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Navy SEAL Chief Edward Gallagher
“Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? The Shadow knows.”[1]
I’ve been watching this drama with great interest from afar – as much as one can within the beltway of the Swamp. It has fucked up everyone from the President right down to the SOF deck plates. Who’s wrong and who’s right? It has so far claimed the career and legacy of the former SECNAV, who should now shut the fuck up, since he is playing a loser’s hand, and will go down in history as just one more stupid shit fired for going behind the back of his boss. The NCIS and Navy JAG prosecutors are in the same boat – exposed in this story if you dare follow the link:
https://www.navytimes.com/opinion/2019/11/27/op-ed-navy-corruption-and-the-gallagher-case/

It doesn’t paint a flattering picture of the Navy, much less the PC culture of our leadership. And this also goes for the three Army guys who were also exonerated by Presidential fiat.

A couple of weeks ago, I was staying up late writing and decided to take a break, flipping through the channels, and came upon the long director’s cut of Apocalypse Now, which was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s tale of a 19th Century journey up the Congo River in Africa, to wit:
Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-British novelist Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the Heart of Africa. Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells his story to friends aboard a boat anchored on the River Thames. This setting provides the frame for Marlow’s story of his obsession with the ivory trader Kurtz, which enables Conrad to create a parallel between what Conrad calls “the greatest town on earth”, London, and Africa as places of darkness.[2]

Central to Conrad’s work is the idea that there is little difference between “civilised people” and those described as “savages”; Heart of Darkness raises questions about imperialism and racism.[2]
It inspired a lot of debate at the time about the moral imperative of the British Empire, and was the inspiration for Francis Ford Copolla’s epic, which 40 years ago explored the psyche and morality of the Vietnam War; eerie parallels here – and it never lacks for searing drama.

Martin Sheen did a great job of playing the lead character of Captain Benjamin Willard in channeling Charles Marlow as both the narrator and chief protagonist, matched up against the immortal Marlon Brando as Kurtz the antagonist. But the conundrum remains and even after the end you still have to wonder – who was the more moral man living in the Heart of Darkness?

As I have stated earlier, it is my goal in writing these opinion pieces to educate and entertain, and then try my best to relate my own personal experience and render opinions for the benefit of our younger Socotra readers. I thought long and hard about finding a seam in the Gallagher tragedy and I think I found it; darkness is harbored in the hearts of every upright sapient being that currently inhabits or has ever walked the planet Earth – if mercy and goodness are the yin, then inherit cruelty and sadism are the yang of human nature, and nothing brings out the latter so much as war.

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I swore up and down that I was not going to really write about the Gulf War. Not that it was bad, but some things that go on cruise definitely need to stay on cruise. The Chief Gallagher saga has ripped off that scab, and what it reveals about all of us. I will now admit that the Heart of Darkness syndrome became a part of my DNA –and there is a thin line between being a stone-cold professional, and a raving, blood-thirsty fiend and maniac – so here goes.

War sucks, plain and simple – there may be glory to be found, but success in that endeavor is gained at the incredible mental and physical pain caused by committing acts of blood-letting and savagery. That’s why we now have a clinical acronym for it – PTSD. I don’t think that I have it, since I don’t really feel any remorse or guilt about what we did, but I may also be lying to myself. There’s a dichotomy in all of us self-styled warriors – we can be the nicest people you will ever meet, but don’t cross us when we have the proper ROE. I saw that quality in the people I worked with from Delta and Team Six when laboring for SOCOM – they were great guys, but also cold-blooded killers. One of my favorite satirical short poems sums it up pretty nicely:

“Roses are red,
Violets are Blue.
I’m a schizo,
And so are we.”

Harkening back to my War College days, we used to love using dead guy quotes in our papers. Trotsky had a great way of putting it: “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.” That hit home when we saw our now dead friends murdered in the Pentagon on 9/11 in real-time on TV. Stalin had another favorite of mine: “…a single death is a tragedy – a million deaths is a statistic.” But here’s the Master of War, On War:

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Carl von Clausewitz characterized war as (and I paraphrase here since I can’t find the actual quote) “…a mystical force which roams the battlefield, seizing control of the hearts and souls of even the most moral of men, and bending them to its will.”

I’ve been there, done that, and it is fucking scary – an out-of-body experience. War makes you do superhuman things, like staying up 10 days straight after H-Hour trying to sort out the targeting for four carrier air wings and maybe sleeping two hours a day during down times between launches, normally sitting in your chair in the carrier’s intel center; getting woken up to be fucked with by the CARGRU staff,[3] signing strike reports (MISREPS) tucked under your arm while napping, and when not chain-smoking Marlboros and sucking down stale black coffee, you were eating box lunches and dinners delivered to you by your troops who were concerned about your well-being.

I only took time off to take an occasional shower and change my grungy khakis; I lost 20 pounds in the process. Don’t get me wrong; despite the fact that the experience almost killed me, I still look back on the ordeal and I never felt more alive. I loved combat ops – it was surreal; terrible but enthralling. I finally got some down time for a day, and slept through most of it until we got called to GQ when we thought we were under Exocet attack by the Iraqi Air Force. Danger definitely got my full attention and in the end took a large chunk of my as, so maybe we do have PTSD, after all.

Ergo, I learned the hard way that war is a bad business – once you are there and possessed or cursed with living the dream or nightmare depending on your point of view, then it demands your all, so you better damn well fight like a demon since you don’t know when or how it is going to end. After things settled out and we could see how it was going, then our blood lust really manifested itself. There is nothing better than kicking the ever-living shit out of an enemy, and avenging all of the casualties suffered by our brave warfighters.

Since we were the Battle Force Flagship for all four Persian Gulf carriers, I took every combat loss of our pilots (none from Ma Midway thanks to the fates) to heart. The best way we had to get revenge was to stick our biggest and most precise weaponry to the bad guys as we could, and the bigger the better – the cold, grim and legal application of superior firepower. In doing so, I felt like an avenging angel, aided and abetted by my super senior chief Pappy, who was an imagery analyst par excellence. Our air wing strike pilots awarded him with the moniker “The Eye of Death” and we wielded the virtual sword of justice in pursuit of the mission without mercy.
I grew up as an Intruder guy and we owned the night, but it was our Hornet pilots who dominated the day. I had participated in the Hornet Air Wing compatibility OPEVAL back in the early-80s – we told Big Navy not to buy it – too late. It was Desert Storm that made me a believer in how awesome a weapon it had become when it was full of gas, which was always an issue. The first good Gulf War was one where gas was not that much of a big deal, since we were assigned to be up front on point in Carrier Operations Area One (CVOA-1) because we had 18” armored battleship sides, and were otherwise considered to be expendable. There were plenty of Air Force tanker orbits to suck off of, so It was advantageous for us since our mostly Hornet air wing on Midway was closer to the target.
I’ve always said I was born forty years too late, and wish I could have fought in WWII in the Pacific. Being on Midway in Desert Storm was the next best thing. The first night launch with Intruders, Hornets, and Tomahawks zorching majestically off into the heavens was a thing of beauty. That Air Force Major in Riyadh said it best on CNN “This is a night that none of us will never, ever forget.”

F-18 Rolling In on Target
Midway at the time was a bad-ass bitch full of strike aircraft – three squadrons of Hornets and two of Intruders. Our flight deck crew and ordies were the best. Pound-for-pound, we over-matched even the most modern of our Nimitz-class counterparts when it came to delivering hard punches and sustained body-blows to the bad guys. We got our share of special missions assigned to us since we were good at what we did, which was blowing the fucking shit out of high-profile targets. The Air Force didn’t like a lot of things we did, but that was the Midway.
We always carefully assessed our targets and assigned weapons suited to the task working with our Strike Ops guys. Our Air Force overseers in Riyadh who controlled the Air Tasking Order (ATO) were wise enough to allow us leeway on what ordnance we would drop after our fight over targets-that-count. They called it //BEST// in the format section where ordnance was specified. For us in fragging the Hornets, it was four Mk-84 2000 lb bombs for “visually pleasing BDA.” When assigned a large target that needed to be blown away, we would load four Mk-84s per Hornet, and assign four aircraft to a strike – followed up by a couple of 2000lb Walleye glide bombs for BDA and mop-up duties – 36k pounds of good bombs on target on time was Maxwell’s Silver Hammer coming down upon the heads of the bad guys; Bang Bang! You’re fucking dead.

We took great pride in seeing our aircraft trap without any ordnance on board – we dropped or shot everything but air-to-air missiles. Every once in a while, a Hornet or Intruder would hang a piece of ordnance, which couldn’t be returned to the carrier, so the pilots would bingo to the Marine air field we had in Bahrain, where they could download the bomb and get serviced before returning home. One of our squadron COs, Randy, had that happen to him and had a great story to tell about that, so bear with me.

During his attack run one fine day, Randy hung a bomb on an outboard weapons station, so there was no way he could recover on the ship. Since ordnance was an issue and we were running low on the big stuff, he diverted to download the Mk84 so the Marines could employ it later. He landed in Bahrain, downloaded the bomb, got refueled and field-launched to get back to Midway and trap on board during the next recovery cycle. Randy was a tall cowboy from Texas, and a great gentleman. As the Strike Leader, he came straight to CVIC still wearing all of his flight gear to debrief. He told us something that I have never forgotten, delivered in his signature Texan twang:
“I saw a lot of our bombs hitting the targets, the three I got off were okay, and I heard later from the Walleye guys that we pretty much killed everything we were after – is that what everybody else said”
I told him that we had seen most of the tapes, and that was what we were going to put into the report, just needed his input.

“Well shit hot – now here’s the funny part.”
An aside: there is an age-old aviation tradition of ordnance men (aka ordies) to paint or chalk epithets on weapons aimed at our enemies. Our ordies on Midway were particularly notorious in that respect. Here’s where it gets really good.

“I landed in Bahrain, was directed to the pits for downloading and servicing the aircraft. The ground crew was a bunch of female Marine enlisted gals, and they were cracking up laughing when I pulled in. I thought it was because I was just an old fart getting out of his bird to go take a real piss, but then I saw the hung bomb.”
An ordie had chalked on it “I like bald pussy.” Randy was pretty embarrassed.
“Dang, I would have had to hang that fucking bomb.”

We were rolling on the deck laughing – damn, a new acronym – ROTDL. War is serious shit, but not without its comic moments. You can’t make this shit up.

Later on in my career both in the Navy and then in the Army, I once again got the chance to administer extreme unction to drug dealers, by locking them up and destroying their networks and taking their money, and later roadside bomb makers, by enabling our troops with the means to kill them dead while they were trying to get their Jihad on. No one died in the drug war, but I took every combat loss personally in my last job. I hated to read about casualties in the SIGACTS every morning – fuck, it was depressing, but made me even more determined to win. While there is a grim satisfaction one can take in dealing death to assholes who desperately deserve it, there is no true joy there, and it takes a toll on your soul. During the course of a career, you have to assume many personas – my last was as a well-dressed man dispensing destruction on our enemies while wielding policy, backed up by a healthy checkbook.

I had to travel a good bit back then. In various airports around the country, I saw our troops coming and going to and from theater, and was eye-witness to some honor flights – moving experiences, but never ever a good thing. I would seek out our soldiers in the smoking lounges and over sharing some cowboy killers, ask them what their experiences were – how many times were you hit by IEDs, how many friends did you have killed – tell me about it? What worked and didn’t work? What can we do better, what do you need? I always parted ways by reassuring them that “I am in a position to make a difference, and I guarantee you that we will seek out and destroy all of the motherfuckers who injured you and killed your friends.” I always came away both inspired by their courage, and with a dark heart filled with terrible resolve.

Early on in my last tour, I got to go to theater to see for myself what our troops had to deal with – inhuman living conditions, enduring terrifying and chaotic conditions in both wild and urban environments, faced with a cunning enemy where life and death were split-second decisions or chances of fate. I marveled at what they had (and still have) to deal with in almost impossible situations that mere normal humans couldn’t even begin to comprehend. I only spent a week over there, and the nicest place we went was Bagram, where we heard gunfire and bombs detonating on the perimeter every night, punctuated by SOF helos launching on their seek-and-destroy missions. It was the same in Baghdad. Eddie Gallagher had to eat that shit sandwich every day, going mano-a-mano with the bad guys as a volunteer and professional serving eight tours in the Heart of Darkness, and he was persecuted for his decision making during the chaos and heat of battle? – Good God Y’all.

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The decision to go to war, and rightly so, is best left up to the civilians. If it were up to us military guys, we would kill every perceived enemy of our country without mercy if left unchecked. The scariest ever radio transmission you would hear in a Combat Information Center on an American warship is “weapons red and free.” God have mercy on the poor souls of the people who we have now been ordered to send to meet Allah. Yeah, there’s a moral dilemma with all of that, even if you have a clear conscious.

Talk is cheap with some of the political assholes we have to deal with, but once that decision is made, the civilian leadership needs to back out, since they don’t know jack shit. Life and death are black and white in battle and there’s only one primal choice – survival. It’s the shades of grey that get you, as in being later judged by abstruse legal standards when you are asked to justify how you applied the law-of-the-jungle.
War is different, even special. There are some pretty strict bounds and we are obliged to abide by both national and international law, like the Geneva Convention. However, the over-aweing force of nature that governs it, the triumphs and tragedies on the battlefield, the pure bloodlust and desire for revenge after watching your friends getting blown away alongside you trump (pun not intended) everything else. If you haven’t been there or experienced it firsthand, then shut the fuck up; you don’t know a goddamn thing about it.

Our troops are being asked to execute an incredibly crazy policy in crazy situations, expected to be letter perfect in mission execution with no emotion or passion involved, and when things don’t go according to Hoyle be subject to judgement by a higher standard courtesy of a bunch of REMFs,[4] like the JAGs, former CNO, and SECNAV in the Gallagher case who never went over there for even a courtesy visit to see the conditions for themselves – GMAFB. The President’s instincts are right in shielding Chief Gallagher and the three other pardoned Army guys against a vindictive, Obama-era policy egged on by the sycophantic mainstream media. Lesson learned? – don’t put our troops in harm’s way and then demand that they measure up to impossible pre-conditions, and instead back them up you craven cowards.
Those of you out there who would judge our warriors should look inside of yourselves to see if you have real bravery and then show some compassion. Where the real Darkness resides is clear, and it is not in the Hearts of our troops, but in the ravening mob who would otherwise tear down and devour those who defend truth, justice, and the American way.
I remain your faithful servant.

Copyright 2019 Point Loma
www.vicsocotra.com

[1] Credit Walter B. Gibson, pulp fiction hero of the 1930-40s.
[2] Wikipedia.
[3] Falcon Code 107 – “you might not like the fucking staff, but the staff likes fucking you.”
[4] I can’t resist – REMF = Rear Echelon Motherfuckers, aka pussies.