“With as many details as you can, just tell me the story.”
Craig Miller was sitting at a tiny table in a small windowless interrogation room with blank white walls. Just a block away, huge gray warships stood in rows along the pier of Naval Base San Diego, and the sun glinted off the Pacific. But Miller was deep inside the offices of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service. All he could see were four blank walls, three cheap office chairs, a box of tissues on the table, and two agents in plain clothes staring at him.
Miller was wearing a plain gray T-shirt and jeans to try to be inconspicuous, but his frogman Rolex Sub was still on his wrist. His big frame hunched uncomfortably forward. He had his arms between his knees. He was nervous, tense, already upset, though he had been trying to keep himself calm.
The lead agent tossed a notebook on the little table. His name was Special Agent Joseph Warpinski. Nothing seemed particularly Navy or police about him to Miller. He was tall and slender and wore jeans and a plaid flannel shirt. He had a full, thick beard and the low-key, confident way of speaking that one might hear from an especially discerning barista at a hipster espresso bar. He wasn’t scribbling notes. His hands rested in his lap like he was settling in for a long conversation. And he didn’t talk like a cop.
“With as many details as you can, just tell me the story,” Warpinski said gently. Then he sat back patiently, letting quiet flood the tiny room. Miller had decided to ignore the mysterious lawyer and meet with NCIS without representation. He hoped it wasn’t a mistake. Sitting in that tiny room, he realized that he had never told the whole story, start to finish, to anyone. He had mentioned bits and pieces to his wife and parents, mostly in bursts of frustration. He’d talked over what to do with the guys, but just to learn who knew what. He’d tried to tell the story to Breisch and Alazzawi, but those conversations had felt more like sparring matches. Miller wasn’t sure if he had ever even fully told the story to himself.
Now he had the time and space to tell it, and someone who mattered waiting to hear it. That, in itself, made him hesitate. He hadn’t been able to shake the conversation with that bizarre lawyer from the night before. He had stayed awake all night in bed wondering if he’d be locked up for the act of trying to report a crime. When he left home that morning, he hugged his wife tightly and told her he was unsure if he would ever come home. Now he had agents listening, and he wasn’t sure if they were waiting to spring a trap.
“Okay.” Miller let out a long breath and fumbled with a pad of paper. “I brought my notes…just stuff I jotted down this morning, ’cause I didn’t know…” He glanced at what he had written and shook his head. He cleared his throat. He pressed his hand up to his temple. And in halting half sentences, he began.
In early May 2017, he said, his platoon was on the edge of Mosul. They were firing mortars and calling in air strikes on ISIS. They were there to support the Iraqi Army. And then a bunch of Iraqi soldiers arrived at their position with a wounded ISIS guy across the hood of a Humvee. “Probably like a sixteen-year-old or whatever, and I look over, and Eddie is there,” Miller said. “I thought that was weird. Because Eddie was supposed to be with the forward element, and I couldn’t understand why he was there.”
Warpinski listened and nodded.
Miller said he watched for a while, then went to get some food and came back. “I was walking behind the Humvee and around it,” Miller said. His voice quivered. “And then I looked down and I see this person laying there and he had, like, bandages on his leg, or whatever, and I see Eddie laying over him with the knife, sticking it into his neck.”
As Miller said it, he saw it all happen again. He paused and took several breaths. He shook his head and swallowed hard. Warpinski didn’t say a word. He waited, his hands not moving from his lap.
Miller took another breath. Recalling that morning was harder than he was prepared for. He shifted uncomfortably in his chair and willed himself to go on. “Corey Scott was right there,” he stammered. “He was, like, pretty shocked by the whole thing. I could tell Corey was, like, freaking out a little bit with what he just did. There was nothing I could do at this point so I left that scene and just tried to catch my breath and just think about what I just saw.”
Miller told Warpinski that he immediately went to find the lieutenant in charge and told him what had happened with Eddie, then said the situation was getting out of hand and the platoon needed to leave. He went to pack up and came back to find Jake Portier doing a reenlistment ceremony for Eddie over the body. “And I was just thinking like this is the most disgraceful thing I’ve ever seen in my life,” Miller said.
Warpinski interrupted for the first time. “They do it with the body right there and everything?” he asked.
“Yeah, the body was right there,” Miller said, catching his breath and nodding. “I just remember, like, this is so bad.” Saying it out loud broke down a wall Miller had built around the murder in his mind so he could focus on the deployment. For the first time he saw the full tragedy of the day, not just the murder but the knife Eddie had shoved into every life in the platoon. He thought about going to jail instead of going home to see his wife and baby. His eyes got hot and looked toward the wall. The Sheriff was on the verge of tears.
Miller described how he feared that Eddie might know he had witnessed the execution, so he felt forced to get in the picture Portier was taking.
“I think Jake is like a good person, you know,” he said. “I think Eddie was proud of it, and it was like part of things for him. The guy’s freakin’ evil, man.”
Warpinski asked about the photos and Miller said he didn’t know where NCIS might find them. He knew there was a good chance they were all deleted.
Miller went into the weeks at the Towers, where Eddie started targeting civilians. “The snipers told me they had stopped going after ISIS and were trying to shoot warning shots to get civilians away from Eddie,” Miller said. “And I talked to Tom and Jake about this and…” His voice cracked. He stopped to wipe his eyes. He was a SEAL with a reputation as a hardass; he had not cried because he was upset since he was a boy. But he was overwhelmed. It hurt to know that telling the truth might somehow be seen as a betrayal. He regretted that it might end up with the lieutenants being charged with crimes. He didn’t want to go to jail. And if he was being honest, he was scared that Eddie would find out and try to kill his wife and baby boy.
“Hey, if you need to take a break at any point, man, you can,” Warpinski said. “Obviously this is some big shit, so take your time.”
“Sorry, first time,” Miller said, sniffing.
He said he was pretty sure the chain of command knew about the stabbing for months but didn’t seem to do anything. Then he interrupted himself to mention that Eddie had told guys in the platoon he would kill anyone who was talking shit.
“That’s something you should be aware of,” Miller said, choking up again. “Because, I don’t know, it’s one thing to come back at me, but my family, you know?”
Warpinski glanced at Miller’s notepad and saw there was a bullet point about whether Miller would be charged with a crime. Warpinski told him not to worry. If he had even the slightest suspicion Miller had committed a crime, he was required to give Miller formal notification of Miller’s rights. “Right now,” he said, “you are one hundred percent here as a witness.”
Miller walked out of the office two hours later a free man. Though he was completely drained and exhausted, he immediately called some of the senior guys in Alpha. He told them he thought it was going to be okay. The agent had listened. He seemed cool. Miller didn’t think any of them were going to jail.
Warpinski left the interview with his mind blown. The agent was thirty-two years old. He had done a little over two years with NCIS and seven with the U.S. Border Patrol before that. He had never worked a war crimes case. And he had definitely never worked a case involving a bunch of SEALs making accusations against their chain of command.
The case had dropped when Warpinski came to work Monday morning. Waiting for him was an email saying two SEALs had witnessed their platoon chief murder a prisoner. That in itself, even before the details came out, was a meteor impact. NCIS, despite the high drama of the top-rated TV series by the same name, was typically a pretty sleepy affair. Most of the cases were low-level drug busts and sexual assaults, with some theft here and there. Most crimes involving sailors occurred off base and were handled by civilian authorities. NCIS rarely investigated a murder. And after fewer than twenty-four hours on the case, it was clear that this wasn’t just a simple murder. An eyewitness said Eddie Gallagher had stabbed a detainee, but there were also rumors of his shooting multiple civilians. There might be a photo of the whole platoon around the dead body. Even more bizarre, the witness said the platoon commander had arranged the photo. And it sounded like there was also a concerted effort by the leadership at multiple levels to keep the crime from seeing the light of day. If even half of that was true, this could end up being the biggest case of Warpinski’s life.
Warpinski already had suspicions about the officers involved. Even before talking to Miller, he had tried to contact Portier, but the lieutenant refused to talk. He referred the agent to his lawyer. That was his right, Warpinski knew, but of course it made him wonder what the lieutenant was trying to hide. After talking to Miller, he had a better idea.
The agent needed to act fast, before any more of Alpha circled the wagons. That afternoon he called Corey Scott, the medic who had supposedly also witnessed the stabbing. He got him to come down to the headquarters the next day.
The Ghost sat down at the interrogation table in a black T-shirt that showed his broad shoulders. He was shaved bald, and his heavy brow and big arms made him look like hired muscle. Warpinski showed him his badge, took down his personal information, then closed his notebook and said, “Why do you think you’re here?”
Scott didn’t hesitate. “Probably for the prisoner stabbing incident,” he said casually. “I was there, Eddie was there, T. C. Byrne, and then Ivan Villanueva.”
Scott leaned back in his chair and started telling the story without any prodding. He seemed relaxed, unemotional—the opposite of Miller. He described how a wounded kid had come in. Eddie and the other medic, Byrne, were working on him, and one of the new guys, Villanueva, was helping. There were a bunch of Iraqis around. Scott came in late and knelt by the head to monitor vitals. As Scott talked, he picked a lash out of his eye and inspected it on the tip of his finger, as if not only at ease but a little bored.
“And then anyways, they kind of had everything under control, so I was kind of at the patient’s head while they were working with him. And then all of a sudden Eddie just starts stabbin’ the dude.”
Warpinski broke in. “Just while everyone was just there working on him?”
“Yeah,” Scott said. “I was at the head. Like, all of a sudden, Eddie’s, like, stabbing this dude in the neck.”
“Did he say anything about it or just start stabbing him just because?” Warpinski asked.
“No. I was kind of shocked, ’cause, like, there was a whole bunch of partner force around, so I was, like—it was a holy shit moment, no idea what to do.”
The SEAL stopped himself and leaned forward. He started talking using his hands to make a point. “To preface all this,” he said, “at the time Eddie was like a very respected chief. Our minds, we weren’t on the lookout, like, ‘Hey, keep an eye on this guy.’ We respected him at the time and didn’t really question anything yet. Had this happened later on in deployment, we would have all been watching him.”
Warpinski asked how close Scott was to the stabbing.
“Like, a foot,” Scott said.
“Did Eddie say anything or just pull out a knife and start stabbing him?” the agent asked.
“He just pulled out a knife and started stabbing him.”
Any chance it was in self-defense? the agent asked.
Scott didn’t hesitate. No.
Warpinski asked if the patient had been stable before the stabbing. Scott said yes. Then Warpinski asked if the patient would have been cared for by the Iraqi Army. Scott nearly snorted. Without going into detail about hearing ERD’s torture captives, he said, “If the Iraqis got him, he probably would have died.”
Warpinski asked what happened after the stabbing.
“I was kind of shocked at first. I kind of looked around. I was like, Who else is seeing this?” Scott said. “And then, like, I kind of stayed at the dude’s head and—like, for a few minutes until he died.”
There was a second of silence. Warpinski didn’t want to interrupt any other details about the death. Scott said nothing.
“You said he stabbed him, one time, multiple times?” Warpinski said.
“It was probably two or three times,” Scott said. He pointed his hand down into the base of his own neck, just above the right collarbone. “It was just like a stab like right here,” he said. “In a few times.”
Scott was straightforward until the agent started asking about the photos that Scott knew he appeared in. Suddenly the medic leaned back and folded his arms and his memory seemed to lapse. His answers became vague. Sometimes only one word. Any idea who was in the photos? No. Any idea who took the photo? No. Any idea who might have the photo? No.
Scott said he wasn’t sure there even was a photo.
A day later, Warpinski had interviews with two snipers in the bag: Dylan Dille and Josh Vriens. The agent had tried to work fast and quiet. He planned to start with the senior guys who had come forward willingly—the Sewing Circle—and then work out from there.
Dille arrived in a long-sleeve plaid flannel shirt and a ball cap pulled low over his eyes. Right away, without any hesitation or much emotion, he started laying out what happened as if he was briefing for a sniper mission. “Eddie…to speak in layman’s terms, he shot at a shit ton of people,” he told Warpinski. In Mosul, Eddie would shoot at just about anyone moving—old men, women, kids. Dille saw the chief fire into crowds by the river. Dille estimated Eddie shot twenty to fifty people, and maybe five of them were legitimate targets. But the sniper was forthright about what he didn’t know. He didn’t know a lot of dates. He didn’t know what had happened to the people Eddie shot at. The only one he really had a date and corroborating witnesses for was an old man Eddie shot in the back on Father’s Day.
“I was, like, just praying for this guy,” Dille said as he described watching the man struggle to get up and lurch away. “I don’t know if you guys are like that, but I, you know, was just praying for him. And he got up and then walked away, and I don’t—you know, I don’t know if he made it.”
What about the captive? Warpinski asked.
Dille said he hadn’t seen the stabbing. He was there right before and right after. But it was his understanding that Eddie had used a custom fixed blade that he always wore in a black leather sheath across the small of his back. Warpinski pressed him for details about the knife. Dille started to describe it, then interrupted himself. You know what, he volunteered, Eddie is genius at manipulating people, but in other ways he’s surprisingly stupid. Eddie had probably never bothered to get rid of the murder weapon. “I wouldn’t doubt at all if he didn’t wash the knife and it’s still sitting in his op box.”
Josh Vriens was just as open as Dille but more emotional. As soon as Warpinski asked the big sniper why he thought NCIS wanted to talk to him, Vriens said, “Yeah, my chief Eddie Gallagher.” He looked around as if trying to decide where to start. “The biggest thing I guess…” He paused to think. “I can give you hours of instances.”
Vriens said he hadn’t seen the stabbing. He wasn’t there that day, but he had heard Eddie admit to it that night. Everyone in the platoon knew. And, he said, “I saw a fourteen-, fifteen-year-old girl get shot in the stomach.” He described the group of girls moving down by the river, then seeing one in a flower hijab get shot and collapse. At first he thought ISIS had shot her, he said, but another sniper, Joe Arrington, told him later that day Eddie had told him he had taken the shot.
“Is there anything you saw that those girls were doing, anything at all that could have justified that shot?” Warpinski asked.
“No,” Vriens said quickly.
“Not a single thing?” he pressed
Vriens paused for several seconds. He rubbed his hand over his scalp as he pictured the scene on the riverbank. “No, I’ll tell you right now, I one hundred percent would not have taken that shot. I don’t know any Navy SEAL sniper that would have.”
Vriens spent most of the interview trying to explain all the toxic behavior that wasn’t exactly criminal. To him the lack of professionalism was vital to understanding the murders. Eddie was completely incompetent at tactics. He didn’t know where the enemy was half the time. One guy got shot. Eddie had almost gotten Vriens killed using him as bait. It seemed like he was trying to get medals. And if you spoke out against him, he’d bench guys. Eddie had the whole command backing him, too. The platoon tried to tell Portier, Vriens said, but he wouldn’t do anything. “He wanted to love the abusive father, I guess.”
As Vriens spoke, he started to realize just how sinister the situation had been, and he could feel his anger rising. “The guy was toxic,” he said. “We would freaking avoid him because the guy was so toxic.”
Vriens knew he had to explain to NCIS why he had not reported Eddie sooner. That was the big question, right? Why had the sniper stayed silent all through Iraq? Why hadn’t he spoken out? Why had he not done anything? He started to lay out how Eddie had put him in an impossible situation because the chief would bench anyone who said a word against him, and other SEALs were counting on him. So he kept quiet. “You shut up and you go out and you deal with it, or you speak up and you get benched,” he said. “And I know for me…” He paused, overcome by the implications of his choice. He looked down and away, trying to hide his tears.
“Guys shot, nearly blown up.” He stopped again, pushed his fists against his brow and cracked his knuckles as tears flowed out of his eyes. He took a breath and tried to continue. “It was like, all right, cool, I can speak up, stand my ground, I’ll get benched and get sent back to the house, and he’ll just do this to a new guy he can manipulate. So I was like, I’m going to be his right-hand man so no one else gets hurt.” He shook his head at his decision, clenched his fists on his forehead, and took several deep breaths as Warpinski watched and waited.
“So I worked for him,” Vriens finally said. “And kept my mouth shut.”
Warpinski was cautiously encouraged by his progress. In the span of a little more than a week, NCIS had interviewed Miller, Scott, Dille, and Vriens. He had also gotten Eddie’s gopher, Ivan Villanueva, who volunteered right away that he saw Eddie stab the prisoner in the rib. Agents had also interviewed the two guys on the East Coast trying out for DEVGRU, T. C. Byrne and Dalton Tolbert. NCIS had three eyewitnesses to the stabbing: Miller, Scott, and Villanueva. They also had at least two other potential murders to pursue: the old man Dille and Tolbert said Eddie shot in the back and the little girl Vriens said Eddie shot in the stomach. Warpinski had at least two more witnesses to track down who apparently knew about those shootings: Josh Graffam and Joe Arrington. Dille texted Warpinski a few days after his interview to let him know he had gone back through some photos and videos from deployment and found close-ups of the knife Eddie used in the murder. It showed a black leather sheath across his back. “That’s awesome and exactly what I needed,” Warpinski replied.
The case was off to a good start.
But having multiple eyewitnesses and a photo of a knife were anything but a slam dunk. NCIS still had no physical evidence that any crimes had taken place: no DNA, no photos of the stabbing, no video, no murder weapon, no blood spatter patterns, no body. They didn’t even know the stabbing victim’s name. Warpinski had no reason to doubt the SEALs who had come forward, but if they testified and Eddie denied everything, there was no physical evidence to back them up. A jury would have plenty of reasonable doubt to acquit.
If the investigation was going to get anywhere, Warpinski needed more. But he knew he probably wasn’t going to get it. The crime scene was already a year old and located in a war zone about 7,000 miles from San Diego. He wasn’t confident they’d find the body or a name. Put up a missing poster of a teenager like that in Mosul and you might hear from hundreds of families. But maybe Dille was right. Maybe Eddie was stupid enough that there was still physical evidence sitting around. If so, the first thing Warpinski would need to do was keep the investigation extremely quiet. If Eddie found out, he might destroy anything that remained. Then it would be over.
Eddie already knew. In fact, he had likely learned about the investigation before Warpinski had. Craig Miller forced Breisch and Portier to report the Law of Armed Conflict violation on Friday, April 6, 2018. Warpinski didn’t get the case until the following Monday. Eddie and his friends were already texting about it on Saturday. And Eddie immediately started working his sources in the Teams.
“So what did you hear?” he texted one of his buddies, a former SEAL named Kenneth Sheard.
“That they were holding it over you…but the ball dropped and a bunch of the new guys are coming after you…with HARD evidence. Threatening anyone who doesn’t jump on board with collusion,” Sheard replied.
Eddie replied that three senior guys in the platoon were saying they had video from one of their helmet cams. He added: “It is so fucked. I don’t know, this whole thing has me stressed. I just want to get out with no trouble.”
“Good copy…you seeing a psych?” Sheard asked. “Start going to psych…say you have ptsd blackout rage…some of it will be true, but go big bro. Honestly…they are coming hard it sounds like.”
Rules designed to protect troops with post-traumatic stress disorder could reduce the Navy’s appetite to punish a SEAL, cut his sentence, or maybe kill the case entirely. Sheard urged Eddie to get his wife to say he was having blackout rage and sometimes hitting her. He said Eddie could then quietly retire, get disability, and he’d win. Eddie gave Sheard the names of the accusers. “Get the fuck out,” Sheard concluded, “and some day we will just kill them.”
Sheard said he had been through a criminal investigation. He gave Eddie a stern warning. “No TEXTING dude. Wipe all your shit. Smash your phone. Bury Hard drive bro. Like don’t fuck around.”
Eddie’s friends immediately started to spread the word that a big investigation was brewing and that guys needed to keep quiet. One texted a member of Alpha platoon on Saturday: “It sounds like NCIS may want to talk to folks about a Law of Armed Conflict case. Here is what a JAG said about talking to NCIS or making a statement,” he said, using the nickname for a military Judge Advocate General lawyer. He included a YouTube video titled “Don’t Talk to the Police.”
The link came from the same mysterious civilian lawyer who had called Craig Miller a few hours after Eddie was reported. He was known in Eddie’s circle at Coronado because he had represented a number of SEALs pro bono in misconduct cases over the years, including a friend of Eddie’s who’d recently been caught with a fake penis used to beat drug tests, called the Whizzinator. That friend had given the lawyer’s name to Eddie just weeks before the investigation launched. Hours after Jake Portier watched Miller force Breisch to report Eddie, the lawyer got a call out of the blue from Portier, asking for help.
The lawyer’s name was Brian Ferguson. He had no direct ties to the Navy or anyone involved, but he quickly became a central force in the case. He was thirty-nine, thin, balding, and a unique model of eccentric. He wore the same pair of worn jeans and faded blue Patagonia polo shirt almost every day—a low-key uniform that seemed half homage to Apple founder Steve Jobs and half homage to people who slept in their cars. He had grown up in West Texas oil country and would sometimes mention that he never had to worry about money, but he was vague about what he did for a living.
He was licensed as both an accountant and a lawyer in Texas and had no office or website but ran several limited liability corporations in his name out of a P.O. box that traced the path of some earlier passions. One LLC was set up to explore bringing high-speed rail to Texas; another was a company for single-fin surfboards. He was also a part-time lawyer in the Air Force Reserve. His civilian work? Ferguson would only tell people that it was not exciting. He moved things between corporations. He knew taxes. His letterhead had an oil derrick at the top. His real passion was representing military clients.
Ferguson was a registered Democrat and a longtime critic of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. It angered him that for years top officers had been able not only to walk away from the chaos they’d made in the Middle East but to get promoted for it. Meanwhile, the little guys at the bottom who did the killing too often got killed, maimed, or drummed out of the service for misconduct after several combat tours. He liked to joke that the military always did the right thing, but only after every other course of action had been exhausted. His act of civil disobedience and public charity in response to the endless wars in the Middle East was to represent the little guys for free. It began by helping out a college friend who went into the Army, then that friend referred him to someone else. He loved to surf and started meeting SEALs on the beach in Coronado. By 2018 much of the pro bono work he was doing was with frogmen.
SEALs who met Ferguson often later described him as a weird dude. He maneuvered with a confident West Texas swagger, but underneath was a jumpiness, as if he were having several thoughts at once. One of the first things SEALs often noticed about him was that he had a habit of revealing in vivid asides that he was gay—not something many people did in the hyper-hetero male world of the SEALs. “Yeah, I know him,” he might say casually of a mutual acquaintance. “In fact, I used to blow him.”
Ferguson had a history of insurgent efforts trying to upend order. As a student at the University of Texas in Austin, he twice ran rabble-rousing campaigns to be elected editor of the university’s newspaper, even though he had never worked at the paper, had almost no journalism experience, and was loathed by much of the staff. A few weeks after he lost his second bid, a short-lived rival right-leaning student weekly paper launched. Ferguson insisted that he had no involvement. Then a few weeks after the launch, he showed up as one of the editors. After graduation Ferguson wooed investors and tried to get control of several major newspapers, including the Austin American-Statesman and the Rocky Mountain News. He assured investors he could reinvent the stodgy news business. Nearly all of those efforts fell flat.
Ferguson made no claims of being a good defense lawyer. In fact, he sometimes said he was barely qualified and had skipped most of his classes at the University of Texas Law School. If you get charged with a real crime, he would tell SEALs, I’ll turn you over to a real lawyer. Mostly he just advised guys who were in administrative trouble, facing, at worst, discharge from the military. The most common advice he gave was to keep quiet. The cops are not your friends; they don’t want to help you. When you talk to them, you will probably try to lie to protect your buddies. Then you’re on the hook for making false statements. Better to lawyer up and stay safe.
The Gallagher case was the biggest thing he had ever gotten mixed up in. When Portier called him, he whipped into action, reaching out to as many people in the platoon as he could as fast as he could. He knew a lot of SEALs. His gut told him that whatever had happened in the platoon, everyone probably had something to hide. He told Alpha he didn’t care if Eddie went to prison or not; he just wanted to make sure they were protected.
Three days after the crime was reported, Ferguson had notified NCIS that he was representing Portier, and Portier wasn’t going to talk. For NCIS, that was a huge blow to the case. The lieutenant was at the center of the whole mess. He not only knew about the stabbing, but he also knew what Lieutenant Commander Robert Breisch knew and when. Despite repeated negotiations, Portier never said a word to NCIS.
Ferguson reached out to nearly everyone in the platoon. He said Big Navy was going to go nuclear over this case. It would fry the platoon to make itself look good. It was going to be an international diplomatic fiasco. The guys might even be sent to a war crimes tribunal in Baghdad to save face.
None of the SEALs knew much about the legal process, and several got scared. NCIS started getting letters of representation from Ferguson for guys Warpinski had not even contacted. The three EOD technicians were some of the first. That surprised the snipers in the platoon, because even before Dragon got shot, those guys seemed to hate Eddie, and Dragon had been around the captive with the medics and in the photo when Eddie did the ceremony. He would have been a helpful witness. Next came Josh Graffam, the new guy. He had often served as a spotter for Eddie. Dille said Graffam had seen the Father’s Day shooting of the old man, and they had talked about it. He was another key witness. But he was invoking his right to remain silent.
As Warpinski raced to collect interviews, more and more doors started slamming. Guys didn’t want to talk. Guys said they had an attorney NCIS would have to go through. Eventually Ferguson, the self-described terrible lawyer, represented thirteen of the twenty-one men who had deployed together to Mosul.
Josh Vriens needed to blow off steam, so he decided to take his dog to the beach. It was the summer of 2018, and the investigation was in full swing. Like most of the guys, he had gotten the hard sell from Brian Ferguson. Unlike most of them, he had told the lawyer to get lost. Vriens wasn’t worried about getting in trouble for telling the truth. He was the most overtly religious guy in Alpha, and he felt like he was being tested by God. He was trying to prove himself worthy. Still, the idea of getting fired or put in jail had him stressed. So did Eddie.
Eddie lived fewer than a dozen houses away in their neighborhood of San Diego. Before the investigation, Vriens had never seen Eddie walk past his house. But when the platoon went to NCIS, Eddie started walking his two French bulldogs down his sidewalk almost daily. Vriens would see him through the window, walking slowly, his stare fixed on the house. Vriens didn’t say anything because he didn’t want to upset his wife. But soon she noticed, too. Vriens took the walk-bys as a message. Eddie knew where he was vulnerable. Vriens and his wife started talking about moving.
That morning Vriens decided to go to the beach to decompress, figuring a few hours playing with his dog in the waves would clear his head. He stepped out his front door and headed out to his car with his eighteen-month-old son in one hand, his dog on a leash in the other, and a diaper bag under his arm. As he opened the car door, he looked up. At the end of the driveway was Eddie. He was staring at Vriens with a tight smirk.
Vriens straightened up and looked at him. Eddie stared back without saying a word.
Vriens could feel the heat rising. If this was Eddie’s way of trying to intimidate him, he wasn’t going to back down. Eddie had done too much bad stuff. It wasn’t just the unshakable image of the girl in the flowered hijab gripping her stomach, it was how Eddie had smashed Vriens’s view of the world. Eddie had taken the SEALs from him. And he wanted to make Eddie pay. He could feel the muscles tighten in his shoulders. If Eddie thought he was so badass, let him try going up against someone besides children and old people. Maybe the chief should learn what it felt like to tangle with someone bigger. Vriens wanted to send him sprawling into the street, then stand over him and tell him how disgusted he was, how for all his boasting and bragging, Eddie was nothing but a stain on the brotherhood and the worst kind of turd.
But Vriens knew instinctively that neither he nor the chief were likely to stop after getting punched. They were trained to go at opponents until someone was dead. Under those circumstances, even if Vriens won, he’d lose. He’d be in prison for years. Eddie would turn into some pathetic kind of martyr. He looked at the toddler in the back seat and the dog gazing up at him. His wife and infant daughter were just inside. His heart was pounding, his fists were clenched. But he realized how much was at stake. He took a deep breath, picked up his son, took the dog, and went inside. Later that afternoon, he started making arrangements to move.
Vriens was not the only guy who feared what Eddie might do. As Alazzawi had warned, Eddie was like a cornered rat. Come at him, he’s going to fight. And the guys expected him to fight dirty. In the civilian world, most threats of violence are only threats, but not in Alpha. Everyone there was, quite literally, a trained killer. They knew how easy it was to slip in, do it, and slip out. They had practiced it. So every threat of violence was serious, and SEALs prepared for war. Craig Miller got a concealed weapons permit. Dylan Dille bought a shotgun to keep near his bed.
By then Dalton Tolbert and T. C. Byrne were far away from the Southern California drama. Both had packed up with their wives and moved to the SEALs’ East Coast home in Virginia Beach to screen for DEVGRU. The Green Team selection course was like BUD/S in hyperdrive. Only two hundred SEALs even got the chance to try out, and the competition just to show up was fierce. Most guys who tried out for DEVGRU didn’t make it. Years before, Eddie had tried and failed to make it. The screening week cut the pool of applicants from two hundred down to seventy. Both Byrne and Tolbert made the cut. But the challenge didn’t stop there. Of that seventy, only about thirty would get into DEVGRU.
For both men, even getting to screen was almost a miracle, considering what they had gone through. For Tolbert, Green Team was the accomplishment he’d been struggling toward for a decade. His childhood hadn’t stopped him. A coma had not stopped him. Eddie wouldn’t either. Arriving at Green Team was his proof to the world that a nobody, frog-catching kid from the Ozarks who’d grown up with nothing could achieve anything he wanted.
Byrne was not as certain. He had been thrown against a truck by an RPG blast and been knocked out cold. Back home he struggled to keep his head straight. He kept forgetting where he had put his keys and wallet. The smallest things would send him into a rage. He didn’t know if it was the stress of everything with Eddie or the lingering effects of the blast. The Navy diagnosed Byrne with a traumatic brain injury, but he wanted to keep going. He tried to put all his problems and doubts in a mental box, seal it up, and leave it behind in San Diego. Making the cut for Green Team was a sign he was back on track. But the case started to weigh on him. He was distraught that the platoon was splitting apart. Gio Kirylo had been one of his closest friends in Iraq, but refused to talk to NCIS. Then there was Dragon. Byrne couldn’t help but remember that he had given Dragon his own blood, and now Dragon had lawyered up and was not standing with Alpha.
Tolbert and Byrne would have loved to forget the criminal investigation. But if they walked away, they would let their brothers down. If Eddie succeeded in dividing them, he had a chance at beating them. Both men had that thought in mind when they got random calls from a Texas number, a lawyer who introduced himself as Brian Ferguson and started warning them that Craig Miller was way out of his league, and if they wanted to save themselves they should keep quiet. Both SEALs politely told the lawyer to fuck off.
Tolbert and Byrne were thrown into months of high-velocity Green Team training and testing. The SEALs had to show they could shoot, jump, dive, run, and fight better and faster than anyone else in the Teams. They had to go through close-quarters combat drills twice as fast as they had at Team 7, with live ammunition and no room for mistakes. The instructors watched every move and could cut a SEAL for any reason.
And they had an extra hurdle. Eddie knew where they were and knew that they were vulnerable, and he appeared to be trying to ratfuck them. Eddie talked often about brotherhood and loyalty, but he started reaching out through the extensive network of SEALs he knew to sink their chances at DEVGRU. He was especially angry about Tolbert, who had defied him in Mosul. He got his SEAL friends to reach out to the instructors. He told one he wanted them all to know “what a rat that faggot is.”
Eddie reached out to another SEAL chief with connections at Green Team and told him, “We can’t let this fucker make it through.”
The Navy moved Eddie to a job in a logistics and supply unit where he was basically expected to babysit a desk until the investigation was over. As he sat there, he seemed to grow confident he would beat the rap. His sources said there was no real evidence—no photos, no video. He didn’t go “hardcore PTSD,” as a friend had suggested. He didn’t try to get out of the Navy as soon as possible. He didn’t even stop using drugs. Throughout the summer of 2018, he hung out with his family, went and had drinks with his buddies, and continued to order trammies online through a friend. He sent a few texts that even suggested he was smoking weed here and there. On June 7 he sent a text to his wife saying, “I love you, I just took a piss test, pray that it’s clean.”
Agent Joe Warpinski had been working the case hard, but he still didn’t have any physical evidence, let alone a smoking gun. And he wasn’t having a lot of luck.
He interviewed Lieutenant Commander Robert Breisch and Master Chief Brian Alazzawi, but both not only contradicted Craig Miller, they contradicted each other. Both said they knew nothing about the allegations of war crimes while they were in Iraq. Alazzawi said they learned about it four months later, around Christmas. Breisch said it was eight months later, days before the formal report was made. During the deployment, Breisch said, he had only heard that some photos were taken with a body. It was nothing criminal, he said, just “poor taste.” And the photos had been deleted. It was no big surprise to Warpinski that both men seemed less than forthright. Admitting they knew too much too early could get them fired. But they didn’t help the investigation.
Alazzawi did say one thing that caught the agent’s interest: Eddie had admitted the killing to him. Before the investigation started, Eddie told him he had been working on the captive when the captive reached for his gun, and Eddie said, “I fucked him up.” That was essentially a confession. It could be very useful.
Warpinski managed to track down platoon JTAC Joe Arrington for an interview, but Arrington had recently talked to Brian Ferguson, and he seemed hesitant. Even though Arrington had earlier confronted Eddie in Iraq about killing civilians and texted the whole platoon in September that they “gotta be honest” about what happened, with NCIS he was halting and vague. He talked about how he saw Eddie as “a selfish dick for years” and watched the chief’s mental state deteriorate over the course of the deployment. But he didn’t volunteer many specifics, especially about crimes. He said he saw Eddie shoot a man carrying a water jug who he thought was probably a civilian. It could have been the man Dille and Dalton saw, but he wasn’t sure. It was possible, he said, that the man was a legal target. Vriens had told Warpinski that Eddie had told Arrington he had shot the little girl. Arrington didn’t mention it to NCIS. He also didn’t mention that he had been in any photos. At one point he asked Warpinski if he would actually have to testify. People might take it the wrong way, he said. It could make “everybody look like a bunch of rats.”
Agent Warpinski’s hopes rose when he learned that T. C. Byrne not only still had the red laptop that everyone had dumped photos on during deployment but also was willing to turn it over without a fight. NCIS ran it through a forensic analysis. But nearly everything on the laptop had been irrevocably deleted. Agents found nothing but traces of a folder called “Eddie’s reenlist day” that had once contained photo and video files from the day of the murder.
Warpinski recovered a few of Byrne’s helmet cam videos that showed Eddie arriving to intercept the captive and saying to the Iraqis, “Is he ISIS? I got him.” But the camera clicked off right as Eddie started giving medical aid. There was another video from Byrne’s cam, recorded a few hours later, showing Eddie flying a drone over the body. But the file numbers showed there were five files in between—videos recorded during the time of the murder and the reenlistment. Those five files were completely gone. Portier and Eddie had ordered the platoon to get rid of the photos, and someone had erased them in a way not even NCIS could undo.
Most murders started with a body but no suspect. This one started with a suspect but no body. And NCIS didn’t even know the name of the victim. Other than the statements from a few SEALs, there was still no evidence a murder had even taken place: no DNA, no blood, no murder weapon.
NCIS sent a crime scene investigator to Mosul to hunt for the body and other evidence. The investigator located the blown-out Towers that the platoon had returned to over and over, still standing on the edge of the Tigris River. Inside, up the crumbling stairs, he found dozens of spent rounds from rockets and hundreds of sniper rifle shells. It was all consistent with what the witnesses described, but none of it proved there had been a crime.
Mosul was still far from safe. The investigator had to rely on an armed escort to get around. He drove out to the abandoned compound where the prisoner had been killed. It had been repaired and was now a base for Iraqi soldiers. The investigator found an English-speaking Iraqi colonel and explained what he was looking for. The colonel said he knew nothing about it.
The investigator made a quick search of the yard where the ISIS fighter had been killed and found a blue glove like the ones the medics had worn and what looked like a piece of skin and a bit of hair in a drain near where the SEALs said the body was stabbed. In another case, NCIS might have been able to use the skin to match the DNA of the victim. In this case, they had no idea who the victim was. They had no family they could use to match the DNA. The investigator asked if the colonel knew of any bodies buried around the compound. The colonel smirked as if to say, You’ve got to be kidding me. “This is war,” the colonel said. “Bodies were all over the streets,” he said. Twenty Assyrians were buried just outside the gate. The whole place, he said, was “like the horror movie Chucky with dead people everywhere.”
NCIS was near a dead end. There wasn’t much left to do but haul Eddie in and hope he would talk.
June 20, 2018, was a Wednesday. As usual, Eddie had nothing much planned at his logistics job, but that morning the commander called and said he needed to meet with Eddie at 9:30. Eddie put on a uniform and knocked on the commander’s door. When the officer opened the door, Joe Warpinski and a handful of other NCIS agents were waiting. They told him he was under arrest. They emptied his pockets, which held some nicotine gum, his keys, and an iPhone. Warpinski picked up the phone. Of course he wanted to see what it held.
You’re in a secure area, phones aren’t allowed in here, Warpinski told him. He told Eddie he was going to have to take it. Do you need to call anyone first? he asked. Warpinski watched over Eddie’s shoulder. iPhones were hard to crack, but not if a suspect was careless enough to give away his code. Warpinski watched Eddie’s thumb punch in four numbers and committed them to memory.
The agents drove Eddie to Naval Base San Diego and put him in one of the cramped, blank interrogation rooms that had hosted so many members of Alpha. Warpinski took off the cuffs and let Eddie stew there for a while before coming in to talk to him. He knew there was a good chance Eddie would talk. In years of law enforcement, Warpinski had learned one constant was that most suspects were too dumb to keep quiet. Get them to believe that telling the truth would make things go easier for them, and they would often spill their guts. He had worked a case right before Eddie’s in which a low-ranking sailor on a destroyer stole a crate of grenades. Of course the kid had denied it, even when a state trooper found some of the grenades on the side of a desert highway in a Navy backpack with the kid’s name on it. During the interrogation, Warpinski told the kid that investigators had found his fingerprints and DNA all over the grenades. It was a lie, but sometimes agents told lies to get the truth. The sailor invoked his right to remain silent. No problem, Warpinski and his partner told him, we have the case in the bag anyway. We’ll write up our reports, but those reports will reflect whether you cooperated or not. It didn’t take long for the kid to change his mind.
Warpinski came in and sat down across from Eddie. He explained that Eddie was being accused of war crimes, including murder. There was a ton of evidence. They had talked to all sorts of witnesses. “We just want to hear your side of the story,” he said.
Eddie refused. He had seen friends go through criminal cases. He knew better than to say a word. He had been through interrogation training. No matter what, he’d learned, keep denying. Even if you think they have you, don’t give a shred of validation. Even if there are eyewitnesses. Even if they say they have video. Deny, deny, deny.
Eddie said he wasn’t talking. He gave Warpinski the number of a lawyer named Colby Vokey who was representing him. Then he kept quiet. Warpinski took the number and said he would be back soon. Eddie sat in the room for another six hours.
While Eddie was locked up at NCIS, twenty agents with tactical gear and a search warrant were raiding his house. They crossed the small yard in bulletproof vests, some with their guns drawn. Eddie’s eighteen-year-old stepson came to the door with Eddie’s nine-year-old son. Agents pulled both out into the yard with guns drawn and put them into a van. Eddie’s wife, Andrea, wasn’t home. His stepdaughter was visiting her father in Ohio. With the house empty, agents filed in looking for anything that might be involved in the crime: knives, guns, drugs, and any phones or computers that might have videos or photos from Iraq.
Eddie lived in a narrow stucco town house owned by the Navy. Nearly all the decorating had been done by Andrea. Little showed that Eddie lived there. Between training and deployment he was gone so often that he was almost a visitor in his own house. Eddie’s few additions included a bench press and weights in the garage and a small alcove near the back door where his military plaques and awards hung. The agents rifled through drawers and boxes and seized a pile of old phones and iPads. They found a variety of knives, but none of them matched the description of the custom-made hunting blade in a black leather sheath. In the garage they found a medic’s kit, a box of ammunition, and some breaching saws, all stolen from the Navy. They found bottles of testosterone and tramadol. It was all contraband, and any of it could get Eddie kicked out of the SEALs, but none of it helped with the murder case. With Eddie refusing to talk, Warpinski had to either turn up some evidence fast or drop the whole thing.
While one NCIS team was searching Eddie’s house, another was searching his operator’s cage. Eddie’s cage had once been in the Alpha high bay, but he moved it when he started working at Special Operations Urban Combat. However, a lot of his old stuff from Mosul was still there. Inside Eddie’s cage, amid the backpacks, duffel bags, and camouflage uniforms, NCIS found a black plastic Pelican case about the size of a cooler: his operator’s box. The outside was decorated with a sticker of a Punisher skull that said, “ISIS hunting permit.” There was a tag on the handle that read “Gallagher.” An agent opened the box to reveal a rat’s nest of gear. Sitting right on top were the Half Face Blades knife and hatchet Eddie had promised his friend Bito he would bury in someone’s skull. Neither matched the description of a small custom blade in a black leather sheath. Next to them were Eddie’s body armor. Below was a slew of smaller gear: a water bottle, a flashlight, rifle magazines, nicotine gum, a stack of patches from ERD, some batteries. The agent lifted it piece by piece. He picked up a radio headset, and there it was: a custom hunting knife in a black sheath. The blade was about three and a half inches long. The handle was mottled gray. It matched photos from the deployment exactly.
Dylan Dille had been right: Eddie had, indeed, been dumb enough to hold on to the murder weapon.
NCIS had a second lucky break that day, but Warpinski wouldn’t realize it for more than a month. Eddie’s friend had warned him weeks earlier: “Wipe all your shit. Smash your phone.” But Eddie had been as careless with his tactics with NCIS as he had in Mosul. In a drawer in his laundry room, NCIS found the iPhone 6 he had been using on the deployment. A few weeks later, when they pulled all the photos and texts off, Warpinski was stunned.
SEALs in the platoon told Warpinski that SEALs had taken all kinds of photos the day of the stabbing, but Eddie and Portier told everyone to delete them. As far as the SEALs knew, they were all gone forever. Eddie, however, had not been as careful with his own phone. When NCIS finally dumped the data from the seized phone, there was Eddie posing with the dead kid’s head in one hand and his hunting knife in the other. They also found the group photo the SEALs had described, with Eddie kneeling at the center like the captain of a high school soccer team and a dirty, dead, nameless teenager splayed out in front. Just as he had held on to the murder weapon, he seemed unable to part with his trophy photos.
It was a huge leap forward. Before the raid, the only evidence NCIS had was the word of a few SEALs. Now it had not only the knife but also photos of the killer holding the victim in one hand and the knife in the other.
Warpinski knew a trophy photo when he saw one. In his seven years at the U.S. Border Patrol, he’d taken a few with drug runners he’d caught. He knew how guys wanted to celebrate a job well done. But this was something different, something darker—the ritual murder of a kid. It was enough to give anyone chills.
The evidence from the phone Eddie had so casually tossed into the laundry room drawer didn’t stop at photos. Warpinski started going through thousands of texts and found evidence that the guys in the platoon never even knew existed. Nine days after Eddie posed for the trophy pic with the murder victim, he texted the photo to a friend back in California—the warrant officer he liked to talk trammies with. Along with the trophy pic he sent a message: “Good story behind this, got him with my hunting knife.”
The warrant officer had been Gallagher’s chief on an earlier deployment, and Eddie considered him a mentor. Throughout deployment Eddie had sent him photos and videos of rockets launching and combat in Mosul. It was almost as if he was trying to measure up. The knife kill was just one in a line of boasts.
“Nice,” the warrant officer replied. “Be careful with pics.”
“Yeah, that’s the only one and I only trust you,” Eddie said.
But it wasn’t the only message. Eddie had also texted Stephen Snead, his friend and fellow chief, to whom he seemed eager to prove himself. “I got a cool story for you when I get back. I got my knife skills on,” Eddie said.
“Haha fuck yeah,” Snead replied.
Warpinski had struck pay dirt. Not only did NCIS now have a photo of the dead victim with wounds matching what witnesses described, but the killer was right there, kneeling over the victim, holding the murder weapon. That in itself was such an unlikely Hollywood turn of events that it seemed like it was right out of an episode of the NCIS TV series. And if that wasn’t enough, the murder suspect also had texted the photo to a friend, saying he had done it.
Eddie had refused to talk, but here was his confession. If there were any doubt that Miller and the others were making up a story, this erased it. After all, how could a group of SEALs concoct a lie that perfectly matched a confession they never knew existed?
NCIS finally had enough evidence to charge the chief with murder.
After the raid on his house, NCIS released Eddie. Putting him in jail would start the clock on his right to a speedy trial, and investigators needed more time. They knew where he was. They figured they could come for him when they were ready.
Eddie tried to brace for whatever was coming next from NCIS. He felt relieved that they had not held him in June. Maybe they didn’t have anything solid. Even so, as June rolled into July and August, Eddie started to get things in order for his defense.
The warrant NCIS used to search Eddie’s house and cage had given Eddie a bit more insight. It included the names of the accusers—just initials, actually, but he now knew who the traitors were: Craig Miller, Dylan Dille, Corey Scott, Dalton Tolbert, Joe Arrington, and Josh Vriens. The SEALs had their own loyalty code, and these guys had violated it. The brotherhood could protect guys it liked, but it could also do the opposite: target snitches, punish them, and drive them out. Eddie started working with friends—especially his old pal the knife maker, Andrew Arrabito—to get the word out about the rats.
Bito had grown his hair long after the Navy and gotten some bit parts and stunt work in Hollywood. He was doing some modeling work for men’s brands that needed a menacing hombre with a big knife. He was also expanding his knife business and had started selling a new line of “pneumo spike” shivs designed specifically for stabbing lungs. Since Bito was out of the Navy and not a target of the investigation, he could help get back at the platoon while insulating Eddie.
The SEALs had a private Facebook group called 5326, named after the four-digit Navy enlistment code for combat swimmers. Only verified active-duty SEALs and SEAL veterans were allowed. There were thousands of guys from every era. Eddie told Bito they needed to use the group to make sure the snitches were put in their place. He gave Bito the names and added, “These guys are pieces of shit and cowards plus trying to make shit up about myself and other team guys.”
Bito and Eddie went back and forth on how to spread the word without divulging too much and possibly getting into trouble. Eddie pushed Bito to do it soon: “I think we have enough facts to put out right now. Also add in they are working with NCIS currently so they cannot be trusted.”
Bito dragged his feet. A week went by and Eddie grew impatient. He wanted the snitches to pay. He wanted the investigation to go away. He was totally stressed out. On top of everything else, he was out of tramadol. He texted a SEAL chief friend to see if he could bum some, but the chief only had a few packs left and was unwilling to share. He tried to get another friend to order trammies online so it wouldn’t show up on the family credit card. He vowed to pay him back with cash. The friend said no.
At the end of August, Eddie was starting the intensive traumatic brain injury program at the National Intrepid Center of Excellence. He seemed to be pressing for action so he could go into the program knowing the ball was rolling on blacklisting the snitches. He texted Bito again to push him. Bito said he would post the names, but another week went by with nothing. “Are you going to put those names out this week?” Eddie pressed a third time.
Bito said he was worried that dumping active-duty SEAL names on the Web might hurt his knife business. He seemed willing to betray his fellow SEALs—he just didn’t want the blowback. “I wish there was a way to drop them anonymously,” he texted Eddie. “I may be able to like put a fake document up saying I was sent this by an active-duty guy saying not to trust these guys.”
He created an image of a document that read: “The names of the Team guys that are and have been speaking to NCIS about other guys, other teams and past platoon deployments are as follows. I do believe there are a few more but these are the names for sure to start with. Please let others know as these dudes have taken it upon themselves to work with NCIS against the Teams both West and East coast. Lying and telling stories of what they ‘heard’ has happened, causing a huge investigation on hearsay.” It listed four SEALs from Alpha, then concluded, “More to follow.”
There was still time for Eddie to get the guys in Alpha before they got him.
“This is not just bad, it’s getting worse,” Matt Rosenbloom said.
Rosenbloom was a Navy captain and the commodore of Group 1, the commanding officer who oversaw all SEALs on the West Coast. He had been watching the NCIS investigation since the day it started. As evidence mounted, he became increasingly convinced that Eddie was not just an operator mixed up in a murder case but a criminal with a long, dark history, scuttling around under cover of being a SEAL, and he needed to be crushed. Unfortunately for Rosenbloom, the Navy didn’t seem to want to let him do it. And it was pissing him off.
So in early September, just as Eddie was taking meditation classes at the Intrepid Center, Rosenbloom went to the office of the Navy admiral in charge of the entire SEAL Teams, set a fat file on Special Operations Chief Edward Gallagher down on the table, and said something had to be done. Across from him sat two high-ranking and respected SEALs, Vice Admiral Tim Symanski, the current commander of all of Navy Special Warfare, and his replacement who would be taking over in a few weeks, Rear Admiral Collin Green.
It was getting worse, Rosenbloom said, because not only did the Navy have a big murder case on its hands, but the suspect appeared to be trying to silence and intimidate witnesses. The Navy had to act. Rosenbloom opened the file and started to brief the admirals.
Rosenbloom had actually started out on Eddie’s side but steadily realized that Eddie wasn’t just a turd but a weaponized version of the pirate ethos.
Like the SEALs he commanded, Rosenbloom was tall and fit, with a surfer’s physique and pale eyes that over the years had shifted from blue to green. He’d gone through BUD/S when Eddie was still in grade school. In twenty-seven years in the SEALs, he had deployed more than a dozen times, including nine tours in Iraq and Afghanistan and a few where the location was still classified. After the invasion of Iraq in 2003, he’d overseen almost nightly raids and takedowns of insurgents. He commanded platoons, then troops, then rose to become commander of Team 7 and eventually a task force commander overseeing all of the special operations missions in northern Iraq. He was a seasoned operator who had watched the SEALs transform since 2001. He knew years of endless war had been hard on the Teams. They were in the hangover phase now, trying to recover and rebuild.
Yet when his staff lawyer knocked on his office door in May and told him they were looking at a court-martial that involved not only multiple murders but also a decorated platoon chief, Rosenbloom looked at him as if he had said Santa Claus was waiting outside his office. His instinct was to not believe it. There must be a misunderstanding. All manner of fucked-up things happen in war, he knew, but that didn’t make them crimes. In his decades as an officer he had seen well-intentioned shots that ended in horrible outcomes. He believed the fog of war could make good dudes unwittingly do bad things. He knew too often the rules of engagement were written thousands of miles away by people who didn’t understand the reality on the ground. He reflexively distrusted any report that a SEAL had committed cold-blooded murder in Iraq. There had to be another explanation.
The incident seemed at first to be fairly contained. It was a report of the death of a single detainee—maybe intentional, maybe not. Bad, but manageable. NCIS would take on the investigation and the SEALs would see what they came up with. Maybe it would turn out to be nothing. As the commodore, Rosenbloom was the convening authority on the case—it was his job to initiate the court-martial and oversee the trial—but his main responsibility was to stay completely out of it. There were Navy lawyers to handle the prosecution and the defense. There was a Navy judge to run the trial. As the commander, Rosenbloom was expected to avoid taking any actions that might tip the scales of justice. That included making statements that might hint at his opinion and might shape how lower-ranking members of the Navy would handle the case. Any statement or action could be deemed “unlawful command influence.” And unlawful command influence could lead to charges being thrown out. If Rosenbloom wanted a fair court-martial, he had to keep his mouth shut.
In late summer NCIS submitted Warpinski’s investigation report to the command. Rosenbloom flipped through the pages, reading summaries of what the SEALs had told Warpinski, and quickly realized the case was not what he had assumed. It read like something out of Apocalypse Now. Chief Gallagher appeared to have gone way upriver, shooting children and old men, firing rockets and machine guns into neighborhoods, doing drugs, stabbing a wounded prisoner of war to death. Rosenbloom, who was inclined to give every benefit of the doubt to his SEALs, found himself repeatedly muttering, What the fuck?
It didn’t seem to be a case about combat. It wasn’t a bad call under fire or rage over the loss of a comrade. It was just murder. Seemingly done just so the chief could tell his friends back home he had gotten a knife kill. Fucking pirates.
Rosenbloom kept reading. He had gotten his start in the SEALs in the 1990s, when the SEALs had not seen much combat for a generation, Demo Dick had been sent to prison, and the pirate culture was at low ebb. He knew things had changed after 2001. The SEALs had always had a lot of freedom to be creative. They trained operators to be fast and aggressive, to see overwhelming violence as a tool. Those were all critical parts of making warfighters. But they all relied on a foundation of character. And with the constant deployments there had been little time to cultivate character. Some platoons far from oversight had rekindled old pirate traditions.
It wasn’t just Eddie. There had been a series of other incidents: Two SEALs were arrested for the death of an Army Special Forces soldier in Mali during a brutal hazing. Both of them were chiefs in Eddie’s generation. There had been a number of drug use cases on the East Coast; a lot of those guys were chiefs, too. It all suggested a bigger problem lurking in the Teams. Pirates who had started as low-ranking shooters in the early days of the wars had worked their way up. And if something wasn’t done, guys like Eddie would keep moving up until they ran the Teams.
Looking over the report, Rosenbloom pieced together that there appeared to be a multilayered cover-up involving the lieutenant in charge of the platoon and the lieutenant commander in charge of the troop. Rosenbloom had held both positions in his career. When he read through the information, he immediately came to the conclusion that both Jake Portier and Robert Breisch were lying to cover their asses. He didn’t know either personally, but figured the only way they couldn’t know about Eddie was if they were total morons. Portier had put in his papers to resign his commission, but he still had a job teaching new officers to be platoon commanders. No way that’s going to continue, Rosenbloom thought to himself. Portier was pulled and stuck at a desk where he couldn’t have any influence.
If Eddie was guilty, it was important that he was tried publicly. There had to be real consequences that everyone could see. If the Teams were going to get back on course, every SEAL had to know how the Navy dealt with pirates.
In the meantime, though, Rosenbloom wanted to take action. He decided he would pull Eddie’s Trident. As commodore, he had total authority over who wore the pin. He could take it from anyone for any reason. There were a lot of rumors flying around Coronado about the case. Rosenbloom needed to send a message that the command was standing with Alpha. Let the courts decide if Eddie was guilty, but the commodore had already decided he didn’t deserve to be in the brotherhood. Neither did Portier. Independent of any crime, they had failed in their professional duties. Their birds were gone.
Before the commodore could act, though, his staff talked him down. Take that large golden eagle away and a jury will notice it is not on Eddie’s uniform in trial. Maybe it would sway their votes, maybe it wouldn’t, but any good defense lawyer would argue unlawful command influence and try to get the case thrown out. The commodore had to hold his fire. It drove Rosenbloom crazy. He had always been blunt. It was part of what made him a good leader. He wanted to get up in front of his SEALs and tell them about the evidence he had seen, so the ranks would know who Eddie was. But he couldn’t. It was one of only a few times in his career as a leader when he had to stay silent.
Even though Rosenbloom couldn’t talk publicly, he felt he needed to act to protect the guys in Alpha. The report included highlights from Eddie’s seized cellphones. Rosenbloom read the conversations where Eddie said he wanted to “bury” guys trying out for DEVGRU and spread the witnesses’ names to thousands of SEALs on Facebook. He read the NCIS report about Eddie standing outside the house of Josh Vriens. The murders were an issue for a court trial, but what Eddie was doing to intimidate witnesses was an immediate issue for the commander. Already Rosenbloom knew some guys in the platoon were refusing to talk. He felt he had to stop Eddie before the whole case was sunk.
He called a meeting with the top admirals.
“We can’t let this go on,” he said as Szymanski and Green leafed through the reports.
The commodore said the only option was to lock Eddie up pending trial. It was a rare move in the Navy, but in the most serious cases where the authorities have reason to believe someone might turn violent or intimidate witnesses, it was allowed. The admirals agreed; the evidence seemed to justify it. But it also came with risk. As soon as they did it, they knew that they would have to charge Eddie. The case would go public. A media shitstorm would follow. Forget Eddie—it would look bad for every SEAL. But all three men agreed they had no choice.
A few days later, on September 9, 2018, Rosenbloom authorized the confinement order. Two days after that, on September 11, Eddie was in meditation therapy at the Intrepid Center when someone on the staff tapped on his shoulder and told him that Master Chief Brian Alazzawi was there to see him. Eddie walked out into the hall to find his fellow frogman from Mosul. He was waiting with two officers, who led Eddie away in cuffs.