Chapter 14: Never Give Up
This is the latest chapter of The Ice Man, my book about the Navy SEAL platoon in Iraq that took the blame for a CIA homicide. The full book is available only to paid subscribers.
Long after he left the SEALs, Justin Legg was still fighting the ghost of the Ice Man. He spent more than a decade battling the Navy bureaucracy to get his “abuse” conviction overturned and the punitive letter of reprimand removed from his file. Most people would have given up years earlier. But most people don’t have to contend with the things Legg had to face in his life at a young age. The same unstoppable will that made him a Navy SEAL kept him pushing forward to clear his name. He just would not quit. “Don’t tell me I’m wrong when I know I’m right,” Legg said. “Don’t tell me I can’t when I know I can do it. Those are the two worst things you can ever tell me.”
Legg kept fighting to clear his name as Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home in New Orleans in 2005. He kept fighting as he was diagnosed with leukemia, which Legg believed had something to do with his mission in Iraq. Legg had inhaled some noxious chemical while some of his men were searching a large, old Bedouin camp in western Iraq. The last room they came to was the only one in the whole place with a steel door that had been chained shut. The SEALs kicked the door out of the frame, somebody threw a crash grenade into the room, and Legg went in. There was a gas mask hanging from the ceiling. Legg knew immediately that he had breathed in something foul. He backed everyone out of the room and started vomiting. Legg kept throwing up for the rest of the night.
A few years later, Legg was diagnosed with leukemia. He endured punishing chemotherapy and radiation. It killed the leukemia, but it destroyed his bone marrow, which produced the white cells his body needed to fight infection. He received a bone marrow transplant, which started a whole new medical nightmare. He developed graft vs host disease. His transplanted white blood cells started attacking his body. That required three days of full-body radiation, which destroyed his lungs. He woke up one day in the hospital. He had been in a coma for two weeks after his lungs had failed.
He needed a new pair of lungs. Duke University agreed to help him with a lung transplant. To qualify, however, he had to walk a mile under his own power. Legg, a former Division One college wrestler, had lost 60 pounds in the hospital. He had to retrain his atrophied muscles how to move again. Three weeks later, he walked a mile. Legg got on the transplant list in 2010, and the next day he was breathing—barely—through a new set of lungs. The hospital staff at Duke thought for sure he was not going to make it. And they were sad to see him go because Legg was such a positive person.
“It’s all been a blessing and a curse, and it’s been far more of a blessing than a curse,” Legg says. “It has given me this insight to see so much in a different light.” Facing death forced Legg to be honest with himself. He could look back at the events in his life without trying to protect himself from anything. He spent a lot of time thinking about his time in Iraq, drawing some hard lessons about leadership. “I realized that all the guys liked me but I did get too close to some of the guys. Not that they didn’t respect me, but they didn’t respect me enough. There was a small handful of them that felt like they could push back with me,” he told me. “That’s a lesson I had to take on to improve myself later on as I went forward.” Legg also continued to drive himself, completing two half-marathons and becoming the first person with a double lung transplant to summit Mount Denali in Alaska, the highest peak in North America.
Meanwhile, Legg was still trying to overturn that false letter of reprimand that had killed his Navy career. He finally succeeded in 2012, when the Navy “set aside” the letter. Legally, that meant that the letter never existed. But he wasn’t done. If the letter of reprimand never existed, then by all rights, he should have and would have been promoted years earlier.
It was as if he had to travel back in time to set things right. Legg was granted a request for a special selection board to review the unique facts of his situation. The board agreed that he should have been promoted to lieutenant commander years earlier when he was passed over due to the punitive letter of reprimand. Three admirals wrote letters supporting his case. Joseph Maguire, the admiral who presided over Legg’s mast and the author of the original punitive letter of reprimand, now agreed that Legg should never have been charged in the first place.
The secretary of the Navy signed off on Legg’s promotion and President Obama stamped it with his seal of approval. The final hurdle was the US Senate. Legg’s nomination to be retroactively promoted to the rank of lieutenant commander was officially received in the Senate in December 2014. Senate approval is usually a formality and long lists of officers are routinely and speedily promoted by unanimous consent. Two weeks later, however, Legg’s promotion was returned to the president. It appeared to have hit a dead end and was going nowhere.
It took Legg a long time before he learned that the holdup was Senator John McCain. A former POW who had endured torture in Vietnam, McCain had become one of the most obstinate critics of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. In 2005, McCain had won the passage of a law that outlawed the interrogations Legg had witnessed in the Romper Room. The McCain amendment, as it was known, required that all people in a Defense Department facility be interrogated only with techniques authorized in the Army Field Manual. In 2014, McCain was the incoming chairman of the powerful Senate Armed Services Committee. The Arizona senator had Legg’s name on a list of members of the military who had been accused of prisoner abuse. Legg would never advance in the military ever again if the senator from Arizona had any say in it.
Legg still would not give up. Why should he? He had done nothing wrong. As he thought back over his time in Iraq, he was proud of his service. Were there some things he wished he could take back? Sure. But by and large, he believed that Foxtrot Platoon had done everything asked of it and performed as best it could in difficult, no, impossible circumstances. They had been sent out in the field with no training or guidance in interrogations and detainee handling or what the rules were regarding the CIA. Then they had been accused of failing to follow rules that no one had told them about beforehand. And then they had gotten the blame when the CIA’s rogue operation got a prisoner killed.
He enlisted the help of two GOP members of the US House of Representatives to persuade McCain to lift his hold on the promotion. Ryan Zinke, a former member of SEAL Team Six who went on to become President Trump’s Interior Secretary, and Mac Thornberry, a representative from Texas who worked closely with McCain on defense issues, both lobbied the Arizona Senator on Legg’s behalf. McCain relented.
There would be no ceremony honoring Justin Legg’s promotion. His wife wouldn’t be watching with tears of pride as her husband swore his oath to protect and defend the Constitution. There would be no speeches from his teammates. It didn’t matter because it wasn’t about that anymore. More than a decade had gone by since his hearing before Admiral Maguire. His multiple health crises had reshaped his life in ways he could never have even imagined back when he wore the SEAL Trident.
It wasn’t about getting pinned with a gold oak leaf insignia on his lapel. It wasn’t about the small bump in back pay he was owed. It wasn’t about the party after the ceremony. It was the Navy admitting officially that Justin Legg did nothing wrong. He didn’t “abuse” Manadel al-Jamadi. He didn’t fail in his duty to prevent “abuse” that had never happened in the first place. It was the Navy saying to him we fucked up. We believed the word of a liar and a thief who perjured himself to keep his Trident. We blamed you and your men for the death of the Ice Man. We acknowledge that you didn’t kill him. The CIA did it and got away with it because they’re the CIA and that’s what they do. We hung you and the rest of the platoon out there to take the fall and we’re sorry.
On June 29, 2016, John McCain took the floor in the Senate chamber. The Arizona senator told the officer presiding over the chamber that he was submitting a list of men and women up for promotion. About halfway down the page, one of the entries read: “Navy nomination of Justin C. Legg, to be Lieutenant Commander.” McCain asked for unanimous consent to approve the list of promotions.
“So ordered.”