The Hardest Thing

Hey there, before we start, just know that this episode contains descriptions of violence in war and a reference to suicide. Thanks for listening. Previously on The Line. That was like holy shit, you know, putting a city, an ISIS team like in the face, and then also maybe just sort of stabbing the dude. This morning, a decorated Navy SEAL facing court martial later today for the murder of an ISIS fighter in Iraq. We didn't stab this kid. No, and that's the complete lie that was told. They wanted us just to remain silent, and I was like, we're done with that. A lot of these more millennial mindset SEALs, they did not want to perform. They didn't want to go out to battle. So we captured fucking hundreds upon hundreds of people. How did that work? You were doing night raids? Correct. The job that they do hurts them and hurts their families. Please raise your right hand. Who was directing the particular medical treatments you described so far? Chief Gallagher's was the medic on scene. How many times did you see Chief Gallagher stab that detainee? I won't say twice. There was no stab on the job today? Not a single one. You didn't say that Chief Gallagher suffocated and did he? No. Did you suffocate him? Yes. Episode 6 The HARDEST THINGS In June of 1944, the tide in World War II was turning. Over 150,000 Allied troops had stormed the beaches at Normandy, and now they were fighting their way toward Berlin, liberating as they went. At the time, private first class Lewis Cooperberg was serving in France as a medic, treating wounded American soldiers in the fight. But sometimes we'd have to treat the enemy as well. The wounded Nazis who had become their prisoners. That summer, Cooperberg wrote a letter to his sister Eleanor back in Brooklyn about having to save the lives of Germans. He calls them Jerry's, who up until that moment had been trying to kill him. He writes, "The casualties have run heavy on both sides. One memorable day we had about 90 Jerry's and about 10 hours. What can I say? They've robbed and murdered and raped, and they lie in my slab, innocent like and in pain. And I give them the same care, the same treatment I give our own boys." Yet all the while I know these same men have killed my cousins and aunts and uncles and Poland, have tortured and killed without compunction, but I treat them. Occasionally, when I'm through and Jerry blubbers at his thanks, I tell him I'm a Jew. He seldom believes me. He may say, "Herdly, it matters not to him. He's never killed any Jews. But fear is on his face, and I see the lie. But still, I treat them." I like to imagine Cooperberg using that phrase. Still, I treat them, using it like a mantra. To do the right thing, even when it may have felt so incredibly wrong to do. As far as wars go, World War II seems, at least in memory, to have been the clearest cut, the easiest to get behind. One verses the Nazis? Tired to imagine a clear line. But the burden still fell on the ones on the ground, in the muck, like Cooperberg, to do the hard part, to navigate the ethical and moral details. And the details in war are never as easy, never as clear-cut. What do you think about the Etigalga case? How does it sit with you? "It's tragic, so sad." That's Dr. Bill Nash. You remember he's the former Navy psychiatrist and expert on moral injury. "I never hear that response. I hear anger, but I never hear tragic. Why do you think that? Why is it sad?" "He was a Korman. He was a Navy Korman." Korman is the word for a Navy medic. In addition to being a seal chief, Galagher was trained as a medic. "As a Navy Korman, number one, you're going to put rounds down range just like everybody else. You're going to do your part. So you might shoot somebody, and then because they're not dead, if you do your job right, now you're supposed to heal them and bring them back to life, no matter what it takes. And this person, you might have just seen him kill the best friend you'll ever have in your life. That's crazy making." It is a baked-in paradox. We're doing the right thing. It means doing the opposite of what you've been girding yourself up to do in combat all along. "It's a difficult proposition." This is Dave, a formatic on Team Seven. To go meet out violence and then throttle it back right after the violence ends, keep your composure, and then take care of someone. Internally, I don't want to. I have that feeling. I don't want to. Yeah. And he does it anyway. And for some seals, the contradiction becomes untenable. So I did a combat medic school, which took forever, and then I went to a team. This is Nate, use a medic on Seal Team 2. How do you balance the idea that you're supposed to kill this guy at three o'clock, but then at four o'clock, you're saving his life? How do you switch back and forth? Persmetics don't like doing that kind of thing. What do you mean? What kind of thing? So I'm not going to like dime people out, but like from what I've gathered, there's not a lot of dudes, not a lot of enemies that are going to survive, if you know what I mean. So. You mean like nursing someone to death? I've heard of that. I'm Dan Tabersky, and this is the conclusion of the line. All right, good afternoon. As I've said since the beginning of this case, the best defense for Chief Gallagher is the truth. Today, the truth started to come out. You can hear it in Tim Parletori's voice in front of the courthouse that there's nothing like an almost-and-confession to shake the ho-hums off a murder trial and get everyone paying attention again. You didn't know it killed that moment. I had a strong suspicion based on our investigation, but I didn't know until that moment that he was actually going to go for it. The he is Cory Scott, the platoon medic. The it that he went for was dropping a bombshell on the stand, completely changing his story, saying that it wasn't Gallagher who killed that ISIS prisoner. You didn't say that Chief Gallagher suffocated him, did you? No. Great Miller suffocated him? No. Yes. It was him. Lots of questions. The first being out. There Chief Gallagher left the scene. I was left there monitoring him. I thought he would die. He was continuing to breathe normally as he had been before. So I held my thumb over his ET tube until he stopped breathing. The ET tube from a crack. It's the tube Gallagher put into the prisoner's neck to open an airway so he could breathe. Scott says that when Gallagher walked away from the scene for a moment when the prisoner was still alive, it was Scott himself that put his thumb over the breathing tube until the prisoner suffocated and died. Scott claims he hadn't been lying before today. He just never told the whole truth. That he told investigators that the prisoner had his fixated, but just didn't say it was he who did the his fixating. And that NCIS and prosecutors never put two and two together. And the prosecution is not buying it. Never once in any of those five six statements prior to testifying here where you have a grant of testimony immunity, did you ever mention anything about putting your hand over the crack tube? Did you? Yes. And you never actually told NCIS that he exfixiated in your original statement, did you? Either said he stopped breathing, I know one of the statements I said he is fixing in. What you actually said was, and then I kind of like stayed with the dude's head and then like for a few minutes until he died. Yes. You understand that you have testimony immunity for any statement that you say right now you cannot be prosecuted for for anything other than for that correct? Yes. And so you can stand up there and you can lie. Object. Are you mad at him? Overruled. You can lie about how the fact that you killed NCIS President because you don't want she galloped in. You know, if I lie, I would lose my grant of testimony on the immunity. But you'd never be prosecuted for what you're now saying that you've done. That's what you understand. Yes. You don't want she galloped to go to jail, do you? I don't want him to go to jail. So what do we believe? Do we believe what Corey Scott is saying on the stand now? Or do we think he's lying to protect his chief? You didn't expect him to say that. No. Not one bit. Eddie Gallagher says he and his wife and his kids who just happened to be in the courtroom for the first time that day sat and watched all this happen in shock just like everyone else. What I feel is that he's not going to be a real man. thought he was going to do is get up there and be like, this is all a lie. Why would you think that? Because that's, it was all a lie. In fact, Gallagher says Scott approached Eddie and Andrea in the courthouse during the trial right before he testified. He came up to me and hugged me and was like, I'm sorry. And I said, you know, I'm sorry that toward Andrea, that you guys are going through this. But he was there to testify against Eddie. So you know, a weird thing to do. We also know that Scott and his lawyer visited Eddie during his pre-trial detention. This is after Scott's immunity deal had been approved. That meeting lasted about 20 minutes. Only the people in the room know what was said. You know, I thought he was going to get up there and be like, this is the truth. We all lied. And because he had immunity. But the thing is, that's not what Scott says. Scott testifies that he is the one who entered the prisoner's life, not Eddie. But he never says that he and the other seals an alphabetune made up their accusations. In fact, you could look at Scott's testimony as threading a very specific needle. He throws the murder charge against Gallagher into question. But he does it without really impeaching the testimony of his platoon mates. He doesn't throw Eddie or the sewing circle under the bus. He throws himself under the bus. And he does it while protected by the testimonial immunity that he and his attorneys had negotiated for months. There's another big question that needs answering. Assume Scott is telling the truth here on the stand and that he did kill that ISIS fighter. Why? Why would he do that? Why would Scott a medic? After all that was done to treat this prisoner, all the chest tubes, the crank to open an airway, decompressions to relieve the pressure in his lungs, the works. Why after all that effort would he then unbeknownst to anyone, slip his thumb over the breathing tube and kill him anyway? Why did you kill him? If he had woke it up, he was going to be turned over to the ERD, correct? Yes. The ERD, our Iraqi partner force, who brought the ISIS prisoner to the seals in the first place. The ERD, who have their own documented history of the torture and killing of prisoners. The ones who were blacklisted because of their alleged work crimes and who the US decided to work with anyway. The ones with whom Alphabetun actually shared a building on deployment, who the seals told us they could hear through the walls, torturing prisoners, pretty much every night. Have you ever seen how the ERD treats prisoners in the past? Yes. Have you ever seen them detain, try and then release a prisoner? No. Have you seen them torture, rape and murder prisoners? Yes. Have you listened to this? Yes. Protection relevance? Overruled. Is this why you. It's fixated. Do you work in certain that the ISIS prisoner may die because of anything she's gallored to do for you? No. You're only worried about him being tortured and killed by the ERD? Yes. The only person who knows what the real truth here is is Cory Scott. He declined to speak with us on the record. But consider the impossible situation that Scott was in. This testimony might have put a fellow seal in prison for life. For a war crime that quite likely would have been committed anyway a few hours later, but with no consequences. Because we decided to work alongside documented war criminals in this battle. To blur that line from the get go. Not sure what I would have done in his situation either. This week a bombshell prosecutor's own key witness, seal team medic Cory Scott, who was granted immunity, admitting to a stunned courtroom that it was he, not Gallagher, who killed the prisoner. The media goes bonkers, of course. Luxuriating in the drama of it. The delicious twist of holy cow, it looks like Gallagher didn't do it after all. A bombshell confession. Today another seal confessed that he killed the ISIS prisoner not at a Gallagher. But there's a hitch. One more grenade that Cory Scott lobs into this trial. Then that doesn't fit quite so neatly into the he didn't kill him. I killed him narrative. So much so that a lot of the news reports that day they just leave it out entirely. It was a part of Cory Scott's testimony that came a few minutes before his confession. When Scott was describing what happened as he and Gallagher were giving medical care to that prisoner. This is when the prisoner was still alive. How would you describe the breathing of the patient at that time? The breathing was very normal, shallow, rhythm, exactly what you would expect from somebody in a deep sleep. That's a one what if anything happened next? Next I know that's a one burn left for a time. Then at some point, Chief Gallagher pulled out his knife and stabbed the ISIS fighter right underneath the collarbone. Scott says Eddie Gallagher did stab that detainee. He saw him do it. It's just not the thing that killed him. The witness is pointing towards his top part of his neck, next to his collarbone and a direction down towards his torso. What was your reaction to this? I was startled and I froze up for a little bit. And you think of any medical reason why the stabbing might occur? It was only then after the stabbing when Gallagher walked away that Scott says he himself put his thumb over the breathing tube ending the prisoner's life. As far as Corey saying I stabbed him which I didn't, you know, when Corey admitted to kill the guy that had to be a if he did do that, that'd be a traumatic experience for him and, you know, I'm sure there's certain aspects that are skewed in his mind of what happened. And I still don't know like I don't know why he said that I stabbed him, you know, still. Tim Parylatory again. Can you believe part of Corey Scott's testimony without believing it all? Well, and that was the issue that I had to deal with on closing. But how do we deal with that as somebody hearing this story that we're supposed to believe that Corey put his thumb over the tube and we're supposed to believe him saying that but we're not supposed to believe him saying that Eddie Gallagher stabbed that detainee. And I don't know what Corey Scott saw, what he thinks he saw. I do, I am not accusing him of lying, but just because somebody's not lying doesn't necessarily mean they're telling the truth. They may believe that they're telling the truth, but that doesn't mean it's what actually happened. Do you remember the day of the verdict? Yeah, I remember. I definitely remember the day of the verdict. This is Eddie's younger brother, Sean. They're like, all right, Jerry's in deliberations. Could be a week. Could be an hour. They go shopping on base actually. What else are you going to do? It's just me, Eddie and the lawyers in Andrea were hanging out and suddenly we get word and they're like, hey, they re-strovert it. It didn't even take a day. And I was like, that's when you're like, fuck, and you can feel your heart like hitting. You can hear the thumb thumb and they did it really quick. They reconvened. Judge comes in, Jerry sits down and press is still scurrying into the courtroom at this point because they just, they summoned us quickly and the oldest juror who's a Navy captain stands up and then he takes out a piece of paper. The, the form and reads it and he was like, on the first count, not guilty. Not guilty. Guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. Not guilty. In all of us, immediately I was like, what does the guilty thing and we're just turning around and then Tim finally our lawyer was like, oh, it's the picture. For taking the trophy photo with the dead body, the one thing Gallagher never denied. For that crime, the jury would sentence Eddie Gallagher to four months time served. They would also strip him of his rank as chief. But for now, as they step out of the courthouse just after the verdict, the Gallagher's take their victory lap. We just want to celebrate today and the victory that we have in my husband being a free man. Andrea does most of the talking with Eddie watching. and taking it all in. What do the gunning days look like? Do you think you have plans? Today look like. You have freedom! After that, Eddie and Andrea hop into a rented white Mustang convertible and drive away. Later, Eddie goes to a tattoo parlor, where he has his entire left forearm inked. The tattoo is of two watchful eyes, the eyes of his wife Andrea, and rippling behind them, an enormous American flag. Now, inked on his body forever. It is hard, if not impossible, to truly empathize or understand what Eddie does. I don't fully understand it. I've seen videos of his deployments they all have helmet cams, so they'll film their missions. And I'm like, holy fucking shit. Like, the rawness of it, the absolute brutality. And then they go out and they do it again, and they do it again. If you think that he's the problem, shift your focus. I mean, this was his second time to Mizzol. He went in 2003, and then he goes in 2017. He's not the one calling the shots about why he's there. He's given a mission, and he's told to execute. Eddie's the weapon. The former commander of SOCOM would often have to do a lot of explaining about how special operations worked in the war on terror. About how their job had changed since 9/11. And to do this, he would sometimes bring a prop on a big piece of cardboard. It was a composite image of the world, taken from space, but at night. So instead of land and sea, you see only light and dark. The bright webs of cities and mega cities scattered across all the darkness that takes up most of the map. The commander would say it used to be the light spots where the focus for special operations. But in the war on terror, it has become the dark parts, the unlit places on that map. That is where they operate. I'd say the SEAL teams prefer the unlit places. It's part of their persona, in and out unseen, autonomy to get the job done without a lot of questions asked. But there's a flip side to that. Fewer questions asked means less understanding, when something is going wrong and it's only getting worse, and it's still not clear why. The very same day that Eddie Gallagher was acquitted of his charges, the chief of a different team 7 platoon. Foxtrap platoon was accused of having committed sexual misconduct in Iraq. And another seal from Foxtrap platoon was accused of raping a fellow sailor allegedly just two days after that. He would later plead guilty to a lesser charge. When Socom gets word, they just pull the entire platoon from deployment. That's when the head of Socom, Admiral Green, orders a review of the culture and ethics of special operations. That's though we have a problem, Emot. When the report comes out, it pins a lot of the behavioral problems on Optempo, how depleted the teams are after nearly two decades of war. It calls for better ethics training, more accountability, but in the end, it concludes there are no systemic ethics problems and special operations. But it's not what they chose to put in the report that I think is the problem here. It's what they chose to leave out. The focus is on how they run things, the organizational chart, instead of what is happening to special operators themselves. In the heads and the hearts of the ones who have been doing the fighting all of these years. One of the central things that you hear from these guys is they're struggling to understand what's happening to them. Why they can't remember things, why they're having trouble with coordination, why they're feeling the pain that they're feeling, and why things are just turning upside down. We've heard from many seals for this project about their experiences fighting a forever war. But I want you to hear about one more. Frank Larkin was a seal in the post-Vietnam era, Team 2. But in 2006, his son Ryan, age 18, announced that he was going to give the teams a shot himself. Everybody thought that he was following on my footsteps, but no, he was cutting his own path. Ryan jumped right in, perhaps too hard. During his first tried buds, he broke his back, but he healed up, tried again, and made it. Deployed to Iraq for his first deployment, doing operations, Ramadi, Fallujah, some pretty heavy areas. Ryan kept deploying. Lebanon, another two Honduras, then back to back deployments, first to Iraq, and then to Afghanistan right after that, 12 months straight. So when he came home off that back to back deployment, we started noticing some changes. Ryan began complaining of severe trouble sleeping, anxiety, anger issues, memory loss. But the pressure to keep deploying was hard to resist. Ryan went to sniper school, then deployed again, and returned home to more problems he couldn't shake, an amaze of doctors and counselors. Nobody could agree on what was wrong with him, you know, anti-social behavior, depression, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder. Alcohol abuse, symptoms of PTSD. All told, he'd be prescribed over 40 different medications, trying to find a fix. We're sitting out by a fire one night, and he says to me, Dad, I'm broken up inside. You know, I'm hurting. Something's wrong with my head. But nobody believes me. They're all telling me I'm nuts. And the morning that I found him, first sign was the back door was open, and the dog was, you know, nuts. His dog was very excited. And I subsequently found him in the basement. Ryan Larkin was found wearing a pair of red, white, and blue board shorts and a SEAL Team 7 T-shirt. He had his fixated himself, which was not typical of the way a law special operators take their life to usually use a firearm. He had taken his life, but preserved his brain in a way that we were able to, you know, donate his brain for a research effort at Walter Reed. What we found was that Ryan had a severe case of undiagnosed microscopic brain injury uniquely related to blast exposure. This is video of Ryan Larkin taken before his death with other SEALs on active duty firing a Carl Gustaf shoulder mounted rifle. Firing a Carl G has been described as like being behind a jet engine on takeoff. Research is beginning to show that blast wave exposure, particular to the work of special operators, is causing traumatic brain injury or TBI's similar in effect to the kind NFL players get from being hit so many times. A recent study estimates that as many as 85% of operators have suffered TBI's from training alone. Symptoms from TBI's include anxiety, depression, sleep disorder, memory loss, and a higher risk of suicide. This kid was hurt and he was right. He was the only one that knew that something was wrong with his head, but he didn't know what. The effects of TBI's are just one of a battery of symptoms and ailments that special operators have been experiencing, so much so that they've just recently been rolled up into one catch all term, operator syndrome. With symptoms that are mostly unseen, often easy to ignore or push past, but that are there and persistent. And present in some shape or form it seems with most of the SEALs we spoke to for this project. I didn't feel the same. The hair falling out twice was actually kind of a good thing for me to see, like, okay, well, I'm not just making myself a lot completely crazy. Like I came home and I really started drinking heavily. It's kind of being a dick to family. Like I was forgetting my keys everywhere. I was getting a massive organ in some of my life. Freaking headaches, migraines, nightmares, I was pretty jacked up. It'll only get worse in time. So, you know, they're gonna sit around and, you know, wait for people to get older and start dying. I never imagined in my wildest dreams that it'd be in my bed crying and feeling helpless and thinking that I had nothing more to live for. And it's happened to us on a regular basis now. Many of these symptoms were present with Eddie Gallagher as well, according to medical records and according to Eddie himself. In fact, when Gallagher was first arrested, arrested in 2018 before the trial, before the whole circus, he was arrested not at home, but at the Intrepid Center, a military hospital that specializes in treating traumatic brain injury. They estimate that Gallagher had sustained at least 18 TBI's in his lifetime. That report that the Pentagon did, on the culture and the ethics of the seals, that report never mentions traumatic brain injury, not once, and at 69 pages. Never mentions moral injury either, or PTSD, except in passing, or any of the persistent illnesses that operators are incurring. Illnesses that have symptoms that include anger, aggression, lack of impulse control, and profound moral disorientation, symptoms that from where I sit, bear directly on how behavior might change as an endless war marches forward and the fighters keep fighting and the symptoms get worse. When we reached out last year to the Pentagon about Gallagher and Ethics and Operator Syndrome, they said no pretty much right away. They offered instead to maybe arrange an interview with a Medal of Honor winner, a hero, the public kind, rather than shed light on those unlit places and address the problems that at first are hard to see but that are taking their toll all the same. When I first met Eddie Gallagher at his house in Florida, we recorded it in his wife's walk in closet, quite a stream in the house. That was March 2020. Every conversation you've heard with him so far was recorded then. As I talked to him now, nine months later, he is back in the closet, and me, on Zoom, and my own padded cell. He says when we first spoke, the transition to life post-seal teams was taking its toll. He actually went and did psychedelic therapies, something many seals are doing now that helps him find relief. 5MEODMT is from the venom of a rare toad and I began is a plant extract. It's 10 hours. It's 10 hours of straight home. I'm actually interested to talk to somebody before and after. Oh, it's intense. You release a lot of stuff that you're holding on to. It's gotta be said, the Eddie after that I'm talking to you now, he's different than the Eddie before. Number one, since the trial, in a lot of ways, he's become the kind of seal he's always hated. His Instagram account does a lot less hashtag free Eddie and a lot more videos promoting products, like this one for a workout supplement that caters to the military crowd. I personally like to use the vegan protein, green beret. It makes me feel better after I use it. I don't feel as bloated. Since the trial, he's also written a book begrudgingly. Dude, I didn't want to write that book. I despised guys at wrote books, like as a quiet professional. It was like when against everything that I believed in. He actually wrote the book with his wife Andrea and with the help of an outside writer. Branding is still Andrea's line of work. Although on her website, she has added crisis management as well. A skill she's earned, I'd say. And she manages the Eddie Gallagher brand, including Eddie's social media. Once you turn a person into a brand, can you go back? Can you go back to not being a brand? How do you get out of it? Eddie himself as a human being isn't a brand, but he's representative of a portion of culture that sees him obviously as a very heroic figure and they see him as someone that they want to look up to. After such a public trial, such public accusations, the play for some might be to lay low for a while. The Gallagher's are going a different way. They're busy pushing an Eddie Gallagher branded rifle on Instagram and Eddie Gallagher branded brass knuckles with the acronym FAFO, fuck around and find out and graved right on the part that would hit you in the jaw. Whatever brand he and Andrea are trying to build, it is definitely not contrite. You posted a picture of Eddie in a t-shirt that says Patriots don't cry over dead terrorists. You posted a graphic, it's a drawing of Eddie and it says found innocent by a jury of my peers. So shut the fuck up. I'm interested as a branding expert, do you feel like those comments are feeding the wrong narrative? Like to me, they don't feed the narrative that Eddie was wrongly accused and screwed by the system. To me, they feed the other narrative that Eddie got away with the work, I mean that he feels like he'd do whatever he wants with impunity. Well, there's a lot of perspectives that you can take from anything that we post and whoever loves it, loves it and whoever is like, yeah, this is too edgy for me. This is too much for me. One way of saying is that it's edgy, but it's also very in your face. How many Navy sales do you think are crying over dead terrorists? Including Eddie. I think that's the irony. How many service members, that's not even Navy sales. How many service members do you think are sitting at home crying over a dead terrorist? Eddie Gallagher's freedom was a personal victory for him and for Andrea. And it's not quite fair to insist that their story always serve as a symbol of something larger. At some point, their story is their story. But I do think it's fair to say that their win was also a win for the curvy line. At his reduction in rank, the punishment for his crime, it got reversed, Trump intervened, and made him a chief again. In the same stroke of the pen, Trump also pardoned an army officer, serving time for the murder of three Afghans and a special forces officer who was about to stand trial for the alleged killing of an Afghan man. Since then, the Gallagher's have started a non-profit to aid service members they feel are unduly targeted by the justice system. One of the first people they chose to support, that seal chief from Foxtrop Latune, accused of having committed sexual misconduct the day of Eddie's acquittal. And even now, Gallagher remains defiant still about who should decide for seals where that line is. This, I don't know, agenda in the teams. It's weakening the teams, you know, about ethics and whatever. I mean, wait, is ethics a bad thing or ethics is a good thing, but this is what they're this, leave it to the seal, the leadership to take it to another extreme to where every, uh, workup you go through the eviscent and ethics scenario. Workup is the 18 months of training and prep that a team goes through before each deployment. And as part of that training, they act out ethics scenarios where a seal has to make a tough ethical or moral combat decision. And one of them is they patrol into target. A guy opens fire, kills four seals and then throws his gun out the window and is like, I give up. Now if they shoot that guy, they're getting counseled for not following ethical guidelines. Which is bullshit. Why? Like, this is war. We're war fighters and our job is to kill the enemy. That guy just smoked four of your guys in your platoon just because he threw his gun out of his hand. That's so what? Like, dude, you're done. It sounds incredibly hard to do what it is. You say they're asking those seals to do, right? On the other hand, that is the Geneva Commensions. If you are unarmed, you take a prisoner. It's like they do to us. No. They don't do that to us. But then it doesn't just make us them. No, it doesn't make us them. I look at it as a good, merciful thing and ISIS is evil. You know, sometimes you got to take on the characteristics of the monsters you're fighting to defeat them. We tried to identify that young ISIS fighter who died that day in Mosul. Through this whole trial was built around it, but whose name the investigators and the prosecutors and the jury, they never even knew. We narrowed it down to two likely possibilities. Two Iraqi teenagers, either of whom, may have been that fighter. So we can say with some confidence that the name of that ISIS fighter was Collin. Or it was Moataz. And we know that he was probably 17. And we know for sure that he never knew a homeland that wasn't occupied by the United States. And we know that he never lived in a country where the borders were drawn by those who lived there, rather than the British or the French. And I'd be willing to bet that like Eddie, good versus evil was his line too. Problem is, when you believe you're good and they're evil, wherever you stand, is the right side of that line. And a line like that allows for all sorts of wrongs. Over the past two years, Team Gallagher laid out a narrative. His attorneys did it in the courtroom and Andrea Gallagher in the media. In that narrative, the Gallagher's platoon mates were framing him and that he did not kill that prisoner that was the winning narrative. Eddie Gallagher won. But winning can enbolt in a person. To say things that they weren't willing to say before. Things that fly in the face of the story that they originally put out there to win in a courtroom. Here's my take. I'm asking for it, but I'll give it to you anyway. (laughs) After reading the trial and listening to the trial and seeing the evidence, I would have said not guilty to. But I still have a hard time believing the other narrative that they made it all up. Just straight up lied. And so I said, "Everyone's in a while, "I'm trying to find the-- - I understand this. - Where's the grave of truth that could have become something larger that felt like a lie. And then, Eddie Gallagher admits what he never admitted the last time we spoke. What he never admitted during the trial and what he has never admitted publicly to, as far as I know, anyone. - The grain of truth in the whole thing is that that ISIS fighter was killed by us and that nobody at that time had a problem with it. We killed that guy, our intention was to kill him. Everybody was on board, not one person's life. - Your intention was to kill him. It was to do medical scenarios on him until he died. - A live tissue lab. Until that prisoner wasn't alive anymore. Is that nursing to death? - Yeah, you wanna put it in a nice way, I guess. It's a-- - I don't wanna put it in a nice way. - It's a nice way. - It's a lie. Yeah, nursing to death or just killing. I mean, he was gonna die regardless. Like, we had no-- We weren't taking any prisoners. - Why? - We weren't going any back because that wasn't our job. - And Eddie says that it wasn't just him. It was all of them. All of the seals who were present when the prisoner came in, including the ones who testified against Eddie in court. Eddie claims they knew that was the plan. And he claims they all agreed to it. - How did you guys verbalize that this person that came in, this detainee, that he was not going to get out of their life intentionally? - Yeah, well, we verbalize everyone's like, let's just do medical treatments on him until he's gone. - You talked about that. - Yeah, it was said. - Like, as T.C. Brass-- - As it was-- - As it was, or, yeah, with both. And Craig Miller-- I mean, Miller was laughing-- - It was verbalized. - It was verbalized. - Oh yeah. - He knew what was going on. Like, everybody knew what was going on. That's the only truthful thing through this whole process. And then the rest of it just is like a bunch of contorted lies to like pin that whole scenario on me. - Before it was that these guys made this up, and I didn't kill this guy, but now it's this like, yeah, we were all gonna kill him, and they're pinning it on me. - Yeah, I mean, I still-- I didn't stab him. That's-- I didn't stab that dude. That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done, and there was plenty of medical treatments that were done to him. - That long list from the trial about how hard they worked on that prisoner, the Craig to open an airway, the chest tubes, the lung decompressions to relieve the pressure. According to Eddie, turns out these weren't the acts of a medic trying to save a life. - Why do the Craig, why give him an airway if you just want him dead? - Just for practice. That's practicing. See how fast I could do one in. - Did you ever tell the leadership what you're telling me now? - What, like what do you mean? - Did you say I didn't stab him, but what-- - Oh, no, 'cause no one treatments that he would die. - No, I didn't talk about it. And once rumors looked like they were going to become charges and his platoon mates were going to become his accusers, that my intuition kicked in and I was like, I'm not talking to anybody about, even though I'm like innocent, I knew to keep my mouth shut. - Last episode, we heard four guys testify on the stand about what happened that day in Mosul. So we went back and we asked them about this sudden change to Gallagher story, where he implicates not just himself, but all of them in the killing of that prisoner. S.O.C. Craig Miller, S.O.1 TC Burn and Marine Staff Sergeant Geo Corrillo are all still active duty. And so they say they're unable to comment on this or any allegations that Gallagher might present now that he is free to speak and they are not. We also reached out to platoon medic Corey Scott. His attorney says that he is unavailable and he doesn't want to be contacted by anyone. But even if they all said, yep, that he's right, we were all in on it. We all killed that ISIS prisoner. My brain keeps coming back to one in-controvertible fact. Eddie Gallagher was the chief. He was the top enlisted man in the platoon. He was in charge. If Gallagher ordered them to nurse a prisoner to death, it would have been an unlawful order and the seals would have been duty bound to disobey. But more importantly, even if every seal in that platoon did agree to violate the laws of war, it would have been Eddie Gallagher's job as the chief to stop them. And according to Eddie himself, he didn't do that. - Moral injury, I really believe, is an identity wound. Identity wound for a person or for a community. - Dr. Nash again, the former Navy psychiatrist. How does it change our identity as a nation? If we decide that we are not going to object when one of our armed warriors crosses the line. How does that change our view of ourselves and how others view us? How does this change our character? We are now the nation that does that. That's who we have become. We are the nation that tortures. Anyone who loves America is going to feel betrayed by that. Of the seven seals from Alpha Batoon that testified against Gallagher at the trial, four of them weathered the storm and remained Navy seals today. One of them serves on Seal Team Six. Craig Miller, the seal who struggled so hard on the stand, he is a chief himself. And he has since been asked to speak on ethics at the Naval Postgraduate College. As for Query Scott, he left the teams shortly after returning from Mosul, and he now lives far from Coronado. That's what we heard. At one point he was driving a truck in Oklahoma. And strangely, for the guys who left, the hardest thing about being in the teams may have been the getting out. For the first five years I was out. There probably wasn't a day that I didn't think about going back in. This is Mark. Mark has been out of the team for 12 years. He had nothing to do with this trial. But he was able to express the experience of finally stepping away from the teams that almost every seal I spoke with felt in some way or another. It was, you know, it's like the worst breakup you're ever going to go through. Huh. I don't know another way to describe it. You know how after a breakup you wake up one day and you didn't even see it happening also and you realize, oh my gosh, I'm over it. Do you remember that happening for you? I think that's why it's the worst one because I'm not over it. No one's over it. You're never over it. It's connection. It's a level of connection that you just can't find anywhere else. If you ask me, when they added the special to special operations, they were asking for a boatload of trouble. Creating a whole breed that might imagine that the rules are for other schmucks and not them. But for every seal like that, from what I've seen, there are scores more. Who realize that what makes them special is that they can do the hardest things. And that sometimes the hardest thing is holding back. Even if the only reason is because it's what's being asked of you. To know that you can operate with no limits but then accept limits anyway. And that maybe that's the honor part. Maybe that's the heroism. (soft music) The Line is an Apple original podcast produced by Jake Saw Productions. Our producer is Lizzie Jacobs. Investigative producer, Diane Hodson, Jody Avergan is our editor. Maria Luis Atucker and David Iverson are our associate producers, Emily Van Blarcom is our production assistant. And Natsumi Ajisaka did our fact checking. Rick Kwan is our engineer and our original music is from Mark Orton and John Hancock with additional music from Jeff Baxter and Eric Phillips. The Line is executive produced and written by me, Dantabursky. For Jake Saw Productions, executive producers are Brad E. Bear, Stacey Hoffman, Richard Perillo, Joey Mera and Alex Gibney. The supervising producer is Whitney Johnson. Our consulting producers are John Schmidt, Annie Allen and Jeff Zimbalist. The team also includes Andrew Haffner, Jay Lewis and Eric Mitten. Our interns are Olivia Butler. Zara Khan, Sarah Feynman, and Lily Levy Epstein, Rachel van Landegam, as our consultant on military law, and a special thank you to Andrew Carroll at the Center for American Wardletters at Chapman University. Legal services provided by J. Ward Brown and Ballard's Bar. I'd also like to thank Merit Jacob, the folks at Final Final V2, and Jessica Farcus for soundproofing the tiny room I ended up recording much of this podcast in once the pandemic hit. And a special thank you to the special operators who shared their stories for this project. If you or someone you know is in crisis, please know that there's help. If you're in the US, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is open 24 hours a day at 1-800-273-8255. For information in other countries, please search for your local crisis line. Find more great stories on Apple TV Plus. [BLANK_AUDIO]