Twenty years ago, when the Eggers family of Cape Coral, Florida, heard the tragic news that their oldest son had been killed in Afghanistan, they did what any Gold Star family would do.
They buried him at Arlington National Cemetery. They heard an Army chaplain recite his final battlefield confession. They mourned alongside his commander in chief, President George W. Bush, and they dutifully honor him every Memorial Day.
This week, the father and sister of Green Beret Capt. Daniel W. Eggers are honoring him in a different way: They're in Guantanamo Bay to represent him at the sentencing hearing of a former hostile commander in Afghanistan.
Capt. Eggers was 28 when he was killed and was on his second deployment to Afghanistan. He was immersed in Afghan food and culture and spoke Pashto. “He was a very humble gentleman,” his father, Bill Eggers, said in a recent interview. He grew up dreaming of joining the military for as long as anyone can remember and had a deep belief in “God, family and country,” his father said.
In a plea deal two years ago, insurgent leader Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi admitted to directing fighters who planted the pressure-activated mines that killed Capt. Eggers and three other U.S. special forces. There was a firefight and the U.S. special forces were pursuing suspected fleeing Taliban when their Humvee exploded.
The case is unusual for the Guantanamo court, which was established after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and considers the globe a battlefield in the war on terror. Hadi's case takes a more traditional view of war and combat zones: In pleading guilty, he acknowledged that some of the tactics used by Taliban and al-Qaida forces to fight the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2003 and 2004 amounted to war crimes.
He admitted to conspiring with Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida since 1996, and in March 2001 helped the Taliban blow up the giant Buddha statues in Afghanistan's Bamiyan Valley, a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
After the US invasion in 2003, he became a commander of the insurgents, mostly Taliban but also other factions. They opened fire on a medical helicopter trying to evacuate a wounded soldier, who later died. His troops also disguised themselves as civilians in suicide attacks and planted bombs in civilian vehicles to attack and kill US and allied forces.
A jury of U.S. military officers will be selected this week to hear evidence and family impact statements and decide on a sentence of 25 to 30 years. Under the 2022 agreement, Hadi can serve his sentence in detention in another country if he can find a reliable ally and receive medical care. During his 17 years in Guantanamo, Hadi has undergone multiple spinal surgeries for degenerative disc disease, leaving him disabled and in need of specialized care.
Hadi, now 63, was captured in Turkey in 2006 and taken to a secret CIA “black site” prison before being transferred to Guantanamo. In 2014, seven years into his military detention, he was indicted in a little-known case that the Eggers family did not initially know about.
Bill Eggers, a Vietnam War veteran and former police officer, was the first family member to attend a pretrial hearing in the case, sitting as the only spectator in a section of the massive courtroom reserved for victims and their relatives, peering across a row of defense tables at the defendant and the judge before him.
When Daniel Eggers' widow, Rebecca, found out about the case, she called her father-in-law. “Dad, I need to ask you a favor,” she recalled him saying, asking him to represent the family.
Public service has been an integral part of Captain Eggers' family, dating back to his maternal great-grandfather, who served as a Rough Rider in the Spanish-American War. Bill Eggers served as a helicopter door gunner in Vietnam. Daniel Eggers' brother, Billy, served two tours of duty in Iraq. His sister, Maris Levid, is a Florida police detective.
Born in Vietnam and raised on a farm in Wisconsin, Col. Rebecca Eggers recently retired from the Army, which she enlisted in more than 20 years after being orphaned when Saigon fell. She met Daniel at Officer Candidate School. The two boys, ages 6 and 3 when their father died, attended The Citadel in South Carolina, his alma mater.
When Eggers, a future captain, was still an ordained priest, he came home from middle school and asked his mother, “Can you be a soldier and a priest at the same time?” Her mother explained that the Army has a corps of priests, some of whom are Roman Catholic priests.
It was an ambition that didn't last long: By the time he reached high school, he “discovered girls,” his father said.
Captain Eggers' sister found the case a bit puzzling when she first heard about it — “war is war,” Detective Levid said at the time — but something has been resolved by the prisoner pleading guilty.
“I think my brother would respect that,” she said, “knowing that they were both leaders in the group, he would respect that he wasn't a coward and took responsibility.”
Now, it's hard to imagine what Captain Eggers thinks about this war crimes case.
“Does my son see himself as a victim?” Bill Eggers said. “I can't answer that question.”
“You had the commander on one side and him on the other,” Eggers said, pondering. “He'd probably say, 'Just let the system do its thing. Don't worry about it.'”
Hadi, an Iraqi whose real name was Nashwan al-Tamir, served in the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war and fled to Afghanistan to avoid returning to Saddam Hussein's forces during the 1991 Gulf War.
Hadi also acknowledged that his forces were responsible for the roadside bomb that killed Captain Eggers and other commandos from his tactical combat team on May 29, 2004.
Captain Eggers' white marble tombstone quotes II Timothy 4:7: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have remained faithful.”
A chaplain in Afghanistan later recalled that Eggers continued to worship until the end of his life. He attended every service except when he was on night duty at the base near the Pakistan border. He went to confession and died “in a state of grace,” without having committed any sins, the chaplain said.
Bill Eggers said there were no better words for his Catholic family: “That's when I got it together.”
