This is a book about a man, two events and an institution. The man is Eddie Gallagher, the Navy special operator accused of murdering an Iraqi prisoner of war in Mosul in 2017; the events are the killing itself and the subsequent military trial at which he was acquitted, while attracting the enthusiastic support of President Donald Trump; the institution is the Navy SEALs, the elite special operators of the United States Navy.
Gallagher is, curiously, not that interesting save as a study in the definition of sociopathy. In Philipps’s meticulously assembled and brilliantly written account, he is not a warrior driven mad by the stress of combat, a good guy gone rogue or a victim of a brutalizing culture. Rather, he is a lousy shot (by SEAL standards, that is), a poor planner, a glory hound, a petty thief, a popper of tramadol and other opioids when he can get them and a cunningly effective manipulator of those around him. Philipps leaves little reason to doubt his conclusion that Gallagher really did plunge that special knife of his twice into the ISIS prisoner’s neck. But he also reveals that the killing was only the culmination of years of indiscipline, recklessness, tactical incompetence and bragging about, among other things, shooting a girl in order to get a terrorist.
