On a December evening in Palm Beach, a month after the secretary of the Navy left the Pentagon with his things in a paper bag, Eddie stood up from his seat at dinner and pulled his wife in close. He was wearing a black suit and tie. Andrea was in a black sleeveless dress with the same jagged gold necklace she had worn when she first appeared on Fox News to battle for Eddie. Donald Trump Jr. was chatting with someone just across the table. He smiled and urged everyone to crowd in for a photo, just as Jake Portier had two years before. Eddie had been invited to Mar-a-Lago, President Trump’s ritzy private club in Palm Beach. He and Andrea navigated around a table scattered with fresh flowers, tall, delicate glasses of red wine, and martinis sweating in the Atlantic air. They pressed in for a photo. Trump’s lawyer Rudy Giuliani was there. He stood up from the table and leaned in next to Don Jr. and his wife. Eddie put his arm around Andrea’s waist and held her close. Everyone smiled.
The president had arrived at the resort that day to spend two weeks for Christmas. Fresh off being impeached and determined to fight, he planned to surround himself over the vacation with his legal team to form a defense. That night, though, was a chance for him to hobnob with some of the conservative talking heads who had been loyal through the whole impeachment ordeal.
Eddie had been a fan of Trump since the first days of the 2016 campaign. He still had photos on his Facebook page from the San Diego rally he attended. He had literally flown a Trump flag in Mosul. He had even gotten to speak to the president a few times by phone about his court-martial. But he never dreamed when he was a platoon leader in dirty cammies in Iraq that he would be rubbing elbows at the Trump resort.
Eddie had retired honorably from the Navy in December 2019 with a chief’s pension. He went back to his new house with its big front porch in the Florida panhandle, where he kept his hunting knife on his trophy table. He gave podcast interviews to other retired SEALs and starred in a sympathetic lifestyle piece on 60 Minutes. He showed no remorse for the saga that had torn his platoon apart and left a cloud over the entire SEAL organization. Instead, when he told his story, he focused on Eddie. Eddie being jailed, Eddie being spied on by the prosecution, Eddie fighting admirals trying to take his Trident. In his mind the whole thing seemed to boil down to another war story, one against a domestic enemy. As usual he was at the center. He saw his acquittal as divine intervention. God had stepped in on the side of Eddie Gallagher.
With newfound free time, Eddie started teaching a few freelance gigs on urban combat techniques to civilians, showing them how to sweep rooms with a rifle and toss grenades around corners. He took his local congressman to the shooting range. He went on a healing retreat to Mexico, where he took hallucinogens and went through guided therapy, writing down the things that were burdening him and throwing them into a fire, then taking ibogaine and having a ten-hour-long vision. He told people he came out of the trip feeling completely at peace. Slowly, he began to admit in interviews that he had, in fact, pulled out his knife and stuck that kid, but just to check that he was already dead.
Eddie also tried to cash in on being Eddie Gallagher. He started writing a book with the subtitle “From Fighting ISIS to Fighting for My Freedom.” During the court-martial and the battle over the pardon, Eddie and Andrea had amassed nearly a hundred thousand social media followers. They wasted little time trying to capitalize on his newfound fame. He started doing product posts for diet supplements and CBD oil. He created his own pirate-themed line of customized brass knuckles and shirts with skulls and blades.
Others also used Eddie’s win as an opportunity. Two of the men who had stuck by Eddie through the court-martial, Congressman Duncan Hunter and Bernard Kerik, were pardoned by the president, who wiped away their felony convictions. Eddie’s lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, started getting hired by other SEALs. By the time Eddie retired, Parlatore was representing another SEAL Team 7 chief. This one had been charged with sexual assault after his platoon was drinking in Iraq on the Fourth of July to celebrate Eddie’s acquittal.
The invitation to Mar-a-Lago had come as a surprise. Eddie’s court-martial had turned him into a conservative darling who had taken on ISIS and the deep state and vanquished both. He had been invited to something called the Turning Point Student Action Summit, which featured thousands of high school and college kids packing the Palm Beach convention center to hear conservative speakers like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. President Trump was speaking, too. After the convention, Eddie found himself invited to Mar-a-Lago. And not to just any part, he was at the tables roped off for VIPs, sitting with Don Junior and Rudy. It was too much. As they sat down for dinner, word came that the president, himself, wanted to meet Eddie.
Eddie and Andrea were led into a hallway off the dining area. There stood the president with his signature long tie flapping below his belt and the First Lady on his arm in a sleek black dress. Eddie and Trump talked just briefly, standing in one of the resort’s decorative corridors. Trump did almost all the talking, gesturing the whole time. Melania stood silently by his side looking down at Eddie. Eddie kept his hands in his pockets. Andrea was beaming. She leaned in and put her hand on the president’s arm and thanked him for everything.
It wasn’t hard to see what the president saw in Eddie. Trump had promised his screaming crowds that he would knock the hell out of ISIS, bomb the shit out of ’em. Waterboarding wasn’t good enough. Killing them wasn’t nearly enough. You had to take out their families. You had to be worse than they were. You had to show strength. Eddie was a real American who had actually done it. Forget being loyal to the rule of law, he had been loyal to Trump, and Trump had been loyal to him. That was what it was all about.
Eddie pulled a small black item from his pocket and told the president he had a gift for him. It was something he had brought back from the rubble of Mosul that he knew the president would appreciate: a small black flag with white Arabic writing—a captured flag of ISIS. For a president who often framed things in stark terms of winning and losing, a captured flag was exactly the right gift. And without realizing it, Eddie fulfilled an ISIS boast that one day their flag would be in the White House.
Almost a year later, Josh Vriens was dropping off his son at preschool when he got a text. It was from Corey Scott. The medic wanted to meet up.
Right after the trial Vriens had left the Navy and moved far from San Diego. Alpha’s onetime most aggressive SEAL found a quiet house in a quiet neighborhood and got a quiet, boring desk job that was about as far as he could get from being a SEAL sniper. He tried to keep a low profile. He needed a break from the past. Now the part he wanted to remember least had found him. The Ghost was in town.
It wasn’t the first time Scott had reached out to guys in Alpha trying to patch things up. He had texted Craig Miller a few months before, asking to meet. Miller texted back that he didn’t trust Scott and had nothing to say. Scott had called Dylan Dille. By that time Dille had gone back to school for a master’s degree in strategic leadership. He was ready to move on and was open to the idea of reconciling, but only if they could have a truly honest exchange about what happened. On the phone, Dille demanded to know about the trial. Scott refused to say. Maybe if we’re alone on a mountain sometime, with no phones anywhere, I’ll tell you, Scott said. Dille hung up. No point in talking to that guy.
A few of the other guys had texted Vriens, too—guys like Christian Mullan, the Switchblade pilot, who had Fergusoned immediately and stayed silent. Vriens wasn’t interested. What was the purpose of patching things up with anyone who had rung the bell when it really mattered? Cowards, he thought. He had no use for them.
But Vriens was curious about Scott. He had always liked the medic and wanted to know what the hell had happened on the witness stand. He texted Scott back. Okay, let’s meet, but in public. He told him to meet outside a swanky grocery near where Vriens now lived.
When Vriens arrived, Scott looked the same, if slightly older. Same shaved head, same brow. He was out of the Navy, but looked like he was still working out. He had on a T-shirt and jeans and was looking at his phone when Vriens walked up. Vriens went to shake Scott’s hand; Scott hugged him.
Vriens embraced the medic with guarded tenderness. Scott was both a longtime friend and a man who had betrayed him. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to forgive him or punch him, and he tried to keep himself open to either. Scott on the other hand seemed to want to act as if nothing had happened. He started making small talk. He moved to Virginia to start a job with a company that built coffee drive-thrus. His wife and kids were doing okay.
“You talk to any of the other guys much?” Vriens asked.
Joe Arrington and Ivan Villanueva, Scott said.
Only guys who had Fergusoned, Vriens thought. He knew Ferguson’s guys had been calling around, trying to patch things up. Josh Graffam and Arrington had both reached out to Miller. Both clearly wanted to bury the hatchet, but instead of apologizing, they had just made excuses. Miller had politely pushed them away. Now that he was a chief in charge of making new SEALs and enforcing standards, he simply didn’t believe that guys who bailed on Alpha belonged in the Teams.
Scott dug his hands in his pockets. “I texted you in July, but you never answered,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I was in a rough spot,” Vriens said.
“How you doing now?” Scott asked. The conversation had started cordial, but it turned on that question. The rough spot Vriens had been struggling through had been due in large part to Scott. What Eddie had done in Mosul was bad, but it didn’t bother Vriens half as much as the feeling that other guys in Alpha had betrayed him. Scott had encouraged Vriens to stand up and speak, then had ducked out. Part of Vriens wanted to hurt Scott as much as Scott had hurt him. Maybe break his nose.
Shoppers passed by on the street, oblivious to the tension between the two men.
“Let’s get to the elephant in the room, Corey,” Vriens said. His voice turned sharp. “When this all started, you were the one who said we should report Eddie. You asked how we could look ourselves in the mirror if someone’s kid was killed because of Eddie. And then you helped him. So you tell me. How are you doing now? What the fuck happened, bro?”
Scott sounded deadpan and rehearsed, just as he had on the witness stand.
“You know family is the most important thing to me,” he said. “I had to put them first.”
“What’s that got to do with anything?” Vriens said.
“Well, if we could live in a world where no one went to jail and Eddie was out of the Navy, and everyone could just move on, wouldn’t you want that?” Scott asked. “Think about it. That’s what happened. And the only dude who really got hurt was an ISIS fighter.”
The words filled Vriens with so much pain and rage that he felt like he was watching a girl get shot in Mosul all over again. As time passed, he had started to get over the disappointment of the trial. At first everyone he knew—his family, his friends, and guys he knew in the SEALs—tiptoed around him, not mentioning the trial, as if he was too fragile. Then people started constantly trying to comfort him. Even William McRaven, the officer who had tangled with Demo Dick in the 1980s and had gone on to oversee the raid on Osama bin Laden, had called to console him. But after a while, he got tired of being treated like a victim. He wasn’t a victim. He had been tested—tested like few people ever are—and he had made the right choice. He didn’t see that as a tragedy; he saw it as a triumph. He was free and clear. He could live the rest of his life without regret. Now Scott was here telling him he hadn’t even been tested at all, that the whole thing was a sweet deal that had worked out great for everyone.
That morning Vriens had been half-ready to forgive Scott. But Scott hadn’t come asking for forgiveness. Instead, the former would-be avocado rancher was trying to convince him that the scheme had been great, and didn’t seem to realize it was actually a disaster. Vriens started to boil inside.
“No, man, you fucked us,” Vriens said. “You got up there and lied for Eddie.”
Scott cut in, insisting he didn’t lie. He said he really did cover the kid’s breathing tube and was ninety-nine percent sure no one had seen it, so he kept his mouth shut, and he was glad he did because he could have gotten in real trouble.
“Yeah, but you had immunity for months,” said Vriens. “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you tell your friends? Why did you lie?”
Scott insisted again that he didn’t lie.
“What about the knife, then? You said you didn’t see any blood?”
“There wasn’t any blood,” Scott said, folding his arms.
What about all the blood in the photos? asked Vriens.
Scott smiled and said, “That was after the fighter died.”
Vriens had seen the photos and the spatter from when the blood spurted out of the neck. That hadn’t happened after the kid’s heart stopped. Scott was lying all over again, this time to a fellow SEAL. Vriens could feel the muscles in his neck get tight. As they stood on the street, inches from each other, he spread his shoulders and made himself larger.
“Look, Corey, I told NCIS everything. Everything. The Switchblade thing. Every bad thing I ever did. I didn’t care. We agreed to take it on the chin,” Vriens said. “I know Ferguson told you to do it that way, but that guy is messed up. I’m pretty sure he was working with Eddie and his lawyer. Just tell me this, at what point did Gallagher’s team pitch you?”
Scott said he wasn’t working with them. He just visited Eddie a couple times. Eddie’s lawyer just knew what questions to ask.
Scott was shaking his head to imply Vriens was being stupid. Then he smiled and said, “It’s not my fault he’s smarter than NCIS.”
Vriens was ready to knock the smug look off the medic’s face. Did Scott really think he’d won? Did the deal still seem that sweet? Look at the fallout. He was having lunch with Brian Ferguson because his old friends wouldn’t return his calls. He had traded his integrity and the brotherhood for a short-term win, or worse, for Eddie. It was just another raw deal, another dead-end avocado farm.
“Corey, you always think you’re so smart,” Vriens shouted. “You got caught up in some lawyer games. They used you! You think you’re the puppet master, but really you were just a fucking puppet!”
Scott started to yell back. Both men were on the verge of a fight. Then Scott took a breath, appeared to remember he had come to make peace, and tried to be conciliatory. “That’s just water under the bridge now,” he said. He said he wanted to put the past behind and be friends.
“You serious?” Vriens clenched his jaw. “Water under the bridge? Do you have any idea what we went through? Eddie was outside my house, bro. I fucking moved my family across the country. It’s not just water under the bridge. How ’bout if I banged your wife and came back a year later and said it was water under the bridge? It doesn’t work that way.”
People on the street were now staring. Vriens still wanted to hit Scott but figured the truth would hurt more. He narrowed his eyes and looked right at the medic. “How do you look at your kids? How do you teach them how to be good to their friends? How do you lay down at night and say, ‘You know what, I’m a good father’? How do you live the rest of your life knowing what you did?”
Scott paused. “I just thought we could put water under the bridge,” he said.
“Fuck you, Corey,” Vriens said, and he walked off.
At Naval Base Coronado, the dawn breaking over the beach revealed the silhouettes of BUD/S students running along the sand in twin lines. They passed the Alpha high bay, wet, sore, exhausted, each one hoping to have the grit to make it through to earn the SEAL Trident and join the elite brotherhood. The bell hung on its post on the Grinder, offering comfort and rest for anyone who could live with the willingness to accept it.
Craig Miller drove past in his old Jeep. He had on his blue instructor shirt and a frogman Rolex Sub. It was a new one. After Mosul he had set his original watch aside and started wearing another because he and his wife now had two young sons. He wanted eventually to pass a watch down to each.
Eddie was thousands of miles away, selling pirate T-shirts, posting about his preferred protein powders, and giving interviews about how he used to be a SEAL chief. Miller was actually doing the job. He was coming through the gate at Coronado each morning to teach the next generation of SEALs. His task was to take the students who made it through Hell Week and put them through an underwater crash course until they knew their equipment so well that he could rip it away from them underwater in the dark, tie it up in knots, and know they would be able to fix it. That night, he was taking students on a night dive in the murky water of the bay.
The experience in Mosul made Miller harder than he might have been on students, but also made him realize that aggression and grit were not enough. The Navy would always be able to find guys who wouldn’t quit no matter how much you beat them. You could train them until they were the best small teams of killers in the world. But those teams also needed something else that was harder to instill. The advantage of the SEALs, Miller realized, wasn’t lethality. After all, the Navy had missile cruisers and fighter jets that could deliver far more firepower than a SEAL platoon. The true value was that even in this technologically advanced age, SEALs were still human. Some missions required a group of commandos who could think, react, and sort through the shifting complexities of war. The commandos had to be loyal and tough, of course, but because SEALs were always going to do the up-close, face-to-face fighting, they would also need an extremely durable sense of humanity. SEALs had to have a killer instinct but also empathy, restraint, the ability to stay on course in the stormy morality of combat. It had to be more than just skill in fighting. SEALs had to have the clarity and courage to remember what they were fighting for.
Miller decided to stay in the SEALs for that very reason. He could have rung the bell. He could have gotten out, maybe moved back to Texas, probably made more money and had more time with his family. But he had spent two years realizing that there were pirate friends of Eddie in the SEAL Teams who didn’t want guys like Miller around, and because of that, he had to stay. It might end up being a fight. But he had joined the SEALs to fight, and no fight was worth waging more than the fight for the SEALs.
Miller suspected there would always be Eddie Gallaghers who made it through BUD/S. When they did, he was determined to be there to either mold them into SEALs with character or flush them out of the force. After all, Eddie was both a guy who had found trouble his whole life and a product of the culture at Coronado. Pirates had made him who he was. They had taken a fundamentally insecure screwup who had been seeking approval and raised him in a subculture where status came through killing. Miller had come to believe the biggest reason that Eddie had killed the prisoner was actually a really small one: that he thought it would make him cool. If Eddie had been raised by better chiefs, everything might have been different.
If Miller could make good SEALs, they would become good chiefs, who would make more good SEALs. It would have to start with guys like him. He knew it wasn’t only on him—there were plenty of good dudes in the SEAL Teams. Even so, if he retreated, there’d be one fewer in the fight. He planned to stay as long as the Navy would have him.
Other SEALs from Alpha were also determined to stick it out. As Miller went to his operator’s cage to get his gear ready for the day, T. C. Byrne was stepping in front of a classroom of combat medics in Mississippi to instruct the next generation who would deploy with platoons. When he would hear students whispering that he had been in that platoon in the news, he’d readily admit it. Here is what happened, he’d say. Here are the lessons from it. As medics, you better be prepared to deal with way more than just someone getting shot. Dalton Tolbert was on a classified mission with DEVGRU. Despite Eddie’s efforts, Tolbert had been accepted into the elite tribe. Of course, guys asked him about Eddie. Tolbert was more than happy to tell them.
Tom MacNeil had finished a stint at the Naval Postgraduate School and was taking over command of a platoon on the East Coast. He had managed to keep his officer’s commission despite what had happened. Officers up the chain figured that the SEALs could use a guy who had been through a deployment like Mosul. It was one thing to send lieutenants to courses on leadership. It was another to have them learn the hard way. MacNeil had come out of the court-martial determined to never be a Jake Portier or a Robert Breisch.
That core group of guys from Alpha had gone up against Eddie. The common perception, both in the civilian world and in the SEAL Teams, was that they had lost. They had broken the unwritten rules of loyalty by turning in a fellow frogman. They had taken a beating on Fox News. They had poisoned their own brotherhood by testifying. And Eddie had not only dodged nearly every criminal charge, he had walked away a hero of the conservative media and a personal champion of the president.
But when it was all said and done, the truth was that the guys in Alpha had achieved the mission they had set in the beginning: Eddie was out of the Navy. He would never lead SEALs again. They had taken casualties. Nothing had gone as planned, but they were still standing. None of them thought Eddie got what he deserved, but at least he’d never be behind one of the Navy’s sniper rifles again or in front of one of its platoons.
Captain Matt Rosenbloom sometimes imagined what it would be like to call Eddie out of retirement for one day, have him put on a uniform and report to Coronado so the commodore could ceremoniously take his Trident. But it was just a passing fancy. More than anything he wanted to help the SEALs move on. If civilian wannabes chose to worship Eddie online and buy his T-shirts and protein powders, that was their problem. Rosenbloom wanted to ensure that in the SEALs everyone knew he was a turd.
Late in 2019, when Eddie was pushing for the president to reverse his sentence, Rosenbloom’s two-year command spot as the commodore at Coronado ended. At that point, no one in the Navy leadership had spoken out against Eddie. Politically, he was still too hot. Even the admirals who were willing to lose their jobs over condemning Eddie—and there were a few—ultimately thought the corrosive effect of having a showdown between high-ranking officers and the White House would do more harm than good. As it had during the whole court-martial, the Navy stayed silent.
But Rosenbloom was determined to get a covert message to the ranks—especially to the guys in Alpha. At his change of command ceremony, a crowd of SEALs gathered in a small memorial park on the water at Coronado that looked out over San Diego Bay. Rosenbloom stepped up to the podium in a white uniform. In his time as commodore, he said, he had the privilege to see a lot of battlefield heroics, but he also had the rare chance to see true moral courage. Without calling them out by name, he told the story of Alpha through the analogy of a historic World War II naval battle.
It was the height of the fight for control of the Pacific in 1944. The Allies were making a crucial ground invasion in the Philippines when a Japanese decoy fleet drew the U.S. fleet’s battleships away, leaving only a tiny guard of lightly armored destroyers with the radio call-sign “Taffy 3.” At dawn the next morning, the entire Japanese strike force swept down from the north with Taffy 3 in their sights.
“You could say their chain of command let them down,” Rosenbloom said, sweeping his eyes across the SEALs gathered at the park to look for men from Alpha. The Americans had only eleven small ships protecting a hundred thousand troops packed on supply ships. The Japanese had the largest battleship in the Pacific.
“Knowing that they were alone, abandoned by their chain of command, would face an enormous assault from all directions and no doubt take heavy losses, the sailors had a choice to make,” Rosenbloom said. “They could make a run for it, decide not to engage, and they probably could have gotten away with no damage, and maybe no one would have known the difference. The problem was, they were all that stood between the Japanese main battle force and the almost completely undefended ships of the invasion fleet. So, in this moment of extreme adversity, they made a courageous decision. They would go into the attack.”
The tiny defense fleet motored full-speed into the Japanese armada and unleashed everything they had: guns, torpedoes, fighter planes, and dive bombers. One pilot, after running out of ammunition, even emptied his .38 revolver out of his cockpit window. Taffy 3 took heavy damage. Four of the seven destroyers were sunk by the Japanese. A number of men who abandoned ship died in the water from shark attacks. “You could say they lost the battle. But a funny thing happened,” Rosenbloom said. “They had fought so hard that it was the Japanese who retreated. They limped back to their ports and would have no further influence on the war.”
Rosenbloom pointed across the bay to San Diego. By the water there was a bronze memorial to the men of Taffy 3. “It acknowledges them for the heroes that they are,” Rosenbloom said. “There is no memorial to the Japanese task force, and they have been completely forgotten, as if they never existed.”
The Navy had taken repeated fire during the Gallagher case. Not everyone had survived. Some of the SEALs from Alpha left the service disheartened. Commander Chris Czaplak was forced to retire after the email scandal. But others pressed on. Joe Warpinski kept working cases for NCIS. Brian John got quietly promoted and assigned to the Navy legal division that shapes all policy on criminal matters.
After Rosenbloom left command as commodore, his next assignment was to head up the teaching of ethics and leadership in the SEALs. It was supposed to be a cushy job to give the officer a bit of a break after two years as commodore. He didn’t see it that way. If there was ethical drift in the force, he was taking over right at the rudder. Careful moves in early ethics training—moves that would fly below the radar of the Pentagon and the president—would years later steer the SEALs to a much different place.
When the guys in Alpha were coming up through the SEALs, ethics was a footnote—an hour-long talk by some retired frogman that many young SEALs soon forgot. In the wake of Eddie’s court-martial, Rosenbloom and Green decided to build ethics courses into every step of leadership. When officers took command of platoons or troops or teams, they would learn to think through the ethical traps of being a SEAL—how their culture of pushing boundaries and breaking rules was both a huge advantage and a potential pitfall, how their celebrity in the civilian world was both well-earned and toxic. They would look at how the demand for loyalty was vital in such a high-stakes profession but also a liability. And, Rosenbloom decided, they would work through those lessons by looking specifically at the story of Alpha platoon.
It was a plan that Big Navy would never approve. The Pentagon feared another confrontation with the president. It wanted to pretend Eddie’s court-martial never happened. Any mention of him in the Navy was unofficially forbidden. But when did the frogmen ever pay much attention to what the Navy approved? Rosenbloom knew he had to make the mission small, covert, and deniable. He would hit where his tiny force could have the most impact. It was classic frogman tactics. When a frontal assault would be suicide, when the brass had your hands bound in red tape or the standard approach wouldn’t work, you had to get creative. Find another way to attack the problem.
Rosenbloom decided the right spot to hit was the training for all new lead petty officers. It was the first step enlisted SEALs took to being leaders. It was where he could have the most influence on the most SEALs in platoons actually deploying and fighting. He would make sure every LPO knew the story of Eddie Gallagher. The real story. To connect with those first-time leaders, though, he needed the right wingman. As a captain with graying hair, Rosenbloom knew he’d have a hard time connecting with the junior SEALs he needed to reach. It would be too easy for guys in their twenties to view him as a fossil. He needed someone to make it real, and of course there was only one man. He tracked down the Sheriff.
The only way this is going to work, Rosenbloom told Craig Miller, is to tell the whole story. I’m giving you clearance to tell it however you want as long as you tell it how it really happened—no bullshit. Will you help us set this right?
A few weeks later Miller walked into a classroom just off the beach in Coronado where about a dozen SEALs were on the cusp of becoming lead petty officers. It was the first time of many.
Standing together, Rosenbloom and Miller started briefing the case. It was, Rosenbloom told the class, a perfect storm: A narcissistic sociopath comes of age in the SEALs when civilian culture has made the force out to be angels and a bunch of pirates are busy building a dark culture obscured by the halo. Over a few deployments the SEAL is taught not only how to put the culture into practice but also how to get away with it. The SEAL Teams are too enthralled in their own mythology to take a hard look at the subculture spreading in their ranks. A warped idea of loyalty causes guys to give a turd like Eddie too many second chances. He is put in charge of a small unit with almost no oversight. The trust and leeway the Navy sees as the advantage of the SEALs becomes the downfall. The chief goes completely off the rails.
Rosenbloom made sure students knew about all the stuff that never made it to the news: Eddie’s pointless missions that endangered SEALs’ lives, his lying and stealing, his absurd and selfish write-ups for medals, and the numerous times Alpha was told by superiors to just drop it.
Then Miller walked to the center of the room to deliver the real take from the lead petty officer who’d actually been through it. The Sheriff crossed his arms. He was just as tall and imposing as he had been in Alpha, but he had changed a lot since those days. He had started out as one of Eddie’s biggest backers. He wanted to see the chief succeed. He knew it was the door to his own success. Miller told the class he felt a duty to be loyal to his chief, he felt he needed to be loyal to his commanders, he felt he needed to be loyal to the guys in the platoon. It had been drilled into him since the first day he showed up at BUD/S. But he never really understood what loyalty meant. He doubted anyone in the platoon did.
“You need to understand what we’re really talking about when we say ‘loyalty,’ ” Miller said to the group of younger SEALs. “It should be loyalty to the Constitution first, to our values, then the Navy, then your buddy, then, last, yourself.
“Most of the time there’s no problem there, you can be loyal to your buddy and to the Constitution with no conflict. But if that gets out of whack and you put your buddy first, it goes against everything we stand for—the whole reason the SEALs exist. Without it, what the hell are we even doing in the military?”
Sometimes while telling his story in classes, Miller thought about the guys in Alpha he no longer spoke to. He knew they would probably never describe themselves as disloyal. But the fight had come and they had not stood up. They had abandoned their brothers—not just Alpha, but every SEAL in the Teams.
Miller figured the guys in the classroom all knew about Eddie’s court-martial. They’d probably seen Andrea on Fox News and maybe heard gossip around Coronado. Maybe a few even had “Free Eddie” shirts hanging in their closets. He wanted to set them straight. He wanted to explain how it had started slow, with a chief they all liked leading them in a direction they wanted to go. It seemed at first like he was doing them a favor. First the SEALs were turning trackers off; then Eddie was telling them to fire suspect shots or launch rockets. They wanted it; it was exciting. They kept following. Eddie was conditioning them. Step by step, things got darker until they were watching the cold-blooded murder of a skinny, wounded kid and the platoon commander was taking photos like it was cool.
Miller didn’t want the story of Eddie’s knife kill to become legend. The SEALs needed the truth—not just the men in the room but everyone. Over the years the SEALs had been too ready to congratulate themselves, too quick to cover up fuckups by awarding medals, and too willing to think that nothing like Eddie Gallagher could ever happen. They had to be willing to study what happened and understand. They had to take a hard look at the dark truth: Eddie was not an outlier of the SEALs but a product.
When he was done talking, Miller folded his arms and stared at all the young SEALs looking back at him. The light caught on his Rolex Sub. “All right, ask me anything,” he said. “What do you want to know?”