Apple TV Plus docuseries The Line examines the impossible contradictions of military service
The controversial case of Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher is explored in this four-part documentary, produced by Alex Gibney’s Jigsaw Pictures
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Herman Wouk’s 1951 novel, The Caine Mutiny, is one of the most honest and unsettling pieces of fiction ever written about military discipline and order. It tells the story of a clearly unfit naval officer—someone who is at best petty and indecisive and at worst cruel and dangerously incompetent—who may nonetheless have been wronged when his men relieved him of his command during a mission. It’s a challenging book (and later a play and movie), pushing the audience to consider what it takes to fight wars, and whether we should hold the people we entrust with national security to the same moral and behavioral standards we would hold, say, a supermarket manager.
At its best, the four-hour Apple TV+ docuseries The Line (and the podcast that preceded it) pushes some of those same buttons. The Line looks back at one of the controversial military war crimes cases of recent years—the trial of Eddie Gallagher, a Navy SEAL accused of murdering an Iraqi prisoner—and presents multiple points of view on what happened and why. On the whole, the series is overlong and repetitive, and is missing some clarifying voices. But directors Jeff Zimbalist and Doug Shultz and their team (including the prolific documentary producer Alex Gibney) have some startling footage shot by Gallagher’s squad. They also have interviews with most of the story’s principals, including Gallagher himself, who remains defiant in the face of any suggestion that he acted inappropriately.
For those who don’t remember the case (or have a hard time distinguishing it from the soup of scandals and outrages that bubbled up during the Trump administration), Gallagher was a Navy SEAL sniper and chief petty officer who led a team of SEALs during the Battle for Mosul in Iraq in 2017. During the deployment, several men in Gallagher’s platoon complained he was behaving erratically: boasting about killing civilians, stealing food from people’s care packages, and firing weapons indiscriminately into crowds.
They filed formal complaints, which they kept pushing up the chain of command after they returned home. In 2018, Gallagher was arrested on multiple charges—most prominently for murdering an injured and immobilized 17-year-old ISIS fighter named Khaled Jamal Abdullah and then posing for pictures with his corpse, texting to a friend that he “got him with my hunting knife.”
The case became highly politicized, with Fox News and other right-wing media outlets rallying behind Gallagher. This drew the attention of President Trump, who publicly pressed the Navy to free “one of the ultimate fighters.” The trial turned on a surprise confession from a medic who’d been granted immunity, and who claimed on the stand that he killed Abdullah by depriving him of oxygen, minutes before Gallagher stabbed the kid in the neck. Gallagher was convicted only for the photo, and punished with a demotion. Trump intervened, reversing the demotion and demanding a review board not strip Gallagher of his SEAL Trident Pin. Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer was fired, for privately trying to persuade the president to let the process play out properly.
The Line tells this story very deliberately—and overly so. It opens with a long look at the training of a Navy SEAL, before getting into the experiences of the platoon in Mosul. The doc establishes the positives and negatives of assembling men recognized and groomed by the military for their skill, steeliness, and initiative—all disciplined warriors with a smidgen of piracy in their hearts. These special forces demand the most dangerous assignments, going into a mission looking to do damage. But in a drawn-out and constantly shifting engagement like the ones the United States has been involved with in Iraq, sometimes valuable resources like the SEALs are poorly utilized, like bringing a sledgehammer to do the job of a screwdriver.
So the series’ first episode plays almost like an apologia for these men—Gallagher included. Even Gallagher’s accusers describe the importance of eradicating ISIS, and talk about how tough it is for a collection of trained killers to perform the more subtle tasks of an occupying force. Describing what is commonly known as “the fog of war,” one of the SEALs says, “You see death on such a huge scale that the lines get blurry.” In The Caine Mutiny terms, this episode is like the mutineers themselves giving the shaming “you don’t respect the military enough” speeches leveled at them in the novel.
But then the second episode goes deeper into the accusations against Gallagher. He’s described as someone who made no distinction between ISIS soldiers and the civilians that the SEALs were meant to liberate. Some in the platoon say they got in the habit of scattering the Iraqi citizenry during combat before Gallagher could take aim at them. They say he was overly aggressive in ordering his men to attack, at times even using them to bait the enemy. They say he popped pills regularly and often pushed his underlings around, using physical and verbal assaults to correct minor misbehavior.
In his interviews, Gallagher denies everything; he seems more offended at the accusation that he stole snacks than anything having to do with him shooting at non-combatants. He insists his men didn’t like that he was so demanding, and so determined to get results. But the accusers—and the officers above them interviewed for this documentary—counter that the rules of combat are “not an opinion,” and that the only way the U.S. has any credibility in military endeavors is if they hold themselves to the highest moral standard.
Because Zimbalist and Shultz were able to get so many people to go on the record, and because the list of accusations against Gallagher is long, The Line can be a bit of a grind. It doesn’t help that Gallagher himself shows little interest in re-answering the same questions he faced in court. At times, this series is like having a bunch of old newspaper articles read aloud, with no new information.
An even bigger problem: Nearly all the people interviewed in The Line are the Navy SEALs who knew Gallagher. Their take on the case is well-informed, certainly, but they lack perspective on Iraq, the Iraqis, the Iraq War, and ISIS. In episode four, after the trial is over, there’s a long interview with Abdullah’s father, where he talks about how his son was recruited to fight against American interlopers he’d become convinced were the embodiment of evil. Abdullah’s origin story isn’t too different from many of the SEALs’. If the documentary had explored those similarities, it might’ve been more powerful.
Still, what’s here is frequently fascinating. This is a questioning look at the warrior mentality, pondering whether it’s possible to be the toughest of the tough while adhering to every regulation. And while too much of the series is made up just of visually simple on-camera interviews, they’re enhanced by videos and photos taken by the SEALs themselves, documenting their own culture and—sometimes—callousness. The Line likely won’t change anyone’s minds right now about Gallagher or his accusers. But it’s a valuable if incomplete record of a moment military historians and ordinary American citizens alike ought to keep reckoning with, and perhaps reassessing.
16 Comments
The service members who testified against Gallagher, and the prosecutors who pursued the case, to various degrees put their career and even their lives in jeopardy in search of justice. And the system, with its built in assumption that our elected leaders would have some kind of basic moral compass, failed them. In a society that rewards the worst impulses and behavior what incentive is there to do the right thing? There are many, many signs and canaries in the coal mine the suggest we as a culture are fucked. Not being able to control our owned armed forces —not being able to hold them accountable and in fact celebrating when they are not held accountable to the rule of law — is surely one of those signs.
We (as an American culture) have embraced situational, transactional justice.It doesn’t matter what is done. Does it make us feel better? Does it make money for me (or a company that will make me feel better that it’s making more money)? Does it advance the interests of my political favorites?“Right” or “wrong” are entirely relative at this point. We aren’t even having the same discussions and no longer share the same language. One side says the won an election. The other side says it was stolen. One side says a fertilized egg being removed is a medical procedure. The other says it is murder. One side follows scientific consensus regarding COVID vaccinations and precautions. The other says so many nonsensical things I’d die of old age before I listed them all.One side tends to want to follow rational scientific debate and long term planning. The other side wants to follow dogmatic teachings from established sources that they believe to the exclusion of all else.Of course, part of the problem is that each will accuse the other side of being the irrational one.
The problem is one of those sides is correct in their accusations, while the other side celebrates their irrationality like Mardi Gras and would rather burn everything down than not get their way.“Right” and “wrong” still exist, but there is a powerful group of people who don’t believe in anything except their own power. The “both sides” paradigm just gives them an excuse to keep on doing what they do. They need to be loudly and repeatedly called out for their stupidity at every chance.[BTW, one side DID win the election. That’s not an opinion, it’s a fact.]
I know I’m a gray, but can anyone here at least say they have heard of the Kandahar massacre in March of 2012? 16 Afghanis were murdered by a US Soldier, SSg Robert Bales, including 9 children. His unit from Washington was replacing mine in that Theater. I was there to film the aftermath, but in almost the decade since, I’ve met less than a handful of US civilians who have any idea what I’m talking about(I’ve also met plenty of Soldiers who have no idea what I’m talking about either). I didn’t redeploy until almost 2 months after the incident and by then, I never heard anything about it, but was caught up as having to serve as a witness in a trial over my friend, a 19 year-old Chinese-American Soldier who was bullied by other Soldiers in our unit to the point that he killed himself in Afghanistan.Was it even remotely covered in the states at the time? At times my depression, anxiety, and paranoia start to make me worry it actually didn’t happen and that I’m going crazy, which then amplifies my depression, anxiety, and paranoia to extreme levels.
There’s a Wikipedia for it and everything
I’m from a small town in Australia but I’ve certainly heard of and remember it.
I remember it now that you mentioned it (had forgotten about it), but probably because I deployed to KAF and the surrounding area twice.
Hey man – First off, thank you for your service. Second, I want to be honest with you — I had to google the incident. Once I started reading about it, I vaguely started to remember hearing about it when it first happened, but if you asked me cold “do you remember the Kandahar massacre” the answer would be “no”. It’s not because it didn’t happen (it did, I googled it, it was covered, you’re not crazy) but because so much shit has happened, a lot of it bad, that it’s hard to pinpoint one specific tragedy and say “Yes, I recall the details of that incident.”Honestly I think the only reason why I still remember any details about Gallagher was because Trump got involved and politicized it. Pretty much once Abu Ghraib happened, I think the prevailing take was “oh My Lai stuff is still happening, just with Muslims now” and every few years you’d hear some bone chilling story that involved brown civilians being tortured or murdered and typically ended with a miscarriage of justice, or at least not enough justice. It sounds like you may be dealing with some shit, and I, a random dude on the internet, am not the best person to advise you on how to do so. But I will say that there is help out there, and there are people who have wrestled with the same feelings you describe and are ok now. I did not serve but a good friend of mine was a Marine, served in Iraq, and got sad-drunk on his birthday and (unsolicited) told me a bunch of stories that fucked me up just by listening to them. But my friend is doing good today, has a family, a good job, and plays a mean guitar, so I know getting to a better place is possible.Forgive me cause I may be way out of line here but:You can reach the Veterans Crisis line by dialing 1-800-273-8255 and Press 1You can also reach the War Vets call center by dialing 1-877-WAR-VETS (1-877-927-8387)
A little blue star isn’t big enough for this humane reply. You need a giant fucking gold one.
I know it’s 10 days later, but I’m a vet and I wanted to tell you how awesome this reply is. It’s nice to run into people on the internet who have empathy, particularly these days when empathy is sorely lacking. It’s pretty obvious that you’re good people.
Not fir nothing, we heard about it plenty in Canuckistan and Bales was put away for life https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/23/afghanistan-massacre-robert-bales-trial
Robert Bales was sentenced to life without parole.
It’s part of the wall of terrible shit that made the news during that time, to the point that I remember it based upon your prompting but couldn’t begin to recall any of the details. Based upon the other comments I’m at least glad to hear the POS is in jail for life.All this is complicated by the fact that all stateside news was pretty heavily politicized so it was tough to know in real time what was an actual outrage and what was hyping a bad situation into something more than it was. In this case we’re obviously well beyond simple outrage (which is why it stuck we me at all) but man there was just such a drumbeat of noise.
It’s only an impossible contradiction for avclub writers.
I firmly believe there’s a place for everyone in society. As Nicholson said in A Few Good Men, this dude is someone you want In Certain Places (not the wall) so the rest of us can sleep at night. BUT, he’s a precision instrument to be used for specific purposes in certain circumstances. And both that dude and the organization who pays him have to agree to certain rules and punishments for infractions of those rules. This guy didn’t and neither didn’t the org.
Now, who’s going to control this rabid dog or put him down?
Gallagher denies everything; he seems more offended at the accusation
that he stole snacks than anything having to do with him shooting at
non-combatants.
He probably considers stealing snacks from fellow soldiers worse than against war crimes against enemy combatants because it violates the false Esprit de Corps that he’s trying to project.