The mail arrived at Alpha’s combat house on the edge of Mosul and Eddie ripped open a box to discover another new knife he had ordered from Bito. He went back to his room and sent his friend a text to say thanks: “The knife came today. Looks nice. I’ll sink it into someone in the next couple weeks.”
Then Eddie noticed Tom MacNeil’s phone sitting in the room that they shared. He picked it up. Over the months in Mosul, Eddie’s opinion of MacNeil was starting to cool. MacNeil was not as pliable as Portier. He was always arguing about the rules of engagement. He would bitch to Portier about things Eddie did. He didn’t always follow orders. When Eddie told him once to call in false coordinates so he could fire on a mosque, MacNeil refused. And he had stepped in when the Iraqis provided a second captive and Eddie had his hatchet out. Plus, MacNeil was friendly with the snipers that Eddie was sure were hatching mutiny.
Eddie picked up the phone and read the last text that MacNeil had sent: “How are the guys doing?”
It was July 7, 2017. MacNeil had texted Joe Arrington because he was worried about how Squad 1 was holding up going back to the Towers every day. As the assistant officer in charge, he was sick of how Eddie was acting and even more disgusted that every time he brought it up to Portier, he would say, “I’ll take care of it,” or “I’m working on it,” but nothing ever seemed to change. MacNeil believed that SEALs should be creative, but he had always trusted that a war crime would be dealt with by the book. Instead, it looked like the SEAL Teams were trying to bury everything.
Arrington was the platoon’s most experienced JTAC. As the prime bomb-dropper he probably could claim more kills than anyone, but it was not his style. He was a goofy, unassuming guy who didn’t buy into all the pirate bravado and Punisher skulls. He liked to surf and mountain bike. Combat was his job but not his life.
By that point in the deployment, nearly everyone in the platoon just wanted to get out of Mosul alive. Despite Eddie, the past six months had been a clear success. Alpha accomplished their mission to support the ERD troops taking the city block by block. The platoon had pinpointed ISIS strongholds, pounded positions with hundreds of mortars, spotted car bombs and called in air strikes long before the suicide drivers reached their targets, and picked off enemy fighters at long range with sniper rifles. All of them were proud of what they had accomplished. At the same time, though, the chief had grown increasingly erratic. After his constant sniper fire had scared almost everyone out of the streets, he tried to drive people out into the open. He went on what he called “gun runs,” driving one of the armored trucks up onto the blown-out bridge to empty the heavy machine gun into the city. He ordered the junior SEALs to fire rockets into the neighborhoods with no clear targets. He even hung up an American flag on one of the Towers, hoping to draw fighters out—a tactic lifted directly from the book American Sniper. The Towers got hit by heavier and heavier weapons. One night ISIS hit with a rocket attack powerful enough to knock down a whole portion of a building. The SEALs figured it was only a matter of time before someone was killed.
Eddie read over MacNeil’s text. MacNeil asked how the guys were doing. Arrington’s response: “The guys are fine, they’re over working for Eddie, but they’re fine.”
Rage started to build as Eddie looked at the response. He had served with Arrington for longer than anyone in the platoon. He’d always thought Arrington was a bit of an oddball, but he never figured he would be a traitor. So ol’ Bubbles was sick of him? He knew Dille and Tolbert were talking trash about him. They had probably convinced some of the new guys to join their little mutiny. Arrington, too. Eddie had to do something. Now.
That day the Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, arrived in Mosul. He stood in the street in a black military uniform and declared victory over ISIS in the city. Crowds of celebrating soldiers and civilians thronged around him amid smoldering piles of rubble bristling with rebar, waving Iraqi flags and firing guns into the air. A few pockets of ISIS resistance still waited to the north, but the great Battle of Mosul was over.
Even as that fight was drawing to a close, though, the battle for Alpha platoon was about to explode. Eddie decided he couldn’t have a turd like Arrington undermining him. Tolbert had been openly defying him. Miller was no longer on his side. Even the young guys were starting to question him. He didn’t get it. Alpha was on a dream deployment with combat opportunities they might never see again. And all they did was whine and second-guess him. Now here was Bubbles trying to blame him for the problems. Time to put the hammer down.
Eddie found Portier and told him that this shit needed to end—he was kicking Arrington out of the platoon.
That day, Squad 1 had just started a rest rotation at the safe house an hour outside of the city. Arrington, Miller, Dille, and Tolbert were catching up on the things they couldn’t do in Mosul—email, laundry, fixing gear. Miller was in the kitchen when a text message arrived from Portier. Tell Arrington to pack his stuff, it read, he’s going to another platoon and we’re getting a new JTAC to replace him.
“What the fuck is this shit?” Arrington said as soon as he heard. He stormed into the kitchen where Miller still had his phone in his hand. He didn’t like Eddie and knew the feeling was mutual, but he didn’t want to leave Alpha. The platoon had only about a month left in the deployment, and much of that would be taken up by packing and inventorying all their stuff. Effectively, the job was done. By the time a new JTAC arrived and learned the ropes it would be time to go home. This was just a way for Eddie to screw him.
Arrington hadn’t done anything wrong. He was a top JTAC and had never complained about missions. He had even kept his mouth shut about going back to the Towers over and over. All the shit Eddie was doing, and Arrington was getting fired? Fuck that, he told Miller.
The other guys heard the commotion and gathered in the kitchen. Arrington was a respected guy who was good at his job. They all agreed trying to replace him seemed like a ridiculously bad move, even for Eddie. Miller texted Portier to try to get him to change his mind. The senior SEALs in the squad crowded around to hear Portier’s response.
No dice, Miller told them, looking at his phone. I guess Eddie’s really pissed.
The guys started to grumble, but the Sheriff quieted them down. He wanted to avoid an all-out insurrection. Look, I agree kicking Arrington out of the platoon is stupid, he said, but Eddie’s the chief, it’s his call. We can’t just tell him no. Miller was trying to find a way to flank the chief but didn’t see one.
Dalton Tolbert stiffened as he listened. His upbringing had made it easier to spot treachery disguised as the system.
“No,” Tolbert said. “No way. Nope. Joe’s not going anywhere. We have to fight this.”
This is bigger than Arrington, he said. Eddie had straight-up murdered people. Portier wasn’t doing shit about it. Tolbert believed Alpha could still bring Eddie to justice when they got home, but only if they stuck together. Let Arrington go and who would be next? Eddie would dismantle Alpha piece by piece. He would send them to new assignments and probably say bad things about them, quietly, to their new chiefs. He would make it look like a courtesy: Heads up, you have a real turd coming. He would say the guys had been afraid to fight in Mosul. As strangers in new platoons, they would have no credibility. Everyone would look at them like disgruntled cowards. The guys from Alpha would be alone, with no one around to vouch for them. At that point, if they tried to tell anyone that the great Eddie Gallagher was really a screwup and a murderer, who would believe them? Eddie would be free to bury the whole thing.
“If he divides us, we have no chance,” Tolbert said. “We have to make a stand.”
Dille agreed. He could almost hear Eddie in his head telling stories when he got home about how he had run through fire to save Dragon, about his incredible sniper shots that would put all of Chris Kyle’s feats to shame. In order to build his own mythology, he would need to persuade everyone that the guys who said different were just a bunch of turds who couldn’t handle Mosul. Arrington was the start, but he likely wasn’t the end.
Tolbert’s right, Dille said. Eddie has to be held accountable for what he’s done, but it will take all of us standing together.
Miller hesitated. Even as everything was coming off the rails, he saw the rules as a refuge. No one wanted Eddie to face justice more than him, but refusing a lawful order from the chief was waving a red flag in front of the bull. He didn’t see how it could solve any problems. Alpha could all lose their jobs over it. They could be court-martialed. Then Eddie would paint them as a bunch of lying, disgruntled cowards anyway. Miller wanted to stick up for Arrington, but he pushed the guys to make one more phone call to Eddie before they did anything they’d regret. Maybe they could smooth it over.
Okay, Tolbert said, but we have to do it on speakerphone so everyone can hear. He didn’t want Eddie to work any of his manipulative jiujitsu on Arrington or Miller or anyone else. They were going to do this together.
Miller dialed and Portier picked up in Mosul. Miller told him they wanted to talk about Arrington. Tolbert leaned in and said, “Put Eddie on!”
There was a pause. Then Portier said Eddie wasn’t going to take the phone.
“Well, we’re not sending Arrington back,” Tolbert said in a stern voice. “This is total bullshit and you know it. He’s not going anywhere.”
Eddie got on the phone and started swearing. The SEALs could hear the rage amping through the tiny speaker. Arrington was fucking going, Eddie said. They were going to do what they were fucking told. He was coming to get Arrington the next day and it wasn’t up for fucking discussion. And Arrington shouldn’t be talking shit behind people’s backs.
Arrington leaned over the phone and shot back, “That’s funny coming from you. You’re the master of it!”
“FUCK YOU!” Eddie shouted.
“NO, FUCK YOU!” Arrington said.
“NO, FUCK YOU!” Eddie shouted. He hung up.
The SEALs looked at each other wide-eyed. Miller was silent. They had definitely not managed to smooth things over. The chief was raving, and he was driving up in the morning to lay down the law. “This isn’t good. What are we going to do?” Miller said. “What’s Eddie going to do?”
“He’s gonna be pissed, he might be ready to throw down,” Dille said.
Tolbert was so revved up that all he could do was laugh. “I don’t really care at this point,” he said. It felt good to finally have the enemy out in the open. He looked at Dille and said, “I’m not afraid of Eddie. I mean, are you?”
Dille smiled, too. Even though he was quiet and never liked to beat his chest, he was a vicious boxer who used the same calculating patience with his fists that he did with a sniper rifle. Eddie was only five-foot-eight and had a short reach, plus he was impulsive. Dille savored the idea of knocking the chief out.
“No, man. Honestly, I’m not,” Dille told his friend. Then he paused. Eddie had been acting so weird lately, he said, we don’t know what he’ll do. If Eddie wanted to start something, no problem, the four of them could beat his ass. They were younger and bigger. They had numbers on their side. “But what if he pulls his knife?” Dille said. “Or a gun?”
There was silence. No one spoke up to say they thought it was unlikely. The idea that Eddie might draw on another SEAL would have seemed crazy in a normal context, but they were a long way from normal. They believed Eddie had killed multiple people. He was looking at prison if they talked. He had gotten stranger and stranger over the months. He might do something desperate.
“We’re going to need a guardian angel,” Dille said, someone with a pistol whose sole job was to stand watch in case anything happened. There was no argument in the group. They decided that the guardian angel should be the fastest and best pistol shooter in SEAL Team 7: Craig Miller.
It was the last thing Miller wanted to hear, but he knew they were right. Since the day five months before when Miller arrived in Iraq with Eddie, the chief had grown more unhinged. It was totally reasonable to be ready with a gun. At the same time, it was insane to even talk about shooting another Navy SEAL. The SEALs were a brotherhood. Their training taught them to protect one another at all costs. Miller didn’t want to kill Eddie. At the same time, he didn’t want to put that responsibility on any of the other guys. He was their leader. It was on him. He grudgingly agreed. Just a few weeks before the end of what was billed as a dream deployment, he was prepared, if necessary, to shoot his own chief.
That night Miller called his parents in Texas and explained what was going on. There’s a chance either I kill Eddie or Eddie kills me, he told his mother. He told her about the stabbing and had her write it down in her phone. That way, if things got really out of hand, at least there would be an outside witness who knew about the murder.
Miller’s father got on the phone. Even though his father had been a frogman before him, he had never encountered anything like this. He urged caution and restraint. Don’t act unless you are absolutely sure. Don’t seek violence, try to find another way. But if there is a real threat to your friends and fellow SEALs, he said, I don’t see what else you can do. Miller told his father he knew he was right, but even if he tried to do the right thing, it was almost certainly going to go really badly. There was a good chance Miller was going to get fired and kicked out of Iraq, and maybe kicked out of the Navy, he told him. He could even go to prison. He added, “I just hope Arrington’s worth it.”
The next morning the guys in Squad 1 started preparing for battle. Dille ran on a treadmill in the back room to warm up. Arrington started punching a heavy bag. If they needed to fight the chief, they wanted to be ready. Tolbert got a text from the SEALs in Mosul that Eddie and Portier were on their way in a white Ford pickup and would be there soon. Miller put on his uniform and slid a holster holding his 9mm pistol onto his belt.
The group kept tabs on the progress of the pickup through texts. Miller paced nervously in the main room. Chances were good that the storm now brewing would hit him the hardest. Try to avoid a fight, he told Arrington and Tolbert. Be ready to handle this civilly. We’ll confront him together so he can’t manipulate us, we won’t back down, but the best thing to do now is try to work it out. That doesn’t mean we can’t turn him in when all this is done, but just try to make peace.
Arrington agreed. He wrote out a list of five complaints so when Eddie tried to change the subject or manipulate him he could remember why he was there. The first thing on the list was shooting civilians. No one thought the meeting was going to go well.
The truck pulled up with Eddie, Portier, and two other SEALs. There was a great room just inside the front door of the safe house, and the squad gathered there in a line. Dille, Tolbert, and Arrington all had their shirts off, ready to fight. Miller stood off to the side at an inconspicuous spot that offered a good angle on the room, with his pistol ready to fire.
Eddie was the first through the door. He had an M-4 assault rifle slung over his shoulder. Miller instinctively scanned for a threat. If a finger was on the trigger or the gun was pointed, he would shoot without waiting. His eyes found Eddie’s hands. One was on the forward grip, but no hand was on the trigger.
As Eddie stepped inside and his eyes adjusted from the desert sun, he looked up and took a half step back. Three bare-chested snipers spread out in a line facing him. He glanced to the side and saw Miller with his hand hovering like an Old West gunslinger over his pistol. He half-opened his mouth to say something, then stopped. He put his rifle down. The guys could see a sudden physical change, his shoulders relaxed. He took a breath and nodded in a tacit recognition. He wasn’t going to start throwing punches.
Miller’s shooting hand went slack.
Eddie motioned to the computer room just off the main room. Come on, he said to Arrington, let’s talk in here. They went in, and Eddie closed the door behind him.
Dille looked at Tolbert who looked at Miller.
“That was not supposed to happen. He shouldn’t be in there alone,” Dille hissed. He went to try the door. It was locked. He stood listening. He could hear the muffled tones of a calm conversation. No shouting. No breaking furniture. He thought about kicking the door down, but he decided to hold off.
Portier walked in from the truck. He saw the SEALs waiting and did the same surprised double take as Eddie. He stood awkwardly, as if acutely aware of what was happening, but not sure what to do.
“Jake, you have to do something. Just do something,” Miller said.
Dille and Tolbert circled around the lieutenant and joined in. They weren’t angry at Portier, just perplexed about why he didn’t seem to see what Eddie was doing. Eddie’s out of control, Tolbert told him. He tried to use short, clear sentences. Eddie’s tactics are madness. Everything has gotten totally out of hand. You know it’s true. Arrington shouldn’t get in trouble for calling it out. No one is kicking him out of the platoon.
Portier’s face was blank. He looked down at the floor as he responded. I’m not going to make any decisions yet, he said, I’ll talk with my chief and we’ll make a decision together.
This isn’t about Arrington, it’s about Eddie, and you know it, Miller said. He’s not doing his job. He’s stealing stuff. And he’s making stupid decisions that put everyone at risk for no reason. He just sits on the sniper rifle killing civilians.
Tolbert jumped in and pointed a finger at the lieutenant: “And you’re supposed to do something, and you’re not!”
Portier raised his voice and told Tolbert not to point at him.
“Oh, I’m fucking pointing at you!” Tolbert shouted. What little deference and respect the SEALs did afford their officer was pretty much gone.
Guys are pissed and we’re not going to stand by anymore, Miller said. If you aren’t going to do anything and the troop leadership isn’t going to do anything, we’re going over your head to the command master chief of the team.
Portier snorted. He knew as well as they did that many of the enlisted guys up the chain were friends of Eddie. They’ll crush you, Portier told them.
Miller looked squarely at Portier and tried to level with him. He tried always to see the good in people. He thought Portier was a decent guy who was just young and had become enthralled with all of Eddie’s pirate stories. He knew Portier had been bullied and manipulated, but now the lieutenant needed to do the right thing before it was too late. Portier was legally required to report any suspected war crimes immediately or face criminal charges himself. The longer he waited, the worse it would turn out for him.
“If you side with Eddie,” Miller told him, “this isn’t going to end well.”
Portier didn’t respond. He refused to look at Miller.
Behind the locked door of the computer room, Eddie and Arrington were having a conversation that Arrington later described as “civil.” The two sat down across a desk. Eddie didn’t seem angry anymore. He leaned back in his chair ready to listen. Arrington started going through his list of five complaints. “It feels like we have to put the reins on you versus you putting the reins on us,” he began.
Eddie nodded and listened. His whole demeanor had shifted. Just like in the talks with guys after the stabbing, he appeared empathetic and kind. He became a father figure, the wise old chief. He denied everything with a tone that made it sound like the whole thing was a big misunderstanding by Arrington. Eddie addressed the stealing first. He said he had grown up in platoons where everyone was like family and they shared everything. He was sorry if Arrington saw that as stealing. As for tactics, Eddie sighed and said he had been deploying a lot longer than Arrington and knew a little bit more about what good tactics looked like. Then he turned to putting guys’ lives in danger. That was part of the job, he said. Other SEALs in Coronado were banging down the door trying to get a chance to fight in Mosul. They would give their left nut, and probably their right, for a piece of the action. If Arrington or anyone else couldn’t handle his leadership style and wanted out, he was sorry, but he understood. They were free to leave anytime.
Arrington was silent. With a velvet glove, Eddie had slapped Arrington with the ultimate SEAL insult: If you can’t handle it, coward, go ahead and ring the bell.
Guys could say what they wanted, Eddie continued, there are some guys in the platoon who are just against me. To them I can’t do anything right. They get together and bitch and blow everything out of proportion. This kind of sewing circle gossip happens on every deployment. It’s natural. You get to the end of deployment and guys are pissed off and want to go home and they have to blame it on someone. Look, Eddie said, Alpha has had an amazing deployment. You guys are kicking ass. There are only a few weeks to go. After that, if guys are still angry, they never have to speak to me again. But for now let’s just put our differences aside, stick together, and bring everyone home safe.
Arrington was genuinely defused. Eddie was offering peace, and Arrington decided to take it. He later summed up the whole episode by saying, “We had a good talk.”
The door opened, and Arrington and Eddie emerged. Eddie announced the platoon wasn’t going to get rid of Arrington. Then he turned to Miller. Fellas, he said with a kind lilt, you’re obviously upset, tell me what I’m doing wrong. The platoon brought up the same stealing and killing that they had with Portier. Eddie gave the same kinds of responses he had given Arrington. The young SEALs might not be able to understand what he was doing as a chief, but it was all good. If they weren’t up for it, he could work with them to get them out of there. Eddie said he thought highly of the guys. They were awesome operators. I applaud you for confronting me, he said. That took guts, he said, I respect you for doing it.
Miller let his guard down. Even Dille and Tolbert were so perplexed by Eddie’s response that they didn’t know how to react. Eddie left as if nothing had happened.
Right afterward, Eddie texted his boss, Alazzawi, to assure him everything was fine. “The meeting went well,” he said. “As always lesson learned for me is I have to be more sensitive to people’s feelings.”
To the warrant officer who had sent him a care package, he texted a very different take. “I think I’ve seen the worst of the teams this deployment, especially from the younger guys. Shit is definitely different now.”
After the confrontation with Arrington, Eddie never really went out on another mission. Alpha still had about six weeks left in Iraq, but Eddie spent nearly all of it back at the spacious safe house in Kurdistan. He wrote platoon evaluations and awards for the deployment. Portier wrote up a nomination to get Eddie a Silver Star for saving Dragon and other suspect acts of heroism. Eddie was careful not to mention the nomination to the platoon. For the most part, he stayed in his room alone in a recliner watching movies and playing videogames.
“I’ll tell you what,” he texted his friend Stephen Snead, who had set up the house in Kurdistan before Alpha replaced his platoon in Iraq. “That Lazy Boy that you put in this room is the best piece of gear ever. I lounge in that thing all day.”
After the fall of Mosul, ISIS still held territory along the Syrian border near the town of Tal Afar. While Eddie was at the safe house, the rest of Alpha went out on missions without the chief. They followed the same battle rhythm that they had in Mosul. Set up behind the FLOT to support the Iraqi soldiers on the ground. Dig in mortars, set up snipers, and launch the Puma and Switchblade drones to hunt for targets. Eddie just wasn’t around.
On August 1, Squad 2 drove out to the outskirts of Tal Afar. Josh Vriens climbed onto the roof of a farmhouse with a pair of binoculars. Even though Eddie seemed to have checked out, Vriens was still eager to go after ISIS. A handful of Peshmerga fighters stood with Vriens on the roof. The Peshmerga pointed out an ISIS checkpoint in the distance and said they took fire from it daily. Vriens studied the checkpoint through binoculars and decided to hit it with mortars. The squad set up their mortar tubes and launched two rounds to register the mortar tube so they could walk hits in on the checkpoint. When the rounds hit, two men came out of a hut at the checkpoint and fired at the SEALs. Vriens smiled. Open, hostile action. He was free to engage. But before they were able to fire more mortars, the squad intercepted communications from enemy territory. An ISIS radio transmission said the Americans had arrived and told other fighters to send the truck bomb. The squad sent the Puma circling over enemy territory to see if they could spot the truck bomb. The drone soon came across a tractor pulling a tank of liquid and followed the tractor to a small warehouse where it spotted people loading barrels onto a truck. From the sky it looked like a group of ISIS fighters with homemade explosives. Vriens called over a Peshmerga leader to look at the grainy gray video footage. Yes, he said through an interpreter, that warehouse is a known ISIS supply point.
Vriens called down from the roof to the SEALs below. The tractor was the perfect target for the Switchblade.
A junior SEAL named Christian Mullan was at the controls of the Switchblade. He launched the drone from an upright tube like a mortar and it immediately unfolded four wings and buzzed away at 60 mph. As the Switchblade sped into the sky, Mullan held what looked like an oversized videogame controller with a small black-and-white screen in the middle. The camera on the Switchblade was even grainier than the one on the Puma. All throughout deployment the platoon had struggled to use the new weapon. Often the camera was so poor that the SEALs couldn’t find targets that the Puma had spotted. The Switchblade could only circle and search for about fifteen minutes before running out of power, but once it was launched, there was no way to bring it back. If the pilot couldn’t find a target, there was a self-destruct button that sent the little drone skyward to explode. Over the deployment the platoon had launched several but only ever managed to score one confirmed kill. The drone transmitted grainy gray photos of the last seconds of its dive. On that single successful run, the last frame was a bearded fighter with a rifle slung over his back, looking over his shoulder in terror as he ran for his life.
The squad hoped for a second hit that morning. Vriens watched the camera feed from the Puma and helped guide Mullan with the Switchblade. They spotted the warehouse and the truck full of barrels. The Switchblade made a circle around the target and Mullan set the coordinates for the dive bomb. Vriens came over to look at the screen. There was a grainy group of figures near the truck. They shuffled into a row with one figure standing a few feet out in front of them.
“Sweet,” Vriens said, studying the video. “They’re doing the martyr photo with the driver before he goes and blows himself up.” It was the perfect time to get them all.
Vriens was on the roof with a junior-grade lieutenant named A. J. Hansen, who had only been in command a few times. Portier was down in the truck on the radio. Vriens and Hansen looked at the video and gave Mullan the green light. The pilot pressed a button that sent the Switchblade into a kill dive. The drone sped up into a streaking blur. As it dove it sent back a rapid succession of photos. The frames zoomed closer as it closed in on the warehouse. First the frame showed the whole yard and the building, then just the line of people and the truck, then just the people. The Switchblade was now too far into its dive to abort. The photos clicked closer and closer until for a split second the grainy feed showed the figures in detail: the cut of their clothes, the outlines of their faces. Then closer until the last frame showed the face of the person at the center of the Switchblade’s target.
In the distance the SEALs heard the explosion. Normally they would have cheered a hit on ISIS, but no one said anything at all. They just stared at the last images on the little screen. There was a boy, maybe eight years old. There appeared to be two other boys on the edges of the frame.
Vriens looked at Mullan. He had seen it too. The group they had targeted was full of children.
Take a block of Swiss cheese, slice it up, and then stack up all the slices randomly, and one time in a million, the holes will all line up. That is how the troop commander, Lieutenant Commander Breisch, later explained the strike. A series of small failures—a clumsy translation, a new weapon, a junior leader, a grainy screen, a mistaken call about a truck, all lined up and led to something catastrophic. One of the biggest holes in the cheese was the absence of a chief with the experience and patience to know how battlefield mistakes can compound. That’s why platoons had chiefs. At the same time, no one in the squad would have argued that Eddie might have made anything better.
An American Predator drone circling the area at the same time as the Switchblade spotted the strike, and its high-resolution camera captured the dead scattered on the ground. The drone pilot sent out a civilian casualties alert. Within an hour, the SOTF had been notified. Top commanders radioed the squad to shut down and return to base immediately. On the high-definition monitors back at the SOTF command center, the commander replayed the Predator footage of the strike. “Wow, that’s fucking bad,” Portier said when he saw it. But he insisted it was an honest mistake. What were clearly women and children on the big screen had “just looked like blobs” on the tiny Switchblade controller.
The whole platoon was put on lockdown and an investigation started. Alpha had four weeks left in its deployment, but for the rest of it, they were not allowed to leave the house. A mistake on the battlefield had managed to do what all Eddie’s sniper shots and rocket strikes on civilians had not. Eddie was finally benched—officially.
Vriens tried not to think about the Switchblade. The whole deployment he had tried to keep his aggression focused. He had rejected Eddie’s approach, which seemed to be about shooting everything that moved. He had been determined to be a professional, and he had totally failed. Thinking about the strike was more painful than remembering the girl getting shot down. The girl was on Eddie. The children hit by the Switchblade were on him.
One of the jobs of a platoon chief was to greet the incoming chief of the platoon replacing him and show him the ropes. Stephen Snead had done it for Eddie. Now Eddie had to do it for a new chief. It meant staying after most of the platoon went home to ensure the new guys had all the best, most up-to-date intel to make the mission a success. Eddie had no plans to do it.
For most of July and August, Eddie had been counting down the days until he could get out of Iraq. The chief from a platoon in SEAL Team 3 was arriving at the very end of August. When Eddie learned the Team 3 chief would be a few days late, he complained about having to stay. “Fuck this place when there is nothing to do,” he texted Snead. “Team 3 turds aren’t even coming on the first flight or possibly the second flight.”
Up on the roof of the safe house, Snead’s platoon had built a bar. In the weeks Alpha was locked down, they made improvements, adding lights and music. They painted a sign behind the bar dedicating it to Snead’s fallen EOD tech. Most nights the SEALs congregated on the roof to drink beer and take turns playing music. Drinking in Iraq was against the U.S. military regulations, but the rule had been regularly disobeyed by SEALs up and down the ranks for years. It was one of the many rank-and-file rules they felt didn’t apply. As long as no one was on duty and nothing got rowdy, they didn’t see a problem. The officers went to the rooftop with the enlisted guys. They weren’t in a war zone, they had nothing to do. A few beers wasn’t a big deal.
Eddie rarely went to the roof. Not because he didn’t drink on deployment, but because he no longer wanted to look at anyone in the platoon. He had already started to craft the story of what had gone wrong. It wasn’t about the stabbing or the shootings, it was that the younger guys were a bunch of whiners. “Bro this last month is dragging out,” Eddie texted his warrant officer friend in mid-August. “I am glad I’m not doing another platoon next, I fucking hate this generation of team guys.”
The feeling in the platoon was overwhelmingly mutual. At the bar on the rooftop, both squads were together for the first time without Eddie. Over beers they started to realize how messed up things had gotten. Eddie had intentionally split the platoon, then used the isolation to completely warp their views and keep them off-balance. He spent the whole deployment telling Squad 1 they were a bunch of fuckups and that Squad 2 was crushing it. And he did the same to Squad 2. Men began to doubt themselves and mistrust the other squad. Eddie was beating them down, making them feel inferior, keeping them isolated like some two-bit cult leader, even as he was feeding them accounts of the battlefield that built himself up to be a god.
Slowly, on the rooftop, the SEALs realized they were all dealing with the same crap. Joe Arrington talked about all the shit he had seen Eddie do. Ivan Villanueva told the guys it had started before Mosul, and shared that Eddie had sent his mother to buy drugs. Dylan Dille told the story of the old man shot in the back. Josh Vriens said he had seen the same kind of thing. He was both glad he was no longer alone in doubting Eddie and furious that the problem was much bigger than just one schoolgirl. Vriens stood up and said they had to do something.
“We already talked to Jake,” Dille told Vriens. “I’m not too sure he’s going to do anything.”
“No way,” Vriens said. “Eddie’s already worked his magic on Jake.”
They knew they had to report Eddie. They decided they should first get home safe, then something had to be done, and quickly. If they didn’t speak up, Eddie would regale all of Coronado with his heroics. He’d be celebrated. He’d be promoted. He’d be given more responsibility and be put in charge of more SEALs, maybe a whole troop and eventually a whole Team. His pirate influence would spread to a whole new generation as he picked which guys climbed the ranks. To Vriens and Dille, Eddie was not just a psycho who had fucked up their deployment or killed innocent people, he was a cancer that had to be cut out of the SEAL Teams because there was no telling how far it would spread.
Eddie was determined to get on the first plane home, leaving behind his responsibilities and his men, but he was unable to get approval from above. Then, at the last minute, he reported a family emergency. He said his teenage stepdaughter had run away from home and he needed to get back ASAP to help. MacNeil told Eddie he needed him to stay for the turnover. Eddie took off anyway.
“Left a day early to deal with the family drama,” Eddie texted Alazzawi at the end of August. “Bro I was happy to get away from my platoon, I was beginning to hate them all at the end.”
Eddie sent several more texts to his friends as he made his way through stopovers on the way home to California. They seemed primarily focused on getting home in time for a big pay-per-view boxing match.
Back in Iraq, the rest of Alpha watched Eddie’s family post photos on Facebook of him grilling and drinking beer at the warrant officer’s house. The family was there, watching the fight. Some emergency. Someone found one of Eddie’s uniform name tags and stuck it to a whiteboard in the main room of the safe house, then drew a giant arrow pointing toward it and wrote the word “Turd.”
The whole platoon, minus Eddie, had to stop in Heidelberg, Germany, on the way home a few days later. One of the requirements of the layover was an individual session with a special operations psychologist to make sure there were no pressing issues from combat that had to be addressed before SEALs hit the States. Traditionally, SEALs treated the meeting with the shrink as a box to check as quickly as possible before going home. But some of the guys in the platoon saw it as the first chance to document what they had seen with someone outside the platoon. They set up a group chat so that they could keep tabs on one another while traveling. Someone texted that they should all tell the psych their concerns about Eddie. The SEALs started joking around because they had heard the psych was attractive.
“Seriously. Tell the truth,” Dalton Tolbert urged the platoon. “It’s only going to help us resolve this.”
“Definitely telling the truth,” Joe Arrington replied.
Germany was the first time Josh Vriens had allowed himself to reflect on what happened. Iraq had been too hectic, and his subconscious had put up defenses that kept him from dwelling on his inner thoughts. Now he was somewhere safe, and the thoughts were leaking out of every seam. That afternoon it was Vriens’s turn to sit down with the psych. He decided not to hide anything. He needed to come clean. Part of him hoped he could drop everything that was burdening him like a duffel on a tarmac, so he wouldn’t have to carry it home. He slumped into a chair. After a deep breath, he told the psychologist that his chief was killing civilians, and that he had seen him do it. He had seen a girl get shot and her friend look toward him in terror. There was more, he said. Other guys had seen other things. Old men and women. A teenage kid stabbed. It had gone on for months. Worst part was, Vriens had stood by and done nothing. It hurt even to say it.
Just then a SEAL from Golf platoon pounded on the door. He had been waiting out in the hall and Vriens was taking much longer than usual. The SEAL had been drinking and wanted to get the appointment over with. He stuck his head in, drink in hand.
“I’ll be done in a minute, bro, just hold on,” Vriens said. He knew there was still more he had to unload, but wasn’t sure if he could do it, or if he should. He wanted to talk about the Switchblade. It was just a mistake, just an honest mistake, he said. He had tried his best. Guys were just trying to do their jobs, but children had died. He’d do anything to reverse it, but there was no way to bring those families back.
Vriens had been in the SEALs for seven years. They were years of almost total sacrifice with constant training, painful physical struggle, and a fair amount of danger. He’d deployed around the world. He’d worked hard to make his platoon the best. He had been picked for a dream deployment in Mosul that positioned him to write his own ticket in the SEALs. And then everything had collapsed. Vriens didn’t know if he wanted to be a SEAL anymore. The whole squad was under investigation for the Switchblade. He could be court-martialed and be sent to prison. Vriens had young kids. And meanwhile Eddie—
The SEAL from Golf platoon banged on the door again and stuck his head in. He asked if Vriens was done yet. Vriens noticed the drink in his hand. All of the rage and frustration that had been building in Mosul suddenly hit like a Hellfire. Vriens jumped up from his seat, slapped the drink out of the SEAL’s hand, knocked him to the floor, and started choking him.