I am a U.S. Naval Academy graduate who served proudly for 10 years aboard a ballistic missile submarine, yet I do not consider myself a “warrior.”
Sure, I spent a few weeks in Quantico, running around in the mud. I’ve conquered plenty of obstacle courses, worn in a pair of combat boots and trained in multiple hand-to-hand combat disciplines. But I’ve never taken fire, engaged an enemy or had to kill anyone, up close or at a distance. Those are the things that warriors do.
But I do know plenty about operational service, morale and leadership. And after nearly two decades in the law, I also know my way around the justice system — including the military version. So I find myself in an interesting place when it comes to the case of Navy SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher, with a reluctant perspective on why we’re getting it wrong and what we can do about it.
First, in the interests of full disclosure, I feel compelled to say that I am not a supporter of President Donald Trump.
But Trump is not the reason I decided to write about the Gallagher situation. The reality is that Trump is far from the only American who feels Gallagher is wholly above reproach and deserving of the treatment he’s received from the president.
There are many people who feel this way, and you likely know some of them. This segment of the population fetishizes combat and violence, and views “warriors” as one of the highest actualizations of human beings; individuals so supreme and disciplined that they can end a life with the same effort that the rest of us deploy in getting in and out of our cars.
Unfortunately, many of these same individuals are called to serve, and end up serving for the wrong reason.
That’s right: There is a wrong reason to serve. Serving because you enjoy violence and want an excuse to engage in it is dangerous and wrong. There is a reason we don’t deploy prisoners into combat alongside our professional soldiers.
The reality of war is far from its glamorized and fictional counterpart. Talk to any battlefield veteran (as I have) and they’ll tell you, even the “hardest” movie doesn’t come close to real war. It is the ugliest thing we do as humans, and the day we don’t have to do it anymore will be a glorious day, indeed.
But we have not yet advanced as a civilization to the point where we can abandon war. That being the case, we must master it and develop individuals to master each discipline within it, if for no other reason than to ensure the survival of our way of life.
That brings up an issue of confusion in training. I can tell you that there are few places in the U.S. military more warrior-oriented than the service academies. It was there I learned to make my “war face,” where I jumped into the Severn River in December to prove my toughness, where I chanted that “blood makes the grass grow.”
But I always knew that this training was allegory. I never really thought I’d kill someone with my hands, or expected to storm an enemy compound. The point was that these harsh truths made for hard lessons, and that those who had suffered before us could pass these lessons on without the scars to go with them — and future generations of soldiers to apply them, without having to lose so many brothers and sisters along the way.
There was a time when I looked at men like Eddie Gallagher with reverence and envy. His easy smile and casual cool, even in uniform, was part of what I imagined a military man to be; what I wanted to be. But from the other side of my 20-year Academy reunion, he looks much smaller and more fragile. Rather than hate him, I really just feel badly for him.
I suspect that in his quiet honest moments, he’ll feel badly for himself. At some level, he knows that he’s just a bully who killed an 18-year-old kid and took a photo with his body because it made him feel good and there was no one with enough conviction to stop him.
For the foreseeable future, there will be men like Gallagher, and people who worship men like him, but when we start holding both groups to account, even when it forces us to look at ourselves, we can begin to see them for who they are, and see ourselves for what it makes us to count them as our own.
Glenn Truitt is a Las Vegas attorney who specializes in health care law.