Luke Ford

Here are some highlights from this meticulous 2021 book:

* Like Eddie [Gallagher], [Chris] Kyle claimed to have more sniper kills than any SEAL in history. But by his own telling, he was repeatedly investigated for needless deaths of civilians, and members of his own platoon started to openly question his shots. In his memoir he described killing two insurgents riding on a scooter together in Ramadi with a single bullet. Kyle said he saw the pair plant an IED before he pulled the trigger. But the Army investigated and found no IED. A short time later, Kyle shot a man walking on a busy street in broad daylight, claiming he had a gun. The man’s wife complained to authorities that he had been walking unarmed to a mosque. The Army again investigated and had enough doubts that it shut Kyle’s whole platoon down for the rest of the deployment. SEALs in Kyle’s platoon grew so suspicious of his shots, that while some SEALs called him “the Legend,” others in his platoon called him “the Myth.”

At the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while platoons were quietly sharing photos of the enemies they’d “canoed” and Kyle was selling books celebrating all his kills, Eddie was coming up through the Teams, learning the ropes from older frogmen who carried knives and wore pirate patches on their uniforms. Pieces of the pirate worldview forged in Vietnam and Afghanistan lay scattered all over the Teams by the time Eddie arrived at BUD/S. An operator who wanted to embrace the pirate ethos had only to pick the pieces up.

* The camera panned in on Hegseth in a sharp blue suit, white shirt, and Betsy Ross–red tie in front of a backdrop of the Stars and Stripes, his hair slicked back in a glossy wave. He was wearing a 101st Airborne Division pin. That morning he was waging his latest offensive in a personal campaign to defend troops accused of war crimes. It was a battle he’d been fighting for months. Before officially joining the Fox News staff, he had served as an Army officer, and now he was the network’s in-house blunt-talking grunt, there to vet-splain the complexities of war to the public. “I was a platoon leader in Iraq, I stood over wounded members of the enemy,” he told viewers at one point while explaining Eddie’s case. “I’m at the point I’d rather get the information from that guy, ’cause I don’t really care if he dies.” Despite his frank talk, Hegseth was more Ivy League than G.I. Joe. He spent four years at Princeton University. Instead of ROTC, he was deeply involved in a conservative publication called The Princeton Tory, where he penned columns on conservative talking points like support of the invasion of Iraq or how the “homosexual lifestyle” was “abnormal and immoral.” After graduating he worked at an investment bank before joining the Army Reserve. He did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, but despite his brash declarations on camera, nothing in his military record suggested he saw much combat. In Iraq he was a civil affairs officer working with local officials to restore infrastructure. In Afghanistan he taught counterinsurgency classes for Afghan officers and left the deployment early to run unsuccessfully for Senate. Despite his relatively limited military career, Hegseth had used his penchant for the conservative spotlight and ties with Fox News to become one of Donald Trump’s go-to advisors on veterans’ issues. On Fox & Friends that morning, Hegseth wanted to probe the absurdity of charging warfighters like Eddie for killing what he called “an ISIS dirtbag.”

* For a conservative media world that often peddled racially charged grievance news to a mostly white, mostly male, mostly old audience, Eddie’s story checked all the boxes. Here was a hardworking, traditional, Christian family man accused of killing a foreign, Muslim terrorist. The conservative media got around the conundrum that siding with Eddie meant throwing several other SEALs under the bus by framing it as a generation gap problem. The old-school SEAL was just trying to do what needed to be done when he was tattled on by pouty, politically correct millennials. Now a bunch of bureaucrats was trying to bring him down. The story touched the same resentments that had mobilized millions of people to vote for Donald Trump—the sense that in America, elites, lawyers, bureaucrats, brown people, and entitled youngsters were conspiring against real working Americans with traditional values. The conservative landscape was primed to embrace Eddie before he was ever arrested. All Andrea had to do was deliver the message. She told the story of a conspiracy of millennials over and over. Hosts not only never challenged the family on the details of the case or bothered to seek other sources, they tacitly, and sometimes not so tacitly, suggested they didn’t care if Eddie really did murder an ISIS prisoner.

* Fawning TV spots funneled thousands of people to JusticeforEddie.com. Andrea started selling new T-shirts that read, “In a world full of Mean Girls be a Gallagher.” The family soon raised more than $500,000. Hegseth started bringing in other families with stories like Eddie’s. Andrea appeared on Fox & Friends with the mother of Clint Lorance, an Army lieutenant turned in by his own men in 2012 for ordering the killing of three unarmed Afghan villagers. He was serving nineteen years at Fort Leavenworth. Also on the show was the wife of an Army Special Forces major named Mathew Golsteyn who was facing murder charges for killing an unarmed man he suspected was a Taliban bomb maker in Marjah, Afghanistan, in 2010. “I’m not here to trash the Army,” Hegseth told viewers with calculated outrage. “But why do our institutions work against our warfighters as opposed to giving them the benefit of the doubt?” “I think there’s a big difference between the actual warfighter and the people who are back here judging them in hindsight,” Golsteyn’s wife replied. “Amen,” Hegseth said.

* On his flight back to the East Coast, [Navy secretary Richard] Spencer tried several times to call the judge on the case, a Navy captain named Aaron Rugh, but couldn’t reach him. Spencer went to sleep that night figuring he could take care of it in the morning. The phone rang early again the next day, right after the Gallagher family had appeared on Fox & Friends. “I thought I told you to get Gallagher out,” the president said. The tone of his voice had sharpened. Spencer started to explain that he was working on it. “I don’t give a shit, get him out of there,” the president said. “Do I have to give you a direct order?” Spencer said it wouldn’t be necessary, he would take care of it right away. “Okay, I want you to call over to Pete Hegseth at Fox and tell him what you’re doing,” the president said. He hung up. A White House operator came on and explained that she was connecting the secretary to Hegseth. Spencer was annoyed at how the president had snapped at him. He was, of course, willing to carry out the president’s wishes, but he wanted no part in whatever public relations campaign the president had cooked up with Fox News. He hung up. Donald Trump had always been enamored of the military for the same reason he’d been enamored of the business world. He saw both as black or white, strength or weakness, winners or losers. Trump had spent his high school years at the New York Military Academy, a traditional military school with uniforms and lots of marching. He rose to the rank of captain his senior year. He inspected young cadets and issued orders. In the future president’s senior portrait from the military academy, he wore a gray uniform covered in twelve medals marking years of good conduct and academic achievement. It had a gold braid distinguishing him as the student aide-de-camp. But the uniform wasn’t his, nor were the medals. Both belonged to a friend. Trump had grabbed the friend’s uniform so he could look more important in his portrait. If you couldn’t be a winner, it was important to look like you were winning. Trump graduated in 1964, just as the Vietnam War was ramping up, then got five deferments to avoid the military draft, including a letter from a family doctor that claimed the varsity athlete was unfit for service because of heel spurs. Vietnam was a loser war, Trump felt. Guys who got shipped over there were losers for not being clever enough to get out of it. Vietnam became an important lesson for the future president: The country wouldn’t win unless it was willing to do whatever it took to prevail.