making their way along a path through deep reeds. He heard Eddie start firing and saw the women turn and disappear into the reeds. Had they been wounded or killed? Dille couldn’t be sure, but he was increasingly sure his chief was shooting at anyone he saw, civilian or fighter, man or woman.
Dille realized his mission in Mosul would have to shift. He had come to the Towers to kill ISIS. Instead he was going to have to keep Eddie from killing civilians. He would do it by firing warning shots to scare people away before Eddie could spot them. The strategy came to him instinctively one morning a few days after Alpha had started operations in the Towers. Eddie had set up in a bathroom that offered a good view of the city from the north tower. Dille and Dalton Tolbert both wanted to stay as far away from Eddie as possible, so that day they set up in the south tower.
That morning Dille spotted a man coming down a road leading to the river with a boy. They were at a spot where Dille could see them for about a half block before they came into Eddie’s view. Dille focused his scope on the pair. He noticed the man wasn’t gripping the boy by the arm. Instead, it was the boy who was leading the man along, gently pulling him by the sleeve. It was a small detail that told everything: They were family, and almost certainly not enemy fighters. Dille had to do something before Eddie could get a shot. Knowing he had only seconds, he aimed a few meters in front of the pair and just a degree off to the side, hoping a bullet would hit the dirt in the road and scare them back. He squeezed the trigger. He saw a splash of dust and watched the pair scurry back the way they came. As they ran, he breathed a sigh of relief.
That night Dille told Tolbert what he had done. He was almost ashamed to admit it. He knew shooting warning shots was a quiet form of insurrection against Eddie and might even help ISIS, but he felt he had no choice. To his surprise, Tolbert smiled and said he had been doing the exact same thing. They agreed to keep doing it to try to buy time. When Craig Miller had left, he told them he had reported Eddie to Jake Portier and Portier vowed to take care of it, so a fix was in the works. Both snipers hoped they could limit the damage until Eddie was removed.
It was a high-stress operation. A warning shot had to hit close enough to scare off a target, but not so close that it accidentally killed. Snipers had to read the subtle clues to decide who deserved a warning and who didn’t. But because Eddie shared much of the same field of fire as the other snipers, they often only had seconds to spot a person, make a decision, and line up a shot before Eddie got a chance to fire.
It was the opposite of what sniper work was supposed to be. Dille and Tolbert had gotten a small taste of what the real work was like before Eddie’s constant shooting put them on a new mission. One morning, Dille was scanning the street life for targets when he spotted a man in a saffron-and-gold robe hustling down a side street amid the dusty locals. He had a long, bushy beard but no mustache and full, round cheeks that suggested he was not sharing in the besieged city’s hunger. “Check this dude out,” Dille called over to Tolbert, who was tucked behind some rubble a dozen feet away.
“Talk me on,” Tolbert said. He traced his scope along the outlines of the city as Dille guided him verbally in a hopscotch of known landmarks until he was at the right street: the green mosque, then the grassy bank, side street to the north.
“Looks like homeboy is doing a little too good,” Tolbert said.
They watched him. He hurried down the road and turned down a side alley. There he peered around furtively, then crawled through a rat hole pecked in the wall of a house. Dille swung his scope to the front of the house. It seemed normal enough. No fighters on the roof, no young men loitering outside. The two snipers waited and watched. They saw members of a family come in and out through the front door. The man in the robe was not one of them.
“Definitely something shady,” Tolbert said.
The SEALs’ rules of engagement didn’t require a target to be armed. If snipers saw someone they reasonably thought was aiding ISIS in any way, they could shoot. But both men were extremely careful, knowing every bad shot could galvanize the locals against them and build support for the enemy.
Tolbert and Dille kept their scopes trained on the house, figuring the man with the saffron robe would eventually emerge. Finally, they saw him crawl out of the hole. The snipers both instinctively slid their fingers to their triggers. No one would crawl from a rat hole like that instead of using the front door unless he was ISIS. As the man squeezed out of the rat hole, Dille centered him in his scope. So did Tolbert. Just as Tolbert was putting pressure on his trigger and exhaling to fire, Dille took the shot. Dille would later remember that shot as an example of what his work was supposed to be: Calm. Calculated. Considered. Justified. He wouldn’t get many more like it.
Eddie’s shooting forced a shift. Now the snipers had to race to keep people from getting murdered. Every day when Dille lay down behind his rifle, his heart would pound as he watched the street and searched for the next person to come around the corner, knowing he would have only a few seconds to decide whether to save or end a life. Karma was still the driving force of the platoon, but it had flipped. Instead of inflicting the cosmic payback on evildoers, Dille was now trying to protect the world from one. It was exhausting. The tension of being forced to fire at people to make them flee in terror without accidentally killing them left him covered in sweat. The pressure of spending hour after hour hunting, knowing he had lives in his hands, fried his nerves. By the end of each day he tottered down the winding stairs with his hands shaking, physically and emotionally drained. He wasn’t sure how long he could keep it up.
Eddie took the platoon back to the Towers day after day. Each morning Alpha would arrive and park the trucks behind the buildings, then ferry gear up the winding, burned-out stairs to the third floor. For the first few days, locals ventured out oblivious to the snipers, and the streets along the river teemed with targets. Eddie quickly took care of that.
The chief shot constantly. For most snipers, the work was about watching and waiting. On a busy day, good snipers might take three or four shots. Sometimes none. Not Eddie. He reliably shot ten or twenty times a day. Sometimes more. Occasionally in rapid succession. Bang. Slide the bolt to reload. Bang. Slide the bolt to reload. Bang. A box of .300 Win Mag sniper ammo came with twenty rounds. It was not unusual for him to send Ivan Villanueva back down to the truck at midday for another box.
After a few days of Eddie firing, the streets cleared like a scene in an old Western. Still, Eddie kept taking the platoon back to the Towers and at the end of the day boasting to the boys about his kills. Early in the deployment most of Alpha just rolled their eyes when Eddie bragged about kills. But after the ISIS prisoner, no one was laughing anymore. They had no doubt Eddie was inflating his numbers, but one by one, they witnessed things that convinced them that he was gunning down civilians.
Joe Arrington was in the same building as Eddie one morning, scanning north along the river with his scope when he heard a shot from Eddie’s position. He swung his scope south and stopped on the same dirt road leading down to the river where days before Dille had scared away the boy holding the man’s sleeve. Arrington spotted a man down on the ground. He was older, with gray hair. The man rocked in agony, unable to get up. Arrington was at a slightly different angle from Eddie, and a wall blocked part of his view. He could only see half of the man. But clearly to one side he could see the item the man had been carrying when the bullet dropped him. It was an empty plastic jug. The city had no running water. The man had probably been going to the river to get some.
Arrington watched the man writhe in pain for several minutes. No one was coming to help. The sniper decided to put him out of his misery. But because of the wall, he couldn’t get a clear shot. He had to watch the man’s struggle grow weaker and weaker over an agonizingly long stretch of time until finally he stopped moving. That night, Arrington told Dille and Tolbert what he had seen. He described the anguish of watching the old man suffer. The other snipers shook their heads and said they had witnessed similar shots.
Soon nearly the whole platoon was aware of the kinds of shots Eddie was taking. No one had actually seen Eddie pull the trigger and kill a civilian, but his statements to the platoon left them little doubt. Chris Shumake, the senior sniper in Squad 2, later said Eddie told him shooting unarmed people was no different from shooting ISIS fighters because “if they are helping ISIS, they are ISIS.” Ivan Villanueva said the chief told him, “If you’re leaving your house for any reason,” then you’re ISIS. Corey Scott said Eddie would “make comments that he was okay with killing women and kids.” Scott added, “You could tell he was perfectly okay with killing anybody that was moving.” He said he saw Eddie shoot an old man in the back and said Eddie justified it by saying, “The man could’ve been going to get a gun.”
One of the few things the people of Mosul had going for them was that Eddie was not a very good shot. He told his SEALs he had been trained at the Marines scout sniper course before becoming a SEAL. But, in fact, he had only been a medic at the course, not a sniper, and he never got a certificate. Records did not show he had been through formal SEAL sniper training, either, and his lack of knowledge showed. While other snipers tried to find protected hides where they could lie prone for a steady shot, Eddie often plopped down in the open on a folding camp chair, completely exposed to enemy snipers, and shot from a tall tripod that made his firing less accurate. He used an outdated scope and often didn’t adjust when he switched ammunition, which had the potential to put his shots off by several feet. The other snipers never corrected him, hoping his sloppiness would save lives.
As the deployment wore on, Eddie grew reclusive and disturbing, even while not on missions. The platoon had set up a small outdoor gym with cinder blocks and sandbags at their house, and during the hour each day when Eddie was using it, no one else was allowed. Gym time, he told them, is my time. They also suspected him of stealing. First it was going through guys’ closets scrounging for food and tobacco. Then the platoon noticed someone had taken the jar of money used to pay for energy drinks from the communal fridge. Then Miller was missing a pair of sunglasses. When he mentioned they were missing, he saw Eddie surreptitiously put them back. It was just petty theft, but in a tribal culture based on trust and respect, it was toxic. Many guys were resigned to get through the two months they had left in Iraq with as little exposure to Eddie as possible.
On deployment Dille was reading a book called On Killing by a former Army Ranger named Dave Grossman. It explored the psychological toll on warfighters of taking a life. It also talked about how psychopaths enamored of killing sometimes gravitated to military service. Dille highlighted that passage. He highlighted passages about the long-term damage to troops forced to participate in atrocities. And he highlighted a passage that hit close to home because it so accurately captured how he felt about Eddie: “Those who commit atrocity have made a Faustian bargain with evil. They have sold their conscience, their future, and their peace of mind for a brief, fleeting, self-destructive advantage.”
Sometimes when Dille and Tolbert were alone in the south tower or riding in the truck, they would talk about whether Eddie had been born a cold-blooded murderer or had become that way after years of deploying. Maybe he had done too many pumps in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maybe it was post-traumatic stress disorder or a brain injury. Maybe his humanity had been so worn down since 2001 that he just wanted to eradicate all Middle Easterners like lice. It was also possible he had just gravitated to a profession where he could not only act on his darkest impulses but get medals for it. Or maybe Eddie, who had moved constantly growing up and learned to fit in with each new crowd, was doing all this stuff just to be accepted by other pirates. In the discussions, the takeaway was always the same: It really made no difference whether Eddie was born bad or made that way. He was still killing innocent people, and they needed to do what they could to stop it, at least until the SEAL brass pulled Eddie from the platoon.
But as the weeks went by, Dille started to doubt that the leadership was going to act. Portier was as enamored of Eddie as ever. The lieutenant regularly set up in the same building as the snipers who were taking warning shots, often just steps away. One morning Portier looked up after Tolbert fired a shot and asked Tolbert if he had hit anything. Dille and Tolbert decided to level with him. They weren’t shooting to kill, they said. They were shooting to keep people away from Eddie. Portier looked confused. Tolbert rolled his eyes and told him, “Jake, come on, you gotta know Eddie is killing civilians.”
Portier seemed to stutter. He said it wasn’t his job to second-guess the snipers in the platoon. He trusted individuals to make good decisions. He had to let them do their jobs.
“But Jake, we’re telling you now, he’s killing civilians,” Dille said.
Miller had reported a crime. Now Dille was reporting a second.
Portier demurred. He repeated that he trusted Eddie. Dille and Tolbert were probably misinterpreting who he was shooting. Tolbert went back to his rifle thinking to himself, Okay, I’m gonna show the lieutenant exactly who Eddie is shooting.
Later that morning Dille and Tolbert were scanning through the neighborhood and stopped at a Y intersection that led down toward the river. Two old men were standing on a street corner talking. They wore flowing white ankle-length tunics and had long, wispy gray beards. They appeared to be doing nothing in particular, just talking like old men talk.
Oh shit, Dille thought. He knew the street corner was visible from Eddie’s hide in the north tower. If Dille didn’t act fast, Eddie would spot them. Dille had to take a warning shot, but were these guys really locals or were they combatants? He raced through a checklist of clues. No weapons. No supplies. Not doing anything to support the enemy. Not carrying—
A shot rang out. Both Dille and Tolbert heard it echo from Eddie’s position in the north tower. Through his scope Dille saw the air warp as a bullet swam through the heat waves. He saw the loose cotton of one man’s tunic ripple as a bullet hit him in the small of the back. The man stumbled forward. A spot of blood appeared on his back.
Both men ran around the corner, out of Eddie’s line of sight but still in sight of Tolbert and Dille. The blood on the white fabric spread until it was the size of a dinner plate. The man collapsed against a piece of wreckage in the street.
“Yup, Eddie just shot an eighty-year-old man,” Tolbert announced in a clear, loud voice, so the lieutenant could hear.
The man pushed himself up on his arms and tried to lurch a few steps forward, then stumbled and sprawled out on the dirt.
“Uhhh…he’s down,” Tolbert announced. Dille could hear him. He knew the lieutenant could too. “Oh…he’s trying to get up again. No…no…he’s down again. Definitely down. Yeah, he’s probably going to die now.”
After several seconds, the man struggled to his feet one more time and stumbled out of sight. The snipers never learned what happened to him, but with little medical care available, Dille guessed he was probably in for a slow, painful death.
Eddie called over the radio to report that he had taken the shot but thought he had missed. Dille and Tolbert didn’t radio back to give him the satisfaction of knowing he had hit.
Dille felt his heart sag. The shooting almost felt like it was just as much his fault as Eddie’s. He hadn’t been fast enough. He’d have to do better next time. He wrote in his journal that night that he had been on the sniper rifle and had taken a few warning shots, then concluded: “Missed getting old man from getting shot.”
That night Josh Graffam, one of Alpha’s new guys, ran into Dille in the little kitchen in their house. Graffam had been Eddie’s assistant that day in the north tower and had seen everything. Did you see the old man today? Eddie thought he missed, but he hit that guy, Graffam told Dille. He patted his lower back, right where the bullet had entered.
Dille nodded. He didn’t want to be reminded.
In the chaos of the deployment, the old man was the only shooting where the date of the killing later stood out clearly in Dille’s memory. It was June 18, Father’s Day. He remembered calling his father that evening, and when he did, the image of the old man struggling on the ground came back to him. He told his dad what he had seen, then said, “I bet the guy was someone’s father.”
Dille wished the Sheriff were back with the platoon. He began to truly hate the chief. He hated how he had become complicit in Eddie’s bullshit. He wished they could just do the job they had come to do. Every time Eddie set up his tripod in the middle of a blown-out room with no cover that was completely open to Mosul, Dille found himself hoping that Eddie would get shot.
With each passing day, Eddie seemed to become more unglued. Back at the house, he stayed away from the other SEALs and brooded in his room. Multiple times the SEALs were awakened in the tight quarters by the chief screaming in his sleep. He seemed to be going mad.
Eddie had a secret he had kept from the platoon. While he was supposed to be leading the team, he was struggling with an opioid addiction and other drug problems.
It had started years before. Eddie began taking a painkiller called tramadol to ease sore joints. Tramadol is a synthetic opioid and a cousin of oxycodone—the pill widely blamed for starting the opioid epidemic in the United States. Tramadol had been approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1995 as a safer alternative to other opioids. Manufacturers claimed it offered the same pain relief without the risk of addiction and marketed it as safe enough for children and the elderly. It was considered so harmless that no prescription was required. For a long time few people used it, but between 2008 and 2013 the number of users nationwide soared to forty-four million.
The Navy handed out tramadol freely for minor aches and pains. Medics could dispense it with little oversight. At low doses the pills were relatively harmless, but taking more than the daily recommendation produced a euphoric high. A stressed-out SEAL on his fourth deployment could pop a couple with some beers and float on a cloud. Some guys started to chase that feeling. Eddie and a number of buddies he came up with through the Teams started doing tramadol regularly, referring to it by a number of pet names: trammies, T bombs, or simply Ts.
Eventually the Drug Enforcement Agency recognized that tramadol wasn’t as safe as advertised, and in 2014 the agency cracked down, making tramadol a Schedule IV controlled substance. That meant Eddie now had to get a prescription. That wasn’t a big deal, though. A high-tempo SEAL had any number of reasons for a painkiller. A few weeks after the change Eddie visited a Navy doctor and left with a prescription for a thousand T bombs.
From that point on, he became a repeat customer at Navy doctors and pain clinics. He assured the medical staff he was using the pills “sparingly” to treat lower back pain, but he kept running out and asking for more.
Eddie got promoted. So did several of his friends who shared the habit. Some of them became senior chiefs and warrant officers. They were rising up in the SEAL hierarchy while quietly addicted. The problem went well beyond Eddie’s social circle. By 2016 tramadol was the third-leading cause of opiate overdoses in the military. The SEALs were the elite of the elite, but when it came to opioid addiction, they had the same problem as the rest of the country.
The Navy tried to rein in the opioid crisis. Prescriptions got smaller and harder to get. In the summer of 2016, Eddie’s SEAL Team got a new physician’s assistant who tried to stop issuing tramadol entirely. Eddie was irate. One of Eddie’s closest buddies had been his platoon chief when Eddie was the lead petty officer. They appeared to have developed the same opioid habit. The platoon chief went on to become a chief warrant officer, but they stayed in touch, including regular texts about tramadol. “I need to find a connection for t’s. This new guy…just cut everyone off at the team for any prescriptions,” Eddie texted his friend.
“What the fuck, did he say why?” the warrant officer replied.
“He is a complete fag! He said no one needs to be on meds,” Eddie said.
Eddie went outside the Team to a Navy pain clinic and got a new prescription, but he also started looking for another supply. He found he could get trammies just over the border from San Diego in Tijuana without a doctor’s script. Instead of going himself, in October 2016 he asked Ivan Villanueva, his gopher, to get his mom to buy some and bring it back for him.
The SEALs had mandatory random drug tests. But Tom MacNeil, the officer in charge of keeping the records, noticed Eddie started skipping the tests. And as was the case with so many other infractions before, he never got in trouble.
In December 2016, just weeks before Alpha deployed to Mosul, all SEAL Teams on the East Coast halted training for a safety standdown to address widespread drug problems in the Teams. “I feel like I’m watching our foundation, our culture erode in front of our eyes,” the commander of the East Coast SEALs said in an email to the force. That same month, the Navy prescribed Eddie one hundred trammies. By early January his supply was out. “Do you still have any more Mexican Ts leftover?” he texted his warrant officer friend. When his friend said no, Eddie replied, simply, “Fuck.”
Eddie went back to Villanueva. He had smoothed over Villanueva’s bar-fight arrest the week before. Now he told Villanueva that the pills his mother bought in Mexico were no good, and he needed him to get more. If the gopher could find good Ts, Eddie wanted “a bunch for deployment.” Then the chief told him they should discuss Villanueva’s career track as a SEAL.
Villanueva texted Eddie on a Sunday that his mom had purchased five hundred. Eddie said he was at church so couldn’t do a handoff. “Just put it in the back of my truck,” he said.
In Iraq, guys in Alpha started to notice the signs of a drug habit, even if no one fully realized the extent of the problem. Craig Miller would sometimes notice Eddie slipping pills into his mouth secretively. Dylan Dille could hear pill bottles rattling in Eddie’s sniper bag as he walked up the stairs into the Towers. Josh Vriens saw empty blister packs scattered around Eddie’s seat in the M-ATV.
Eddie had his own fully stocked medic’s bag that included 150 tramadol pills. The records he was required to keep show he prescribed nearly all his trammies to two Iraqi interpreters, even though the platoon medics couldn’t remember Eddie giving pills out to anyone.
As medics, Corey Scott and T. C. Byrne probably saw Eddie’s addiction most clearly because he would come to them for supplies. When Eddie couldn’t get what he wanted from Alpha medics, he tried the medics in other platoons. It got to the point where when a new medic showed up near the end of deployment, the others had to warn him that the chief would hit him up for drugs.
On the day Dille and Dalton saw the old man get shot in the back, Eddie’s warrant officer friend texted from California. He asked, “What color were the good T’s from Mexico???”
Pink, Eddie said.
The warrant officer replied, “Ready for a care package?”
Tramadol was not the only controlled substance Eddie used regularly. The medics had a supply of a stimulant called Provigil in case SEALs needed to stay awake on multi-day operations. Few in the platoon ever used it. But SEALs saw Eddie take it regularly. On missions, it showed. Vriens noticed Eddie would often be unusually “amped up.” Dille said that Eddie was sometimes like “the Energizer Bunny.”
Eddie was also injecting himself with testosterone. Early on in the deployment he texted his warrant officer friend, “I need to get some vitamin x. I’ve dropped a ton of weight and the workout situation here sucks.” A short time later, Eddie got an Iraqi interpreter to buy him steroids at a local shop, then tried to stiff him for the cost. SEALs later found syringes all over his room.
Steroids, stimulants, and opioids. Even the SEALs who saw Eddie every day couldn’t say for sure what effect the substances might have had on him, but each drug would have fundamentally changed the chemistry of Eddie’s brain. Testosterone can increase aggression and erode moral decision-making. Provigil can leave people sleepless and agitated and in some cases cause mania and paranoid delusions. Tramadol slows the executive brain function of chronic abusers. And if the supply is interrupted, withdrawal symptoms can include psychosis, paranoia, even hallucinations. None of the drugs alone would explain why Eddie had become so fixated on killing. He may have harbored an inclination long before he joined the SEALs. He may have been conditioned by years spent in pirate circles where killing wasn’t just accepted but was a path to status. That edge may have already been in Eddie’s personality when he got to Mosul, but the drugs could have pushed him over.
The SEALs who heard Eddie scream at night thought he might also have been grappling with ghosts from earlier deployments. Brain injuries may have also warped Eddie’s behavior. Eddie had never been hit by a blast big enough to officially land him on the Navy’s wounded roster. No IEDs had apparently ever shredded a truck he was riding in; no mortars had ever blown him off his feet. But years of heavy machine gun fire, rockets, and blows to the head during training may have taken their toll. After Mosul, when he finally went to the Intrepid Center to get a clinical assessment, he complained of forgetting names and misplacing objects. When a doctor asked how many blasts he had been exposed to, he said probably four hundred. He did poorly on the center’s visual and spatial memory tests. He didn’t identify patterns or recall details of how they were arranged. In spatial cognition he scored almost at the bottom, in the sixteenth percentile. The neuropsychologist assessing him estimated that his total cognitive functioning had once been in the seventy-fifth percentile but, after years of traumatic brain injuries, had declined to the fiftieth. He had either become significantly impaired or was smart enough to try to make it look like he was.
If Eddie had indeed lost much of his ability to think straight by the time he was a chief, it came right at the point in his career when he most needed a clear head. He was in charge of more than a dozen SEALs in complex urban combat. Mosul was all about spotting complex spatial patterns: who belonged in the neighborhoods and who didn’t, who showed the signs of being a combatant and who was just a civilian, who was maneuvering to attack the platoon, and how the platoon would shift to counterattack. But just when Eddie needed to be at his sharpest, the effects of drugs and years in the SEALs had likely worn him down.
Eddie kept taking Alpha back to the Towers, day after day. It was like Captain Ahab and the whale, going further and further out toward what seemed to be self-destruction. A few of the more vocal guys, led by Tolbert, argued that they should move on from the Towers. Eddie wouldn’t budge.
Josh Vriens was determined to make the best of it and stay focused on the mission. One morning, as the SEALs snuck into the Towers before sunrise and began setting up, he found a good place in the stairway of the southern building that offered a view north all the way to the blown-out bridge and south to the open intersection where Dille saw the old man get shot. Arrington was also set up on the sniper rifle that day. Portier and a handful of other SEALs were in the south tower to support the snipers. Eddie as usual had gone to the bathroom he liked to shoot from in the north building.
That morning, Vriens was trying not to let Eddie’s bullshit get to him. Whatever dark sideshow was going on with the chief was not why he was in Mosul; he was there to wax bad dudes who needed to get waxed. Karma. As he set up his rifle, Vriens was looking forward to a productive morning. “I’m going to kill some motherfuckers today,” he said to himself, “even if I have to stay on the glass all day.”
The morning started off with promise. Vriens saw a few fighters sprinting across the intersection and squeezed off a few careful shots. Then things got quiet. The temperature climbed to over a hundred degrees. There was no foot traffic. The only movement was heat waves shimmering on the street. Vriens stayed on his scope, determined not to lose any chance.
He was scanning the rooftops along the river when he heard a shot from the north tower, then another. He got on the platoon radio. “What are you seeing, Eddie?” Vriens said. He was hoping to get in on the action.
Some by the bridge, Eddie said.
Vriens swung his scope north and spotted a group of figures. He focused in, but the only thing he saw was a group of four school-age girls. The girls were in pairs, making their way along the riverbank under the high jagged rim of the bombed-out bridge. One had on a blue dress. Another wore a gray dress and a hijab printed with bright flowers. Definitely not ISIS based on the way they were dressed, Vriens decided. Where were the fighters?
Vriens had no doubt some women in Mosul could be enemy fighters, and if they were armed he knew he might have to shoot them. But these girls were too young. Their clothes were too colorful. They held nothing in their hands. There was no way they were enemies. If anything, they were probably trying to escape.
He was about to pan away and look for the real targets when he saw the girl with the flowered hijab clutch her stomach and go down. A shot echoed from the north tower. Two of the other girls ran. The girl’s friend in blue looked across the river at the SEALs’ position. Vriens could read the terror on her face. He watched through his scope as the girl in blue pulled the girl in the flowered hijab to her feet. She was doubled over, still clutching her stomach. The girl in blue pulled her along. They scrambled up over a dirt berm under the bridge, stumbled, and fell over the other side, out of sight.
Vriens was so shocked that he sat up from his rifle and stared out in a daze. Anger boiled up as he tried to make sense of what he had seen. He had heard a shot from the north tower, but that didn’t make sense. Shooting an innocent child was so evil, so disgusting, that in his mind the only group capable of doing it was ISIS. That must be what happened, he told himself. He had seen ISIS shoot people trying to flee Mosul. He knew they didn’t care whether they were shooting women or children. And it had just happened right in front of his eyes.
Jake Portier was in the room behind him, just off the stairwell. Vriens shouted back, “ISIS is shooting civilians again. I just saw them shoot a little girl.” He got back behind his rifle and scanned for the gunmen. Who could be so heartless, so vile, that they would target a group of children? He wanted to find them and kill them. He savored the idea of drilling whatever fucker had done it. He stayed on his rifle for hours.
At the end of the day, back at the house, Vriens was still thinking about the look on the girl’s face as he headed to his room to take off his gear. Right behind him was Arrington, lugging his sniper bag. As usual, they were doing an informal debrief on what had happened. “I saw ISIS shoot this little girl under the bridge today,” Vriens told Arrington. It was right under the bridge. Flowered hijab. There were a group of them. “It was crazy, like, I watched it happen.”
Arrington stopped walking. That wasn’t ISIS, Arrington told him, that was Eddie. Eddie told me he took that shot. Vriens’s mouth dropped open.
The bottom fell out. Vriens had joined the SEALs to protect the innocent. He had pushed for years to be aggressive and fearless so that when the real fighting came, he would crush whatever came. He had been one of Eddie’s biggest disciples. He aspired to eventually become the same kind of battle-hardened frogman. Over the deployment Vriens had started to see Eddie’s many flaws, but he had tried to put them aside and focus on the larger mission. Even when Eddie tried to send Vriens back out as bait in enemy fire after he was nearly hit by an RPG, Vriens justified it as Eddie trying to take the fight to the enemy. Now he realized Eddie was the enemy.
Vriens’s whole image of Eddie suddenly reversed, like a photo negative. All those stories Eddie told about shooting people in Afghanistan had once seemed cool. Suddenly, they were chilling. Had the young girl in Afghanistan that Eddie boasted about shooting looked anything like the girls by the Tigris? Had the man carrying her really been a Taliban fighter, or was he just a farmer? How long had Eddie been murdering people?
The sniper knew he had to do something, but he realized he was trapped. It seemed clear after the stabbing of the ISIS prisoner that there was no point reporting things to Portier. More than likely, word would just get back to Eddie. If Eddie started to suspect Vriens wasn’t down with what was going on, he’d bench him back at the safe house. If Vriens was benched, one of the more experienced guys in the squad would be missing, which would put other SEALs in danger. It would also expose the new guys to Eddie’s pirate influence without an older guy to intervene. He reached a miserable conclusion: It was better just to say nothing. Eddie’s platoon was like a gang. If you were good with what the boss was doing, he’d take care of you. If you made trouble, trouble might find you. Either way, there was no good way out.
The more Vriens thought about it, the more his whole perception of the SEAL Teams started to crumble. He didn’t know if it was just Eddie that was all messed up, or if it went further. Was it just one platoon or platoons all over the Teams? For a long time Vriens had been planning to try out for DEVGRU after Mosul. Eddie encouraged it. He said Vriens would be perfect. After watching the girl get shot, Vriens was afraid he’d get there only to find more guys like Eddie. A few days after the girl was shot, Vriens told Eddie not to submit his paperwork, he didn’t want to go to DEVGRU anymore.
The Sheriff returned from California at the end of June, after being away from the unit for a month.
The guys in the platoon had kept everything from him while he was in San Diego so he could focus on his wife and newborn son. But within a day of getting back it was clear to him that things had gotten much worse. First of all, Eddie was still there. Portier seemed to have done nothing to alert the SEAL brass, the SOTF, or anyone else about the murder. Second, the relationship between the guys and the chief had grown poisonous. Guys were barely speaking to Eddie. Even guys like Vriens, Villanueva, and Byrne, who had been Eddie’s biggest fans, skulked around like beaten dogs. When not on missions, Eddie spent much of his time shut up in his room or working out alone. Dalton Tolbert, who was the acting lead petty officer and should have been Eddie’s right-hand man, looked ready to punch the chief in the face. As soon as Miller arrived and asked for a debrief, Tolbert told him, “I fuckin’ hate that guy.”
Soon after Craig Miller’s return, Eddie invited him into his room and sat down across from Miller on a bed. Congratulations on the new baby, Eddie said. He pulled out the newest Half Face Blades knife Bito had sent him and presented it as a gift. You’ve been crushing it as an LPO. I’m really glad to have you back, Eddie told him. He said he’d been having problems with Tolbert and Dylan Dille. The snipers were afraid to go out on missions. They were being total pussies.
Eddie seemed noticeably different than when Miller had left. His voice had a ragged edge that Miller hadn’t noticed before. His eyes danced around, both tired and anxious. Eddie seemed to have grown withdrawn and paranoid. He was convinced Tolbert was talking shit about him and turning the younger guys against him, trying to stir up a mutiny. He suspected Dille was in on it, too.
Miller tried not to show a reaction. His job as lead petty officer was to support Eddie. He had never criticized him or defied him in front of the men, even after the stabbing. Eddie still viewed him as an ally. Eddie knew Miller kept close tabs on the guys and probably had a better sense of what was smoldering in the platoon.
Who’s against me? Eddie asked Miller abruptly. And what were they saying?
Miller looked at the knife in his hands. He suspected the gift came at a price. It appeared that Eddie was trying to buy loyalty. And information. But there was no way Miller was taking Eddie’s side after seeing him murder a captive. He still hoped that any day now Portier and the troop commander would step in and remove Eddie for good. Even so, he owed Eddie the courtesy of being straight with him about what he was hearing from Tolbert and others.
“Guys are pissed at the decisions you’re making,” Miller said. Why are you going back to the Towers over and over, or that rooftop? It’s not personal, Eddie. It’s tactics. What you are doing doesn’t make any sense.
Miller didn’t bring up the ISIS prisoner. He worried that if Eddie knew he was intent on reporting the murder, the chief would find a way to kill him. But he wanted Eddie to know that the guys thought neglecting his responsibilities as chief and returning to the Towers every day was a bad deal.
Eddie pressed Miller. He wanted to know who specifically was complaining. Miller refused to say. He didn’t want Eddie to come down on anyone. “Just talk to the guys. Sit down and listen to them,” Miller said.
Eddie switched modes. He adopted his most understanding, paternal tone. He said Miller was right, he would try to listen better. He said he appreciated Miller talking with him. He hoped Miller enjoyed the new knife.
The next day the chief took the platoon back to the Towers.