Part Three: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

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 6, Richard Marcinco. And in these two episodes, we will be getting, you know, past just Richard and talking about kind of how the things he 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 things got as bad as they are now. Andrew T. Andrew, how's it going? I'm good. Find it. Andy Andrew. Find it. No war crimes this morning. So that's good. You haven't committed to me, right? I can't promise that. Yes. The world. Yeah. Possibly even SEAL Team 6. I don't know. It's entirely possible. There's a non-zero chance. We're back at war with Iran if I'm remembering correctly, but that changes every day. Your point is I don't know. Yeah. Your point is you don't know. And the point is also that you have a podcast. Yes. That is the point. Yes. I've been doing a Star Trek podcast with Tony Newsome, Jesse Gendur. It's called Star 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 in YouTube and excellence. Yeah. That's what I'm doing these days. One of those. I guess. Check that out. 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 no longer being produced. But the hosts of that are two great guys, Dan and Jordan, who did wonderful work documenting Alex Jones and actually helping with like the legal fight against him and info wars. And they both have new projects. So I would just wanted to let you know because a lot of our listeners listen to their stuff. And 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. That's it. And now it's time for some seals. Not the not the ones who like blubber and like the people eat well. I guess our navy cells have some blubber, but they're pretty skinny usually, right? Yeah. I doubt they'd taste very good maybe I wouldn't try my, yeah, they might, man. I'll eat any kind of seal. Look, at once, you know, I'm not going to 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. Yep. This isn't I heart podcast guaranteed human didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast. And what you missed there should not be a single law enforcement agency that does not have body cameras. It's real. Black farmers have been under attack. This is just the latest example of them just slapping DEI on anything. It's wrong. And I'm sitting here going. They are playing y'all for foals. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the I heart radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. I am talking to a felon right now with face tattoos, and I cannot decide if I like him or not. That was a caller from my podcast, Therapy Gecko, where I speak with anonymous callers about their problems, relationships, and anything else in the depths of their mind. It all happens on my show Therapy Gecko. So if you're trying to get out of your own head and into someone else's, this is the podcast for you. It's a Therapy Gecko on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 30 years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City. Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Who will you trust the people five miles overseas? This is a story about neighbors turning on each other. And what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough. But we're not stopping, are we? Listen to revisionist history, the Staten Island problem on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey there, everybody, Amy Robock and TJ Holmes here from the Amy and TJ podcast. We're going to cover everything you need to know during this heated political season. Yes, we just saw Lindsey Graham, the death of a long time senator. Also, we've got a couple of missing members of Congress. Also, we got a lot of members of Congress behaving badly. We got accusations, allegations flying all day long on Capitol Hill. Listen to Amy and TJ on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. Richard Marcinco commanded seal team six from its inception in August of 1980 to July of 1983. So again, not a long run as the as the founder and head of seal team six. Oh my God. We're going to get. We're going like more than one episode per year. This is like. Yeah. Yeah. Because we're getting way beyond. There's way more. That's true. You're doing anything bad. You have to get out of Marcinco's era because they're not doing a lot when he's running teams. Right. You're doing bad things. But be it not mostly to their livers. It seems like. Yeah. Right. Right. Right. During that early 80s period, there's not as much shit for them to go do as there's going to be or as there was in NAM. 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 fire on a little island called Grenada. Now most of you millennials are too young to have any memory of this, but Grenada was one of a handful of brief little mini wars that the US ran during 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. The only way to do that was to invade some countries that had no chance of fighting back. What? You can look in the Falklands. If you want to say sorry. I don't need to get. Concentrate about it. We just had confidence. Builders. Yeah. Batting practice. Yeah. Grenada and fucking Panama and then Desert Storm were like taking Seattleists 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. Yeah. 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 U.S. medical students who might be the next Iranian embassy hostages to deploy overwhelming and sudden U.S. force to the area. Their first task ended in disaster. On the night of October 23rd 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 400 pounds each and their life vests couldn't support them. Four team six seals died in 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 like that sucks, that sucks so bad that's, but that also what a shitty way to do. It feels I guess that's how it was going to happen, Jesus. Well, someone again, it's the someone probably should check the math on that. I don't know. Yeah. 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. In his book or notes that seal team four actually had wanted to 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 seal team six not been so eager to show off its skills in a real war. That's from um, brave men, dark waters and in brave men, dark waters is pretty positive book towards the founding of the seals and their early establishment. So the fact that or is saying that they did this because they kind of wanted to see if they could and a bunch of guys died mean something, right? I, I, it's, I guess the, 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. And they're always really bad at estimating risk like estimating how likely things are to work for them. Yeah. Yeah. Unfortunately, they're also try likely to take certain risks, which is why a lot of people don't, don't fight back, um, 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 government because Grenada was a commonwealth. And so 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 sign that thing. So like technically, they accomplished 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. Yeah. Then the adults have to come rescue. Yeah. Yeah. The adults being the Marines, right. Right. Yeah, they took a break from eating crayons to go save the seals. Yeah. 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 asked by war planners. Had everything Team Six had been asked to do? Been necessary? Did we need to use these guys for this? The failures witnessed in Grenada helped spur the creation of a new joint special operations command. They're basically reforming JSOC, and now it will include all special forces and not just a few specialized units. Now, the seals fought this. One way they'd established 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 was probably for the best for the seals. Because being integrated to JSOC brings them a lot more money, and by 1990, it's insured that the seals have expanded to more than 2000 men, which is double the size they'd been in Vietnam. Because as we're kind of nearing, you know, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the post-Cold War era, as that's all in sight, there's this understanding 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, I got a terrorist, handle a hostage situation. Could I ask you a broad question, I guess, which is like something I've, you seem like you definitely would know this more than me, which is that like the JSOC of it, why, besides branding, or is it just branding, why the fuck do we have so many different types of elite guys? 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, hostage operations, assassinations, kidnapping. Whereas a unit 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 job is to build up a militia of locals and like train them and teach them how to like 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. Green Berets are obviously, you 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? Delta Force is also, I mean, and these kind of do get muddled, especially today, like what is Delta Force used for as opposed to the team six is, but Delta Force was originally like, right? There's a lot of them and they all have specializations, got it. Possibly, right? Yeah, yeah. I guess that to me, it's just the era of like helicopters, drones. It just seems more like GI Joe than anything else. Yeah. And there's an argument to be made for that again, not quite that a lot of these guys will make, but there is a major made that like some time, 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. Yeah. So when we left off with Richard Martinko, because this is the stuff that's happening, I told you in the last episode, he gets a new job creating the Red Cell, who's to break in a Navy basis. That's right. So he is starting that job. That's when like Grenada is going on, right? Because he's out of the team six by that point. So let's get back to Richard for a little bit. When we left off, Martinko had charmed his way into getting a classified unit, Red Cell, which he 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 of said facilities to test their security protocols. This latter remit gave Martinko 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. 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. 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 work out of this story. That would be, you know, probably funny enough, honestly. 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 just miss people saying, Hey, but they're really dicks to us. Like kind of sour grapes, because you're not good at your security and the city showed you up. But then Marcinco's red cell started crossing paths with a man named Ronald Sheridan. Now, Ron was not a soldier, but the civilian head 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 Marcinco 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? If you're trying to cause me as an enemy, you can't like prep inside the base, you know, because they won't get to get your own motel six asshole. Yeah, get your, that's literally what he's saying, right? And Marcinco 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 Marcinco 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 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 Artero Farias 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 20th, 1986, the red cell moves into Kidnapper on Sheridan. 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 45 and she nearly shoots Phillips two times. And he has to like explain and I'll show them his badge. And Ron agrees to go with him for the good of the exercise. So I think you could agree they beat the exercise. This lady got the drop on his elite Navy seal and nearly killed him in his larping job, testing security on naval bases. He almost gets a sealed hill by a housewife like that is so funny, that's so good. Good. Good. Yeah. Like I would say, I guess his security was pretty good. Yeah. Like sounds like Sheridan's got it on lock. And instead they kidnapped this guy and they take him to a shitty motel. Well 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 got to 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 Marcinco. And Marcinco is still at the bar and is very drunk and continuing to drink during the operation. And he's like, that fucker wants to leave. Terrible new 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 him in a toilet. Now again, all of these red cell guys are seals. Yeah. Four more 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. And operator fell on Sheridan while torturing him and broke a rib. They lose a man beating up a tied up dude. The best of the best only the most elite. It only a seal could take out a seal clearly in both these instances we've talked about today. Well, only a civilian security employee's body can take out a seal or a seal hook of self-doubt. Yeah. Oh, yeah, Rob's wife later said after her husband was returned, I wish I had shot that guy. Yeah. And I get it. Margaret. That's a fair way to feel. 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 cops and stuff. Just a little bits. Yeah. I am a little, you know, wonder what's going to happen one day because one of these days, I was going to do something one way or the other, I guess, it probably won't be the fun version of it. But we could never raise, I guess, yeah, yeah. So the fact that his guys had beat up the student filmed it didn't look good for Marcinco. So he had the tape edited to remove the worst of the beating, but Sheridan reported the abuse and then he got access to the full video Marcinco insisted nothing had normal happened, but he was fired from red cell a month later and given an admiral's mask this time. Now, his clout held up yet again, it is sure, ensured him a slap on the wrist punishment. But a month later, the Navy opened an investigation into Marcinco's time as team six commander. The motivating incident for this was a report Marcinco had drunkenly pulled a gun during a military exchange trip to New Zealand. Like, Marcinco's like, this was all political, but also, and maybe it was, but also when did you drunkenly pull a gun during a military exchange ship and that's a good reason to fire a guy, I'd say. Why did you bring a gun to New Zealand? I mean, I'm sure maybe he gets, like, it's these in the military. I'm sure that was so kind of badass. You should. I'm going to say this. I'm so sorry. He should. You should, if you're a seal, if you're the king of the seals, you should be able to fight New Zealand barehanded. Yeah. That's all. You should be able to fight New Zealand barehanded. I mean, come on. Like, come on. Get the, get the fuck out of here. Get real. Yeah. So the seals clammed up and defended Marcinco, 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 realize what a fucking poison, Marcinco is, to everything they 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 Marcinco had enabled and carried out in Team 6. This caused the launch of a probe in the spring of 1986, which turned into a full investigation nicknamed Iron Eagle. Marcinco would later blame 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 Siben, 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 Marcinco get away with corruption. From the book Brave Men, Dark Waters, quote, "At one point they hired a truck, backed it up to the door of Team 6 headquarters, and carted away the team records, about 50 boxes of them. In a extraordinary scene, a government agency raiding, in effect, one of the Navy's most secret and most vital military units." So this is like a big deal. Investigation. Yeah. Yeah. Like that's scandalous. Honestly, crazy. They kept any records though. Giffin. It is. Just small amount. I know about it. Yeah. So, at first, the actual evidence against Marcinco 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'd actually fought in Grenada, John Mason, had also taken trophies back from Grenada with him, AK-47s. And that was illegal. Trophy takings illegal now, importing automatic weapons is definitely not, and that's supposed to be doing that. Of the trophies, AKs is not the most illegal one. Really illegal. Yeah. And look, would it be tempting where I and John Mason's, of course, you can't expect superhuman self-control. You build guide rails into 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. He had like ongoing relationships with print shops to fake receipts that he sent in to the Navy to get reimbursed for stuff. Oh my god. That's pretty funny. Yeah. So they, investigators get Mason dead to rights and they're like, hey, you want to keep that Navy seal wallet 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 and prison. So he gives them a bunch of information about widespread financial and propriety's directed by Marcinco. Mason was charged with 37 counts of various kinds of fraud and offered a suspended sentence for flipping on Marcinco. He agreed and he gave the Navy info on the scam Marcinco had just perpetrated. During his red cell days, Dick had cooked up a scheme with Mason. Mr. Mason had left the Navy and was a civilian working for a contractor. Marcinco agreed to order 4,300 experimental grenades for red cell with seal team six sponsoring the 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 4,300 experimental grenades were repenable. 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. He wanted to test them with his new elite unit. There's debates about this. One source says they were just normal grenades that was always a lie. In his book, Orr seems to be convinced that they were experimental grenades. I don't know the truth. The grenades sold for $310,000 and the manufacturer kicked $110,000 back to Ramco, the company that Marcinco and Mason had formed. So he is lying to just get start up money for a new business. Like that's the purpose here is like they're creating a con grenade by 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 in 1987, Marcinco is tried in federal court with bribery and conspiracy. The first trial ends in a hung jury in the second and January of 1990 sees him found guilty and sentenced to 21 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 the end of his military career, right? Richard Marcinco will hear from him a couple of times still old dickies still out there. But he's not in charge of anything. In 1987, the name of seal team six was changed to naval special warfare development group or dev group and this is the official name today. They're no longer called team six. People still call them team six all the time. Yeah, yeah. 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, Marcinco's legacy was hard to eradicate, right? You can change the name, but you can't necessarily change the culture that this guy started off in there. It's all it's all branding and culture. It's the real shit, I guess. 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 costs some problems. You know whose branding is never cause problems though. I was hoping you wouldn't do that. Pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good ad pivot. All right, everybody. Go away. Well, don't go away. Listen to ads. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pignero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word solita, trading the pity for possibility. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us. Not a lot of people smile around here. It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Ace Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the big money players network. Our show is extremely accessible to first time listeners. Each week we talk to someone in show business, aka the biz and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time and no one gets mad at their publicists for letting them do our show. You want to great guest like Sarah Sherman? Not that great. I actually can you help me can you can you help me shape this? Yeah. How about we flip it on his head? No. Right? How about we flip this around? Okay. What is the surprise one then? Well, actually, you think is the straight man is actually the one who's acting weird. Adam Scott. Love. This entire time you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never let go of that. I have. I would never set expectations for something like that. It seems like if the universe allows for something like that to happen, I am open to it. I'm always going to accept, you know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah. It's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking on the hallway to be honest with you. I was like, is that what you need? Nope. It's fragile masculinity. Ben stiller. No. There's a lot of times out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? Like you're like, oh, it's so stupid. Everyone's so dumb. And fake. Right. Fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh. And by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode. But he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. 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. I 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 stories about what it takes to make it out alive, listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. Our town is small taters by most standards, right? But to the people who grew up here, it's everything. What happens when a quiet Tennessee town becomes the front line in a battle over the future of America? Developers with right wing ties have purchased hundreds of acres of land in the area. The first thing you see when it pops up is high nears and apple etchah. But they weren't just planning houses. We need cities on a shining hill that exemplify and embody the Christian way of life. Stop right there, is that normal? A podcast about what happens when a small town becomes the site of a social experiment. God need that to rule. And decides to fight back. Do not use my hard work to sell your bulls***. They're not just opposing what's being planned for here. Our hometown is not a test tube. They feel like they're standing in opposition to an entire administration. I guess you didn't move in on a bunch of dumb hillbillies now, did you? Listen to our town on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're back. So it's December of 1989. 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 Chocane, but we went over those and are behind the bastard's episodes on Panama with Chelsea Manning, so go listen to those if you want to know why Panama happened. Contrasting with Grenada. There was a ton of time to plan before invading Panama. Grenada, they have to throw together really quick, which is part of why shit's so slap-dash. Panama shouldn't have been. In part because while they're planning it, we have bases there, so we literally have like our guys planning the invasion just like walking around and taking notes on the stuff they're going to be doing for a while. That's really kind of the ideal situation to invade another country. I mean, it's the red team, you know, the red cell approach. Don't even need a red cell, yeah. 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 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 their own stuff, right? So they test the seals with taking and capturing the airport that held 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 up with an air strike and we're not going to give you 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 small group of elite seals with small arms to take this hanger, right? So the guys they send in are like, the seals bluff has just been called basically like, okay. Kind of does. Kind of does. Captured badass. You should be able to do this like a knife. Yeah. 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 hanger, 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 hanger. But that's also the point at which they're like 10 or 15 something yards away. And so they get up close and the second they 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 have 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 24, I think. Like around two dozen seals. It's like a more. It's like a, it's like it 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. They have sent in like and 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 15 or 20 meters away from people with a machine gun, you're going to 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 of a commission almost instantly. Right. The seals do eventually accomplish the mission, but not because they take like the hanger 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. Norrigan never even tries to go for his jet. So their sacrifice is completely meaningless. And their opponents flee rather than being defeated in a satisfying way. It's the worst it could have gone. But again, it's because you, this is not a thing any guys should be doing. We know if you just send dudes directly into the mall of a machine gun, they die. It doesn't matter if they're seals, there's a reason you conventional infantry should have handled this. What is that? 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 like that where to happen? That's kind of your idea. It's 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, they didn't. 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. Come here. Yeah. Come here. Great. Okay. So, the Persian Gulf conflict is probably going to be the high water mark for unproblematic seal success at war because Commanding General Norman Schwartzkopf hated special forces. He's very distrusting of special forces. He only wants the West Coast seals participating because they're seeing 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 1990. None of them. Now, maybe because there weren't guys like Marcinco 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 acts of like subterfuse and sabotage. And they're able to successfully draw two full Iraqi visions away from engaging the US in combat. And that's exactly the kind of shit seals they're supposed to be doing, 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 you could use guys with this sort of training, right? So they can be used effective, you know? Outside of that, seals track and remove sea mines and they do search and rescue for downed pilots, the captured oil platform and none of them die. So Desert Storm goes pretty well for the seals. But that's like, 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. Schwartzcoff number one does not buy in to all of the bullshit around the mythology of these units. And number two, he's using them to accomplish a really reasonable thing to use a small unit like that for, right? The tasks they're being set. Yeah. My memory of him is he just seemed like a guy that had a turkey sandwich with no condiments on it every day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I read his autobiography as a kid. He was a bland or bland fellow. Weirdly enough, he grew up in Tetrawn as a child, which is kind of strange. His dad was like an ambassador or something. Wow. It's very strange. Andrew, you think he has a like white bread, turkey sandwich, no seasoning with just a piece of lettuce? Yeah. Just one of the whiteest men you can imagine. Yeah. Stormin Norman? Absolutely. Half a packet of mayo. Yeah. But just next to the sandwich, like my grandpa used to just open a bottle of rameuth when he was mixing his, his, his, his, that kind of idea. Just the seasoning. Yeah. Salt is in the house next door, yes. So by the 1990s, that's like kind of the mid to late 90s, the seals had been in a wide range of conflicts that they could draw experience from when looking and planning for the future. They'd been successfully integrated into the modern war fighting machine of the United States. And this is where the book Brave Men Dark Waters ends. An 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 9/11, right, about what he's afraid is going to happen to 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 in just 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 beat, breathing on like that Panama shit show. Yeah. And I don't know if they walked out because they were disturbed at 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. Yeah. 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 or is fear for the seals as they go for it. Yeah. And it's going to prove to be kind of prescient. It's really like these tough guys are kind of just soft baby boys that every turn as soon as criticism is evidently kind to never be mean to them and always treat them like special angel boys. Yeah. 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 previous duties of doing sabotage. Well, we don't need to send like some guys and flippers to sabotage refinery. We can shoot a missile at it, right? In his book or noted that seals had previously focused primarily on their ability to influence events by violence and contrast with the army special forces and that they might need to learn more about how influencing hearts and minds should work. He's talking about army special forces of the green berets and he's talking about how the seals maybe in the future will need to be more like that, right? even then some series resisted this idea. As Orr 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 that their involvement in Desert Shield and Desert Storm was that Saddam Hussein remained off limits, attempting to take out Hussein would have been an assignment tailor-made for the specially trained anti-terrorist experts of SEAL Team 6. In fact, one form remember 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, stuff that's not necessarily the SEALs, but our, you know, stuff special forces guys are doing in the Trump era to take the stage. Do you regret not going to college to write fanfic about fucking murdering Saddam Hussein? I do, I do. 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, for the crimes, but his romance novels, you know. He's an artist. You've got to separate the artist. That's right. And the art is very hard to do with Saddam Hussein. So or Kelly also related his concern that SEALs in Panama had shown they had issues working in large multi-platoon groups. Furthermore, their extraordinary abilities only really were at 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 NAMM, but that means like if you don't have access to that stuff, are they as capable? Are they likely to get into problems, you know? Yeah. And the global war on tailors. It's awfully stone soup with the SEALs. It's like, all you need is Navy SEALs and fucking air support and an army behind them. And the fucking do whatever you want. They're great. They're great. With all the air support they can call in, they're deadly as hell. So the global war on terror would prove some of these fears prescient and give Mersinko'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 90s. A glorious decade of peace and prosperity will nothing bad happen if you don't count the Balkans or Owanda or several other places. Anyway, in 1992, Richard, Mersinko gets out of prison and publishes the book Rogue Warrior, which is the first account of life inside SEAL Team 6 written by a SEAL. Even though Mersinko was disgraced, it timed perfectly with the post desert storm hype and millions of copies were sold. So the book is a stupendous hit among civilians who wanted to glimpse inside the rare fight air of special forces. And they'd already thought these guys were basically superhero. So Mersinko's bold claims didn't seem so wild. Like the reader is prepped to believe anything about a SEAL Team 6 guy, right? If he says he was doing crazy operations with Team 6 while he was leading them even though they really weren't doing all that much, it must be true because he founded SEAL Team 6, right? Well, we're in the Van Dam, you're in the Steven Seagull. Of course, this is what they do. We see it. It says a lot about the veracity of Richard's first book, Rogue Warrior, that he follows his autobiography, his nonfiction autobiography with a fiction novel series, also called Rogue Warrior. He creates a bunch of fiction novels with the same title and branding as his autobiography that's supposed to be a nonfiction. I think the idea is these were based on the real class. I'm going to tell you about those, you know, but yeah, I love when you do that voice. Based on a true story, based on a true story, that's all we need to put in the Hollywood's. They're like Rogue Warrior. That's right. Great title. Print it. The first of the fictional Rogue Warrior novels was Rogue Warrior Green Team, which spiraled out into the long series of subsequent novels, also ostensibly based on Marcinco'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 2, Red Cell, that's actually Richard Marcinco. He's got like Steven Segal. Are you ready for this? I don't think I am actually. Oh, man. So again, he's got a ponytail and a beard. He looks like Segal in the 90s. He's purposefully proud. He's wearing all black. He's got an MP5 submachine gun crossed against it over his heart. Like it's a fucking, I don't know, what a crucifix. Yeah. It's always sweet. Oh, man. It's so sad. Okay, Richard. Okay, man. It was through these novels, which made him a rich man that Marcinco 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. Make shit up. Yeah, just make shit up. I need to read you how the book is still sold today. This is from the audible description. When Richard Marcinco 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 Rogue Warrior 2, Red Cell, a riveting new novel with Marcinco himself as the hero. Oh my god. Love it. Love it. I love the the tales he couldn't tell a riveting new novel with himself as the hero. Yeah. I'm sure these are real stories, Richard. So this is him. This I picked Red Cell because we know the real Red Cell story. So here's what Richard wants people to believe 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 Marcinco is playing terrorists at Tokyo's Nareda Airport, easily penetrating the facilities defenses. He engages in a deadly firefight with North Korean operatives and discovers 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 Marcinco to the Navy against his will to command Red Cell. A dirty dozen seal team Marcinco 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 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 traitorous Americans are smuggling nukes to North Korea and Japan. And Ally is a nuclear warfare North Korea and Japan shaking hands. What is their plan? Why do North Korea and Japan want nukes together? It's just, you know, for the vibes. I guess it's for the mecha Godzilla. Mecha might be mecha Godzilla. That's actually possible. It's possible. On September 11, 2001, 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 the beginning, it's pretty 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 there. Right. Yeah. A lot, a lot of the operational burden in Afghanistan. From the beginning, we knew was going to be put on U.S. Special Forces, right? And actually at the start, when U.S. troops first in our Afghanistan, they're basically 100% of the war effort in the earliest days. It's not long after the Twin Towers fell that the Navy seals, who were still largely the force they'd been in the 1990s at that point, which is, you know, men trained mostly for coastal operations, who specialize 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 sealed blood. Then fucking up is going to cost a lot of other people their lives. Some of this is just an unavoidable consequence of war. When you invade a country, especially with an army where most people haven't like done that stuff before, even 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 initially you had a fight. When you drop your water type Pokemon into an earth, into an earth. This 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 sponsors of this podcast, all of whom, are actively planning to invade the United States and subjected to an authoritarian rule. But you know, that part's actually true. This is the closest truth. I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Binieto, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes, without asking anyone else first. Every time I try to be alone, I kept Meaning people. and they were like, "You smiled at us, "not a lot of people smile around here." - It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. 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So, in January of 2002, a SEAL Team Six officer named Vic Haider murdered an unarmed Afghan man at the first Team Six action of the war. Haider had been leading a team to capture all Kaida 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 evacking. So right, 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 'cause 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, Haider starts shouting at the man to stop, but this guy doesn't speak English. He's in his own country. He doesn't know what's being said. And he's elderly, he can't see for shit. And so he keeps stumbling in their direction and Haider who's got like night vision and is not in direct danger from 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 the cell to really man to death, right? The thing that had been in his hand that Haider worried was a grenade turned out to be a cassette from a tape player. 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, not, 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 Haider is. He shot a man with a fucking cassette in his hand. Right, right. It's what you're asking them to do. There's no training that'll 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. Well, and you can 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 that they might be heard. Means the person has a die. Vick 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 pie petters are like, that's fucked up. They'd used and murdered an old guy. And they complain and it gets put down to officer enlisted rivalry. And they just don't like their officer, you know? Right. Heiter 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 behaviors that some officers don't all go through like the really intense selection process 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. 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 ultra-violent, right? That is a pattern that occurs among the teams periodically. So 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, 'cause they're just psychos, right? I'm just trying to provide you some explanation for the motivation. It's a little, yeah. It could be a little both. Yes, yes. It's gotta be some of both. But the insecurity here isn't a 0% of the fact, right? Yeah, at the time of combat operations in Afghanistan, team six had about 200 operators split into three assault teams, blue, red, and gold. Each team got a mascot and proving that Navy SEALs are no different than 15-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 emer-- stereotypical Native American warrior as their mascot, right? And they call themselves the red men. Yeah. 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, yeah. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the worst would be the red men. The ones with like a racist nickname. In his book, Matthew Cole writes, quote, "Since the 1980s, when red team was first created, there were many operators in the unit who had experienced a metamorphosis of identity and persona in native American warriors. This is something that officers in the team who are critical of the culture will say." And someone listed, guys, that's how they describe it. That it's a metamorphosis. These guys really believe. Again, you don't have to credit these guys as 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, right? That's all I'm saying. Right, right. It's a cartoon. It's a cartoon. It's a cartoon, right? I have never gotten enough to tell about exactly what's meant 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 scouts. Now, of course. This had not happened at the start of the, when Heiter's and Aggie, this isn't start immediately, right? But Heiter is one of the guys who kind of starts the ladder of escalation of brutality that helps lead in that direction, right? And 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 there's a classic small man bully. Right. Very small man. Yeah. On March 6, 2002, the 10th Commander Heiter led more than 20 SEAL Team 6 operators in Tushanooks on a mission to kill their capture bin Laden. As you can guess from the date, it didn't go well. Intel had revealed an al-Qaeda 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 bomb the convoy. And they're like, are jacks. job is to like be super discriminating guys who can get really close and we could know if that because they didn't really know is this convoy bad guys are not and our job should 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 shinnok's gunners had unloaded into women and children who were being protected by the bodies of their men. And so in the seals land they see these guys were like throwing themselves these piles of corpses were men are trying to shield their children and wives from the gunfire of the ship that these seals had just been in and it fucks some of these guys up, right? 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. Heiter and several seals continued to see treat them as combatants per Cole's book, quote, Heiter said that he and a few other seals began to bury the casualties near a ravine by piling rocks over them as he did so he approached the man he 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. Heiter said that his single shot had blasted open the man's head. So there's this guy who isn't dead and this instead of trying to render eight he's just like, well, I thought he might have had a weapon. Yeah. I think this guy who's dying on the ground might have a weapon is like, I guess that's peak cowardice. It's just like fucking and there's some other seals who were there at the time who do complain about of this say like, well, they had weapons, but they were family weapons. Like it's Afghanistan. People, they're not Al Qaeda because they have a gun, you know, that's just life out here. So according to Heiter, 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 Heiter shoots this wounded man who was unarmed, by the way, Heiter proceeded to mutilate his body by stomping in his already damaged skull and like spreading brains out everywhere. And there's a chunk of guys who think this is cool and there's a chunk of guys who are fucking horrified, right? Heath who had shot the man initially and witnessed Heiter'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, kills this guy when he doesn't need to and mutilates his corpse. I think that's fucked up and I don't feel good about it, right? When he 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 Heiter does. And he does start to get iced out from the seals at this point or from like some units. They have this way of, if you're an officer and you're gross 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 by 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 Heiter gets, you know, what I'd call a slap on 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 2002, a team of team six seals under Master Chief Britslubinsky are in a Chinook looking for a bin Laden, soaring over a mountain that they've 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 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, Slubinsky 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 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 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 been mutilating after that Afghan people, right? That's pretty standard for these guys like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Can't do that to us. No, no, you can't do that to us. In code over 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 acknowledged 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 with the pigs and then not get dirty. And this is, again, this is bad. This is 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. He is right about it. If you ask me to go live with the pigs, I can't go live with the pigs are any one you asked 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, this is inevitable to some extent becomes like, so we can't get angry when guys do it as opposed to, no, that means if you think this war is really necessary, you actually have to do it. You actually have to punish those guys immediately and incredibly harshly, even though you know it'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 stop people from trying to kill your dudes, which what happens in Afghanistan? There's a direct correlation in a lot of provinces between war crimes committed by Navy seals and excesses by U.S. Special Forces and the number of Taliban fighters in activity and recruitment and whatnot, right? It pisses people off, just like I'm an Abu Ghraib around the same time in Iraq, really pisses people off, right? It pisses a lot of Iraqis off, it generates more 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 I think this really only extends, there's too many of them, I think that this really only extends to their ability to kill, not their ability to keep their head and their sense of morality in 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 mass-occurring civilians. I would say that's an elite unit. When you do this kind of shit, where you're just like the Taliban, right? Right. Right? Why do I feel better about you than that? Like, yeah, of course. Right. Exactly. Just a little bit of fucking 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 are. But you're not, right? I never have. And they want to be while acting the same way, right? Anyway. And I think part 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, you know? Right. Unfortunately. That attitude is still present among some people in team six in 2002. And almost 20 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 as private professionals and harkened back to the old UDT days from the men more poured in Marsenko's mold. And this would come to a head in early March of 2002 after Heiter's mutilation of the wounded man, and after Robert's Ridge, right, so this is all going down in like the spring of 2002. Roughly 40 seal team six men meet at Bagram Air Base to discuss what Heiter had done and what had happened to Robert's and be like, so should we just like start committing war crimes because the Taliban are what do we do? And they talk and the claim that Cole reports in his book is that 35 of the 40 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 able to mutilate people. 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 2002, maybe that that's much earlier. Well, it's like the bad apples thing. It's just like the bunch is getting spoiled guys. Exactly. 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. And they don't like Heiter. 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, you know, like they're not because you don't do that in the seals. You don't punish your own guys, you know? This is Marc Sinko's favorite way of dealing with seals who didn't fit in, right? Just, you know, icing them out 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 service agent, told Matthew Cole, her opinion that quote, "The seals believe that they can handle the discipline themselves. That's equal or greater to what they do." 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 values, right? You get some of this in an account of that meeting by a retired, 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 Fifi? 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 moving ahead. I understand the desire. I don't condone it, but there was definite retaliation. Right? Yeah. So again, you've got this guy'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 too 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, yeah, yeah. 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 the difference from looking at all the brains splattered on the ground. Yeah, God. So in this account, Heiter's medilation 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. Heiter for his part denies that he ever desecrated the body of an enemy fighter or a dead enemy civilian to this day. Quote, this is what Heiter said, somebody else is making this up. Memories get distorted over 14 years. They're telling you how they remember it. There was a lot of chaos. I'm telling you the absolute truth. I don't know who's right. You know, to be honest, it's entirely possible someone besides Heiter did that medilation should get fucked up. Like, stuff like that happens. People forget, like, it's war fucks with your mind, even if you're there. I don't, I literally don't know. But so many guys talk about this that like, yeah, I think I know what the like least thing is, right? It's more or less the story that most of these seals told Cole a lot of several seals told Cole. So team six leadership analyzed Heiter'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 men do it. And again, the officer's you're supposed to be able to fight. You need to sometimes, but you're there for other reasons. You are 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? It's like one thing of the assistant manager pulls a slurpee himself. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it doesn't once. But if you're constantly doing it, like, you cannot do in 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 both. However, Marcinco's culture totally venerated the enlisted man and demonized officers. So insecure guys like Heiter 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 of part three. We did it. Yeah. Still grim. Still grim as fuck. Yeah. It's going to get grimmer. I don't know why I said that way. Andrew, you want to do a plug? Sure. Sure. Let's see, I used to do the Yo is this racist podcast. We're putting that on pause a little bit, but in the same feed, we're doing a podcast called Starter Trek. That's me. Tony 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 billions time. So yeah, it's been fun. It's been nice to not to take a little racism break. Surprise surprise. Still plenty of shit to talk about in Star Trek. Well, listen, there's why don't you all take a racism break and we'll be back on Thursday. Huzzah. Peace. Behind the Bastards is a production of Coolzone Media. For more from Coolzone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. 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