Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast
Speaker 1: that again I did that year. Listening now a bit anyway,
Speaker 1: I'm Robert, you know me. We're talking about Richard, the
Speaker 1: Navy Seals guy, you know, and and my guest is
Speaker 1: again Andrew T.
Speaker 2: Andrew. What are you doing, buddy?
Speaker 3: Ah good? Still here? Still alive. Yeah, it's a little
Speaker 3: it's it's warm, but I'm alive. This is great.
Speaker 1: It's warm, but you're alive, just like everyone else in
Speaker 1: the eternal summer that is increasingly gripping the world. Well, yeah,
Speaker 1: let's distract ourselves from our problems by thinking about a
Speaker 1: man who lived a charm and mirthful life of constant
Speaker 1: war crimes. The Seal Team six guy, Old Dicky marks Richard.
Speaker 3: A question, not to be glib. Why is Seal Team
Speaker 3: six like, is there I assume one through five? Or
Speaker 3: is this like a James Bond situation.
Speaker 2: We'll talk about that, don't worry, we'll talk about that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's actually a fun story. But yeah,
Speaker 1: at this point, initially there are like two teams, but
Speaker 1: each team is like hundreds of guys, right, They're divided
Speaker 1: into platoons and stuff.
Speaker 2: So it's not.
Speaker 1: When you hear like Seal Team six, you might think like, well,
Speaker 1: that's like six guys or ten. Now there's like hundreds of.
Speaker 2: Guys like Seal Team six.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of Team six guys. Okay, okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: exactly right. So when we ended last episode, the newly
Speaker 1: formed Navy Seals along with newly made Navy Seal Richard Marsenko,
Speaker 1: had been shipped to Vietnam and started partnering with the
Speaker 1: CIA to carry out Phoenix missions all over the waterfront, right,
Speaker 1: And you know these are you're killing informants and are
Speaker 1: like informants bringing in for You're killing and capturing guys,
Speaker 1: You're having them tortured by the CIA, You're getting more info,
Speaker 1: You're going after other guys. You know, it's this kind
Speaker 1: of self perpetuating loop of targets, right, that's what they
Speaker 1: create with with Phoenix, and that's what the Seals are.
Speaker 1: They're kind of fighting their own separate war that's occurring
Speaker 1: alongside the rest of Vietnam. But it's really just like
Speaker 1: the Seals and the CIA murdering a fuck loaded dudes, right, yeah, and.
Speaker 3: Based off of it now that we know also, it's like, yeah,
Speaker 3: just mostly because someone told them to yeah, because.
Speaker 1: Some guys said, like, yeah, this guy's definitely a facilitator
Speaker 1: for the Viet Cong or whatever, and often for less
Speaker 1: reason than that, as we'll discuss right now. Because seals
Speaker 1: report to themselves, they can kill for the CIA without
Speaker 1: any issues or without abiding by any of the rules
Speaker 1: of war. Right Like, there's the Seals are supposed to
Speaker 1: abide by the rules of war. They're not supposed to
Speaker 1: be any units in the US military that are exempt
Speaker 1: from them. But practically the Seals don't have to abide
Speaker 1: by the rules of war, right right. These guys are
Speaker 1: nearly always to go into battle on dexa dream. They
Speaker 1: will avoid sleeping for debt speed. That's just like straight
Speaker 1: up old style speed, so they are wired as fuck
Speaker 1: on speed. They're usually operating at night, and the fact
Speaker 1: that they are both highest tits not sleeping for days.
Speaker 1: Killing people at night means they screw up constantly. These
Speaker 1: guys kill the wrong people all the fucking time. Phillips ads.
Speaker 1: The intel Seals received was often suspect. A farmer might
Speaker 1: finger his neighbor over an old grudge. A corrupt official
Speaker 1: might turn in someone to whom he owed money. Fishing
Speaker 1: boats the seals ambushed because someone said they were used
Speaker 1: by viet Cong couriers often turned out to be nothing
Speaker 1: but fishing boats. Purported viet Cong bases burned to the
Speaker 1: ground were sometimes just poor collections of huts inhabited by
Speaker 1: simple peasants.
Speaker 3: Cool, so you know.
Speaker 1: They're fighting a fun war. That's Richard Marsenko's baptism of
Speaker 1: fire light a lot of huts on fire. In Code
Speaker 1: Over Country, Matthew Cole writes that from the Jump, Navy
Speaker 1: brass were hesitant to embrace the seals because, among other things,
Speaker 1: they're not like working for the Navy a lot of
Speaker 1: the time, like the Navy muney have a use for them,
Speaker 1: like they did for the Frogment, but the CIA is like, not,
Speaker 1: we got.
Speaker 2: Some of these guys to do.
Speaker 1: They actually don't ask. They're going to show up on
Speaker 1: board periodically when they need a break, and they're going
Speaker 1: to be like, they're gonna have long hair, they're gonna
Speaker 1: smell like shit, and they're all going to be doing
Speaker 1: illegal drugs on your boat and just don't say anything, right,
Speaker 1: you're not allowed to. Maybe brass don't like that all
Speaker 1: the time, right, Seals often get a reputation of looking
Speaker 1: and acting like insane criminals. Cole quotes a seal captain
Speaker 1: at the time who told him we had no status,
Speaker 1: no standing in the regular Navy. Some part of the
Speaker 1: Navy saw us as a sort of quasi criminal element,
Speaker 1: not a respected profession that should only be used in
Speaker 1: desperate circumstances, and when you were through using it, you
Speaker 1: would stop forever, like it was some sort of a
Speaker 1: moral activity. So the Navy kind of treated them like drugs,
Speaker 1: like the speed they were on.
Speaker 3: Just one less, one less hit, one less hit.
Speaker 2: Yeah, one last hit, but then I'm going clean. I'm
Speaker 2: going clean.
Speaker 1: From special operators, the seals were seen like some sort
Speaker 1: of a moral activity because they often did immoral things.
Speaker 1: In his book Alpha, David Phillips uses the terms there's different.
Speaker 1: This is again there's like a thousand or so seals
Speaker 1: in Vietnam, I think at the height so, and there's
Speaker 1: factions within them. They're not all the same, and they're
Speaker 1: not all doing the same kinds of missions. They're not
Speaker 1: all doing Phoenix missions for the CIA.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: Seals do other stuff too, obviously, to to kind of
Speaker 1: describe the split between them and his book alpha. David
Speaker 1: Phillips uses the terms boy scouts and pirates to divide
Speaker 1: kind of the two broad ideological ends of the Navy Seals.
Speaker 1: The boy Scouts are more or less the direct descendants
Speaker 1: of the old style of UDT operator. Right, we are
Speaker 1: professionals doing a really insanely dangerous job. But the job
Speaker 1: is fundamentally there because it is supposed to save lives
Speaker 1: in the long run.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: The pirates are cia assassins, right, we'd to kill people.
Speaker 1: I don't give a shit, right, right, Like, I'm just
Speaker 1: here for fucking blood. Right, That's my only interest in
Speaker 1: anything that I'm doing. And the conflict between boy scouts
Speaker 1: and pirates is still present today in the Navy Seals.
Speaker 1: Right on one end are the quiet professionals, and on
Speaker 1: the other end are the fucking maniacs and the you know,
Speaker 1: the quiet professionals are always the guys who have been
Speaker 1: in charge up until very recently. And Seal branding because
Speaker 1: like the Seal Oath, there's a lot in there about
Speaker 1: like part of why we train so much so that
Speaker 1: we don't shoot civilians. You know, we can we can
Speaker 1: target and very you know, discriminatingly only get the bad guys, right, Like,
Speaker 1: that's why you send in the seals, is we're the
Speaker 1: most discriminating way in order to get your man, and
Speaker 1: we won't hit anyone that we don't mean to. And obviously,
Speaker 1: like that's the branding. The reality is sometimes they're just
Speaker 1: a lot of times they're just killing people, you know, Yeah,
Speaker 1: because it's hard to not kill people that you don't
Speaker 1: mean to in gun fights. Actually, when you're on speed especially,
Speaker 1: it's a lot harder to not kill people like fights
Speaker 1: when you're wired to the gills on speed and haven't
Speaker 1: slept in four days.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but right, but even if you're one of the
Speaker 3: good guys, like, yeah, good.
Speaker 1: I'm not again, I'm not trying to make an objective
Speaker 1: moral term. I'm talking about how the people within the
Speaker 1: unit see themselves and the breakdown the right, Like, you
Speaker 1: don't have to think of the boy Scouts as literally
Speaker 1: good people. That's dependent upon your own belief about ethics. Right.
Speaker 2: The pirates just.
Speaker 1: Want to kill people, though, right, and they believe that
Speaker 1: that's what the Seals are for. They're there because they're
Speaker 1: really good at killing. We have an account by one
Speaker 1: member of an early pirate platoon, Michael Beanan and his
Speaker 1: platoon was a station in the Mekong Delta, and Beanan
Speaker 1: wrote later an anonymous account of his experiences in this
Speaker 1: unit that he published afterwards. This is how Phillips describes
Speaker 1: it in the book Alpha. The job mutated from identifying
Speaker 1: and killing Vietcong operatives to tasks like sneaking into a
Speaker 1: village at night to assassinate a village chief and making
Speaker 1: it look like the Vietcong had done it. When the
Speaker 1: Intel told them to do it to Vietcong tax collectors,
Speaker 1: they would, according to Beanan, rob them of all money
Speaker 1: and of course kill them, and then report that all
Speaker 1: the money was destroyed in the firefight. The money would
Speaker 1: then be used to buy drugs and prostitutes. Beanan also
Speaker 1: wrote about the obsession pirates had for close quarters blood
Speaker 1: letting or getting wet. Per Beanan, this meant cutting somebody's
Speaker 1: throat with your knife so the blood would go all
Speaker 1: over you.
Speaker 2: It was ritual.
Speaker 1: His platoon leaders told him to do it to some villagers.
Speaker 1: He refused, but said that many others did not. And
Speaker 1: this is something I want to get into. I've been
Speaker 1: reading a book about prehistoric warfare lately, and it includes
Speaker 1: a lot because there was this belief that, particularly by
Speaker 1: a lot of like European military historians in the early
Speaker 1: part of the twentieth century, that primitive war was basically
Speaker 1: playing around.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: You'd have two shides show up and they'd throw some
Speaker 1: like weak arrows at each other, and then once a
Speaker 1: couple of guys got injured, they'd kind of back off,
Speaker 1: and they didn't really usually have the hunger for like
Speaker 1: real The reality is the opposite. In fact, nearly everything
Speaker 1: that like every basically everything that we see as like
Speaker 1: special forces style tactics is all stuff that Europeans stole
Speaker 1: from indigenous warriors.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: These are all like kind of rating and ambush tactics
Speaker 1: that literally Europeans learned. They called it the skulking method
Speaker 1: of war in the Americas, right, because they weren't they
Speaker 1: hadn't practiced. That was not the way Europeans fought at
Speaker 1: the time at which that was they started coming over
Speaker 1: into the Americas. And you'll hear a lot about some
Speaker 1: of the different because primitive warrior cultures. Number One, war
Speaker 1: was often genocidal, Right, If one tribe is going, you
Speaker 1: often wipe out the other side if you beat them
Speaker 1: if you can because that's the thing that guarantee you
Speaker 1: to the most safety. And there's a lot of trophy
Speaker 1: taking all over the world. This is in Europe, this
Speaker 1: is in Southeast Asias, in the Americas, and all sorts
Speaker 1: of it. You know, you have scalping in some areas,
Speaker 1: you have the taking of whole heads. There are some
Speaker 1: cultures that would literally and these are multiple parts of
Speaker 1: the world, take the entire skin, and in some places
Speaker 1: even where the skin of a defeated enemy like a
Speaker 1: costumes sometimes and when you read about this, it's often
Speaker 1: pointed as like, wow, the brutality of like ancient warfare.
Speaker 2: Now this is just war.
Speaker 1: It's still the same. The US military does this. They're
Speaker 1: taking heads in World War Two, they're taking ears in
Speaker 1: Vietnam and other body parts. Seals are often described as
Speaker 1: taking ears. Right, this is something that being In writes
Speaker 1: about in his account.
Speaker 2: Is then like.
Speaker 1: Taking parts of bodies. And again, as a ritual, you're
Speaker 1: supposed to cut the throat of a dude who might
Speaker 1: is often a civilian. Right, Eddie Gallagher killing that sixteen
Speaker 1: year old kid in Mosul, that was not a break
Speaker 1: with tradition, That was long standing tradition within at least
Speaker 1: a chunk of the seals according to accounts from Vietnam.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: And so this is when people talk about like, oh,
Speaker 1: you know war, you know a lot of these these
Speaker 1: these these indigenous cultures have really brutal methods of like warfare.
Speaker 1: And now that's just war man. That's everyone who winds
Speaker 1: up agreeing to do the kind of warfare where you're
Speaker 1: just like ambushing a village at night and murdering everybody,
Speaker 1: if that's the shit you're doing, and we do that too, right,
Speaker 1: it utilizes.
Speaker 2: The men who do it right.
Speaker 1: And if you're gonna send men to do that, you
Speaker 1: really it's very hard to stop them from taking trophies
Speaker 1: and cutting off and becoming very deranged by what they've done.
Speaker 1: And throughout time and history, different cultures have built in
Speaker 1: ways to try to provide accountability or to even there
Speaker 1: were some ritual ways of like cleansing some some indigenous
Speaker 1: cultures even had this understanding that like and there was
Speaker 1: a ritual way to ensure that we believe the people
Speaker 1: who go out to war is in something a different
Speaker 1: person than they are when they're at peace, and there's
Speaker 1: this ritual to kind of transition them back, right, and
Speaker 1: don't We never built that into our cultures, so we
Speaker 1: just kind of pretend these people are always like acting
Speaker 1: like heroes as opposed to cutting off pieces of dead
Speaker 1: enemies and murdering civilians in the woods. But they often do.
Speaker 1: They often do. Beamed and described the business of the
Speaker 1: Navy Seals in Vietnam as terrorism against Vietnamese villagers. Quote
Speaker 1: finding a loved one with a green face and stabbed
Speaker 1: in the middle of a road was incredible terror. In
Speaker 1: other words, the Navy Seals would abduct someone in the night,
Speaker 1: paint their face green because they would go intobut it
Speaker 1: with green faces, right, and then they would stab them
Speaker 1: and leave their corpse in the road for their families
Speaker 1: to find. And after abducting the victim, they would also
Speaker 1: often wire the door of their hut to explode, so
Speaker 1: when their children opened it to try to like find
Speaker 1: their dad, it would blow up, killing or maiming them,
Speaker 1: guaranteeing further death and terror. Like that's no less like
Speaker 1: like you, that's no less brutal than the shit people
Speaker 1: were doing ten thousand years ago in any way, shape
Speaker 1: or form, in any meaningful manner, right.
Speaker 3: Arguably because you don't have to and you're like, you
Speaker 3: don't believe that they're going to come find you.
Speaker 1: Right right, You are not literally in danger of your
Speaker 1: culture being exterminated by this.
Speaker 2: You have no reason to be there.
Speaker 1: You live six thousand miles away, Like, why are you
Speaker 1: in Vietnam. Former Seal Lieutenant Bob Carey later wrote about
Speaker 1: a nineteen sixty nine raid he led to assassinated target
Speaker 1: in a rural village. On the way, they encountered an
Speaker 1: elderly man and a woman sleeping in a bedroom with
Speaker 1: three little kids. To stop them from warning anyone else,
Speaker 1: they killed all five with their knives. Immediately after this,
Speaker 1: they fucked up and ran into a dozen women and
Speaker 1: children out in the open, and since they lost the
Speaker 1: element of surprise, they just gunned them all down with
Speaker 1: automatic weapons. And their after action report they claim to
Speaker 1: have killed twenty one Viet Cong fighters in a firefight. Yeah,
Speaker 1: just women and children, stabbing babies to death in the
Speaker 1: their sleep, right, and to be killed in the firefight.
Speaker 2: Yeah cool?
Speaker 1: Right now again, the first Seals are hunters and trap
Speaker 1: of men, and they grew to worship mastery over the
Speaker 1: killing arts. Any personal flaws were forgivable, and a truly
Speaker 1: talented killer. One New York Times article noted that at
Speaker 1: a seal based down range in Vietnam, operators hung a
Speaker 1: sign above the base bar that read, people who kill
Speaker 1: for money are professionals. People who kill for fun arsadists.
Speaker 1: People who kill for money and fun are seals, right,
Speaker 1: and reading that I couldn't have a think of when
Speaker 1: I was in Urbill, which is in northern Iraq, it's
Speaker 1: the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan during the fighting against ISIS
Speaker 1: and Mosel I was sitting up in like a coffeehouse
Speaker 1: that was like a couple floors up. It's sort of
Speaker 1: this like Grand Bazarre area in the center of the city,
Speaker 1: and there's like I noticed, like a couple of big
Speaker 1: white dudes like milling around in this market area and
Speaker 1: they're like, you know, they're big, muscular, covered in tattoos, bearded,
Speaker 1: and one of them has a T shirt on that
Speaker 1: just says I'm only here for the violence, which is
Speaker 1: like you can find them online commonly. I don't know
Speaker 1: if those guys were might have been some form of
Speaker 1: fucking media, but there were probably contractors and they not
Speaker 1: necessarily combat. Most of those guys were doing like drone work, right,
Speaker 1: Like most of the contractors I met were nowhere near,
Speaker 1: but you still saw that kind of aesthetic on them
Speaker 1: all the time.
Speaker 2: Right, I'm only here. It's the same thing.
Speaker 1: I'm only here for the violence, right Like that's that's
Speaker 1: the same thing that that sign of that base bar says.
Speaker 2: Right, I'm here for the fucking violence because it's fun.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: These guys are fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, these guys are doing good. They're doing good.
Speaker 1: Richard Marsenko fit in perfectly among this crowd. As Phillips writes,
Speaker 1: he quote went by the name Demo Dick and called
Speaker 1: his men Marsenko's merry band of murdering marauders. Village by village,
Speaker 1: his team destroyed rice supplies, blew up fishing boats, and
Speaker 1: burned houses. Demo Dick liked to booby trap the bodies
Speaker 1: of those his men had killed before they moved on
Speaker 1: from a village. It made me feel good to hear
Speaker 1: an explosion after we'd left the area, he later wrote
Speaker 1: in his memoir. Over several deployments, Marsenko described his men
Speaker 1: getting spookier and dirtier as they began to think more
Speaker 1: like gorillas. He loved the free that he and his
Speaker 1: unit were given to de vised new tactics and pick targets.
Speaker 1: He later wrote this about Vietnam, a war that killed
Speaker 1: close to four million people. There's something to be said
Speaker 1: about the purity of a small war. For the Seals.
Speaker 1: It was instant gratification. You would write up a patrol order,
Speaker 1: go out there and shoot the bastard. It was black
Speaker 1: and white, no gray, And that's the music. That's the
Speaker 1: epitome of life for a warrior.
Speaker 2: And like, here's the thing.
Speaker 1: The Seals are very kind when I talked about like
Speaker 1: ancient prehistoric warriors and also like these kind of going
Speaker 1: back to like a lot of these indigenous warrior cultures
Speaker 1: that have even been around up into the modern era.
Speaker 1: The Seals very consciously pattern themselves a lot after particularly
Speaker 1: American Native American warriors. That's like a major thing now
Speaker 1: but especially later in Seal culture. And so this idea
Speaker 1: is really common, right that like we're there, like you know,
Speaker 1: we're living the warrior's life and it's this perfect this
Speaker 1: like cycle of violence where we're just constantly going out
Speaker 1: and killing more people is.
Speaker 2: Exactly like that. That's the purity of what we do.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't nothing but lose wars as far as
Speaker 1: I can tell, Like, if that's the idea epitome of
Speaker 1: life is if you say what you want about the
Speaker 1: ethics of these ancient warriors and every continent on Earth
Speaker 1: who practiced such brutal, often genocidal tactics they had to
Speaker 1: and they won or they died.
Speaker 2: This is like this is just murder cause play. That's
Speaker 2: the thing. It's like, we're the taxpayer, are just like
Speaker 2: paying these guys to cosplay as.
Speaker 3: We're like footing the bill for these psychos.
Speaker 1: And I guess the only yeah, yeah, completely unnecessarily and
Speaker 1: it never works. Yeah, Like yeah, they get like our side,
Speaker 1: like they have a lot of fun, some of them,
Speaker 1: a lot of them get obviously very traumatized. But like
Speaker 1: guys like Barsenko have a lot of fun. But it
Speaker 1: doesn't work right, right, An Army intelligence analyst later called
Speaker 1: the Phoenix program, which killed at least twenty one thousand people,
Speaker 1: indiscriminate murder. In nineteen seventy one, the Navy pulled all
Speaker 1: seals out of action and made them pass a test
Speaker 1: on the rules of war. Right, because there's so many
Speaker 1: reports that these guys are just murdering people. After the
Speaker 1: Meli massacre. Mini Seals refuse to go to Vietnam entirely because,
Speaker 1: as The New York Times reported, they were scared of
Speaker 1: being prosecuted for war crimes that they were undeniably committing.
Speaker 1: There's this A lot of them are complaining, like, oh,
Speaker 1: after me, Lie, I don't even want to go there anymore. Right,
Speaker 1: what's even the point if we can't fight the war
Speaker 1: the way they'll win it? And like, you guys got
Speaker 1: to fight that war for years and it just kept
Speaker 1: getting worse. You lost, like they won, Vietnam won.
Speaker 3: Like that's the only the only tiny sliver of like again,
Speaker 3: fucking like silver lining is like, this really doesn't work.
Speaker 3: They like, for all the life great, you know your
Speaker 3: comfort needs hard men kind of shit. It's like it
Speaker 3: never has once worked.
Speaker 1: It doesn't it again, it does when when both sides
Speaker 1: are like one hundred guys. If you can kill all
Speaker 1: hundred of the other guys, then yeah, sure, like you
Speaker 1: actually can end that problem forever. Right, But modern war
Speaker 1: these are nations of millions and millions and millions of people.
Speaker 1: It doesn't work that way. All you do is piss
Speaker 1: everyone off and raise the level of brutality and anger
Speaker 1: and motivate the enemy to fight and to themselves dig
Speaker 1: in harder, Right, it does not get you what you want?
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Twenty one years later, after you know this period of time,
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety two, Marsenko wrote Rogue Warrior, which gave
Speaker 1: him a chance to whitewash his own conduct in that
Speaker 1: of the Seals entire. And before I get into that more,
Speaker 1: I want to quote from this New York Times review
Speaker 1: of books review for an idea of This is how
Speaker 1: they describe his writing style. Mister Marsenko, fifty one years
Speaker 1: old comes across as less the genuine warrior than a
Speaker 1: comic book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like little
Speaker 1: Lord Fauntleroy. To planning for his first combat assignment, he writes,
Speaker 1: he inhaled deeply and knew instantly I was going to
Speaker 1: like Vietnam a whole lot. He revels in the wonderful
Speaker 1: lethal odor of cordite wafting over me and tells us
Speaker 1: that after one particularly hair reaction, I dreamt of warm
Speaker 1: women and cold beer. And I want to highlight something
Speaker 1: I found kind of revealing here. Because Marsenko talks about
Speaker 1: the coreite lethal odor of cordite wafting over me. You
Speaker 1: may have heard that, especially if you read weirdly enough
Speaker 1: warhammer books. Cordite is a kind of smokeless bullet propellant
Speaker 1: that was developed in eighteen eighty nine. It had a
Speaker 1: very unique scent and became famous because a lot of
Speaker 1: Victorian earin novels of colonial British warfare loved to describe
Speaker 1: the cordite stink of battlefields.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Cordite actually stopped being produced in the mid twentieth century
Speaker 1: and would have been out of production by the time
Speaker 1: Marsenko was having his gunfights, and also most of the
Speaker 1: AMMO that would have been in Vietnam was not made
Speaker 1: by people whoever used cordite in their bullets.
Speaker 2: Right. I'm sure he would have encountered.
Speaker 1: There's a lot of weird bullet types floating around Vietnam
Speaker 1: at varying points. I'm certain he encountered chordite sometimes, but
Speaker 1: this was definitely not like. This was something either his
Speaker 1: ghostwriter added because it's a common thing to put in
Speaker 1: books like this, or it's something he stuck in because
Speaker 1: it reminded him of books that he read as a kid.
Speaker 1: Brought out like badass colonial Warriors murdering non white people, right,
Speaker 1: it's like a pulpy thing to say, yes, yes, exactly, Court,
Speaker 1: it's not a mule recollection. Yeah, I mean honestly, it
Speaker 1: is like basically just like an updated like Conan the
Speaker 1: Barbarian novel.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: It's particularly funny in Warhammer books because you're like, okay,
Speaker 1: so you're saying, forty thousand years from now, we go
Speaker 1: back to using the shit that they decided was bunk
Speaker 1: in the fifties.
Speaker 2: Really well, that is a lot of the war Heeber aesthetic,
Speaker 2: to be fair.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does fit a little maybe.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 1: The combat scenes in Rogue Warrior are remarkably inaccurate, despite
Speaker 1: being pinned by a man who undeniably saw combat with
Speaker 1: the Seals and no. The best example of this is
Speaker 1: a mission that occurred on March thirteenth, nineteen sixty seven.
Speaker 1: A Seal team including Marsenko were inserted to Dung Island
Speaker 1: on the path of a Vietcong smuggling route. This was
Speaker 1: a free fire zone, which meant the Seals would be
Speaker 1: free to kill anyone they saw out after curfew. In
Speaker 1: Rogue Warrior, Marsenko describes the mission as them waiting to
Speaker 1: kill a courier and recover intel. But quote, the killing
Speaker 1: was an important element for a couple of reasons. First,
Speaker 1: that's what we were in Vietnam for. Second, you never
Speaker 1: know whether you can kill someone until you do it.
Speaker 1: I wanted to make sure each member of Bravo, that's
Speaker 1: his squad, was up to the task. In other words,
Speaker 1: we didn't need to kill these courriers, but I wanted
Speaker 1: each of my guys to experience killing a human being, right,
Speaker 1: that was the point of the mission. Really, Now this is.
Speaker 3: Just a gang initiation or sorry, like a fiction exactly.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but this is like just the Navy seals. Our
Speaker 1: taxpayer dollars is fun to them.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
Speaker 3: It's cool.
Speaker 1: It's cool stuff. Yeah, I love quiet professionals. Now this
Speaker 1: is important because Marsenko goes on to claim that after
Speaker 1: downing the courier and moving to recover his body, Bravo
Speaker 1: unit came under heavy fire from all sides and had
Speaker 1: to radio for extraction. That's when Lieutenant Larry Bailey, who's
Speaker 1: a seal officer driving their boat, failed to rescue them,
Speaker 1: and the team had to retreat under heavy fires. Bullets
Speaker 1: are slicing through the bark because this lieutenant, this officer
Speaker 1: fucks up. My men are under heavy fire and we
Speaker 1: barely got out of there with their lives. And so
Speaker 1: Marcinko writes that he attacks Bailey when they finally reached
Speaker 1: the boat. I pleaded for covering fire, and you were
Speaker 1: so goddamn far up river you were out of goddamn
Speaker 1: radio range.
Speaker 2: Is that bad enough for you, you pussy?
Speaker 1: That's what Marcinko says, that he's goals at this guy.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: Oh.
Speaker 1: The author of Code over Country actually interviews Bailey and
Speaker 1: one other member of Marsenko's unit, and both of these
Speaker 1: guys were like, no, Richard was lying. That's not at
Speaker 1: all how it was heard. First off, Richard was not
Speaker 1: on the radio. Bailey didn't hear anything. At no point
Speaker 1: was Richard like begging to be picked up because they
Speaker 1: weren't under fire right. In fact, Bailey eventually decided to
Speaker 1: go check on Bravo himself because it was weird that
Speaker 1: they hadn't radioed for so long. Quote as they crept inland,
Speaker 1: I could hear some guys laughing, Bailey said. The laughing
Speaker 1: was undimistakably American. He recalled, I could hear Marcinko hollerin
Speaker 1: they had lost all degree of military discipline in a
Speaker 1: supposedly hairy area. Bailey's radio man told them they'd turned
Speaker 1: their radio off for the ambush and forgot to turn
Speaker 1: it back on. After killing not a viet Cong k
Speaker 1: but a couple of fishermen, the radio men told Bailey,
Speaker 1: we have our first war souvenirs and pulled out a
Speaker 1: bag filled with ID cards and a watch. Cool say,
Speaker 1: they just killed some fishermen and they're not in any danger.
Speaker 1: They're partying. You're just with the corpses and laughing.
Speaker 3: You know.
Speaker 1: Obviously that's saying he was never in danger. The Navy
Speaker 1: Seals and Vietnam, I'm sure they've definitely under fire at times,
Speaker 1: but a lot of times they're just murdering people. Paired
Speaker 1: with the paragraph that I quoted earlier, it's clear that
Speaker 1: Marsenko wanted his team to notch some kills, and because
Speaker 1: it was a free fire zone, he knew that he
Speaker 1: was safe to murder the first men he saw. This
Speaker 1: is emblematic of his approach to war, and the Marsenko
Speaker 1: approach to war. Will linger among the Navy Seals long
Speaker 1: after he leaves the unit. But you know who never
Speaker 1: abandons their men in the field. Me, yeah, Sophie. Sure,
Speaker 1: but also ads podcasts huzza.
Speaker 2: And we're back.
Speaker 1: So I give more anecdotes of Marsenko's experiences in Vietnam,
Speaker 1: but Richard lies about everything. It's worth noting that military
Speaker 1: historian David Andreid looked into Marsenko's claims for Soldier of
Speaker 1: Fortune magazine, of all publications, and I would not I don't.
Speaker 2: I don't tend to credit them miss being a particularly
Speaker 2: credible Uh.
Speaker 3: But that's the other way I look at it is
Speaker 3: if fucking Soldier of Fortune is like.
Speaker 2: Fashion, we should check the shit out. Yeah, you are
Speaker 2: a liar.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Andreid publishes an article called Pogue Warrior about him, and
Speaker 1: pogue is military slang for like a soldier in like
Speaker 1: the back, like a soldier who's like stationed far back
Speaker 1: from the line of contact. He doesn't actually do anything,
Speaker 1: but who like lies about having done cool. Sure, right,
Speaker 1: Like that's what a pogue is. That's it's it's a
Speaker 1: pretty funny title for the article. Here's Cole's to description
Speaker 1: of the article. The article also found another instance from
Speaker 1: Arsenko's book in which he grossly mischaracterized what was supposed
Speaker 1: to be a seminal event in his military career, losing
Speaker 1: his first seal in battle, and appeared to outright fabricate
Speaker 1: a scene in Vietnam. And there's something important for people
Speaker 1: to we who weren't in the military and haven't seen
Speaker 1: combat to understand, which is, like, I think people are
Speaker 1: generally familiar with the idea that someone would lie about
Speaker 1: having served for like clout right or that event, who
Speaker 1: never did anything cool might lie about having seen combat.
Speaker 1: But if you can confirm that someone's like a combat veteran,
Speaker 1: people don't tend to assume that they would lie about
Speaker 1: what they saw in combat. And the reality is that
Speaker 1: happens all the time. Guys who've seen heavy combat often
Speaker 1: lie about it, in part because it's very common, especially
Speaker 1: in repeated combat actions, for even people who are trained
Speaker 1: and experienced to fuck up and panic under fire and
Speaker 1: screw up in situations that like they have to lie
Speaker 1: about to themselves and everyone else because it's the only
Speaker 1: way they can go on emotionally.
Speaker 2: I've like, yeah, it happens anyway.
Speaker 1: So remember that, both with Dick and anytime you see
Speaker 1: someone telling like war stories that seem like really crazy.
Speaker 1: I'll never forget a buddy of mine who was in
Speaker 1: a combat unit and saw a lot of combat. We
Speaker 1: were driving in like near the base in or one
Speaker 1: of the bases in southern California outside of San Diego,
Speaker 1: and there's like a road named for some Medal of
Speaker 1: honor winner, and I asked him, like what the guy did?
Speaker 1: And he was like, oh, I don't really pay much
Speaker 1: attention because it's one of those like loan Survivor stories,
Speaker 1: and I don't trust anyone who won an award, and
Speaker 1: it is like the only guy who survived, Like anyone
Speaker 1: doing that is probably.
Speaker 2: Lying about what happened.
Speaker 1: I think that's generally a smart way to approach those stories,
Speaker 1: especially the story of Navy Seal Marcus Latrell, who wrote
Speaker 1: the book Loan Survivor, which is an account of him
Speaker 1: being the only survivor for unit that we know is
Speaker 1: largely inaccurate. Right, fun stuff. So Dick starts that tradition
Speaker 1: of being a fantasist and a huge braggart while also
Speaker 1: like having actual qualifications that make it very difficult for
Speaker 1: most people to kind of argue with you or deny
Speaker 1: what you did. Right, But he's also like he's also
Speaker 1: someone who does have a lot of popularity in the unit.
Speaker 1: A lot of guys, particularly in the pirate end of
Speaker 1: the Seals, really like him. As or Kelly writes in
Speaker 1: his book, quote, men who served under him in Vietnam
Speaker 1: say they would follow him anywhere. These, however, are the pirates.
Speaker 2: Again.
Speaker 1: Other seals described him as a boastful bragger. So it's
Speaker 1: it's it's not like universal, but he is popular within
Speaker 1: the popular with the worst guys, which yes, and that's
Speaker 1: not a small number of them, right. That's kind of
Speaker 1: an important thing is that he is hated by a
Speaker 1: lot of Seals, but he's liked by a.
Speaker 2: Lot of them.
Speaker 1: When the war ended, he remained in the now shrunken
Speaker 1: Navy Seals, and he spent the next decade watching the
Speaker 1: military he loved languish in post Vietnam peacetime outside of
Speaker 1: a war zone. His behavior made more waves among his peers.
Speaker 1: Per the book Brave Men, Dark Waters, quote, he had
Speaker 1: away with people that permitted him to get away with
Speaker 1: behavior that has one friend's would get me killed. He
Speaker 1: casually called strangers by racial epithets and got a smile
Speaker 1: in return. Rear Admiral George Worthington, who succeeded marsinco as
Speaker 1: naval lettache in Cambodia in the mid nineteen seventies, recalls
Speaker 1: a reception for General lawn Nan, brother of lawn Nole,
Speaker 1: who had been president of the country. Marsenko was well loved,
Speaker 1: if not revered, by the Cambodian officer corps and the
Speaker 1: troops too. He had a sort of Lawrence of Arabia
Speaker 1: esque leadership quality about him. Worthington says, Marsino had never
Speaker 1: laid an eye on Lawnnon, but he walks up behind
Speaker 1: him and grabs him with a big bear hug, and
Speaker 1: the guy loved it. And again that's also very telling
Speaker 1: because the Cambodians he talked, he's talking about are the
Speaker 1: guys who lost to the Khmer rouge. So he trained
Speaker 1: the military that lost. Yeah, yeah, I mean, is this
Speaker 1: becoming a pattern?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's yeah.
Speaker 2: That's how we roll, That's how we roll in the seals.
Speaker 1: He trained the brutal, authoritarian military that's war crimes so
Speaker 1: enraged rural Cambodians that it provided fuel for the Khmer roote.
Speaker 1: So at one point in the nineteen seventies, Dick panicked
Speaker 1: a top Navy officer during a visit to the Pentagon
Speaker 1: when the officer noted that Marsinko had a pistol stuffed
Speaker 1: in his sock. Now, let me tell you something about
Speaker 1: carrying a gun, folks. You got two, broadly speaking, two
Speaker 1: ways to carry a gun. One is just the firearm itself,
Speaker 1: either loaded or unloaded, but without a round in the chamber. Right,
Speaker 1: a gun can be loaded and not have a round
Speaker 1: in the chamber. That means you've got a mag in.
Speaker 1: But there's not like if you pull the trigger, it's
Speaker 1: not going to immediately fire a bullet.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: You have to cock it basically, or you have to
Speaker 1: charge it, is the term in order to get a
Speaker 1: bullet in there.
Speaker 3: Right.
Speaker 1: The other way to carry it is with around in
Speaker 1: the chamber. Now, most good holsters are like made out
Speaker 1: of us and they didn't really do that with holsters
Speaker 1: back then. But ideally your holster is made out of
Speaker 1: a rigid plastic material, so there's something hard in between
Speaker 1: the trigger and the rest of the world, so that
Speaker 1: if you carry with a gun with a bullet in
Speaker 1: the chamber, something can't just like poke the trigger and
Speaker 1: make it fire.
Speaker 2: Two things.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna assume Richard Marsenko never carried a gun without
Speaker 1: a round in the chamber, So I'm going to guess
Speaker 1: he's just got a chambered hot pistol with no safety,
Speaker 1: shoved in a sock, with nothing between that.
Speaker 2: Trigger and the world around it but a sock.
Speaker 1: And I think that's beautiful. I think that's beautiful.
Speaker 2: Or adds that quote.
Speaker 1: Another officer invited Marsenko to present a briefing at the
Speaker 1: Pentagon and then called the session off because he was
Speaker 1: so embarrassed by Marsenko's flamboyant profanity. Now this is evident
Speaker 1: in the book Rogue Warrior. Richard's favorite word is cock breath,
Speaker 1: which he uses eleven times in his autobiography.
Speaker 2: I don't know if it's been used more in a book,
Speaker 2: but I probably not right or weird guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd have to try. At one point, he calls
Speaker 1: his own men positively Mary murdering cock breath shit for
Speaker 1: brain's asshole. At another he claims to have shouted down
Speaker 1: a higher ranking officer who graduated from the Naval Academy
Speaker 1: and at admiral relatives, saying fuck you and all your
Speaker 1: fucking kind you sorry shit for brain's cock bread pencil
Speaker 1: Dick numbnuts, asshole.
Speaker 2: Fun. I know it's a different era, but yeah, you.
Speaker 1: Know what I'll say here is like there's a way
Speaker 1: to do that suit you a But like Ari Eirmley
Speaker 1: had a fucking horrible politics. That's like the drill sergeant
Speaker 1: from a full metal jacket, right, but he was at
Speaker 1: least really good at creatively cursing and dressing people down.
Speaker 1: Richard is not right, Like, it's a lot of the
Speaker 1: same insults eat it and they're not very creative. The
Speaker 1: bleakest moment of Maarsenko's career before the end came in
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty when Jimmy Carter had US Special Force his
Speaker 1: attempt to rescue prisoners of the American embassy who were
Speaker 1: trapped in Iran. This is a very famous failure. And
Speaker 1: this is why I say, like, you know, US Special
Speaker 1: Forces until the modern era had a much more mixed reputation,
Speaker 1: And this is a this is a Delta Force operation,
Speaker 1: so it's not Seals. On the day of the mission,
Speaker 1: Dick was almost forty. He was a Navy commander assigned
Speaker 1: to represent the Seals at the Pentagon, so he had
Speaker 1: a front row seat for the disastrous attempt by Delta Force,
Speaker 1: which is at that point the pre eminent special forces
Speaker 1: unit in the country, way more elite than the Seals,
Speaker 1: to save the hostages, and the whole event was a clusterfuck.
Speaker 1: One chopper hit a C one thirty while refueling, which
Speaker 1: caused an explosive crash, and the Delta operators bailed in time,
Speaker 1: but three Marines and a helicopter died, along with five
Speaker 1: Air Force crew. The whole affair was a calamity for
Speaker 1: the special Forces community as well as the Carter. A
Speaker 1: lot of people will say this is why Carter lost. Yeah, right,
Speaker 1: and it's definitely part of why Carter lost, and.
Speaker 3: You know, not to do too much history, that is
Speaker 3: arguably why we're at the position we're in now.
Speaker 1: Arguably why we're in the position we're in now because
Speaker 1: Delta Force couldn't get their fucking well. I guess this
Speaker 1: is more on the air the pilot guys, but yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So as a result of this horrible cluster fuck, Jimmy
Speaker 1: first off, Carter calls for an immediate follow up attempt,
Speaker 1: but he also calls for like the Pentagon, to reform
Speaker 1: the way their special Forces unit works, and as a
Speaker 1: result of this, the Pentagon decides to form the Joint
Speaker 1: Special Operations Command or JAYSOCK to coordinate between different special
Speaker 1: forces teams directly.
Speaker 2: For the president. This is the birth.
Speaker 1: Weirdly enough, it comes from Jimmy Carter. You can trace
Speaker 1: the birth of special forces not being well. These are
Speaker 1: units that are part of the Navy, part of the army,
Speaker 1: and they help with these special tasks to the most
Speaker 1: elite of these units are like the president's direct guy, right,
Speaker 1: this is the president's goon squad.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: Ye, Carter really does start that in a lot of ways.
Speaker 1: I mean, this has been happening before him, but he's
Speaker 1: a major part of that. Actually, he was horrified, I'm
Speaker 1: sure by like where this led. He was trying to
Speaker 1: rescue some hostages. But that is kind of part of
Speaker 1: what leads us where we get or where we are today.
Speaker 3: Well, it's also sort of why, like, you can't be
Speaker 3: the American president, no matter who you are, without being
Speaker 3: at minimum of war criminal.
Speaker 1: Right, You're going to be party to some horrible things
Speaker 1: as the president, and the very best case scenarios of
Speaker 1: like the most ethical guy in that job, you can imagine,
Speaker 1: which probably was carter like he probably in terms of
Speaker 1: like trying to be ethical, you know, not this again.
Speaker 2: He did a lot of there's a lot of critiques
Speaker 2: of course.
Speaker 3: Grading on the presidential curve. Yeah, he simply has to
Speaker 3: be the top.
Speaker 2: He's got he's got to be the guy who cared
Speaker 2: the most, right.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So Jaysock is formed to coordinate between these different special
Speaker 1: forces teams for the President, and Marsenko is tasked with
Speaker 1: building the Navy contribution to Jaysock, right. And this proves
Speaker 1: something else important about Marsenco, which is that he's very
Speaker 1: good at making the right friends. And for all of
Speaker 1: his hate of like officers and politics and all these
Speaker 1: connected people he describes as like the whole problem with
Speaker 1: big Navy, he's great at politics. He's a political animal.
Speaker 1: He's really good at interfacing as an officer in a
Speaker 1: political way in order to get what he wants.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: He's great at selling his ideas to command. It's a
Speaker 1: legitimate skill he has. Marsenko lays out and sells to
Speaker 1: them his vision of a new seal team with its
Speaker 1: own commanding officer and six platoons dedicated to counter terrorist
Speaker 1: missions and hostage rescue missions. To make his dream team,
Speaker 1: marsinco would have to reach over the heads of his
Speaker 1: fellow Special Forces officers to steal their very best men.
Speaker 1: In the book Brave Men, Dark Waters, or Kelly writes
Speaker 1: that Marsenko was armed with a pri one Priority one
Speaker 1: that permitted him to take the men and equipment he
Speaker 1: needed to from other commands. So he starts grabbing the
Speaker 1: guys he wants from these other Special Forces units, and
Speaker 1: by September of nineteen eighty Marsinko was commander of an
Speaker 1: entirely new unit, which he named Seal Team six. This
Speaker 1: is where that starts, and this forms an important part
Speaker 1: of team war which you had brought up, Right, How
Speaker 1: are the five? Were there five other Seal teams at
Speaker 1: this point? There were still just two. The name initially, though,
Speaker 1: referred to the fact that there had been six Seal
Speaker 1: platoons that had taken counter terrorism training. Right, So Seal
Speaker 1: Team six is made up of six platoons that had
Speaker 1: taken the specialized training, So that's why they start with
Speaker 1: the name. But because there's only two other Seal teams,
Speaker 1: Marsinko decides he really likes the idea of naming them
Speaker 1: Seal Team six is a disinformation tactic to trick the Bobbies,
Speaker 1: so they think there's more seals than there are. Right,
Speaker 1: that may have been something after the fact. I kind
Speaker 1: of think it was just because they trained six platoons
Speaker 1: and then after we said, oh this is clever, right,
Speaker 1: you know, but I don't, I don't know.
Speaker 3: Yeah, and the children where it's like, you know, at
Speaker 3: fourteen year old year old Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're ruled by violent, violent fourteen year old boys. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Like, here's the thing about testosterone. It has its uses,
Speaker 1: but it it One thing it can do is stop
Speaker 1: you from ever growing past age fourteen. Yeah, you really
Speaker 1: have to fight that part of the effect. So in
Speaker 1: an article for Rolling Stone, Matthew Cole notes Marcinko sought
Speaker 1: men who, in his estimation, would otherwise be athletes or
Speaker 1: criminals in the civilian world. He wanted seals who had
Speaker 1: combat experience, he later said in an interview, who had
Speaker 1: a bullet go past their head with their name on it.
Speaker 1: Marsenko wanted men who were adept at all the traditional
Speaker 1: seal skills shooting, underwater diving, skydiving, mountain climbing, but who
Speaker 1: also had or could develop tradesman life skills. These men
Speaker 1: had to engineer solutions to any problems standing in their
Speaker 1: way to mission success, whether it required manufacturing a quieter
Speaker 1: piece of equipment or conceiving a quieter method for building entry. Right,
Speaker 1: And that's very telling. But this is also not just Marsenko.
Speaker 1: If you remember when the Seals were formed, there was
Speaker 1: some talk of like, I want them to be rogues,
Speaker 1: and he's now taking that a step forward. Do I
Speaker 1: want guys Seal Team six guys who could have only
Speaker 1: been pro athletes or criminals? Right, that's Marsenko's idea, right now,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of sense to this. Actually, you know,
Speaker 1: the whole criminal thing is going to cause problems immediately,
Speaker 1: but if you want to form a unit of dudes
Speaker 1: who can solve serious problems using out of the box
Speaker 1: on the fly, it does make sense.
Speaker 2: To recruit guys like this.
Speaker 1: You know, criminal cartels and gangs are famously creative.
Speaker 3: Yet done, they can get shit done. Yeah yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3: The outsides are they're not They're not the type of
Speaker 3: people you want to do this. You can find other
Speaker 3: creative people. I guess is what I would say, you.
Speaker 1: Probably want to make more of these people in any
Speaker 1: society and give them like guns and the right to
Speaker 1: do whatever they want. That might be a bad idea,
Speaker 1: but you know this also does work really well in
Speaker 1: certain ways. It's a great way to a lot of
Speaker 1: like innovative combat tactics and like operate special operations tactics
Speaker 1: are created by these Team six guys because they're just
Speaker 1: kind of given freedom to do whatever they want and
Speaker 1: a bunch of money to explore and make gear and
Speaker 1: try new stuff. Right, So there's aspects of what Marsinko
Speaker 1: does that are a really good idea, And I don't
Speaker 1: want to pretend like that's not the case, but Richard's
Speaker 1: good ideas are always married with his bad ones. For example,
Speaker 1: Dick is a hardcore alcoholic in nineteen eighty and since
Speaker 1: he considered himself the.
Speaker 3: I'm so shocked to hear this, wow.
Speaker 1: Still an alcoholic wow, And since he considered himself the
Speaker 1: best operator ever, obviously any man who might hope to
Speaker 1: be his equal would have to drink at least as
Speaker 1: much as he did. So membership in Sealed Team six
Speaker 1: was thus mostly restricted to alcoholics.
Speaker 2: The New York Times, He's fucking Stalin what is happening? Yeah,
Speaker 2: we need to you know, what we really need.
Speaker 1: And this team, full of heavily armed badasses who are
Speaker 1: unaccountable to any laws, is drinking problems.
Speaker 2: That's gotta be key.
Speaker 1: I want these guys to be hungover or hammered one
Speaker 1: hundred percent of the time. The New York Times confirmed
Speaker 1: that his recruiting interviews often amounted to boozy chats and bars.
Speaker 1: One team member told Or that when he came for
Speaker 1: a seven am interview, Marcinko offered him a beer and
Speaker 1: said you might not fit in. When he declined, he
Speaker 1: did ultimately admit the man, but one of Marsenko's officers
Speaker 1: admitted to be with him, you had to drink to
Speaker 1: be in the in crowd. I drink when I want
Speaker 1: to drink. This went against the grain, and when he
Speaker 1: was interviewed by Or for the book Brave Men, Dark Waters,
Speaker 1: Maarsenco didn't even try to deny this. Instead, he wrote
Speaker 1: Or a letter explaining his alcohol preferences, especially Gin Bombay
Speaker 1: team members East Coast weaned on rum coke at Saint
Speaker 1: Thomas during Animal Annual winter training. I polished these skills
Speaker 1: in atache A training and inverted it and converted to gin.
Speaker 1: Gin is powerful, but my safest drink. I can consume more.
Speaker 1: It demoralizes the opponent drinking mixed drinks or slurring while
Speaker 1: I casually rant and rave. I do play head games.
Speaker 1: I use booze as a tool. It's very telling too
Speaker 1: that like people he's drinking with are his opponents that
Speaker 1: he wants to demoralize.
Speaker 2: He's like, that's not how I drink. He's like, I'm
Speaker 2: not like the others. Gin and bombay.
Speaker 1: Alcohol is a tool that I use tactically to defeat
Speaker 1: my enemies who are also my men.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're employee cool.
Speaker 2: I mean you're at least it's like, I mean they're
Speaker 2: they're there.
Speaker 3: If their only job is a commit war crimes, at
Speaker 3: least they're sluggish and hungover. Sometimes at least they're fucking drunk.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this has going to cost some issues too. To
Speaker 1: justify his selections to command, Marcinco hired a psychologist to
Speaker 1: evaluate his picks and rubber stamp them. Per an interview
Speaker 1: he gave to Cole, it was a fallacy. We were normal.
Speaker 1: According to me. If I was fucked up, then we
Speaker 1: were all fucked up. Also true, that's true. He also
Speaker 1: towed Cole this, if you want to call them sociopaths,
Speaker 1: you can. That's how you get the enlisted in charge.
Speaker 1: They are the talent. So if you want the enlisted
Speaker 1: to be in charge, if you want the talented you'd like,
Speaker 1: you have to cater to sociopaths. That's who you're looking
Speaker 1: for in this job. He's very direct about it. Concentrating
Speaker 1: this specific group of men and giving them unlimited funding
Speaker 1: for weapons and training resulted in the creation of a
Speaker 1: uniquely skilled group of soldiers. And to give you an
Speaker 1: idea of the kind of proficiency these guys developed, Marsinko's
Speaker 1: Seal Team six fire more rounds training in their first
Speaker 1: six months of existence than the entire United States Marine
Speaker 1: Corps used in training for a whole year. Yeah, that's
Speaker 1: how much these guys are practicing.
Speaker 2: They are really good with guns.
Speaker 1: Marsenko saw his men as artisans of violence, and a
Speaker 1: shoot house was built to practice for incredibly niche hostage
Speaker 1: rescue situations. That's the idea is, we're going to be
Speaker 1: We need these guys to be able in order to
Speaker 1: avoid killing, you know, the hostages and what rather than whatnot,
Speaker 1: they have to be able to develop these skills. Now,
Speaker 1: does Marcinko ever really care about avoiding civilian casualties? Is
Speaker 1: that ever a priority of Team six? Highly debatable? But
Speaker 1: that's how they're build, right, That's how they're sold to command.
Speaker 1: That's why he's able to claim this is necessary. I
Speaker 1: need this many bullets the only way to develop the
Speaker 1: skills they need to do the kind of job that
Speaker 1: we have.
Speaker 3: I mean, it's also probably a lie you could pretty
Speaker 3: easily tell yourself. I mean, why else would you? You know,
Speaker 3: you do have to live with yourself.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's also nobody wants to think of Most
Speaker 1: people don't want I think in themselves.
Speaker 2: It's just like murderers, right, yeah, but you know who
Speaker 2: are just murderers? No?
Speaker 1: No, no, okay, well don't think about that. Just think
Speaker 1: about these ads.
Speaker 2: And we're back.
Speaker 1: And Sophie has informed me that none of our sponsors
Speaker 1: are ruthless murderers.
Speaker 3: I did not.
Speaker 2: I did not, especially.
Speaker 1: Especially if the Washington State Patrol ads are the police.
Speaker 2: As just ran, I cannot.
Speaker 3: I cannot vouch for all of our sponsors because I
Speaker 3: have no idea who they are.
Speaker 2: But that's the level of trust you have in them.
Speaker 2: That's the level of trust. Mean, they could be anybody.
Speaker 2: They could be anybody. Hitler could be running an ad
Speaker 2: I would have no way of knowing. Literally.
Speaker 1: Seals also trained for high altitude insertion and every other
Speaker 1: cool thing they could find someone to teach them. Marcinko
Speaker 1: had been made a commander by this point, which put
Speaker 1: him above most of the other Seal officers and ensured
Speaker 1: he pretty much always got what he wanted. He's received
Speaker 1: a lot of praise down on down the years for
Speaker 1: his creation, but even in the early days of Team six,
Speaker 1: other Seal officers looked at what he was building with
Speaker 1: worry and brave men dark Waters or quotes one of
Speaker 1: these officers. You get a bunch of people, smart, strong, aggressive,
Speaker 1: and you require them to kill other people. You are
Speaker 1: requiring guys to do some really tough things. They are
Speaker 1: going to go in and find that terrorists are women,
Speaker 1: terrorists or children, anybody. You're up close. This is very personal.
Speaker 1: The psychologist looks at whether you can blow a hole
Speaker 1: in a man two feet away and watch his brains
Speaker 1: come out the other side of his head, and do it.
Speaker 1: You give them this training I'm talking about concentrating year
Speaker 1: after year on parachuting, making guns, sniper shooting, scaling mountains, swimming, diving.
Speaker 1: You give them all this training and require them to
Speaker 1: kill people, not from one hundred yards away, not from
Speaker 1: two hundred yards away, not from thirty thousand feet with
Speaker 1: a bomb, but from three feet away. Can you imagine
Speaker 1: that group of people together, all of a sudden, In
Speaker 1: that group of one hundred and fifty or two hundred
Speaker 1: men who are so highly trained, all keyed up, and
Speaker 1: required to do such hazardous things, you are going to
Speaker 1: find some amorl people. They're there because they're smart and aggressive,
Speaker 1: and they have no morals. You have guys who have
Speaker 1: no morals will do anything. That's how you get a
Speaker 1: reputation for being really bad. But the great majority are
Speaker 1: really dedicated, straight, hard working people. The reason the a
Speaker 1: moral man doesn't get his way more is that a
Speaker 1: lot of people watch him. He is controlled. But you
Speaker 1: are going to find that kind of person when you
Speaker 1: have a group of people required to perform with These
Speaker 1: people are required to perform right, And I might argue
Speaker 1: that the great majority are hardworking, moral people. It depends
Speaker 1: you know. Some seal units do abide by the rules
Speaker 1: of engagement and don't commit war crimes constantly, and some don't.
Speaker 1: It does tend seem to depend on like the ratio
Speaker 1: of the pirates to the boy Scouts guide of end
Speaker 1: them at the time or whatever. But he's making a
Speaker 1: good point, right that as much as we want to
Speaker 1: condemn and should condemn arcinco and individual and Navy seal
Speaker 1: guys who commit war crimes, all of their crimes are
Speaker 1: inevitable by their existence. You can't have these guys and
Speaker 1: have them. We can't have any group of guys who
Speaker 1: are trained to do this and supposed to do the
Speaker 1: kind of shit that we send Navy seale to do,
Speaker 1: who don't turn into this. It can't be done.
Speaker 2: It's a consequence. Yeah, yeah, consequence. It's brutalizing.
Speaker 1: You can try to minimize some things, right, There is
Speaker 1: more that certainly should be done to control and punish.
Speaker 1: You can punish certainly when they commit war crimes, to
Speaker 1: try to make it less common. But this is always
Speaker 1: going to be a problem when you're concentrating the most
Speaker 1: violent and skilled men together in saying like we want
Speaker 1: you to commit a bunch of murder for the government, right,
Speaker 1: good people don't want to do that. Job all that often,
Speaker 1: and if they are good people when they start, they
Speaker 1: don't stay that way long because they're shooting people in
Speaker 1: the head from three feet away every day. It's bad
Speaker 1: for you to do that. Yeah, you have to be
Speaker 1: a bad person after a period of time. It fucks
Speaker 1: you up in pretty profound ways.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Another officer told or that when Marsenko came to him
Speaker 1: to recruit from his youth, he was surprised that he
Speaker 1: took not the best performers, but quote uniformly, the scum.
Speaker 1: The fact that these guys had so much attention and
Speaker 1: resources lavished on them certainly bred jealousy. In a mixed reputation,
Speaker 1: Team six guys could both get called Jedi by other
Speaker 1: Seals and, per another Seal officer, a paramilitary fitness club. Still,
Speaker 1: the officer who called him a fitness club wanted to
Speaker 1: join Team six because they got all of the best
Speaker 1: gear and all of the best missions, and they also
Speaker 1: had no real oversight. At one point during the early
Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, Marsenko build the government for lodging his entire
Speaker 1: command in Washington, d C. It was later found that
Speaker 1: the hotel he built never existed, and the Seals had
Speaker 1: bunked on a yacht and the Potomac owned by a
Speaker 1: buddy of Marsenco or something like that, and he'd just
Speaker 1: taken the money, he'd build the navy. And he did
Speaker 1: this all the time. This is normal standard operating procedure
Speaker 1: for Richard Barzenko. We know he engaged in similar acts
Speaker 1: of financial fraud at least thirty seven times during the
Speaker 1: three years he led Seal Team six, So about once
Speaker 1: a month, he's doing this like monthly. This is like
Speaker 1: very common for him. Nobody notices at first. Marsinko's a
Speaker 1: rising star, and it's widely agreed that he had accomplished
Speaker 1: something great in getting one hundred man special forces team
Speaker 1: up and running in just three months. Within a year
Speaker 1: or so of Team six's creation. Many insiders regarded Seal
Speaker 1: Team six as being as good as Delta Force, if
Speaker 1: not better, But the skill they exhibited was displayed alongside
Speaker 1: their faults, including a team wide pinchant for apocalyptic drinking.
Speaker 1: Team six guys from the jump get in trouble for
Speaker 1: starting fights for like like being just incredibly violent, rowdy
Speaker 1: drunks and causing problems everywhere they.
Speaker 3: Fucking go, right, I mean, but that's the problem. Yeah,
Speaker 3: it's just that that then the mythology for like the
Speaker 3: you know people is like, oh, we we got at
Speaker 3: least the vikings are on our side. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's just like it's like, yeah, but is that really
Speaker 1: necessary to modern war?
Speaker 2: We actively don't.
Speaker 3: I think so.
Speaker 1: I think this might be a detriment on the whole.
Speaker 1: Marsinco clearly saw this as more evidence that he was
Speaker 1: the good kind of officer, writing, I played havoc with
Speaker 1: their system. I treated my lowest drinking seamen with more
Speaker 1: respect than I did most captains and commodorees. I ate
Speaker 1: and drank with my enlisted men in chiefs. I threw
Speaker 1: loud parties. I said fuck to flag rank officers. I
Speaker 1: said fuck, I'm cool. Yeah, okay, okay, Richard, okay, man,
Speaker 1: we get it, buddy. Now there are good reasons Marsinko
Speaker 1: was a legend to many of his operators during his time.
Speaker 1: Marsinko hurt his leg training overseas and decided he could
Speaker 1: manage well enough that he just kept working on it
Speaker 1: because he didn't want to take medical leave, and he
Speaker 1: avoided the doctor until seventeen months later he was diagnosed
Speaker 1: with a broken Lake such a moron, and again, yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really dumb because he had to get at that point,
Speaker 1: it was so bad that he had he had to
Speaker 1: get a special procedure his fucking military healthcare wouldn't cover,
Speaker 1: and he had to borrow money from one of his
Speaker 1: enlisted men in order to get like a sports medical
Speaker 1: procedure done on himself because he was such a difficual.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Now, Marsenko's problems with the Navy began when Lieutenant William McRaven,
Speaker 1: and that's the guy who was running the Seals by
Speaker 1: the way, when Bin Lanen gets killed, was transferred to
Speaker 1: Team six as an officer. Now, McRaven comes from Navy royalty,
Speaker 1: and so Marsenko hated him immediately. For his part, McRaven
Speaker 1: was a by the book officer and seems to have
Speaker 1: been one of like the boy scout side of things.
Speaker 1: And as soon as he gets into Team six he
Speaker 1: notices a bunch of irregularities and part of I should
Speaker 1: note here Marsinko has his pick of enlisted men officers
Speaker 1: are assigned.
Speaker 2: To Team six.
Speaker 1: So a lot of his conflicts come with the officers
Speaker 1: because he doesn't get to pick them right. They are
Speaker 1: not his chosen guys in other words, right, so only.
Speaker 3: There to either be like jumped in or to knark
Speaker 3: on him.
Speaker 1: Yeah, right, exactly exactly. And mcgraven on him because he
Speaker 1: notices a bunch of irregularities and how operators are filing
Speaker 1: their travel vouchers, and he complains to his superior officer,
Speaker 1: who says an x in essence like, hey, dude, don't
Speaker 1: ruin this for us, Like we got a good thing
Speaker 1: going here, right, And so this guy then tosses mcraven's
Speaker 1: gear out of their cabin and when they get back
Speaker 1: from training, Marsenco fires McRaven. Decades later, he still claimed
Speaker 1: the man had been sent to Team six as an infiltrader.
Speaker 1: McRaven got his running orders from the West Coast something uh,
Speaker 1: Marsinco writes, right that this guy he was a spy
Speaker 1: sent by the West Coast Seals. He infiltrade by elite
Speaker 1: East Coast unit because they hated me.
Speaker 3: This is it is. It is telling that, like like
Speaker 3: all things in a petty criminal enterprise, there's East Coast
Speaker 3: West Coast beef.
Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. He is the biggie in this one.
Speaker 1: And I guess McRaven is.
Speaker 2: Tupac, I don't. Yeah, that's the same, right actually, but.
Speaker 3: Okay, well they all said the N word just about
Speaker 3: the same amount, just to a real different tone.
Speaker 1: Marcinko sure does. I don't know McRaven, but Marsenko for
Speaker 1: sure done.
Speaker 3: Yeah. I feel pretty confident about that one too.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh. In Code over Country, Cole gives a good explanation
Speaker 1: of how many other seal officers and outside Navy officers
Speaker 1: saw this as having as Marcinko having upended the chain
Speaker 1: of command and sent a signal to his men that
Speaker 1: no officer beside Dick mattered. He credits this with the
Speaker 1: decision senior officers in the Naval Special Warfare Division made
Speaker 1: a few months later, which was to replace Richard Barsenko. Right, So,
Speaker 1: his total period of time commanding Team six after forming
Speaker 1: it is like three years, and they never, like I
Speaker 1: don't think they really do much while he's like they're training,
Speaker 1: they're getting up to speed, like he's not there for
Speaker 1: any of like the shit that makes them famous. But
Speaker 1: he leaves a mark that pretty much universally agreed to
Speaker 1: still affect the unit to this day. The officer who
Speaker 1: replaced Marsenko Captain Robert Gormley found the unit in awful shape.
Speaker 1: He found that Marsenko had quote constantly misled his superiors
Speaker 1: in the chain of command under the guise of operational
Speaker 1: secuitre ready right. In other words, he lied in order
Speaker 1: to like steal from the Navy, and said that the
Speaker 1: reason why he had to lie was op sack. Yeah,
Speaker 1: can't file accurate finance reports because like I, I the
Speaker 1: commis might find out that I'm stealing money to buy drugs.
Speaker 2: And Richard is alleged to have had a pretty serious
Speaker 2: cocaine problem. A lot of Team six guys are alleged to.
Speaker 1: Have had pretty serious cocaine problems that they were stealing
Speaker 1: from the Navy. Yeah, you know what happens a decent
Speaker 1: amount up to the present day is Special Forces guys,
Speaker 1: particularly at Fort Braggs selling military weapons to criminals for
Speaker 1: money to buy drugs. Anyway, cool stuff. That's not a
Speaker 1: Team six thing, but it's just good time saying, just a.
Speaker 3: Thing that we all pay for. Yeah, why do we
Speaker 3: pay taxes? Again?
Speaker 2: This is crazy?
Speaker 1: You know, I love paying taxes and knowing that it
Speaker 1: goes to this shit. Gormley also found widespread alcoholism among
Speaker 1: the team to be a serious problem. He wrote, Dick
Speaker 1: insisted upon everyone drinking with him whenever he wanted, and
Speaker 1: as long as he wanted. On exercises, they seldom finished
Speaker 1: the entire scenario because as soon as things got tough,
Speaker 1: Dick would step in, abort the exercise and take the
Speaker 1: troops drinking. And so, in Gormley's view, like yeah, the
Speaker 1: Seals like Team six did some cool training stuff, but
Speaker 1: also they weren't very as good as they could have
Speaker 1: been because mar Singo didn't really care about training.
Speaker 2: As much as he cared about drinking. After a point,
Speaker 2: like he's ending X, fuck it, fuck it, let's just
Speaker 2: go drink.
Speaker 3: Nah. Right, you guys done it enough? Come on.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And you see this kind of casual attitude to
Speaker 1: the things that are supposed to be serious. Then Eddie
Speaker 1: Gallagher is accused of like one of the first weird
Speaker 1: signs some of his younger unit mates got is during
Speaker 1: training before they headed over to Iraq, when they would
Speaker 1: like do the shoot houses, he would just be shooting
Speaker 1: the civilian targets that he wasn't supposed to hit and
Speaker 1: like joke about it, like aha, yeah, it's funny, you know,
Speaker 1: Like yeah, and people would be like, but you're not.
Speaker 1: You have to doesn't he have to pass training? And
Speaker 1: he would just like clear it with his friends, so
Speaker 1: he didn't have to actually pass, like because he didn't
Speaker 1: care about not hitting civilians, you know.
Speaker 2: Right, Allegedly this is this is what some guy I
Speaker 2: wasn't there. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I'm not nave of Zeel. I'm just saying what some
Speaker 1: guys said to another guy who wrote a book. You know,
Speaker 1: a book called Alpha, very good. You should read it.
Speaker 1: So despite the praise that Marsenko gets for creating a
Speaker 1: team with unique skills, he likely had the very low
Speaker 1: operational tempo of the early eighties to thank for the
Speaker 1: fact that his men were never tested too hard while
Speaker 1: he was in command. His last IRAQ came in June
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty three, when he invited Gormley to drink
Speaker 1: with the unit on Virginia Beach. It was an awkward night.
Speaker 1: The operators were insubordinate to Gormley, so he left, but
Speaker 1: marsinco kept drinking. As Cole writes, Marsenko decided to continue
Speaker 1: drinking elsewhere. He had a command aid drive him in
Speaker 1: a modified Mercedes Ben Sedan one of three he had
Speaker 1: custom built and shipped to the United States, which he
Speaker 1: frequently used as his personal car. That night, Marsinko's driver
Speaker 1: fell asleep in the early morning hours and rear ended
Speaker 1: another car, causing significant damage to both vehicles.
Speaker 2: I would just say, warrior, great.
Speaker 3: This type of guy always drives the Dictator Mercedes like
Speaker 3: kind of across any.
Speaker 2: Only car they want.
Speaker 1: It's the only car they want, right, Yeah, the Dictator
Speaker 1: Mercedes is a true human universal Yeah.
Speaker 2: It's so wild, Yeah it is.
Speaker 1: It is kind of beautiful. We're all really the same
Speaker 1: deep down, even our psychopaths.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Every culture, every culture, every culture.
Speaker 3: After aout, you know, as soon as Mercedes were around,
Speaker 3: there was a psycho.
Speaker 2: Who oh, this is a psycho asshole car, a.
Speaker 3: Cult of personality, of violent culture personality got driven around it.
Speaker 1: Yeah mmmm yeah. It's just like if you show up
Speaker 1: drunk to a car dealership, they don't even ask. They
Speaker 1: hand you the keys to a Dodge.
Speaker 2: Ram, right.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll figure out the financing later. You need to
Speaker 1: be driving this twenty five hundred this.
Speaker 3: Night for you.
Speaker 2: Yeah, get on the road immediately.
Speaker 1: So, in true Dick fashion, he ordered his staff not
Speaker 1: to report the accident, but they refuse to cover it
Speaker 1: up because again he's about to leave, So like, I'm
Speaker 1: not going to commit a crime for you, You're out
Speaker 1: the door. And this says a lot.
Speaker 2: Macinco.
Speaker 1: A big part of what he establishes in Team six
Speaker 1: is loyalty. That's part of like the Team six, you know,
Speaker 1: the oath the Seals take, and the way Marsinko establishes
Speaker 1: this is like, you don't rat on your boss, on
Speaker 1: your your fellow guys if they commit crimes, if they're stealing.
Speaker 1: We're a wall. We don't talk to anybody. We don't
Speaker 1: talk to big Navy, we don't talk to the NCIS investigators,
Speaker 1: we don't do any of that stuff because we're a
Speaker 1: loyal warrior brotherhood. Richard talks about that all the time.
Speaker 1: As soon as he gets sent to a captain's mast,
Speaker 1: he rolls on his driver and blames him for the accident. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so he gets a slap on the wrist for this.
Speaker 1: Anyone else in Dick's position would have been forced into
Speaker 1: early retirement. But such was the awe with which Marsenko's
Speaker 1: rogue warrior pirate personality was held by some Navy admirals
Speaker 1: that he was given another chance to create another elite unit,
Speaker 1: this time with even less oversight. He gets the same
Speaker 1: job again after doing it, how because people just think
Speaker 1: he's cool.
Speaker 3: Yeah, because because people's brains are poisoned by like fucking you.
Speaker 3: Because again, like, oh, you need dirty men to protect
Speaker 3: you know, your fucking life. That's like sort of sounds
Speaker 3: good when it's dirty, Harry, I guess yeah, but like
Speaker 3: what the fuck are you talking about? But whatever, this
Speaker 3: is how we run our world.
Speaker 2: Well, what were those shirts you saw, Robert, I'm just.
Speaker 1: I'm only here for the violence. Yeah, And and fucking
Speaker 1: Marsenco talks all the time about like these big these
Speaker 1: admirals who come from these admiral families and they but
Speaker 1: those are a lot of his big backers too. There
Speaker 1: are admirals that love him, and they're usually guys who like,
Speaker 1: didn't do anything all that cool, but like they they
Speaker 1: really buy into everything. Marcinko says, right, well.
Speaker 3: But that's the sing.
Speaker 2: He doesn't hate officers for real.
Speaker 3: He just needs he hates accountability, a cudgel with which
Speaker 3: to beat office, you know, like, oh, oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: thought you were cool.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he needs an excuse for like why people are
Speaker 1: always giving him shit for like fucking up constantly. And
Speaker 1: it's because these officers don't understand what real warriors do.
Speaker 1: And it's like, well, real warriors don't need to like
Speaker 1: steal money from the government and ram their fucking Mercedes
Speaker 1: into the back of a civilian's car because they got drunk.
Speaker 1: That's not really key to the war fighter ethos. I
Speaker 1: don't think this is going to help the US win anywhere.
Speaker 1: Your lord, shit, it's yeah, it's war lord shit. It's
Speaker 1: not like a soldier in a democratic nation. Shit. I
Speaker 1: mean it is, yeah, I mean objective, but it shouldn't.
Speaker 3: It shouldn't.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: Uh. Marsenko was initially transferred to teach at the National
Speaker 1: War College, but he got lucky. On October twenty third,
Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three, a truck loaded with T and T
Speaker 1: was detonated outside of a Marine barracks in Beirut and
Speaker 1: killed two hundred and forty one Americans. Admiral Lyons, who's
Speaker 1: one of his biggest backer in the Navy, who's the
Speaker 1: Vice Chief of Naval Operations, suggested that the Navy create
Speaker 1: a special team to test security in their facilities and says,
Speaker 1: I know the guy for the job, right, right, So Dick,
Speaker 1: is it dear old Dick.
Speaker 2: It's Dearald Dick.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's always it's always like it's the problem is
Speaker 3: that it's just always some like it's so crazy it
Speaker 3: just might work shit, Like people think that's like real.
Speaker 1: Well, I mean there's an element that it is. There
Speaker 1: are real things called red teams that exist to this
Speaker 1: day and everything from like actual like military operational security
Speaker 1: to like like a corporation will hire a red team
Speaker 1: to see like is our website secure? Right?
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, like that is like a thing.
Speaker 1: You do want to do this, right, but you don't
Speaker 1: necessarily need them to be completely immune to like all laws.
Speaker 1: That's not necessary, right, But Dick argues, in order to
Speaker 1: really be able to work like the enemy, we have
Speaker 1: to be completely classified and completely free from any kind
Speaker 1: of oversight, right because the enemy is not gonna there
Speaker 1: won't be oversight of the enemy. Right.
Speaker 2: So if you want me to know do what the
Speaker 2: enemy could, you have to give me this kind of freedom.
Speaker 1: Right.
Speaker 3: It's also red This is play acting, motherfucker.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well your cause playing now you're not even in danger. Well,
Speaker 1: actually he is going to wind up endangering his men
Speaker 1: somehow in this job. So the Red Cell is an
Speaker 1: super classified unit that was tasked with breaking into US
Speaker 1: military facilities and even kidnapping officers and civilian employees to
Speaker 1: demonstrate weaknesses and security protocols. They are kidnapping people now.
Speaker 1: Depending on who you ask, Richard was either very good
Speaker 1: at this or deeply irresponsible to the extent of criminality.
Speaker 1: Dick's ultimate plan was to carry out mock terror attacks
Speaker 1: on fifty bases, spending one hundred and twenty five thousand
Speaker 1: dollars per attack. Advanced warning was given so these the
Speaker 1: officers at these bases and the security people knew that,
Speaker 1: like there's going to be an exercise, but you won't
Speaker 1: know the form it takes. Right, And when Marsenko told
Speaker 1: showed up to explain what was going to happen to them,
Speaker 1: he tried to psyche them out. His job was to
Speaker 1: scare these people, and he took a lot of pleasure
Speaker 1: in that, and recalled. He'd go into a briefing and say,
Speaker 1: we won't break any skin, we won't draw any blood,
Speaker 1: no broken teeth, everything else is mine. He would tell women,
Speaker 1: we're not going to pull the skirt over your head
Speaker 1: and tie your hands behind your back. He wanted to
Speaker 1: get attention. He enjoyed twisting tails. Right, you don't like
Speaker 1: tell women in an office, don't worry, We're not going
Speaker 1: to rip your clothes off and bind intact if you
Speaker 1: don't want them to think that that might happen. It's
Speaker 1: like a weird thing to say if you're not trying
Speaker 1: to scare people. Right.
Speaker 3: It's also, yeah, what what is this? Fucking right? It
Speaker 3: accomplishes he gets to do his thing.
Speaker 1: Of course, again the basic idea of sure, you want
Speaker 1: some guys to test, and that's aspects of this need
Speaker 1: to happen, but not the way he is going to
Speaker 1: do it. He also saw the Red Cell as his
Speaker 1: chance to get revenge on the Poindexter. She'd screwed him
Speaker 1: out of Team six, so he made sure to recruit
Speaker 1: his best guys there from Team six for the Red Cell,
Speaker 1: along with some of the best dudes from other teams.
Speaker 1: Since his new unit was classified, he basically had Team
Speaker 1: six sign for everything he wanted to buy and wound
Speaker 1: up purchasing enough gear to operate multiple full seal teams.
Speaker 1: Now again, these guys don't need guns, but he's buying
Speaker 1: tons of them. He's buy it because his hope is
Speaker 1: that once he's exposed all the security flaws and the
Speaker 1: regular Navy that big Navy doesn't want them to think about,
Speaker 1: he'll be so beloved they'll make his team the near
Speaker 1: tier one guy right right. They'll be like, Wow, we
Speaker 1: really need your guy. We have to send you on
Speaker 1: special missions. Now you're so good.
Speaker 2: You've proved that we really need you. Richard, Like this
Speaker 2: is like some.
Speaker 3: Very suckercorn shit. He's supposed to just sew it in
Speaker 3: and like tag someone with a NERF gun and just
Speaker 3: be like, could have been this could have been bad.
Speaker 1: Bro, it's gonna said, it's so much worse than that.
Speaker 1: So one of his first actions was to chat test
Speaker 1: security at the Charleston Navy Base and Brave Men Dark
Speaker 1: Waters or Kelly describes Marsinko's team as showing up to
Speaker 1: areas that stored nuclear weapons quote, dressed in scroungy clothes, unshaven,
Speaker 1: and with long hair, and that they spent several days
Speaker 1: rummaging about, through which they were never challenged. And so
Speaker 1: he's able to show that like, yeah, we just had
Speaker 1: some guys like show up in this nuclear facility looking
Speaker 1: like shit, and nobody like asked what they were doing
Speaker 1: there or tried to like stop them from rooting around.
Speaker 1: So this is kind of his proof of concept, right,
Speaker 1: and it does probably show a real security Like this
Speaker 1: is the fucking post Vietnam US military. I have no
Speaker 1: trouble believing that he did, in fact find security with shit,
Speaker 1: and so the fact that they prove that, like where
Speaker 1: our operators were able to get this close to nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons right without even trying is what secures him the job.
Speaker 1: And so from this point forward, Richard Marsinko was in
Speaker 1: charge of yet another elite, unaccountable military unit. So we'll
Speaker 1: talk about what happens with the Red Cell, and we'll
Speaker 1: talk about what happens to the Navy Seals and Team
Speaker 1: six after that next week.
Speaker 2: How are you doing?
Speaker 1: How are you feeling, Andrew?
Speaker 2: Good?
Speaker 3: God? I mean, the only thing that makes it not
Speaker 3: as bleak is like, I guess life has more or
Speaker 3: less functioned with these fuckers roaming around. Sure not well,
Speaker 3: but yeah, yeah, but right, every every second of this
Speaker 3: is infuriating. Obviously, there's there's so much.
Speaker 1: Among other things, like one of the worst cartels in
Speaker 1: Mexico was formed from Mexican Special Forces guys who were
Speaker 1: trained by like US green Berets and then took that
Speaker 1: training in order to like make a cartel that worked
Speaker 1: really well. And it's very common by the way, even
Speaker 1: in the US for like cartel and like people who
Speaker 1: are running large criminal enterprises to recruit from former Special
Speaker 1: and current Special Forces guys, including Delta guys.
Speaker 2: This has the case of this.
Speaker 3: It's like it's the private sector version of this public
Speaker 3: sector thing. It's the same job.
Speaker 1: Some of them go into fucking you know Blackwater, and
Speaker 1: I mean the modern equivalent of Blackwater, and yeah, some
Speaker 1: of them worked for a fucking cartel.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It's not everyone who gets out of that, but it's
Speaker 1: not none. Yeah, and it's it's probably it's the same job.
Speaker 3: Yeah. Is why this could happen is because we create
Speaker 3: this job that doesn't do us. Does it create do
Speaker 3: anything for us except cause problems? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Before and after?
Speaker 1: Yeah, all all I was ever my job was in
Speaker 1: the military was just to kill people. Right, That's like
Speaker 1: like all they wanted me doing is just going and
Speaker 1: gunning down strangers every night, And that's all the cartel's
Speaker 1: going to have me do.
Speaker 2: Right, Like I'm ready to do this job.
Speaker 1: You know, if you're still physically and mentally capable, if
Speaker 1: it hasn't, if the work hasn't run.
Speaker 3: You through, just occasionally use pliers in an interesting way
Speaker 3: to fucking make a make a different kind of tripod
Speaker 3: in the field or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Other than that, it's cool stuff.
Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I uh well, we'll talk a lot more
Speaker 1: about this, about all this good stuff. But first, you know,
Speaker 1: another week has to pass because you're only legally allowed
Speaker 1: two episodes behind the Bastards a week. Sometimes we give
Speaker 1: you a third, but every time we do that, it's
Speaker 1: a felony and we have to throw one of our
Speaker 1: employees under the bus and they go to prison for
Speaker 1: life for life. Well, so every time we do a
Speaker 1: three parr or just think of that.
Speaker 3: You know, you got them out of it.
Speaker 2: Get them out of it, Robert, just call up.
Speaker 3: No, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I don't believe in being unaccountable. It's important for us
Speaker 1: to be accountable.
Speaker 2: You know, that's right. You'll do the crime someone else
Speaker 2: does have to. Someone else will pay the time, someone else.
Speaker 2: Good stuff. Anyway, plug a bug, are we not?
Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, Starter Trek, it's my new Star Trek podcast.
Speaker 3: With Tony Newsome jesse Gender. It's on the same feed
Speaker 3: as Jos's racist used to be. We're having a lot
Speaker 3: of fun. Come listen. Everyone here probably loves Star Trek enough.
Speaker 3: I'm I'm new to Star Trek that's the thing.
Speaker 2: So don't feel like you got to be a Star
Speaker 2: Trek fan to get into it. M yeah, but you
Speaker 2: should be a Star Trek fan. It's good, you know.
Speaker 3: I'm getting there. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Anyway, I don't know. Don't don't join the military. Avoid
Speaker 1: that if if you can, We're done. Behind the Bastards
Speaker 1: is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from
Speaker 1: cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or
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Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 2: Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
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Speaker 1: Kit remind me on Netflix you don't miss an episode.
Speaker 1: For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe
Speaker 1: to our YouTube channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind
Speaker 1: the Bastards. We love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,