Search
Home

October 20, 2020—Eddie Gallagher never thought he would be one of those SEALs who wrote a book.

But when he was arrested and charged with murdering an ISIS prisoner in 2018, charges he was subsequently acquitted of, much of the public remained under the false impression that he had literally gotten away with murder. His name, face and family were dragged through the dredges of the internet, across television screens and in newspapers, painted as a war criminal. He needed his voice to be heard. He needed the truth to be heard.

“The media was biased against me from the get-go,” Chief Gallagher said. “Just like the Navy and NCIS, they had an agenda, and it was to make this Navy SEAL look like a crazed monster running around Iraq killing civilians. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t true. It got clicks. And it worked.”

He and his wife Andrea decided that the only way to get the real story out was to write their own book. Chief Gallagher didn’t need to take the stand during his trial; the testimony from the handful of accusers in his platoon was so riddled with lies, half-truths, and mischaracterizations that the jury came back with a “not guilty” verdict the first full day of deliberations. That meant he never got a chance to tell the public what actually happened in Iraq. In the book, he sets the record straight.

“Even after my acquittal, the New York Times continued running stories and airing TV shows depicting me as guilty,” he said. “They weren’t stopping. We had to let the American public know the true story.”

Mrs. Gallagher said, “After President Trump got involved in our case, I felt like we were being used as a political football. The truth seemed to get lost in their agenda.”

The result of that desire to reveal the entire truth is Eddie and Andrea’s forthcoming title, The Man in the Arena: From Fighting ISIS to Fighting for My Freedom. It is a raw, unapologetic account of a warfighter who got caught in a corrupt system and was nearly put away for life.

“People have told us that if this were a movie, no one would believe it. Guess what? This is our real life.” Mrs. Gallagher said. “The twists and turns and crazy things that happened to us really are unbelievable. And the reality is, most people don’t know the extent of it. We lay it all out in the book. The corruption, the lies, the motivations of the accusers. It’s all in there.”

The Man in the Arena begins on the day Eddie was thrown in the brig, and takes the reader through the deployment where his SEAL platoon decimated ISIS, back to the States where a whisper campaign of lies and rumors metastasized into charges of war crimes, and through the trial where Chief Gallagher’s life hung in the balance.

“My goal with the book wasn’t to come across as a sympathetic figure,” Chief Gallagher said. “My goal was to let the American public know the truth about what happened, both in Iraq and after we got home. If this could happen to me, it could happen to anyone.”

Signed, first edition copies of The Man in the Arena are available for preorder now at www.eddiegallagherbook.com. Mass distribution will open up later this fall. 

 

#thetruthiscoming