Part Four: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

Robert takes us into the modern day history of SEAL malfeasance, from kinda robbing Captain Phillips to the comedy of errors that was the raid on Bin Laden.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast,
where we are now in our fourth episode of our
series on Richard Marsanko, the founding of Seal Team six,
and the continuing derangement of.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
The Navy Seals. This episode featuring focusing much more on
the continuing derangement of the Navy Seals.

Speaker 3 (00:22):
Yeah, it's not getting better. I guess it is getting better,
it's not getting It was pretty bad at the start.
So yeah, maybe I'm wrong.

Speaker 2 (00:30):
There's a lot I mean, we're not talking about Abu
grab and how that connects as much as we should.
Maybe there's a lot to cover. We're not talking about,
like those Seals who got in trouble for murdering a
Green Beret over maybe drugs and prostitution, a bunch of Like,
there's a lot of stuff that we're I mean, I'm
trying to give you the hits here, But there's the
Navy Seals get up to a lot, a lot of
different seals doing a lot of different things.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
Yeah, it is like, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely immediately,
is shocked.

Speaker 2 (00:58):
Really fast, really fast, right away.

Speaker 4 (01:01):
Yeah, in Afghanistan, the Seals were exposed to the kind
of tempo of activity that they had never known, and
killing became an everyday affair.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
In some cases, this had a brutalizing effect. Within months
of Robert's Ridge, Red Team operators had started filming what
they called bleedout videos and showing them to other seals
at BOGRAM. One viewer later described these as war porn,
and the operator responsible, Yeah, they're warporn. It's like videos
of like guys getting executed and dying and like bleeding

(01:36):
to death, you know, after being like the wark. It's
really dark. It's really dark.

Speaker 3 (01:42):
Yeah, Trophy taking in the digital age is like, oh.

Speaker 2 (01:46):
And there's Yeah, I can tell you when you do
like warzone reporting, you will accumulate either directly or through
like the people that you know, bits of footage of
horrible things that like you can't avoid taking, but you
don't want to air. Sometimes are asked not to air
because it's just like a guy bleeding to death. But
like so the idea of just like taking that and
like watching it with beers is pretty gross, I think.

Speaker 5 (02:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:10):
Yeah. The operator responsible for these war porn vidies bleed
out videos was ultimately forced out of Team six after
pistol whipping a fellow Navy Seal while drunk on base.
The next years, That's what got about, not the videos
he fucking pistol whipped one of his mates on baits.
After Robert's Ridge, the number of allegations of brutality and

(02:31):
war crimes among Seals, particularly Team six members, but not
exclusively in the field, continued to percolate out. As in Vietnam,
the Seals often persecuted their own little war in Afghanistan,
one kidnapping mission would lead to information about a caravan
smuggling guns or an isolated Al Qaida cell, and that
would lead to more emissions and so on. While the
war itself had stalled into something of a quagmire as

(02:52):
the US struggled to rebuild a functioning government, the Seals
delivered what looked like a constant string of winds. Enemies destroyed, arms,
seized value, targets captured and killed. That all changed on
June twenty seventh, two thousand and five. A four man
Seal team had been dropped in to go after a
local leader named Ahmed Shah. Now this is there's a
movie starring Mark Wahlberg called Loan Survivor that's about this

(03:14):
mission and if you watch the movie or you read
the book Loan Survivor, which is by the lone survivor
of this mission, Marcus Latrell, he will describe Ahmed Shah
as a major Al Qaeda guy who's close to Bin Laden.
He's one of bin Laden's top guys. They did. There's
no evidence these guys knew each other in any real way.
There's no Shaw's not with the Taliban. He's a local warlord.

(03:36):
There's a lot of them in Afghanistan, and he's not
even particularly hostile to the US at this point. Right,
this is a guy who could have maybe gone a
couple of ways, but then we send dudes to kill him,
and you know what happens. You know, like if someone
sends dudes to kill you, you probably like take that
bad that people.

Speaker 3 (03:54):
Are like it like clarifies how things are gonna go.

Speaker 2 (03:57):
Yeah, Okay, I guess I know it's side I'm on now.

Speaker 3 (03:59):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:00):
But they always refer to him as a Taliban big
He was not. He simply wasn't. That's a lie. Shaw
and his men heard the distinct twin rotor sound of
a Chinook descending with seals, and they mobilize to ambush them.
Marcus Latrell, a Navy hospital Corman's second class with the
Seal team, would later blame a group of local herdsmen
for giving them up to Shaw In like the movie

(04:21):
about Latrell's book, they come up to these guys and
they like capture them and hold them for a while,
and they this debate about should we kill them. If
we don't kill them, they're gonna run and they'll tell
the Taliban and we'll get ambushed. And the Seals are like, no,
you know, we can't. They're civilians. They run it, We're
not going to murder them. And eventually they let these
guys go, and Latrell's group does meet some herders and

(04:41):
they leave and Latrell does blame them for like, but
there's no evidence of that, and in fact, we actually
have evidence from Ahmed Shah and his people that kind
of contradicts that that they were already moving in when
those guys were like that didn't really lead to the
ambush happening, honestly, but if you if you frame it
that way, then that means seals are always justified in

(05:03):
killing any civilians to come across in the field. Got
get nothing else to do. They're all informing to the taal.
Then we got a murder and whenever we come across them.

Speaker 3 (05:09):
You know, it's also just like it was your dumb
ass car.

Speaker 2 (05:14):
Exactly exactly the idea that it's the fault of these
herders and this evil all met. No, you guys got
yourselves killed by flying in unsupported a four man team
to go after a dude you didn't need to kill.

Speaker 3 (05:27):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (05:28):
So in Loan Survivor, in the movie, there's dozens of
these fighters attacking the seals, and there's this long battle
and they're firing until they got nothing left, and Marcus
Latreuell played bar Mark Warbur is doing everything he can,
all the badass john Wick gun stuff. You know, they
kill fifty or more men in every popular account before
everyone but Latrell is killed in this lengthy gun battle. Right, So,

(05:49):
this epic last stand, this four man unit holds off
dozens of times their number, Right, but they just get
overwhelmed in the end by this vast number of savages. Right,
You're supposed to read that they're savage in the movie,
in the book, right, I'm here's what actually happened. And
this is a description by Matthew Cole from the book
Code Over Country, and this is based on the actual

(06:10):
evidence of what happened in that fight. Shah grabbed his
small force as few as seven but no more than ten,
and quietly stalked up the ridge line in the early
morning hours. As the Seals settled into a covered observation post,
Shaw and his men had the advantage of both the
high ground and familiarity with the terrain. They hit the
Americans with an overwhelming attack from AK forty seven rifles,
a PK machine gun, and rocket propelled grenades, which forced

(06:32):
four Seals down the nearby Sheer mountain side. Now, the
Seals do manage to fight on for more than an hour,
but they're like running and don't re barely can see
like who they're shooting at a lot of the time.
There's video from Ahmed Shaw and his men. He has
a videographer with them as they are ambushing and taking
out this unit of Navy seals. And in the video

(06:53):
you can hear Shaw has a guy who's repeatedly saying, guys, surrender,
if you surrender, like we will take you captive, and
he's saying it in English. Now, if you were to
tell that. I think to a lot of Americans they say, well,
obviously these guys would kill any Americans they got. Number one,
they've captured Americans and not killed them a lunch.

Speaker 3 (07:10):
In the past.

Speaker 2 (07:10):
Yeah, there's lots of evidence of this. Number two, you
don't know that at all. The war was not nearly
settled at this point in time. They just assumed these
guys are Oh maybe maybe they didn't hear. Obviously that's
entirely possible. But if they did, they may have just
assumed that these guys were monsters and would never have
actually taken them in. It was a fate worse than
death or whatever. So they fight to the death, and
Shaw's manner willing to oblige them, and at the end

(07:33):
again in the movie, Latrell keeps his rifle basically the
whole time. I think he drops it and flees and
runs away because his guys are getting killed. He like
the way it's been described, and the way Latrell tells it,
at least has told it at least once. I think
in more recent days, is that, like his officer was
got himself into a dangerous position to try and call
in for help and was able to reach to tell

(07:53):
them that they'd been ambushed and then got killed because
like the position he had to get in to get
a signal, and la Trell fucking panics and runs. At
least in one interview ever heard he calls it. He
says that he felt like it was an active cowardice
to run because he drops his gun. Now, realistically, again,
even well trained, experienced people break under the worst possible circumstances.
You can't overwhelm human nature. People are going to flee

(08:14):
at a certain point. That said, the idea that Latroll
fought until he could do nothing more is simply not true.
He is rescued later by a local Afghan dude who
just sees a wandering lone Navy seal that decides to
help this man who's clearly terrified and out of it
and unarmed. And that guy reported that when Latrell came
up to him, all of his mag pouches had full
magazines in them, but he had no gun, which suggests

(08:37):
he didn't really do much of any shooting. Yeah, which
I also have in ambushes. You're just running, you know,
you've got so much to do.

Speaker 3 (08:43):
You know, that's how you should do. You should get
out of it.

Speaker 2 (08:45):
But you may be completely unable in that situation to
actually provide effective counterfire, you know, and probably at some
point when everybody starts getting hit and you realize it's hopeless,
you fucking panic and you bolt right to try to
survive and save yourself. That's the real story, and in
objective terms, that's not shameful. You were in a terrible situation,
you had no fucking way to deal with it, and

(09:06):
you ran like fuck. But that's not a good story.
That's not a good movie. So a quick Reaction force
with eight more Seals and eight Army Special Forces guys
is dispatched in a chinook to rescue these dudes when
they're under fire, but it gets hit and destroyed by
another one of Shaw's men, killing everyone on board, which
makes this the deadliest day and Navy Seal history. Again,

(09:27):
they get another sixteen people killed, including eight more Seals,
because they fly in another fucking chinook, the first thust
thing they had done that had alerted them the enemy,
and they get blasted again because they're not going in
with proper cover, they're going in too quickly, and they're
assuming the enemy is not as smart as they are right.
They're underestimating these guys. That's why they get beaten. And
this is the defeat by the Navy Seals. There's no

(09:48):
other way to look at it. Latrell is eventually rescued,
and after he's saved, the Navy gives him time off
to write a book about his heroic survival because they
see this as a great way. We're going to need
way more of these, which has got a bunch more killed.
Latrell puts out a book maybe weeks and get some
more marks in here, you know, turnam into seals, send
him to die in Afghanistan. So Marcus does a huge

(10:12):
media tour. Loan Survivor becomes a best seller, and he
makes a bunch of money. I think this is the
first seal that I'm aware of that makes a fortune
off of doing a Navy Seal book after Marsinko. Right,
I can't say it to one hundred percent, but this
is like the first one the War on Terror era.
Certainly all across the teams cash register signs started ringing.

(10:34):
The Trell's book is so successful, and the fact that
in his movie does pretty well Marky Mark plays them,
that's a big here a lot of guys want to
be played by Marky. Mark Marsinko had started the pattern,
but Latrell makes it obvious to every new seal in
the Global War on Terror that this job could be
a path to riches after you quit. Right. So, the

(10:54):
same year the DoD, the same year that this all happens,
two thousand and five, the do OD issues an order
to the Navy to bring in five hundred new enlisted
seals in five years. One of the things they start
doing to try to do this is they start producing
a movie that we'll talk about a little later called
Act of Valor, starring real Navy seals. It's awful. It's
dog shit. I come remember that. Yeah, that doesn't come

(11:16):
out until twenty twelve. And obviously Latrell in his book
is part of that. And I'm going to quote from
a twenty sixteen article in The New York Times discussing
like the effort to increase the number of seals, the
average increase in the force of the previous decade was
just five annually. The United States was fighting simultaneous wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, and seals were getting killed, wounded,
or just burned out. And leaving the service. The command

(11:38):
decided that a movie aimed at high school athletes would
be the best way to draw in more recruits the
film project, though it took years, Active Valor was released
in twenty twelve of coursing eighty one million at theaters
around the world. And this was an attempt to do
a new Frogman, which is what brought Marsenko in. It
is funny enough to be worth watching, but like the
plot is, there's these two Russian villains and one of

(12:00):
them is like a Russian mobster who's like working for
the Russian criminal cartel moving drugs, and one of them
becomes a Chechen Muslim terrorist and they're both like working
together because obviously Chechen Muslim terrorists and like Russian crime
working together. And by the way, also the Russian criminal
helping the terrorist group is based out of Costa Rica,

(12:23):
and the whole plot is that they have a factory,
I think somewhere in Southeast Asia where they're manufacturing a
new kind of deadlier suicide vest that can't be detected
from with X rays, and they have a bus full
of migrants that they're putting the suicide vests on and
driving the bus through the tunnels under the border to
attack America and create nine to eleven times fifty and
the Navy Seals have to stop it by invading Mexico.

(12:45):
At the end, it's.

Speaker 3 (12:45):
Great, so insane, so fucking crazy, holy shit, ies. I
just think all new Seals should also have to submit
a write example on top of everything else.

Speaker 2 (12:59):
Together, give us a spec script.

Speaker 3 (13:01):
Got to make sure that novel is going to be good.
A short story. Short story is fine.

Speaker 2 (13:05):
You want to make a harder hell week, have these
fuckers bash out a full screenplay in un your seven days.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
You know.

Speaker 3 (13:14):
It would. It would measurably make them better at It would.

Speaker 2 (13:18):
Probably get you a better quality of seal. You can
make them do boat step too. At the same time,
it's fine so to do this. In order to increase
the number of people getting into the Seals, the Seals
had to reduce their standards and start accepting candidates who
were less competent and maybe less mentally stable.

Speaker 4 (13:37):
Right.

Speaker 2 (13:38):
Navy brass had repeatedly tried to call the pirates from
the ranks of the Seals in the pre Global War
on Terror era, but now letting more of them in
is the only way to fulfill their orders. Right, If
you're trying to get hyped up people who get hyped
up on the dumbest movie ever, they're not going to
be guys by and large who overwhelmingly are motivated to
follow the rules of war. One of the first members

(13:59):
of this new generation was a troubled young man named
Eddie Gallagher. We'll talk a little bit more about him
later in these episodes. In two thousand and six, Seal
Team six and to sniper James Foreman to Ramadi in
Iraq to observe a pair of Seal Team three platoons
who were supporting training the Iraqi Army and also aiding
Marines in a major battle. Ramadi is like the big
battle after Fallujah that becomes a center of the Sunni

(14:21):
insurgency in Iraq. Early reports had shown that, like, wow,
you know, even though they're just there to like train
guys and help them Marines out a bit, their snipers
are racking up an insane body count. They're killing like,
way more guys than Seal snipers have ever reported killing before.
And this one sniper, Chris Kyle, is really getting a
lot of them. So they send Foreman out. Team six
does to be like, is there anything Team six is

(14:43):
the most elite team and the other Seal teams can
learn about what these guys are doing in Ramadi? Right?
Is it maybe that they found out and invented some
new and incredibly effective counter insurgency tactics. Right, So, Chris Kyle,
you've probably heard of him, He's the American sniper guy.

Speaker 3 (14:57):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (14:58):
His commanding officer was current pop podcaster Lieutenant Commander Jocko Willick.
Oh god, who also makes like protein bars now it's stuff.

Speaker 3 (15:06):
Yeah, yeah, podcaster and posh chev chef.

Speaker 2 (15:13):
Considering how famous Jocko and Chris are today, you might
expect Foreman to have been really impressed by what these
guys were doing and been like, yeah, they've got a
lot to teach the rest of the teams. Instead, he
walked away, deeply concerned that they were ignoring the rules
of engagement. I'm going to quote from the book Code
over Country again. According to two Team six leaders, what
troubled Foreman most, however, was what he witnessed once the

(15:33):
Seals got into contact. After being fired upon, the Seals
could make individual determinations as to who presented a threat
and that could be unarmed Iraqis, including women and children,
and the chaos of Ramadi. An unarmed individual fleeing gunfire
could be seen as a civilian or an insurgent who
had just hidden his weapon. A child walking to the
store as Seal snipers engaged nearby insurgent through the sniper's

(15:54):
scope appear as a potential enemy maneuvering in some manner
and therefore engaged in the battle. And racky mother standing
on a nearby street holding a cell phone in a
bag of groceries could be shot because an ied had
been set off down the street and the Seals concluded
her cell phone was the detonator. The judgment was left
to the Seals to determine who was the threat and
by extension, who lived in who died. Foreman reported to

(16:15):
a superior that willinks young seals shot unarmed men, women,
and children the Seals declared threats. According to two Team
six leaders, A retired senior Seal officer told me that
Foreman's account of Ramadi was seen inside Team six as
an ominous sign that Seals had lost their moral compass
and that the United States may have lost the war.
There was no discretion over who they were killing the

(16:36):
officer told me. Their assumption was that because they were
dropping to a war zone, everyone in the city was
the enemy. After they shot a woman who was going
to say she wasn't going to set off a bomb.
Once they shot a kid, who is going to say
he wasn't serving as a spotter for the enemy.

Speaker 3 (16:50):
Yeah, but that's also like, yeah, of course that's how
you get record number like kills.

Speaker 2 (16:56):
Yeah, you just blast whoever.

Speaker 3 (17:00):
That the fact that the army had like Eddy or
the Navy had any like, oh, we should we should
research this, like obviously was that?

Speaker 2 (17:08):
And that's if you look into Kyle's story in his
own book, he writes about a bunch of metals he
didn't get and shit liked didn't any Again, like Marsenko,
he's in real combat, he kills real armed people. He
just also does a lot of not that and lying,
you know. Foreman's conclusion apparently was that Willinks unit only

(17:28):
wanted to draw fire because it would give them an
justification to kill whoever they wanted. Right, They were kind
of exposing themselves to get shot at, so they again
start blasting, right, Yeah, and this is this is a
tactic some people will argue as valid encounterinsurgencies called reconnaissance
by fire sometimes right where you're basically shooting so that
you'll get shot at and you can see where the enemy is.
And obviously like sometimes yeah, that is like I've been

(17:50):
in that situation, not as a guy with a gun,
but like it's it's a thing that happens in war, right.
But you know, Foreman is a combat veteran. He knows
what that's supposed to look like. And he is saying,
I think they're just kind of mostly shooting random people, right,
at least no one. I mean, that's what these other
guys in the unit say. Foreman's report concluded, I'm not
in the Navy Seals. One retired seal told Cole quote

(18:13):
they had no supervision and they were looking for body
count because they thought it was cool. So people inside
the units think that too. Foreman was particularly upset with
Chris Kyle, whose colleagues had started jokingly calling him the
Legend because he seemed to be a legend in his
own mind and now it's just printed on T shirts
like that was a real nickname. Kyle was accused of

(18:34):
constantly exaggerating or lying about how many people he'd killed,
even to his own teammates. One senior seal leader later
told Cole that Foreman had reported they're shooting kids as spotters.
Whoever was used as a spotter. Kyle's shot quote a
young unarmed mail had been forced by insurgents to spot
the seals. Kyle's teammates, manning the sniper roof and scope
refused to shoot the young male because he wasn't armed.
They would not take the shot, the retired seal leader accounted,

(18:57):
so he, referring to Kyle, just jumps on the gun
and play uggs the dude in the street. When the
guy's family runs out to help him, he shoots them too,
only he misses, and then he calls four enemy killed
in action for his confirmed kills. He was lying about
the number of his confirmed kills. It's not only allegedly
is Chris shooting people he doesn't need to do, but he's
also just like missing sometimes and be like I got him,
I totally got.

Speaker 3 (19:17):
Him kill killing kids and civilians and lying about cleaning
up the family Jesus Christ.

Speaker 2 (19:24):
The guys who accused Addie Gallagher of breaking a bunch
said he did this too. He would shoot and kill civilians.
He would also miss. He's not a good shot, they said,
he would miss constantly and like just say he had
killed them. And before he stabbed that kid, his guys
were like some of them were like, well, he seems
like off, Like what do we do like because he's
just lying and shooting at nothing and saying he's killing people.
So there's this point at which they don't know how

(19:45):
seriously to take how deranged and dangerous he is. Right,
that's according to their stories related in the book Alpha.
It's a very weird one, but I think he's My
interpretation is that Gallagher, after Chris Kyle got super famous
and got a movie, Gallagher just wanted to do what
it lie then whatever he could in order to get
more kills than Chris and become more famous. That's I
think what his goal was, right, because Chris Kyle got

(20:07):
rich and made a bunch of money and you know
enough after his time in Iraq, Kyle wrote a best
selling seal book in two thousand, which was published in
twenty twelve, which was later turned into the twenty fifteen
blockbuster movie American Sniper. He was played by Bradley Cooper.
And you know, even though Kyle dies not long after
this and really messed up turn of events. His whole

(20:29):
story is going to be very inspiring to Eddie Gallagher,
a troubled young man whose early life had left him
with two options crime or the military. In other words,
he was exactly the kind of guy Richard Marcinko selected
for PIPS. Yeah, yeah, these are the greatest real Here's
how David Phillips describes Gallagher's early life in Alpha. One
morning in nineteen ninety nine, without telling his family, he

(20:49):
had walked into a Navy recruiting station in a strip
mall in Fort Wayne, Indiana, determined to enlist. On the
wall there was a poster of a Seal commando coming
out of the water with night vision goggles and a
glistening assault rifle. Edi told her that was what he
wanted to do. The recruiter laughed and said that the
Seals are not just something you sign up for. So
Eddie becomes a Corman. That's a Navy medic, but Corman
are deployed with US Marines, and that's what Eddie does.

(21:10):
When he finishes training, he goes to a rack right
after the invasion, and he's eventually attached to a marine
sniper unit. He applies to the Seals every chance he gets,
but he gets rejected repeatedly because he's not again some
of these guys when he's not that good at the
technical stuff, right. But then two thousand and four they
say yes because there's not enough seals.

Speaker 3 (21:30):
You're starting to lose.

Speaker 2 (21:31):
Them, right, This is right before the Pentagon's like we
need five out or more. Right, So he gets in
and you know he's one of those guys with kind
of looser standards. He graduates Hell Week the same year
that Latrell becomes a lone survivor, and Eddie's first years
as a Seal saw him acclivating to the organization, while
Marcus Latrell became a best selling author and eventually kind
of a movie star. In the years that followed, the

(21:53):
Seals only grew more famous, and unfortunately, they also grew
increasingly comfortable flouting the rules of war. Remember Robert's Ridge,
that disastrous seal op in Afghanistan where that guy fell
off the chopper and got abandoned by his friends on accident. Well,
he had been killed. After he was killed, and the
Taliban had mutilated his corpse. Guys like Slabinsky, his former boss,
and other high ranked seals had started passing around a

(22:15):
book to each other. This was published in nineteen seventy
one and it's titled The Devil's Guard. Have you ever
heard of this book? Andrew M M. I don't like
the name.

Speaker 3 (22:25):
Remember when these dipshits passed are on books now it's
just like Nazi podcasts.

Speaker 2 (22:31):
Nobody wants to read anymore.

Speaker 6 (22:32):
So podcasts sall Twitter and podcasts.

Speaker 2 (22:37):
That is unfortunate. Tweet the threads, the tweet threads. Unfortunately,
this book did do some damage. So the book claims
to be the very true story of a former SS
officer who took a bunch of his old comrades joined
the Foreign Legion and fight in Vietnam. And these guys,
there were a bunch of SS guys who fought from
the Foreign Legion in Vietnam. But this book is nonsense.

(22:57):
As Matthew Cole wrote in an article for The Intercept,
which glorifies Nazi military practices, describes counterinsurgency tactics such as
mass slaughter and desecration and other forms of wanton violence
as a means of waging psychological warfare against the savage Vietnamese.
These fucking morons read the book The Devil's Guard and
believed it, said one of the former Seal Team six
leaders who investigated Slabinsky and Blue Squadron. It's a work

(23:19):
of fiction build as the Bible as the truth. In reality,
it's bullshit, but we all see what we want to see.
Slobnsky and the Blue Squadron seals deployed to Afghanistan were frustrated,
and that book give them the answers they wanted to
see terrorize the Taliban and they'd surrender. The truth is
that such stuff only galvanizes the enemy. And that's a
former Seal officer saying that, right, is that like this
is a deliberately harmful These guys are idiots.

Speaker 3 (23:40):
It's so weird to occasionally hear like a rational person
among these quotes in the military.

Speaker 2 (23:45):
I mean, it's really hard to do, and you do
have so like some of the people do it are
exceptional at least in like a physical way. And some
of them are also just like smart guys and think
enough that they don't fall for all of the bullshit completely.
Even in you can talk about like morally, what do
you think overall? Is it moral to be. It's a
Navy seal. I certainly wouldn't argue in the twenty first
century it is. But that doesn't mean like everyone in

(24:07):
that feels the same about all this day, right for sure? Yeah,
but I don't know. This is a pretty good time
for an ad break, Andrew, I didn't have a really
good plug into it. But we're doing it now. You
can't stop it. Why would you? I won't. We're back.
So starting in two thousand and five, freshly red up

(24:31):
on the Devil's Guard Navy Steals, and this starts with
Team six guys, but it does spread I think two
other teams over time. But it's really it's known particularly
for being a Team six thing. They start canoeing dead
and wounded enemy fighters. That's the term they use. And
canoeing is a term for if somebody's like dead or
like just wounded and otherwise harmless, you shoot them in
the upper forehead in such a way that you crack

(24:53):
open their skull and spill their brains. That's called canoeing
right one four. And this is something obviously if you're
in gunfight, guys are gonna get hit hit there. It
happens accidentally from time to time, and that's probably what happens.
Like one former Team six leader tells Cole that it
starts as like accidents, but people decide it looks like cool,
so it becomes a meme to shoot dead guys and

(25:13):
wounded guys to do this to their heads. And two
thousand and seven is really when this like picks up
in a big way. And that's not the only form
of corpse mutilation that the Navy Seals are doing during
the Global War on Terror. On some missions, they start
being required to bring back a scrap of skin for
DNA testing, and of course, once they're told you've got
to bring back part of these guys, dudes start carrying

(25:36):
big knives and skinning dead enemies much more than the
enemy requires because it's fun, right right now? This is
a war cry.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah, yeah, it's I mean, also, the data, isn't that
what like hair and saliva is for?

Speaker 2 (25:53):
That's the idea. I think you just get like a
little bit right. We'll talk about it a lot more later,
But they're they're going way outside of what's necessary, and
the most part Team six leadership seems to want to
pretend it's not happening, and again in part because like, well, yeah,
if you're sending guys out literally every night to murder
people in their beds at point blank, and then you
say bring back a piece of them, it's kind of

(26:13):
your fault if they start desecrating the corpses. Honestly, you
should have known. You should have known.

Speaker 3 (26:22):
You definitely basically asked for it.

Speaker 2 (26:24):
You really pretty much did Jesus. But yeah, also just yeah, lunacy, lunacy.
In two thousand and six, a seal officer, and this
is my favorite part, a seal officer named Hugh Yman
Howard the Third takes over Red Squadron, the Red Men,
and he is exactly the kind of old Navy Royalty
Maarsenka would have hated. And I think this guy is

(26:45):
again very insecure. The reporting makes it seem like this
is a guy again who wants to He wants to
go to extreme lengths for his enlisted men to think
he's cool and bond with him. And because of the
unit mascot, he commissions a famous knife maker named Daniel
Winkler to make a bunch of tomahawk hatchets for the
guys in his units. And these are supposed to be
like symbolic gifts as first, and it's bold because it's

(27:08):
very funny. You often come across like tactical tomahawks being
being sold and people will say, like, well, the Navy
Seals use them. They're actually really effective even still in
the modern day combat weapon because the Seals still use Yeah,
that's complete fucking horseshit that only an idiot believes. Right,
can you kill a man with the tomahawk? Sure? Tomawks
are really fucking heavy and cumbersome for the job, especially

(27:29):
the tomahawks Winkler is making. These are not like very lightweight,
like absolute minimalist tomahawks. They're like big and heavy. They're
a bad thing to carry into a modern battlefield where
you have silenced fucking guns, right, and you also, you're
the Seals. You have access to modern, lightweight, purpose built
tools for anything you need. But tomahawks are cool and

(27:51):
like the old Indians used them, right, you know, the
guys that we wear on our patches used them, didn't they.
And there's also this thing because the old frogmen had
always carried knives and some of them had killed guys
with knives. In World War Two, the Crowning Seal achievement
was to kill an enemy with a knife, right, or
some sort of edged weapon, because that's extremely rare in
modern war, very rarely are there. Sometimes it does happen.

(28:12):
There are times when people have to and have had
to defend themselves with edged weapons in modern combat. It
does occasionally occur. It was a fucking bayonet charge by
British troops in Iraq that worked. But it doesn't that's
so wild. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does not happen often, right, yea.
And because it doesn't happen often, guys who really want

(28:33):
to be able to say that, like the term is
that they've been blooded. Right. This goes back to Vietnam. Right,
You cut a man, you feel his hot blood cover
your fingers, and then you're blooded, even though like maybe
he wasn't an aim maybe he was just like a
fisher and he was like, kill the dude for no reason.

Speaker 1 (28:48):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:48):
Yeah, I'm going to quote from Cole's article in The
Intercept again. By two thousand and seven, when Howard and
Red Squadron showed up with their hatchets in Iraq, internal reports,
according to a former Seal Team six leader with direct
knowledge of operators using the weapons to hack. Dead and
dying militants were provided to both commanding officers of Seal
Team six at the time, Captain Scott Moore and his deputy,
Captain tims's Manski. Howard, who declined to answer questions from

(29:11):
the intercept rallied as seals and others before missions and
deployments by telling them to bloody the hatchet. One seal
I spoke with said that Howard's words were meant to
be inspirational, like those of a coach, and we're not
in order to use the hatchet to commit war crimes.
Others were much more critical. Howard was often heard asking
his operators whether they'd gotten blood on your hatchet when
they returned from a deployment.

Speaker 3 (29:30):
Right, And also it's like, because of course you don't
use You're only ever going to use your hatchet on
someone who is helpless, right.

Speaker 2 (29:39):
Because it's not a great in a modern war. Yeah, exactly.
The odds that you will be in a situation were
the only way to defend yourself is a fucking tomahawk
in the two thousands, and you're festooned with guns and
also better fighting knives, Like this is just nonsense, So
I quoted earlier, that Team six officer who talked about

(30:00):
how some of the Red Team guys like experience a
metamorphosis of identity and persona and start believing their Native
American warriors. Well, this guy told Cole about the Tomahawks.
Guys are going out every night and killing everything. The
hatchet was too intimate, too closely high aligned with a Tomahawk,
who have been a good idea. The former seal, who
himself had served and read during his career, said that

(30:21):
by giving operators the weapon of their battlefield persona, Howard
sent an unmistakable message to his men use it. That's
when you take away a hatchet, the retired seal said,
not provide them.

Speaker 3 (30:31):
Yeah. Yeah, and this.

Speaker 2 (30:33):
Guy's he really is talking that retires. So it was
talking about like seals like kids, and again you kind
of have to treat soldiers that way because a lot
of them basically are Yeah, I.

Speaker 3 (30:42):
Mean some of the kids to young men, young young men.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
Yeah yeah, yeah, So maybe don't give them hatchets if
you don't want people to use the fucking hatchets.

Speaker 3 (30:51):
Yeah yeah, you're gonna there, You're gonna hurt someone, You're
gonna there's some shit's gonna it's not gonna turn well, and.

Speaker 2 (30:57):
It's going to make all the Iraqis talk about you
know these anyac Americans are just chopping up civilians to death,
and then some of them will go blow up Americans. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly,
and they'll kind of be right to do so.

Speaker 3 (31:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (31:09):
In the years since Marsenko left, the Boy Scouts Team
six leadership had really emphasized the ability of highly trained
seals to discriminate as key to their value. Seals don't
hit people who aren't a threat. Right. That mostly held
in the very earliest days of the war. But it
kind of it starts to crumble pretty quick, right, Seals
Initially who fail at this, who hit civilians as we

(31:30):
talked about, it's happening very quickly, and initially they're forced
out of the teams if they do that, right, But
within a few years that stopped happening as much as
cole writes and code over country. In two thousand and seven,
for example, a Gold Squadron sniper was pushed out, according
to a former Seal Team six leader, after he killed
three unarmed people, including a child, and at least two

(31:51):
different operations. He was allowed to return to the regular
Seal teams. No investigation into an unjustified killing has ever
resulted in formal disciplinary action against member of SIS Seal
Team six. Sure probably probably not.

Speaker 3 (32:03):
Great unsurprising, but yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:07):
The Seals also continued their long working relationship with the CIA.
During the GWATT In two thousand and eight, Gold Squadron
operators deployed near Jalalabad with CIA officers for a raid
on an insurgent stell Seals were ordered to capture and
detain six men sleeping inside. Instead, all six sleeping men
were canued. The CIA guy who was with them, who

(32:27):
himself was a retired seal, the CIA SuDS like a
former seal with this unit to monitor their them, and
he's pissed and he complains to his bosses that, like,
these guys just murdered everybody, like we had them dead
to rights, they were asleep and they just shoot everybody
in the head to take pictures of them, basically, yeah,
And so the CIA gets pissed and starts complaining to
the Seals, and this erupts in a massive conflict between

(32:47):
Seal Team six and CIA officers stationed in Kabul. The Seals,
like Seal leadership kind of gets involved eventually, and there's
a deal made with the CIA Station chief. Gold squadrons
redeployed back to the United States, and there's like a
period in which the Seals are kind of like pulled
in a bit right. They're stopped from like operating in
the way that they had been temporarily as things are,

(33:10):
there's like attempts that are made to kind of like
reform some of the disciplinary problems that have become too
obvious to ignore, but complaints like these not just from
the CIA, but from regular Army and Navy units from
Afghan officials continue to build, and the Navy never really
does much more in the Seal Command ever, does much
more than like rotata guy or rotata unit. There's no

(33:31):
desire for accountability. They're not punishing people, right of course,
and they're not fixing the problem, you know. So Admiral
William McRaven becomes head of Jaysock and he pulls Team
six temporary. This is right around the time Obama gets elected,
and he pulls Team six temporarily back from action, and
then he pauses Seal and Jaysock operations for two weeks

(33:51):
in February of two thousand and nine as reforms are
sketched out and hastily attempted. So after Obama gets in,
people are sick of the ugliest days of the War
on Terror what they assume will be the ugly stays
of the War on Terror. And you know, Obama puts
McRaven and a guy who'd been fired from the Seal
Team six by Marsenko for being too much of a
wet blanket. So he at least seems like a good

(34:13):
guy actually to give that job, right, And initially it
seems like he's going to cause some like major reforms,
but he never gets enough of a handle on this
unit's because it's kind of impossible for him to the
way the unit culture is. I shouldn't say impossible. He
never tries hard enough. That's the issue. Really, He never
makes it that much of a priority because it's kind
of scary.

Speaker 3 (34:34):
Right right right, Like we just have like a group
of entitled psychos.

Speaker 2 (34:39):
Yeah, and they're fucking shit up for the rest of
the military.

Speaker 3 (34:42):
Yeah, but it's like, you know, you fuck with them enough,
it's just like they're coming after you. Who knows. Like
there are a lot of clouds them are like not
above that of clearly.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah, the American people seem to be really into them.
You know, it's kind of hard to just like go
after the these guys, and you know that's not an excuse.
But I think that's why mcgraven, that's why none of
this is going to go as far as at all.
No one's incentivized to really fix. So some of the
intended reforms involved stuff like requiring seals to do call
outs before rating a compound, to where they're like, hey,
we're about to go in there, so like women and

(35:16):
children can get to safety and maybe some people who
like surrender, but the seals complain, well, we lose the
element of surprise when we do this, And I guess
what I say to that is like, hey, dipshits, if
you want to be treated like heroes, you got to
act like it. That would mean like taking extra risk
on yourself to avoid hurting civilians, which is like what
would make you special as special forces? It kind of
seems like you're just forces.

Speaker 3 (35:38):
Yeah, yeah, you know, like.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
I could put together a group of guys capable of
shooting sleeping people to death. I think anyone could. It's
not hard, like mentally maybe, but technically it doesn't take
a lot of training.

Speaker 3 (35:51):
Especially again when you have fucking the Air Force and
an army behind it, right, which seems to be what
you also require.

Speaker 2 (35:59):
Right. So mcraven's reforms attempted, with mixed success, to reduce
the amount of corpse mutilation as well. All of these
attempts at reform ran into two issues. Marsenko's insistence on
seals covering for each other had only grown more entrenched
in Team six and had spread to other teams. The
other issue is that the Pentagon and the President needed
the seals more than ever once Obama took the White House,

(36:20):
because a big thing for Obama is going to be
keeping the operational footprint low as few guys as possible
in there, but still killing people. That's part why we
have drones, and that's why special forces are really convenient.
Warcart top Come on, no, no, they just changed their clothes.
So speaking of people who changed their clothes, I don't know.

(36:42):
Here's an ad Yeah, but Boom two thousand and nine
is the year that Navy seals rescued Captain Phillips from
those Somali pirates. If you've seen the movie about this
with Hanks playing Captain Phillips. You know the basics, right,

(37:02):
This is a very famous moment. Phillips is trapped in
this tiny lifeboat with three pirates and there's like a
thirty thousand dollars in cash because when he'd been kidnapped
off the boat, they had like petty cash that he
took to try to like here, maybe take the cash
and don't kidnap the boat. Didn't work out. So Phillips,
three pirates and that bag of cash, which is important,
are in this tiny covered boat and the Team six drops,

(37:24):
like they drop into the water and like, I guess
get to the boats or whatever. A handful of Team
six snipers who are like stationed on a naval vessel,
and they like there's this whole process where they get
to tow the vessel in and negotiate, and the snipers
are waiting until they can hit. In the movie, the
snipers are waiting the whole time until they can see
all three simultaneously to drop them all signimultaneously because that's

(37:45):
the only way to save the hostage from getting killed.
In Counterfire, right, and in the movie, this all goes
very quickly and cleanly, and one assumes legally, and according
to plan that's not true. Sure that movie is not
fully accurate. Prisident Obama had only authorized Admiral McRaven, in
charge of the operation, to use deadly force if it
was immediately necessary to save the captain. But McRaven is

(38:08):
managing the op remotely. I think he's in Afghanistan. I
think I might have been a racted, but I think he's
not anywhere near the operation. He's in a different country
in an operation center, and there's an officer in the
Seals on the ground are commanding the actual effort. So
Raven he thinks he's got he should have clout he's
in charge, but seals don't like to listen, right, And

(38:30):
because the way McRaven gave the orders to the seals,
they technically felt that well, the way he phrased the orders,
we could technically shoot whenever we feel the timing is best,
even though he doesn't really want them to shoot. So
McRaven does not want this to end in bloodshed. His
hope is that negotiations could still work. But these Seal
Team six guys are some of the pirate type, and
they respect McRaven no more than Marsinko had when he'd

(38:52):
fired the dude. So as soon as they get a
chance to shoot all three pirates, they shoot them all
without asking for approval in the movie. Have you seen
that movie, Andrew, I have a long time ago, And yeah,
they all die in the movie right away. Seals are incredible.
They never they would never, like, there's no rereated man
left alive, perfectly surgical, brilliant. That's not accurate. So after

(39:15):
they drop these guys, two officers make their way to
the lifeboat. They're like crawling over rope to get there.
One of them's got a knife in his teeth, you know,
because it looks really fucking bad ass. And when he arrives,
he finds Phillips in the boat with one surviving wounded pirate.
Phillips is unharmed and the pirate does not appear to
have been armed or capable of harming anybody. And I
want to emphasize this because the Navy seal with a

(39:37):
knife kills the pirate as soon as he enters. Now,
I know what you're thinking, and how Hollywood would depict
this if they chosen to show that a Navy seal
stand that man to death. Is like one really cool
surgical motion like a bad ass, because like that's what
it would be. If this guy was a danger and
you only had a knife to defend yourself, you'd have
to quickly use it. Fucking horseshit. You want to know
how many times this Navy seal stabs this unarmed pirate

(40:01):
kid who's wounded.

Speaker 3 (40:03):
I mean, I'm sure I don't but.

Speaker 2 (40:05):
Ninety one times.

Speaker 3 (40:07):
Right, right, he's like a prison assassin, special training.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
He's a trained knife fighter. Yeah, no, he's just fucking
around with a knife and a wounded kid. You might
also remember from that movie that thirty thousand dollars that's
supposed to be there. Whatever happened to that, Well, here's
code of our Country quote. FBI agents inspected the lifeboat
after it had been towed up to the Bainbridge, documenting
the crime scene. In the evidence, Captain Phillips told investigators

(40:31):
he'd seen the thirty thousand dollars in cash he'd given
his captors during the ordeal on the lifeboat, and at
one point felt it when his captors gave him a
bag to lean against. Yet the FBI agents couldn't locate
it aboard the lifeboat. The vessel had been monitored second
by second throughout the standoff, and no one had seen
anything go overboard. No one could account for the disappearance
of the cash. Investigators zeroed in on two seals, the
operators who first boarded the lifeboat. The FBI and NCIS

(40:54):
to conducted an investigation, during which the two operators submitted
to a polygraph. The results were inconclusive. Of the seals
were never charged, and the money was never recovered. Cool. Now,
I might say the Navy Seals have a documented history
from Vietnam of stealing money, at least in Vietnam, to
spend on drugs. Maybe that's what happened here. I don't know.

(41:16):
I wasn't there, but that didn't make it into the movie.

Speaker 3 (41:20):
It's also rough that the best tool we have against
this is a polygraph, aka.

Speaker 2 (41:25):
A polygraph the thing that doesn't work. Yeah, it's all
pretty silly, And it's like again, this is like the
operation that is the most like why you would think
someone would justify the existence of the seals. This incredibly nuanced,
difficult rescue that only people trained to do, Like three
simultaneous shots like that could have pulled it off. But
maybe the shots didn't need to be taken.

Speaker 3 (41:47):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (41:47):
And also what certainly didn't need to happen is like
a kid get stabbed ninety one times after he was
already taken out of account and thirty thousand dollars get stolen.

Speaker 3 (41:54):
Yeah, well, again, the shots need to get taken, because
otherwise how they're going to get that thirty.

Speaker 2 (41:58):
Kgey to get that money. McRaven and Obama are both
really pissed off initially, but that gets kept quiet because
this whole event is riotously popular to Americans, who largely
ignore what happened afterwards. You know, they're just big fans
of these seals. This increasingly becomes a pattern with the
Navy Seals, who, due to their fame and the need
the Pentagon has for pipe hitters with a low operational footprint,

(42:20):
become increasingly immune to consequences and oversight the more famous
they get. The same year that happens, Richard Marsenko's highly
fictionalized life is turned into a video game the same
year as as Captain Phillips. This video game is called
Rogue Warrior, and Oh boy, I wish I'd gotten to
play it. Did you play it?

Speaker 3 (42:40):
I don't know. They all kind of blend together yeah.
To me, they sort of Call of Duty's and Rainbow
sixes and all the shit.

Speaker 2 (42:47):
From that era. Yeah, yeah, yeah, this is Rainbow six esque.
I found a review in the Bad Game Hall of Fame.
It's pretty fun. The original design concept for Rogue Warrior
was an ambition thing. Set in present day North Korea,
The game would have seen players control a squad led
by Richard Demo Dick Marsenko as you relieve the country
of their nuclear launch capabilities. This campaign would have provided

(43:10):
optional four player cooperative play, presumably allowing each player to
take the role of one of the squad's individual members.
The role of Richard Richard Marsenko would be played by
actor Mickey Rourke, fresh off from his Academy Award nominated
performance is Randy the Ram Robinson in two thousand and
eight's The Wrestler, and in a press release put out
by Bethesda in cooperation with Blind Light LLC, an organization
established to facilitate the involvement of Hollywood actors and video games,

(43:31):
the game's executive producer, Todd Vaughn is quoted as saying
Mickey Rourke absolutely one captures Marsenko's raw and gritty personality.

Speaker 3 (43:39):
That Actually, that part does seem about right, yep.

Speaker 2 (43:42):
I gotta play you audio from this, guys, we need
to hear this together. This is a selection on YouTube
of all of Mickey Rourke's quotes from Rogue Warrior.

Speaker 5 (43:52):
Fuck you, asshole. You gotta be fucking kidding me. Bring
the noise, bitch, send me the bill. Cocksuckers, I got
most from every one of those. Motherfucker Carl Marx, Fuck
Carl Marx. He's a big fucking faggot. Pussy. Shut my balls,
my hairy, fucking big balls. Wrap him around your fucking mouth.
Goddamn tuck breath. Tell me, motherfuckers, stop dead, motherfucker you
fucking amateurs and man fighting. It only makes it worse.

(44:14):
Just die like the little motherfucker you are.

Speaker 2 (44:16):
Okay, Okay.

Speaker 6 (44:17):
I think that that's an episode of Sons of Anarchy,
and a certain point it did start to feel improvised.
They just let Mickey Rourke go after a WHI just
saying slurs and ship.

Speaker 2 (44:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (44:31):
Like it feels like it feels like at the end
of that tape he goes like, Okay, I'm ready.

Speaker 2 (44:37):
Okay, I'm ready. It feels like his contract was just
a case of tequila in the Holy Shit, but I
know that would have made it much different from the Wrestler.
Great movie though, honestly, Yeah, really funny, really funny stuff
from Mickey Rourke here. Yeah, I don't know. We could

(44:58):
talk more about what happens in that game, but the
plot is fucking nonsense and very silly and and just
I think it's I just wanted you guys to hear
Mickey Rourke pretend to be Richard Marsenko before we talk
about Osama bin Laden and the Aboda Bad raid in
Pakistan that kills Bin Laden and makes Seal Team six
a household name.

Speaker 3 (45:14):
Right.

Speaker 2 (45:15):
Yeah, Now, the raid isn't worth going into in a
ton of detail here, That's not really what we do.
There's movies that you can final and a lot of
we all most people like lived through this and remember
the media coverage, right, What I'll tell you is that
like wasn't in a lot of media coverage, which is
that the Seals who were present seemed to pretty universally
agree it was like a comparatively simple and easy mission,
even though one of the books about it I think

(45:36):
is called No Easy Day, right, But like exactly like
kind of a you know. Yeah, only one of Bin
Ladden's people even got off a shot, and he was
dropped pretty much immediately. I could do a whole episode
honestly on Bastard ury in this mission, but for now,
what you need to know is that again, of the
two of the team six guys who were there that
day wrote books about having killed been the guy who

(45:56):
shot and killed Bin Laden, we know neither of them
did it, right.

Speaker 3 (46:01):
I mean, also, those guys at the very least, if
the Navy Seals are gonna like just create a core
of fantasists, a Seal rule should have to be these
two guys have to fight to the death.

Speaker 2 (46:14):
Right right before one of them can write a book.

Speaker 3 (46:17):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (46:18):
What's very funny is that reports indicate Bisonett O'Neil, the
you guys who like write these conflicting books, were friends
at one point and initially planned to co author a
book on the raid, but they like broke up before
it happened, and they were both it seems like they
were kind of competing the day of the raid to
try to get there first, and both have been accused
of having like exposed their teammates in some ways while

(46:39):
trying to do that. One of these dudes actually shoots
bin Laden after he's dead in the head and it's
like I had to do it. He was still alive,
but it like it makes it harder to identify the
body and so they have to like take it back
and stuff, and it increases risk for the whole unit.
Basically the time that this adds to the mission. The
main thing you should take away from the real what

(47:00):
actually happened in A Bought a Bad is that by
the time the mission to kill Bin Laden happened, two
of the twenty three seals present that day entered action
with an active plan to profit from their experiences. And
this was important enough to these men, the best of
the best, that they were willing to endanger themselves in
their teammates and the mission to get it done. The
second of these books came out in twenty fourteen, two

(47:21):
years after the movie Zero Dark thirty was released based
on the raid. Over those same years, Navy seals were
elected to Congress, published multiple best selling books, and in
general grew to become a massive brand, which they are
to this day. For his part, Richard Marsinko spent the
Global War on Terror years trying with minimal success to
become a media pundit. He really wanted to be like
a right wing influencer, and he just didn't have the

(47:45):
mental agility. He wasn't in with the new technology enough.
I don't think to really make it honestly surprising, he
is like, yeah, yeah, he at the internet. Yeah. In
two thousand and six, he wrote an op ed complaining
that the media was being too mean about US torture
at Abu Grab. He operated a private consulting firm called
Red Cell International giving security consulting, and he hosted a

(48:07):
right wing talk show.

Speaker 3 (48:10):
It could be right wing dirty work, like Joe Logan
could start it, like genuinely, if Dailey Wire had Eddie Juice,
they'd be doing shit like that.

Speaker 2 (48:19):
I just love the idea of his like red Cell
and end consulting firm, being like, yeah, so your first
real security issue is you got to have a lady
willing to shoot any one of my guys. The incince
they try to like break into your house, arm your
wife and tell her to shoot at anyone who looks
like me.

Speaker 3 (48:35):
Just like or just anyone fight back. Honestly.

Speaker 2 (48:38):
Yeah. His main claim to fame in the twenty first
century is that in the year two thousand, Richard Marsenko
worked with Ron Howard on The Grinch movie with Jim Carrey.
Perfect people have heard about this. The way it's usually
described is that the makeup and costume Jim Carrey was
wearing was so fucking awful and horrible that they had
to bring in a navy sea old to talk to

(49:00):
him about, like like techniques that you're taught in like
Sari to resist torture right in order for him to
endure it. And I'd heard that, man, I was like,
I guess that makes sense, Like those guys do get
taught those techniques. That's like a real thing. I didn't
realize it was Marsenko, Like that, what are the oddest?
So yeah, he probably got an idm IMDb credit for

(49:22):
fucking the Grinch.

Speaker 3 (49:23):
Movie, Oh my god, as like a as like a
costume consultant.

Speaker 2 (49:27):
So it's like, I don't know what they would I
don't know if he's actually credited, but he gets brought
in for that, Oh.

Speaker 3 (49:32):
My god, that's so amazing for essentially, by the way,
just doing the calm app.

Speaker 2 (49:38):
Yeah, yeah, the call mapp. Jim Carrey being the Grinch
so much Yeah, Marsenko died of a heart attack, fucking
finally on December twenty fifth, two thousand and one. He
was eighty one years old. God twenty one, Jesus twenty
twenty one, he was eighty one years old.

Speaker 3 (49:56):
That's wild, Yeah, my life listen. Usually those guys never die,
so yeah, yeah, for mostly alcohol probably.

Speaker 2 (50:07):
Yeah, he really. It was a rough story most of that.
But right at that the end there I was on
the same page as Richard. He finally did something I
can support. Yeah, yeah, I don't know Andrew Pluggables.

Speaker 3 (50:22):
All right, well, hardly any war crimes over at Starter
Trek or a new podcast which is still on the
same it's like the same feed as Josus Racist, which
were putting on hold for a little while. It's me
Tony Newsome Jesse Gender again. I've watched almost no Star
Trek intentionally, and they've watched a ton so I'm just

(50:44):
just going through it. They're telling me what the hell's
going on. It's fun. We're all writers in some way,
TV writers and just making you know, I know about
I know how TV's made, but don't know how Star
Trek has made. Turns out those are pretty different, actually, interesting.

Speaker 2 (51:00):
Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Well, I know how Behind
the Bastards is made, and it's not made anymore today
because you've listened to it, So go away. We'll be
back next week.

Speaker 6 (51:09):
Shoo Shoo Shoo. Behind the Bastards is a production of
Cool Zone Media. For more from cool Zone Media, visit
our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on
the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Full video episodes a Behind the Bastards are now streaming
on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me

(51:31):
on Netflix you don't miss an episode. For clips and
our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube
channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We
love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,