Book Review – Alpha, by David Philipps
'Eddie Gallagher and The War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs'
Reading David Philipps’ rare look into a 2017 Navy SEAL deployment and the resulting controversy around Chief Eddie Gallagher is like poring over a beautifully drawn map that depicts a complex geography in exquisite, imperfect detail. Reality cannot be fully conjured by contour lines or the written word, but Philipps charts an important narrative with stunning clarity and relief.
The book details the events of Alpha Platoon, SEAL Team Seven’s six-month deployment to Mosul, Iraq, but it unearths a wider arc—the struggle between unrestrained bloodlust and honorable war-fighting that runs like a riptide through America’s armed forces.
It is easy to heap scorn on someone like Gallagher, but Philipps deftly sheds light on the chief's weathered lines, illuminating a battle-hardened operator with strengths and faults, whose defining aggression became warped around his ego by years of combat, drug addiction, and a renegade subculture that worships brutality. Philipps sketches numerous other fighting men in the story with empathy and skill, and he articulates with rare subtlety many of the contradictions and dilemmas that combat troops face. The book is a lucid, thoughtful tour inside the world of special operations, and Philipps achieves an uncommon grasp of the nuances of military culture.
Because of Gallagher’s trial, its media spectacle, and the advent of social media and podcasts, Philipps had access to an unlikely motherlode of source material, in addition to his own extensive interviews, and he uses it brilliantly to give the reader a god-lens overview of relevant events—battles, conversations, indoctrinations, even several characters' thoughts at key points in the story.
One of the strengths of the book is Philipps' deft contextualization of major players with concise asides that provide insight into character and upbringing. Each backstory is sewn seamlessly into the action, which paces and enriches the narrative. He even manages to include an unlikely enemy fighter perspective.
To provide historical context to the book’s wider theme, Philipps also charts the history of 'pirate' subculture in the Teams—from blue collar UDT renegades through Dick Marcinko's operator mafia—with engaging depth and detail. At times it evokes Hunter Thompson's depiction of the Hell's Angels' outlaw libido: the boiling-over of westward frontier inertia that collided with the Pacific Coast and found itself alienated in an increasingly modern world.
Polite society easily forgets that most of history was written in blood, and that we are all descendants of people who fought and won and lost countless vicious conflicts. Like it or not, we need warfighters who are capable of extreme violence to deter threats and defend the rest of us, yet we also need to temper and check their violent capabilities to minimize the rape, murder, and 'collateral' horror that lurks inevitably in every war.
The task of winning honorably—the ultimate goal of every American combat unit—is as difficult as it gets1. Efforts to spare civilian lives and prevent unnecessary bloodshed almost always bring a short term tactical disadvantage. War is chaos, speed kills, and losing your closest friends exacts a deep toll. Asking frontline fighters to wield an ever-expanding array of high-tech weaponry with careful precision under the most stressful conditions, and against enemies who have no such rules of engagement, creates a dilemma most of us cannot appreciate.
Alpha is a deeply reported account of the struggle at the heart of that crossroads, and an absorbing read.
The task of winning honorably is also sabotaged by the lack of a coherent strategy or end game, and by the corruption and bureaucratic fuckery that pervade the American empire at the highest levels, but that’s a bit outside the scope of the book.