How the Navy SEALs Lost Their Way

Matthew Cole exposed SEAL Team Six’s crimes in a 2022 book and now the government wants to know who talked to him.

For a community that once prided itself on being quiet professionals, the Navy SEALs are hard to miss these days. Bookshelves groan under the weight of endless SEAL memoirs that have become a content farm for Hollywood blockbusters and TV streaming series. A number of SEAL veterans have also built second careers as podcast hosts, leadership consultants, Hollywood consultants, or pitchmen for supplements, energy drinks, and merchandise. Seven retired SEALs are current members of Congress, and others hold senior posts in the Trump administration.

Few other special operations communities behave this way. Only a handful of former Delta Force operators and Army Rangers have written books, and a few serve in Congress, but most keep quiet. No one hears from the operators in the Air Force’s special tactics squadron or those in secretive units with classified codenames, who are the true quiet professionals.

So what happened to the SEALs? The short answer is that the War on Terror happened, and they lost their way. The longer answer, laid out in journalist Matthew Cole’s 2022 book Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six, is that SEALs became completely unaccountable, leading some to believe, not without reason, that they could do whatever they wanted—on the battlefield and off.