Part Three: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

In this episode Robert Chronicles how Richard Marcinko's elite red cell suffered two casualties trying to beat up an unarmed man. Also: the Navy SEALs make a series of questionable decisions overseas.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
A media.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
It's Behind the Bastards once again, the podcast where every
week we tell you the worst things about the worst
people in all of history. And this week we are
doing parts three and four of our series on the
founder of Seal Team six, Richard mar Singo, And in
these two episodes we will be getting you know, past
just Richard and talking about kind of how the things

(00:25):
he's set in motion led to the continuing derangement of
the Navy Seals well beyond just Team six, and back
to talk with me about how, thanks God, as bad
as they are now, Andrew.

Speaker 3 (00:35):
T Andrew, that's it going.

Speaker 4 (00:38):
I'm good.

Speaker 2 (00:39):
Find it and Andrew Findian have no war crimes this morning,
So that's good.

Speaker 3 (00:44):
You have committed to me, right.

Speaker 5 (00:45):
I can't promise the world possibly even six.

Speaker 4 (00:50):
I don't know.

Speaker 3 (00:51):
It's entirely possible.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
There's a non zero chance we're back at war with
if I'm remembering correctly, but that changes every day.

Speaker 4 (00:58):
The point is I don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:00):
The point is you don't know. And the point is
also that you have a podcast.

Speaker 3 (01:04):
Yes, that is the point.

Speaker 2 (01:07):
Yes, I've been doing a Star Trek podcast with Tony
Newsom Jesse Gender.

Speaker 5 (01:11):
It's called Starter Trek. They are I won't say making
me watch Star Trek because I do enjoy it, but
I do not know jack shit about Star Trek. So
I'm I'm muddling my way through and it's really fun.
We're on podcast places and YouTube and excellent. Yeah, that's
what I'm doing these days, one of the two, I.

Speaker 3 (01:29):
Guess check that out.

Speaker 2 (01:31):
And I've got a little plug I want to put
in for some friends of the pod. A lot of
you listened to the Knowledge Fight podcast, which is currently
on hold or you know, no longer being produced. But
the hosts of that are two great guys, Dan and Jordan,
who did wonderful work documenting Alex Jones and and actually
helping with like the legal fight against him and Info Wars,

(01:51):
and they both have new projects. So I just wanted
to let you know because a lot of our listeners
listen to their stuff. Dan has a new podcast called
Show Me State of Mind, and Jordan has started a
YouTube series of short video essays called AT or that's
at Everyone Is Wrong About. So YouTube at Everyone Is
Wrong About is Jordan's new thing. Yeah, uh, that's it.
And now it's time for some seals, not the not

(02:14):
the ones who like blubber and like the people. Well,
I guess our Navy stills have some blubber, but they're
pretty skinny usually, right, Yeah, I mean I doubt they
taste very good. Maybe I wouldn't try it.

Speaker 4 (02:27):
Might yeah they might.

Speaker 2 (02:29):
Man, I'll eat any kind of seal look at once.
You know, I'm not gonna club it, but if it's
fed to me, I'll try a Navy seal. I'll try
a harp seal. You know, that's just where I that's
just where I roll.

Speaker 4 (02:41):
Yep.

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Richard Maarsenko commanded Seal Team six from its inception in
August of nineteen eighty to July of nineteen eighty three.

Speaker 3 (02:53):
So again, not a.

Speaker 2 (02:54):
Long run then as the founder and head of Seal
Team six, Oh my god, we're gonna get We're going
like more than one episode per year.

Speaker 3 (03:04):
This is like yeah, because we're getting way beyond. There's
way more.

Speaker 2 (03:09):
So you were for the Seals doing anything bad. You
have to get out of Mrsinko's era because they're not
doing a lot. When he's running Team six, you know, doing.

Speaker 4 (03:16):
Bad Vietnam mostly to their livers.

Speaker 3 (03:18):
It seems like yeah right right.

Speaker 2 (03:20):
During that early eighties period there's not as much shit
for them to go do as there's going to be,
or as there was a nom So, given Richard's bloodthirsty
nature his frequently stated love of killing, it's tragic that
he missed Seal Team six getting its baptism and a
fire on a little island called Grenada. Now most of
you millennials, you're too young to have any memory of this,

(03:41):
but Grenada was one of a handful of brief, little
mini wars that the US ran during the Reagan and
Bush one years to make us feel better about the
fact that we'd lost Vietnam. We needed to get our
mojo back, and the only way he would do that
was to invade some countries that had no chance of
fighting back whatsoever. You can look at the Falklands if
you want to say, sorry, I don't.

Speaker 3 (03:58):
Need to go right now. We just need.

Speaker 4 (04:02):
Patting practice.

Speaker 2 (04:04):
Yeah, Grenada and fucking Panama and then Desert Storm were
like taking Sealis for like your military industrial complex after
it gets like that middle aged Vietnam, you know, LIMP syndrome.
Yeah yeah, yeah, this is the first this is the
first time this has happened.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (04:21):
So Reagan took over after Carter during a time when
left wing movements were spreading across Latin America and the Caribbean.
There was a coup in Grenada and leftists took over
the government, and he used the pretext of some US
medical students who might be the next Iranian embassy hostages
to deploy overwhelming in sudden US force to the area.
Their first task ended in disaster. On the night of

(04:42):
October twenty third, prior to the invasion, a mixed team
of Seals and some Air Force Combat Control Team members
parachuted into the sea to go ashore and plant beacons
on an airfield. This is exactly the kind of thing
seals are supposed to be doing, right. The jump got botched, though,
and one of the seal teams had way too much
gear up to four ndred pounds each, and their life
vests couldn't support them. Four Team six seals died in

(05:05):
drowning without ever seeing combat. The rest of the mission
flopped because of boat broke. So not a great first
run for Team six. You know, oh man, drowning because
of too much gear is it sucks?

Speaker 3 (05:17):
That sucks so bad. That's but also a shitty way
to die.

Speaker 4 (05:21):
It feels. I guess that's that's how it was gonna happen.

Speaker 2 (05:24):
Jesus, well someone again, it's the someone probably should have
checked the math on that.

Speaker 3 (05:29):
I don't know.

Speaker 2 (05:30):
There was massive debate as to why Team six had
needed to parachute into the water with all of that
gear in the first place, because there were other ways
to have accomplished the mission, and the answer seems to
have been because, like, well, it was cool as fuck
to do it that way, and that's what we trained for,
because that's the kind of stuff we're into. And his book,
Or notes that Seal Team four actually had wanted to

(05:51):
do the mission instead of Team six, and they were
going to use like boats, and they might have they
might have done that quote had Sealed Team six not
been so eager to show off at skins in a
real war. That's from Brave Men, Dark Waters and Braveman
Dark Waters is a pretty positive book towards the founding
of the Seals and their early establishment. So the fact

(06:11):
that Orr is saying that they did this because they
kind of wanted to see if they could and a
bunch of guys died means something, right. It's I guess
the tiny thing that is, like, is it heartening to
know that that, like, right wing dorks have just always
been around or you know, the entire most of everyone's lifetime,

(06:31):
and they're always really bad at estimating risk, like estimating
how likely things are to work for them.

Speaker 4 (06:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (06:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (06:40):
Unfortunately, they're also try likely to take certain risks, which
is why a lot of people don't don't fight back.
But that's a separate question. So a day and a
half after the drowning, during the actual invasion of Grenada,
Seal Team six was again tasked with a special mission.
This time, they were asked to seize the government house
and protect the Governor General, who was a representative of
the British govern because Grenado was a commonwealth and so

(07:02):
the job was like they would infiltrate and like get
this guy and evacuate him, and he would like sign
a thing declaring the US invasion legal, right, that was
kind of why they wanted Team six there. But the
mission gets fucked from the jump and they wind up
under heavy fire, getting really badly injured, surrounded in this
building by APCs, and they don't really get to do much,
but they do get the Governor General and he does

(07:23):
sign that thing. So like, technically they accomplish their political goal,
but like it slows the invasion. A bunch of like
regular Marines have to rescue the Seals because they've they've
gotten themselves in a bad situation. Yeah, the adults have
to come rescue these unite as the adults being the Marines, right, which, right, Yeah,

(07:43):
they took a break from eating crayons to go say yeah.
Two other units from Team six were sent to accomplish
other tasks. One had to set beacons on an airfield
and the other had to disable a radio transmitter. After
the short conflict was over, there were serious questions by
war planners. Had everything Team sixted been asked to do
been necessary? Did we need the use these guys for this?

(08:07):
The failures witnessed in Grenada helped spur the creation of
a new Joint Special Operations Command. They're basically reforming Jaysock,
and now it will include all special forces and not
just a few specialized units. Now, the Seals fought this.
One way they'd establish their value post Vietnam was to
make themselves an integral part of Carrier Group operations for
the Navy, But ultimately the Seals were integrated, and it

(08:29):
was probably for the best for the Seals because being
integrated to Jaysock brings them a lot more money. And
by nineteen ninety it's ensured that the Seals have expanded
to more than two thousand men, which is double the
size they'd been in Vietnam. Because as we're kind of
nearing the collapse of the Soviet Union the post Cold
War era, as that's all in sight, there's this understanding

(08:50):
that maybe we don't need to worry about the big wars,
but we need elite teams of guys who can do
stuff like overthrow a government that we don't like so much.
You're like, take out of arras hand hostage situation, can
I said abroad? Question I guess, which is like something
i've You seem like you definitely would underno this more
than me.

Speaker 5 (09:08):
Which is that like the jsack of it? Why besides
branding or is it just branding? Why the fuck do
we have so many different types of elite guys?

Speaker 2 (09:17):
It's because they do different things. So the Navy Seals
are traditionally supposed to be number one, like water naval operations.
They work with carrier groups like we talked about they're
also supposed to be doing like hostage rescue, hostage operations, assassinations, kidnapping,
whereas you know, like the Green Berets, for example, are
like the guys at the start of Afghanistan. You drop
a handful of them into like a village, and their

(09:38):
job is to build up a militia of locals and
like train them and teach them how to fight as
a unit and stuff in order to help them accomplish
the US's goals. And that's a very different skill set
than the Seals. The Green Brays are obviously need to
be competent fighters, but they're supposed to be really good
at like working with locals and not just killing them,
because that's kind of a point. That's why you want
a Green Beret, right right. Delta Force is also, I mean,

(10:01):
and these kind of do get muddled, especially today, Like
what is Delta Force used for as opposed to the
Team six is supposed to like opposed to right, there's
a lot of them, and they all have specializations ostensibly, right.

Speaker 4 (10:14):
Yeah, yeah, I guess that.

Speaker 5 (10:15):
To me, it's just that in the era of like helicopters, drones,
it just seems more like g I Joe.

Speaker 4 (10:20):
Than anything else.

Speaker 3 (10:22):
Yeah, and there's an argument to be made for that.

Speaker 2 (10:24):
Again, not that a lot of these guys will make,
but there is a charge made that like sometimes, especially
like today, a lot of these units have like overlapping
capabilities and like purposes that it's kind of yeah anyway, right, right, Okay,
So when we left off with Richard Marsenko, because this
is the stuff that's happening. I told you in the
last episode, he gets a new job creating the Red Cell,

(10:45):
who's supposed to break in a navy basis. So well
he is starting that job. That's when like Grenada is
going on, right, because he's out of the of Team
six by that point. So let's get back to Richard
for a little bit. When we left off, Marcinko had
charmed his way into getting a classified unit, Red Cell,
which you got to train up and could use to
break into any Navy facility he chose. He was also
supposed to use them to kidnap sensitive employees have said

(11:07):
facilities to test their security protocols. This latter remit gave
Maarsenko a chance to get back at the people he
hated and blamed for all of his woes. Lazy officers
and civilians with cushy desk jobs. Right, he gets to
like fuck with these guys for a living now, So
he and his men often forced kidnap victims to carry
out intense workouts and would like mock them for their performance.

(11:29):
And otherwise they're not like supposed to beat them up usually,
but they are crossing that line or getting right up
to it a lot because they're dicks.

Speaker 5 (11:37):
I will just say, if like the Daily Wire or
someone like that had any actual chops, you could make
like kind of like a right wing version of dirty.

Speaker 4 (11:45):
Work out of this story.

Speaker 5 (11:47):
Yeah, that would be you know, probably funny enough, honestly.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
Yeah, there's a great script in this tale. I'm surprised
it hasn't been made into a movie. So complaints were
pretty minimal at first, right, because they're not really beating people,
and so it's easy to dismiss people saying, hey, but
they're really dicks. To us, it's like kind of sour
grapes because you're not good at your security and the
Seaus showed you up. But then Marsenko's Red Cell started

(12:12):
crossing paths with a man named Ronald Sheridan. Now ron
was not a soldier, but the civilian ahead of security
for a naval weapons facility. He had criticized the flaws
in the Red Team analysis of his facility when they'd
shown up on site, and he had denied Marsenko the
use of his facilities to plan their operations. He's like, basically, Okay,
if you want to try to bust in, you can't
like use facilities on the base for your planning, right.

(12:36):
If you're trying to cosplay as an enemy, you can't
like prep inside the base, you know, because they.

Speaker 4 (12:41):
Won't get to get your own Motel six, asshole.

Speaker 2 (12:45):
Yeah, get your That's literally what he say, right, And
Marsigo does not love this, So I'm going to quote
again from Code over Country. The team instead worked from
a local dive called Garfs. There, marsinco and the team
plotted their next operation while drinking day and night. This
included how to terrorize Sheridan. The strict rules of engagement
called for all operations to occur at the naval facility
being probed, and for the operators to only use force

(13:07):
to simulate getting control of a target. Sheridan lived in
Eagle Rock, a Los Angeles suburb north of Seal beach.
By the time the two operators, Frank Phillips and Arturo
Farius showed up at Sheridan's home, they had already gone
too far. So from the jump, they shouldn't be at
this guy's house, and they are. On March twentieth, nineteen
eighty six, the Red Cell moves into kidnap ron Sheridan.

(13:29):
But here's the thing. Sheridan knows he's got a really
sensitive job and he takes it seriously, and so does
his wife. She takes it really seriously. So when Frank
Phillips tries to kidnap Ron Sheridan, his wife is there.
His wife, Margaret is there with a gun. Every morning
she walks him out to his car with a loaded
forty five and she nearly shoots Phillips two times, and

(13:50):
he has to like explain and show them his badge,
and Ron agrees to go with him for the good
of the exercise. Although I think you could agree they
beat the exercise. And this lady got the drop on
his elite navy seal and nearly killed him in his
LARPing job testing security on naval basis. He almost gets
a sealed killed by a housewife.

Speaker 4 (14:11):
Like that, is It's so funny, funny, really good good.

Speaker 2 (14:16):
Yeah, Like like I would say, I guess his security
was pretty good.

Speaker 3 (14:20):
Yeah, Like sounds like Sheridan's got it on lock.

Speaker 2 (14:25):
But instead they kidnap this guy and they take him
to a shitty motel will they like sit and watch
TV with him for most of the day and he's
like putting up with it for a while, but after
a few hours he's like, I gotta go home. Guys like,
why are we still doing this? And the Seals are
like no, and he's like, seriously, let me go, And
so they call Marsenko and Marsenko is still at the
bar and is very drunk and continuing to drink during

(14:46):
the operation, and he's like that fucker wants to leave
terriminy asshole and have the camera team film it. So
he orders his guys to beat him up and film it.
So two Red Cell operators bust into the hotel room
and start beating the shit out of Sheridan. They strip
him to his underwear and tie him to a chair
while calling him a pussy. They beat him, they waterboard

(15:08):
him in a toilet. Now again, all of these Red
Cell guys are Seals, former seals. They're the best of
the best, a lot of team six guys, and yet
while beating an unarmed, tied up man, they still took casualties.
When operator fell on Sheridan while torturing him and broke
a rib, they lose a man beating up a tied

(15:29):
up dude. The best of the best, the most Only
a seal could take out a seal, clearly. Yeah, in
both these instances we've talked about today, Well, all the
civilian security employee's body can take out a seal or.

Speaker 4 (15:46):
Took himself down. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:50):
Rob's wife later said after her husband was returned, I
wish I had shot that guy, Did I get it?

Speaker 3 (15:56):
Margaret? That's a fair way to feel.

Speaker 2 (15:59):
Yeah, I will say, just broadly, we're kind of getting
close to this era of like we're starting to see
law enforcement fight other law enforcement at the margins, you know,
ice arresting, like local.

Speaker 3 (16:10):
Title bits, little bits. Yeah.

Speaker 5 (16:13):
I am a little you know, wonder what's going to
happen one day, because one of these days someone's going
to do something one way or the other.

Speaker 2 (16:20):
I guess it probably won't be the fun version of it,
but we could never is I guess yeah, yeah, So
the fact that his guys had beat up the student
filmed it didn't look good for Marsenko, so we had
the tape edited to remove the worst of the beating.
But Sheridan reported the abuse and the Navy got access
to the full video. Marcinko says did nothing abnormal happened,

(16:42):
but he was fired from Red Salem month later and
given an admiral's mast. This time now his clout held
up yet again. It is insured him a slap on
the wrist punishment. But a month later, the Navy opened
an investigation into Marsenko's time as Team six commander. The
motivating incident for this was a report Marsenco had drunken
pulled a gun during a military exchange trip to New Zealand.

(17:03):
Like they and Marsanko's like this was all political, but
also and maybe it was, But also, why did you
drunkenly pull a gun during a military exchange ship? And
that's a good reason to fire a guy, I'd.

Speaker 4 (17:14):
Say, why did you bring a gun to New Zealand.

Speaker 2 (17:18):
I mean, I'm sure maybe he gets to take like
these in the military.

Speaker 3 (17:20):
I'm sure that kind of.

Speaker 2 (17:22):
Badass you should. I'm just say this. I'm so sorry.

Speaker 5 (17:25):
He should he If you're a Seal, if you're the
King of the Seals, you should be able to fight
New Zealand bear handed.

Speaker 2 (17:32):
You should be able to fight New Zealand bare handed.
I mean, come on, like, come.

Speaker 4 (17:36):
On, get the get the fuck out here, get real.

Speaker 3 (17:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (17:39):
So the Seals clammed up and defended Marsenko, and for
a while it seemed like he'd get away with this too.
But after the word got out that Richard was about
to be promoted to captain, a bunch of officers inside
Navy Special Forces flipped out. And these are not like
big Navy guys, these are Special Forces guys, and they
realized what a fucking poison Marsenko is to everything they

(17:59):
are trying to do. One of these dudes actually writes
a seven page letter to Ronald Reagan being like, please
do not promote this man, but ultimately decides instead to
call Naval Investigative Services and report some of what he
knew about the fraud Marsinko had enabled and carried out
in Team six. This caused the launch of a probe
in the spring of nineteen eighty six, which turned into
a full investigation nicknamed Iron Eagle. Marsenko would later blame

(18:22):
all of this on eggheads and Big Navy, who he'd
offended and lightly tortured while it read so. But the
lead investigator was Clifford Simon, a former Army ranger who
joined a Bronze Star in combat. He was a huge
supporter of the mission of the seals. He just wasn't
willing to let Marsinko get away with corruption. From the
book Brave Men, Dark Waters quote at one point, they

(18:43):
hired a truck, backed it up to the door of
Team six headquarters, and carted away the team records, about
fifty boxes of them. It was an extraordinary scene, a
government agency rating, in effect, one of the Navy's most
secret and most vital military units. This is like a
big deal investigation. Yeah, like that's the analysts.

Speaker 5 (19:00):
Honestly crazy they kept any records though, Giffin, it is
a small unt I know about them.

Speaker 3 (19:06):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (19:08):
So, at first, the actual evidence against Marsenco seemed thin.
He'd done a pretty good job covering his tracks, but
eventually investigating agents found out that one of his top seals,
a man who had actually fought in Grenada, John Mason,
had also taken trophies back from Grenada with him AK
forty seven's and that was illegal. Trophy taking is illegal. Now,
importing automatic weapons is definitely not.

Speaker 3 (19:31):
You're not supposed to be doing that off.

Speaker 4 (19:33):
The trophies AKS is not the.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
Yeah, and look would it be tempting were I and
John Mason's of course, you can't expect superhuman self control.
That's why you build guide rails into the systems like this.
So they decided to look into Mason, and sure enough,
he'd filed a shitload of fake receipts, so many that
he'd had them printed at print shops to mimic real receipts.

(19:58):
He had like ongoing relationships with print to fake receipts
that he sent into the Navy to get reimbursed for stuff.

Speaker 3 (20:06):
That's pretty funny.

Speaker 2 (20:08):
So they investigators get Mason dead to rights and they're like, hey,
you want to keep that Blue Navy Seal wall of
silence up or do you want to not go to prison?
And Mason says, oh, I'll roll on dick if it's
between that in prison. So he gives them a bunch
of information about widespread financial improprieties directed by Marsinco Mason
was charged with thirty seven counts of various kinds of

(20:31):
fraud and offered a suspended sentence for flipping on Marsenko.
He agreed, and he gave the Navy info on a
scam Marsenco had just perpetrated during his Red Cell days.
Dick had cooked up a scheme with Mason after Mason
had left the Navy and was a civilian working for
a contractor. Marsinko agreed to order forty three hundred experimental
grenades for Red Cell, with Sealed Team six sponsoring the

(20:53):
contract because it's a Red Cell's a classified unit, so
they're doing purchasing through Red Cell right now. The idea
was that these forty three hundred experimental grenades were repinnable,
so if you pulled out the pen you could change
your mind later I guess, and like put it back
in so you could make the grenades safe, and he
wanted to test them with his new Elite unit. There's

(21:14):
debates about this. One source says they were just normal grenades,
that was always a lie in his book, or seems
to be convinced that they were experimental grenades. I don't
know the truth. The grenades sold for three hundred and
ten thousand dollars and the manufacturer kicked one hundred and
ten thousand back to Ramco, the company that Marsenko and
Mason had formed. So he is lying to just get

(21:36):
startup money for a new business, Like that's the purpose here,
is Like they're creating a con grenade buy in order
to steal money from the Navy that they will then
put into a business for their civilian lives. Right, So
that was the idea. But Mason gets the money first,
and he blows all of their money on fancy cars
and like a lavish office space for the I don't
even know what the business was supposed to be. So

(21:58):
in nineteen eighty seven, Marseille has tried in federal court
with bribery and conspiracy. The first trial ends in a
hung jury in the second and January of nineteen ninety
sees him found guilty and sentenced to twenty one months
in a minimum security prison. So Richard goes away for
a while. He's out of the Navy and he is
officially persona non grata among the Seals, and this is

(22:19):
the end of his military career, right, Richard Marsingle, we'll
hear him a couple of times. Still old Old Dicky's
still out there, good, but he's not in charge of anything.
In nineteen eighty seven, the name of Seal Team six
was changed to Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or dev GREW,
and this is the official name today. They're no longer
called Team six. People still call them Team six all

(22:40):
the time. Yeah, people, I mean a lot of people
know they're called dev GREW too, But like dev grew
is the official name, right, And as you might guess
by the fact that everyone does still call it Seal
Team six, Marsinko's legacy was hard to eradicate.

Speaker 3 (22:54):
Right.

Speaker 2 (22:54):
You can change the name, but you can't necessarily change
the culture that this guy started off in.

Speaker 4 (23:00):
There. It's all branding and culture. It's the real shit.
I guess.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
The branding is where criminals and no one tells us
what to do, and also we get to murder whoever
we want. Yeah, shocking, shocking that branding caused some problems.
You know, whose branding has never caused problems?

Speaker 1 (23:16):
I was hoping you wouldn't do that.

Speaker 3 (23:17):
It's pretty good.

Speaker 2 (23:18):
It's pretty good, pretty good, pretty good ad pivot All right,
everybody go away.

Speaker 3 (23:23):
Well, don't go away. Listen to ads. We're back.

Speaker 2 (23:33):
So it's December of nineteen eighty nine. The good people
of the George H. W. Bush administration have decided that
the United States still has not gotten enough of its
mojo back post Vietnam, and so we invade Panama. There
are other reasons involving Manuel Noriega and cocaine, but we
went over those in are behind the Bastard's episodes on
Panama with Chelsea Manning, So go listen to those if

(23:55):
you want to know why Panama happened. Contrasting with Grenada,
there was a ton enough time to plan before invading Panama.
Grenada they have to throw together really quick, which is
part of why shits so slap dash. Panama shouldn't have
been in part because like while they're planning it, we
have bases there, So we literally have like our guys
planning the invasions, like walking around and like taking notes

(24:15):
on the stuff they're going to be doing for a while.
That's really kind of the ideal situation to invade another country.

Speaker 5 (24:23):
I mean, it's the Red Team, you know, yeah, the
Red Cell approach.

Speaker 3 (24:28):
Just yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:31):
However, the fact that we have all this planning time
may have actually hurt the Seals because the people of
Panama are generally friendly. They really like Americans, They tend
to be nice. They tended to be nice to American soldiers.
That was the attitude of the government at the time.
And so the Bush administration doesn't want to have a
lot of civilian casualties. To explain, it doesn't want damage
to a lot of infrastructure, right, They just want Noriega
out and to be able to, like, you know, do

(24:53):
their own stuff, right, So they test the Seals with
taking and capturing the airport that holds Noriega's jet, and
they test them with doing it only with small arms.
So we're not going to try to take this out
with an air strike, and we're not going to give
you what guys, heavier equipment, and we're not going to
give you like send in a larger unit or unit
backed up with armor. We're going to send in a

(25:15):
small group of elite Seals with small arms to take
this hanger. Right, So the guys they send them, it.

Speaker 5 (25:22):
Feels like the Seals bluff has just been called. Basically,
it's like, oh, okay, kind of does that's kind of dust.
Captain badass. You should be able to do this like
a knife.

Speaker 3 (25:31):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (25:32):
So this is not Team six, this is Seal Team four.
But the op is a massive shit show, so much
of one that it becomes historic because the seals kind
of as they're approaching this hangar, they have to do
so in the open, and they have like night vision,
so when they get up to a certain point, they
can see who's in the hangar, but that's also the
point at which they're like ten or fifteen something yards away,
and so they get up close in the second they

(25:52):
see these guys, they realize they're completely in the open,
and those there's like a dozen or so guys dudes
in there who are all guns trained on them and
immediately open fire and there is zero cover. And if
you watch like movies the way Navy seals are, you've
got something like twenty four I think like around two
dozen seals.

Speaker 3 (26:10):
It's like or more.

Speaker 2 (26:11):
It's like a it's like was a historically large group
of seals. There were huge arguments about should multiple platoons
because we don't seals don't train to fight that way
at this time. Should they have sent in like I
think it was two platoons, but they outnumbered the enemy
two to one. Again, in the movies, they would have
killed these guys in a second. But this is real life,
and it doesn't matter how well trained you are in
real life, if you are in the open fifteen or

(26:33):
twenty meters away from people with a machine gun, you're
gonna die. And that's what happens. It's possible that only
two men actually fired back into the seals, but they
immediately kill four and wound like seven or eight, where
they take like half the unit out of commission almost instantly.

Speaker 3 (26:47):
Now, the Seals do.

Speaker 2 (26:48):
Eventually accomplish the mission, but not because they take like
the hangar gets abandoned by these guys. They like leave
after a while, and it's just it's a really bad time.
Like the Seals have a horrible time. A lot of
them die or get horribly injured. Noriegan never even tries
to go for his jets, so their sacrifice is completely
meaningless and their opponents flee rather than being defeated in

(27:11):
a satisfying way. It's the worst it could have gone.
And again it's because this is not a thing any
guys should be doing. We know, if you just send
dudes directly into the law of a machine gun.

Speaker 3 (27:23):
They died, it doesn't matter if their seals.

Speaker 2 (27:25):
There's no reason conventional infantry should have handled this.

Speaker 5 (27:29):
But it's the same version as like a Navy seal.
This is just like, is this the same as just
like a stealth bomber being taken out with an ied
kind of.

Speaker 2 (27:38):
If something like that were to happen, that's kind of
your idea, is that, like, this incredibly valuable unit that's
highly trained was sent in to do something that was
You should not have elite, highly trained operators just running
into guns like that. It's stupid. Also, during the same thing,
Team six tried to capture Noriega.

Speaker 3 (27:57):
They didn't.

Speaker 2 (27:59):
In the wake of the invasion, the commander of US Forces,
Lieutenant General Carl Steiner, bragged that everything had gone so
well there were no real lessons to learn, which gives
you an idea of why the US military sometimes makes
the same mistakes over and over again. Cover your ass great, Okay,
So the Persian Gulf conflict is probably going to be

(28:19):
the high water mark for unproblematic seal success at war.
Because Commanding General Norman Schwartzkoff hated special forces. He's very
distrusting of Special Forces. He only wants the West Coast
Seals participating because they're seen as less problematic. I think
that's some of Richard's legacy. Still, he probably would have
been annoyed if he wasn't still in prison in March
of nineteen ninety now, maybe because there weren't guys like

(28:43):
Marsenko around at the time. The Seals get integrated effectively
into a broader military apparatus during Desert Storm at one point,
Like one of the things that the Seals do are
used to do, is a six man unit is sent
in to create a diversion, Like they're basically swimming by
a coast and they're trying to like fake and make
it look like an invasion is coming by carrying out

(29:04):
acts of like subterfusee and sabotage. And they're able to
successfully draw two full Iraqi visions away from engaging the
US and combat. And that's exactly the kind of shit
Seals are supposed to be doing, right, right, Like, that's
undeniably useful. It does require people who think outside the box,
It requires courage and creativity, and it saved a bunch
of lives net Like that's a good example of how

(29:25):
you could use guys with this sort of training, right,
so they can be used effectively, you know, outside of that,
Seals track and remove sea mines, and they do search
and rescue for down down pilots the captured oil platform
and none of them die.

Speaker 3 (29:39):
So Desert Storm goes pretty well for the Seals.

Speaker 5 (29:42):
But that's like most of the time, it's always leadership, right,
it's always just like like actually being used correctly. It's doable.
They are human psychos, but you can put them in
the right place.

Speaker 2 (29:55):
Schwartz Coough number one does not buy into all of
the bullshit around the mythology of these units. Number two,
he's he's using him to accomplish a really reasonable thing,
to use a small unit like that for right, the
tasks they're being set.

Speaker 4 (30:07):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (30:07):
My memory of him is he just seemed like a
guy that had a turkey sandwich with no condiments on
it every day. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (30:13):
Yeah, Fellow.

Speaker 2 (30:15):
I read his autobiography as a kid. He was a
Bland or Bland Fellow. Weirdly enough, he grew up in
Tehran as a child, which is kind of strange. His
dad was like an ambassador, something very strange.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
Andrew, you think he has a like whitebread turkey sandwich,
no seasoning with just a piece of lettuce.

Speaker 4 (30:32):
Yeah, lettuce, one of the men.

Speaker 3 (30:35):
You can imagine, Yeah, Storm and Norman absolutely.

Speaker 4 (30:39):
Half a packet of.

Speaker 2 (30:42):
Half a packet of mayo, but just next to the sandwich.
Like my grandpa used to just open a bottle of
vermouth when he was mixing his his Martinez. That kind
of idea, just a good seasoning. Yeah, salt is in
the house next door. Yes, So by the nineteen nineties,
that's like kind of the mid to late nineties, the
Sea had been in a wide range of conflicts that
they could draw experience from when looking and planning for

(31:04):
the future. They had been successfully integrated into the modern
war fighting machine of the United States. And this is
where the book Brave Men, Dark Waters ends and author
or Kelly notes that a couple of points that he
felt like worried him about the organization's future. So this
is or writing post Desert Storm and before nine to eleven,
right about what he's afraid is going to happen to

(31:25):
the Seals in the future. The Seals have not been
very good at learning from their experiences, especially when things
go wrong, and applying those lessons to the future. A
meeting devoted to seal participation and Operation just Cause was
held shortly after the operation, but most of the seals
present found the briefing unsatisfactory and a few were so
disturbed that they walked out. Right, that's the reading on
like that Panama shit show. And I don't know if

(31:47):
they walked out because they were disturbed how bad the
planning was, or were disturbed that guys didn't want them
to do shit, Like, It's a little unclear to me,
but it shows that there's this kind of institutional unwillingness
to really critique as much of what they're doing. You know,
you could treat critique Big Navy, and that's ores fear
for the Seals as they go forward, and it's going
to prove to be kind of prescient.

Speaker 4 (32:07):
It's so like.

Speaker 2 (32:08):
These tough guys are kind of just soft baby boys
that any kind to never be mean to them and
always treat them like special angel boys. Yeah, it's weird
for as tough as they claim to be. So there's
a real debate post Gulf War about the purpose of
Navy seals and what it should be in a world
where guided missiles had relieved them of many of their

(32:29):
previous duties of doing sabotage. Well, we don't need to
send like some guys and flippers to sabotage refinearty.

Speaker 3 (32:35):
We can shoot a missile at it. Right.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
In his book, Or noted that Seals had previously focused
primarily on their ability to influence events by violence in
contrast with the Army Special Forces, and that they might
need to learn more about how influencing hearts and mind
should work. He's talking about Army Special Forces or the
Green Berets, and he's talking about how the Seals, maybe
in the future, will need to be more like that.

Speaker 3 (32:55):
Right, And even.

Speaker 2 (32:57):
Then some has resisted this idea, as Or wrote, one
form of violence that Seals talk about among themselves is
the possibility of capturing or killing terrorist leaders or even
foreign heads of state. One of the frustrations of their
involvement in Desert Shield In the Desert Storm was that
Saddam Hussein remained off limits. Attempting to take out Husain
would have been an assignment Taylor made for the specially
trained anti terrorist experts of Seal Team six. In fact,

(33:19):
one former member of the team, while at the Naval
Postgraduate school, wrote a study of how the team might
be used to carry out clandestine assassination attempts. His thesis
remains highly classified. Cool just thinking about. You know, that's
not necessarily the Seals, But are you stuff special forces
guys are doing in the Trump era to stay?

Speaker 4 (33:39):
Do you regret back going.

Speaker 5 (33:40):
To college to write fanfic about fucking like murdering Saddam Hussein?

Speaker 2 (33:48):
I do?

Speaker 4 (33:48):
I do?

Speaker 2 (33:49):
I mean I would have written fanfic about writing a
novel with Saddam Hussein, which remains my chief goal. You know,
I'm a fan of him for his other work. I
don't forgive him for you know, oh for the crimes,
but his romance novels. You know, he's an artist. You
got to separate the artist. Artists very hard to do
with something say so or Kelly also related his concern

(34:14):
that Seals in Panama had shown they had issues working
in large, multi platoon groups. Furthermore, their extraordinary abilities only
really were at the their peak when they had rapid
air and artillery support. Right, the Seals are only able
to be the most effective when they have a lot
of guys backing them. And if you know that had
been a facet of most seal ops since nom But

(34:37):
that means like, if you don't have access to that stuff,
are they as capable?

Speaker 3 (34:40):
Are they likely to get into problems? You know?

Speaker 5 (34:43):
And global war on it's always it's awfully stone soup
with the Seals, isn't it.

Speaker 4 (34:47):
It's like.

Speaker 5 (34:49):
Navy seals and fucking air support and an army behind them,
and they'll do whatever you want.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
They're they're great with all the air support they can
all in. They're deadly as ll. So the Global War
on Terror would prove some of these fears prescient and
give Marsenko's old unit in particular a chance to make
a name for themselves as the President's assassins. Before all that,
we get to the nineties, a glorious decade of peace
and prosperity. Will nothing bad happened if you don't count

(35:18):
the Balkans, Rwanda or several other places anyway. In nineteen
ninety two, Richard Marsenko gets out of prison and publishes
the book Rogue Warrior, which is the first account of
life inside Seal Team six written by a seal. Even
though Marsenko was disgraced, it timed perfectly with the post
Desert Storm hype and millions of copies were sold. So

(35:40):
the book is a stupendous hit among civilians who wanted
a glimpse inside the rarefied air of Special Forces. And
they'd already thought these guys were basically superheroes, So Maarsenko's
bold claims didn't seem so wild, Like the reader is
prepped to believe anything about a Seal Team six guy. Right,
if he says he was doing crazy operations with Team
six while he was leading them, even though they they
weren't doing all that much, it must be true because

(36:02):
he founded Seal Team six. Right, we're in the Van
Damn Era. Yeah, Steve, of course this is what they do,
see it says. It says a lot about the veracity
of Richard's first book, Rogue Warrior, that he follows his autobiography,
his non fiction autobiography, with a fiction novel series also

(36:23):
called Rogue Warrior. What hell Yeah, he creates a bunch
of fiction novels with the same title in branding as
his autobiography that's supposed to be nonfiction.

Speaker 4 (36:35):
Makes sense.

Speaker 3 (36:36):
I think the idea is these were.

Speaker 2 (36:37):
Based on the real classified missions I tell you about those,
you know.

Speaker 3 (36:41):
But yeah, I.

Speaker 1 (36:43):
Love when you do that boy, Based on a true story.

Speaker 2 (36:49):
Based on a true story, that's all we need to
put in the hollywoods.

Speaker 3 (36:51):
They're like Warrior.

Speaker 2 (36:54):
That's right, great title printed. The first of the fictional
Rogue Warrior novels was Rogue Warrior Green Team, which spiraled
out into the long series of subsequent novels ostensibly based
on Marsenko's real life, with him as the lead character
and also on the cover. So if he's going to
show you a copy of Rogue Warrior two red Cell,
that's actually Richard Marsenko.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
He's got like Steven, are you ready for it's Andrew.

Speaker 2 (37:21):
I don't think I am actually oh man, so again,
he's got a ponytail and a beard. He looks like
segall in the nineties, the purposefully probably he's.

Speaker 3 (37:35):
Wearing all black.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
He's got like an MP five submachine gun crossed against
it over his heart like it's a fucking I don't know,
a crucifix.

Speaker 4 (37:44):
Yeah, it's always tweet.

Speaker 3 (37:46):
Oh man, it's so sad. Okay Richard, okay man.

Speaker 2 (37:52):
It was through these novels, which make him a rich man,
that Marsenko would prove himself forever the smartest member of
Team six. Instead of risking his freedom and money by
telling us government secrets like some subsequent Team six members,
he could just lie and tend to be giving away
secrets up.

Speaker 3 (38:11):
Yeah, just make shit up.

Speaker 2 (38:12):
I need to read you how the book is still
sold today. This is from the audible description. When Richard
Marsenko wrote his best selling autobiography Rogue Warrior, he and
co writer John Weissman were bound by government restrictions and
could only tell a fraction of his incredible story. Now,
the tales he could not tell, the secrets he could
not reveal explode in Rowe Warrior two. Red Cell, a

(38:33):
riveting new novel with Marcinko himself as the hero.

Speaker 4 (38:41):
Oh my god, love it, love it.

Speaker 2 (38:43):
I love the tales he couldn't tell a riveting new
novel with himself as the hero. Yeah, I'm sure these
are real stories, Richard.

Speaker 3 (38:53):
So this is him this.

Speaker 2 (38:54):
I picked Red Cell because we know the real Red
Cell story. So here's what Richard wants.

Speaker 3 (38:58):
People to believe.

Speaker 2 (39:00):
What he was doing with Red Cell, instead of nearly
getting his men killed by a dude's wife and having
another one of them seriously injure himself torturing a man.
Quote freelance security consultant Dick Marsenko is playing terrorists at
Tokyo's Narita Airport, easily penetrating the facility's defenses. He engages
in a deadly firefight with North Korean operatives and discovers

(39:22):
that a group of traitorous Americans are smuggling nuclear materials
to North Korea and Japan. With nowhere else to turn,
the former Secretary of Defense recalls Marsinco to the Navy
against his will, to command Red Cell, a Dirty dozen
seal team Marsinko created from infiltrating Washington's Navy Yard offices
and secret special nuclear weapons depot in California to raiding
a North Korean Navy base and target far out in

(39:43):
the Pacific. The Row Warrior and his marauding seals fight
incredible odds and increasingly dangerous enemies. Yeah that's real, man, Yeah,
I love that a group of traders Americans are smuggling
nukes to North Korea and Japan. Here ally is in
nuclear warfare, North Korea and Japan shaking hands?

Speaker 3 (40:03):
What is their plan? Why do North Korea and Japan
want nukes together? It's just you know, for the vibe.

Speaker 4 (40:11):
I guess it's the Mecca Godzilla.

Speaker 2 (40:13):
Mecca might be mecha Godzilla. That's actually possible as possible.
On September eleventh, two thousand and one, some unfortunate things
went down, and at the end of it, two pretty
big buildings were gone. Because the guys behind this had
mostly been Saudi terrorists living in the Afghanistan. The United
States goes to war with Afghanistan. From beginning, it's pretty

(40:33):
clear that this was, you know, not going to be
a normal kind of conflict, in part because it's Afghanistan
and wars don't tend to go very well.

Speaker 3 (40:43):
There, Right, Yeah, a lot, a lot.

Speaker 2 (40:46):
Of the operational burden in Afghanistan from the beginning we
knew was going to be put on US special forces,
right and actually at the start, when US troops first
in Afghanistan, they're basically one hundred percent of the war
effort in the earliest days. It's not long after the
Twin Towers fell, but the Navy Seals who were still
largely the force they'd been in the nineteen nineties at
that point, which is, you know, men trained mostly for

(41:06):
coastal operations who specialized in hunting, tracking, and destroying Afghanistan
was new terrain and a new kind of war to them,
and when it began, most of them had no combat experience.
And there were a lot of lessons that are going
to be learned in Afghanistan, and not all of it
is going to be I mean, there are a lot
of lessons that are going to be learned in blood
in Afghanistan, and it's not just going to be seal blood.
Them fucking up is going to cost a lot of
other people their lives. Some of this is just an

(41:28):
unavoidable consequence of war. When you invade a country, especially
with an army where most people haven't like done that
stuff before you, when your special forces guys usually haven't
been in combat, there's going to be even more mistakes
than there normally is in a war if you've got
like a lot of people who have been in combat before.
So like that stuff's going to happen too. It's just
you're going to have a lot of fuck ups in
the early stages of special forces involvement because in part

(41:50):
specially had to fight. When you drop your water type
Pokemon right into an earth an is as much as
I know about that, But I feel like I'm correct,
that's more or less how military strategy works. Actually, Andrew,
you know who else knows how military strategy works. The

(42:13):
sponsors of this podcast, all of whom are actively planning
to invade the United States and subjected to an authoritarian rule.

Speaker 5 (42:19):
But you know that part's actually true. This is the
I've heard for a while.

Speaker 3 (42:34):
And we're back.

Speaker 2 (42:36):
So in January of two thousand and two, a Seal
Team six officer named Vic Heider murdered an unarmed Afghan
man at the first Team six action of the war.
Hyder had been leading a team to capture Al Qaida
guys in a compound. After the mission was completed, the
seals took fire from somewhere and after that, an old
man walked up to them as they were evacing. So, right,

(42:56):
they captured some guys in a compound, there's a firefight
after it's completed. They're taking fire, they can't see who's
shooting at them. And then around the same time, an
old man is just kind of walking because they're just
out in Afghanistan and there's just a dude who lives
there and he's walking around, and because it's dark, Hider
starts shouting at the man to stop. But this guy
doesn't speak English, he's in his own country, he isn't

(43:17):
know what's being said, and he's elderly. He can't see
for shit, and so he keeps stumbling in their direction
and hider who's got like night vision and is not
in direct Dangerum, this man decides he's close enough that
if he has a grenade, he could hurt me. So
I must assume he has a grenade, and he shoots
this elderly man to death. Right, the thing that had
been in his hand that Hyder word was a grenade
turned out to be a cassette from a tape player.

(43:38):
Now again, if we're talking about it's bad when cops
do this all the time, but cops don't have very
good I mean, this is part Here's what I'll tell you.
This is why the training argument is bullshit for cops, right,
because the argument is, well, cops do this, but it's
because we need to fix their training. These guys had
all the training in the world. No cop will ever
have more training than Vic Hyder. Is he shot a
man with a fucking cassette in his hand, right, that

(44:00):
what you're asking them to do, there's no training that
will stop that they make decisions themselves past a certain point,
and a lot of guys in situations like this will
decide my life matters more than any random dude whose
country I just stepped into. Right, yeah, well, and you
could argue that these guys clearly have been told they
are so valuable as humans that their life is worth
much more than any random person. You know, the potential

(44:23):
that they might be hurt means the has to die.
Vic says that, and I'm sure who's taught that. What
should tell you that that's not universal is a bunch
of his men complain, right, yeah, he's an officer, A
bunch of his enlisted men. The guys that are supposed
to be like the real pipe eders are like, that's
fucked up, dude, you just murdered an old guy, and
they complain and it gets put down to officer enlisted rivalry. Eh,
they just don't like their officer, you know, right, yesus

(44:48):
Hider was not well liked in the unit for stuff
like this. One reason, and this is a reason that
also causes a lot of fucked up behavior, is that
some officers don't all go through like the really intense
selection necessarily that seals enlisted seals do. You don't necessarily
go through all of the same shit if you're an officer,
because it's a different job. In the way you get
there is different, right, and that causes some of the conflicts.

(45:11):
And some of these officers are insecure about maybe I
don't really deserve to be here, and some of them
compensate for that insecurity by becoming ultraviolent.

Speaker 3 (45:19):
Right.

Speaker 2 (45:19):
That is a pattern that occurs among the teams periodically.
It's not every officer who does this, but some of
these guys, and it comes sometimes from insecurity. I'm sure
some of them would do that if they were an
enlisted man too, because theyre's just psychos, right, I'm.

Speaker 3 (45:30):
Just trying to provide you some explanation.

Speaker 4 (45:32):
For the motivation. It's obviously.

Speaker 2 (45:35):
Yes, yes, it's got to be some of both, but
the insecurity here isn't to zero percent of the factor, right.

Speaker 4 (45:41):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (45:42):
At the time of combat operations in Afghanistan, Team six
had about two hundred operators split into three assault teams, Blue, Red,
and Gold. Each team got a mascot and proving that
Navy seals are no different than fifteen year olds. This
immediately started to get out of hand, right, because they
get way too into their fucking mascots. Now, the biggest
problem is that Red Team has a Native Americ stereotypical

(46:04):
Native American warrior as their mascot, right, and they call
themselves the Red Men. Blue Team are the Pirates and
they fly a jolly roger into battle. And Gold Team
are the Knights or Crusaders, and they wear Crusaders crosses
and lions. And you can imagine how comfortable some of
this imagery gets Jesus Christ. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the worst would
be the Red Men, the ones with like a racist nickname.

(46:28):
In his book, Matthew Cole writes, quote, since the nineteen eighties,
when Red Team was first created, there were many operators
in the unit who had experienced a metamorphosis of identity
and persona into Native American warriors. This is something that
officers and the team who are critical of the culture
will say, And some of us said, guys, that's how
they describe it, that it's a metamorphosis.

Speaker 3 (46:46):
These guys really believe that.

Speaker 2 (46:48):
Again, you don't have to credit these guys are knowing
anything about any Native American tribe, knowing anything about history,
knowing anything but shit they've seen on bullshit movies, but
they think that's cool and they get way into the idea. Yeah, right,
that's all I'm saying. Please don't. It's a cartoon, right.
I have never gotten enough detail about exactly what's meant

(47:09):
by metamorphosis. I'd really like to talk to some dudes
about that. But the most demonstrable part of it is
unfortunately quite racist, which is that as the war on
Terror goes on, some of these dudes start taking scalps. Now,
of course this had not happened at the start of
the when Hiders and Abbey. This doesn't start immediately, right,
But Hider is one of the guys who kind of
starts the latter of escalation of brutality that helps lead

(47:32):
in that direction, right. And he's, among other things, he's
a guy who feels like I need to prove I
deserve to be here, right, being ultra violent. Right, So
the classic small man bully, right, like five very small man.
On March sixth, two thousand and two, the ten Commander
Hider led more than twenty Seal Team six operators in
two chinooks on a mission to kill or capture Bin Laden.

(47:53):
As you can guess from the date, it didn't go well.
Intel had revealed and I'll heid a convoy traveling in
the area which was bombed by the US Air Force
before the seals went in. Some operators protested having the
air Force bombed the convoy. They're like, our job is
to be super discriminating guys who can get really close
and we could know because they didn't really know is
this convoy bad guys or not? And our jobs should

(48:14):
have been to get in there close and see if
we needed to attack this convoy, right, we could have
verified that. And it turns out the intel was wrong.
The air Force had just bombed a family caravan and
their Chinook's gunners had unloaded into women and children who
were being protected by the bodies of their men. And
so when the seals land, they see these guys were
like throwing themselves these piles of corpses where men are
trying to shield their children and wives from the gunfire

(48:36):
of the ship that these seals had just been in.

Speaker 3 (48:38):
And it fucked some of these guys up.

Speaker 4 (48:39):
Right.

Speaker 2 (48:40):
It's a pretty awful thing to see. And not all
of these guys are completely dead inside and fine with
that despite the fact that it's immediately clear none of
these people were involved in anything. Heighter and several seals
continued to treat them as combatants. Per Cole's book quote,
Hyder said that he and a few other seals began
to bury the casualties near Ravine by piling rocks over them.

(49:01):
As he did so, he approached the man Heath had shot.
He was partly partially alive, faced out his back to me,
and he rolled over. I shot him, finished him. He
was dying, but he rolled over and I didn't know
whether he was armed or not. That was the end
of that. Hyder said that his single shot had blasted
open the man's head. So Jesus, there's this guy who
isn't dead and this instead of trying to render aid,

(49:23):
he's just like, well, I thought he might have had
a weapon.

Speaker 3 (49:24):
So mentioning this.

Speaker 2 (49:26):
Guy who's dying on the ground might have a weapon
is like, and I guess that's peak cowardice. It's just
like and there's some other seals who were there at
the time who do complain about it this say like, well,
they had weapons, but they were family weapons. Like, it's
Afghanistan people, it doesn't like they're not al Qaeda. Because
they have a gun. You know, that's just life out here. So,

(49:46):
according to Hider, the encounter ended there after he shoots
this wounded guy. But a retired seal who was there
on the mission told a different story to Cole. And
according to this person, after Hider shoots this wounded man,
who was unarmed by the way, Hider proceed to mutilate
his body by stomping in his already damaged skull and
like spreading brains out everywhere. And there's a chunk of

(50:07):
guys who think this is cool, and there's a chunk
of guys who are fucking horrified.

Speaker 3 (50:11):
Right.

Speaker 2 (50:11):
Heath, who had shot the man initially and witnessed Hider's actions,
reports them to his team leader. He's like, look, I
shot this guy because I thought he needed to, and
then he just mutilates this guy. She kills this guy
when he doesn't need to mutilate his corpse. Like, I
think that's fucked up, and I don't feel good about it.

Speaker 3 (50:25):
Right When he.

Speaker 2 (50:28):
Does this quote, several of the guys turned and walked away.
According to the retired seal, they were disgusted. He quoted
Heath as saying, I'm morally flexible but I can't handle
that right. So the way, at least in this report,
a lot of people are grossed out by what Hyder does,
and he does start to get iced out from the
seals at this point, or from some units. They have
this way of if you're an officer and you're grossed

(50:50):
like that, when you rotate out, we don't have to
let you back in. And so sometimes stuff like that happens.
But what you should take from this isn't just that
there are seals who are grossed out this who report him.
There's also seals who think it's cool and you don't
have a problem with it. And in this instance, maybe
Hyder gets, you know, what i'd call a slap on

(51:10):
the wrist, and there's a little bit of accountability, just
a teeny amount eventually for him, not really much. But
in the future this is going to become like in
other units, when this stuff happens, it won't be people
won't complain, right, people will be okay with it. That's
going to happen increasingly often after this point too, and
it's going to happen because of something that goes down.
On March of two thousand and two, a team of

(51:31):
Team six seals under Master Chief Britz Slabinski, are in
a chinook looking for a bent laden soaring over a
mountain that they'd been told had no enemy presence. When
they get hit with an RPG. Petty Officer first Class
Neil Roberts falls from the bird right he'd been you know,
the chopper has like I think it's ramped down, and
he's standing out there and it gets hit and he falls,
and he falls and hits so hard that he bends

(51:52):
the stock of his rifle on the way down, so
he doesn't have the normal armament that he would have.
Even they think he's you know, they don't know if
he's dead or not. But the pilot can't stop to
rescue him, so they have to get back. And when
they return the base with that chopper, Slabinsky gets in
another chopper with the rest of his men and they
head back to rescue Roberts. But in the interim period,
Roberts had been found by al Qaeda fighters and they

(52:14):
had killed him and stripped his body for gear, and
one fighter had attempted to saw his head off as
a trophy. Now, seals do this all the time, as
we've talked about when war hits a certain kind of level.
People do this all over the world. There's no way
to avoid types of this other than not going to war.
You know, that's the real way if you want to

(52:34):
ensure this shit doesn't happen. But again, these seals are
new to Afghanistan and this really like enrages them. These people,
they lose their minds over the fact that their buddy
got mutilated, even though some of them had already even
mutilating that Afghan people, right.

Speaker 5 (52:52):
That's pretty standard for these guys, like whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Can't do that to us.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
No, no, you can't do that to us in code country.
Matthew Cole quotes a former Team six leader saying, when
you see your friend killed, recover his body, and find
that the enemy mutilated him, it's a school yard mentality.
You guys want to play with those rules, okay. And
although this former seal acknowledge that war crimes are bad,
he understood how often they happened. Quote, you asked me
to go living with the pigs. I can't go live

(53:18):
with the pigs and then not get dirty. And this
is again, this is bad. This is the kind of
thing there should be accountability, The military should be cracking
down on this shit more right, like, this is not
the sort of thing that should be allowed to happen.
It's also if you're going to vote to send guys
to war like this, stuff like this is going to happen.

(53:39):
He is right about if you asked me to go
living with the pigs, I can't go live with now.
The pigs are anyone you ask to go murder people
right in the middle of nowhere repeatedly, right regardless of
what side they're on, They're going to wind up doing
ugly things because that's what happens when you wind up
in that kind of a fight. And yeah, it's the
issue is that this becomes an excuse that like, well,

(54:01):
this is inevitable to some extent, becomes like so we
can't get angry when guys do it, as opposed to
know that means if you think this war is really necessary,
you actually have to punish those guys immediately and incredibly harshly,
even though you know what's going to happen to some
of them, and that's going to be bad to morale
because otherwise things get much worse and you wind up
defeating your own attempts to win hearts and minds and

(54:21):
stop people from trying to kill your dutes, which what
happens in Afghanistan. There's a direct correlation and a lot
of provinces between war crimes committed by Navy Seals and
excesses by US special forces and the number of Taliban
fighters in activity and recruitment and whatnot. Right, this stuff
pisses people off, just like I'm an abu grabe around
the same time in Iraq really pisses people off. Right,
It pisses a lot of Iraqis off. It generates more

(54:44):
resistance because it's horrifying to see Americans doing stuff like
this to dudes in your country. And this, you know,
this is the thing that frustrates me most in some
ways about the Seals, which is that they understand that
their job is to be extraordinary and they're very proud
of that, but they think this really only extends. There's
too many of them think that this really only extends
to their ability to kill, not their ability to keep

(55:05):
their head and their sense of morality, and a horrific situation.
I would say, if you want to call yourselves truly elite,
the best of the best, exquisitely trained. Those are the
guys that you can trust, would be able to trust
to put into a situation like this for months at
a time and then not start massacring civilians. I would
say that's an elite unit when you do this kind
of shit where you just like the Taliban, right, right, yeah,

(55:30):
of course, right, exactly, just a little bit of self control, yeah, yeah,
Because honestly, if you're supposed to be elite, your actual
stated job is live with the pigs and don't get dirty. Yeah,
because you're better than them if you if you are,
but you're not right, and they want to be while
acting the same way, right anyway, And I think part

(55:51):
of the reality is that like Richard Marsenko and a
lot of Team six guys after him, just wanted to
be really well funded and supported pigs.

Speaker 3 (55:57):
You know.

Speaker 2 (55:58):
Unfortunately, right, that attitude is still present among Team some
people in Team six in two thousand and two and
almost twenty years after Marsenko's departure. It's present certainly in
chunks of the seals across a number of different teams.
The brutality in Afghanistan divided the men who saw themselves
and as private professionals and harken back to the old

(56:18):
udt days from the men. More poured in Marsenko's mold,
and this would come to a head in early March
of two thousand and two, after Hider's mutilation of the
wounded mand and after Robert's Ridge. Right, so this is
all going down in like the spring of two thousand
and two, roughly forty Sealed Team six men meet at
Bagram Airbase to discuss what Hider had done and what
had happened to Roberts and be like, so should we

(56:40):
just like start committing war crimes because the Taliban A,
what do we do? And they talk and the claim
that Cole reports in his book is that thirty five
of the forty guys wound up agreeing we can shoot
them and move on, but we don't mutilate them. That's
not honorable, right, But five guys are like, I think
I should be.

Speaker 3 (56:55):
Able to mutilate people.

Speaker 2 (56:56):
I don't know if that's the actual ratio. It doesn't
seem impossible to believe, And I think the ratio would
be a lot worse today, to be honest, you know,
I can believe that in two thousand and two, maybe
that's much earlier.

Speaker 4 (57:07):
Right, it's like the bad Apples thing. It's just like
the bunch is getting spoiled guys exactly.

Speaker 2 (57:12):
And this, this bunch who vote not to mutilate corpses
are still responsible for helping to spoil the rest of
the apples because even though they agree, we don't do that,
that's not honorable and they don't like Hider, no one
reports his war crime. He's not punished, right, He's pushed
out of the teams quietly, right, and they'll deny, they
won't let him get posted there again. But that's it,

(57:33):
you know, like they're not because you don't do that
in the seals. You don't punish your own guys.

Speaker 3 (57:38):
You know.

Speaker 2 (57:39):
This is Marcinko's favorite way of dealing with seals who
didn't fit in, right, just you know, icing them out
of the of the of the team. But it also
means that the established standard is that guys who commit
war crimes get iced out and not punished, and often
continue their military careers elsewhere. This is well known to
the rest of the Navy. Susan Razer, a retired naval
criminal investigative of his agent, told Matthew Cole her opinion

(58:02):
that quote, the seals believe that they can handle the
discipline themselves that's equal or greater to what the criminal
justice system would give to that person. And reading between
the lines, I think that at least some of this
refusal to hold their own accountable comes from a fear
that a lot of the Saner Seals have of their
more piratical peers and colleagues.

Speaker 3 (58:23):
Right.

Speaker 2 (58:24):
You get some of this in an account of that
meeting by a retire that big seal meeting about whether
we should mutilate corpses. And this is from a retired
non commissioned seal. Fifi, that's Roberts was mutilated. And then
we had to address a very important question, how do
you get the guy's head straight to mitigate any retaliation
for Fife? Otherwise we knew it's going to get out
of control. A third of the guys literally think they're
Apache warriors. Then you had the Muslim way of from

(58:45):
moving ahead. I understand the desire, I don't condone it,
but there was definite retaliation.

Speaker 3 (58:50):
Right. Yeah, So again you've.

Speaker 2 (58:51):
Got this day, he's trying to defend his unit, but
he's too honest to be like yeah, but like these
guys are. A lot of these guys are literally insane,
and the fact that like some of these Taliban guys
are pretty out there is just making them crazier. It's
feeding into their delusions. You've got two groups of really extreme,
heavily armed maniacs hunting each other, and it's making them
all get hideously more violent, especially to the civilians. Yeah,

(59:12):
that's this guy's argument, and we're the good guy and
we're the good guys though, even though you really can't
tell it. The difference from looking at all the brains
splattered on the ground. God, So, in this account, Hider's
mutilation gets sort of grandfathered in under the general belief
that we have to allow some kind of retaliation from
the craziest of the seals in order to keep the
units functional. Hider, for his part, denies that he ever

(59:35):
desecrated the body of an enemy fighter, of the dead
enemy civilian to this day. Quote this is what Hyder said.
Somebody else is making this up. Memories get distorted over
fourteen years. They're telling you how they remember it. There
was a lot of chaos. I'm telling you the absolute truth.
I actually don't know who's right, you know, to be honest,
it's entirely possible someone besides Hyder did that mutilation. Shit
get fucked up like stuff that happens people forget, like

(59:57):
it's war fucks with your mind even if you're there.

Speaker 3 (59:59):
I don't I literally don't know.

Speaker 2 (01:00:01):
But so many guys talk about this that like, yeah,
I think, well, I know what the likeliest thing is.
It's more or less the story that most of these
seals told Cole A lot of there are several seals
told Coal so Team six leadership analyzed Hider's performance after
their deployment and concluded that he'd been a dangerous officer
for several reasons. Despite being a ground commander. He'd repeatedly
killed perceived enemies on his own rather than having his

(01:00:23):
men do it. And again, the officer's supposed to be
able to fight. You need to sometimes, but you're there
for other reasons. You're the officer. There's a reason. If
you're constantly just shooting dudes that you don't like need to, Yeah,
then that kind of means you're not doing your job
as an officer, right right.

Speaker 5 (01:00:37):
It's like one thing if this assistant manager pulls a
slurpy himself, Yes, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:00:42):
Yeah, and does it once, but if you're constantly doing
it like you kind of not doing your other job,
and one former seal called this a total breakdown of
operational tactics. This also gets back to something Marcinco seeded
into the unit. Officers and enlisted have very different, but
not lesser job descriptions. That's the way it should work, right,
you need botho. However, Marsinko's culture totally venerated the enlisted

(01:01:03):
man and demonized officers, so insecure guys like Hyder came
to feel that the best way to earn their place
as a real pipe hitter is to just start blasting
dudes as soon as they see them. And this is
not going to be the last time that causes a problem.
But this is the end a part three.

Speaker 3 (01:01:17):
We did it.

Speaker 4 (01:01:18):
Yay, still grim, still grim as fuck?

Speaker 3 (01:01:23):
Yeah, it's gonna get grimmer.

Speaker 2 (01:01:27):
Ah.

Speaker 3 (01:01:27):
I don't know why I said it that way.

Speaker 1 (01:01:29):
Andrew, you want to do a plug real sure?

Speaker 2 (01:01:32):
Sure, let's see I used to do the know is
this racist podcast? We're uh putting that on pause a
little bit. But in the same feed, we're doing a
podcast called Starter Trek. That's me Tawny Newsome our producer
is Jesse Gender. We're also on YouTube. I'm watching a
lot of Star Trek for the first time. They're watching
a lot of Star Trek for like the billionth time.

(01:01:53):
So uh yeah, it's it's been fun.

Speaker 5 (01:01:56):
It's been nice to not to take a little racism break. Surprised,
still plenty of hits to talk.

Speaker 4 (01:02:01):
About in Star Trek.

Speaker 2 (01:02:03):
Well, listeners, why don't you all take a racism break
and we'll be back on Thursday.

Speaker 4 (01:02:07):
Bazza please.

Speaker 1 (01:02:12):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
For more from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia
dot com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video
episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,
dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me of Netflix.
You don't miss an episode. For clips in our older

(01:02:33):
episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel YouTube
dot com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about
forty percent of you, statistically speaking,