How the Navy failed to stop a murderous special operations leader. (Eddie Gallagher)
In recent years we’ve had a raft load of fanboy books by and about Navy SEALs and other special operators at war. But in Alpha, David Philipps, a reporter for The New York Times, has produced a serious study of a SEAL unit in crisis as it fought ISIS in Mosul, Iraq, in 2017. By Philipps’s credible account, the unit’s leader, Eddie Gallagher, was a one-man wrecking crew for ethical behavior. He murdered a teenage captive by plunging a knife into the helpless prisoner’s neck. He entertained himself by repeatedly firing his sniper rifle at people who clearly were civilians, such as old men, schoolgirls, and people doing their laundry in the Tigris River. He frequently disobeyed orders from his superiors and hid information about his unit’s whereabouts on the battlefield. He had a drug abuse problem.
Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs by David Philipps Crown, 480 pp.
The story gets worse. Gallagher’s immediate superior, a Navy SEAL lieutenant, was intimidated by him and went along with his misdeeds. The chain of command above that officer was aware of Gallagher’s behavior but did nothing to constrain him. Indeed, when the commander of SEAL Team 7, Robert Breisch, was told of possible war crimes violations by members of Gallagher’s team, instead of pursuing their allegations, as was his clear and legally required duty, he told them to report the violations themselves. But Gallagher’s immediate subordinate worried that if he vocally asked for an inquiry into the murder of the prisoner, Gallagher would find a way to kill him—which would be easy enough in a combat zone.
But Philipps’s book isn’t just about Gallagher. It’s about a system that enables evil because it doesn’t want to look bad. After the Mosul deployment, Gallagher was assigned to teach special operations urban warfare in the United States, and the compliant lieutenant was promoted to teach the art of command in such fights. Despite his justified fears of death, Gallagher’s concerned deputy went on to report the murder three times—only to have the Navy fail to act on each occasion. The institutional Navy’s response was to figure out a way to handle the situation quietly. When that failed and Gallagher’s story became major news, the Navy was still unable to discipline him, and the SEAL was embraced by high-level political figures, including then President Donald Trump.
In the spring of 2018, several members of Gallagher’s platoon lost patience with their leader’s misdeeds and essentially demanded an investigation. Gallagher responded by seeking to intimidate witnesses. Among other things, he gave the names of his accusers to an old SEAL buddy, who responded in a text message, “some day we will just kill them.” This book brims with such striking quotations, mainly because Philipps was able to read a trove of some 6,000 texts written by Gallagher and 2,300 others sent by members of his platoon.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/september-october-2021/seal-of-disapproval/
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