The Missouri legislature is scheduled to begin a special session, on Friday, to discuss whether to impeach Eric Greitens, the state’s embattled governor. A former Navy SEAL who was once a rising star in the Republican Party, Greitens is now fighting allegations of sexual coercion, blackmail, invasion of privacy, and misuse of charity resources to fund his campaign. The charges stunned many in Missouri, but, in the tight-knit SEAL community, Greitens has been a divisive figure for years. In 2016, before Greitens was elected, a group of mostly anonymous current and former SEALs tried to sound the alarm about why they thought he was unfit for office. “What we were afraid of is that, eighteen months from now, you’ve got candidate Greitens, former Navy SEAL, running for President,” Paul Holzer, a former SEAL who worked on the campaign for one of Greitens’s gubernatorial-primary opponents, John Brunner, told me. But Greitens, who used his military background to create a public image of honor, courage, and leadership, was largely able to deflect their criticism.

After the killing of Osama bin Laden by SEAL Team Six in a 2011 raid, Navy SEALs became full-blown celebrities, and Greitens rode that fame to speaking tours, a spot on Time magazine’s 2013 “100 Most Influential People” list, and, eventually, the governor’s mansion. The success of the raid also intensified a growing division in the SEAL community.

SEALs have traditionally embraced a culture of quiet professionalism. Part of the SEAL credo reads, “I do not advertise the nature of my work, nor seek recognition for my actions.” In the last two weeks, I spoke to more than half a dozen current and former SEALs about the spectacular implosion of Greitens’s public image. Most chose not go on the record, but all expressed frustration that a peripheral and contentious figure in their community, one who served overseas but never served with SEALs in combat, became a public face of the SEAL community. Many complained to me that it tends to be those who are least representative of SEAL core values, such as Greitens, who end up trading on the group’s reputation and representing it in public, earning respect from American citizens but contempt from other SEALs.

In 2015, Lieutenant Forrest S. Crowell, a Navy SEAL, wrote a thesis for Naval Postgraduate School titled “SEALs Gone Wild.” In it, he argued that the SEALs’ celebrity status had diverted their culture “away from the traditional SEAL Ethos of quiet professionalism to a Market Ethos of commercialization and self-promotion.” Crowell warned that the new approach incentivized “narcissistic and profit-oriented behavior” and undermined healthy civil-military relations by using “the credibility of special operations to push partisan politics.”

Greitens, who has been in office for a year and a half, is accused of coercing his former hairdresser into a sexual encounter in 2015 and threatening her to keep her quiet. According to her testimony, he led her into his basement, bound her hands, blindfolded her, ripped off her clothes, took her photograph, and coerced her into performing oral sex. He told her that if she made details of the encounter public, he would release the photograph. Greitens also faces felony charges for tampering with a computer to gain access to a donor list associated with the charity organization he founded in 2007. The allegations, which Greitens has denied, will be considered in the Missouri General Assembly special session. The revelations have provoked bipartisan condemnation, with several Missouri Republican state lawmakers sending a letter to Donald Trump, asking him to demand that Greitens step down. The President has not responded.

Greitens’s controversial reputation among the SEALs began, oddly, when he performed what could arguably be considered an act of integrity. In 2004, he was a junior officer in the Navy SEALs, taking part in a large military exercise in Thailand. While there, he suspected that the ranking SEAL officer in his squadron, a highly respected combat veteran named Scott Hobbs, might have been abusing and distributing drugs.

Greitens was new to the command and had yet to prove himself. “Culturally, you’re not viewed as a SEAL until you’ve deployed in a SEAL platoon,” one former operator told me. In Thailand, Greitens served in a unit that supported one of the deployed platoons, the “team guys,” who were considered the force’s rock stars. The exercise was a chance for Greitens to get command time and learn how the SEALs worked before getting assigned to a platoon and heading to Iraq or Afghanistan. For a few of the SEALs in Thailand, though, the exercise was a chance to unwind between combat tours with binge drinking, drugs, and prostitutes.

The easiest course of action for Greitens would have been to look the other way, or report the problem to the senior enlisted officer in the unit, who likely would have addressed the issue in-house. But Greitens worried that some of his sailors were taking part in the drug use and reached up to senior leadership outside Thailand. Drug tests were ordered. “We have a rat,” Hobbs told his men. Hobbs tested positive, along with four other SEALs, and three special-boats crewmen. Courts-martial were scheduled, and two SEAL platoons that had been preparing to deploy in Iraq or Afghanistan were sent home. SEAL platoons in Baghdad that had been expecting to be relieved had their tours extended. Other stateside platoons were deployed early and kept overseas for eight or more months. They were told that one individual was responsible for their extension—Eric Greitens.

Senior leadership approved of Greitens’s decision to report the drug use, but others in the community believed he should have handled the issue within his local chain of command. (Greitens would later claim that the incident was an example of SEAL values winning out.) Greitens’s time in Thailand would be his last significant deployment as a SEAL. When he came home, he was offered an assistant-platoon-commander billet, but he declined, a SEAL working in his unit at the time told me. It wasn’t a command position in the SEALs, and Greitens had other opportunities lined up, including a prestigious White House Fellowship. He would instead deploy with a unit training and assisting Kenyan forces in Manda Bay, and then leave active duty.

“Greitens is extremely smart, and he had a timeline,” one of his fellow-officers told me. “Everything he has done, he’s done thinking ten moves in advance.” Greitens later deployed to Iraq as a reservist, in 2006, and suffered chlorine inhalation and other injuries after a suicide truck bombing, but he ended his time on active duty never having led SEALs in combat.

Greitens’s political rise coincided with a period when the Navy itself sanctioned, in a few well-known cases, the commercialization and politicization of special operations. In 2007, Marcus Luttrell’s best-selling memoir, “Lone Survivor,” an account of a disastrous operation in Afghanistan, was published with the blessing of Naval Special Warfare Command, despite containing contentious factual claims regarding Saddam Hussein’s connection to Al Qaeda, as well as overt political speech that criticized “liberals” and the “liberal media.” A year later, the N.S.W.C. endorsed the film “Act of Valor,” which starred active-duty Navy SEALs and grossed eighty-one million dollars. It was in this environment that Greitens wrote his own memoir, “The Heart and the Fist.”