From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is the Daily.

Today, Navy Seals were warned not to report their platoon leader for war crimes.

They did it anyway.

It's Thursday, April 25th.

Dave, when did you first hear about Chief Edward Gallagher?

I first heard about him when he was arrested in September.

And what caught my eye is that this was not just any sailor who was getting arrested. It was a special operations chief in the Navy Seals, sort of the top, the elite of the entire Navy.

Dave Phillips covers the military for the times. And even within the Seals, this guy Eddie Gallagher was a big deal.

He'd been in for almost 20 years. And in that time, he had had qualified for everything pretty much that you possibly could.

He was repeatedly awarded medals for heroic actions. He was an expert medic, a crack sniper, expert in explosives.

He had been a trainer at the Seals Bud School, literally the guy who's yelling at you while he's making you crawl through the surf. And he had this reputation among Seals as this real hard-charging warrior respected, loved.

So to see him suddenly arrested was really something.

And Dave, what were the accusations against Chief Gallagher?

What the people in the platoon say is that when they deployed to Iraq in 2017, he kind of went off the rails.

He spent most of his time in a hidden sniper perch where he would fire five or ten times as much as other snipers.

They say he would shoot indiscriminately at civilians in the city.

At one point, he shot a girl who was wearing a flowered hijab who was going down to the river with friends.

And other Seals through their scopes saw the body carried off by the other girls.

And in another case, he shot an old man, they say, and that man collapsed.

This is just an old man walking down the street.

And that's what they say. I mean, this is a war zone, but it's also a place where millions of people live.

And so that was common. And in fact, the Seals say that they grew so concerned about him firing at civilians that they would regularly fire warning shots.

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