Part One: Richard Marcinko: The Founder of SEAL Team 6

(upbeat music) - Cool, sir, media. - 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 hearing organs to your body so that your life is one undifferentiated cacophony of noise. And if you have done that, what, why? Why would you do that? - Because I could produce more podcasts. It would make me, so if you are the one person who needs it. - Bronset, baby. - Yeah. - Bronset. - That's right, that's right. Why are 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, buddy? - That's available, we could probably make that a product. - Andrew's hair is long, so long and luscious now. - No, I know. - Where are the people? - It's a moderate. - I know, right. - Yeah, summer. - It's great. - It's maybe never going to stop being summer in Southern California. - That's right. - It is always summer in Southern California. - At this point, maybe for petually. I had the most distressing thing that happened to me is I went to Santa Barbara and distressing but not, I guess box crab is now very, very readily available in Santa Barbara when it didn't used to be necessarily in such a couple of numbers. - Box crab? - Box crab for the animal? - Yeah. - The little spikey, is that like a restaurant? Okay, no, no. - No, the animal box. - No, the animal is available with a little delicious spiky guys. And the way, the like Fisher guy and the restaurant, people were talking, I mean, they know it's climate change. But I think they're like not, they're trying not to talk about it. It just like, it bums everybody out. - All of a sudden, I guess, I don't know. Crab is just the side they want to live here now. - A lot 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 pausing it to do a Star Trek show with Tony Neesom and Jesse Jender, right? - Yeah, we're, I think we can, I cleanly say, where we're doing the Star Trek show as the main thing. Yo is this racist, might come back, or yeah, we're doing Star Trek. That's a show where Tony and Jesse are huge. Tony was on Star Trek, Jesse loves Star Trek and knows so much about it. They both know more than me because I only ever watched Star Trek extremely stoned in syndication. So I recognize shit. Basically, every episode is me doing the Leonardo DiCaprio meme of like pointing at the screen like, I know that. But I don't understand. 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 history is. So. - Well, that is exciting. But I figured this week we could give, Yo is this racist fans? - Yeah. - One last little hurrah, 'cause I wanna ask you, and is this racist question? - Oh, good. - Oh yeah. - Yeah, maybe I'll just, I'll bring back Yo's this racist just for a year. - Is this racist, the Navy SEALS? (all laughing) - Listen, my only like experience with this train of thought is that 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, 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 Navy man. - That is, that's actually not true. At least, is regards the US military, you know what 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 echelons of special forces are a lot wider than the rest of the military, to a degree that's kind of uncomfortable when you also look at where some former Delta guys who are now political figures and some former SEALS wind up. - Right, right. - This episode is not actually about the Navy SEALS as a whole, but we are talking about SEAL Team 6. This is gonna be a two part episode because I wanna talk about how SEAL Team 6 went from like, you know, another special forces unit where 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 6 guy, it seems like it has a fucking book and a podcast, you know, all over the media. They're running, they're 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 16 year old kid in the neck for a reenlistment ceremony and Mosul, then they are for even like fucking killing Ben Laden. And all of this comes back, like the reason why all of the shit with the Navy SEALS is as messy and as fame hungry and as crimey as it is today, it all starts with the guy who founded SEAL Team 6. A fella, I can't wait to tell you about named Richard Marsinco. Have you ever heard of Richard? Nope. Oh, yeah, well, this is gonna be a hoop. Yeah, can't wait. This is an I Heart Podcast, guaranteed human. I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable, abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Kylie Breikman, Angel Jaretana. Jeremy Colhane, Patrick McDonald. And we're the hosts of the artists on artists on artists podcast. The improvised character comedy podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants. And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He, he winks on Halloween. It's right up next to the microphone. I hear you get the elbows here. The eyelashes hit each other. You never seen it least so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to artists on artists on artists on artists every Thursday on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a four-year page or equally important to your personality, welcome home. Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture. With your favorite writers, book talk creators, and plenty of overthought opinions. Yeah, I'm obsessed, so obsessed. Listen to Pro Society on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Self-care September is your reminder to slow down, check in with yourself, get off your phone, and maybe ask why am I like this? I'm Gemma Spek, host of the Psychology of your 20s podcast, and this month we're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming from setting boundaries and navigating friendships to understanding anxiety, confidence, relationships, and attachment. Sometimes our biggest decisions, without us even realizing it, aren't driven by what we truly want, but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. So, before we talk about him, I want to kind of lead you in to, the reason I wanted to talk about this at all, which is that the Navy Seals and the kind of special forces look, the operator look, is one of the more dominant styles in American pop culture these days, and you can see this all over the fucking internet. If you happen to be particularly a male, who has looked up anything related to firearms, or survival gear, or talked about that stuff. - Or how to sharpen a knife, can I just say? - How to sharpen a knife, that's how my YouTube algorithm got poisoned. I literally was trying to learn how to sharpen knives during a very valuable skill, immediately. Like, within like, - When did you say shit? - It was like Nazi shit, it was incredible 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 so if he's gonna put it out, it's an ad for it, it says the Pipe Pitters Union, they're advertising their spring break special, 15% 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, he's wearing body armor, he's got like a tattooed hand, and it's holding, he's holding an AR-15 across his chest and like a low-ready, right? - Not the Pipe Pitters Union, honey. - Yeah. - The Pipe Pitters Union. - Yes. - This is, he's got, you can also see his like, Chen, 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 US Special Forces operators. Now, the fact that this business sells, Tactical and special forces themed apparel should be obvious from the context of the ad, but what are pipe hitters? If you guys heard that term before, I just assumed it was, you know, we'd, we'd smokers, bro. That and just, I heard that in a girly pop conversation. No, definitely not, 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 bad ass 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 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 hitter 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 terms origins start in drug lingo, which also, by the way, special forces, massive drug problems, like there's a fuckload of drug issues all across you, a special forces. Right right right. 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 think it's more from opium just based on when it started being said. And here's our due to an Afghanistan presumed right, I mean, and before, yeah, sure, I think Vietnam too, but here's how the soldiers 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 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 team, a seal guy, a seal team guy, right, or a delta guy, you might call yourself when your buddies a pipe hit or pipe hitters, right. But today, it's more commonly an aspirational term used by people who are desperate to embody it and usually do so for buying things, right. And here's a fun example from the student of the gun company, which offers tactical training and books like the pipe hitters guide, the citizens are regular defense court for 1099. What a deal. And you can see the cover of this self-published book. There's like four shlubby looking dudes with a looks like a K various a K style guns and like quasi civilian tactical gear in like a grayscale foggy photo of a city behind the looks kind of post apocalyptic. And the best way I can describe like the way these men are dressed is like it's race rioters chic, right, like that's how they all look. They're all dressed like Kyle written out a little. Or how written house thinks he's dressing. Yeah, yeah, the product description of this book reads as follows, building upon the widespread popularity of the original pipe hitters guide. This book will take the lessons from the original text and build upon them. The citizens are regular defense court 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 hitters book and I found myself falling down a rabbit hole of related text, including a pipe hitters guide to access denial. And a pipe hitters 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 as personal website and it turns out that name is quote the numb de plume for a civilized barbarian, a savage gentleman with 30 plus years of operational and combat experience in the United States and overseas. The author is 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. You can just be right. 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 mach people in the 80s and 90s kind of five the like blood sport guy like all the fake like like white martial arts guys that could like kill you with three moves. Yes. I guess what I mean is these guys have always existed with basically the same gun same mindset. And also they have always worshipped the special forces aesthetic and that has always been like the coolest thing and that this guy hierarchy is a special forces dude with special forces experience. Um, 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 training manuals to make up. It's extreme, but strip mall karate five right. Exactly. Exactly. But this guy's whole schtick 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 hyper competence to insecure white dudes who feel like they're like one book and maybe one gun away from being like John Wick, right? I buy a $6,000 pistol and enough books about tactical shit. Then maybe I'll be that cool. Um, and even before it reached the civilian word pipe hitting pipe hitter as a term was an act of branding special forces guys at the dawn of the G watt that global war on terror took a term from a popular recent movie and used it to define themselves how they wanted to be seen as gruff tattooed bad asses who didn't follow the rules but got results. And that's why when disgraced navy seal 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 so people show you the website for the pipe hitter foundation. But yeah, I mean, 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 Mosul 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 what this guy is alleged by a bunch of his colleagues as having done right bad representation by Ray band here. But there's not any good representation of Ray band and the main step up in the pipe hitter ethos is these meta glasses. Just the idea to be to look like this and be like an easy creep bad representation for people named Andrea. Yep, this website is amazing. It's incredible. We'll talk about Eddie and the very end of these episodes because this a lot of what we're talking about with both Richard Marcinco 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 hounds, right? Is what births Eddie Gallagher in a lot of ways now special forces guys have been seen as cool pretty much since we invented them. But their popularity really rocketed up after the Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, which is a 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 they we didn't like the pilot was like if you're going to land you can't land a helicopter. And like I've walled an environment like that it'll fuck up the rotors and they were like, well you're fired and then the other thing the guy said happened. Not quite as professional as they often come across. But yeah, since 2011, the term has made its way back from the military into movies like cicario. That's kind of the first place. I seem to remember hearing it in like a pop culture sense. Yeah, I said theaters. Right. Right. Right. It's 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 another example from the the pipe hitters union. Right. And I my favorite is probably this original pipe hitter t-shirt that shows this is part of like a series where it's like the founding fathers reimagined as like special forces gangster bad asses. You 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 aesthetic of the operator is because Teddy's not depicted as a regular soldier. He's got a gun over a 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 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 Tate posing for Instagram. He's got the plate carrier. He's got a gun. He doesn't 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, if you're watching this in the video, right in the east where his mask ends. 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. Well, like you want to have that thing covered. Really dumb. Yeah. Now the skull, the skullgator, too. That's the big. Yeah, the skullgator is a big part of this aesthetic too for sure. Yeah. Sure. Now, we're going to look this week into the first pipe hitter, the man who created the template for this kind of guy and also who literally invented seal team six, Richard. Marcinco. Now, the Navy's seals were already well known when an operator with seal team six killed us. How I'm been laden in a boat a bad Pakistan, but before that day, they were. were simply among the best special forces units that the U.S. kept and it's arsenal. And in all honesty, prior to a vote of 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 attitude then. But after bin Laden, there was not really any question anymore. The seals and team six in particular were the premier 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 our Ashford Congress this day. But first, here's some fucking ads. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived, and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. Just remember, this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're a bookshelf and you're a for-you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, and that is a Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Hi, this is Kylie breakman, Angel Jaretana. Jeremy Colhane Cash MacDonald. And we're the hosts of the artists on artists on artists on artists podcast. Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is foe journal. I don't know, have you guys heard of foe journaling? Yeah, it's reading, it's called reading. So we don't like to use that word anymore. OK. A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class? No! I've been dying too. I'm so sorry, I'm seeing a reading of Sadako in the thousand paper cranes by Audrey McDonald's at the Wonderland bookstore, 14. That's crazy. I went to the Wonderland bookstore yesterday and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Doctor 30. No way. We'll have to come to the last bookstore, though. Kim Katrol is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. A panel of Eurovision participants. He winks on Halloween. He gets rid of next to the microphone. You've never seen Italy so quiet as when the pope gets up to wink on Halloween. Listen to artists on artists on artists. On the I heard radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. By Asia, rather than or so, at least 70% have a phone. Middle school is a different world than the one we grew up in. I'm Dr. Joy and this is therapy for black girls. We spent real time on it in our surviving middle school run, bringing in a child psychologist and a psychiatrist who's raising two black girls of his own to talk about what's really going on with our kids right now. So it's literally physiological and neurological, air-psychological chaos happening all at the same time. We got into group chats and gaming, friendship and bullying, and how to tell the difference between healthy monitoring and the kind of surveillance that erodes trust. You're belonging. You could think of belonging as I can be myself and I can still be accepted. And then they're fitting in. But again, says I have to change who I am in order to avoid rejection. Then we turn the conversation toward the fathers, sitting down with therapists, care games on black fatherhood, and what it means to raise a daughter through this stage. You don't have more shorts so you can't do flips. You have on the dress here, across your legs. That's the range of this run. From screen time to identity to the fathers doing the work at home. We have to get off our device. But the reality is there's a lot of life out there that we don't want you as your adult in the life to miss out on. This has been our surviving middle school run. Brought to you by the people who spend their careers thinking about exactly this. I'm Dr. Joy. Listen to therapy for black girls on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. And we're back. Richard was born on November 21st in 1940 in Landsford, Pennsylvania, in the home of his grandmother. Now his hometown was a mining community and coal 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 in land in Landsford as a whole as they were born, they worked the mines, they died, right? So understandable that he's going to want to get out of this, right? Now we'll be discussing his autobiography, Roe 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, Roe Warrior, is the first Navy SEAL tell all, right? It is the first true story book written by a former operator for 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, 'cause I used to know a SEAL team one guy who was fought in Vietnam. And the book he recommended was called Hunters and Trackers. That was like, he said was very true to his experience. Marcinco's book covers Vietnam heavily, but it's nearly all lies, right? That said, it's an important historical book, right? Because every one of these Navy SEAL fucking books that's come since and the modern era, there's two of them from two different guys who were part of the Osama operation who claimed to have shot him, neither of them killed Osama bit. - Lot, and everyone knows that, right? - 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, the podcast listeners might be able to find this, but someone like LA comedian-wise basically went on a date with another person who, I don't even know if they're actually a Navy SEAL, but claimed to have killed Osama, but not 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 red, we don't know his real name, and he does not talk, right? That's what people say about the guy who actually did it. We'll talk about that too, because again, because two different people who were there on the day they killed Ben Laden were both there with the primary purpose for them being to write a book about it later. They both fucked up and broke the rules and did 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? Like Marcinco not only starts Team Six, but he establishes that this is a way to make a fuckload of money. - After you get out of there, you see it, right? - So again, don't take anything, he says in this, literally, and assume a degree of artistic license. When Marcinco describes that his family was too poor to buy boots to pull themselves up by their boot straps, right, I don't doubt that they were poor, but he's probably exaggerating a little bit. From an early age, Richard seems to have identified with his maternal grandfather, Joe Pavlev, who he described as a cantankerous, short, barrel-chested, shot in a beer, hard-drinking son of a bitch, with a square face and Lee and his Breznev 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 Marcinco just invented this personality to graft onto a real guy because it was way more convenient, right? This is part of, 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 bad people, right? - Right, right, right, right. - It's also like, that's what everyone sees their grandpa has, like, for take. - Yeah, so 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 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 beer glasses. Get it, that's all aesthetic. He's not telling us anything about what his grandpa actually did, or, like, said. He's just talking about like his hands and how he's like an archetypal tough guy in a working class bar. That's just not, that didn't sound real to me. That's not how, like, well, or it's not at all a tough guy, but I wouldn't just go that way. - Scrape that surface. That's like fucking 3,000 guys in that town of 5,000 people. - Exactly, exactly. That's a picture. that's not a man, right? - Yeah. - Anyway, Richard says that he was independent from a young age, right? 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 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 10th. And that I don't, I don't doubt. - Right. - I mean, that's true of my grandparents, right? I mean, my grandpa, I think, had an age grade education. Yeah, I haven't found any accounts that contrast with this. So again, we, and I don't, I don't have trouble taking that stuff as well. - And who took that stuff as well. - Yeah, when he was in seventh grade, the mind's 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, 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, alter boy. And as an adolescent, he worked as a waiter at a lunch place near the Rutgers campus. He claims to have worked 120 hours a week during the summer. He says the Italian owner of the place treated him like a son and started giving him wine, which Richard developed a taste for. And by age 13, 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 15, Richard claims he pretended to be an 18-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 when she was hired to fill in for a teacher in his high school French class. She's like dating this girl and she shows up to teach it at his high school. I don't know if this is true. - This is why I'll put it, this is autobiography. - Yeah, yeah, yeah. - He does want you to think this is cool that like he was-- - Yeah. - I mean, big, statutorily raped by an adult, but also that she didn't know. Like, that's part of why I kind of doubt it is, he thinks this is 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 class at all. He claims that he was dating an Italian woman, quote, "Married to a guy 27 years or senior and in serious need of vigorous humping and pumping." - Right. - Again, this is from his autobiography. - Yeah. - I hated that. That was so-- - This is a guy. - This really gross. - This is certainly this kind of guy. - 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 off. Behind the bastard's true fact about Richard. - He tried to join the Marine Corps at this point. Eisenhower had just sent the Marines to Lebanon 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 this guy's like, "Well, you got to graduate high school. "We don't just hand a gun to you," right? Like he's clearly up soft put by this kid. - Right. Like, dude, to join the Marine Corps, we'll tell you how hard it is to make a recruiting sergeant not want to get you to sign that paper immediately. (laughing) You have to see him insane. - Right, this will hurt me to pass them on more than ever to get the additional number Jesus Christ, right? - Yeah, my conscience won't allow this. And I'm a recruiting sergeant. (laughing) 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 problem 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 starts dating seriously for the first time at this point and he writes that when I wasn't cutting 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. - Good for him. I'm mostly good for her, especially good for her. - 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 1958 and goes to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. In the great book, Code Over Country, Matthew Cole writes, "Shortly after enlisting, Marcinco, a radio man saw "The Frogman, the 1951 movie, film depicting UDT Force, "Heroics in World War II 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 five years of life, right, that's during World War II, 40 to 45, 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 in every society, in every place that's done formal war, right? You can look at the Greeks who hid in the Trojan horse as like an example, whether 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 soldiers, spies, and assassins that would do the work that modern states have speck ops guys do, right? This has always been a thing, and during World War II, the development of technology mandated the creation of highly trained soldiers capable of extremely niche operations, particularly doing complicated underwater shit. And the United States, 'cause this happens, like the British have, you know, the SAS and shit, like this is independently happening in a number of places, the Germans have the Falschworm Yagers, 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, unsurprising. - Unsurprisingly, it's just like a lot of, they were very influential in a lot of like small unit tactic developed. - Yeah. - And for the US, a lot of this process started in the Pacific, the storming of Betty O' Island by the second marine division in the Torawa toll was a hideously bloody affair. And the reason why it was such a fuckup is basically, they calculated the tide, 'cause you need to know what the tide's gonna be to like have the boats moving in the proper way to get all of the dudes on shore at the right times, that one set of them isn't exposed, and you're 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 alt," then it would have avoided a horrible bloody situation, right? And so the Navy decides we need specialist divers who can scout out coastal areas ahead of a landing, measure the depths of exactly figure out the tide, find and disable mines before landing craft come in, right? Like these are our first real special forces units. So the Navy had started training underwater demolitions teams before Torawa. And 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 II are like reading feverishly stories about Navy Frogmen. These are some of the, like some of the first GI Joe's are Frogmen. - Yeah, I was gonna say, it's cool. - It's like GI Joe mentality, you need a water guy, you need a nice guy, you need a flying guy. - Exactly, exactly, that looks like rocks. - Yes, it looks like rocks for some reason. - So the first men in the line of descent of the Navy SEALs were Navy CB 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 of these units went through the same training. And we're expected to handle the same tasks and work together in units so small that you couldn't have the traditional divide between officers and enlisted men. One thing that's noted is 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 meal. Now that said, I have known some people who were in units that would say that like after months of heavy combat, you kind of stop, some of that stuff matters a lot less, right? - Right, right. - Right, right, in the book Alpha, which is a great read about Navy SEAL alleged war criminal letty Gallagher, author David Phillips writes this about the first Frogmen. They've been formed from civilian workmen in the New Deal 1940s America and they embraced the era's informal attitudes of blue collar solidarity 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 bad asses 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 respected because the thing that they have to do is both totally necessary for the success of naval operations and insanely dangerous. During D-Day, UDT swimmers would be 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 basically naked. And they're swimming directly into guns. 52% 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 II 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. Phillips notes that they had little use for discipline that regular troops were expected to live under. They refuse to shave their hair, wear proper uniforms, march or salute as a rule. Officers outside the unit complain that they look 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 job. They could be as crazy as they wanted, right? Right, right, right. And that's a, then that's still a big part of the, and it's not a problem really in World War II, 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 fellow soldiers and risking their own lives to do it, right? Right. It's sort of like the engineering version of the medic. Yes. Yes, exactly. It's like they're doing logistics under fire. 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. Some 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 the stress. Many couldn't, between 60 and 75% dropped out by the end of the week, right? And a part of what they're doing, 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, 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. 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 SEALS. 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. Yeah. I mean, some stuff gets hard and some stuff gets softened. Yeah. You know? Yes. 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 very observant man. Because so many want to be frogmen 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. Postwar, stories of these formerly secret elite units captured the imaginations of countless young Americans, and in the wake of World War II, 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 won by air power, with anything on the ground handled by small elite teams of highly trained soldiers. In 1951, 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 Hollywood US military joint production propaganda movies. The 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. From top secret records, filmed with the cooperation of the Department of Defense, comes the thrilling story of these pin-footed, goggle-eyed, beach-blasting heroes. They fight like men from another world, but they've got Brooklyn, Texas, and Missouri written all over their hearts, "You're a brave man, all of you are, you wouldn't be in this outfit, nobody questions that, but your kind of bravery comes ten cents a dozen, and isn't worth a hoot more when the chips are down." This is great, so I love this 50 shit. It's so fascinating to put yourself back in the audience mindset of, like, in cooperation with the US Navy being like a positive thing, like who's juxtaposed? Well, and honestly, that whole thing about like they've got Texas and all their home states written all over, and just like, yeah, there is something that does a little, like the original fragment we're 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 from modern day Navy SEALs, right? Modern SEALs are descended from these guys, not at all alike, honestly, really. Now, young Richard Marcinco 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, 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 rest of his days. So Richard, who'd basically parented himself, half his childhood, finds this 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. Now, Richard had to spend a couple of years living the life of a normal and listed 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 big female ugly commander, or big fuck for short. Cool. Now, you know, that sentence didn't go where I thought it was going to 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 unlikely, but it's not impossible. Women were first allowed to enlist in the Navy in 1908, but initially only as nurses. Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels, who was weirdly woke for 1917, famously asked, is there any law that says a young man 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 Navy ladies join the naval reserve while men 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 core version, right? The waves in the wax are like the kind of ladies auxiliary during World War Two. And post war, the Women's Armed Services Integration Act brings women into the armed forces properly. And they're still limited today and what roles they conserve, less than they were then. The first female Navy officers had just been commissioned in 1948. And so 58 is when this is all happening. Marcinho could have had a lady CEO, right? But it seems like clear 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 a 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 we should we should take this. But this is something that like he wants us to believe. Richard writes quote, big fuck was also a rulebook creature. And he will later decide that basically all of the Navy's problems comes from people following the rules too, strictly the book, Brave Men Dark Waters or Kelly writes that some of the guys who served with Marcinho 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 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 fist fight 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. That's famously how that works. Yeah. I think that's the kind of lie a guy like Richard Marcinho tells. God. 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 shit beat out of him in a major trouble, major major trouble story. Yeah. Oh, I was just too, too tough. They had to. They had to promote me. They had to put me in the UDT 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. Mm-hmm. Yeah, that works. That's an ad transition. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. You just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced. to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the I Heart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm gonna have to look up this story, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, this is Highly Breakman, Angel Jaretana. And we're the hosts of the artist on artist on artist on artist podcast, the improvised character comedy podcast, where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. What I try to do is faux journal, I don't know if you guys heard of faux journaling. Yeah, it's reading, it's called reading, so you're so we don't like to use that word anymore. Okay, a panel of New Yorker cartoonists. No, I've been dying too. I'm so sorry, I'm seeing a reading of Sadako in the thousand paper cranes by Auderman Donald at the Wonderland bookstore, 14. That's crazy. I went to the Wonderland bookstore yesterday and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of zero dark 30. No way. We'll have to come to the last bookstore though. Kim Catrol is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. I hear you'll get the almost here. The eyelashes hate each other. Listen to artists on artists on artists on the I heard radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Buy Asia Raven or so at least 70% have a phone. I'm Dr. We spent real time on it in our surviving middle school run. Bringing in a child psychologist and a psychiatrist who's raising two black girls of his own to talk about what's really going on with our kids right now. So it's literally physiological and neurological and psychological chaos happening all the same job. We got into group chats and gaming, friendship and bullying. And how to tell the difference between healthy monitoring and the kind of surveillance that erodes trust. There's belonging you could think of belonging as I can be myself and I can still be accepted. And then they're fitting in fitting in says I have to change who I am in order to avoid rejection. Did we turn the conversation toward the fathers sitting down with therapists cure gains on black fatherhood? And what it means to raise a daughter through this stage. You don't have more shorts so you can't do flips you have on the dress you have across your legs. That's the range of this run from screen time to identity to the fathers doing the work at home. You have to get off her device. But the reality is there's a lot of light out there that we don't want you as your adults in the life to miss out on. This has been our surviving middle school run brought to you by the people who spend their careers thinking about exactly this. I'm Dr. Joy. Listen to therapy for black girls on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. 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 1961. This is a decade after the frogman 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 why we have the Navy SEALS right. He's the effectively the father of the Navy SEALS right. Now the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in mid 1961 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 Kennedy 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 armed to fight guerrilla conflicts assassinating local leaders in military figures in Canada. assassinating local leaders in military figures in carrying out acts of sabotage and then blending back into the jungle or the wilderness right. Captain William Hamilton Jr. a UDT man from World War II who was one of the people who was tasked with creating the Navy SEALS. Described the kind of men that he was looking for to populate this new unit right. 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 duty, sacrifice, personal dexterity and intelligence. Team and mission must come first. At the same time they must be individuals near robes 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 to kind of like pivot and think on their feet right. It's but it's like the same 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. Right. And the other part of it you need those things. But the training is basic is mostly like are you okay with guys screaming at you and blowing stuff up next to you and yelling at you. Right. 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 incredibly talented and skilled and have 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 robes. 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 and it has always been a cause of problems for them. And it's because they they this right Richard is going to be this guy to a fucking T right. One of these rough men with 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 26 20% 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 the diving instruction that it like previously had and that 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 courtesy of his bowels. Here's the book Rogue Warrior. I had a problem with Hell Week I developed a case of the runs and today's Navy that would probably be enough to get me excused. Not in 1961 they stopped for nothing the solution was speed. I discovered as they ran me up and down the beach that if I ran fast enough the smell of what ran down my leg and into my boot got left behind for the next boat crew to enjoy. Oh man so he right so he was just in a soft permissive era. Yeah. And and oh god. Well he was in an era where all they cared about was like can you handle the physical difficulty of the running. We don't care if you're like mentally fit if you're crazy if you're like an asshole. Right. 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 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 pride for him. So after he graduates Hell Week he writes that he and his classmates were confident as $500 hookers. They were sent for 10 weeks of training at St. 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 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 that's like blow fell style that's like like how gold finger recruits. Also I watch out with the lobster of Mr. soft stomach. Come on. Yeah. Yeah. Come on. You should be in lobster right now man. You 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 goes out of biography Marc Cinco talks about how much he likes to drink. A little earlier we're describing the kinds of men who made it through Hell Week he mentioned that some guys like him spent all of their downtime at the bar. The reality is that he 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 be coming off. So much of his book is taught and then he goes through like and then I I became 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, you know He's just a tough guy trying to get ahead, bro. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I think he's trying to protest too much Now as a reminder the seals don't exist I just said sealed right there's still not quite like it's it's still like it's 1662 so it's like the year after this train the seals are officially formed So he's he's kind of in a similar situation to like a former governor Jesse Ventura like Ventura is a little earlier But Ventura was UDT and then 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 You 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 Triton with a flint lock and an eagle on it because it People immediately are like that kind of looks like the Budweiser logo So people call it the Budweiser too 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 is all justifiable by the parameters 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? I mean Scott FBI at the time right. No, it's a CIA. It's a CIA. It's a 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 Viet Cong 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 insurgency was to kill these people So as early as 1967 the year that Marsinco first shipped to Vietnam as a seal His job was carrying out Phoenix missions all over the war front CIA informants would provide the agency with info and they'd send it to the seals who would murder kidnap an ambush Whoever they thought they needed to each of these raids would gather more intel Which would be used to plan further murders and raids and we've called it a different thing now But this is how counterterrorism strategy in US Special Forces worked in Afghanistan and Iraq to 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 rage you gather in for you do more raids and you often just wind up murdering guys Right, yeah, both in Vietnam and in Iraq and it's just often just murder squads right right right right Sir some stossy type shit. 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 And eventually we'll win eventually It hasn't worked ever but like it's got it at some points, you know, 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 Marsinco 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 get a pull it together and and become I mean, they're only getting worse Yeah, yeah, it's really all downhill from World War two, but that's American military history in a nutshell World War two is sort of our Batman begins it like set a tone that actually every subsequent thing based off it Really really fucked us as a as a global concern. 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, who else is pretty cool Andrew you Thanks, man plug your pluggables. Yeah, you know what well if we just kind of yada yada our way that a 23rd century You can yeah, just go to Star Trek times Yeah, I don't know Andrew T starter track That's it. I don't know. Yeah, please listen if you like it. We're we're really having fun doing it and Yeah, it's really and it's on YouTube also. Yeah, I will speaking of special forces and Star Trek One of my favorite episodes of T and G 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 made them too good as killers Oh, you know, he's on like a he's on like a ship full of starfleet people who are like really good utopian people and have are Absolutely not prepared to deal with it. It's a fun episode. It's sort of like Rambo. It's like they just drop Rambo on board It's like they dropped Rambo in like a kindergarten Warf is not prepared All right, I can't wait. We'll have you on for that great We'll be back with part two. Bye Thanks Behind the bastards is a production of cool zone media for more from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com Or check us out on the iHeart Radio 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 on Netflix. You don't miss an episode for clips and our older episode catalog continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel YouTube.com/at behind the bastards. We love about 40% of you statistically speaking I survived nine months in captivity and I've spent my life Exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth smart and these are the survivor files Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive Listen to the survivor files with the Elizabeth smart on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts Hi, this is Kylie breakman, Angel Jaretana Jeremy Colhane Cash MacDonald and we're the hosts of the artists on artists on artists on artists podcast The improvised character comedy podcast were each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft Join us for a panel of Eurovision participants and we do a little Halloween sometimes does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween It's right up next to the microphone I hear you get almost hear the eyelashes hit each other you never seen it least so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween Listen to artists on artists on artists on artists every Thursday on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality welcome home Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club part group chat for anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse Each week we're connecting the dots between books the internet and pop culture with your favorite writers book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions Yeah, I'm obsessed so obsessed Listen to pro society on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts self-care September is your reminder to slow down Check in with yourself get off your phone and maybe ask why am I like this? I'm james back host of the psychology of your 20s podcast and this month We're helping you make sense of the person that you are becoming from setting boundaries and navigating friendships to understanding anxiety confidence relationships and attachment sometimes our biggest decisions without us even realizing it aren't driven by what we truly want but by what will prevent us from feeling lonely or being alone Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the iHeart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts This is an iHeart podcast guaranteed human