The death of Navy SEAL candidate Kyle Mullen, a fit 24-year-old who died at the tail end of the grueling SEAL BUD/s selection program in February 2022, became national news as his family sought to understand what had happened.
After a rare, outside investigation of the incident found that Capt. Brad Geary, along with other members of the command, were negligent in their leadership responsibilities and that medical care for recruits was lacking, he was removed from command and now, more than a year later, is facing a board of inquiry that has the power to boot him from the Navy, his lawyer said last week.
Unlike most naval officers who find themselves facing the military justice system – including two others connected to this incident – Geary is not staying quiet. Instead, he has begun to make the argument that Mullen died from drug use and that top Navy officials are trying to make him a scapegoat.
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In an interview with Military.com, Geary stood firm on remarks he made on a recent podcast appearance in which he questioned the validity of the final, outside Navy investigation and argued that performance-enhancing drugs, or PEDs, may have played a role in Mullen's death.
Military.com reached out to the Navy on these allegations, but the service declined to comment, citing ongoing administrative processes.
Geary also offered a variety of justifications and arguments in favor of the SEALs and the BUD/s training process that largely revolved around the idea that the arduous, if not brutal, process has a method to the madness that bears dividends on the battlefield.
"We have refined the idea of what it means to be a warfighter and we've been very, very successful," Geary said, before noting that the SEALs have made mistakes and "we're not perfect."
Although Mullen's autopsy was never publicly released, Navy reports found that he died of acute pneumonia shortly after completing the first, most challenging portion of SEAL training known as "Hell Week" on Feb. 4, 2022.
After Mullen's death, investigators also found a stash of performance-enhancing drugs in his car, including testosterone and human growth hormone, and text messages on his phone that included a conversation in which he discussed using a bad vial of drugs that left swelling at an injection site.
However, that same investigation failed to definitively conclude that Mullen used the drugs, noting that neither his blood nor urine were able to be tested.
Regina Mullen, Kyle Mullen's mother and a registered nurse, didn't disagree with the idea that her son flirted with the notion of taking PEDs: In an interview with Military.com, she said he told her in several phone calls about feeling pressure to take them, but she doesn't believe that they had anything to do with her son's death.
"You don't get bacterial pneumonia from PEDs," she said in a phone call last week.
She also noted that pneumonia is treatable and that three other Navy SEAL candidates who were training with her son also caught the infection but survived.
Geary argued that top Navy leaders who oversee the SEALs have "a gap in their understanding of us and how we've evolved over the last 25 years -- necessarily evolved -- and they haven't," adding that that lack of knowledge contributed to the investigation's conclusions.
One of Geary's key claims that diverges from the public understanding of Mullen's death is that "one of the early investigations" found that not only were drugs "absolutely a contributing cause in his death … that was backed up by five of six subject matter expert doctors, who all said the same thing as well."
"That's when the Navy changed that report. … The new report no longer addressed drugs as a causing factor, just ignored them," Geary claimed. Military.com was unable to verify those claims.
In early August, Geary sat down for a nearly six-hour interview with SEAL veteran and podcaster Shawn Ryan. The pair spent around three hours discussing the Mullen incident, during which time Geary questioned the validity of the Navy's investigation and pushed his contention that PEDs were a contributing factor in Mullen's death. They also both described their strong belief in the need for the grueling selection process.
Ryan, whose public biography says he spent 14 years with the SEALs and the CIA, told Military.com that the training "absolutely, 100% carries over into real-world scenarios."
"It gives you confidence in your teammates, too, because, you know they've all been through it and they're not going to quit on you."
Regina Mullen is still hoping that there will be some level of accountability for what she believes was the entirely preventable death of her son.
"I didn't want to put him in jail," she said, before referring to Geary's wife and four kids, but "I figured if they could just lower his rank, force him to retire, and he can't come back -- to me, that was fair enough."
According to a source familiar with the Navy's accountability efforts, the service pursued actions against four people -- a change from last September when a Naval Special Warfare spokesman revealed efforts to hold only three officers accountable.
While the source who spoke with Military.com was not able to offer names, they noted that only two of the four cases had been resolved as of this week.
In addition to Geary, Cmdr. Erik Ramey, the training program's top medical official, is also facing a board of inquiry.
Meanwhile, the source said that charges were dismissed against one person during administrative proceedings, and a formal disciplinary letter was recommended to be added to another's official record.
In September 2023, the Navy said that it would pursue an admiral's mast -- a nonjudicial form of punishment -- for Geary's boss, Capt. Brian Drechsler. In June, Drechsler announced his honorable retirement from the Navy in a social media post.
Rolling Stone reported that the fourth person, to whom the Navy hoped to issue a disciplinary letter, was the medical duty officer the night Mullen died and they have since retired, as well.
Since the investigation, the Navy has made some significant policy changes to prevent another mishap, including 14 changes to BUD/s that range from proactive antibiotics to prevent pneumonia to more robust health screenings for Hell Week.
Included among those changes was the Navy’s announcement that it would start to regularly test SEALs for PEDs, though at least one lawyer who has represented members of the teams expressed skepticism that it would actually lead to change.
However, for Regina Mullen, the issue isn't a lack of rules, it's the fact that SEALs, driven by decades of being on the front lines of the Global War on Terror, have become virtually untouchable and unquestionable.
Both Geary and Ryan did agree that the last 20 years of war and the fame and celebrity that followed have not been good for the SEALs.
"I think it's great for recruiting, but … it has brought the wrong type of candidates," Ryan argued in the Military.com interview.
"All of the fame that the SEAL community has gained over the Global War on Terror has guys coming in trying to capitalize off that fame for a follow-on career in any type of social media, and it totally destroyed the quiet professional,” he added.
Regina Mullen thinks it's also made them impervious to consequences.
"They're not getting tickets for DWI. … They're acting like they're holier than thou and not getting in any trouble," she said. "They can do whatever the hell they want."
Geary and the BUD/s doctor are the only two Navy leaders left who may face any sort of punishment that would amount to more than a slip of paper in a service record or an early retirement.
Concerns about a lack of accountability extend beyond the Navy SEALs.
A 2020 review by U.S. Special Operations Command, the combatant command that oversees all special operations units, found that there was entitlement and a culture that lionized combat experience above anything else in many units across the U.S. military.
"Those who did deploy forward, specifically in some degree of combat, are held as almost an infallible standard bearer for the rest of the organization to emulate -- seemingly regardless if it is a positive or negative standard," the review found.
Navy officials are usually incredibly tight-lipped over any disciplinary actions out of a fear that commanders can be accused of unduly influencing the proceedings. However, it is unusual for a sailor to wait nearly a year to face punishment, as Geary has, given that a formal court-martial is not being convened.
Geary's lawyer, Jason Wareham, told Military.com that, even though they added time to the process by refusing nonjudicial punishment in December of last year, it has still been "the longest NJP/[Board of Inquiry] in my history [of] almost doing this 15 years."
Geary himself thinks that his community's fame is just drawing an outsized amount of attention.
"Leaders feel like they have to make decisions based upon perceptions because, God forbid, the public lose trust in Naval Special Warfare so they start knee-jerk reacting and making decisions to crucify leaders," he argued to Military.com.
