For Veterans Day: Remembering Command Sgt. Maj. Bob Gallagher
Featuring his riveting final briefing to prepare the officers under his command for their dangerous deployment to Iraq.
For this Veterans Day, I’d like to tell you about Command Sergeant Major Bob Gallagher, who was in the line of fire so often that some of his buddies called him “the metal magnet.”
I visited Sgt. Maj. Gallagher at Ft. Stewart, Georgia in January of 2005, for a series of CNN profiles.
In a few days, he and his 3rd Infantry Division’s First Combat Brigade would be heading to Iraq — many of them, including Gallagher, for the second time in less than two years.
They were replacing a unit that had suffered heavy casualties — which is why Sgt. Maj. Gallagher’s final briefing to the officers under his command, before they deployed, was so important.
The following excerpt is a minute-and-a-half of Bob Gallagher inspiring, warning, informing, imploring — and giving orders:
The Backstory
“I was a juvenile delinquent,” Bob Gallagher told me.
My mother passed away when I was young — 6, 7 years old — [which] left my father to raise myself and my two brothers. I did not finish high school. I just decided on my own, I’m either going to stay in this town and probably wind up in jail, or I’m going to get up and go. And I got up and went.
Gallagher enlisted in the Army and rose through the ranks to become a respected leader.
He fought in the battle of Mogadishu —the Blackhawk Down battle — in which 18 American soldiers were killed, and 84 others, including Gallagher, were wounded.
He showed me the helmet that he was wearing -- three circles marking the shrapnel from an RPG. Which helps explain why he was so adamant with his officers about always - always - wearing protective gear.
And there are the following images — captured along Highway 8 in Baghdad, on April 7, 2003 — when he and his soldiers came under a fierce onslaught as they battled for control of a key intersection and overpass.
Hit in the leg by shrapnel, Gallagher limped to the cover of a tank and continued fighting and directing his troops while a fellow officer treated his wound.
One Last Picture
In his front hallway, Gallagher showed me what he called his “ten square feet of wall” — covered with photos of his past military battles.
And I asked him one last question — about how he envisions his future — about one more image he’d like to see hanging on that wall.
Please listen to his brief, moving response:
Follow Up Call
I called Bob Gallagher five years after I put together that CNN profile. It was 2010, and he was serving in his final assignment as the Command Sgt. Maj. of the Army’s Wounded Warrior Program.
I asked him if he had returned from Iraq with his health intact.
“I have wounds above the shoulders,” he told me. And he went on to share, openly, the details of his severe insomnia, congnitive struggles, and other painful but invisible symptoms — consequences, in part, from the impacts of being so close to so many explosions.
What was striking, in light of his suffering, was that his mind seemed even more occupied with the well-being of his fellow wounded warriors.
Postscript
Bob Gallagher did make it to his retirement in 2013.
Just one year later, he died in his home in Georgia. According to a story in The Army Times, he had been suffering from a heart ailment.
He was only 52.
I wish this story had a happier ending.
Veterans Day is an opportunity to acknowledge that our own happy endings are possible, in part, because of the sacrifices made by soldiers like Bob Gallagher — and their families.