You Can't Unring the Bell

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. Well, I want everyone to know that number one, my husband is innocent. I'm like, "What can we do?" And Eddie was just like, "What do you mean, what can we do? I'm in fucking prison." And at first, all of the news were very bent and one-sided and like, "Oh, it's, you know, this guy's a freaking lunatic, he's a killer." The line's got to be a curvy line. A curvy line. You can see on this number, all day long, there's like, "Psh, taking shot." And then I don't think you should have been in the back of this number, all day long. We have rules, but those rules can be bent, and that's all I'm going to say about that. Episode four, you can't un-ring the bell. In 15 seconds, there is going to be an explosion. Three alphabetune seals are on a bombed-out rooftop in Mosul, all staring at their watches. The seals are the ones who set the charge. They're in the middle of the battle for Mosul, helping Iraqi forces take the city back from the Islamic State, block by block. What they just did there was create a loophole. In sniper speak, a loophole is the hole in a wall through which you spot, assess, aim at, and shoot at your targets. Make the loophole too big, and you leave yourself exposed to the enemy. Make the loophole too small, your field of vision is too limited. You can't see enough of what's going on around you to make the right decision. And when you're fighting a thousand ISIS fighters hiding among hundreds of thousands of civilians, making the right decision can mean the difference not just between life and death, but between a mission accomplished and a lifetime of regret. On today's episode, alphabetune, on the stand, pulling back the curtain on how we fight war now. And just how gray the gray areas have become for the special operators fighting today. I'm Dan Tabersky, this is The Line. If you want a picture of what the trial of Eddie Gallagher looks like in the room, start by lowering your expectations, everyone please be seated. This courtroom has all the grander of the break room at Dunder Mifflin. No golden eagles holding olive branches on the wall, no wood paneling, just a few church pew looking benches for the audience to sit on. And this is UCMJ remember, uniform code of military justice. It's not civilian law. So it's similar enough to be familiar, but it's just different enough to irk. Like a Canadian McDonald's menu. The jury for example, there's not 12 of them, there's only 7. And everyone in this jury box is military, two navy, five Marines. They're also all men, it should be said. There was almost a woman, but she got dinged at the last minute. Also notable, one juror is a navy seal himself. Eddie Gallagher walked hand in hand with his wife into court, accused of murdering a wounded ISIS soldier and shooting a non-cut baton elderly man and young girl. As loud as the Gallagher's have been and attacking any secusers, the seals themselves have up until now been pin drop quiet, a gag order prevented them from speaking. When the investigation began, most of the seals in the platoon cooperated. That was well over a year ago. Since then, ones got married, two have had babies, and 14 have loyered up. Many of them have stopped cooperating with the investigators. The group of seven remains set to testify against Gallagher. The media calls them the sewing circle, a catch-all after that original text threat, and the stakes for them could not be higher. Some have received death threats, at least one got a permit to carry a handgun for fear of retribution. Now, they'll trade their usual secrecy to point to finger at their chief in public on the stand under oath. A conviction could mean Gallagher spends the rest of his life in prison. We continue this morning with the government's case, government you may proceed. We're going to tackle this trial in two parts. The charge of stabbing and murdering that ISIS prisoner, that's for next time. Gallagher also faces two separate charges of the attempted murder of unarmed civilians. What I want to talk about today is one of those charges, for the shooting of an old man in Mosul. Your honor, the government calls Mr. Dylan Delay. Raise your head. Do you swear that the testimony you were about to give in the case now in hearing will be the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so I hope you got it. Thank you, please have a seat. Dylan Delay was a seal for eight years, all of them on team seven. All the seals have specialties, some are breachers, some are comms. Delay was trained as a sniper, like his chief. Had you heard of Chief Gallagher before you ever met him? Yes. It was my impression that he was a strong operator and I was excited to have him as my platoon chief. Delay left the seals in 2018, in part he says because of what happened on that Mosul deployment. Did you ever see or hear Chief Gallagher fire shots at civilians? Yes, I did. Can you tell us about the first time you recall that happening? I believe the first time I witnessed that was on Father's Day 2017. So here's a setup. Along the banks of the Tigris River in Mosul, there is a building that at some point in airstrike effectively turned into two buildings, a north tower and a south tower, both barely standing. The platoon sets up sniper's purchase in those towers, Delay and another sniper in one tower, Chief Gallagher and the other, all aiming out the loopholes to spot ISIS fighters among the civilians near the river. And as I scanned down there there was two old men standing on the corner and just as I drew my attention to that a shot went off and one of the old men was hit, I could tell right the way that he was hit. Did he have a weapon? No. What was he doing? Standing there. You said you saw the individual get hit, tell us what you saw. I watched the vapor trail strike him and the, you could see his white clothes, you could see that they were hit and then as he ran around the corner it developed into a blood spot. I could see. Did you see what he did next? He fell down multiple times, kind of struggled to get back up, fell down, kind of regained his strength and eventually got out to the road and then I didn't see him anymore. So do you know what happened to him? I don't. The prosecution calls another sniper from a team, SO1 Dalton Tolbert. Did you know anything about Chief Gallagher before you had met him? All the things I had heard were good at first, I heard, honestly the first thing I heard about him was he was called Vast Eddie, he was a fast runner. Since returning from Mosul, Tolbert had made it to SEAL Team 6, that's where he's serving now. On a day in question, Tolbert was set up on a rifle in the tower with SO1 delay. So that day, much like others, there were mostly civilians that were trying to get through the water. The Americans and Iraqis clearing Mosul had recently blown up the water pumps into the city. The strategy was to starve ISIS of water, and that meant keeping anyone from getting water from a Tigris river, including civilians. Typical you got a warning shot well in front of them on the understood they would turn around and walk back. He sees the old man make it to the river, so he takes aim. I aimed to the side of him, far to the side, and fired. What happened next after you took your white gun? The old man got startled when he ran from north to south, across the road. Then Tolbert hears somebody else take a shot, and then that's when I saw the red mark on his back after hearing the shot being taken, and I saw him fall for the first time. What happened next? The blood started to pull on his back at this point, and I saw it, and it was a square hitting the back. And over the radio, I hear you guys miss him, but I got him. Were you able to determine who said that? It sounded like Chief Gallagher. My name is Tim Parlatory. It's my privilege to represent Chief Gallagher along with my team. Tim Parlatory was brought in pretty late in the game, just a few months before trial, to provide a more aggressive defense for Gallagher. And he hangs it all on one big idea right from the start, that this wasn't murder. It was mutiny. That the less experienced platoon felt that Eddie was pushing them too hard into combat, and that they were afraid and that Chief Gallagher wasn't. Because they didn't want to get in the fight, they banded together and made a plan to take get a Gallagher out of the fight permanently. That they had made the whole thing up, a whole string of allegations, including the shooting of innocent civilians, just to get back at Gallagher. You guys coordinated a lot of this over text messages, didn't you? This is Parlatory cross-examining S-O-1 delay. Coordinated what? Getting your story straight, right? He's referring to that WhatsApp thread that was seized as evidence, months of back and forth between seven seals in the platoon, their own words that Parlatory now quotes back to them on the stand. He gives the same treatment to S-O-1-Tollbert, and it becomes uncomfortably clear that Parlatory somehow has access not just to all their texts, post-appointment, but even from a day or two ago, while the trial was going on. We should know that Tim Parlatory literally warned the jury at one point that he could be kind of a jerk. You're not a big fan of this legal process, are you? I was at one point frustrated with the continuances. Did your frustration rise to the level where you said, "I'm going to burn this mother-fucking-cord astle ground"? Yes. Did you call this legal proceeding a fucking joke? Yes. Did you say somebody fired this pussy-ass fucking judge? Who's fucking court remiss this? It's time to man the fuck up, Facts. Did you say that? Yes. You understand that the judges say Navy Captain, correct, Stan? About this narrative that they made it all up because they're cowards and want to get back at their chief, here's a couple things to consider. First, these are Navy SEALs. Remembering the terrifying things they have to do just to become a SEAL, the idea that Alphapatoon would end up with not just one but seven shaggies from Scooby-Doo, seems unlikely. But more importantly, the idea that the whole thing was made up after the fact is contradicted by multiple accounts that the sewing circle was telling people on deployment as it was happening. Did you ever report any of these alleged targeting of civilians at the time? Yes, I did. Do? Lieutenant Portier. Here is the OIC in the platoon, officer in charge. Whereas Eddie was the top enlisted man, Portier is the top officer. Delay isn't the only one who says he reported his concerns to the OIC about Gallagher targeting civilians. In fact, Eddie's number two, LPO Miller, says that he also reported what was happening. And the assistant officer in charge says the same thing. Lieutenant Portier declined to comment about any of this, but it is corroborated by a SEAL from outside Alpha Batoon that we spoke to, who was also in Mosul at the time. The response, they all say, "Wasn't that they weren't believed?" It's just that no one did anything about it, not until months and months later after deployment when the sewing circle wouldn't let it go. Eddie Gallagher doesn't testify at his trial, but he denies it all. And another SEAL, who was Eddie's spotter that day on a sniper rifle, that SEAL testifies that he too believed it was a good shot. But given how rare it is to have multiple team guys from the same platoon make such severe claims against their chief, I think it's fair to say the allegations at the very least deserved investigating, and that it was a failure of leadership at the teams to not take them seriously. And most importantly, the situation left the sewing circle stuck in a bind, believing that their chief was committing war crimes, but not quite knowing what to do to stop it. As one SEAL who was there put it to me, what do you do, tackle your chief to the ground? S-O-1 Delay again. We were much less effective at the mission, because we had this tertiary thing that was constantly floating over our head. What was that tertiary thing constantly floating over your head? That civilians were being killed by our chief. Objections. Overrule. S-O-1's Delay and Tolbert were now waking up in the morning with two missions to accomplish. First, the official one, kill Isos, liberate the city, and then their self-imposed mission. Keep their chief from crossing a line that they were not okay with. Delay and Tolbert say they begin shooting warning shots, not just to scare civilians from the river, but to scare them away before Gallagher had a chance to shoot them for real. You know, there was countless times where I took warning shots and gave the person the benefit of the doubt when, in fact, if the situation were to develop, and we could have let everything happen as it would have, that I don't doubt we took warning shots at Isos because of it. Delay admits going so far as to not give Gallagher the density altitude cards that he was preparing for all the snipers. It's basically a cheat sheet of atmosphere conditions to help a sniper dial in a more precise shot. You wanted to make sure his aim was off, right? Yes. You're in a combat zone, and you want your chief, one of your snipers, to not be able to shoot straight? Yes. Did you ever take incoming enemy fire from that position? Yes. And you'd rather just leave one of those guns out of the fight? Mr. Partor, no, the question is, would you rather leave one of those guns out of the fight? Yes or no? It's not quite rightful, yes. Thank you, no further questions. There's a thing that military ethicists talk about, called the Unlimited Liability Contract. That when you sign up to be a seal or any military service member, you're accepting that, yes, you could get hurt or lose your life because of what you're asked to do in this job. In exchange for that, the government keeps that physical risk as low as they possibly can while still accomplishing the mission. Well, what about the moral risk? What about the harm that can come from being put in combat situations where all the right answers begin to fade away, leaving you with just a bunch of wrong ones to choose from? Choices that you'll have to live with when the war is over. I want to leave this trial for a moment. I want to leave Alphabetune, I want to leave Mosul in 2017. I want to go back instead to 2005. Same war, same Iraqi city, different special operator, a guy named Bill. Bill was a green beret, another branch of spec ops. And Bill was tasked with a year-long mission. My assignment was, I was to live on a small, tiny Iraqi base and to partner with an Iraqi intelligence officer and interrogator. It's with this one assignment that Bill would end up in an ethical trap of sorts. The kind of moral gray area that special operators specifically have been placed in more and more in the past 20 years of war. And that many believe is affecting them in ways that we are just beginning to understand. Bill won't reveal the name of the Iraqi interrogator that he was paired with. For our purposes, he calls him Sadie. Which is just merely Arabic for sure. And my job was to try to teach and mentor him, you know, but I wasn't allowed nor able to give him orders. Bill was to help Sadie capture and then interrogate prisoners, Iraqi insurgents. However, he was willing to torture a prisoner. Was your job to stop him from torturing? My primary job was to help him be a better interrogator so that he could more effectively fight the insurgency. And if it didn't contradict that primary mission, I was to try to do what I could to try to deter him from using torture. But you couldn't order him, you had to convince him. I had to convince him. His job became talking Sadie out of torture, one prisoner at a time. The prison was in the basement of one small Iraqi building. It was always cold and dark and damp. The interrogators would wear a black mask, you know, a wool hood. And I would just sit in the back of the room with my own black wool mask. Torture isn't just wrong, it's ineffective. Study after study show it rarely results in good intel. But what torture often did give in this situation was a confession, any confession. And that confession was the thing that allowed Sadie to hold a prisoner for more than a couple days, otherwise he'd have to let him go. And that is the trap that Bill's mission as a special operator put him in. If Bill couldn't talk Sadie out of torturing a prisoner, he'd have to sit there and watch the torture in that basement that he failed to stop. But if he did convince Sadie not to torture, no torture often meant no confession, which meant the prisoner would be set free. Freedom that Bill would sometimes find had allowed that prisoner to go on and cause the death of more innocent people. Deaths for which Bill would also feel responsible. Every choice was between wrong and wrong, you know, that another prisoner that I argued over and over to Sadie to not torture. He didn't. And so that prisoner didn't provide us information. Information that prisoner had about an abduction that Bill might have prevented. And it eventually led to the death of a young girl. You know, we found her body in the tall reads of the Tigris River and, you know, her name was Aisha and she was 12 years old. Another prisoner Bill was able to spare from torture. He was released and then went on to execute 10 people before he was captured again, back in Sadie's cell. This pattern went on for a full year, Master Sergeant Anthony Yost. He was killed entering the house that was booby trapped by a former prisoner. Someone that I convinced Sadie to release. My mind started to slow down and eventually my shut off. Hundreds of prisoners, over a thousand hours of interrogation. And suddenly find yourself living within the skin of a completely different person. Someone that you don't want to live with. Someone that you, you know, for horrible reasons believe that it is sometimes preferable to not be in a life. The most toxic experiences people have in life are not threats to their own life and safety, especially not service members. Those guys eat that shit for breakfast. Dr. William Nash was a Navy psychiatrist for 30 years. The thing that that made them suffer the most were these moral issues. I didn't do enough. I could have saved my brother and I didn't. I was just a little too slow getting my weapon up to the sniper in the window, where something happened that shouldn't have happened and you cannot unring the bell. Moral injury was a term coined after Vietnam, and whereas PTSD and war is caused by experiencing something terrifying, maybe life-threatening, moral injury is a threat to your conscience, making the wrong choice or seeing the wrong choice made and not stopping it. It's injury to your soul, to your character. Dr. Nash was part of a symposium that the Special Operations Command held on moral injury in 2019. What some see as the first big sign that Socom might be taking it seriously, as a possible key to the problems that seals are seeing, with scandal and transgression, with profound substance abuse, with suicide. And one of the things that's causing their pain is the way military missions have shifted toward defining their role as a hitman, as an assassin or a torturer. The job that they do hurts them and hurts their families and has serious long-term consequences. And the organization that puts them at risk for this is operating on the assumption that a person can kill as many people as they want in their life and still go home and play with their dog and hug their children, which may not be true. That is what happened to Bill. After he finally got out of that basement with Sadie after 12 months, he struggled for years with what he was asked to do as a Special Operator. Eventually making peace with what he saw as his own moral failures in war. Too often I think every choice I made was based upon some hypothetical future catastrophe. And therefore, it justified doing wrong. What I've come to understand is that we should base our moral judgments, right and wrongness over actions on the present moment, because it is only the present moment that is real. Incredibly, Bill is still a Special Operator. When we spoke, he was on his 15th deployment. Here's Dr. Nash again. If we were doing our jobs of protecting these young men and women that we were accrued out of high school to do these horrible dirty jobs that no one else wants to do, we absolutely would scrub their environments and identify moral risks and eliminate them. Put a simpler way. If you cannot see that line, there's no way to know which side of it you're on. One of the strangest moments in the Gallagher trial happens without a word. A man enters the courtroom with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist. He approaches the jury. He opens a briefcase and hands them each a piece of paper. While each member of the jury reads it, he stands and he waits. When they're done, they hand it back. The man puts it back in the briefcase and he walks out. The jury was just let in on the Mosul Deployment Rules of Engagement, or ROEs. Their super top secret, hence the briefcase drama. The rules of engagement in its simplest expression is the line. The parameters under which you can use force against who and in what circumstances. It's the line between right and wrong for Americans in any combat situation. American leadership had insisted over and over that the line had not been moved in the battle for Mosul. I want to emphasize here, there has been no change to our rules of engagement. This is Jim Mattis, the Secretary of Defense at the time. And there has been no change to our continued extraordinary efforts to avoid innocent civilian casualties. But at the trial, listen to the guy who rammed the Spekhov's Task Force in Mosul, the guy in charge, Lieutenant Colonel Andrew Christian. Here's what he said about the ROEs. When General Mattis took over as a Secretary of Defense, we saw a significant change in the ROE. And while ROEs remain classified, we do know that civilian air strike casualties saw a significant jump in the battle of Mosul. Amnesty International stopped just short of accusing the United States itself of war crimes for not protecting civilians there. In fact, one thing the Gallagher trial did do was lay bare just how blurred the line had become, the loophole that were built right in in order to win that fight in Mosul. Like for example, that we were even fighting at all. We were supposed to have gotten out of Iraq in 2011. Big announcements, everyone relieved. Everything after that was what they would call "Advise, Assist, and a Company", AAA. The American forces that have been deployed to Iraq do not and will not have a combat mission. Here's Obama announcing a AAA deployment in 2014. Our mission is to "Advise and Assist our partners on the ground". But at trial, here's Lieutenant Colonel Christian again, saying the quiet parts out loud. We were engaged in some form of combat on a daily basis in the U.S. forces that are extra. Despite serving as a supporting and a supporting role, absolutely. And that included Chief Gallagher and his things, absolutely. They were in combat every day. His Assist and a Company is a word game. And then, there's our partner force that we were fighting with, the Iraqi-ERD, the emergency response division. We're challenging to work with those guys. Here's Commander Christian again. And at one point, U.S. commanders weren't sure we wanted to partner with them at all because of some of the war crime violations that they were accused of. In fact, in 2015, the ERD had been blacklisted by the United States from receiving aid or training because of war crimes, reports of torture, of summary executions, but the Pentagon sidesteped that law for Mosul, saying in effect, "We're not aiding them, really. We're just working with them." Not only were we working with them, at one point, Seal Team 7 shared a building with them in Mosul. The Seals and American fighters told us they would, on the regular, hear the torture at night, men screaming in pain, muffled gunshots through the walls as they were sleeping. The prisoners would go in and not come out. Put yourself in the position of alpha-platoon in that environment. How skewed is your perspective become, assessing the difference between right and wrong? How groundless your decision-making? There's another moment in the Gallagher trial I want you to hear, where the defense is grilling S.O.1 Delay, one of the snipers who dined out on Gallagher. You also kept the journal on the deployment, didn't you? Yes. Delay called it his "significant actions journal" or "sigx." It's how he would record and process the events of combat. The preparatory turns to the entry that Delay made on Father's Day, when the old man was allegedly shot. At the time, you write down on sniper rifle and pink building with Dalton, get 338 sniper rounds through each window. Just do warning shots, miss getting old man from getting shot, right? Yes. In parletory's eyes, it's what's missing from that journal entry that proves the shooting never happened. But then, the prosecution has Delay read that entry one more time. Can you please read the whole statement? On sniper rifle, in pink building with Dalton, get 338 sniper rounds through each window. Just do warning shots, miss getting old man from getting shot. Only this time, they ask him to explain that last line. What does that mean? It meant that I had a sense of responsibility to keep these civilians from getting shot, and I had failed because I didn't get to that old man in time to crack off a warning shot before he was killed. Delay isn't talking about Gallagher's responsibility here. He's talking about his own. On that day, he picked up a pen, and he framed what happened as his own failure. Beyond guilt or innocence, this trial showed that at least for some of the seals and alphotune, the line between right and wrong in Mosul got extremely hard to see. And if you can't see that line, the only way to know which side of it you're on might just be to stand up and redraw it yourself. But standing up has its risks, because it can make a person a really easy target, as some of these seals are about to find out for themselves. And the problems will become even bigger, because one of them is about to go on the stand, swear to tell the truth, and then change his story altogether. Next time on The Line. Yeah, the witnesses, I mean, look, each one of these witnesses is going to come in and tell their own individual story, and we're going to have to go through each one of them, expose each one of them for lying. Did Chief Eddie Gallagher stab and kill an ISIS prisoner? Now, what's the big challenge? The big challenge is, we don't have a body, we don't have an autopsy. Well, of course, it seems distasteful. Or as fucking way beyond distasteful. You don't think in like, oh, this is wrong, or you're like, yeah, fuck this guy, he was just trying to kill us. I wasn't sure what was going to happen. I wasn't even sure he was going to testify. Did that hatred of Chief Gallagher continue throughout the deployment? Yes. It's a little bit defiant. It is. We are very defiant, both Eddie and I. I also am not going to show up there like a victim, I'm not a victim. The Line is an Apple original podcast produced by Jigsaw Productions. Our producer is Lizzie Jacobs, investigative producer, Diane Hodson, Jody Avergan as our editor. For real, a Lisa Tucker and David Iverson are our associate producers, Emily Van Blarkum, is our production assistant, and Natsumi Ajisaka did our fact checking. Rick Kwan is our engineer, and our original music is from Mark Orden and John Hancock, with additional music from Jeff Baxter and Derek Phillips. The Line is executive produced and written by me, Dan Tabersky. For Jigsaw Productions, executive producers are Brad E. Bear, Stacy Hoffman, Richard Perillo, Joey Mera, and Alex Gibney. The supervising producer is Whitney Johnson. Our consulting producers are 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. Legal services provided by J. Ward Brown and Ballard Spar. Rachel Van Landingham is our consultant on military law. Thanks also to Paul Soldier and Rita Nakashima Brock. Thanks to the folks at Final Final V2, listen and follow on Apple Podcasts. 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 U.S., 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. [BLANK_AUDIO]