Who killed Boozer in The Terminal List? The 9mm he supposedly shot himself with was a gun he hated
Reece knew it wasn't suicide the moment he heard which gun Boozer had used. Season 1 spends eight episodes proving him right, and the trail runs a long way past the man who staged the scene.
Ernest "Boozer" Vickers, played by former Navy SEAL Jared Shaw, is one of only two men to make it home from the ambush that opens The Terminal List. Days later he is dead, and his death is the first piece of evidence that the ambush was no accident. With season 2 arriving on Prime Video on October 21, here's how season 1 answers the question.
Spoilers for The Terminal List season 1 follow.
The "suicide"
James Reece (Chris Pratt) leads his SEAL platoon on Operation Odin's Sword, a raid in Syria that turns into a massacre. Reece and Boozer are the only survivors. Back in Coronado, Reece gets a call: Boozer has shot himself in his apartment.
Nothing about it fits:
- The timing — Reece remembers flying home with Boozer and drinking with him in a bar the day before. NCIS Agent Josh Holder (Warren Kole) tells him that's impossible, because Boozer had been dead for two days by then.
- The gun — the coroner says Boozer used a 9mm. Every man in the platoon carried a personalized 9mm SIG P226 as his team pistol, and Boozer hated his. He was a devoted .45 man whose favorite was a custom 1911.
- The reaction — when Reece raises the gun with his best friend, CIA officer Ben Edwards (Taylor Kitsch), Ben suggests Boozer might have chosen the team gun deliberately, as a kind of goodbye.
The timing problem makes Reece doubt himself. He has a concussion, his memory is unreliable and the people around him are happy to say so. The gun is the detail he can't let go of.
Who was behind it
The answer comes in pieces over the season. The ambush was set up to kill Reece's entire platoon, whose members had been unknowingly given an experimental drug, RD-4895, that was causing brain tumors. A failed drug trial with a dead platoon attached was something its backers could not let surface. Boozer and Reece, the two survivors, were the loose ends.
The killing traces back to Capstone Industries, run by billionaire Steve Horn (Jai Courtney), whose vice president Saul Agnon handled the dirty work. Holder was on their payroll. Reece finds out that Holder pulled his fingerprints from the military database two days before his own wife and daughter were murdered, which is how someone opened Reece's biometric gun safe and took his team 9mm.
What the show never does is put a face on the person who actually fired the shot in Boozer's apartment. It doesn't need to. By the time Reece has his list, every name on it shares the blame, starting with the agent who signed off on the suicide.
The conspiracy kills Boozer with the gun he hated and comes after Reece with his own. In both cases the weapon was picked to point back at the victim, and in both cases it gives the game away.
How Reece answers it
Holder becomes the first name on the list Reece writes on the back of his daughter's last drawing. Ben hands Reece Boozer's own pistol, a Kimber Warrior 1911 .45, and Reece breaks into Holder's apartment at night. Under pressure, Holder gives up a name, Saul Agnon, and then lunges at Reece. Reece shoots him with Boozer's gun.
Then he stages it the way Boozer's death was staged. He puts Holder's service 9mm in his hand and leaves a 9mm casing on the bed. The man who covered up a fake 9mm suicide is left as one.
In Jack Carr's 2018 novel, the setup is the same, though Holder works for the Defense Criminal Investigative Service, not NCIS, and he is the second name Reece crosses off, after the investment banker who opens the book.
Boozer since then
Shaw, who served as a SEAL before becoming an actor and executive producer, played Boozer again in the 2025 prequel The Terminal List: Dark Wolf, set in Iraq in 2015, when Boozer was serving as a sniper in Ben Edwards's platoon. It's a brief look at the man before the ambush, and before anyone needed him dead.
Previously we wrote: The Terminal List or Dark Wolf: which to watch first? Jack Carr picks one order — it could cost you season 1's biggest twist
