I am a 10-year military veteran.  I was both enlisted and commissioned.  I graduated from the United States Naval Academy and served onboard a ballistic missile submarine that was underway and “loaded for bear” when 9/11 happened.  And 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. Of course, that’s not to say I’m without military expertise, I know plenty about operational service, morale and leadership and after nearly two decades in the law, I know my way around the justice system – including the military version. So, I find myself in an interesting place when it comes the case of Navy SEAL Chief Eddie Gallagher – with a reluctant but important perspective on why we’re getting it wrong and what we can do about it.

First, in the interests of full disclosure, I am a vocal and vehement opponent of President Trump and the overwhelming majority of his policies.  I find him morally repugnant and academically farcical, and while his involvement in this matter inspired my first look into it – he is not the reason I decided to write about it.  The reality is that Donald Trump is far from the only American who feels that Eddie Gallagher is wholly above reproach and deserving of the treatment he’s received from the POTUS. There are tens of millions of people who feel this way, and you likely know many 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. Their reverence for military service derives from this fetish, so they often reserve contempt for those who serve like I did, far from the probability of enemy fire.  Unfortunately, many of these same individuals are called to serve, themselves, and end up serving for the wrong reason.

That’s right, there is a wrong reason to serve, which I know to be blasphemous among these same warrior worshipers.  But it’s still true. 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 – and if you don’t see any problem with that, then you’re part of the problem.

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 that we do as humans, and the day we don’t have to do it anymore will be a glorious day, indeed.  To aspire to be “good” at the dirty business of war is be hopelessly juvenile and absent of even the basest maturity, because the psychosis of prurient satisfaction from committing violence against others is incompatible with any measure of practical human existence.

Nevertheless, we have not yet advanced as a civilization to the point where we can abandon war – so 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. Despite the anecdotes and allegories, modern warfare isn’t conducted by hand-to-hand combatants, and it likely won’t be again. This isn’t as much function of maturity as it is one of efficiency.  Since the very first days of professional soldiering, we’ve used technology to increase the speed, efficacy and efficiency of our killing efforts, and the simple truth is that killing with individual hyper-talented, hyper-trained “super soldiers” just isn’t good enough anymore.

I can already hear the common dissent spoken by those same fetishists – that, you will always need a bad man with a gun to do the real business of war – but will you? Really? Ask a modern day flag officer and find out how wrong this is.

The remaining issue is one 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” and even memorized Conan the Barbarian’s famous quote about what’s best in life. These things motivated me as a young man. I was looking for a fight, and the Navy gave me more of them than I could handle. There were fights everywhere and being a warrior way the only way to address those long odds.  I drank it up and used it to complete the hardest thing I’ve ever done – graduate from USNA.  But I knew; I always knew that it was allegory.  I never really thought I’d kill someone with my hands.  I never expected to storm an enemy compound or to watch a friend die beside me in battle.  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 brother and sisters along the way.  But for those in the grips of a violence fetish, these slogans are confirmation and commitment. Beyond motivation, they become license and haven.  They end up on t-shirts, car stickers and tattoos – and they quietly move from allegory to dogma.

I’ve heard it said that what differentiates humans from other animals is that we are the only animal that doesn’t usually die screaming. Of course, there are still plenty of (if not, too many) screaming human deaths, they just get more attention.  In fact, we’ve been trying to reduce that number for all of the time we’ve been around, because if we hadn’t, we might still be roaming the world in nomadic tribes, wearing the skins of animals we’ve killed.  The world’s most powerful people aren’t warriors and they don’t command warrior armies; nor will they ever again. Modern power derives from wealth, assets and influence, and the world’s best “real” warriors often die broken, penniless and alone. In fact, all that’s likely left for Chief Gallagher is to serve this same fetished subset of Americans – hawking products and services to them by lending his faux mystique. If seeing him on a late-night commercial selling reverse mortgages, “easy” loans or investment in collectible coins doesn’t demystify him, I don’t know what will.

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 twenty-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 that 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 Eddie 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.