Did We Create Chief Eddie Gallagher?: Thoughts on Navy SEAL Worship

Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher is accused of, in May 2017, stabbing an unarmed, wounded Iraqi teenager.  The boy, a suspected insurgent fighter, had been injured, and the SEAL medics were attempting to patch up his wounds when Gallagher allegedly stabbed him in the neck and in the side.   Shortly thereafter, Gallagher apparently held his impromptu reenlistment ceremony over the body.

Fellow SEALs reported also that Gallagher, in previous incidents, had sniped a girl walking down by the river and an older man carrying a water jug, and at other times, he had fired into civilian crowds.  Consequently, his comrades began secretly altering his sniper rifle to make it less accurate, and they would fire warning shots themselves to scare away civilians before Gallagher came along.

Gallagher, currently being held at the Navy Medical Center in San Diego, denies these allegations and awaits trial and/or perhaps a presidential pardon.  

To some Americans, Gallagher is a hero.  To others, he is a war criminal.  Still, others might view him as something in between: a tough guy who did what we sent him to do, for better or for worse.  How we view Gallagher depends, in part, on our politics.  That is, on how we view his line of work, on how we view his alleged victim—innocent, or righteous, or neither?—and on how we view the scene/country of the crime—member of axis of evil or occupied, oppressed people?  Potential Trump pardon aside, Gallagher remains innocent until proven guilty.

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Whether he is found guilty or not (or is pardoned), I believe that we the American people are complicit in the crimes committed.  

I am not simply talking about our sending Gallagher and others “over there” for a combined eight overseas deployments and those deployments compounding into some PTSD that eventually caused him to snap and use a hunting knife to stab an Iraqi boy.  

It is possible that that was or is part of the equation.  PTSD is real, but by itself, PTSD is too clinical, too facile an explanation here.  I am talking about a deeper, more culturally-incubated, often latent causation.  I am talking about our worship of SEALs and, by extension, our worship of military “heroes,” whether deserved or not.  And, how that reflexive worship can feed the militarism and nationalism that makes such a stabbing possible in the first place.        

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The first SEAL—short for “Sea, air, and land,” one of the navy’s special operations forces—I was introduced to was either Casey Ryback or LTJG Dale Hawkins, I can’t recall.  Both were hot-shot badasses, but neither was real, of course.  Hawkins was played by Charlie Sheen in the aptly titled Navy Seals (1990).  Ryback, i.e. Steven Seagal’s character in Under Siege (1992), was actually an ex-SEAL—a cook of all things—by the time I met him.  His earlier SEAL training, however, served him and the country well when he took the ship back from Tommy Lee Jones’s band of mercenary, terrorist hijackers.  

Neither was actually a good film by most standards—I find them hard to watch in my 30s—but both entertained twelve-year-old boys well back in the day.   

The first actual SEAL I met was at the US Naval Academy, during Summer Seminar 1999.   We rising high school seniors—and aspiring midshipmen-naval officers—sat in awe of the SEAL chief on the stage.  He regaled us with stories from his training, from his “hell week” for instance. He shared stories—presumably the unclassified ones—from conflicts he was involved in (“conflict” is what we called war in the 1990s).  He told us about leadership and about grit.  We saw that grit in his face and on his hands.  A great number of us wanted to be just like him.  I didn’t want to be exactly like him—I didn’t think I had either the courage, the prowess, or the mandibles to become a SEAL—but I stood in awe of him nonetheless.  We had met other officers and chiefs throughout the week, but this was a SEAL in front of us.

A couple years later, I met some other real SEALs, in closer quarters.  That time, I was a midshipman on “summer cruise” with the USS Albany, a fast-attack submarine.  SEALs had deployed with us on the sub off the coast of Spain, and they were conducting exercises, getting into a mini-submarine, and then going out some distance and doing things SEALs do.  Practice-do, I believe, not do-do, although I’m not sure. 

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Navy SEALs loom large in the American public and psyche.  Actual SEALs, fictional SEALs, fictional SEALs based on actual SEALs, former SEALs, it doesn’t matter—we love and revere them.  Bradley Cooper/Chris Kyle in American Sniper.  John Krasinski/Jim Halpert/Jack Silva in 13 Hours.  Chris Pratt and company in Zero Dark Thirty.    

Former SEALs in government have a lot of street cred, too.  Sometimes more perceived cred than actual and sometimes more short-lived than long-.  Part-Teddy-Roosevelt-Rough-Rider, part-Casey-Ryback, part-Montana-white-settler-colonial-faux-cowboy, former SEAL Ryan Zinke rode a horse to his first day of work as Interior Secretary.  Then, he quickly dove headlong into corruption and scandal in his brief tenure and proceeded to open up federal lands for his fossil fuel friends. Then he resigned.  

(“...And the horse you rode in on.”)

Former SEAL Erik Prince built his mercenary Blackwater empire, comprising other former SEALs and special ops people.  Then, he avoided war crimes charges in Iraq, changed the name of the company and hid out in Dubai for some time.  Now, he has come back with a vengeance and arrogance in recent years—his sister Betsy DeVos meanwhile dismantling the Department of Education from within, very SEAL-like of her—and has pitched his new mercenary viceroy plan to ostensibly get the US out of Afghanistan.  He does this all with the gall of a non-war criminal—or war criminal if you prefer, as that is very in right now.  Bannon, Don Jr., and many other frustrated, white guys are enamored with Prince and what he represents.  As investigative reporter Matt Cole points out:

They love the myth of Erik Prince, the Navy Seal, of the former secret CIA agent…. This guy really has so much in common, aside from his military experience, so much in common with the president of the United States and I can see why someone like Don Jr. then, you know, they come from sort of a similar background in some ways of wealth and privilege, but this guy was willing to be a Navy SEAL and has done the dirty deeds and gotten his hands dirty.

Like Don Jr., notably and randomly, Tiger Woods also has a (reverse) celebrity-crush on the SEALs.  He has made VIP visits to SEAL training locations, shot their guns, run their obstacle course, and given talks.  Tiger’s vicarious flirtations with them are bewildering and yet, in the context of American SEAL/hero/celebrity worship, completely normal.  Apparently, he had dreamed of becoming a SEAL himself.  Like Don Jr. though, he too had to settle.

Even liberals have a weakness for SEALs.  Obama vowed to withdraw from Iraq but then to escalate in Afghanistan.  In the latter, we would have a new reliance on special forces.  Stanley McChrystal, not a SEAL but special operations regardless, was celebrity-general under Obama until his celebrity got him in trouble.  We know, too, William McRaven, Navy SEAL, celebrity-admiral who oversaw the Osama bin Laden raid.  SEALs and special ops mean a lighter military footprint.  Not so much “shock and awe” but smarter, quicker, stealthier, techier.  That combined with some drone strikes—the “gig war” alongside the “gig economy”—became our preferred liberal cocktail.  Meanwhile, that Iraq-to-Afghanistan pivot gave us liberals an out (or an in), to say, “Look, we’re not crazy anti-war people.  We’re sophisticated, tactical. We might be against the Iraq war, but we’re not against all war. We’re serious people….Full speed ahead on Afghanistan.”  SEALs helped give us that opportunity.  Politically, psychologically.

Finally, there are the fake SEAL stories.  Mr. Rogers, for one.  Urban legends that he used to be a Navy SEAL and had a bunch of tattoos (which is why he wore long sleeves all the time) are harmless enough and even a little funny.  But, it does beg the question, of peddlers of this urban legend, why a genuine cultural hero can’t just be the sweetest and loveliest man ever (which Fred Rogers was) but needs a violent past to make him more legit.  

The SEAL rumors were funny, too, for Tom Barna, who was a teacher and then administrator at my high school.  While less well known than Mr. Rogers, he was genuine and sweet too.

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Why do we need SEALs?  There is the military geo-strategic question, and then there is the psychological question.

On the geo-strategic level, I guess I’m glad they exist.  I’m glad that Osama bin Laden is no longer around and that neither my schmuck friends nor I had to go in and get him.  Especially, in a hypothetical, actually defensive, history-started-yesterday-no-historical-context-needed, just-war scenario, I’m glad there are people braver than I am to do “what needs to be done.” 

History, though, didn’t begin yesterday, and most of our “engagements” overseas are not defensive.  Maybe that’s more on us than on the SEALs, but that is another blog post for another day.  Questioning these engagements does send us down that same clichéd path: you’re either a “traitor” or a “pussy” or both.  Colonel Nathan Jessup reminds both us and Lieutenant Coffey, should we dare to question the efficacy or morality of a particular engagement: "You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.”  When SEALs are involved, that clichéd response is multiplied because SEALs are revered and worshipped even more than the regular soldier.  Just watch the coverage of Chief Gallagher on Fox and Friends--coverage that Trump then downloads as his marching orders (well, don’t actually watch Fox). 

More than the geo-strategic military angle however, here I am interested in why we need SEALs, culturally and psychologically speaking?  What do Casey Ryback and Ryan Zinke give us?Historian, Vietnam veteran, and gold-star father, Andrew Bacevich, in Breach of Trust, illustrates the unique relationship of the American public to the American military, especially in the last forty years.  Borrowing slightly from Occupy Wall Street’s lexicon, there is the “1 percent” at the top—the millionaires and billionaires, whose bank accounts we covet.  There is the 1 percent at the bottom “whose members get sent to fight seemingly endless wars.”  (While the bottom 1 percent economically does not completely match up with the 1 percent in the military, poor and working class people—often people of color—do disproportionately comprise the military.)  And then, there is the 98 percent in the muddied middle—we who will never actually attain top 1 percent status and who will never actually attain bottom 1 percent grit either.  We live dull, unsatisfying lives, or we convince ourselves that we live dull, unsatisfying lives and that some external adventure will satisfy.  Part of us envies the bottom 1 percent’s heroism and grit.  Most of us armchair warriors actually live quite complicated, nuanced, and messy—if not sexy—lives, but we nevertheless envy what appears to be a rawness and simplicity in the “heroes”’ decisions: black/white, shoot/no shoot, die/kill.

Among other incongruities, this worship-yet-distance helps create a warrior caste that is above reproach and perhaps even above the law.  In the case of SEALs: no, the majority are not Chief Gallagher or Erik Prince, but add to the extra special reverence SEALs receive the fact that the organization is deployed all over the world and has limited oversight, and there is greater ability and temptation to “go rogue."  

Bacevich’s hypothesis of the military-cult-worship is not specific to SEALs or special forces, but because they’re the “best of the best,” I believe his hypothesis is doubly true when it comes to them.  As for our role: “In a free society, some are guilty, but all are responsible” (Rabbi A.J. Heschel).

In a similar vein—channeling both Greek mythology and Freud—Chris Hedges describes the battle between Thanatos and Eros, i.e. the death drive and the life drive, in War Is a Force that Gives Us Meaning:

This love, like death, radiates outwards. It battles Thanatos at the very moment of death's sting. These two fundamental impulses crash like breakers into each other. . . . Love alone fuses happiness and meaning….We believe in the nobility and heroic self-sacrifice demanded by war, especially when we are blinded by the narcotic of war. We discover in the communal struggle, the shared sense of meaning and purpose, a cause. War fills our spiritual void. . . . This is a quality war shares with love, for we are, in love, also able to choose fealty and self-sacrifice over security. 

Thanatos and Eros battle each other within individuals, and they battle each other within civilizations.  At both levels, souls are at stake.  When war is unleashed, societies imagine they are thriving, but the narcotic of war is rotting all of its other (non-war) institutions.  This often takes place slowly.  Its effects can be latent.  Soldiers—and war reporters like Hedges and others close to war—appear to thrive, but the narcotic kills them literally and/or rots them spiritually.

Because war is a force that gives us meaning and the warriors are heroes that give us meaning, we venerate the SEALs.  The actual, fictional, and fake ones.  The good ones and the bad ones.  We revere them in the similar macho ways that we revere cowboys, Custer, Texas Rangers, Border Patrol, John Wayne, Clint Eastwood, Rambo, Andrew Jackson, celebrity chefs, and ice road truckers. 

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What did we SWOs—surface warfare officers—think about SEALs?  To the degree that we thought about them at all, in one breath, we viewed them as uncouth—not too much better than those Marine jarheads.  We were the philosopher-warriors after all, drinking scotch on top of Hong Kong skyscrapers and smoking cigars on bridge wings in Tokyo Bay, discussing both Alfred Thayer Mahan and This American Life, our hands and consciences cleaner and our missiles sleeker.  But in another breath, we were also likely jealous of them, in the way that we were jealous of those “brown shoe” navy pilots.  Both groups cooler and more admired—from the outside and the inside of the navy—and more fictionalized/filmed than we were.

A colleague of mine recently told me he wished he had signed up for the military like I had—that he had put on the uniform like I had.  I told him not to worry about it—that he didn’t miss much--but, I get where he is coming from.  That was part of what drove me to sign up.  That is, when boyhood fascinations with the military faded, there was still that lingering (late adolescence) question: would I regret not signing up, every time I saw someone else in uniform?  And while I did serve, part of me wishes that my time was grittier, more hard-core.  Something like the SEALs.  I would have more street credit, from myself and from others.  That’s not rational, but it’s true. 

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Because I'm not in the end a pacifist, I imagine there are times when we would need SEALs (or any other special force, or armed force for that matter).  In a sane country with a sane military budget, with a moral foreign policy and an emotionally mature and sexually secure populace, we would use them sparingly and justly.  When we would have to use them, we would neither shun them nor gush over them when they returned.  We would re-enter them intentionally and not worship them reflexively. We would honor those who deserved it, which by the way would not be everyone.  (If everyone who puts on a uniform is a “hero,” hero loses its meaning.) 

And if this war or fighting was necessary, we would understand that it was a serious, somber undertaking.  It could not be reduced to pre-football game flyovers and seventh-inning-stretch “God Bless Americas.”  The SEALs and soldiers who would have to do this fighting—we would recognize their moral injury and help reintegrate them.  Saint Augustine’s just war was predicated on this.  And even if the cause were just, which is a bigger and bigger “if” these days, there would still be moral injury.  There would still be internal and ritual work required required to put Thanatos back in balance with Eros.  Because it would be—because it is—such a serious, somber undertaking, we wouldn't treat it lightly.  We wouldn’t cheaply worship nor creepily envy the soldiers, but we would deeply pity them.  And we non-soldiers—we, too, would be morally injured.  Not as greatly, but injured still and in need of healing.  We would need to put respective Thanatos back in balance with Eros.   

During this process, we would not be so frivolous.  Our frivolity—our cheap hero-worship—has fed Thanatos, at the expense of Eros.  In our frivolity, we plant the poison seeds for the next war, the next war criminal, and the next gangster-president to rise.   

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Whether or not Chief Gallagher himself is found guilty, whether or not that boy needed to die, Thanatos nevertheless reigned supreme in that stabbing.  And Thanatos certainly reigned and celebrated when, after a chance to catch their breath, the SEALs conducted the reenlistment ceremony over the dead body.

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According to The New York Times reporting around Chief Gallagher, there are two general subsets in the SEALs or at least in that crew of SEALs:

There’s this subculture that has grown up within the SEALs. Some people call them the Salts. Other people call them the Pirates. But we’re talking about these roguish war fighters, the guys who’ve really been there and done the stuff. And those people are really prized in this culture. You know, it is a culture of war fighters. And they celebrate toughness, and they celebrate killing in ways that I think a lot of us would find kind of shocking. And to a certain extent, they care less about the rules than they do about getting things done. And they will cover for each other when necessary. And these documents prove that that pirate culture is there. But they also show us this whole subculture we never knew about, people who disprove the Pirates, that don’t agree with what they’re doing, that don’t think they should be able to get away with things, that think they should be reported. And those people, one of the SEALs described them to me as the Boy Scouts.   

If a force like the SEALs must exist, and if the above description is true, it would behoove us to lift up the boy scouts and not the pirates.  Definitely not pardon the pirates, at least.

Yes, how we view Gallagher depends, in part, on our politics, as I stated at the beginning.  But it also depends on how we view ourselves.  Who will we be: boy scouts or pirates?  The choice is as important for us pretenders as it for the SEALs.  As Kurt Vonnegut warns in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”