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From the outset, each participant in this charade was driven by one of three motivations: protecting their career, advancing their career, or ruining mine.
The term “hate train” was common vernacular. Guys would select a target and, for whatever reason, work in overdrive to spread hate and discontent about that person.
So many of Eddie’s kind—the warrior class—had either been killed, gotten out, or were being squeezed out in favor of a new softer and kinder generation of SEALs.
Some days we’d watch ISIS gun down crowds of women and children as they tried to escape the city. The terrorists sent them running toward us and then opened fire in an attempt to draw us out. There wasn’t much we or the partner force could do except return fire from a distance.
Once, we witnessed the heads of women and children mounted on fence spikes ringing what used to be a park.
ISIS regularly chained women and children inside buildings, then put mannequins on the roofs with AKs so they looked like targets for us to bomb. There were stories of children being boiled alive and their mothers being forced to eat the broth of their dead children. W...
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A U.S. Navy SEAL’s official military designation is Naval Special Warfare Operator. We are, above all else, warfighters. We exist to eliminate the enemy, and everything else is just details toward achieving that goal. It’s not pretty, and I don’t expect the average American to understand what we do.
We’re not Boy Scouts. Our sole purpose is to dispose of evil people, killing them by whatever legal means available.
We aren’t charity workers. Despite what the Pentagon upper brass says, our job isn’t to win hearts and minds.
But that’s okay. I was their platoon chief, their boss, not their friend. I didn’t care if they liked me. I didn’t like them. I was there to train them for war and get them ready for combat. That’s how it was supposed to be in the Teams—at least how it had been.
During the Obama administration, instead of focusing on winning wars and maintaining the standards for selection, a new emphasis on diversity and progressiveness had trickled down to the rank and file. Chiefs walked on eggshells, worried about offending the SEALs under them, fearing retaliation.
Naval Special Warfare was no longer recruiting those who wanted to go to war. It felt as if they wanted polished guys looking to get college degrees in order to make the institution look good at fundraising events.
I immediately instituted some new training policies that not everyone was thrilled with. Were we training when other platoons were off? Yes. Was I hard on them? Yes. But the additional training paid off. We ended up ranked one of the best platoons at Team 7 during workup, which is how we earned the deployment to Mosul to fight ISIS.
War is a chaotic environment. It isn’t black and white. We do a difficult job that involves taking lives. I’d killed plenty of bad guys on previous deployments and plenty more during the Mosul deployment. I’d seen mistakes that resulted in innocents injured and killed. War is ugly. We fight monsters, and sometimes we have to take on some of those characteristics to defeat them.
Being in the Teams is like riding on a freight train going one hundred and twenty miles per hour. Everything you go through and see during your career gets put in the caboose. After you retire and the train comes to a screeching halt, everything stored in the caboose comes flying back at you. But while on the train, you don’t think about it stopping, nor do you want it to.
Eddie wasn’t merely an American citizen. He was active duty military, subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) rather than protected by the Constitution and laws of the land like the rest of us. We’d come to find out just how corrupt and unfair the system was, designed to stack the deck against accused service members whether they are guilty or not.
I wouldn’t say I was in peak physical condition when I arrived at Naval Station Great Lakes for boot camp, but I didn’t need to be. Boot camp was a joke. Instead of focusing on physical training and learning warfare, as I’d expected, it was all about how to fold clothes and make your rack.
(Don’t get me started on the genderneutral pronoun changes to the ethos by someone you’ve already been introduced to and will get to know well in this book, Admiral Collin Green: “Common men with uncommon desire to succeed” has since been changed to “Common citizens with uncommon desire to succeed,” as well as striking any other reference to men or brotherhood.)
Over the previous eight years under the Obama administration, we’d been severely hamstrung by how we were allowed to engage the enemy. Now, a month after President Trump’s inauguration, common sense was prevailing, allowing the guys on the ground more control. War was war, and each of us accepted that there was a chance we might die, but handcuffing the warfighter made the possibility more likely. It was hard enough to fight a vicious and wicked enemy on their own turf without overly-restrictive rules. Now it sounded as if we’d be able to engage the enemy directly and kill them without
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“I need you to listen to me very closely,” Andrea said. “For years now, you’ve left us more times than I can count to do this job. You’ve put this job before our family and held the Teams on a pedestal, above all else. The kids and I have followed you through this because you always told us what you were doing was for a righteous cause. We trusted you when you said this. Now I need you to trust me when I tell you this: It’s only us. The command is not behind you. The command is against you. They are hanging you out to dry. No one is coming to help you. I need you to let go of the notion that
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That conversation with Andrea was a much-needed come-to-Jesus moment that forced me to see reality. I hung up the phone, went back to my cell, sat on my bed for five minutes.
“So I hope if you intend to lie about it, it lines up perfectly,” wrote Dalton Tolbert to the other mutineers. Dille’s response: “Our shit is watertight.” Another time, Craig wrote, “this will only work if we’re all on the same page. You guys want to meet at my house tomorrow and talk about it?” All clear evidence of conspiracy.
But mostly, the texts shared jokes about me, calling me a thief and an asshole, and complaining I had used them as “bait” in Iraq. Not a word about stabbing an ISIS prisoner.
Then there were the NCIS interviews with Joe Warpinski. What a disgusting display by all parties. Warpinski began each interview by telling the “witnesses” they would remain anonymous and the interview would go in a “source fi le” rather than a “case fi le.” It was lie designed to incite these bitches to say whatever they wanted, believing they would never have to back it up. And it worked.
The videos also proved that Warpinski and NCIS had no interest in a real investigation or discovering the truth. From the first day the accusations were thrown out, Warpinski had his mind made up about the case, viewing it as his career meal ticket: Nail the Navy SEAL accused by members of his own platoon of war crimes. He told them as much right off the bat, saying, “NCIS. . . we already kind of have our approach, our take on this.”
The NCIS agent knew what he wanted them to say and how to get them to say it, with no qualms about utilizing false pretenses to achieve it. It was my first taste of the depths of Warpinski’s corruption and deviousness.
To give you an idea of how sacred NCIS held those interviews, they ended up leaking the videos to the New York Times and their little ratfuck reporter David Philipps, who cherry-picked pieces to put in his articles to make me look like a psycho, the exact type of b.s. stories he’s built his career on.
We were expected to believe that this Navy SEAL, part of a team fighting ISIS tooth and nail for seven months, who had seen dead and mutilated bodies of civilians and terrorists on a daily basis, was bawling almost a year later about a dead terrorist who had been trying to kill us? Bullshit.
As I watched, I silently implored Warpinski to ask Craig if he had been so upset, why didn’t he report the supposed stabbing earlier? Why, when he made complaints about me to the command half a dozen times over the past year had he not mentioned any stabbing?
Craig had repeatedly been asked if any war crimes had been committed. Why had he answered “No” each time?
Suddenly, unprompted, as if remembering his own indiscretions, Craig started volunteering his rationale for taking the photo with the ISIS corpse, which he knew NCIS had.
Because they were under the impression they’d never have to answer for what they said, they didn’t hesitate to lie. Warpinski continued to reassure the accusers. He told them things like “We don’t care what you guys did, we’re just here to talk about Eddie,” and “There’s nothing wrong with taking a photo.”
Though the accusers had gotten together to align their stories, once separated and asked to tell them in an interrogation room they quickly fell apart and contradicted each other.
People often ask why I got involved when I never even knew Eddie Gallagher. Through my own experience, I’ve learned there is nothing more dangerous than a government that violates its own laws in the guise of enforcing them.
There is no greater threat to our republic than depriving an American citizen of their freedom and liberty for political reasons.
It was miserable being forced to leave Eddie every evening, a new trauma ripping my child away from his father each time, further enraging me and solidifying how this corrupt machine was working in overdrive to terrorize my family.
NCIS, the prosecutors, and Naval Special Warfare had long ago decided Eddie was their scapegoat and they weren’t going to stop persecuting him or our family. Their thumb was on the scale, and no matter who was on our side—the president, congressmen, or active duty SEALs—they intended to run us ragged and keep the pressure on until we broke. We had to fight fire with fire.
I had Tim pause the video as I realized just how significant this part was. It showed the body after the alleged murder, but didn’t match up with what the navy had been leaking to the press and what the accusers were saying. We zoomed in. There was no big pool of blood around the terrorist’s neck, nothing that made it look like he had been stabbed at all.
Tim enlarged the photo so I could see Eddie’s hands. His gloves looked clean, with no blood on them. The terrorist’s face and neck were covered with dirt, but not blood, as the navy had been claiming. Instead, you could see white medical gauze and the breathing devices Eddie and the other medics had attached to his body.
Leaking false information wasn’t the only tactic the military was utilizing to paint Eddie as a war criminal instead of the hero he was. It became evident that NSW was purposefully trying to make things miserable for Eddie once President Trump ordered him moved out of the brig. Even before that, I knew he had been mistreated in the brig. The command had tried to block me, a member of Congress, from visiting him in there.
I immediately wrote to Judge Rugh, explained what had happened, and asked that he allow us to show Congress the videos and pictures. Predictably, prosecutor Czaplak objected. I could see why he reflexively wanted to conceal the truth, but I could never understand why he wasn’t thinking of the long game. This case was going to trial: The truth would be coming out soon enough. I guess he still believed that if he played dirty enough, he would eventually break Eddie’s spirit and get him to plead guilty before trial.
If Czaplak had intentionally attached a tracker to my email, it would be a serious breach of ethics, as well as a violation of the Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Amendments.
During discovery I learned that upon receiving my e-mail, Czaplak immediately forwarded it to NCIS, saying, “They found the beacon.”
I sat there, stunned at the turn of events and how the navy prosecutors could be so corrupt as to guide a federal investigation into me and my team for misconduct they themselves had committed. All the leaks had been negative towards Eddie and most were made before we even took over the case. It made no sense.
Czaplak had lied again. This was an unauthorized rogue operation between him and a few corrupt NCIS agents. Now it was time to put Chris Czaplak on trial.
When I learned that they were accusing Eddie of shooting women and children, I was irate. That is such a fucked-up thing to say, whether you love him or hate him. I can tell you this, that even if a dude I loved was doing that, I would damn sure do something about it. I knew those accusations to be factually false. I was on every single operation with his team, most of them spent in the same sniper observation post as Eddie, spotting and monitoring ISR overhead, while conducting sensitive intelligence operations to identify who was ISIS and what they were doing, and taking shots myself. I knew
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They all got great evals from me, though one of Josh Vriens’s many lies to NCIS was that I had screwed him over in his. Not true at all. I kept my personal opinions out of each eval.
I almost felt bad for Czaplak. He looked as if he was about to cry. He said nothing. He knew what was happening. He looked at the prosecutors’ table for help, but all they could do was nod. It was true. While Czaplak had been cross-examining General Abbas, Tim received an e-mail with Judge Rugh’s ruling on our motion to have Czaplak kicked off the case. He had officially been booted for the spying caper.
While the entire courtroom looked on, Czaplak made his way over to the prosecution’s table. It was like his feet were in quicksand as he packed up his stuff. On the way out, he looked over at me and made eye contact. I flashed him a peace sign and said, “Thanks for coming out.” Tim snickered.
Watching this pathetic excuse for a naval officer walk out of the courtroom with his head down and tail between his legs made it one ...
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