What the hell was wrong with Alpha? Back at the base in Coronado, Senior Chief Brian Alazzawi could tell something was up. After twenty years and eight stints overseas, he had been around the Teams long enough to know how things should go right after deployment. It was supposed to be a honeymoon. Other platoons were eating burritos with their shirts off at the beach and going home at noon to spend time with their families. Alpha had returned from a dream deployment and all of Team 7 was buzzing about how they were a total pack of studs. The official statistics from Mosul told the story of the kind of savage combat that the SEALs hadn’t seen in years: 189 enemy positions obliterated, 13 vehicle-borne IEDs destroyed, 546 enemy fighters killed. Incredible. Career-making. Totally badass. But whenever the senior chief passed Alpha’s high bay, he could sense the hate and discontent. The guys were moping around like they had shit their pants.
Alazzawi had a bushy mustache and dozens of black tattoos that made him look like he should be riding a Harley, but he liked to pedal around the small SEAL base on a beach cruiser. About a week after his platoons returned from Iraq, he was pedaling back to his office when he spotted Jake Portier and Eddie outside the Alpha high bay, talking by Eddie’s pickup. It was early September 2017. Alazzawi put on the brakes. This was his chance to figure out what was up.
He pulled up next to the tailgate and started some small talk with the chief: Good to be back, hope the wife and kids are doing well, congrats again on crushing ISIS. After a little back-and-forth, he got down to what he really wanted to know: “Hey, everything cool with Alpha? They seem a little off.”
Eddie smiled like nothing was wrong. Yeah, they’re fine, he said. Just venting. His tone was that of a dad dealing with his teenager’s latest breakup. It was just petty drama, he said. Some guys got their feelings hurt.
“Yeah, I hear that. Well, let ’em vent. It’s good for ’em,” Alazzawi said. He knew how six months of living in shitty conditions with little rest or privacy could turn a platoon ugly. But usually they were hugging again as soon as they got home. This seemed more serious. If it’s one or two bitching, that’s to be expected, he told Eddie. If there are six or eight, something is wrong and you need to sit them down and figure it out.
Yeah, Eddie said. They’re just being pussies. He said a few guys in the platoon had balked at going out on missions and Eddie had come down hard on them. Now they had their panties in a bunch.
As Eddie was talking, Alazzawi kept his eye on Eddie’s young lieutenant, waiting for him to speak up. He probably had his own take on the problem. But Portier said nothing. Not a word. He just looked down and to the side. It struck Alazzawi as strange. It could be this was bigger than one or two guys with a grudge. As the senior enlisted SEAL in the troop, it was Alazzawi’s job to make sure everything in the ranks ran smoothly. He was the fixer. If there was petty drama, he’d need to figure out the cause and find a way to make peace. If there was something bigger…well, he’d figure that out, too. He pedaled off without saying much more but made a mental note to ask around until he found out what was up.
It didn’t take long for him to start hearing rumors. On the flight back from Iraq in a cavernous cargo jet, the guys in Alpha had not been shy about their gripes. They intentionally kept the killings quiet but told anyone who asked that, broadly speaking, Eddie was a disaster. His approach to warfare was idiotic. He was so clueless that he had almost gotten guys killed. He used guys as bait. He was making up stories to get medals. And he was stealing from the platoon.
It was the stealing that first caught Alazzawi’s attention. Tactics were subjective. What a guy in his first deployment might see as reckless might just be another day at the rodeo for a seasoned chief. Besides, as the platoon chief, tactics were Eddie’s call. Alazzawi didn’t want to second-guess him. But stealing from his own platoon? That raised a flag. As soon as he heard, he pedaled off to find Eddie.
“Please tell me you’re not fucking stealing, ’cause that’s what your guys are saying about you,” Alazzawi told Eddie when he found him.
Eddie looked confused, as if it was the first he was hearing about it. He took a moment to consider, then told the chief it was probably just a misunderstanding. He might have taken a snack bar here or there, or an energy drink, maybe even a can of Copenhagen when he really needed it, but he had been brought up like that in the Teams, sharing everything. Guess the millennial guys coming up are different, he said.
Alazzawi chuckled. He definitely had moments when he shared the chief’s view that the latest generation was a little too in touch with their feelings. Still, he wanted this dealt with. “You need to call your guys in and hear them out,” he said. There was no reason for high school gossip over PowerBars and Red Bulls. It could grow into something ugly that would impact the mission. For the good of everyone, he said, make peace.
After Alazzawi left, Eddie stalked off and found a few of the guys from Alpha cleaning weapons. He cornered one of the younger guys from Squad 2, Christian Mullan. Who’s talking shit about me? asked Eddie. Mullan didn’t answer. There was a pretty good roster of possibilities. Could have been anyone in the platoon. He told Eddie he didn’t know. Well, tell them to tell it to my face like a man, Eddie said, so I can break their noses.
He walked off.
A short time later, a text from Dalton Tolbert pinged on the phones of all the senior SEALs in Alpha. They had set up a group chat at the end of deployment specifically to coordinate how to deal with Eddie. During the showdown in Mosul over kicking out Joe Arrington, Eddie had told the guys they were acting like a gossipy bunch of women in a sewing circle. In his honor, they named the group text the Sewing Circle. The Circle had decided they were going to report Eddie to the authorities but hadn’t yet figured out how. The obvious way was to report to Portier, but they already had tried that, and it was a dead end. Breisch was the next step up, but they had suspicions about him, too. They weren’t sure where to go from there, but Tolbert pinged them all to say it was time to figure it out.
“I know some of y’all just got back and don’t want to hear this but I guess Eddie is out for blood. We need to talk to someone ASAP,” the sniper told them. “Guess he’s asking around who said he’s stealing.”
“Eddie talked to me in the high bay today,” Corey Scott, the medic, replied. Eddie had warned him he was going to kill the motherfuckers who were talking behind his back and demanded to know who they were. “I told him if he wants to know what people are saying he can bring everybody in and ask. Not sure how to handle him but he is ready to fight or kill people so we do need to have this talk with leadership.”
The others agreed that they were down to tell the leadership ASAP.
“Did he actually say ‘kill’?” Tolbert asked.
“He was talking about fighting people, then mentioned he’d be down to kill someone as well,” Scott replied.
Josh Vriens cracked a joke: “I’ve personally never seen him kill an able-bodied male, so I’m not sure how he intends to do that.” He asked what the end goal was in talking to the leadership. Was it to pull Eddie’s Trident and kick him out of the SEALs or just to make sure he wouldn’t be in a leadership position again?
“That’s their decision,” Joe Arrington said. “We just need to give them the truth because we are concerned.”
Craig Miller told everyone he would take care of it. He was the point man. But before he could speak to anyone up the chain of command, Eddie called a mandatory meeting in the high bay at 1300 hours.
Tom MacNeil saw the text about the meeting and was furious. What could Eddie possibly have to say to all of them after Mosul? The junior lieutenant went to confront Portier and found him talking with Miller in the parking lot just outside the high bay. “What’s this Eddie meeting about?” MacNeil asked Portier. Don’t give Eddie a forum to address the whole platoon. You’ve given him too many chances already. He just needs to go.
Eddie saw them in the parking lot and came over at a fast clip, catching the last few lines of the conversation. The junior officer he had once thought was a rising star was now clearly a liability. Eddie was not ready to back down. MacNeil had turned off the ATAKs just like everyone else. He had snuck around and lied to the SOTF; he had not reported the stabbing he knew had happened. He was in the group photo. He wasn’t clean in all this. Eddie got in the young lieutenant’s face and started yelling.
“I have shit on all of you,” Eddie told him. “If you take me down, I will take all of you down.”
MacNeil and Portier were silent. Miller saw the distant look on the officers’ faces and worried that Eddie might be right.
The meeting started a few minutes later. SEALs gathered in a somber array around the ratty old couches in the back of the high bay. The devilish gaze of the mural of the Bad Karma Chick in her fire-red bustier stared down at them. No one really felt like the embodiment of karma anymore. The room was silent and downcast. The guys didn’t want to be there. Most of them had been hoping they would never see Eddie again.
If Eddie was intimidated by the room, he didn’t show it. He stood up in front of them all and stared down each man. There’s a lot of chatter going around, he said, and I want to address it right now. I bring you in here as a sign of respect. I don’t need to do this. I’ve been called a lot of things…but never a thief.
A silent shock wave went through the room. Eddie’s announcement was almost funny. All the shit that went down, and Eddie wanted to talk about being called a thief? We’re calling you a lot worse than that, thought Dille.
There was an incredulous silence. No one spoke for almost a minute.
“All right, ranks are off,” Eddie said. “Tell me exactly what I stole from anybody. Come on, what did I do?”
Tolbert broke the silence, as usual. Eddie just wanted to discuss the little stuff? Fine, there was no shortage. Fuck it. They could still turn him in for murder tomorrow.
You took Red Bulls out of the fridge on deployment that weren’t yours, Tolbert said. And the communal cash jar on top of the fridge that was used to buy more drinks, you took that too.
Eddie said he might have taken a Red Bull, he couldn’t remember, then said sarcastically, “Please tell me there is something else.”
The dam broke. Guys started jumping in. They had caught Eddie opening their care packages and rooting through to take what he wanted: food, beer, Copenhagen. It’s not like the stuff was just left out somewhere. Eddie had gone into Dille’s room, into his closet, dug through his stuff, and eaten a whole jar of Trader Joe’s cookie butter.
“Hey, sorry,” Eddie said. “When I grew up in the Teams it was more a family, we shared everything.”
Eddie had tried to steal thousands of dollars’ worth of gear on the way home. He had tried to stiff one of the interpreters who bought him testosterone. He had even tried to steal a commemorative shadow box in the safe house created to honor the EOD tech who died on the previous deployment.
Miller was growing angry. He had intentionally decided not to confront Eddie about the murders, but he wasn’t going to let Eddie limit the conversation to Red Bulls and cookie butter. “You made Villanueva buy you drugs,” he said. “That’s really fucked up.”
Eddie placed his hands out, palms down, as if telling the guys to calm down.
“And guys are pissed you’re using them as bait,” Vriens yelled.
“That’s tactics. I’m not going to discuss tactics,” Eddie shot back. “If I went back to Mosul again, I wouldn’t do anything differently.”
The guys kept hitting him with accusations. Any time anyone tried to bring up more serious stuff—firing rockets at nothing, lying about targets, shooting at civilians—Eddie refused to engage. He was there to talk about stealing and stealing only. The rest was tactics. When they were platoon chiefs, they could run things how they wanted.
After about twenty minutes the room went silent. The men were still seething, but there was no way they were going to talk it out.
Look, Eddie said, I know you guys don’t like me, but you just need to get over it and move on with your careers. If you’re willing to drop it, so am I. You guys did good in Mosul, don’t fuck it up now.
Eddie walked out without saying more, pursued by the stares of more than a dozen angry men. The silence hid a standoff that both the chief and his men likely understood could not hold for long.
Eddie told friends he had taken care of the problem. He hadn’t. The guys were still set on turning him in. The question was how. For all their special training, the SEALs knew next to nothing about the military criminal justice system or how to report a crime. And even if they did, as frogmen they didn’t do things strictly by the books. It wouldn’t be cool to go outside the Teams and, say, call the Naval Criminal Investigative Service hotline. It wasn’t seen as right to take family business outside the family. Besides, the SEAL Teams were so anti-NCIS that most of the guys didn’t even know there was a hotline. No one had ever told them.
Right after the meeting in the high bay, the whole troop went on a two-week post-deployment leave. Craig Miller was for the first time in months able to spend real time with his wife and new son. He allowed himself to put Eddie out of his mind. But right after the break, Miller was in a hallway on the third floor of Team 7’s offices and ran into Alazzawi. The senior chief had been looking for him.
“We need to talk,” Alazzawi said.
“Yeah, we do,” Miller agreed. It was the chance he had been waiting for—the chance to report the crime without Portier there to bury it.
Alazzawi pulled him into an empty conference room.
“Dude, what happened to Alpha?” Alazzawi said as he slid into a chair and folded his big, tattooed arms on the table.
Miller sighed. He started with the small stuff: the repeated trips to the Towers, the bad tactics, the stealing. Eddie just wasn’t a good chief.
Alazzawi started to play devil’s advocate. What might seem like bad tactics to a younger guy might be totally fine to an experienced chief like Eddie. And he wasn’t going to fry Eddie over a PowerBar or some beef jerky.
Miller stopped him. It was more than that, he said. Part of Miller wished he could get Eddie fired without telling anyone about the murders. It would be simpler just to make him go away without launching a full-blown investigation. Miller didn’t even know what a full-blown investigation might look like. But Alazzawi seemed unmoved. Bad stuff happened in Iraq, Miller told him. Really bad stuff. Eddie was shooting at civilians and bragging about it. Guys had seen it. Women, old people, children. The guys had confronted Eddie on deployment. They had told Portier, but the officer did nothing.
Alazzawi shook his head in silence. As the senior enlisted guy in the troop, he was in charge of fixing things. How the fuck was he going to fix this? He didn’t hate Eddie like many of the guys in Alpha did. He actually kind of liked him. But he had to do something before things got worse. He couldn’t have guys going around talking about murder. It would cause an insurrection in Coronado and certainly get the attention of Big Navy. He let out a long breath.
Got any proof? he asked. If you come at a guy like Eddie Gallagher with murder accusations, you better have some helmet cam footage or something. Eddie is slippery as an eel. “It’s gonna be your word against his, and it’s going to be difficult to get anyone to believe you, based on his reputation,” Alazzawi said. “So unless someone actually witnessed something—”
“I saw him stab a prisoner,” Miller interjected.
Alazzawi stopped mid-sentence.
“Where the fuck’d he stab him at?” he asked.
On deployment Miller harbored some suspicion that both Breisch and Alazzawi knew about the captive and either didn’t care or outright approved. Alazzawi’s response made Miller believe the senior chief was hearing about it for the first time. Miller pointed to the base of his neck.
When? Alazzawi said.
About four months ago, Miller said.
Holy shit, Alazzawi thought. You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone on the base who really cared that an ISIS fighter was dead. But killing a prisoner of war? That was a different matter. If it was true, it was obviously murder. Cold-blooded. And four months had passed with no action. No matter what happened now, the frag radius was going to be huge. The young officers in the platoon might all be on the hook for failing to report. So might some of the enlisted guys. So might Miller. So what was the senior chief supposed to do now?
Alazzawi wasn’t a pirate, but he had been raised in the Teams among pirates, getting the SEAL code of loyalty and brotherhood drilled into him. It wasn’t expressly said anywhere in the SEAL ethos that every new SEAL memorized, but everyone knew the code of loyalty included silence. That was the dark side to loyalty. Being loyal to your brothers meant you would crawl into a burning helicopter to pull them out. It also meant you didn’t fucking rat. You had your brother’s back, no matter what. You shut up and dealt with things in the family. Eddie had put the platoon in a no-win situation. Come forward, you’re a rat; don’t come forward, you’re a criminal. Rat on Eddie, you betray the brotherhood; don’t rat on Eddie, you betray the rule of law that SEALs swear to uphold. Eddie had served them a real shit sandwich. Alazzawi could either be loyal to Eddie or loyal to Alpha—but not both. And no matter what happened, it was going to be ugly.
Listen, he told Miller, this is serious shit. Portier could go down, MacNeil could go down. Breisch could go down. So could guys in the platoon, if they had any part in it.
Miller nodded. He had the same look of pain and resignation that he had often worn while trying to limp through BUD/S with a broken foot. He had thought a lot about what to do, and he knew everyone might not come out clean. But pain or no pain, he couldn’t ring out, he had to push forward. Maybe Eddie could just be fired or forced to retire. Maybe he could be put at a supply desk somewhere where he couldn’t do any damage. But whatever happened, he couldn’t be in charge of SEALs again.
“All right,” Alazzawi said, “what do you think we should do?”
“I don’t know,” Miller said. “I just don’t want other guys to burn because Eddie is a piece of shit.”
Just then, Portier walked into the room looking for someone. The senior chief stood up and brushed his uniform down as if he and Miller were just wrapping up a friendly chat. Glad you’re back, he told Miller. Enjoy being home.
Alazzawi walked down the hall to Breisch’s office and immediately reported what he had heard. Breisch stuck his head out into the hall, called Portier into his office, and shut the door. Miller watched the lieutenant go in. This is it, he thought. It’s all done. No stopping it now.
About an hour later, Portier walked into the high bay looking as if he’d just gotten a fatal diagnosis. He found Miller sorting gear by the storage shelves and said, “What did you tell Al?”
“I told him everything,” Miller said grimly, almost apologizing.
Portier looked at the shelves and for a moment didn’t say anything. Then he looked over at Miller and sighed as if the Sheriff had screwed up big-time. “Okay,” he said. He started walking away. As he watched him go, Miller felt his skin prickle as pent-up anger from the deployment surfaced. He wasn’t going to let Portier try to blame him.
“And I’m telling you again right now!” Miller yelled. Portier was still walking away. This fuckup was as much on Portier as it was on Eddie. If the lieutenant had only had an ounce of spine, it would have ended before Eddie killed anyone. Miller went around the shelves to catch Portier on the other side. Miller started to list all the things that happened—shooting civilians, the gun runs with the armored trucks. His voice grew louder and louder as Portier walked away. All those stupid missiles and rockets. He was almost shouting by the time he got to photos over the murdered prisoner, half-hoping that someone else in neighboring high bays would hear.
The door slammed shut. The lieutenant was gone.
A few days after the meeting in the high bay, Eddie went to the doctor complaining of a traumatic brain injury. He said it had been caused by a blast in Mosul that had left him unconscious for nearly a minute—a blast the chief had never mentioned to the medics or Alpha’s squad leaders. He told the doctor he was increasingly irritable, had difficulty finishing sentences, couldn’t focus, and was too wound-up to sleep. When the guys from Alpha heard later that he was claiming an injury again, they just shook their heads.
Eddie asked for a referral to go to the traumatic brain injury clinic at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence. His visit to the doctor may have been for a real combat injury that the platoon medics were not aware of, but if Eddie was concerned that some guys in the platoon were maneuvering against him, a traumatic brain injury diagnosis would provide a handy way to get out of the SEALs quickly, and with benefits.
There were signs Eddie knew the high bay meeting hadn’t put things to rest with Alpha. After the meeting, he had several closed-door discussions with Portier, Alazzawi, and Breisch. At times Tom MacNeil was doing paperwork in the office they wanted to use and they would just tell him “Get the fuck out.”
Eddie wasn’t eligible for retirement until 2019. If he wanted to get out with a pension before that, he would have to get a medical discharge. At the traumatic brain injury clinic he could get formal documentation for all the minor combat injuries and psychological issues that he’d downplayed for years. Even without a Purple Heart or other formal documentation of previous injuries, it wasn’t hard for a SEAL chief with several deployments to present enough scrapes and dings to leave the clinic with a medical discharge and a pension. In addition, regulations written to protect troops with brain injuries and PTSD made it difficult for the Navy to discipline sailors for misconduct once they started the medical evaluation process. If things started to go sideways with Alpha and Eddie needed a quick exit from the Navy, the TBI clinic was the best route.
As a bonus, Eddie also left the doctor’s office with a new tramadol prescription.
“I got a script for some trammies, picking it up tomorrow,” he texted the warrant officer friend who had sent him a care package in Iraq.
“Gettin back on the T-train?” the warrant officer wrote back.
“Yup, they are being super cool now that they think I have TBI haha,” Eddie said.
Later that day, after he had gotten out of the doctor’s office, Eddie got news that appeared to make him reconsider going the TBI route. Leaders in the SEALs above the level of Breisch and Alazzawi were impressed with his work in Mosul. They had decided to give him a plum new assignment. He was going to work at the SEALs Special Operations Urban Combat training. It was where all SEAL platoons went to learn how to fight door-to-door and rooftop-to-rooftop in urban areas. What Eddie had done in Mosul, the Navy now wanted him to teach to every SEAL on the West Coast. It was exactly what Alpha had feared: Instead of getting pushed out of the SEALs, Eddie was getting pushed up.
The confrontation in the high bay was the last time the platoon ever gathered together. The two-year training and deployment cycle had come to an end. The new guys moved up in Alpha and welcomed a fresh batch of new guys. The senior guys left for new assignments. Craig Miller, Josh Vriens, Corey Scott, and a handful of others were tapped to become instructors at BUD/S. Joe Arrington became a JTAC instructor. Eddie’s gopher, Ivan Villanueva, went to sniper school. T. C. Byrne and Dalton Tolbert were selected for a punishing six-month ordeal called Green Team in Virginia, where they could try out to join DEVGRU. And after a smashingly successful deployment, Jake Portier was picked to teach up-and-coming platoon lieutenants the art of being a commander in urban ground warfare.
Dylan Dille could have easily moved up, too, but he realized after a few weeks home that he didn’t want it anymore. He had spent years training to become one of the top snipers in the SEALs and now had six months of urban combat experience that would allow him to write his ticket almost anywhere in the Teams. It should have been the height of his career. But he had joined the SEALs to try to make the world a better place, and after Mosul, he no longer thought it was possible to make the world a better place by looking through a sniper scope. It wasn’t just that Eddie had tainted everything he admired about the SEALs. It was something more fundamental. In Mosul, Dille had been given the freedom to kill and the responsibility to decide who lived and died. It didn’t take him long to realize that he wasn’t worthy of that kind of godlike authority. He couldn’t ever quite shake the nagging belief that whatever mix of problems created ISIS, it was foolish to think anyone could kill their way out of them. He wasn’t really sure karma worked like that. He decided to leave the Navy behind. He didn’t know what he planned to do long-term, but he definitely didn’t want to be a shooter anymore.
Miller kept the scattered members of the Sewing Circle up to date with texts and phone calls. He told all the guys about his meeting with Alazzawi and how Al had talked to Breisch. The gears of justice were turning, he assured them, and it was only a matter of time before Eddie was nailed. They could go off to their new assignments knowing they had done their duty. Miller was proud that the platoon had stayed unified and done the right thing. He had a new baby, and his wife was now pregnant with another. With a job as an instructor he’d actually have regular hours so he could focus on being a father. It was a weight off his mind to not have to worry about Eddie.
Eddie spent much of the fall of 2017 chilling out. He had saved up a lot of leave time. His job as platoon chief was pretty much done, but his new Special Operations Urban Combat assignment wouldn’t start till the new year. His wife, Andrea, bought him a devil-red Harley-Davidson and he took classes to learn to ride. He took her out to dinner and went with the kids to the movies. He met up with his buddies for beers and watched the UFC fights. Eddie and Andrea had dinner with Portier and his fiancée, and Eddie gave the lieutenant a respectable bottle of bourbon as a post-deployment gift. He made a number of visits to his buddy Bito’s knife-making workshop to check out new blades. He reminded Portier to put in the paperwork for Eddie’s Purple Heart.
Eddie also tried to find ways to supplement his tramadol prescription without tipping off his wife. “I found a way to order trammies online,” he texted the warrant officer. “You’ll have to order it, Andrea will get in my shit if she finds out. I’ll give you the money. It’s expensive.”
In late November, perhaps believing the drama of Alpha platoon was behind him, Eddie reached out to Alazzawi. If he was going to stay in the Navy, he would need allies. “I realized I didn’t tell you what an honor it was working with you,” Eddie said in a text. “I know I was a pain in the ass at times but I am sure you were too when you were a platoon chief so I won’t apologize.”
The platoon believed Alazzawi was quietly working behind the scenes to nail Eddie for murder, but if he was, he held his cards close. “Congrats on a very successful Platoon Chief run,” he replied. “U Should be very proud of what you did. I appreciate the hard work you put in with the little, if any oversight needed to get it done right. Made my life a lot easier.”
In December, in a gesture of reconciliation to the platoon, Eddie designed a plaque to commemorate Alpha’s deployment. It was a traditional SEAL keepsake made of wood with the image of the Bad Karma Chick engraved at the top. Eddie already had a few like it from previous deployments with the Good Old Boys. This was the first one he had designed himself. There was a spot in the middle where each guy could add a photo from deployment, and the plaque had everyone’s name, arranged by rank.
When the platoon saw the design, they could hardly contain their disgust. It was riddled with typos. Instead of putting Lieutenant Jake Portier’s name in the top spot, Eddie had put his own. And underneath the photo, in a spot where a platoon motto would normally go, Eddie had written, “KILL ’EM ALL!”
“Names missing, names misspelled,” Ivan Villanueva said in a text to the rest of the platoon when he saw it.
“Can I spell my name correctly, or is that extra?” Tolbert replied. He added, “To be fair, I’m surprised it doesn’t just say his name only.”
“Trash,” said one of the mortarmen, Michael Stoner. “Was ‘KILL ’EM ALL’ ever a thing?”
“For some people,” Tolbert said, “it was the only thing.”
“LOL,” said Arrington. Then after a second of consideration, he responded to his own text. “Actually, that’s not funny.”
A month later, Craig Miller cut across the sun-bleached concrete courtyard at the center of the BUD/S training area, where so many generations of SEALs had suffered through endless push-ups and sit-ups that everyone called the space “the Grinder.” Miller marched through the yard, determined to find out what the deal was with Eddie.
It was January 2018, seven months after Miller first reported the stabbing to his platoon commander, Jake Portier, and more than three months after he had reported it to Senior Chief Alazzawi. During those months, Miller thought the SEALs were doing something to force Eddie out of the Teams. Not anymore. He had heard from a friend working in headquarters that Eddie not only was still in the SEALs but had been given a high-profile gig at Special Operations Urban Combat training and was going to be awarded the Silver Star.
Miller was furious. He had assured the other guys in the platoon that things were getting done. The Sheriff always kept his word. He knew that a lot of guys might have let what happened in Iraq slide. After all, little good could come from turning in your chief. Eddie had friends all over Teams on both coasts. They wouldn’t forget. Pirates dealt harshly with rats. No one would call the guys rats to their faces, probably, but over time they’d be quietly ostracized, undercut, passed over, and pushed into more and more marginal assignments until they finally got the message and left the Navy. If the pirates had their way, Miller could say goodbye to the career he’d been working toward his whole life. He might as well just pull off his Trident pin and walk away.
Staying silent was safer. If Miller and the rest of Alpha just kept their heads down, they could continue to coast on the fiction Eddie had created about their awesome feats in Mosul. It was a path to choice assignments. Eddie would almost certainly continue to work his way higher in the ranks. He would reward the platoon for its loyalty. There would be favors, hookups, promotions. The only downside was that Miller would have to live with himself. His son was starting to crawl. One day he would stand up and walk, and eventually he would be old enough to read about the Battle of Mosul and ask about it. Miller wanted to be able to look his son in the eye on that day.
Even so, Miller went back and forth. Sometimes he felt Eddie just needed to be put at a desk where he couldn’t harm any more people. Let him retire. Force him out of the way. That would save the trouble and guilt of sending a SEAL to prison in a public trial that would give the Teams a black eye. But other times, Miller would lie awake in the middle of the night next to his wife and picture what he saw in that dusty yard in Mosul and say to himself that a desk job wasn’t enough. It wasn’t justice.
Eddie had sworn an oath to uphold the Constitution over the body of a man he had murdered. Eddie obviously didn’t believe those words, but Miller did. There was no way to serve the SEALs or the Constitution if guys like the Sheriff weren’t willing to stand up and face the fire. If it sounded a little dramatic, it was also true. Take away willingness to fight for virtue, and the SEALs would eventually just be a well-equipped murder squad.
As new BUD/S instructors, Miller and Josh Vriens had to go through a three-week ethics and leadership course in January 2018. As part of the course, veteran frogmen from every era came to talk about case studies. It was a relatively new requirement that Eddie didn’t have to meet as a new instructor in 2010. It had been put in place because the brass was concerned about the growing influence of pirates and what they called “ethical drift.” For some years, top leaders in the SEALs had known that the Teams were drifting off course. Maybe only a few degrees off true north, but they knew over time it could carry guys into dark waters. Out there, violence was no longer a tool to reach an end, it was the end.
One of the speakers at the class was a white-haired frogman who addressed the mistakes of the Vietnam era. He had served in Senator Bob Kerrey’s platoon when a clandestine kidnapping mission went off the rails and SEALs ended up killing twenty-one unarmed villagers. The old frogman talked about how things had gone wrong and how they had covered it up instead of owning up to the mistake. Over the years it had destroyed some of them.
Vriens came up to Miller after the talk and Miller could see the big sniper was weighed down by worry. Vriens had taken the deployment harder than almost anybody. Once the most gung-ho gunslinger in the platoon, he had grown sullen and silent. He had a toddler at home and another baby on the way but spent most of his time so distracted and angry that his wife started wondering if he had sustained a brain injury in Iraq. At church each week his mind wandered and he barely heard what the pastor was saying. He had once believed the values spelled out in the SEAL ethos were his values: Defend the defenseless, live with honor and integrity, accept the extraordinary risks of the work, be humble and fade away when the work is done. But after Mosul he began wondering if the SEAL ethos was a fig leaf covering a darker set of values: violence and selfishness, silence and loyalty, the creed of every gang.
On top of everything else, Vriens was carrying the weight of the Switchblade strike. The strike had been ruled an accident, and he managed to avoid formal punishment, but he couldn’t deny what had happened. Before Mosul his view of Christianity was basically that if you lived right and did good, you would be rewarded. But now it felt like he was living through some Old Testament ordeal with God repeatedly visiting him with misfortune. He had spent years thinking he was the good guy. He believed the SEALs were good guys. That had been taken from him. He was having nightmares. Even when he was awake, he was tumbling through dark thoughts. He never said the word suicide to himself, but he wasn’t sure he deserved to live.
“Craig, dude, I am not sleeping. I have not been sleeping for a long time,” he said after the class on Vietnam. “We need to do something. I mean, fuck, we could easily be one of these case studies.”
This thing is going to get buried unless we push it, Vriens said. Corey Scott and Michael Stoner were in the same training course, and Miller knew they had the same concern. Vriens had decided to leave the Navy. After a deployment with Eddie he didn’t want to be a SEAL anymore. “Look, I’ll be the fall guy, I’ll put my name on the report,” he said. Other SEALs could call him a rat or a traitor. It wouldn’t matter, he’d be out.
Miller briefly considered it. But having just one guy come forward wouldn’t work. Eddie would tear that guy apart. His support in the Teams was too deep. Alpha had to stay united. That was the key. Miller was sure he could get the commanders to do the right thing. Just hold on, he told Vriens, let me work this out.
That’s why he was crossing the Grinder. Miller had called his former troop commander to see where the investigation was headed, and Breisch had told him to meet in his office. Miller reached the office and pushed open the door.
“Is Eddie really getting a Silver Star?” Miller asked before he even sat down. He knew Alazzawi had already told Breisch about the stabbing, so he couldn’t get his head around why Eddie was going to get a big medal for heroism.
Breisch, like nearly every other SEAL around the Grinder, was fit and slender. He had a frogman’s confident gaze. He smiled. He didn’t seem to want a conflict with Miller.
It looks that way, he told Miller. Does that surprise you?
Yeah, the Sheriff said emphatically. Half the things in the award had never happened, he said, and the other half are things other guys did. “Look, I need to make sure you’re tracking some things,” Miller told Breisch. He wanted to give the commander the benefit of the doubt. Maybe Alazzawi hadn’t told him everything. Maybe he was still in the dark. Miller went through everything about Mosul: Eddie’s random sniper shots, a girl and an old man shot, and a prisoner executed with a hunting knife. Breisch listened with all the reaction of a statue. There was a long pause.
Regulations required Breisch to report even the suspicion of a violation of the laws of armed conflict as soon as he heard them. Miller understood that the SEAL leadership might try some frogman fix that quietly circumvented official channels. By January, though, it was clear they weren’t even doing that.
I need to think about this, Breisch said. He nodded and smiled. He thanked Miller for coming forward and said he would take care of it. He said he had to talk to some people.
Even though it was the third time Miller had reported the murder, he got up to leave feeling encouraged. At least Breisch had listened. He hadn’t argued. He hadn’t kicked Miller out of his office. He hadn’t stuck up for Eddie. Maybe Breisch was finally starting to see Eddie for who he really was. But before Miller could leave, Breisch stopped him.
Besides all the stuff that happened in Mosul, Breisch said, would you feel comfortable letting your son deploy with Eddie?
In a moment, all Miller’s hopes that the commander was starting to understand exploded like a grenade. “Absolutely not!” he said.
Okay, Breisch said, nodding in thought. What about other people’s sons?
“Fuck it,” Vriens said after Miller had told him about the meeting with Breisch. It was a few days later and they were sitting through another class on leadership. Vriens wanted to blow things up and didn’t care what the collateral damage was. “If they want to be shady and try to pretend nothing ever happened,” he told Miller, “we should just go straight to the commodore’s office. And if he doesn’t do anything, we can go to Fox News.”
Miller went to confront Alazzawi, who had been promoted to master chief. Miller still loved the SEAL Teams and wanted to give the system a chance to work. “Guys are running out of patience,” he told Alazzawi. “If you don’t do something, there’s a chance they’ll go to the media.”
Alazzawi snapped to attention. Don’t do that, don’t do that, he said. Frogmen were supposed to be covert. No need to come out in the open. There had to be another way that made everyone happy that didn’t involve a full-blown war crimes investigation. He would figure out a way. Look, make me a deal, he told Miller. Just hold off. I promise I’ll work this out.
Alazzawi talked to some of the top-ranking chiefs. A few days later, at the end of January, the SEAL command pulled Eddie from his job at Special Operations Urban Combat. Eddie was not amused. He went and found Alazzawi at the base in Coronado.
Why am I not working? he asked. Eddie had been talking about his badass combat deployment to whoever at Coronado would listen. When anyone mentioned the bad blood with Alpha, he dismissed it as just a bunch of whiny turds who couldn’t handle Gallagher-style warfare. If the other SEALs saw him suddenly get benched over Mosul, it wouldn’t look good.
Alazzawi tried to be direct. Look, he said, guys from Alpha are raising some disturbing accusations about deployment. It isn’t a good time for you to be an instructor in front of students.
That’s all bullshit, Eddie shot back. Whatever they’re saying, I can clear it.
“This isn’t about tactics. Guys are saying some serious shit about you. Like about a prisoner,” Alazzawi said.
Eddie let out a half laugh, as if to say, Is that it? He knew what they were referring to, he said, and that was bullshit, too. Eddie said he had been working on an ISIS captive and the guy had grabbed for his belt near his gun, so he had fucked him up.
There it was. Even if Eddie was saying it was self-defense, Eddie had just admitted he had killed the captive. Now Alazzawi had confirmation. And a confession. Eddie would have to be dealt with. Alazzawi got up to leave and said, “Hey, man, it’s your story, be able to tell it. Because at the end of the day that’s the allegation coming out on you.”
It’s all good, Eddie said. Don’t worry, I can clear it.
Later, when he texted a SEAL chief and longtime friend he sometimes talked trammies with, he was much less confident.
“I am dealing with some shit, I’ll have to tell you on Monday. It’s fucked,” he said.
“Geez, bro, you good?” the chief asked.
“No,” Eddie said.
Eddie was never one to give up, and he wasn’t going to now. He wanted his sweet Special Operations Urban Combat training assignment back. He wanted his medals. He talked with Alazzawi and Breisch and tried to smooth things over. He went up the chain to the top enlisted SEAL master chief at Coronado, hoping to figure out how to make Alpha go away. It didn’t go well. “Nothing can be done with these turds,” Eddie texted his chief friend after the meeting. He said the command master chief was worried that if an official investigation started, no one could stop it. Best thing to do is just lay low and see what happens. Maybe it would just simmer down and go away.
“So I’m chilling here for a while,” Eddie texted. But he wasn’t just going to sit there and take it, he told the chief. “I am just going to let everyone know who these fucks are and what they are about.”
He was pretty sure he knew which turds were talking shit: Craig Miller and the sniper twins, Dalton Tolbert and Dylan Dille, who had second-guessed Eddie all deployment.
Eddie didn’t know what they had on him. If it was just their word, then he could probably survive it. He had been through investigations before and had always emerged intact. But if it was more, it could be a problem. There were a lot of photos and videos taken the day of the stabbing. Who knew where they all ended up? Eddie started reaching out to guys he thought he could trust. T. C. Byrne was the medic he had hand-selected to come to Alpha platoon. Eddie had given Byrne a glowing recommendation for Green Team, and they had parted on good terms. He tracked him down to find out what he knew.
Eddie didn’t know he was part of the Sewing Circle.
“Had an awkward run-in with Eddie in the parking lot behind the team,” Byrne texted the group. It was mid-February, a few weeks after Eddie learned some guys in Alpha were pushing an investigation. “He asked about Green Team, then he immediately said he’s getting forced out and he’s moving on. He mentioned the video of him is the reason. He was being very vague.”
“Vague about what though?” Michael Stoner asked. “I feel like he’s more than likely already been notified that we all reported it up and what we reported up.”
“He is trying to figure out if there is a video,” Miller guessed. “If there isn’t a video, he may try to force an investigation to clear himself. If he thinks there is, he will accept his fate. He is just probing.”
What both Alpha and Eddie didn’t know was that nothing had been officially reported up. A handful of senior enlisted frogmen, led by Alazzawi, were thinking about shoving Eddie into a new assignment in a quiet corner where perhaps he would eventually get the message and leave the SEALs, but Breisch had not alerted the chain of command, so no criminal investigation had started, and chain of command at Coronado still had no clue. Neither did the larger Navy or the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
The frogman plan to get Eddie to disappear quietly might have worked if the guys in Alpha had been on board. But they weren’t. In fact, they were doing the opposite of keeping it quiet. To anyone in the Teams who asked, they would say that Eddie was a lying, thieving psycho who had no business being in the SEALs. Ask for details, they were happy to provide them, war crimes and all. Golf platoon was talking too.
Gossip about Eddie was getting so widespread by March 2018 that Breisch and Alazzawi decided they needed to call Alpha together and give them an ultimatum: Either report Eddie Gallagher for war crimes or shut the fuck up. They told the platoon to meet with them.
Miller texted the guys and asked if they were willing to talk to their old command team. Their quick replies left no doubt.
Dylan Dille was in.
Michael Stoner: “In.”
Josh Vriens: “Down.”
Corey Scott: “Fine with me.”
Joe Arrington: “Yup.”
Ivan Villanueva: “Send it.”
A. J. Hansen: “Check.”
Dalton Tolbert and T. C. Byrne had just left for Green Team. Tom MacNeil had moved to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey as he climbed the officer ladder. David Shaw the JTAC was on his way out of the Navy. None of them could be there, but all told Miller they were behind him. That was the vast majority of Alpha. As far as Miller knew, there was no one in the platoon that didn’t want Eddie dealt with.
Alazzawi told the SEALs to meet at a lecture hall called the Donnell Classroom, not far from the Grinder. It would be big enough to hold all of them but private enough to have a real discussion. At the very end of March 2018, seven SEALs from Alpha wearing green camouflage uniforms filed into the room a few minutes before 11 a.m. Nearly all of the senior SEALs were there: Miller, the lead petty officer; the snipers, Vriens and Dille; and Scott, the medic who had witnessed the stabbing.
Breisch took his place at the front and told them he was tired of the trash talk. It was time either to report Eddie to the authorities or to drop it. The gauntlet was thrown down. The former enlisted SEAL turned troop commander apparently was not going to betray the code of loyalty, even though regulations required it. He was putting it on the junior SEALs, almost daring them to act: You want to rat on Eddie? Then you do it.
Miller was starting to think the boss would back Eddie no matter what. He knew Breisch and Eddie had come up through the Teams together and Breisch had stood by Eddie at every turn. Now Eddie was the star of the Battle of Mosul and Breisch’s highest-profile SEAL. If he was suddenly revealed as a war criminal, it would tarnish everything the troop commander had accomplished. People might start asking what kind of officer Breisch was.
Breisch warned the platoon that if a bunch of relatively low-ranking guys reported a chief like Eddie, they might end up looking like fools. Unless they had photos or video or something hard, forget it. The SEAL Teams would not look kindly on it, and the accusers would all get their Tridents pulled and be tossed out of the Navy. It was up to them, he said.
None of the SEALs had ever been taught that under Navy regulations, it was not up to them. Officers were not supposed to ask the troops whether they wanted to report a crime. Crimes were not reported after taking a vote. And it was not the job of the commander to try to weigh the facts and decide whether an investigation was really warranted. That was what the investigation was for. Everyone was supposed to report up the chain of command and move on. Other authorities would order the independent fact-finding and decide what to do.
Alazzawi got up in front of the men and said what they all knew. “Fellas, the frag radius of something like this is going to be fucking major.” The master chief was a year older than Breisch and had deployed more. He was supposed to be the mature one in the room, the leader, but he seemed to argue both sides, as if he was himself unsure what to do.
Alazzawi had zero love for those “KILL ’EM ALL” crusaders in the Teams. His full name was Brian Hussein Alazzawi. His father had immigrated from Iraq in the 1970s. A lot of his family still lived there. On deployments he’d seen SEALs trash houses and rough people up, smash things for no reason, and dismiss it by saying, “Fuck the towelheads.” He was always one to push back. The war was not with the Iraqi people; it was with the criminals and jihadists. There was a difference between being an operator and being a pirate. If Eddie couldn’t distinguish between doing the job and making war on an entire culture, then fuck him.
At the same time he worried that the investigation might take down a lot of good SEALs. He suspected other stuff had happened on deployment and it would all come out if NCIS got involved. The SEAL Teams had long existed on the edge of what was acceptable. They had to. They were doing the nation’s dirty work, not teaching kindergarten. And the guys willing to do it were always going to be a bit fringe. The line between the Navy’s trained killers and criminals was clear, but it wasn’t always very wide. Messed-up things happened in combat, and Alazzawi knew that if SEALs didn’t stand together, if they let a bunch of rear-echelon desk pilots pick them apart after the fact, everyone might end up behind bars.
Then there was the problem of Eddie. Alazzawi had supervised him for three years. He knew Eddie was a hard dude. Attack him head-on, he wasn’t going to back down. “Eddie’s like a cornered rat. If you come at him, he’s going to fight,” he told the platoon. He’ll pull out everything. He’ll try to take you down. So don’t come at him unless you have something real and you are ready.
Some guys in the room asked if there was a middle way. They didn’t want to blow things up with a criminal investigation; they just wanted Eddie out of the SEALs.
Alazzawi shook his head. It doesn’t look that way, gents, he said. Right now, Eddie Gallagher looks great on paper. Best chief in the team. Top marks. Medal for valor. Even if they got him moved out of his Special Operations Urban Combat assignment, he’d get a new assignment and probably do pretty well there. He always does. People like him. He’ll become a senior chief. He’ll probably even become a master chief. He’ll almost certainly be back out there eventually leading SEALs.
“So that’s it?” Josh Vriens said, his eyes throwing daggers at the leaders. “Eddie gets to just go on with his life? He said he’s gonna kill us.”
Do you really think he’s going to kill you? Breisch said. He raised an eyebrow.
“I saw him shoot a little girl,” Vriens fired back.
“And I saw him stab a guy,” Corey Scott said.
Breisch stopped them. It was as if he specifically didn’t want to hear about any crimes. If he insulated himself, there would be deniability, a chance he could stay clear of the blast. If you saw anything criminal, report it, he said. If not, shut up. Up to you what you want to do.
Both Breisch and Alazzawi left the room to let them confer.
Dylan Dille was the first to speak. They had been kept separated by squad in Mosul, and he still didn’t have a full understanding of who had seen what there. If they were going to report Eddie, he wanted it to be clear. “So who actually, no shit, with their own eyes saw Eddie commit a war crime?” he asked.
“I saw him stab the guy,” Scott said. He said that Villanueva, who had been unable to attend the meeting because of training, had seen it, too.
“Me too,” said Miller.
Vriens spoke up about the girl.
Dille said he had seen Eddie shoot multiple times at civilians but was only sure the chief had hit the old man on Father’s Day. Dille said Tolbert had seen it. Josh Graffam, too.
“So what do you guys think we should do?” the Sheriff asked, looking around.
Vriens spoke up. He was getting out, so he didn’t care about himself, but his instinct was to protect his friends. Eddie said he has shit on all of us, and he probably does, he said. There were guys who posed for the photo. Guys who took their own photos with the body, guys involved in the Switchblade strike. He knew there were guys who took sniper shots they regretted. “Look, we do this, that’s all going to come out,” he said. “A lot of us are going to take it on the chin. We could all end up getting fired. Are you good with that?”
There was a moment of silence.
To everyone’s surprise, Corey Scott, who very rarely had much to say, spoke first. The Ghost was slated to get out of the Navy, but for now he was an instructor at BUD/S with Miller and Vriens. He turned to them. “Eddie’s going to be leading SEALs,” he said. “If Eddie gets one of our students killed on a deployment, how are we going to look their parents in the eyes knowing we could have stopped him?”
There was a long silence.
“Okay, let’s take a vote,” Miller said. “Who thinks we should report—”
Before he had finished, Scott put up his hand.
Vriens was surprised. He considered Scott a guy who showed up late, left early, and only did what was expected. He wasn’t exactly a man who charged ahead with the SEAL ethos on his sleeve. If Scott was that adamant about reporting Eddie, then Vriens was one hundred percent behind him. He raised his hand.
Dille felt the same way. He knew the weight of the investigation would fall most heavily on the witnesses to the stabbing. He wasn’t going to vote yes unless they were on board. Scott was the one who had seen it most clearly. If Scott was in, Dille was in. He raised his hand. One by one, so did everyone else.
Breisch popped his head back in the door of the classroom. “So you want to report something?” he asked. Okay, he said, no problem, I’ll take care of it. But for the record, he said, this was the first time he had heard about anything criminal.
Miller felt they had no choice but to trust Breisch. It was Friday. The team had Monday off for Easter. Breisch said he would make the report to the Team 7 commander first thing Tuesday.
Tuesday morning, Breisch, Portier, and Alazzawi went to the Team 7 commander’s office. They sat down to tell the commander in charge about the murder allegations, but then Breisch and Portier talked in circles. They brought up problems with rumors and petty stealing in Alpha and complaints of bad tactics. They talked about bad blood between disgruntled SEALs. No war crimes were mentioned.
That afternoon, Alazzawi found Miller. “They bitched out,” he said. “They didn’t fucking do it. It’s on you now.”
Almost exactly fifty years before Alpha met their leadership in a classroom at Naval Base Coronado, a company of about 150 Army soldiers in Vietnam poured out of helicopters and began raking a small village with gunfire. The troops encountered no resistance but continued shooting anyway. They went on a rampage, setting huts on fire, stabbing old men, raping women, and taking scalps as trophies. That morning became known years later as the My Lai Massacre and was eventually recognized as the most notorious atrocity of the Vietnam War. But on that day and for several years after, the Army proclaimed it a decisive victory. Newspapers across the United States carried news of a sweeping triumph. No Viet Cong fighters had been seen in the village, but The New York Times declared on the front page: “G.I.’s, in Pincer Move, Kill 128 in a Daylong Battle.”
Some soldiers on the ground had witnessed what really happened and immediately sounded the alarm, but they were repeatedly ignored, sidelined, and silenced. No investigation started. No soldiers were questioned. No one went to the village to document the bodies. Instead, the colonel in charge issued commendation letters for a job well done.
The witnesses kept pressing authorities to do something, but by that point the whole chain of command was exposed. Admitting to a massacre and a cover-up would make the Army look bad. It wasn’t just the soldiers who did the killing, it was the commanders, and the commanders’ commanders, and the Army as a whole. Careers and promotions were on the line. Support for the war could be poisoned. The Army began a systematic effort to investigate the massacre out of existence and deny that it had ever occurred. A few months later, the Army issued a report that found that “the allegation that U.S. Forces shot and killed 450 to 500 civilians is obviously a Viet Cong propaganda move to discredit the United States” and took no further action.
Witnesses refused to give up and eventually took their allegations to Congress. Two years after the massacre, the Army charged eleven soldiers and officers with murder and rape and another fourteen officers with the cover-up. Then everyone involved tried to put the blame on someone else. The low-ranking soldiers said they were just following officers’ orders. Officers said they had never ordered anything. Ultimately, in the systematic massacre of hundreds of people, only one junior officer named Lieutenant William Calley Jr. was ever convicted.
Craig Miller now found himself in a situation that, if not nearly as horrific as My Lai, had managed to exploit all the same weaknesses in the military. He had witnessed a murder. He had reported Eddie in Iraq. He had reported Eddie when he got home to Coronado. He had reported Eddie across the desk from the troop commander. He’d brought all the guys together to issue a united decision to report Eddie. Every time, nothing happened. The SEAL Teams seemed set on burying it.
No one along the way had ever told Miller to fuck off—at least not explicitly. Instead Miller got a soft, bureaucratic “Thank you for coming forward and sharing your concerns.” But after nearly a year of hearing that, he now had little doubt that “thank you for coming forward” and “fuck off” were effectively the same thing. He had been raised to trust the SEALs, to see the frogmen as a true brotherhood, but he began to wonder if the whole thing was tainted by pirates.
Miller wasn’t willing to become one of Eddie’s accomplices. He didn’t want to be that white-haired frogman the SEAL Teams invited back fifty years later to turn his regret into a lesson. No more wasting time. Alazzawi was right: It was on Miller now. On April 6, 2018, just a day after hearing that Breisch had bitched out in his meeting with the Team 7 commander, Miller went into Breisch’s office with an iron look on his face. He found him at his desk and Portier sitting on a couch across the room. Both looked startled when the Sheriff came in.
“We’re going to report it right now. Right now,” Miller said.
Okay. No problem, Breisch told him. His voice danced with the nervous compliance of someone asking a bank robber to put down a gun. He nodded his head while he gathered his thoughts. Sure, we can do it right now, he said, but hang on a sec. Okay. Now. He paused and turned to Miller. Now, what are we talking about? What do you want to report?
Miller looked at the lieutenant commander like he had lost his mind.
“Eddie,” Miller stammered. “Eddie and the prisoner.”
Breisch scrunched his brow in an expression of confusion and waited, mouth half-open.
“The ISIS prisoner Eddie killed in Mosul?” Miller said.
Breisch held up his hand. Wait a minute, he said, you’re telling me Eddie Gallagher killed an ISIS prisoner on deployment?
Miller looked around the room. It was so ridiculous it had to be a prank. He started to wonder if it was all being recorded. Then he regained his bearings. Whatever shit was going on, it didn’t matter. He crossed his arms on his six-foot-two frame, his feet planted firmly in the middle of the office, his frogman watch on his wrist. If Breisch was recording, Miller wanted to say exactly what had happened.
“You knew about it. This isn’t the first time we’ve talked about it. I have witnesses,” Miller said. He looked at Portier. “Jake, the first time I talked to you about it was the night it happened.”
Portier looked down. He mumbled that, actually, he didn’t learn about it until near the end of the deployment.
“Whatever,” Miller said. “Let’s do it right now. How do we get this started?”
Breisch acted like he’d been asked how to repair a nuclear submarine. I’m not sure, he said. I guess we could send an email to one of the legal people? He turned back to his computer. He started typing and narrated as he did. Okay, so, Special Operator First Class Miller witnessed Eddie Gallagher stab…a prisoner?
“Yeah, in the neck. And Corey Scott witnessed it too,” Miller said. “He’s already mentioned it to you several times. He needs to be on there.”
Breisch nodded and typed. It was no more than three sentences. Miller’s trust in Breisch had grown so thin that he stepped around the desk to make sure the email was actually there and stood watching until Breisch clicked Send.
Breisch looked up at Miller. “Okay,” he said. “It’s done.”
Within hours the Team 7 commander and the commodore in charge of all SEALs on the West Coast had read the allegations. By the end of the day, they had notified the Navy’s version of the FBI, the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.
A few days later, Portier submitted his papers to resign from the Navy.
Miller walked out of the room more angry than relieved. He didn’t understand why the SEALs made it so difficult to do the right thing. But at least now the report had left the pirate ship. Outsiders had it. Professionals. They would know what to do.
Miller was proud of Alpha. The investigation might turn out to be a hard fight, but they were all stacked up and going through the door together. Eddie wasn’t going to split them. Miller wasn’t sure how it would turn out. He’d never dealt with the Naval Criminal Investigative Service before. But at least his brothers were with him.
He was still savoring that new feeling of lightness at home that night on the couch with his wife as they watched their son crawl around the living room when his phone rang. He recognized the area code from his hometown in Texas and picked up. On the other end was a strange voice, a guy speaking with a fast West Texas twang. He introduced himself as Jake Portier’s lawyer, then said, You’re in way over your head on this, my friend.
Before Miller had a chance to say much, the man fired a barrage of declaratives: This NCIS deal isn’t going to end well. I know you think you’ve thought it through, but you haven’t. They’re going to search your house. What are they going to find? Any unregistered firearms? Any gear you’re not supposed to have? What about those photos you guys were in? Everyone’s going to lie to protect their buddies, and then NCIS will charge all of you for it. Half of your boys are probably going to get kicked out of the Navy over it. Some might even go to jail.
Miller could feel tension balling up in his chest. He hadn’t even caught the lawyer’s name, but the guy already seemed to know everything about the case. Miller looked over at his wife, then at his son on the floor. He started to respond, but the man cut him off.
Guys get screwed over all the time because they think they can trust NCIS. Bad idea, the man said. Not your fault, you didn’t know, but NCIS is not your friend. Now you need to protect yourself. You need to protect your friends. First, don’t talk to the cops. Period. Then get a lawyer. I can represent you if you want. I’ll do it for free. Everyone will be fine if guys just shut up, now. No point in being a hero. There isn’t enough evidence to convict, anyway. It’s just a he-said-she-said case. Eddie is going to walk. Hell, he’ll probably get a book deal out of it. And all you’ll get is screwed.