The next morning, Eddie arrived outside the courtroom with Andrea on his arm, just as he had every morning. As usual, she was wearing a body-hugging dress and dark sunglasses and carrying a coffee cup. As usual, they breezed through the front door and were followed by a line of defense lawyers and investigators and Eddie’s brother and parents. But something had changed. For the first time Eddie brought along his teenage stepdaughter and stepson.
The reporters watching the family file into the courtroom did a double take. Medic Corey Scott was slated to testify that morning. For prosecutors he was the key witness that everything rested on. He had been the closest to the body and was the one who saw the stabbing most clearly. He was also the guy with the medical expertise who could describe the seriousness of the wounds, and he had stayed at the victim’s side as his blood pumped out into the dirt. Everyone following the case expected it to be a pretty gruesome morning for Eddie. Not one you would want to have the kids watch.
An aide for Congressman Duncan Hunter was also in the courtroom for the first time, monitoring the proceedings so he could report back to his boss. The reporters filing into the press seats in the back row of the gallery noted the new faces and began whispering to one another behind their notebooks. The reporters now had the same suspicion as Dylan Dille: Something was definitely up.
A few minutes later Brian John called Scott to the stand. After this witness John planned to go back to be with his family. He had spent almost every free minute outside of court dealing with his father’s sudden death and trying to console his mother. He was tired and flustered but determined to do his best.
Scott walked in looking like he had just stepped off a Cracker Jack box. He wore the classic Navy enlisted dress uniform, wide-legged white trousers and a white tunic with blue stripes on the collar. His head was shaved, and around his thick neck he had a neatly knotted dark neckerchief.
Before Scott began his testimony, he had arranged for the judge to go over his immunity deal on the record. His lawyer, Brian Ferguson, was in the gallery, wearing a suit instead of his customary faded blue polo. Ferguson looked around the courtroom with a nervous grin. He had been working for months to orchestrate this moment.
Before trial, Ferguson told the prosecutors Scott would refuse to cooperate any further unless he had two kinds of immunity. The first was testimonial immunity, which would bar the Navy from using any of Scott’s testimony on the stand against him. He also insisted on transactional immunity, which prevented the Navy from prosecuting Scott for any crime he admitted to, even if investigators later tracked down evidence independent of Scott’s testimony. Ferguson then went a step further and got an immunity agreement not only from the Navy but from the U.S. Department of Justice. The government gave in grudgingly, believing it had no choice.
“This is the golden ticket,” Ferguson told his client after working out the deal. As long as Scott didn’t lie on the stand, he could say anything and not get in trouble. He was completely bulletproof. By that time Scott had a young child and a second on the way. It was important for him to know he wouldn’t get in trouble.
That morning, the judge advised Scott of the two different layers of immunity he had with the Navy, then asked him if he would agree to testify. Scott looked over at Ferguson, who nodded vigorously from the gallery. Scott looked back at the judge and said, “Yes, Your Honor.”
Brian John had watched over several months as Scott had slowly changed from a willing whistleblower to a reluctant witness protected by a lawyer, but he felt the case was safe. He knew Scott was working with Ferguson, but the immunity arrangement the Navy had worked out would still lock Scott into his previous statements. Those statements included all the key points about the stabbing. John knew what the medic was going to say on the stand. All that was left to do was have him say it.
John stood up after the jury was seated. He had the Ghost raise his right hand and swear to tell the truth. Then he began. He knew this witness was critical. The first three witnesses had not gone great. MacNeil had not witnessed key moments of the crimes. Dille laid out what he had seen powerfully, and with conviction, but the evidence for the shootings was weak. And while Craig Miller had witnessed the stabbing, his testimony had foundered under disjointed questioning and legal missteps. The Navy needed Scott to save the case. John was determined to give this key witness all he had.
He asked the medic a few establishing questions about his role in the platoon and where Alpha was deployed, then said, “I’m going to direct you to the incident with the prisoner. Do you recall the incident?”
“Yes, I do,” said Scott. He was slouched down in the plastic witness chair, swiveling slightly like a kid in the back row of the class.
John had to walk Scott through a series of simple questions about that morning, starting with Eddie coming over the radio and saying, “No one touch him, he’s mine,” and work up to the stabbing and the reenlistment. They had gone through it all several times before in the office.
“What do you first recall about that day?” John asked.
Scott replied with all the emotion of a reptile.
“I was in a vehicle and there was some sort of commotion. I don’t remember if it was some sort of radio traffic or watching people convene to the other side of the building. For whatever reason I went over there. While I was on my way over there someone asked me to grab my med bag. I went back, got my med bag, went over to where the ISIS fighter was.”
“You heard something over the radio, do you remember what that was?” John asked.
“No, I don’t,” Scott said without hesitation. He didn’t explain more.
John paused and looked directly at Scott. He needed Scott to say he’d heard Eddie say something like “No one touch him, he’s mine.” That detail would help establish Eddie’s intent: Eddie heard there was an ISIS captive, he said the captive was “mine,” he went and killed the captive. Clear premeditation. John was sure Scott had said it before. His failure to say it here was confusing. The pause grew uncomfortably long as John shuffled through papers, looking for something.
“Okay…” he said, distracted. “You said after you had heard something over the radio—sorry, would anything help you refresh your recollection about what you had heard over the radio chatter? Would your previous statement to NCIS refresh your memory?”
It was a standard move in criminal court: Show the witness the transcript where he said those words, forcing him to admit them.
“It’s possible,” Scott said.
John handed Scott a stack of paper. “Does that refresh your recollection about what you heard over the radio chatter?” he asked.
Scott glanced at it briefly and looked right at the prosecutor.
“No, it does not,” he said.
John was incredulous. “You still don’t remember?” he asked curtly. This was supposed to be an easy question.
“No,” Scott said. He sounded bored, as if going through some ceremony he had long ago lost interest in.
“Okay,” John said, shuffling through his notes again, trying to regain his footing. “So after you heard whatever you heard over the radio chatter, what, uh, what did you do next?”
“I don’t remember if it was radio chatter or some other commotion, I want that to be clear,” Scott said.
John was confused. The Navy needed Eddie’s statement over the radio and for some reason Scott wouldn’t give it to him. It was a tiny fact, but huge for Eddie. Without premeditation, a life sentence was off the table. Maybe Scott knew that, maybe not, but either way, it didn’t look like he was going to give it to the prosecution.
John pressed on with questions leading to the murder. Scott described going over to the captive and seeing Eddie and the other medic, T. C. Byrne, providing treatment.
“What treatments did you witness when you walked up there?” the prosecutor asked.
“I don’t remember,” Scott said.
There was another awkward pause. John looked at Scott. Of course Scott remembered the treatments. He had described them all multiple times before. Now, suddenly, Scott’s memory was getting fuzzy? John muttered under his breath as he shuffled through his papers again, unable to find what he needed. “Just a moment, please, Your Honor,” he said.
Scott poured himself a glass of ice water. The jingle of ice cubes was clear in the silent room. Eddie’s children watched from the gallery. His wife leaned over and whispered to Bernard Kerik. The jury members’ eyes shuttled from the witness to the prosecutor. Finally, John found what he was looking for. “Would looking at a transcript of your interview with NCIS help refresh your recollection?”
“It’s possible,” Scott said, sounding even more bored than he had earlier. Scott took a leisurely glance over the paper and sniffed, then looked up.
“Does that refresh your recollection of the treatments that have been done?” John asked.
“Not really,” Scott said.
John slapped his stack of papers down on the prosecution table. He had never had a witness resist like this. Suddenly it hit him what was happening. The witness appeared to be deliberately sabotaging the prosecution. Even though Scott had been called to testify by the Navy, it appeared he had become a witness for the defense.
Trial attorneys can spend years learning how to draw details out of reluctant or combative witnesses. If they know the statements they want to elicit, they can build questions like traps that lead only to one simple answer. In the quiet world of Navy law, John had never needed to perfect that skill. Now he was off-balance and didn’t know how to move forward. He could have asked for a recess so he could have time to confer with the senior attorney. But he decided to push ahead with his original plan.
John went back to the murder. Scott seemed to relent. He described how he had knelt down next to the fighter and pressed two fingers against the side of the neck to feel his pulse. It was normal. There were no injuries to the neck. He felt the breath coming out of the tube inserted in the kid’s throat. It was normal, too. Then he sat there, monitoring the patient. All of it was consistent with his interviews with NCIS.
“What happened next, if anything?” the prosecutor asked, knowing that Scott had been interviewed by NCIS and the prosecution at least six times and each time he said next Eddie stabbed the prisoner. But there was tension in John’s voice that made it clear he had no idea what Scott would say this time.
Next, T. C. Byrne left the scene, Scott said. “And then at some point Chief Gallagher pulled out his knife and…”
Scott paused. Four seconds went by. It was a brief time by most measures but an eternity in the middle of an eyewitness statement about a murder. Eddie’s family and the reporters packed in the gallery barely took a breath.
In those four long, drawn-out seconds, the images of the chief kneeling over the body in the sun-bleached gravel almost certainly flashed before Scott’s eyes. But there was also time for flashes of the conversations with Ferguson and with Eddie. There was time to consider what Scott planned to say, what he practiced saying, what he was advised to say. And there was time to hesitate and to think about how everything would play out among pirates and among SEALs. Even though it was just four seconds, there was time to remember that for months he had been thinking about Alpha and the different possible meanings of the word loyalty.
If nothing else, the four-second pause showed hesitation. Whatever Scott’s plan was going in, he had come to a key moment, and he seemed to waver.
What happened next, if anything?
“Chief Gallagher pulled out his knife and…” One. Two. Three. Four. Scott made his decision and pushed forward, “…stabbed the ISIS fighter right underneath the collarbone.”
There it was.
The eyewitness had seen the stabbing. And he had said it on the stand. The biggest box on the prosecutors’ list had been checked. John relaxed just a bit. He was over the hump. Whatever Scott had been planning, it looked like he had stepped back from the brink.
“And how many times did he stab the ISIS fighter?” John immediately asked, relieved that the most important fact had now come out.
“I don’t remember,” Scott said.
John sighed. Scott was back to his original tactic.
John leafed angrily through his notes. The first time Scott talked to NCIS he said he had seen Eddie stab the victim “two or three times” and “a few times,” pushing the knife from the base of the neck “down into the neck, lungs.” The second time he told NCIS that Eddie had “stabbed the ISIS fighter two or three times in the neck and then went around him and stabbed him again in the chest.” John shuffled through the prosecution’s stacks of documents furiously, looking for the third and fourth time Scott had described the stabbings. Every time Scott was interviewed, he was asked to read over his past statements and make additions or corrections. He never made any big changes.
John marched up to the witness stand with papers in hand. He had Scott review the notes from one interview, then a second. Whatever calculation Scott was making mystified John. If the witness was trying to help Eddie, why would he say he saw the stabbing but then balk at the number of stabs? It had John rattled all over again. He asked if any of the notes had refreshed his recollection.
“No, it has not,” Scott said calmly.
After several seconds of searching and trying to find yet more interview notes, John gave up and pressed on. He started to ask about Eddie leaving the scene, but then realized he had lost his bearings and skipped a couple of questions. He apologized and brought Scott back to the stabbing. “After he stabbed the prisoner,” John said, “can you please show the members the direction of the knife and how and where he stabbed him?”
“Behind the collarbone, parallel with the head, down right here,” Scott said, showing how the knife stabbed down through the base of the neck toward the lungs. Eddie’s wife and stepchildren watched without moving.
“What was your reaction to this?” John asked.
“I was startled and I froze up for a little bit,” Scott said.
“What did you do next?”
“I stayed at the scene until the ISIS fighter asphyxiated,” Scott said.
John pushed on to the enlistment ceremony and the confrontation the platoon had with Eddie where Eddie threatened to kill guys for talking. Again, Scott resisted. He downplayed the threat Eddie made, said he couldn’t remember key details.
John sat down frustrated after forty-one minutes of questioning, not realizing that the worst was yet to come. In the midst of his testimony, Scott had set a trap—a trap that the defense attorney, Timothy Parlatore, was ready to spring. When Scott had uttered the word “asphyxiated,” Parlatore punched Eddie in the leg under the defense table and whispered to him, “We got ’em!”
Parlatore stood up smiling, wearing a particularly busy blue-and-orange paisley tie. He walked up to the podium and looked at the medic.
“You didn’t think Chief Gallagher was serious about killing members of the platoon, did you?” he said with confidence.
“No,” Scott said politely. He clearly wasn’t nervous about facing Parlatore.
“How long you been in the Navy?” Parlatore asked.
“Ten years now,” Scott said.
“You ever met a chief that didn’t threaten to kill members of his platoon in jest?” he asked. Chuckles rippled through the courtroom. Members of the jury smiled.
“No,” Scott said, grinning and shaking his head.
“If you had thought that was a serious threat you would have reported it, right?” Parlatore asked.
“Yes,” Scott said.
It was a textbook cross-examination. Ask several simple questions building to a larger point. Never ask one you don’t know the answer to. Hit the punch line and move on. John and Pietrzyk sat at the prosecutors’ table, unsure where Parlatore was going.
Parlatore asked several questions that suggested to the jury that the platoon had little combat experience before Mosul and that several of the men, including Scott, didn’t like Craig Miller. It was the first time he had ever made a statement like that. Unlike Scott’s testimony with Brian John, there was no hemming or hawing. There was no not remembering. He answered like a willing ally.
Now Parlatore turned to the stabbing. He appeared to already know the answers to all of his questions. “You said you saw chief Gallagher stab this individual. You never saw any blood, did you?”
“No.”
“There wasn’t any blood on his knife, was there?”
“No.”
He asked a few more questions about the stabbing and Scott’s medical training, then paused for dramatic effect. He turned toward the jury and raised his voice just slightly. “You used an interesting word. You said you watched him until he ‘asphyxiated.’ Asphyxiated as a combat medic, that means someone who is deprived of oxygen, doesn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Why’d you use that word?” Parlatore asked. He thought he knew the answer. It had all been choreographed beforehand.
“That was…what killed him,” Scott said.
“You didn’t say that Chief Gallagher suffocated him, did you?” Parlatore said.
“No.”
“Craig Miller suffocate him?” Parlatore asked, raising his voice.
“No.”
“Did you suffocate him?” he said accusingly. It was time to spring the trap.
“Yes.”
Scott didn’t bat an eye. He didn’t stammer. There was no regret or worry, no pause of four seconds. He took credit for the killing with a confidence that almost sounded like relief. The courtroom was silent, absolutely frozen except for the reporters scribbling madly in the back row. The jury was locked on Scott. Everyone, even the prosecutors, seemed breathless waiting for what would come next.
Parlatore let out a quick breath—a kind of half laugh. Huh. After a brief pause, he said, simply, “How?”
Scott continued with his reptilian delivery even though he was about to shatter the whole case, and he knew it.
“After Chief Gallagher left the scene, I was left there monitoring him. I thought he would die, but he was continuing to breathe normally as he had before, so I held my thumb over his E.T. tube until he stopped breathing,” Scott said, referring to the plastic endotracheal tube protruding from the victim’s throat.
Parlatore pointed over at the prosecution and said, “Have you told them that he asphyxiated?”
Parlatore was going to pile it on. Another SEAL had just taken the rap for the murder. Now Parlatore wanted to make it clear to the jury that the Navy was at fault for not figuring it out before throwing Eddie in the brig. It wasn’t enough to create doubt that his client murdered someone, he wanted to make the prosecutors and agents look guilty in the process.
Scott explained that he had told the prosecutors and investigators multiple times that the kid had asphyxiated, but no one had ever asked him how he asphyxiated.
“Nobody ever asked you a single follow-up question on that?” Parlatore asked.
“No,” Scott said.
Parlatore didn’t act shocked because he wasn’t. Before the trial, Ferguson and Scott sat down at least twice with Eddie’s legal team to go through his story. Scott answered questions right up to when Eddie walked away after stabbing the prisoner. How did he die? asked Eddie’s team. It was the same kind of question NCIS and Navy prosecutors had asked. But with Eddie’s lawyers, Scott gave a very different response. He said he couldn’t answer without incriminating himself. He couldn’t say what happened, but Eddie hadn’t killed the guy. Eddie’s lawyers later claimed they didn’t know exactly what Scott would say, but began preparing for something shocking and exculpatory to be revealed in court. Andrea brought the kids to come watch.
Now it was time to exonerate Eddie. Parlatore asked why the medic decided to kill the nameless prisoner.
“I knew he was going to die anyways. And I wanted to save him from waking up to whatever was going to happen next to him,” Scott said calmly.
“What does that mean?” Parlatore said. It was an absolutely vital clarification. Parlatore needed to make sure that Scott didn’t give the jury the idea that the victim was going to die from the stab wounds, and out of mercy the medic had decided to put him quickly out of his misery. That would leave Eddie on the hook for murder. To protect Eddie, Scott had to make it completely clear the kid wasn’t going to die from Eddie’s knife. “You stated before that he was going to die anyway, there was no medevac coming for this guy, was there?” Parlatore asked.
“No,” Scott said.
He was going to be turned over to the Iraqis? Parlatore said.
“Yes.”
And have you ever seen how the Iraqis treat prisoners in the past? Parlatore asked.
“Yes.”
“Have you ever seen them detain, treat, and then release a prisoner?”
“No.”
“Have you seen them torture, rape, and murder prisoners?”
“Yes.”
“Is this why you asphyxiated the ISIS fighter?”
“Yes.”
“You weren’t concerned that the ISIS fighter may die because of anything Chief Gallagher may have done, were you?”
“No.”
“You were only worried about him being tortured and killed by the ERD?”
“Yes.”
“No further questions,” Parlatore said. He walked back to the defense table with a broad smile.
Lieutenant Brian John shot up from his seat before Parlatore sat down. He had been betrayed by a witness who was on the stand trying to burn down the most important case John would probably ever work on. The fact that the medic was trying to cover his lies by insisting that the Navy had done a half-assed job was gas on the fire.
“Multiple times you were asked what happened next after the stabbing,” John demanded. His voice was loud and accusing. “And you never mentioned that you had covered the tube in any way. Did you?”
“No,” Scott said, still deadpan.
John read some of the medic’s past statements to the court: “I kind of, like, stayed with the dude’s head and then like for a few minutes until he died,” and I “stayed next to the prisoner until he stopped breathing,” and I “monitored the patient’s vital signs until he stopped breathing.” He said Scott had been given a chance to review and correct those statements.
“So when you told Mr. Parlatore that no one had ever asked you any follow-up questions with regard to how he stopped breathing, that’s not entirely accurate, is it?” John said.
“I think it’s accurate,” Scott said, unmoved.
And now you have immunity that will protect you, John said. “So you can stand up there and you can lie—”
“Objection! Argumentative,” Parlatore shouted. The judge overruled him.
In fact, lying was the one thing Scott’s immunity did not protect. Later that day the Navy would start a separate perjury investigation against Scott, suspecting it could get Scott to flip and implicate Brian Ferguson and Eddie’s lawyers in a conspiracy to commit the crime. But that would have to wait. In the moment, John had to focus on trying to pull the murder trial out of a nosedive. And to do that, he had to make it clear to the jury that his own key witness could not be trusted.
“You don’t want Chief Gallagher to go to jail, do you?” he said.
“I don’t want him to go to jail,” Scott said.
This is a completely new story, John said. You have never told anyone you stopped the captive’s breathing until today.
Scott said he had never told a soul except his lawyer.
“Did you tell the rest of your teammates, the ones who you knew would actually have to come up here and testify in this case?” John said. The anger was clear in his face. “Did you tell them, ‘No, Chief Gallagher didn’t actually kill him, I’m the one who killed the prisoner’?”
“If I’m going to be frank,” Scott said, “that would be really stupid.”
“Because the only time you ever said that to anyone that matters, to any official, is now when you are testifying under a grant of testimonial immunity, correct?” John demanded.
“Yes,” Scott said as he swiveled listlessly in the chair, showing no contrition for what he had just done.
Scott had conned his friends in Alpha. He had pushed for a criminal investigation. In part because of him, the guys spent a year working with special agents and Navy lawyers, and went through a gauntlet of hate and harassment. It wasn’t just dozens of agents and lawyers and the platoon who were counting on him, it was Captain Rosenbloom who had been biting his tongue for months, trying to preserve the fairness of the trial. It was all the SEALs who saw the Teams drifting off course and needed someone to right it. Scott had led them all on, and at the last possible moment, he grabbed the case and slit its throat.
“I have no further questions, sir,” John said.
It was Parlatore’s chance for a victory lap. He didn’t care if the case was dead. In fact, that was the whole point. He got up and began firing off questions to reinforce the notion that while Scott had been hiding that he killed the ISIS fighter when he talked to investigators, he was telling the whole truth now.
“Did you think it was a good idea to tell NCIS, ‘Hey, I did it,’ without immunity?” Parlatore asked.
“No.”
“Now you have the immunity, now you are able to tell the truth,” Parlatore said.
“Yes.”
For months, while Scott had grown increasingly reluctant with prosecutors, he had been working out a plan with Ferguson. Early on, Scott told him that he had suffocated the prisoner after Eddie walked away. True or not, Ferguson believed him and right away urged his client to tell the truth on the stand. You don’t want to send another SEAL to prison because you didn’t speak out, he said. How are you going to feel when your kids are graduating from high school and he’s still behind bars? With guilt like that you’ll end up an alcoholic, living under a bridge. Don’t worry, Ferguson said, I’ll get you out of this. He started building the immunity strategy. Now they had pulled it off. Scott could admit to murder and not be touched.
Parlatore pushed ahead with his victory lap. He seemed to be enjoying himself.
“You say you don’t want Chief Gallagher to go to jail,” Parlatore said. “Is that because you don’t want an innocent man to go to jail?”
Scott, who had not hesitated to answer a single one of the dozens of questions Parlatore asked, including the one where he confessed to murder, suddenly paused. It seemed as if putting the phrases “innocent man” and “Chief Gallagher” in the same thought had tripped him up. He had, after all, testified that the chief had stabbed the prisoner in the neck. But he was going along with Parlatore now, so he didn’t argue.
“Thaaaaat…” he acknowledged, drawing out his response as he figured out what to say, “and I believe I have always got along with Chief Gallagher. He’s got a wife and a family. I don’t believe he should be spending his life in prison.”
It was the answer that said perhaps more about his motivations than any other. After the trial, Corey Scott always insisted that he really did suffocate that captive. He said he was telling the truth. And while other guys who testified were shocked, when it came down to it, they didn’t find it too hard to believe parts of Scott’s testimony. In Mosul, Scott had been left alone with the kid as blood pumped out of his neck onto the dirt. Scott had told NCIS he might have tried to put a bandage on the wounds, but as he later told Warpinski, “There was really nothing I could put a bandage on.” The kid was going to die. What was a guy supposed to do? What was the humane thing to do?
Eddie had shoved the knife into a part of the neck full of major veins and arteries. Maybe Scott expected the kid to die within a few minutes, which is how long he originally told investigators he stayed with the patient before he died. But maybe staying for that long was harder than it sounded. The kid could have been struggling as blood gurgled in his lungs. His breaths could have grown frantic and agonal as he inched closer to death. The senior guys in Alpha couldn’t believe what Scott had done in the courtroom, but found it at least possible to believe that Scott covered the breathing tube as an act of mercy.
The prosecutors did not. To them, Scott’s testimony sounded not so much like a confession as a strategy. Yes, it made sense. But it made too much sense. To their trained ears, it seemed specifically crafted by legal minds not only to protect Scott but to get Eddie off.
Pietrzyk listened from the prosecutors’ table, knowing that, legally, Scott couldn’t take the fall for Eddie just by saying, “Eddie didn’t kill that guy—I did.” That would still leave Eddie on the hook for murder because of an aspect of criminal law known as proximate cause. Under the law, someone couldn’t fatally wound another person but then not be responsible if the victim died of something else. A man who shot someone in the chest during an argument, for example, still committed murder even if the victim then staggered into the street and was hit by a car, because the shooting was the proximate cause of death.
Pietrzyk doubted a medic like Scott understood the legal subtleties of proximate cause, yet he watched the Ghost nimbly navigate it on the stand. It convinced him that someone had taken Scott aside and made him rehearse specific false testimony—a practice lawyers often call “woodshedding.” The term implied that someone with an understanding of the law had taken the witness out to the woodshed and coached him. Going through truthful testimony was standard. Advising a witness on ways to safely lie was unethical and illegal. But also reliably effective.
On the stand, at crucial points, Scott had carefully amended his story. He never changed it enough to contradict his previous statements and potentially open himself up to perjury charges. Instead, in crucial places where his story was vague enough to leave gaps, new details emerged. It was as if someone had studied his statements to NCIS looking for places to insert material that would help Eddie while protecting Scott. In this new testimony, Eddie still stabbed the victim, but Scott saw Eddie stab the victim only once, not multiple times. This time there was no blood. Scott was careful to say he didn’t think the wounds were fatal. He said the victim continued to breathe normally and appeared stable. And Scott was very clear on why he covered the tube. He didn’t do it because he was concerned the boy was going to die from the stab wounds. That would mean the proximate cause of the murder was still Eddie. Instead, he killed the boy because he feared what the Iraqis would do. If the stabbing wasn’t lethal—if it was a nonfatal wound with no blood—then there could be no murder, no attempted murder, no life sentence. The most Eddie could be convicted of was aggravated assault with five years in prison and a dishonorable discharge. The testimony threaded all the legal needles perfectly. It meant, if the jury believed Scott, Eddie couldn’t be convicted of murder. And thanks to Ferguson’s immunity deal, neither could Scott.
Pietrzyk didn’t know if Ferguson or Eddie’s team or some pirate he had never met had concocted the scheme, but given the strategic legal navigation evident in Scott’s words, it sure looked like someone had taken the medic to the woodshed.
Parlatore got up in front of a crowd of reporters in the parking lot, grinning in his stripes and paisley. He said he was as surprised as anyone else with the medic’s confession. With Eddie standing silently beside him in whites, he proclaimed that the shocking testimony proved that the case should be dismissed.
“Between all of the missteps up until now,” Parlatore continued. “Between the spying operation, between the prosecutorial misconduct, between never bothering to ask their witnesses the cause of death, how much more embarrassment is the Navy going to take before they say enough?” Scott’s witness stand confession was the kind of courtroom drama that typically only happened in scripted primetime dramas, and here it was playing out in real life. The Navy, as usual, said nothing.
Fox News ran the headline “Navy Won’t Drop Murder Charges Against SEAL Edward Gallagher Despite Bombshell Testimony.” Andrea posted an update to her tens of thousands of Facebook followers: “Big Day for our team! Gallagher’s & The God Father @bernardkerik who has been a Godsend to our family and helped us to assemble our INCREDIBLE Legal Team #TEAMGALLAGHER #TRUTH.”
Craig Miller read the headlines and shook his head. After all this time, Eddie somehow had figured out a way to divide Alpha. Miller felt anger building toward Scott, as if he had just caught the SEAL abandoning his post. Then he realized it was much bigger than just the cowardice of one man. It wasn’t Scott so much as the culture, the toxic loyalty that had for generations defined the SEALs.
Matt Rosenbloom read the news in his office. The commodore was just a mile across San Diego Bay but felt like he was seeing news from another planet. Parlatore was saying the Navy should dismiss the case? Was he insane? Did everyone miss the part where Corey Scott said he saw his chief stab a sedated captive in the neck? Were they not tracking that Scott was the second SEAL to say that in two days? No one outside the courtroom had seen the photos of Eddie posing with the corpse. They hadn’t seen his racist texts or the stuff about buying drugs that Rosenbloom had seen. Part of him marveled at how masterful the Gallaghers were at unconventional warfare. The Navy was shackled by a traditional legal strategy. The Gallaghers had flanked them and were out in the bush, sniping with Fox News, Facebook, and tweets from the White House.
There was no one from the Navy to point out to the public that Scott’s story had changed in critical ways. There was no one to say that, in spite of Scott, the jury could still find Eddie guilty of murder. There was just Parlatore at the microphone with Bernard Kerik behind him, and Eddie standing silent as a Ken doll to the side, beating up on the Navy for trying to give Edward Gallagher the very thing that he never gave the captive—a chance at a fair trial.
Maybe it would have been different if the victim had been presented as a real person. Maybe if the Navy had been able to find out his identity and give him a name, it would have changed how everyone viewed the killing. Maybe they could have made him a son, a brother, a human. His parents could have been seated in the courtroom right alongside Eddie’s family. Maybe his father could have told the family’s story of surviving years of war. Maybe if any of that had happened, the victim would have been more than just a nameless jihadi. Maybe Fox News commentators wearing red, white, and blue wouldn’t have been able to turn him into a faceless caricature of all the nation’s fears, just as they had turned SEALs like Eddie into a caricature of the nation’s hopes.
But NCIS investigators never learned the victim’s name. They never even called him “John Doe” to suggest he had a name. Throughout the whole investigation and trial he was only known as “the kid,” “the victim,” “the ISIS guy,” “the patient,” “the prisoner,” “the fighter,” “the terrorist,” “the dirtbag.”