July 14, 2026 • 54 mins
This week Robert tells Andrew Ti the story of Richard Marcinko, the founder of SEAL Team 6 and patient zero of tacticool "operator" culture.
(4 Part Series)
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/us/richard-marcinko-dead.html
https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/19/books/in-short-nonfiction-731592.html?searchResultPosition=1
https://www.forever-wars.com/teamwork/
https://www.wired.com/2011/02/special-opsforces-could-use-a-breather-commander/?ref=forever-wars.com
https://www.badgamehalloffame.com/rogue-warrior/
https://archive.is/UX4bb#selection-1973.0-1973.503
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-different-era-a-different-seal/
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that
you're listening to right now unless you have multiple sets
of ears or have had some sort of invasive surgery
to like add additional like like hearing organs to your
body so that your life is one undifferentiated cacophony of noise.
(00:25):
And if you have done that, why.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Why okay, because I could produce more podcasts. It would
make me.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So you are the one person who needs that's right,
that's right, wire all of the audio directly into your brain.
Speaking of things I want to wire into my brain.
Andrew T one of my very favorite guests, how are
you doing Buddies?
Speaker 3 (00:48):
That's available that we could probably make that a product.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
And it is also so long and luscious now I know.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
And moderate, that's right.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Yeah, Summer summer, it's maybe never going to stop being
summer in Southern California.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
It is always summer in Southern California.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
At this point, maybe perpetually.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
I had the most distressing thing that happened to me
is I went to Santa Barbara and distressing but not.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
I guess Box.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Crab is now very very readily available in Santa Barbara.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
When it didn't used to be necessarily in such.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Box.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Crab box crab like the animal Yeah, okay, that was
like a restaurant.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Okay, likely the animal box.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
No, the animal is available to the little delicious spiky
guys and the way the like Fisher guy and the
like restaurant people were talking. I mean, they know it's
climate change, but I think they're like.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
They're trying not to talk about it.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
It's just like it bums everybody out all of a sudden.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I guess, I don't know. Crab's just decided they want
to live here now, a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Of stuff suddenly changed. Well, Andrew, you are normally you've
put it on pause. You're the host of a podcast
called yo is this racist? That's correct, that's right, and
you are you are pausing it to do a Star
Trek show with Tony and Jesse gender right, Yeah, we're we're.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
I think we can I cleanly say we're we're doing
the Star Trek show as the main thing is this
racist might come back, But yeah, we're doing Starter Trek.
That's a show where Tawny and Jesse are huge. Tawny
was on Star Trek, Jesse loves Star Trek and knows
so much about it, they moved no more than me
because I only ever watched Star Trek extremely Stoned in syndication,
(02:41):
so I recognize shit. Basically every episode is me doing
the Leonardo DiCaprio meme of like pointing out the screen
like I know that, but I don't understand it, like
it's been in my eyes before, but I don't know
what the fuck it is, or what the context is
or what the So.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Well, that is exciting, but I figured this week we
could give yo, is this racist? Fans one last little
hurrah because I want to ask you and is this racist? Question?
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Good? Hell yeah, yeah, I'll bring back Yo's this racist?
Just for here?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Is this racist? The Navy seals?
Speaker 3 (03:22):
I listen.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
My only like experience with this train of thought is
that the people people generally say that like law enforcement
and military, the higher up you get, like the closer
to boots on the ground like regular ass like you know,
(03:44):
guys with no impulse control and anger issues boots on
the ground, the more racist it is. So I think
there's my guess is I feel like there's a chance
that it's less racist than your average.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
That is, that's actually not true at least in regards
the US military, and I mean, how we determine the
amount of racism and something. But the military as a
whole is fairly diverse. Like the US military is a
very diverse institution. Special Forces, particularly the highest echelots of
special Forces, are a lot wider than the rest of
(04:18):
the military to a degree that's kind of uncomfortable when
you also look at like where some former Delta guys
who are now political figures and some former Seals wind
up we're not. This episode is not actually about the
Navy Seals as a whole, but we are talking about
Seal Team six. This is going to be a two
part episode because I want to talk about how Seal
(04:40):
Team six went from like, you know, another special Forces
unit where they were The term you would hear a
lot was like quiet professionals. You know, these guys are
incredibly good at what they do and they don't talk
about it, because that's kind of the point of like
special ops right to now like every third Navy Seal
it's or at least Team six guy, it seems like,
has a fucking book and a podcast. Yeah, all over
(05:01):
the media. They're running their fucking Republican Congress people, you know,
So how did we get there? And how did we
simultaneously get to the point where like, the Navy Seals
are now way better known for their scandals, for shit
like Eddie Gallagher stabbing a sixteen year old kid in
the neck for a re enlistment ceremony and mosel than
(05:22):
they are for even like fucking killing Bin Laden. And
all of this comes back like the reason why all
of the ship with the Navy Seals is as messy
and is as fame hungry and as grimy as it
is today. It all starts with the guy who founded
Seal Team six, a fella I can't wait to tell
you about, named Richard Marsenko. Have you ever heard of Richard?
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Nope?
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Oh? Yeah, well this is this is this is going
to be a hoot.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yeah, I can't wait.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
So before we talk about him, I want to kind
of lead you in to the reason I will to
talk about this at all, which is that the Navy
Seals and like the kind of Special Forces look, the
operator look, is one of the more dominant like styles
in American pop culture these days. And this is you
can see this all over the fucking internet if you
(06:15):
happen to be particularly a male who has looked up
anything related to firearms or survival gear or talk about
that stuff.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Sharpie, I just say, sharp that's how my YouTube algorithm
about poison. I literally was trying to learn how to
sharpen knives during very valuable skill immediately like within likeness.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
It was like Nazi shit. It was incredible.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Actually yeah, And so if you're if you have done
stuff like that on the internet, you've probably run across
ads on your social media feed that looks something like this,
And Sophie's going to put it out. It's an ad
for it, says the Pipe Hitters Union. They're advertising their
spring break special fifteen percent off store wide. And there's
like a picture behind the ad of you can just
sort of see close in the center of a man's chest.
(07:01):
He's wearing body armor. He's got like a tattooed hand
and it's holding he's holding an AR fifteen across his
chest and like a low ready right, and the.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Pipe Hitters Union, Honey.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Yeah, yes, this is he's got. You can also see
his like chin, there's a slight shadow of a beard.
This is like a very clear sort of tactical apparel look,
which is based on the look of you as Special
Forces operators. Now, the fact that this business sells tactical
and special Forces themed apparel should be obvious from the
(07:35):
context of the ad. But what are pipe hitters? Have
you guys heard that term before?
Speaker 4 (07:40):
I just assumed it was just you know, weed smokers, bro.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
That and just I've heard that in a girly pop conversation.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
No, definitely not, That's not what it means. So the
short answer for what pipe hitters are is it's a
modern synonym for like a Special Forces badass who kills
people for the US government. And the long answer is
that pipe hitters are a big like pipe hitters are
why the US can't win wars anymore. Right, the pipe
hitter ethos and ideology has locked us into this sort
of I would argue this kind of mental way of
(08:13):
looking at how conflict should proceed that makes us incapable
of actually winning most of the fights that we start. Anyway,
it would be accurate to point out that the term
pipe pitter has now crossed into the civilian world, as
this ad shows, and become a general way for guys
who think they're badasses to brand themselves now, much like
the word based. The term's origins start in drug lingo,
(08:34):
which also, by the way, special forces massive drug problems,
like there's a fuck load of drug issues all across you.
A Special Forces and a pipe hitter. Originally, the lingo
originally is someone who smoked, particularly opium from a pipe,
although some people will say crack. But I do think
it's more from opium, just based on when it started
(08:55):
being said. And here's in Afghanistan, pres right, I mean,
and before Yeah, but I think Vietnam too. But here's
how The Soldier's Project describes the military origins of the phrase.
It gained widespread popularity among the Special Forces and Seals
after it was featured in the iconic movie Pulp Fiction.
The term was associated with someone who could be depended
(09:16):
upon in the midst of combat, and the military usage
of the term pipe hitter was initially a description heavily
trained operators used for themselves. It was an internal term, right,
if you were a Green Beret or a Seal guy,
a Seal Team guy, right, or a Delta guy, you
might call yourself and your buddies a pipe or pipe hitters, right.
But today it's more commonly an aspirational term used by
(09:37):
people who are desperate to embody it, and usually seek
to do so for buying things right. Here's a fun
example from the student of the Gun Company, which offers
tactical training and books like The Pipe Hitter's Guide to
The Citizens Are Regular Defense Corps for ten ninety nine.
What a deal. And you can see the cover of
this self published book. There's like four schlubby looking dudes
(09:59):
with it looks like AK various AK style guns and
like quasi civilian tactical gear in like a grayscale, foggy
photo of a city behind the kind of post apocalyptic.
And the best way I can describe like the way
these men are dressed is like it's race rioter chic,
right like the Yeah, that's how they all look. They're
all dressed like Kyle Rittenhouse a little.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Or how Ytense thinks he's dressing.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah. Yeah. The product description of this book reads as follows.
Building upon the widespread popularity of the original Pipe Hitter's Guide,
this book will take the lessons from the original text
and build upon them. The Citizens Regular Defense Corps is
a modern incarnation of many successful programs used throughout history.
For the defense of a community during times of crisis,
and I intended to look out that first pipe Hitter's book,
and I found myself falling down a rabbit hole of
(10:46):
related text, including A Pipe Pitter's Guide to Access Denial
and A Pipe Pitter's Guide to Small Arms and Weapons.
Both of these are by Nicholas Or, and I had
to look into this guy, so I found Nicholas Or's
personal wayde And it turns out that name is quote
the nom de plume for a civilized Barbarian, a savage
gentleman with thirty plus years of operational and combat experience
(11:09):
in the United States and overseas. The author has carried
a gun during innumerable assignments worldwide as a member of
the United States Military, as a military contractor, and an
executive protection agent. I don't know if any of that's true.
It's not under a real name.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
He could just be like, yeah, I mean the small
like sliver of I don't know. Silver lining to all
this stuff is this is just like identical to the
like dim mock people in the eighties and nineties kind
of vibe the like blood sport guy, like all the
fa white like like white martial arts guys that.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Could kill you with three moves.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Yes, I guess what I mean is these guys have
always existed with basically the same gun, same mindset.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
And also they have always worshiped the Special Forces aesthetic,
and that has always been like the coolest thing in
that this guy hierarchy is a Special Forces dude or
a dude with Special Forces experience. And again, I don't
know if Nicholas or is ever served in the military.
This is just some dude fucking rebranding, like old military
(12:16):
training manuals to make a boxtreme strip right, exactly exactly,
But this guy's whole shtick is the perfect embodiment of
what pipe hitter has become. Right. It's a branding term
to sell the illusion of special, secret, Special Forces knowledge
and violent hypercompetence to insecure white dudes who feel like
they're like one book and maybe one gun away from
(12:36):
being like John Wick. Right, by a six thousand dollars
pistol and enough books about tactical shit, then maybe I'll
be that cool. And even before it reached the civilian word,
pipe pipe hitter as a term was an active branding
special Forces guys at the dawn of the g watt
the Global War on Terror took a term from a
popular recent movie and used it to define themselves how
(12:58):
they wanted to be seen as gruff tattooed badasses who
didn't follow the rules but got results. And that's why
when disgraced Navy c. L. Eddie Gallagher got off the
hook for the series of war crimes that he had
committed thanks to Donald President Donald Trump's intervention, he created
the Pipe Hitter Foundation. And Sophie will show you the
website for the pipe Hitter Foundation. But yeah, I mean
(13:19):
again for an idea, Eddie Gallagher, this guy was such
a fucking maniac. His colleagues were doing shit like shooting
above people's heads so that they would take cover so
that Eddie wouldn't murder them, because he was just shooting
every civilian he could find in mosl to try to
rack up a kill count that would let him like
market himself as the next Chris Kyle. Like that's that's
(13:40):
what this guy is alleged by a bunch of his
colleagues as having done right.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Bad representation by ray Band here.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
But there's not any good representation.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
Watson, the main step up in the pipe pitter Ethos
is these meadow glasses to look like this and be
a like an easy creep.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Bad representation for people named Andrea. Yeah, this website's amazing stuff.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
It's incredible, Jitre. We'll talk about Eddie in the very
end of these episodes because this a lot of what
we're talking about with both Richard Marsenko and with you know,
the history of kind of this, this conflict in Team
six between these quiet operators and these like maniac murderer
publicity house, right, is what Berth's Eddie Gallagher in a
lot of ways. Now, Special Forces guys have been seen
(14:31):
as cool pretty much since we invented them, but their
popularity really rocketed up after the Navy Seals killed Osama
bin Laden in twenty eleven, which is little ironic because
basically everyone is there was like, it's the easiest mission
we ever had. It was not hard, we were not
in the main danger was that we fucked up our
own helicopters because we didn't like the pilot was like,
if you're gonna land, you can't land a helicopter in
(14:52):
like I walled an environment like that, it'll fuck up
the rotors. And they were like, well, you're fired and
then the thing the guy said happened. Not quite as
professional as they often come across, but Yeah. Since twenty eleven,
the term has made his way back from the military
into movies like Sacario. That's kind of the first place
I seem to remember hearing it in like a pop
(15:13):
culture sense, and also the right, right, right, good movie.
And also a wide array of products marketed to civilians
who want to feel like more special, more like special
Forces dudes when they're at say the gym, you know.
Here's here's another example from the Pipe Hitters Union, right,
and my favorite is probably this original pipe Hitter T
shirt that shows this is part of like a series
(15:35):
where it's like the Founding Fathers reimagined as like special
Forces gangster badasses. You've got like fucking George Washington with
a tomahawk, and Teddy Roosevelt's got a machine gun across
his shoulder, he's like shirtless, heavily tattooed, he's got a
jug of hard liquor. Right, and you can you can
see in this ad how much this product line really
relies on the aesthetic of the operator and what the
(15:58):
aesthetic of the operator is because his Teddy's not depicted
as a regular soldier. He's got a gun over his shoulder,
he's shirtless, he's muscular, he's covered in tattoos, and he's
drunk carrying what looks to be a jug of moonshine.
And all of these elements, including constant illegal intoxication, are
central aspects of real life special forces culture. Now, I
would define the pipe hitter aesthetic today as a man
(16:20):
usually bearded, wearing weapons, armor and gear, but no uniform
so to speak, who operates as a soldier but is
unaccountable to anyone really. And today, every right wing influencer
who can pull off posing with a gun has tried
to ape this aesthetic at least a little bit. And
as an example, here's Andrew Tait posing for Instagram. He's
got the plate carrier, he's got a gun. He doesn't
(16:40):
have a beard, so he's got one of those skull
masks around his face. And by the way, his plate
carrier is riding too low. You want to have that
thing up higher. You see that there's like right underneath
its dumb. If you're watching this in the video, right
underneath where his maskins, there's like three or four inches
of open real estate before the armor starts. That's just like, well,
that's just your heart, bro, Like you want to have.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
That thing.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Really dumb?
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, Now, skull the skullgator too big.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, the skull gator is a big part of this
esthetic too for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Now we're gonna look this week into the first pipeit
or the man who created the template for this kind
of guy and also who literally invented Seal Team six,
Richard Marsenko. Now, the Navy Seals were already well known
when an operator with Seal Team six killed on How
I'm Been Laden in a boat of Bad Pakistan. But
before that day they were simply among the best special
(17:33):
forces units that the US kept in its arsenal, and
in all honesty, prior to a Boata Bad, their public
record wasn't all that impressive really any sufficiently We'll talk
about that. Any sufficiently nerdy ROTC kid when I was
growing up would have told you that, like, well, Delta
Force is the more elite unit, right, That was certainly
like the the the the attitude then. But after Bin
(17:55):
Laden there was not really any question anymore. The Seals
and Team six in particular were the premier mill military
badasses of the American imagination. So yeah, anyway, I think
I've hyped this up enough. I'm going to start with
the story of ours this day. But first, here's some
fucking ads and we're back. Richard was born on November
(18:21):
twenty first, in nineteen forty in Lansford, Pennsylvania, in the
home of his grandmother. Now, his hometown was a mining
community and cole was the big business of the day.
His ancestors were check on both sides, and in his
autobiography he described the ethos of the men in his
family line and in Lansford as a whole. As they
were born, they worked the mines, they died, right, So
(18:44):
understandable that he's going to want to get out of
this right now. We'll be discussing his autobiography, Rogue Warrior,
not just as a historical document, because it's a terrible
historical document, but it is in and of itself an
important piece of history because the book wrote Warrior is
the first Navy seal tell all right. It is the
first true story book written by a former operator for
(19:07):
the purpose of turning himself into a brand. Right. There
were books about the seals before and by the way,
if you're looking for like a good book about the
seals in uh, because I used to know a seal team,
one guy who was fought in Vietnam, and the book
he recommended was that it was called Hunters and Trackers.
That was, like he said, was very true to his experience.
Marsinko's book covers Vietnam heavily, but it's nearly all lies. Right,
(19:30):
then said it's an important historical book, right because every
one of these Navy seal fucking books that's come since
in the modern era. There's two of them from two
different guys who were part of the Osamba operation who
claimed to have shot him. Neither of them killed osamabed
Black and everyone knows that.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Right.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Oh god, I'm just gonna this is also like La
Comedy community stuff and I don't remember who it was
and I don't know the story, but basically someone I
forget who it was. They you know, podcast listeners might
be able to find this, but someone like La Comedian
wise basically went on on a date with another person
who I don't even know if they're actually a Davy seal,
(20:09):
but claim to have killed those Alli been lot.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Also, if you actually like the serious and good reporting
on that has shown and proven basically because they've talked
to a bunch of guys who were The guy who
actually killed him was a dude whose nickname is read
we don't know his real name, and he does not
talk right, Like, that's what people say about the guy
who actually did it. We'll talk about that too, because again,
(20:31):
it because two different people who were there on the
day they killed Bin Laden were both there with the
primary purpose for them being to write a book about
it later. They both like fucked up and broke the
rules and broke ranks and left their colleagues exposed during
the raid to try to get there faster to shoot
him so that they could write a book about it.
It's very funny, and that's all downstream of Rogue Warrior, right,
(20:55):
Like Marsenko not only starts Team six, but he establishes
that this is a way to make a fuck load
of mind after you get out of it and see us. Right,
So again, don't take anything he says in this literally
and assume a degree of artistic license. When Maarsenko describes
that his family was too poor to buy boots to
pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Right. I don't doubt
that they were poor, but he's probably exaggerating a little bit.
(21:17):
From an early age, Richard seems to have identified with
his maternal grandfather, Joe Pavlick, who he described as a cantankerous, short,
barrel chested, shot in a beer, hard drinking son of
a bitch with a square face and landed bresnev eyebrows
who worked the minds all his life and never complained
about it once. Maybe this guy existed, right. If he didn't,
you know, then Marsenko just invented this personality to graft
(21:39):
on to a real guy because it was way more convenient. Right.
This is part of he he has. This is a
political work in part for him too, So a lot
of his book is him outlining the guys he considers.
These are examples of good people, These are examples of.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Bad people, right right, right right. It's also like that's
that's what everyone sees their grandpaias.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yeah, to take yeah, maybe it's that because this this
sounds like maybe how you'd idealize a person, But this
is not how you describe like a real person. You knew, well,
this is a description of a character in a screenplay. Right,
here's here's Richard again. He was a real hell raiser,
one of those archetypal tough guys you see in working
class bars with big white labor toughened hands that look
as if they were designed to go around old fashioned
(22:19):
beer glasses. That's all aesthetic. He's not telling us anything
about what his grandpa actually did or like he said,
He's just talking about like his hands and how he's
like an archetypal tough guy in a working class bar.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
That's just not that doesn't sound real to me. That's
not how like well or that way scrape that surface.
That's like fucking three thousand guys in that town of
fire exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
That's a picture. That's not a man right anyway. Richard
says that he was independent from a young age. Right.
His his family is not very functional, right, His parents
are fighting all of the time, and so he's just
kind of doing his own shit. He starts working his
own paper out at age five. By age seven, he
says he's leaving on his own for a day or
two at a time to explore the woods and the
(23:06):
wilderness around him. He claims his parents weren't big on
education and says his dad probably dropped out of school
around eighth grade, while his mom may have gotten a
ninth or tenth and that I don't I don't doubt.
I mean that's true of my grandparents, right, I mean
my grandpa. I think I had an eighth grade education. Yeah.
I haven't found any accounts that contrast with this, So again,
(23:27):
I don't have trouble taking him stuff is read. Yeah.
When he was in seventh grade, the mines closed down,
and so his family had to move to New Brunswick.
Because the school was so diverse, he writes he got
into a series of fights walking to and from class.
His uncle moved in with them at one point after
he had a brother, and the five of them had
to cram into a small apartment. Richard remembered his parents
fighting constantly, and since his uncle would take his mom's side,
(23:49):
his dad kind of stopped showing up at home. All
the unrest furthered Dick's tradition of avoiding his family. As
he became an adolescent, he got a series of odd
jobs pin setter for a bowling alley altr boy, and
as an adolescent he worked as a waiter at a
lunch place near the Rutgers campus. He claims to have
worked one hundred and twenty hours a week during the summer.
He says the Italian owner of the place treated him
(24:10):
like a son and started giving him wine, which Richard
developed a taste for, and by age thirteen, he was
a daily drinker. I also don't doubt this. Richard is
a hardcore alcoholic his entire life. This is certainly true.
When he was fifteen, Richard claims he pretended to be
an eighteen year old freshman at Rutgers and started dating
a young teacher named Lucette, who he met at a
fraternity party that he snuck into. The lie fell apart
(24:32):
when she was hired to fill in for a teacher
in his high school French class. He's like, dating this
girl and she shows up to teach at his high school.
I don't know if this is true.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
This is autobiography, Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
He does want you to think this is cool that
like he was I mean big statutorily raped by an adult,
but also that she didn't know. That's part of why
I kind of doubt it is he thinks this is
all awesome, and he's telling you this because he thinks
it makes him look cool that he's getting laid like
hell when he's a kid. So by the time of
his senior year, Richard was no longer showing up to
(25:09):
class at all. He claims that he was dating an
Italian woman quote married to a guy twenty seven years
her senior and in serious need of vigorous humping and pumping. Again.
This is from his autobiography.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
I hated that it's.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
This is certainly this kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Absolutely, eventually he dropped out of high school. And this
is almost the first specific detail of his life that
we can independently verify. He definitely drops out of high school.
I can check that office by in the Bastard's True
Fact about Richards, he tried to join the Marine Corps.
At this point, Eisenhower had just sent the Marines to Lebanon,
(25:50):
and Richard wrote, after seeing them on TV, I liked
their dress, blues and their swords. So he shows up
at a USMC recruiting office and he asks the sergeant
what can I do? I want to get a gun
and go shoot a few bad guys? How can I
do that? And the sergeant and it tells you how
like insane, Richard must have appeared, because recruiting sergeants will
say anything to get you to sign that paper. And
(26:10):
this guy's like, well, you gotta graduate high school. We
don't just hand a gun to you, right, Like, he's
clearly off put by this kid, Like dudes who joined
the Marine Corps will tell you how hard it is
to make a recruiting sergeant not want to get you
to sign that paper immediately.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
You have to seem insane, right, This will hurt me
to pass him on more than it will to get
the additional number.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Jesus Christ, my conscience won't allow this, and I'm a
recruiting sergeant, right. So Richard says that he got disheartened
after this because he knew by the time he did
all of the training shit that was required, the Lebanese
probably would be solved and he wouldn't get to shoot anybody.
So he decided not to join the Marines and fucks
off and spends the summer partying and getting laid. Richard
(26:56):
starts dating seriously for the first time at this point,
and he writes that when I wasn't caatting around with
other women, quote, I discovered that we liked each other.
That's how he describes falling in love. Is what I
wasn't cheating on her. I had a good time with her. Yeah,
that's love for Richard.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Good for him. I'm mostly good for her, especially good
for her.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah. The less time you spend with this guy is
probably on the whole helping you. Regardless, Richard abandons her
that fall when she goes well, I mean, I don't know,
they break up, right, she goes to college and he
volunteers for the Navy. I shouldn't call that him abandoning her.
That's a pretty natural split at that age. He reports
for duty in October nineteen fifty eight and goes to
boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. In the great book
(27:39):
Code Over Country, Matthew Cole writes, shortly after enlisting Marsinko,
a radio man saw The Frogmen, the nineteen fifty one
movie film depicting UDT Force heroics in World War Two,
and knew he needed to join the underwater demolitions teams.
So we need to talk about the UDTs, right, the
underwater demolitions teams, because while Richard was living his first
(28:00):
five years of life, right, that's during World War Two,
forty to forty five, military history was being revolutionized by
the formalization of a kind of unit that had always existed,
special operations forces. Right, These have always been a part
of warfare and every society and every place that's done
formal war. Right, you could look at the Greeks who
hid in the Trojan Horse is like an example, whether
(28:20):
or not that was literally true, that's an example of
like a kind of operation that an early operator would
carry out, right, the kind of elite highly trained soldier,
spies and assassins that would do the work that modern
states have specops guys to do. Right, this has always
been a thing, and during World War Two, the development
of technology mandated the creation of highly trained soldiers capable
(28:40):
of extremely niche operations, particularly doing complicated underwater shit. In
the United States because this happens like the British have,
you know, the sas and shit like this. This is
independently happening in a number of places. The Germans have
the Fauschworm yeggers, which a lot of I mean a
lot of American special forces culture is descended from these,
different from Nazi special forces units, right, yeah, as well,
(29:03):
unsurprising unsurprised. Just like a lot of they were very
influential in a lot of like small unit tactic development,
and for the US, a lot of this process started
in the Pacific. The storming of Bettio Island by the
second Marine Division in the tarahua A Toll was a
hideously bloody affair. And the reason why it was such
a fuck up is basically they calculated the tide because
you need to know what the tide's going to be
(29:23):
to like have the boats moving in the proper way
to get all of the dudes on shore at the
right time so that one set of them isn't exposed
and just getting shot to shit. Right, But there was
a special kind of tide that day that if they'd
had someone out ahead of the landing boats who could
have gone back and said, hey, it's a different kind
of tide you need to all, then it would have
avoided a horrible bloody situation.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
And so the Navy decides we need specialist divers who
can scout out coastal areas ahead of a landing, measure
the depth of exactly figure out the tide, find and
disabled minds before landing craft come in. Right, like these
are our our first real special forces units. So the
Navy had started training underwater demolitions teams before Tarahua, and
(30:07):
these guys are more commonly known at the time as frogmen.
That's like the colloquial term. And they're cool, by the way,
like kids in World War Two are like reading feverishly
stories about Navy frogmen. These are some of the like
some of the first g I. Joe's are fraud are.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
The coolest, like g I Joe mentality. You need a
water guy, you need an nice guy, a fly guy.
Need a guy that looks like rocks.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Yes, it looks like rops for some reason. So the
first men in the line of descent of the Navy
seals where Navy cebe volunteers who took special training in
Fort Pierce, Florida to learn how to fulfill this new role.
Because the work of the underwater demolition teams was known
to be so demanding and difficult, officers and enlisted members
(30:53):
of these units went through the same training and were
expected to handle the same tasks and work together in
units so small that you couldn't have the addition will
divide between officers and enlisted men. One thing that's noted
as being weird about frogmen is they all just called
each other by their first names, right, And you're not
supposed to do that in the normal milk. Now that said,
I have known some people who were in units that
would say that, like, after months of heavy combat, you
(31:15):
kind of stop, some of that stuff matters a lot
less right, right, and a lot of like right. In
the book Alpha, which is a great read about Navy
coal alleged war criminal Eddie Gallagher, author David Phillips writes
this about the first Frogmen. They've been formed from civilian
workmen in the New Deal nineteen forties America, and they
embraced the eras in formal attitudes of blue collar solidarity
(31:36):
and equality. So these men were soldiers, right, But they
also carried no weapon besides a fixed blade diving knife,
which is a major thing that differentiates them. These guys
are badasses, and they are widely renowned, but not because
of their killing ability. That is not at all why
they're like respected, right, They're expected because the thing that
they have to do is both totally necessary for the
(31:57):
success of naval operations and insane leadings. During D Day,
UDT swimmers with the very first people ashore at Omaha
Beach and had to clear the way for landing craft
with zero cover. And again for an idea, these guys
are not in a boat. They are swimming ashore in
like shorts with a knife and flippers. Maybe right, They're
(32:18):
basically naked, and they're swimming directly into guns. Fifty two
percent of the unit were made casualties in a single day,
a rate of loss no normal military unit could be
expected to endure without complete collapse. The Frogmen proved incredibly
valuable in World War Two, and obviously more in the
Pacific theater than the Atlantic, and because of this they
were allowed to live by different rules than other soldiers.
(32:40):
Phillips notes that they had little use for discipline that
regular troops were expected to live under. They refused to
shave their hair, wear proper uniforms, march or salute as
a rule. Officers outside the unit complained that they looked
like criminals and hooligans, not soldiers. But from the book Alpha,
they were not an attack force. They were a crew
of workmen out to do an insane They could be
(33:01):
as crazy as they wanted, right, and that is then
that's still a big part of the And it's not
a problem really in World War two, right, because, for
one thing, what they're doing is objectively heroic and good.
I'm not just talking about the cause of the war.
They're not doing anything to harm like, they're not killing
people directly. They're protecting their fellows soldiers and risking their
(33:23):
own lives to do it. Right.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
It's sort of like the engineering version of the medic Yes, yes,
they're doing logistics under fire.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
And there is like demolitions work that does kill people
that they do, but that's not the primary thing that
they are they're up to, and it was not easy
to train men to do this kind of work. From
Code over Country quote. The final week of training culminated
with the men forced to do a trench on the
Atlantic beach while explosives were set off nearby for an hour.
The goal was to ensure that each man that they
would send into enemy water had proved they could handle
(33:53):
the stress. Many couldn't. Between sixty and seventy five percent
dropped out by the end of the week. Right. And
a part of what they're doing and the way they
will frame it is we're looking for men who are
immune to shell shock. Now that's not a thing. Your
brain is affected by it or it isn't. But depending
on the explode, the force of the blast, and how
close you are. But some people are like better at
handling it and not collapsing until much later it destroys them. Right,
(34:17):
So this is the start of hell Week, which is
still a very famous part. I'm sure it's the thing
everybody knows about Navy seels right right now, we know
that exposure to explosives like this causes CTE. But again
at the time, was that this is like hardening them
and showing like who's immune to shell shock?
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Sub stuff gets hardened, some stuff gets softened, you know.
He has to.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Say, Now, we'd never really trained a unit like this before,
and this was also a top secret unit because we
didn't want the enemy to know like what these guys
were capable of doing. And those two facts together bred
an immediate kind of elitism within the ranks of the
guys who made it through training. The first UDT training
leader was Lieutenant Commander Draper Kaufman, and he was a
(34:57):
very observant man because so many want to be washed
out and because UDT swimmers weren't held to the same
expectations of discipline. They had a tendency to view themselves
as better than their peers. As coal rights, Kaufman and
his officers were concerned that elitism would pervade their ranks,
but the needs of the war won out, and this
problem would only get worse in the years to come.
(35:17):
Post war stories of these formerly secret elite units captured
the imaginations of countless young Americans, and in the wake
of World War Two, the brass and our growing military
industrial complex saw opportunity. The Pentagon had partnered with Hollywood
during the war years to spread propaganda. Now that the
Cold War was beginning, our national propaganda needs had changed.
Military planners felt the wars of the future could be
(35:39):
won by air power, with anything on the ground handled
by small, elite teams of highly trained soldiers. In nineteen
fifty one, a Navy Hollywood partnership produced The Frogmen, which
starred Richard Widmark and was designed to make UDT teams
look fucking awesome. This is one of the very first
like Hollywood US military joint production propaganda movies, and the
(36:00):
original theatrical trailer for this classic is still on YouTube,
and I have to assume that Richard saw the trailer
as a kid too, So here's a clip to give
you an idea of what must have been appealing about
this to the young man.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
From top secret records filmed with the cooperation of the
Department of Defense, comes the thrilling story of these pin footed,
gogglelied beach blasting heroes. They fight like men from another world,
but they've got Brooklyn, Texas, and Missouri written all over
their hearts.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
You're a brave man, all of you are.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
You wouldn't be in this outfit. Nobody questions that.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
But your kind of bravery comes ten cents a dozen.
That isn't worth a hoot mall when the chips are.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
Down, it's great.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
So I love this fifty shit.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
It's so like fascinating to put yourself back in the
audience mindset of like in cooperation with the US Navy
being like a positive thing, like what jucks.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Well and honestly like that whole thing about like they've
got you know, Texas and you know all their the
home state's written all and just like yeah, there is
something that does a little like these are like the
original Frogmen were just working class men forced by circumstances
to endure insane danger in an overall noble struggle, and
that's pretty cool, right, And they could not be further
(37:16):
from modern day Navy seals, right, The modern seals are
descended from these guys, not at all alike, honestly, really, now,
young Richard Marsenko sees this movie and he loses his shit.
He remembers it having lots of action, lots of heroism,
and lots of songs. One of these songs was the
official UDT team fight song, which ended with these words
(37:36):
out in front of the Navy, where you really get
the heat. There's a bunch of crazy bastards pulling off
some crazy feet. And that's that line, particularly those last
two lines, that just completely writes over Richard's mind, like
that's software that just reprograms his fucking brain. Right. He
never wants to be seen as anything else for the
(37:57):
rest of his days. So Richard, who basically parented himself
half his childhood, finds his really appealing, and he specifically
recalls thinking, hey, I could do that after leaving the theater,
and his logic for thinking this was, I mean, I
was a reasonably aggressive sort of person. I'm really violent.
That job looks great for me.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Now.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Richard had to spend a couple of years living the
life of a normal enlisted sailor before he was able
to try out for the UDT teams. They don't just
let you join and do that. His first attempt was
foiled by a broken hand, and his second was, according
to him, nearly thwarted by his commanding officer, who he
describes as, oh boy, the ugliest female I had ever
set eyes on in my life. I called her the
(38:40):
big female, ugly commander, or big fuck for short. Cool
Now you know that's what.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
It didn't go where I thought it was gonna go.
How could you have guessed where that was at it?
How could you have guessed maybe this lady existed? I
can't disprove that. It does kind of seem a little
un likely, but it's not impossible. Women were first allowed
to enlist in the Navy in nineteen oh eight, but
initially only as nurses. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels,
who was weirdly woke for nineteen seventeen, famously asked, is
(39:11):
there any law that says a yeoman must be a
man right? Is there any law that says like a
young sailor has to be like a man, and he
started letting ladies join the Naval Reserve while men.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Were away during World War One. In World War Two,
a separate women's naval auxiliary was created. The waves and
they have like the wax is the Air Corps version, right.
The Waves and the wax are like the kind of
ladies auxiliary during World War Two and postwar the Women's
Armed Services Integration Act brings women into the armed forces properly,
but obviously, and they're still limited today in what roles
(39:40):
they can serve, less than they were then. The first
female Navy officers had just been commissioned in nineteen forty eight,
and so fifty eight is when this is all happening.
Marsinko could have had a lady CEO, right, but it
seems likelier that this is a lie he created because
this caricature of a lady officer symbolizes everything wrong with
what he called big Navy. Right. This is also a
(40:02):
term you'll hear in the Seals to this day, big navy.
And I think Richard, I'm not sure if he's the
origin point, but he's certainly one of them, So yeah,
I don't know how seriously should we should take this,
But this is something that like he wants us to believe.
Richard writes, quote big Fuck was also a rule book creature,
and he will later decide that basically all of the
(40:23):
Navy's problems comes from people following the rules too strictly.
And the book Brave Men, Dark Waters or Kelly writes
that some of the guys who served with Marsenko would
later claim that as a second class radio man, he
bragged that he would one day be the chief of
Naval operations. So you know, he's got a mouth on
him and he thinks he's hot shit. But soon he's
(40:43):
going to get like the chance to prove that he is,
because he gets transferred to the UDT training. I don't
know why he claims that he beats off. First he
beats up one of his peers for being a whiner,
and then that gets him into a fistfight with his
chief petty officer, who he beats up so badly that
he gets transferred to UDT training to keep everyone else safe.
And I think that's a lie. I don't think that's true.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
That's famously how that works.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah, I think that's the kind of lie. A guy
like Richard Barcicata tells, God, I do I have an
uncle who punched his training officer in the Marine Corps.
And he does not have a cool story like that.
He has a he got the ship beat out of
him and in major trouble, major major trouble story.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Yeah. Oh, I was just too too tough. They had,
they had too much.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
They had to put me in the un to protect
the others. Now, you know who I want to protect? Really,
the only thing I want to protect. You know, if
the Navy Seals are there to protect America from terrorism,
then I'm the Navy Seals of protecting these products and
services from you not listening to them. Yeah, that works.
(41:49):
That's an ad transition, and we're back. So Richard claims
he got transferred to UDT training, right, and he does.
You know, I just don't know exactly what leads to that.
He completes his UDT training in nineteen sixty one. This
(42:10):
is a decade after The Frogmen was released. That same year,
President John F. Kennedy authorized the Pentagon to examine ways
to develop new counter guerrilla forces. This included establishing new
special Operations teams as separate components of the existing underwater
demolitions teams. And this is what like JFK is while
we have the Navy Seals, right, he's effectively the father
(42:31):
of the Navy Seals right now. The failure of the
Bay of Pigs invasion in mid nineteen sixty one prompted
Kennedy to address Congress, and everyone remembers the bits where
he stated his plan for the US to put a
man on the moon. But Kimmy also asserted that the
country needed to prepare to fight the new kinds of
proxy wars that had come to define the Cold War.
These next generation Frogmen would need to be trained and
(42:51):
armed to fight gorilla conflicts, assassinating local leaders in military
figures and carrying out acts of sabotage and then blending
back into the jungle or the wilderness. Ever, right, Captain
William Hamilton Junior, a UDT man from World War Two
who was one of the people who was tasked with
creating the Navy Seals, describe the kind of men that
he was looking for to populate this new unit.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
So, at the birth of the Navy Seals, this is
like specifically the job description. They had to be more
than killers all muscle and neck and attack dog mentality.
I wanted demanded creative men who operated with their brains
as well as with their muscles. Men of courage, dedication
to duties, sacrifice, personal dexterity, and intelligence. Team and mission
must come first. At the same time, they must be
(43:34):
individuals near rogues, in fact, rough men, tough men who
could kick ass and operate outside protocol. And you can
see why you might want that, right, if you're looking
at a unit that's got to operate without support, you know,
for long periods of time. They have to be intelligent
and creative, and they have to have like knowledge outside
of what you'd expect from a normal soldier in order
to be able to kind of like pivot and think
(43:56):
on their feed. Right.
Speaker 4 (43:58):
It's but it's like the save as like finding an emperor.
It's like you need those things, but you don't want
anyone who would describe themselves as those things.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Right, And the other part of it, you need those things,
But the training is basically is mostly like are you
okay with guys screaming at you and blowing stuff up
next to you and yelling at you while you're really cold? Right?
And that doesn't necessarily like guarantee that they'll be able
to do all these things. And part of the issue
is that you will all there will always be guys
like this in the Seals who are legitimately like just
(44:28):
incredibly talented and skilled and have a like wide variety
of knowledge. But there's also guys who are there because
they really just want to kill people, right. And this
the fact that from the beginning they're like, well, we
understand that these guys have to be kind of like rogues.
There's to be like a criminal element to them if
they're going to be able to do the job, right.
That that was baked into the Seals from the beginning,
(44:49):
and it has always been a cause of problems for them.
And it's because they they this, like Richard is going
to be this guy to a fucking tea, right, one
of these rough men of the criminal element. Yeah, Like
it's it's They couldn't have made the job more perfectly
for how he saw himself. Richard attended UDT class twenty six.
(45:10):
Twenty percent of his teammates passed the intense training, so
most people dropped out, including he noted in his autobiography
with Glee, most of the officers. They just couldn't take it.
He would claim, he found that perversely enjoyable. Again, he
really he's going to be an officer later, but he
really hates officers, like very performatively. After four weeks he graduates.
Training for the Seals at that point involved none of
(45:32):
the diving instruction that it like previously had and that
it would later have. Right, they're not really learning to
be swimmers at this point nearly as much as they
had in the past and would in the future. And
Dick's largest difficulty during training came with the courtesy of
his bowels. Here's the book Rogue Warrior. I had a
problem with hell week, I developed a case of the runs.
In today's navy that would probably be enough to get
(45:53):
me excused. Not in nineteen sixty one, they stopped for nothing.
The solution was speed. I discovered as they ran me
up and down the beach that if I ran and
fast enough, the smell of what ran down my leg
and into my boot get left behind for the next
boat crew to enjoy.
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Oh man, so he right? So he was just in
a soft, permissive era. Yeah, and and oh god.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Well he was in an era where all they cared
about was like, can you handle the physical difficulty of
the right Like, we don't care if you're like mentally fit,
if you're crazy, if you're like an asshole, like are
you are you comfortable shitting yourself while running? Basically it's
the primary determining factor. And so he's laughing like a
lot of these smarter guys who probably have a lot
(46:35):
of the other skills that might be useful, aren't tough
enough to make it through whereas he is. And this
is this is always going to be a factor of
pride for him. So after he graduates Hell Week, he
writes that he and his classmates were confident as five
hundred dollars hookers. They were sent for ten weeks of
training at Saint Thomas and given he claims, unlimited women,
a never ending supply of aged booze and fresh lobsters,
and all the deadly toys you could ever want to
(46:56):
play with. I don't really know how accurate that is
to Navy seal training if they give you a limited
liquor and women, But I believe the deadly toys.
Speaker 4 (47:05):
That's like Blowfeld style. That's like like how Goldfinger recruits. Also,
I watched us with the lobster of mister soft stomach.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Come on, yeah, you should be.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
In lobster right now. Man, he got the runs. I
think I might know why. He makes repeated mentions of
his drinking in this book about once a page in
his In the opening of his autobiography, Marcinko talks about
how much he likes to drink. A little earlier, when
describing the kinds of men who made it through hell weak,
he mentioned that some guys like him spent all of
their downtime at the bar. The reality is that he
(47:42):
was a hardcore alcoholic who at this point was already
beginning to drink problematically and would be addicted his entire
working life and Special Forces. Despite his constant complaining about
how bad officers are, Richard almost immediately got his high
school equivalency exam and went through OCS so that he
could become an officer. So much his book is talking
and then he goes through like and then I became
(48:02):
an officer, But I had to like study the officers
like they were aliens to learn how to become one.
But I never really became one. You know, I just
got the rank, but that was never me.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
You know right, he's just a tough guy trying to
get ahead. Bro.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think he's trying to protest too much. Now,
as a reminder, the Seals don't exist. I just had
sealed dright, They're still not quite they gets It's still
like it's nineteen sixty two. So it's like the year
after this train the Seals are officially formed. So's he's
kind of in a similar situation to like a former
governor Jesse Ventura, like Venturias a little earlier, but Venture
(48:36):
was udt and then it gets kind of grandfathered in
as a seal. Right, So the new seal unit would
be similar to the old in some ways. The standard
unit of organization was still the number of men who
could fit on a small boat, five enlisted and an officer.
The name seal came from their expected area of expertise
sea and land operations. They're insignia was the tritent with
(48:58):
a flintlock and an eagle on it, because people immediately
are like that kind of looks like the Budweiser logo,
so people call it the Budweiser Two. Captain Hamilton, who
handled training at first for these Navy seals wanted creative,
criminal minded men. He sent his first team members to
take classes from former thieves to learn safe cracking and
hot wiring vehicles. This was all justifiable by the parameters
(49:22):
of the jobs he expected they'd be assigned. What kind
of jobs would the Navy need a bunch of heavily trained,
heavily armed criminals to accomplish? You might ask, Well, let's
talk about that. Who do you think was the first
outside US governmental organization to see the potential in a
unit of killers with criminal training, who were unaccountable to
a standard hierarchy. Who do you think found that really appealing?
Speaker 3 (49:46):
I mean, Scott a FBI at the time.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
Right, Nah, it's a CIA, It's the CIA. It's the CIA. Yeah. Now,
the CIA had recently inaugurated something called the Phoenix Program
in Vietnam. This classified operation was based on the widespread
belief that the Vietcong were only able to function because
there was this shadow network of supporters in South Vietnam
that enabled them, and the best way to defeat the
(50:10):
insurgency was to kill these people. So as early as
nineteen sixty seventh, the year that Marsenko first shipped to Vietnam,
as a seal, his job was carrying out Phoenix missions
all over the warfront. CIA informants would provide the agency
with info and they'd send it to the seals, who
would murder, kidnap, and ambush whoever they thought they needed to.
Each of these raids would gather more intel which would
(50:32):
be used to plan further murders and raids. And we
call it a different thing now, but this is how
counter terrorism strategy in US Special Forces worked in Afghanistan
and Iraq too. Basically it hasn't changed since Project like
elements of it. They try to do less war crimes
sometimes now than the old Project fucking Phoenix guys did,
but it's the same basic idea. Right, you do raige,
(50:54):
you gather info, you do more raids, and you often
just wind up murdering guys, right, Yeah, both in Vietnam
and Inner it's just often just murder squads.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Right right, right, right, right, sort of some stasy type shit.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Yeah, you're kind of just trying to at a certain level,
it becomes just we're killing as many of the male
population in this area as we can. That's Vietnam, that's Iraq,
and that's Afghanistan. Right, This isn't really debatable.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
Right, and eventually we'll win. Eventually.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
It hasn't worked ever, but like it's got it at
some points, we'll kill her kill our way to the
bottom of this barrel. Now we'll talk about how well
all of this works in Vietnam and for Richard Marsenko
and and later. But I think this is a good
place to end Part one. How are you feeling, Andrew
t You think the Navy seals are gonna gonna pull
it together and and become.
Speaker 3 (51:46):
I mean, they're only getting worse.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
So yeah, yeah, it's really all downhill from World War Two.
But that's American military history in a nutshell.
Speaker 3 (51:54):
It's true.
Speaker 4 (51:57):
World War Two is sort of our batman begins like
set a tone that actually every subsequent thing based off
it really really fucked us as a as a global concern.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's pretty bleak. Yeah,
I don't know, but hey, it's those frogmen were pretty cool.
You know, you know who else is pretty cool? Andrew?
You thanks plug your pluggables.
Speaker 3 (52:23):
Yeah, you know what, well, if we just kind of
YadA YadA.
Speaker 4 (52:26):
Our way that a twenty third century you could just
go to Star Trek times.
Speaker 3 (52:31):
Yeah, I don't know, Andrew t Starter Trek. That's it.
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (52:38):
Please listen if you like it. We're really having fun
doing it. And yeah, it's really and it's on YouTube also,
that's the thing I will.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Speaking of Special Forces and Star Trek, one of my
favorite episodes of T ANDNG is the episode where they
like accidentally take on like a crazed Special Forces operative
from some alien race that has been like arrested by
his own people because they may them to good at killers.
And you know, he's on like a a He's on
like a ship full of Starfleet people who are like
really good utopian people and are absolutely not prepared to
(53:09):
deal with them. It's a fun episode.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
It's sort of like Rambo. It's like they just drop
on board.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
It's like they dropped Rambo in like a kindergarten. It's
just wharf is not prepared.
Speaker 3 (53:24):
All right, I can't wait. We'll have you on for that.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
Great.
Speaker 1 (53:28):
We'll be back with part two.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
Bye PCE.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes,
but Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping
every Tuesday and Thursday. Remind me on Netflix you don't
miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog,
(53:56):
continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com
slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about forty percent
of you, statistically speaking,
Cool Media.
Speaker 2 (00:05):
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the only podcast that
you're listening to right now unless you have multiple sets
of ears or have had some sort of invasive surgery
to like add additional like like hearing organs to your
body so that your life is one undifferentiated cacophony of noise.
(00:25):
And if you have done that, why.
Speaker 1 (00:27):
Why okay, because I could produce more podcasts. It would
make me.
Speaker 2 (00:31):
So you are the one person who needs that's right,
that's right, wire all of the audio directly into your brain.
Speaking of things I want to wire into my brain.
Andrew T one of my very favorite guests, how are
you doing Buddies?
Speaker 3 (00:48):
That's available that we could probably make that a product.
Speaker 1 (00:50):
And it is also so long and luscious now I know.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
And moderate, that's right.
Speaker 4 (00:58):
Yeah, Summer summer, it's maybe never going to stop being
summer in Southern California.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
It is always summer in Southern California.
Speaker 3 (01:07):
At this point, maybe perpetually.
Speaker 4 (01:10):
I had the most distressing thing that happened to me
is I went to Santa Barbara and distressing but not.
Speaker 3 (01:17):
I guess Box.
Speaker 4 (01:18):
Crab is now very very readily available in Santa Barbara.
Speaker 3 (01:22):
When it didn't used to be necessarily in such.
Speaker 2 (01:26):
Box.
Speaker 4 (01:26):
Crab box crab like the animal Yeah, okay, that was
like a restaurant.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Okay, likely the animal box.
Speaker 4 (01:35):
No, the animal is available to the little delicious spiky
guys and the way the like Fisher guy and the
like restaurant people were talking. I mean, they know it's
climate change, but I think they're like.
Speaker 3 (01:49):
They're trying not to talk about it.
Speaker 2 (01:52):
It's just like it bums everybody out all of a sudden.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
I guess, I don't know. Crab's just decided they want
to live here now, a lot.
Speaker 2 (02:00):
Of stuff suddenly changed. Well, Andrew, you are normally you've
put it on pause. You're the host of a podcast
called yo is this racist? That's correct, that's right, and
you are you are pausing it to do a Star
Trek show with Tony and Jesse gender right, Yeah, we're we're.
Speaker 4 (02:19):
I think we can I cleanly say we're we're doing
the Star Trek show as the main thing is this
racist might come back, But yeah, we're doing Starter Trek.
That's a show where Tawny and Jesse are huge. Tawny
was on Star Trek, Jesse loves Star Trek and knows
so much about it, they moved no more than me
because I only ever watched Star Trek extremely Stoned in syndication,
(02:41):
so I recognize shit. Basically every episode is me doing
the Leonardo DiCaprio meme of like pointing out the screen
like I know that, but I don't understand it, like
it's been in my eyes before, but I don't know
what the fuck it is, or what the context is
or what the So.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
Well, that is exciting, but I figured this week we
could give yo, is this racist? Fans one last little
hurrah because I want to ask you and is this racist? Question?
Speaker 4 (03:11):
Oh?
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Good? Hell yeah, yeah, I'll bring back Yo's this racist?
Just for here?
Speaker 2 (03:17):
Is this racist? The Navy seals?
Speaker 3 (03:22):
I listen.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
My only like experience with this train of thought is
that the people people generally say that like law enforcement
and military, the higher up you get, like the closer
to boots on the ground like regular ass like you know,
(03:44):
guys with no impulse control and anger issues boots on
the ground, the more racist it is. So I think
there's my guess is I feel like there's a chance
that it's less racist than your average.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
That is, that's actually not true at least in regards
the US military, and I mean, how we determine the
amount of racism and something. But the military as a
whole is fairly diverse. Like the US military is a
very diverse institution. Special Forces, particularly the highest echelots of
special Forces, are a lot wider than the rest of
(04:18):
the military to a degree that's kind of uncomfortable when
you also look at like where some former Delta guys
who are now political figures and some former Seals wind
up we're not. This episode is not actually about the
Navy Seals as a whole, but we are talking about
Seal Team six. This is going to be a two
part episode because I want to talk about how Seal
(04:40):
Team six went from like, you know, another special Forces
unit where they were The term you would hear a
lot was like quiet professionals. You know, these guys are
incredibly good at what they do and they don't talk
about it, because that's kind of the point of like
special ops right to now like every third Navy Seal
it's or at least Team six guy, it seems like,
has a fucking book and a podcast. Yeah, all over
(05:01):
the media. They're running their fucking Republican Congress people, you know,
So how did we get there? And how did we
simultaneously get to the point where like, the Navy Seals
are now way better known for their scandals, for shit
like Eddie Gallagher stabbing a sixteen year old kid in
the neck for a re enlistment ceremony and mosel than
(05:22):
they are for even like fucking killing Bin Laden. And
all of this comes back like the reason why all
of the ship with the Navy Seals is as messy
and is as fame hungry and as grimy as it
is today. It all starts with the guy who founded
Seal Team six, a fella I can't wait to tell
you about, named Richard Marsenko. Have you ever heard of Richard?
Speaker 3 (05:42):
Nope?
Speaker 2 (05:43):
Oh? Yeah, well this is this is this is going
to be a hoot.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yeah, I can't wait.
Speaker 2 (05:54):
So before we talk about him, I want to kind
of lead you in to the reason I will to
talk about this at all, which is that the Navy
Seals and like the kind of Special Forces look, the
operator look, is one of the more dominant like styles
in American pop culture these days. And this is you
can see this all over the fucking internet if you
(06:15):
happen to be particularly a male who has looked up
anything related to firearms or survival gear or talk about
that stuff.
Speaker 4 (06:23):
Sharpie, I just say, sharp that's how my YouTube algorithm
about poison. I literally was trying to learn how to
sharpen knives during very valuable skill immediately like within likeness.
Speaker 3 (06:37):
It was like Nazi shit. It was incredible.
Speaker 2 (06:39):
Actually yeah, And so if you're if you have done
stuff like that on the internet, you've probably run across
ads on your social media feed that looks something like this,
And Sophie's going to put it out. It's an ad
for it, says the Pipe Hitters Union. They're advertising their
spring break special fifteen percent off store wide. And there's
like a picture behind the ad of you can just
sort of see close in the center of a man's chest.
(07:01):
He's wearing body armor. He's got like a tattooed hand
and it's holding he's holding an AR fifteen across his
chest and like a low ready right, and the.
Speaker 1 (07:10):
Pipe Hitters Union, Honey.
Speaker 2 (07:12):
Yeah, yes, this is he's got. You can also see
his like chin, there's a slight shadow of a beard.
This is like a very clear sort of tactical apparel look,
which is based on the look of you as Special
Forces operators. Now, the fact that this business sells tactical
and special Forces themed apparel should be obvious from the
(07:35):
context of the ad. But what are pipe hitters? Have
you guys heard that term before?
Speaker 4 (07:40):
I just assumed it was just you know, weed smokers, bro.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
That and just I've heard that in a girly pop conversation.
Speaker 2 (07:50):
No, definitely not, That's not what it means. So the
short answer for what pipe hitters are is it's a
modern synonym for like a Special Forces badass who kills
people for the US government. And the long answer is
that pipe hitters are a big like pipe hitters are
why the US can't win wars anymore. Right, the pipe
hitter ethos and ideology has locked us into this sort
of I would argue this kind of mental way of
(08:13):
looking at how conflict should proceed that makes us incapable
of actually winning most of the fights that we start. Anyway,
it would be accurate to point out that the term
pipe pitter has now crossed into the civilian world, as
this ad shows, and become a general way for guys
who think they're badasses to brand themselves now, much like
the word based. The term's origins start in drug lingo,
(08:34):
which also, by the way, special forces massive drug problems,
like there's a fuck load of drug issues all across you.
A Special Forces and a pipe hitter. Originally, the lingo
originally is someone who smoked, particularly opium from a pipe,
although some people will say crack. But I do think
it's more from opium, just based on when it started
(08:55):
being said. And here's in Afghanistan, pres right, I mean,
and before Yeah, but I think Vietnam too. But here's
how The Soldier's Project describes the military origins of the phrase.
It gained widespread popularity among the Special Forces and Seals
after it was featured in the iconic movie Pulp Fiction.
The term was associated with someone who could be depended
(09:16):
upon in the midst of combat, and the military usage
of the term pipe hitter was initially a description heavily
trained operators used for themselves. It was an internal term, right,
if you were a Green Beret or a Seal guy,
a Seal Team guy, right, or a Delta guy, you
might call yourself and your buddies a pipe or pipe hitters, right.
But today it's more commonly an aspirational term used by
(09:37):
people who are desperate to embody it, and usually seek
to do so for buying things right. Here's a fun
example from the student of the Gun Company, which offers
tactical training and books like The Pipe Hitter's Guide to
The Citizens Are Regular Defense Corps for ten ninety nine.
What a deal. And you can see the cover of
this self published book. There's like four schlubby looking dudes
(09:59):
with it looks like AK various AK style guns and
like quasi civilian tactical gear in like a grayscale, foggy
photo of a city behind the kind of post apocalyptic.
And the best way I can describe like the way
these men are dressed is like it's race rioter chic,
right like the Yeah, that's how they all look. They're
all dressed like Kyle Rittenhouse a little.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Or how Ytense thinks he's dressing.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
Yeah. Yeah. The product description of this book reads as follows.
Building upon the widespread popularity of the original Pipe Hitter's Guide,
this book will take the lessons from the original text
and build upon them. The Citizens Regular Defense Corps is
a modern incarnation of many successful programs used throughout history.
For the defense of a community during times of crisis,
and I intended to look out that first pipe Hitter's book,
and I found myself falling down a rabbit hole of
(10:46):
related text, including A Pipe Pitter's Guide to Access Denial
and A Pipe Pitter's Guide to Small Arms and Weapons.
Both of these are by Nicholas Or, and I had
to look into this guy, so I found Nicholas Or's
personal wayde And it turns out that name is quote
the nom de plume for a civilized Barbarian, a savage
gentleman with thirty plus years of operational and combat experience
(11:09):
in the United States and overseas. The author has carried
a gun during innumerable assignments worldwide as a member of
the United States Military, as a military contractor, and an
executive protection agent. I don't know if any of that's true.
It's not under a real name.
Speaker 4 (11:22):
He could just be like, yeah, I mean the small
like sliver of I don't know. Silver lining to all
this stuff is this is just like identical to the
like dim mock people in the eighties and nineties kind
of vibe the like blood sport guy, like all the
fa white like like white martial arts guys that.
Speaker 3 (11:44):
Could kill you with three moves.
Speaker 4 (11:46):
Yes, I guess what I mean is these guys have
always existed with basically the same gun, same mindset.
Speaker 2 (11:53):
And also they have always worshiped the Special Forces aesthetic,
and that has always been like the coolest thing in
that this guy hierarchy is a Special Forces dude or
a dude with Special Forces experience. And again, I don't
know if Nicholas or is ever served in the military.
This is just some dude fucking rebranding, like old military
(12:16):
training manuals to make a boxtreme strip right, exactly exactly,
But this guy's whole shtick is the perfect embodiment of
what pipe hitter has become. Right. It's a branding term
to sell the illusion of special, secret, Special Forces knowledge
and violent hypercompetence to insecure white dudes who feel like
they're like one book and maybe one gun away from
(12:36):
being like John Wick. Right, by a six thousand dollars
pistol and enough books about tactical shit, then maybe I'll
be that cool. And even before it reached the civilian word,
pipe pipe hitter as a term was an active branding
special Forces guys at the dawn of the g watt
the Global War on Terror took a term from a
popular recent movie and used it to define themselves how
(12:58):
they wanted to be seen as gruff tattooed badasses who
didn't follow the rules but got results. And that's why
when disgraced Navy c. L. Eddie Gallagher got off the
hook for the series of war crimes that he had
committed thanks to Donald President Donald Trump's intervention, he created
the Pipe Hitter Foundation. And Sophie will show you the
website for the pipe Hitter Foundation. But yeah, I mean
(13:19):
again for an idea, Eddie Gallagher, this guy was such
a fucking maniac. His colleagues were doing shit like shooting
above people's heads so that they would take cover so
that Eddie wouldn't murder them, because he was just shooting
every civilian he could find in mosl to try to
rack up a kill count that would let him like
market himself as the next Chris Kyle. Like that's that's
(13:40):
what this guy is alleged by a bunch of his
colleagues as having done right.
Speaker 1 (13:44):
Bad representation by ray Band here.
Speaker 2 (13:47):
But there's not any good representation.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
Watson, the main step up in the pipe pitter Ethos
is these meadow glasses to look like this and be
a like an easy creep.
Speaker 1 (14:03):
Bad representation for people named Andrea. Yeah, this website's amazing stuff.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
It's incredible, Jitre. We'll talk about Eddie in the very
end of these episodes because this a lot of what
we're talking about with both Richard Marsenko and with you know,
the history of kind of this, this conflict in Team
six between these quiet operators and these like maniac murderer
publicity house, right, is what Berth's Eddie Gallagher in a
lot of ways. Now, Special Forces guys have been seen
(14:31):
as cool pretty much since we invented them, but their
popularity really rocketed up after the Navy Seals killed Osama
bin Laden in twenty eleven, which is little ironic because
basically everyone is there was like, it's the easiest mission
we ever had. It was not hard, we were not
in the main danger was that we fucked up our
own helicopters because we didn't like the pilot was like,
if you're gonna land, you can't land a helicopter in
(14:52):
like I walled an environment like that, it'll fuck up
the rotors. And they were like, well, you're fired and
then the thing the guy said happened. Not quite as
professional as they often come across, but Yeah. Since twenty eleven,
the term has made his way back from the military
into movies like Sacario. That's kind of the first place
I seem to remember hearing it in like a pop
(15:13):
culture sense, and also the right, right, right, good movie.
And also a wide array of products marketed to civilians
who want to feel like more special, more like special
Forces dudes when they're at say the gym, you know.
Here's here's another example from the Pipe Hitters Union, right,
and my favorite is probably this original pipe Hitter T
shirt that shows this is part of like a series
(15:35):
where it's like the Founding Fathers reimagined as like special
Forces gangster badasses. You've got like fucking George Washington with
a tomahawk, and Teddy Roosevelt's got a machine gun across
his shoulder, he's like shirtless, heavily tattooed, he's got a
jug of hard liquor. Right, and you can you can
see in this ad how much this product line really
relies on the aesthetic of the operator and what the
(15:58):
aesthetic of the operator is because his Teddy's not depicted
as a regular soldier. He's got a gun over his shoulder,
he's shirtless, he's muscular, he's covered in tattoos, and he's
drunk carrying what looks to be a jug of moonshine.
And all of these elements, including constant illegal intoxication, are
central aspects of real life special forces culture. Now, I
would define the pipe hitter aesthetic today as a man
(16:20):
usually bearded, wearing weapons, armor and gear, but no uniform
so to speak, who operates as a soldier but is
unaccountable to anyone really. And today, every right wing influencer
who can pull off posing with a gun has tried
to ape this aesthetic at least a little bit. And
as an example, here's Andrew Tait posing for Instagram. He's
got the plate carrier, he's got a gun. He doesn't
(16:40):
have a beard, so he's got one of those skull
masks around his face. And by the way, his plate
carrier is riding too low. You want to have that
thing up higher. You see that there's like right underneath
its dumb. If you're watching this in the video, right
underneath where his maskins, there's like three or four inches
of open real estate before the armor starts. That's just like, well,
that's just your heart, bro, Like you want to have.
Speaker 3 (16:59):
That thing.
Speaker 1 (17:02):
Really dumb?
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Yeah, Now, skull the skullgator too big.
Speaker 2 (17:08):
Yeah, the skull gator is a big part of this
esthetic too for sure.
Speaker 3 (17:11):
Yeah. Sure.
Speaker 2 (17:12):
Now we're gonna look this week into the first pipeit
or the man who created the template for this kind
of guy and also who literally invented Seal Team six,
Richard Marsenko. Now, the Navy Seals were already well known
when an operator with Seal Team six killed on How
I'm Been Laden in a boat of Bad Pakistan. But
before that day they were simply among the best special
(17:33):
forces units that the US kept in its arsenal, and
in all honesty, prior to a Boata Bad, their public
record wasn't all that impressive really any sufficiently We'll talk
about that. Any sufficiently nerdy ROTC kid when I was
growing up would have told you that, like, well, Delta
Force is the more elite unit, right, That was certainly
like the the the the attitude then. But after Bin
(17:55):
Laden there was not really any question anymore. The Seals
and Team six in particular were the premier mill military
badasses of the American imagination. So yeah, anyway, I think
I've hyped this up enough. I'm going to start with
the story of ours this day. But first, here's some
fucking ads and we're back. Richard was born on November
(18:21):
twenty first, in nineteen forty in Lansford, Pennsylvania, in the
home of his grandmother. Now, his hometown was a mining
community and cole was the big business of the day.
His ancestors were check on both sides, and in his
autobiography he described the ethos of the men in his
family line and in Lansford as a whole. As they
were born, they worked the mines, they died, right, So
(18:44):
understandable that he's going to want to get out of
this right now. We'll be discussing his autobiography, Rogue Warrior,
not just as a historical document, because it's a terrible
historical document, but it is in and of itself an
important piece of history because the book wrote Warrior is
the first Navy seal tell all right. It is the
first true story book written by a former operator for
(19:07):
the purpose of turning himself into a brand. Right. There
were books about the seals before and by the way,
if you're looking for like a good book about the
seals in uh, because I used to know a seal team,
one guy who was fought in Vietnam, and the book
he recommended was that it was called Hunters and Trackers.
That was, like he said, was very true to his experience.
Marsinko's book covers Vietnam heavily, but it's nearly all lies. Right,
(19:30):
then said it's an important historical book, right because every
one of these Navy seal fucking books that's come since
in the modern era. There's two of them from two
different guys who were part of the Osamba operation who
claimed to have shot him. Neither of them killed osamabed
Black and everyone knows that.
Speaker 3 (19:46):
Right.
Speaker 4 (19:47):
Oh god, I'm just gonna this is also like La
Comedy community stuff and I don't remember who it was
and I don't know the story, but basically someone I
forget who it was. They you know, podcast listeners might
be able to find this, but someone like La Comedian
wise basically went on on a date with another person
who I don't even know if they're actually a Davy seal,
(20:09):
but claim to have killed those Alli been lot.
Speaker 2 (20:11):
Also, if you actually like the serious and good reporting
on that has shown and proven basically because they've talked
to a bunch of guys who were The guy who
actually killed him was a dude whose nickname is read
we don't know his real name, and he does not
talk right, Like, that's what people say about the guy
who actually did it. We'll talk about that too, because again,
(20:31):
it because two different people who were there on the
day they killed Bin Laden were both there with the
primary purpose for them being to write a book about
it later. They both like fucked up and broke the
rules and broke ranks and left their colleagues exposed during
the raid to try to get there faster to shoot
him so that they could write a book about it.
It's very funny, and that's all downstream of Rogue Warrior, right,
(20:55):
Like Marsenko not only starts Team six, but he establishes
that this is a way to make a fuck load
of mind after you get out of it and see us. Right,
So again, don't take anything he says in this literally
and assume a degree of artistic license. When Maarsenko describes
that his family was too poor to buy boots to
pull themselves up by their bootstraps. Right. I don't doubt
that they were poor, but he's probably exaggerating a little bit.
(21:17):
From an early age, Richard seems to have identified with
his maternal grandfather, Joe Pavlick, who he described as a cantankerous, short,
barrel chested, shot in a beer, hard drinking son of
a bitch with a square face and landed bresnev eyebrows
who worked the minds all his life and never complained
about it once. Maybe this guy existed, right. If he didn't,
you know, then Marsenko just invented this personality to graft
(21:39):
on to a real guy because it was way more convenient. Right.
This is part of he he has. This is a
political work in part for him too, So a lot
of his book is him outlining the guys he considers.
These are examples of good people, These are examples of.
Speaker 4 (21:52):
Bad people, right right, right right. It's also like that's
that's what everyone sees their grandpaias.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
Yeah, to take yeah, maybe it's that because this this
sounds like maybe how you'd idealize a person, But this
is not how you describe like a real person. You knew, well,
this is a description of a character in a screenplay. Right,
here's here's Richard again. He was a real hell raiser,
one of those archetypal tough guys you see in working
class bars with big white labor toughened hands that look
as if they were designed to go around old fashioned
(22:19):
beer glasses. That's all aesthetic. He's not telling us anything
about what his grandpa actually did or like he said,
He's just talking about like his hands and how he's
like an archetypal tough guy in a working class bar.
Speaker 5 (22:30):
That's just not that doesn't sound real to me. That's
not how like well or that way scrape that surface.
That's like fucking three thousand guys in that town of
fire exactly exactly.
Speaker 2 (22:44):
That's a picture. That's not a man right anyway. Richard
says that he was independent from a young age. Right.
His his family is not very functional, right, His parents
are fighting all of the time, and so he's just
kind of doing his own shit. He starts working his
own paper out at age five. By age seven, he
says he's leaving on his own for a day or
two at a time to explore the woods and the
(23:06):
wilderness around him. He claims his parents weren't big on
education and says his dad probably dropped out of school
around eighth grade, while his mom may have gotten a
ninth or tenth and that I don't I don't doubt.
I mean that's true of my grandparents, right, I mean
my grandpa. I think I had an eighth grade education. Yeah.
I haven't found any accounts that contrast with this, So again,
(23:27):
I don't have trouble taking him stuff is read. Yeah.
When he was in seventh grade, the mines closed down,
and so his family had to move to New Brunswick.
Because the school was so diverse, he writes he got
into a series of fights walking to and from class.
His uncle moved in with them at one point after
he had a brother, and the five of them had
to cram into a small apartment. Richard remembered his parents
fighting constantly, and since his uncle would take his mom's side,
(23:49):
his dad kind of stopped showing up at home. All
the unrest furthered Dick's tradition of avoiding his family. As
he became an adolescent, he got a series of odd
jobs pin setter for a bowling alley altr boy, and
as an adolescent he worked as a waiter at a
lunch place near the Rutgers campus. He claims to have
worked one hundred and twenty hours a week during the summer.
He says the Italian owner of the place treated him
(24:10):
like a son and started giving him wine, which Richard
developed a taste for, and by age thirteen, he was
a daily drinker. I also don't doubt this. Richard is
a hardcore alcoholic his entire life. This is certainly true.
When he was fifteen, Richard claims he pretended to be
an eighteen year old freshman at Rutgers and started dating
a young teacher named Lucette, who he met at a
fraternity party that he snuck into. The lie fell apart
(24:32):
when she was hired to fill in for a teacher
in his high school French class. He's like, dating this
girl and she shows up to teach at his high school.
I don't know if this is true.
Speaker 3 (24:43):
This is autobiography, Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
He does want you to think this is cool that
like he was I mean big statutorily raped by an adult,
but also that she didn't know. That's part of why
I kind of doubt it is he thinks this is
all awesome, and he's telling you this because he thinks
it makes him look cool that he's getting laid like
hell when he's a kid. So by the time of
his senior year, Richard was no longer showing up to
(25:09):
class at all. He claims that he was dating an
Italian woman quote married to a guy twenty seven years
her senior and in serious need of vigorous humping and pumping. Again.
This is from his autobiography.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
I hated that it's.
Speaker 3 (25:26):
This is certainly this kind of guy.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Absolutely, eventually he dropped out of high school. And this
is almost the first specific detail of his life that
we can independently verify. He definitely drops out of high school.
I can check that office by in the Bastard's True
Fact about Richards, he tried to join the Marine Corps.
At this point, Eisenhower had just sent the Marines to Lebanon,
(25:50):
and Richard wrote, after seeing them on TV, I liked
their dress, blues and their swords. So he shows up
at a USMC recruiting office and he asks the sergeant
what can I do? I want to get a gun
and go shoot a few bad guys? How can I
do that? And the sergeant and it tells you how
like insane, Richard must have appeared, because recruiting sergeants will
say anything to get you to sign that paper. And
(26:10):
this guy's like, well, you gotta graduate high school. We
don't just hand a gun to you, right, Like, he's
clearly off put by this kid, Like dudes who joined
the Marine Corps will tell you how hard it is
to make a recruiting sergeant not want to get you
to sign that paper immediately.
Speaker 4 (26:26):
You have to seem insane, right, This will hurt me
to pass him on more than it will to get
the additional number.
Speaker 2 (26:34):
Jesus Christ, my conscience won't allow this, and I'm a
recruiting sergeant, right. So Richard says that he got disheartened
after this because he knew by the time he did
all of the training shit that was required, the Lebanese
probably would be solved and he wouldn't get to shoot anybody.
So he decided not to join the Marines and fucks
off and spends the summer partying and getting laid. Richard
(26:56):
starts dating seriously for the first time at this point,
and he writes that when I wasn't caatting around with
other women, quote, I discovered that we liked each other.
That's how he describes falling in love. Is what I
wasn't cheating on her. I had a good time with her. Yeah,
that's love for Richard.
Speaker 3 (27:12):
Good for him. I'm mostly good for her, especially good
for her.
Speaker 2 (27:16):
Yeah. The less time you spend with this guy is
probably on the whole helping you. Regardless, Richard abandons her
that fall when she goes well, I mean, I don't know,
they break up, right, she goes to college and he
volunteers for the Navy. I shouldn't call that him abandoning her.
That's a pretty natural split at that age. He reports
for duty in October nineteen fifty eight and goes to
boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. In the great book
(27:39):
Code Over Country, Matthew Cole writes, shortly after enlisting Marsinko,
a radio man saw The Frogmen, the nineteen fifty one
movie film depicting UDT Force heroics in World War Two,
and knew he needed to join the underwater demolitions teams.
So we need to talk about the UDTs, right, the
underwater demolitions teams, because while Richard was living his first
(28:00):
five years of life, right, that's during World War Two,
forty to forty five, military history was being revolutionized by
the formalization of a kind of unit that had always existed,
special operations forces. Right, These have always been a part
of warfare and every society and every place that's done
formal war. Right, you could look at the Greeks who
hid in the Trojan Horse is like an example, whether
(28:20):
or not that was literally true, that's an example of
like a kind of operation that an early operator would
carry out, right, the kind of elite highly trained soldier,
spies and assassins that would do the work that modern
states have specops guys to do. Right, this has always
been a thing, and during World War Two, the development
of technology mandated the creation of highly trained soldiers capable
(28:40):
of extremely niche operations, particularly doing complicated underwater shit. In
the United States because this happens like the British have,
you know, the sas and shit like this. This is
independently happening in a number of places. The Germans have
the Fauschworm yeggers, which a lot of I mean a
lot of American special forces culture is descended from these,
different from Nazi special forces units, right, yeah, as well,
(29:03):
unsurprising unsurprised. Just like a lot of they were very
influential in a lot of like small unit tactic development,
and for the US, a lot of this process started
in the Pacific. The storming of Bettio Island by the
second Marine Division in the tarahua A Toll was a
hideously bloody affair. And the reason why it was such
a fuck up is basically they calculated the tide because
you need to know what the tide's going to be
(29:23):
to like have the boats moving in the proper way
to get all of the dudes on shore at the
right time so that one set of them isn't exposed
and just getting shot to shit. Right, But there was
a special kind of tide that day that if they'd
had someone out ahead of the landing boats who could
have gone back and said, hey, it's a different kind
of tide you need to all, then it would have
avoided a horrible bloody situation.
Speaker 3 (29:44):
Right.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
And so the Navy decides we need specialist divers who
can scout out coastal areas ahead of a landing, measure
the depth of exactly figure out the tide, find and
disabled minds before landing craft come in. Right, like these
are our our first real special forces units. So the
Navy had started training underwater demolitions teams before Tarahua, and
(30:07):
these guys are more commonly known at the time as frogmen.
That's like the colloquial term. And they're cool, by the way,
like kids in World War Two are like reading feverishly
stories about Navy frogmen. These are some of the like
some of the first g I. Joe's are fraud are.
Speaker 4 (30:23):
The coolest, like g I Joe mentality. You need a
water guy, you need an nice guy, a fly guy.
Need a guy that looks like rocks.
Speaker 2 (30:33):
Yes, it looks like rops for some reason. So the
first men in the line of descent of the Navy
seals where Navy cebe volunteers who took special training in
Fort Pierce, Florida to learn how to fulfill this new role.
Because the work of the underwater demolition teams was known
to be so demanding and difficult, officers and enlisted members
(30:53):
of these units went through the same training and were
expected to handle the same tasks and work together in
units so small that you couldn't have the addition will
divide between officers and enlisted men. One thing that's noted
as being weird about frogmen is they all just called
each other by their first names, right, And you're not
supposed to do that in the normal milk. Now that said,
I have known some people who were in units that
would say that, like, after months of heavy combat, you
(31:15):
kind of stop, some of that stuff matters a lot
less right, right, and a lot of like right. In
the book Alpha, which is a great read about Navy
coal alleged war criminal Eddie Gallagher, author David Phillips writes
this about the first Frogmen. They've been formed from civilian
workmen in the New Deal nineteen forties America, and they
embraced the eras in formal attitudes of blue collar solidarity
(31:36):
and equality. So these men were soldiers, right, But they
also carried no weapon besides a fixed blade diving knife,
which is a major thing that differentiates them. These guys
are badasses, and they are widely renowned, but not because
of their killing ability. That is not at all why
they're like respected, right, They're expected because the thing that
they have to do is both totally necessary for the
(31:57):
success of naval operations and insane leadings. During D Day,
UDT swimmers with the very first people ashore at Omaha
Beach and had to clear the way for landing craft
with zero cover. And again for an idea, these guys
are not in a boat. They are swimming ashore in
like shorts with a knife and flippers. Maybe right, They're
(32:18):
basically naked, and they're swimming directly into guns. Fifty two
percent of the unit were made casualties in a single day,
a rate of loss no normal military unit could be
expected to endure without complete collapse. The Frogmen proved incredibly
valuable in World War Two, and obviously more in the
Pacific theater than the Atlantic, and because of this they
were allowed to live by different rules than other soldiers.
(32:40):
Phillips notes that they had little use for discipline that
regular troops were expected to live under. They refused to
shave their hair, wear proper uniforms, march or salute as
a rule. Officers outside the unit complained that they looked
like criminals and hooligans, not soldiers. But from the book Alpha,
they were not an attack force. They were a crew
of workmen out to do an insane They could be
(33:01):
as crazy as they wanted, right, and that is then
that's still a big part of the And it's not
a problem really in World War two, right, because, for
one thing, what they're doing is objectively heroic and good.
I'm not just talking about the cause of the war.
They're not doing anything to harm like, they're not killing
people directly. They're protecting their fellows soldiers and risking their
(33:23):
own lives to do it. Right.
Speaker 4 (33:26):
It's sort of like the engineering version of the medic Yes, yes,
they're doing logistics under fire.
Speaker 2 (33:32):
And there is like demolitions work that does kill people
that they do, but that's not the primary thing that
they are they're up to, and it was not easy
to train men to do this kind of work. From
Code over Country quote. The final week of training culminated
with the men forced to do a trench on the
Atlantic beach while explosives were set off nearby for an hour.
The goal was to ensure that each man that they
would send into enemy water had proved they could handle
(33:53):
the stress. Many couldn't. Between sixty and seventy five percent
dropped out by the end of the week. Right. And
a part of what they're doing and the way they
will frame it is we're looking for men who are
immune to shell shock. Now that's not a thing. Your
brain is affected by it or it isn't. But depending
on the explode, the force of the blast, and how
close you are. But some people are like better at
handling it and not collapsing until much later it destroys them. Right,
(34:17):
So this is the start of hell Week, which is
still a very famous part. I'm sure it's the thing
everybody knows about Navy seels right right now, we know
that exposure to explosives like this causes CTE. But again
at the time, was that this is like hardening them
and showing like who's immune to shell shock?
Speaker 3 (34:32):
Sub stuff gets hardened, some stuff gets softened, you know.
He has to.
Speaker 2 (34:36):
Say, Now, we'd never really trained a unit like this before,
and this was also a top secret unit because we
didn't want the enemy to know like what these guys
were capable of doing. And those two facts together bred
an immediate kind of elitism within the ranks of the
guys who made it through training. The first UDT training
leader was Lieutenant Commander Draper Kaufman, and he was a
(34:57):
very observant man because so many want to be washed
out and because UDT swimmers weren't held to the same
expectations of discipline. They had a tendency to view themselves
as better than their peers. As coal rights, Kaufman and
his officers were concerned that elitism would pervade their ranks,
but the needs of the war won out, and this
problem would only get worse in the years to come.
(35:17):
Post war stories of these formerly secret elite units captured
the imaginations of countless young Americans, and in the wake
of World War Two, the brass and our growing military
industrial complex saw opportunity. The Pentagon had partnered with Hollywood
during the war years to spread propaganda. Now that the
Cold War was beginning, our national propaganda needs had changed.
Military planners felt the wars of the future could be
(35:39):
won by air power, with anything on the ground handled
by small, elite teams of highly trained soldiers. In nineteen
fifty one, a Navy Hollywood partnership produced The Frogmen, which
starred Richard Widmark and was designed to make UDT teams
look fucking awesome. This is one of the very first
like Hollywood US military joint production propaganda movies, and the
(36:00):
original theatrical trailer for this classic is still on YouTube,
and I have to assume that Richard saw the trailer
as a kid too, So here's a clip to give
you an idea of what must have been appealing about
this to the young man.
Speaker 3 (36:13):
From top secret records filmed with the cooperation of the
Department of Defense, comes the thrilling story of these pin footed,
gogglelied beach blasting heroes. They fight like men from another world,
but they've got Brooklyn, Texas, and Missouri written all over
their hearts.
Speaker 2 (36:30):
You're a brave man, all of you are.
Speaker 3 (36:31):
You wouldn't be in this outfit. Nobody questions that.
Speaker 2 (36:34):
But your kind of bravery comes ten cents a dozen.
That isn't worth a hoot mall when the chips are.
Speaker 3 (36:39):
Down, it's great.
Speaker 2 (36:41):
So I love this fifty shit.
Speaker 4 (36:45):
It's so like fascinating to put yourself back in the
audience mindset of like in cooperation with the US Navy
being like a positive thing, like what jucks.
Speaker 2 (36:55):
Well and honestly like that whole thing about like they've
got you know, Texas and you know all their the
home state's written all and just like yeah, there is
something that does a little like these are like the
original Frogmen were just working class men forced by circumstances
to endure insane danger in an overall noble struggle, and
that's pretty cool, right, And they could not be further
(37:16):
from modern day Navy seals, right, The modern seals are
descended from these guys, not at all alike, honestly, really, now,
young Richard Marsenko sees this movie and he loses his shit.
He remembers it having lots of action, lots of heroism,
and lots of songs. One of these songs was the
official UDT team fight song, which ended with these words
(37:36):
out in front of the Navy, where you really get
the heat. There's a bunch of crazy bastards pulling off
some crazy feet. And that's that line, particularly those last
two lines, that just completely writes over Richard's mind, like
that's software that just reprograms his fucking brain. Right. He
never wants to be seen as anything else for the
(37:57):
rest of his days. So Richard, who basically parented himself
half his childhood, finds his really appealing, and he specifically
recalls thinking, hey, I could do that after leaving the theater,
and his logic for thinking this was, I mean, I
was a reasonably aggressive sort of person. I'm really violent.
That job looks great for me.
Speaker 3 (38:18):
Now.
Speaker 2 (38:18):
Richard had to spend a couple of years living the
life of a normal enlisted sailor before he was able
to try out for the UDT teams. They don't just
let you join and do that. His first attempt was
foiled by a broken hand, and his second was, according
to him, nearly thwarted by his commanding officer, who he
describes as, oh boy, the ugliest female I had ever
set eyes on in my life. I called her the
(38:40):
big female, ugly commander, or big fuck for short. Cool
Now you know that's what.
Speaker 4 (38:47):
It didn't go where I thought it was gonna go.
How could you have guessed where that was at it?
How could you have guessed maybe this lady existed? I
can't disprove that. It does kind of seem a little
un likely, but it's not impossible. Women were first allowed
to enlist in the Navy in nineteen oh eight, but
initially only as nurses. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels,
who was weirdly woke for nineteen seventeen, famously asked, is
(39:11):
there any law that says a yeoman must be a
man right? Is there any law that says like a
young sailor has to be like a man, and he
started letting ladies join the Naval Reserve while men.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Were away during World War One. In World War Two,
a separate women's naval auxiliary was created. The waves and
they have like the wax is the Air Corps version, right.
The Waves and the wax are like the kind of
ladies auxiliary during World War Two and postwar the Women's
Armed Services Integration Act brings women into the armed forces properly,
but obviously, and they're still limited today in what roles
(39:40):
they can serve, less than they were then. The first
female Navy officers had just been commissioned in nineteen forty eight,
and so fifty eight is when this is all happening.
Marsinko could have had a lady CEO, right, but it
seems likelier that this is a lie he created because
this caricature of a lady officer symbolizes everything wrong with
what he called big Navy. Right. This is also a
(40:02):
term you'll hear in the Seals to this day, big navy.
And I think Richard, I'm not sure if he's the
origin point, but he's certainly one of them, So yeah,
I don't know how seriously should we should take this,
But this is something that like he wants us to believe.
Richard writes, quote big Fuck was also a rule book creature,
and he will later decide that basically all of the
(40:23):
Navy's problems comes from people following the rules too strictly.
And the book Brave Men, Dark Waters or Kelly writes
that some of the guys who served with Marsenko would
later claim that as a second class radio man, he
bragged that he would one day be the chief of
Naval operations. So you know, he's got a mouth on
him and he thinks he's hot shit. But soon he's
(40:43):
going to get like the chance to prove that he is,
because he gets transferred to the UDT training. I don't
know why he claims that he beats off. First he
beats up one of his peers for being a whiner,
and then that gets him into a fistfight with his
chief petty officer, who he beats up so badly that
he gets transferred to UDT training to keep everyone else safe.
And I think that's a lie. I don't think that's true.
Speaker 3 (41:05):
That's famously how that works.
Speaker 2 (41:07):
Yeah, I think that's the kind of lie. A guy
like Richard Barcicata tells, God, I do I have an
uncle who punched his training officer in the Marine Corps.
And he does not have a cool story like that.
He has a he got the ship beat out of
him and in major trouble, major major trouble story.
Speaker 3 (41:24):
Yeah. Oh, I was just too too tough. They had,
they had too much.
Speaker 2 (41:29):
They had to put me in the un to protect
the others. Now, you know who I want to protect? Really,
the only thing I want to protect. You know, if
the Navy Seals are there to protect America from terrorism,
then I'm the Navy Seals of protecting these products and
services from you not listening to them. Yeah, that works.
(41:49):
That's an ad transition, and we're back. So Richard claims
he got transferred to UDT training, right, and he does.
You know, I just don't know exactly what leads to that.
He completes his UDT training in nineteen sixty one. This
(42:10):
is a decade after The Frogmen was released. That same year,
President John F. Kennedy authorized the Pentagon to examine ways
to develop new counter guerrilla forces. This included establishing new
special Operations teams as separate components of the existing underwater
demolitions teams. And this is what like JFK is while
we have the Navy Seals, right, he's effectively the father
(42:31):
of the Navy Seals right now. The failure of the
Bay of Pigs invasion in mid nineteen sixty one prompted
Kennedy to address Congress, and everyone remembers the bits where
he stated his plan for the US to put a
man on the moon. But Kimmy also asserted that the
country needed to prepare to fight the new kinds of
proxy wars that had come to define the Cold War.
These next generation Frogmen would need to be trained and
(42:51):
armed to fight gorilla conflicts, assassinating local leaders in military
figures and carrying out acts of sabotage and then blending
back into the jungle or the wilderness. Ever, right, Captain
William Hamilton Junior, a UDT man from World War Two
who was one of the people who was tasked with
creating the Navy Seals, describe the kind of men that
he was looking for to populate this new unit.
Speaker 1 (43:12):
Right.
Speaker 2 (43:12):
So, at the birth of the Navy Seals, this is
like specifically the job description. They had to be more
than killers all muscle and neck and attack dog mentality.
I wanted demanded creative men who operated with their brains
as well as with their muscles. Men of courage, dedication
to duties, sacrifice, personal dexterity, and intelligence. Team and mission
must come first. At the same time, they must be
(43:34):
individuals near rogues, in fact, rough men, tough men who
could kick ass and operate outside protocol. And you can
see why you might want that, right, if you're looking
at a unit that's got to operate without support, you know,
for long periods of time. They have to be intelligent
and creative, and they have to have like knowledge outside
of what you'd expect from a normal soldier in order
to be able to kind of like pivot and think
(43:56):
on their feed. Right.
Speaker 4 (43:58):
It's but it's like the save as like finding an emperor.
It's like you need those things, but you don't want
anyone who would describe themselves as those things.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
Right, And the other part of it, you need those things,
But the training is basically is mostly like are you
okay with guys screaming at you and blowing stuff up
next to you and yelling at you while you're really cold? Right?
And that doesn't necessarily like guarantee that they'll be able
to do all these things. And part of the issue
is that you will all there will always be guys
like this in the Seals who are legitimately like just
(44:28):
incredibly talented and skilled and have a like wide variety
of knowledge. But there's also guys who are there because
they really just want to kill people, right. And this
the fact that from the beginning they're like, well, we
understand that these guys have to be kind of like rogues.
There's to be like a criminal element to them if
they're going to be able to do the job, right.
That that was baked into the Seals from the beginning,
(44:49):
and it has always been a cause of problems for them.
And it's because they they this, like Richard is going
to be this guy to a fucking tea, right, one
of these rough men of the criminal element. Yeah, Like
it's it's They couldn't have made the job more perfectly
for how he saw himself. Richard attended UDT class twenty six.
(45:10):
Twenty percent of his teammates passed the intense training, so
most people dropped out, including he noted in his autobiography
with Glee, most of the officers. They just couldn't take it.
He would claim, he found that perversely enjoyable. Again, he
really he's going to be an officer later, but he
really hates officers, like very performatively. After four weeks he graduates.
Training for the Seals at that point involved none of
(45:32):
the diving instruction that it like previously had and that
it would later have. Right, they're not really learning to
be swimmers at this point nearly as much as they
had in the past and would in the future. And
Dick's largest difficulty during training came with the courtesy of
his bowels. Here's the book Rogue Warrior. I had a
problem with hell week, I developed a case of the runs.
In today's navy that would probably be enough to get
(45:53):
me excused. Not in nineteen sixty one, they stopped for nothing.
The solution was speed. I discovered as they ran me
up and down the beach that if I ran and
fast enough, the smell of what ran down my leg
and into my boot get left behind for the next
boat crew to enjoy.
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Oh man, so he right? So he was just in
a soft, permissive era. Yeah, and and oh god.
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Well he was in an era where all they cared
about was like, can you handle the physical difficulty of
the right Like, we don't care if you're like mentally fit,
if you're crazy, if you're like an asshole, like are
you are you comfortable shitting yourself while running? Basically it's
the primary determining factor. And so he's laughing like a
lot of these smarter guys who probably have a lot
(46:35):
of the other skills that might be useful, aren't tough
enough to make it through whereas he is. And this
is this is always going to be a factor of
pride for him. So after he graduates Hell Week, he
writes that he and his classmates were confident as five
hundred dollars hookers. They were sent for ten weeks of
training at Saint Thomas and given he claims, unlimited women,
a never ending supply of aged booze and fresh lobsters,
and all the deadly toys you could ever want to
(46:56):
play with. I don't really know how accurate that is
to Navy seal training if they give you a limited
liquor and women, But I believe the deadly toys.
Speaker 4 (47:05):
That's like Blowfeld style. That's like like how Goldfinger recruits. Also,
I watched us with the lobster of mister soft stomach.
Speaker 3 (47:16):
Come on, yeah, you should be.
Speaker 2 (47:19):
In lobster right now. Man, he got the runs. I
think I might know why. He makes repeated mentions of
his drinking in this book about once a page in
his In the opening of his autobiography, Marcinko talks about
how much he likes to drink. A little earlier, when
describing the kinds of men who made it through hell weak,
he mentioned that some guys like him spent all of
their downtime at the bar. The reality is that he
(47:42):
was a hardcore alcoholic who at this point was already
beginning to drink problematically and would be addicted his entire
working life and Special Forces. Despite his constant complaining about
how bad officers are, Richard almost immediately got his high
school equivalency exam and went through OCS so that he
could become an officer. So much his book is talking
and then he goes through like and then I became
(48:02):
an officer, But I had to like study the officers
like they were aliens to learn how to become one.
But I never really became one. You know, I just
got the rank, but that was never me.
Speaker 3 (48:11):
You know right, he's just a tough guy trying to
get ahead. Bro.
Speaker 2 (48:14):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think he's trying to protest too much. Now,
as a reminder, the Seals don't exist. I just had
sealed dright, They're still not quite they gets It's still
like it's nineteen sixty two. So it's like the year
after this train the Seals are officially formed. So's he's
kind of in a similar situation to like a former
governor Jesse Ventura, like Venturias a little earlier, but Venture
(48:36):
was udt and then it gets kind of grandfathered in
as a seal. Right, So the new seal unit would
be similar to the old in some ways. The standard
unit of organization was still the number of men who
could fit on a small boat, five enlisted and an officer.
The name seal came from their expected area of expertise
sea and land operations. They're insignia was the tritent with
(48:58):
a flintlock and an eagle on it, because people immediately
are like that kind of looks like the Budweiser logo,
so people call it the Budweiser Two. Captain Hamilton, who
handled training at first for these Navy seals wanted creative,
criminal minded men. He sent his first team members to
take classes from former thieves to learn safe cracking and
hot wiring vehicles. This was all justifiable by the parameters
(49:22):
of the jobs he expected they'd be assigned. What kind
of jobs would the Navy need a bunch of heavily trained,
heavily armed criminals to accomplish? You might ask, Well, let's
talk about that. Who do you think was the first
outside US governmental organization to see the potential in a
unit of killers with criminal training, who were unaccountable to
a standard hierarchy. Who do you think found that really appealing?
Speaker 3 (49:46):
I mean, Scott a FBI at the time.
Speaker 2 (49:48):
Right, Nah, it's a CIA, It's the CIA. It's the CIA. Yeah. Now,
the CIA had recently inaugurated something called the Phoenix Program
in Vietnam. This classified operation was based on the widespread
belief that the Vietcong were only able to function because
there was this shadow network of supporters in South Vietnam
that enabled them, and the best way to defeat the
(50:10):
insurgency was to kill these people. So as early as
nineteen sixty seventh, the year that Marsenko first shipped to Vietnam,
as a seal, his job was carrying out Phoenix missions
all over the warfront. CIA informants would provide the agency
with info and they'd send it to the seals, who
would murder, kidnap, and ambush whoever they thought they needed to.
Each of these raids would gather more intel which would
(50:32):
be used to plan further murders and raids. And we
call it a different thing now, but this is how
counter terrorism strategy in US Special Forces worked in Afghanistan
and Iraq too. Basically it hasn't changed since Project like
elements of it. They try to do less war crimes
sometimes now than the old Project fucking Phoenix guys did,
but it's the same basic idea. Right, you do raige,
(50:54):
you gather info, you do more raids, and you often
just wind up murdering guys, right, Yeah, both in Vietnam
and Inner it's just often just murder squads.
Speaker 3 (51:02):
Right right, right, right, right, sort of some stasy type shit.
Speaker 2 (51:06):
Yeah, you're kind of just trying to at a certain level,
it becomes just we're killing as many of the male
population in this area as we can. That's Vietnam, that's Iraq,
and that's Afghanistan. Right, This isn't really debatable.
Speaker 3 (51:19):
Right, and eventually we'll win. Eventually.
Speaker 2 (51:24):
It hasn't worked ever, but like it's got it at
some points, we'll kill her kill our way to the
bottom of this barrel. Now we'll talk about how well
all of this works in Vietnam and for Richard Marsenko
and and later. But I think this is a good
place to end Part one. How are you feeling, Andrew
t You think the Navy seals are gonna gonna pull
it together and and become.
Speaker 3 (51:46):
I mean, they're only getting worse.
Speaker 2 (51:48):
So yeah, yeah, it's really all downhill from World War Two.
But that's American military history in a nutshell.
Speaker 3 (51:54):
It's true.
Speaker 4 (51:57):
World War Two is sort of our batman begins like
set a tone that actually every subsequent thing based off
it really really fucked us as a as a global concern.
Speaker 2 (52:08):
Yeah yeah, yeah, it's it's it's it's pretty bleak. Yeah,
I don't know, but hey, it's those frogmen were pretty cool.
You know, you know who else is pretty cool? Andrew?
You thanks plug your pluggables.
Speaker 3 (52:23):
Yeah, you know what, well, if we just kind of
YadA YadA.
Speaker 4 (52:26):
Our way that a twenty third century you could just
go to Star Trek times.
Speaker 3 (52:31):
Yeah, I don't know, Andrew t Starter Trek. That's it.
I don't know.
Speaker 4 (52:38):
Please listen if you like it. We're really having fun
doing it. And yeah, it's really and it's on YouTube also,
that's the thing I will.
Speaker 2 (52:46):
Speaking of Special Forces and Star Trek, one of my
favorite episodes of T ANDNG is the episode where they
like accidentally take on like a crazed Special Forces operative
from some alien race that has been like arrested by
his own people because they may them to good at killers.
And you know, he's on like a a He's on
like a ship full of Starfleet people who are like
really good utopian people and are absolutely not prepared to
(53:09):
deal with them. It's a fun episode.
Speaker 3 (53:11):
It's sort of like Rambo. It's like they just drop
on board.
Speaker 2 (53:15):
It's like they dropped Rambo in like a kindergarten. It's
just wharf is not prepared.
Speaker 3 (53:24):
All right, I can't wait. We'll have you on for that.
Speaker 2 (53:27):
Great.
Speaker 1 (53:28):
We'll be back with part two.
Speaker 3 (53:29):
Bye PCE.
Speaker 1 (53:34):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool
Zonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes,
but Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping
every Tuesday and Thursday. Remind me on Netflix you don't
miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog,
(53:56):
continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube dot com
slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about forty percent
of you, statistically speaking,
Behind the Bastards News
Host
Robert Evans
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