The trial of U.S. Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher blew up into something much larger than the fate of an alleged war criminal. It took down an entire command team at SEAL Team 7 and led to the firing of the Secretary of the Navy. More importantly, it led to a debate within the Naval Special Warfare community about what it means to be a SEAL.
At a national level, a disturbing new front in the culture wars opened between those who believe American service members should stand for values and principles and those who believe U.S. troops should be given the freedom to be rabid dogs taken off their chains to wage unrestricted war against our nation's enemies, unconstrained by laws or morals.
That dialog hits even sharper today as Americans try to process what has happened in Afghanistan. For many veterans – and a good chunk of the public – there is a way to avoid confronting this military failure. We defer by saying America failed not because the war was unwinnable or Afghanistan could never be ruled by a foreign imposition. But the cause of the failure is America fought with one hand tied behind its back because of the lawyers, the media, and the politicians who were more worried about the Geneva Conventions than backing up the troops.
This toxic swirl of deferrals allows the veteran to regain some dignity in the aftermath of a failed war, but it is short-lived. By learning the wrong lessons from history, we are not only doomed to repeat them but will carry around a lasting anger within ourselves because we never confronted the reality of the war or our experiences in a truthful way.
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In the new book "Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the war for the soul of the Navy SEALs" New York Times journalist David Philipps confronts one case study within the War on Terror: The Alpha platoon of SEAL Team 7 during their deployment to Iraq with Eddie Gallagher as their platoon chief.
You know the story of what happens next, it was all over the press until we were all sick of reading about it, or at least you think you know the story.
At 400 pages long, "Alpha" is the deep dive that this subject warranted and, for the first half of the book, takes the reader through the platoon's disastrous deployment to Mosul, Iraq. On that deployment, while they were supposed to be confronting ISIS, the SEALs soon found themselves having to find ways to manage their leaders instead.
Philipps' book paints a damning picture of Chief Gallagher as someone suffering from addiction and mental health issues, as well as being tactically incompetent and lacking any semblance of technical proficiency at his job.
According to teammates, Gallagher spent his days in Mosul behind a sniper rifle he didn't know how to use firing boxes of ammunition at nothing and claiming he was racking up a higher body count than legendary SEAL sniper Chris Kyle.
Then there are the accusations of war crimes.
Many of the SEALs in Alpha reported Gallagher for war crimes to their chain of command, first in Iraq and then when they got back to Coronado. Perhaps the most disturbing part of the book is how their chain of command failed to act, played dumb, and did everything they could to prevent these crimes from being reported.
As Phillips points out, Navy regulations require leaders to report war crimes immediately. There is no formal process or DoD form that service members need to fill out prior to senior leaders being required to do their duty.
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Amazingly, the only reason Gallagher's crimes were ever reported was one of the non-commissioned officers in the platoon, an E-6, went behind his company commander's desk after reporting war crimes numerous times and literally watched the officer type up a three-sentence email and send it forward. A massive dereliction of duty took place, and that is the real story of "Alpha," not of a singular out-of-control SEAL like Gallagher, but rather the culture that breeds, protects, and provides people like him with a "safe space" in Naval Special Warfare.
It only goes downhill from there. The Navy botched Gallagher's court-martial, had their lead prosecutor removed, and Gallagher's lawyer tore the SEALs who took the stand to shreds, questioning their integrity and motivations. We would expect that of a defense attorney of course, but on a national level, the debate became about supporting Gallagher, a hardened Navy SEAL combat veteran, while the voices of the Navy SEAL combat veterans who took the stand became irrelevant. Not because they didn't serve honorably, but rather because they fell on the wrong side of America's entrenched and assinine culture wars.
There is more, much more in "Alpha" detailing the backroom double-dealing going on during the trial which led SEAL medic Corey Scott to change his testimony while on the stand in a scene straight out of "Law & Order." The teenaged ISIS detainee that Gallagher allegedly stabbed in the neck is finally given a name, as we learn about his family, and how he ended up as a corpse in Alpha's trophy photo in Iraq.
Gallagher was acquitted of all charges aside from those stemming from the trophy photo, with the support of then-President, Donald Trump.
The SEALs who reported Gallagher were crushed, disavowed by their teammates, and ostracized by their community. Not even the head of Naval Special Warfare could take Gallagher's trident from him because of Trump's support.
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The good guys lost this one, that's just how it goes. As a friend in the intelligence community once told me, "the bureaucracy can fuck anyone at any time and none of us should be surprised when it happens."
"Alpha" is worth the reader's time and consideration for this reason: There are other Gallaghers in the U.S. military right now.
Some of them took photographs and videos of what they did overseas, likely they are on a thumb drive at the bottom of a box in a storage compartment right now, waiting for a service member to remember. Then the social fallout from nearly 20 years of war no longer haunts the veteran late at night but gets smothered in the face of an American public desperate to look the other way.
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Reach Jack Murphy: jack@connectingvets.com or @JackMurphyRGR.
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