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

(upbeat music) - Cool, so media. - Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that again, I did the year listening now, but anyway, I'm Robert, you know me. - We're talking about Richard, the Navy Seals guy, you know? - Yeah. - And my guest is again, Andrew T. - Andrew, how are you doing, buddy? - Ah, good, still here, still alive. - Yeah. - It's a little, it's warm, but I'm alive. - This is great. - It's warm, but you're alive. Just like everyone else in the eternal summer that is increasingly gripping the world. Well, let's distract ourselves from our problems by thinking about a man who lived a charm and merciful life of constant war crimes. (laughing) The CO Team Six guy, old Dickie Marks, Richard Marksicko. - Can I start a question? - Yeah. - Not to be glib. - Why is CO Team Six like, is there I assume one through five? Or is this like a James Bond situation? - We'll talk about that, don't worry. - I'm gonna talk about that. - Yeah, yeah, that's actually a fun story. But yeah, at this point initially there are like two teams, but each team is like hundreds of guys, right? They're divided into platoons and stuff. So it's not, when you hear like CO Team Six, you might think like, well that's like six guys or 10. No, there's like hundreds of guys. Like CO Team Six, there's a lot of Team Six guys. - Come on in, okay. - Okay, yeah, exactly. - Right. - 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 merely 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. - 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 Pinero, 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. Listen to Solita on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. - If you are a bookshelf and you are for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. (upbeat music) 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, I'm obsessed. - Listen to pro society on the I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. - If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news, body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff, we do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to body bags with Joseph Scott Morian on America's number one podcast network, I Heart. Open your free I Heart app and search body bags with Joseph Scott Morian and start listening. (upbeat music) - So when we ended last episode, the newly formed Navy SEALs along with newly made Navy SEAL Richard Marsenko had been shipped to Vietnam and started partnering with the CIA to carry out Phoenix missions all over the waterfront, right? And you know, these are killing informants and I could form it to bring you in for your killing and capturing guys, you're having them tortured by the CIA, you're getting more info, you're going after other guys. You know, it's this kind of self perpetuating loop of targets, right? - Yeah. - That's what they create with Phoenix. And that's what the SEALs are. They're kind of fighting their own separate war that's occurring alongside the rest of Vietnam, but it's really just like the SEALs and the CIA murdering a fuckload of dudes, right? - Yeah. - And based off of it, now that we know also, it's like just because, mostly because someone told them to. - Yeah, because some guys said like, yeah, this guy's definitely a facilitator for the Viet Cong or whatever. And often for less reason than that as we'll discuss, right? Now because SEALs report to themselves, they can kill for the CIA without any issues or without abiding by any of the rules of war, right? Like, the SEALs are supposed to abide by the rules of war. They're not supposed to be any units in the US military that are exempt from them, but practically, the SEALs don't have to abide by the rules of war, right? These guys are nearly always to go into battle on Dexadrine, they will avoid sleeping for that speed. That's just like straight up old-style speed. So they are wired as fuck on speed. They're usually operating at night. And the fact that they're both highest tits, not sleeping for days, killing people at night means they screw up constantly. These guys kill the wrong people all the fucking time. Phillips adds, the Intel SEALs received was often suspect. A farmer might figure his neighbor over an old grudge, a corrupt official might turn in someone to whom he owed money. Fishing boats, the SEALs ambushed because someone said they were used by Viet Cong careers often turned out to be nothing, but fishing boats. Preported Viet Cong bases burned to the ground were sometimes just poor collections of huts inhabited by simple peasants. Cool. So, you know, they're fighting a fun war. That's Richard Marcinco's baptism of fire, like a lot of huts on fire. In code over country, Matthew Cole writes that from the jump, Navy brass were hesitant to embrace the SEALs because among other things, they're not like working for the Navy a lot of the time. Like the Navy, right, right. Have a use for them like they did for the fragment, but the SEAL is like, no, we got something for these guys to do, actually. Don't ask. Don't ask. They're going to show up on board periodically when they need a break, and they're going to be like, they're gonna have long hair, they're gonna smell like shit, and they're all going to be doing illegal drugs on your boat and just don't say anything, right? You're not allowed to. Navy brass don't like that all the time, right. Seals often get a reputation of looking and acting like insane criminals. Cole quotes the SEAL captain at the time who told him, we had no status, no standing in the regular Navy. Some part of the Navy saw us as a sort of quasi-criminal element, not a respected profession that should only be used in desperate circumstances. And when you were through using it, you would stop forever. Like it was some sort of a moral activity. So the Navy kind of treated them like drugs. Like the speed they were on. Just one last hit, one last hit, one last hit. Yeah, one last hit, but then I'm going clean. I'm going clean from special operators. I'm not. Now, the SEALs were seen like some sort of a moral activity because they often did immoral things. In his book, Alpha, David Phillips uses the terms, there's different, this is, again, there's like a thousand or so SEALs in Vietnam, I think, at the height. So, and there's factions within them. They're not all the same. And they're not all doing the same kinds of missions. They're not all doing Phoenix missions for the CIA, right? Seals do other stuff, too, obviously. To kind of describe the split between them in his book, Alpha, David Phillips uses the terms Boy Scouts and Pirates to divide kind of the two broad ideological ends of the Navy SEALs. The Boy Scouts are more or less the direct descendants of the old style of UDT operator, right? We are professionals doing a really insanely dangerous job, but the job is fundamentally there because it is supposed to save lives in the long run, right? The Pirates are CIA assasins, right? We're here to kill people. I don't give a shit, right? Like, I'm just here for fucking blood, right? That's my only interest in anything that I'm doing. And the conflict between Boy Scouts and Pirates is still present today in the Navy SEALs, right? On one end are the quiet professionals and on the other end are the fucking maniacs. And the, you know, the quiet professionals are always the guys who have been in charge up until very recently in SEAL branding because like the SEAL oath, there's a lot in there about like part of why we train so much is so that we don't shoot civilians. You know, we can target and very, you know, discriminatingly only get the bad guys, right? Like, that's why you send in the SEALs is where the most discriminating way in order to get your man. And we won't hit anyone that we don't mean to. And obviously, like, that's the branding. The reality is sometimes they're just, a lot of times they're just killing people, you know? Yeah. 'Cause it's hard to not kill people that you don't mean to in gun fights actually. Right, right, right. When you're on speed, especially. It's a lot harder to not kill people. And fights when you're wired to the gills on speed and haven't slept in four days. Yeah, but, right. But even if you're one of the good guys, like. Yeah. Good guys. I'm not, again, I'm not trying to make an objective moral term. I'm talking about how the people within the unit see themselves and the breakdown in the unit, right? You, like, you don't have to think of the boy scouts as literally good people. That's dependent upon your own belief about ethics, right? The pirates just want to kill people, though, right? And that's, they believe that's what the SEALs are for. They're there 'cause they're really good at killing. We even account by one member of an early pirate platoon, Michael Beenan. And his platoon was stationed in the Meekong Delta. And Beenan wrote later an anonymous account of his experiences in this unit that he published afterwards. This is how Phillips describes it in the book Alpha. The job mutated from identifying and killing Vietcong operatives to tasks like sneaking into a village at night to assassinate a village chief and making it look like the Vietcong had done it. When the intel told them to do it to Vietcong tax collectors, they would, according to Beenan, rob them of all money and, of course, kill them. And then report that all the money was destroyed in the firefight. the money would then be used to buy drugs and prostitutes. Bean and also wrote about the obsession pirates had for close quarters bloodletting or getting wet. Per Bean and this meant cutting somebody's throat with your knife so the blood would go all over you. It was a ritual. His platoon leaders told him to do it to some villagers. He refused but said that many others did not. And it's just something I want to get into. I've been reading a book about prehistoric warfare lately. And it includes a lot because there was this belief that particularly by a lot of European military historians and the only part of the 20th century that primitive war was basically playing around. You'd have two sides show up and they'd throw some weak arrows at each other and then once a couple of guys got injured they kind of back off. And they didn't really usually have the hunger for real. The reality is the opposite. In fact, nearly everything that we see as special forces style tactics is all stuff that European stole from indigenous warriors. These are all rating and ambush tactics that literally Europeans learned. They called it the skoking method of war in the Americas. Because they hadn't practiced. That was not the way Europeans fought at the time at which they started coming over into the Americas. And you'll hear a lot about some of the different because like primitive warrior cultures, number one, war was often genocidal. If one tribe is going, you often wipe out the other side if you beat them if you can. Because that's the thing that guaranteed you to the most safety. And there's a lot of trophy taking all over the world. This is in Europe, this is in Southeast Asia, this is in the Americas. And all sorts of it. You know, you have scalping in some areas. You have the taking up whole heads. There are some cultures that would literally and these are in multiple parts of the world take the entire skin. And in some places, even where the skin of a defeated enemy like it costumes sometimes. And when you read about this, it's often pointed as like, wow, the brutality of like ancient warfare. No, this is just war. It's still the same. The US military does this. They were taking heads in World War II. They're taking ears in Vietnam and other body parts seals are often described as taking ears. This is something that Beenan writes about in his account is then like taking parts of bodies. And again, as a ritual, you're supposed to cut the throat of a dude who is often a civilian, right? Eddie Gallagher killing that 16-year-old kid in Mosul. That was not a break with tradition. That was long-standing tradition within at least a chunk of the seals. According to accounts from Vietnam, right? And so this is when people talk about like, oh, a lot of these indigenous cultures have really brutal methods of warfare. And they're like, nah, that's just war, man. That's everyone who winds up agreeing to do the kind of warfare where you're just like, "Ambushing a village at night and murdering everybody." If that's the shit you're doing, and we do that too, right? And it has to change. And if you're gonna send men to do that, it's very hard to stop them from taking trophies and becoming very deranged by what they've done. And throughout time and history, different cultures have built in ways to try to like provide accountability, or even there were some ritual ways of like cleansing, some indigenous cultures even had this understanding that like, and there was a ritual way to ensure that we believe the people who go out to war is in something a different person than they are when they're at peace. And there's this ritual to kind of transition them back, right? And we don't, we never built that into our culture. So we just kind of pretend these people are always like acting like heroes as opposed to cutting off pieces of dead enemies and murdering civilians in the woods, but they often do. They often do. Being in described the business of the Navy Seals in Vietnam as terrorism against Vietnamese villagers. Quote, "Finding a loved one with a green face and stabbed in the middle of a road was incredible terror." In other words, the Navy Seals would abduct someone in the night, paint their face green because they would go in about with green faces, right? And then they would stab them and leave their corpse in the road for their families to find. And after abducting the victim, they would also often wire the door of their hut to explode. So when their children opened it to try to like find their dad, it would blow up killing or maiming them, guaranteeing further death and terror. Like, that's no less, like, like you, that's no less brutal than the shit people were doing 10,000 years ago in any way, shape or form, in any meaningful manner, right? Arguably more because you don't have to do it much worse. For existential, you like, you don't believe that they're going to come find you. Right, right. You are not literally in danger if your culture being exterminated by this. You have no reason to be there. You live 6,000 miles away. Like, where are you in Vietnam? Former CEO Lieutenant Bob Kerry later wrote about a 1969 raid he led to assassinate a target in a rural village. On the way, they encountered an elderly man at a woman sleeping in a bedroom with three little kids. To stop them from warning anyone else, they killed all five with their knives. Immediately after this, they fucked up and ran into a dozen women and children out in the open. And since they lost the element of surprise, they just gunned them all down with automatic weapons. And their after-action report, they claimed to have killed 21 Vietcong fighters in a firefight. Yeah. Just women and children. Stabbing babies to death in their sleep, right? Enemy killed in the firefight. Yeah. Cool. Now again, the first seals are hunters and trappers of men. And they grew to worship mastery over the killing arts. Any personal flaws were forgivable in a truly talented killer. One New York Times article noted that at a seal-based down-range in Vietnam, operators hung a sign above the base bar that read, "People who kill for money are professionals. People who kill for fun are sadists. People who kill for money and fun are seals." Right. And reading that, I couldn't have a think of when I was in Erbil, which is in northern Iraq, it's the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan during the fighting against ISIS and Mosul. I was sitting up in like a coffee house. There was like a couple floors up. It's sort of this like grand bazaar area in the center of the city. And there's like, I noticed like a couple of big white dudes like milling around in this market area. And they're like, you know, they're big muscular covered in tattoos, bearded. And one time as a t-shirt on, that just says, "I'm only here for the violence." Which is like, you can find them online commonly. I don't know if those guys were, it might have been some form of fucking media, but they were probably contractors. I mean, they're not necessarily combat. Most of those guys were doing like drone work, right? Like most of the contractors I met were nowhere near. But you still saw that kind of aesthetic on them all the time, right? I'm only here for the violence. It's the same thing. I'm only here for the violence, right? Like, that's the same thing that signed up at Basebar says, right? I'm here for the fucking violence, because it's fun, you know? Patriarchy bad. So these guys are fine. Yeah, these guys are doing good. They're doing good. Richard, Marcinco, fit in perfectly among this crowd. As Phillips writes, he quote, "Went by the name Demo Dick and called his men, Marcinco's merry band of murdering marauders. Village by village, his team destroyed rice supplies, blew up fishing boats and burned houses. Demo Dick liked to booby trap the bodies of those his men had killed before they moved on from a village. It made me feel good to hear an explosion after we'd left the area he later wrote in his memoir. Over several deployments, Marcinco described his men getting spookier and dirtier as they began to think more like gorillas. He loved the freedom that he and his unit were given to devise new tactics and pick targets. He later wrote this about Vietnam, a war that killed close to four million people. There's something to be said about the purity of a small war. For the seals, it was instant gratification. You would write up a patrol order, go out there and shoot the bastard. It was black and white, no gray, and that's the music. That's the epitome of life for a warrior. And here's the thing. The seals are very, when I talked about ancient prehistoric warriors and also going back to a lot of these indigenous warrior cultures that have even been around up into the modern era, the seals very consciously pattern themselves a lot after a particularly American Native American warriors. That's like a major thing now, but especially later in seal culture. And so this idea is really common, right? That we're living the warrior's life. And it's this perfect, this like cycle of violence where we're just constantly going out and killing more people is exactly like that's the purity of what we do. And it does nothing but lose wars as far as I can tell. Yeah. Like if that's the epitome of life as well, if you want to say what you want, about the ethics of these ancient warriors in every continent on earth, who practice such brutal, often genocidal tactics, they had to and they won or they died. This is just murder cosplay. That's the thing. It's like we right. We the taxpayer are just like paying to these guys to cause play as ancient warriors, like footing the bill for these psychos. And I guess the only yeah, completely unnecessarily and it never works. Yeah, yeah, they get like our site. Like they have a lot of fun. Some of them a lot of them get obviously very traumatized. But like guys like Barsinco have a lot of fun, but it doesn't work, right? Right. An army intelligence analyst later called the Phoenix program, which killed at least 21,000 people in discriminant murder. In 1971, the Navy pulled all seals out of action and made them pass a test on the rules of war, right? Because there's so many reports that these guys are just murdering people. After the Mealye massacre, many seals refused to go to Vietnam entirely. Because as the New York Times reported, they were scared of being prosecuted for war crimes that they were undeniably committing. There's a lot of them are complaining like I'll have to Mealye. I don't even want to go there anymore. Right? What's even the point? If we can't fight the war the way that'll win it. And like you guys got to fight that war for years. And you just kept getting worse, you lost. Like they won. Vietnam won. That's the only tiny sliver of like, again, trucking like silver lining is like this really doesn't work. Like for all the like, you know, your comfort needs hard men kind of shit. It's like it never has once worked. It doesn't. Again, it does win. And when both sides are like 100 guys, if you can kill all 100 of the other guys, then yeah, sure, like you actually can end that problem forever, right? Yeah. But modern war, these are nations of millions and millions and millions of people. It just, it doesn't work that way. All you do is piss everyone off and raise the level of brutality and anger and motivate the enemy to fight into themselves, dig and harder, right? It does not get you what you want. Yeah, 21 years later, after, you know, this period of time, in 1992, Marcinco wrote Rogue Warrior, which gave him a chance to whitewash his own conduct in that of the seals entire. And before I get into that more, I want to quote from this New York Times review of Books review for an idea of, this is how they describe his writing style. Mr. Marcinco, 51 years old, comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like little Lord Fautleroy. By planning for his first combat assignment, he writes, he inhaled deeply and knew instantly I was going to like Vietnam a whole lot. He revels in the wonderful lethal odor of cordite wafting over me and tells us that after one particularly hairy action, I dreamt of warm women and cold beer. And I want to highlight something I found kind of revealing here because Marcinco talks about the cordite lethal odor of cordite wafting over me. You may have heard that, especially if you read Weirdly Enough Warhammer books, cordite is a kind of smokeless bullet propellant that was developed in 1889. It had a very unique scent and became famous because a lot of Victorian era novels of colonial British warfare love to describe the cordite stink of battlefields, right? Cordite actually stopped being produced in the mid 20th century and would have been out of production by the time Marcinco was having his gun fights. It also, most of the ammo that would have been in Vietnam was not made by people who ever used cordite in their bullets, right? I'm sure he would have encountered. There's a lot of weird bullet types floating around Vietnam at varying points. I'm certain he encountered cordite sometimes. But this was definitely not like this was something either his ghostwriter added because it's a common thing to put in books like this or it's something he stuck in because it reminded him of books that he read as a kid brought out like badass colonial warriors murdering non-white people, right? It's like a pulpy thing to say. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. It's not a real recollection. I mean, honestly, it is like basically just like an updated like cone in the barbarian novel. Yeah. Yeah. It's particularly funny in Warhammer books. You're like, okay, so you're saying 40,000 years from now, we go back to using the shit that they decided was bunk in the 50s. Really? Well, that is a lot of the Warhammer aesthetic to be fair. Yeah. Yeah. He does fit a little maybe. Now, the combat scenes in Rogue Warrior are remarkably inaccurate despite being penned by a man who undeniably saw combat with the seals and knob. The best example of this is a mission that occurred on March 13, 1967. A seal team, including Marcinco, were inserted to Dung Island on the path of a Vietcong smuggling route. This was a free fire zone, which meant the seals would be free to kill anyone they saw out after curfew. In Rogue Warrior, Marcinco describes the mission as them waiting to kill a courier and recover intel. But, quote, "The killing was an important element for a couple of reasons. First, that's what we were in Vietnam for. Second, you never know whether you can kill someone until you do it. I wanted to make sure each member of Bravo, that's his squad, was up to the task." In other words, we didn't need to kill these couriers, but I wanted each of my guys to experience killing a human being. Right? That was the point of the mission, really. Now, this is like just a gang initiation or, sorry, like a fictional gang initiation. Exactly. Yeah. But this is like just the Navy seals. Our taxpayer dollars is fun to them. Jesus Christ. It's cool. It's cool stuff. Yeah. I love quiet professionals. Yeah. Now, this is important because Marcinco goes on to claim that after downing the courier and moving to recover his body, Bravo Unit came under heavy fire from all sides and had to radio for extraction. That's when Lieutenant Larry Bailey, who's a seal officer driving their boat, failed to rescue them. And the team had to retreat under heavy fire as bullets are slicing through the bar because this Lieutenant, this officer, fucks up. I'm in or under heavy fire and we barely got out of there with their lives. And so Marcinco writes that he attacks Bailey when they finally reached the boat. I pleaded for covering fire and you were so goddamn far up river. You were out of goddamn radio range. Is that bad enough for you? You pussy. That's what Marcinco says that he knows that this guy. Now, the author of code over country actually interviews Bailey and one other member of Marcinco's unit. And both of these guys were like, no, Richard was lying. That's not at all how it. Bailey, first off, Richard was not on the radio. Bailey didn't hear anything and no point was Richard like begging to be picked up because they weren't under fire, right? In fact, Bailey eventually decided to go check on Bravo himself because it was weird that they hadn't radioed for so long. Quote, as they crept inland, I could hear some guys laughing, Bailey said. The laughing wasn't a mistakenly American, he recalled. I could hear Marcinco hollering. They had lost all degree of military discipline in a supposedly hair area. Bailey's radio man told them they'd turned their radio off for the ambush and forgot to turn it back on after killing not a Vietcong career, but a couple of fishermen. The radio man told Bailey, we have our first war souvenirs and pulled out a bag filled with ID cards and a watch. Cool. Yeah. They just killed some fishermen. They're not in any danger. They're partying. You're just like playing with the corpses and laughing, you know, obviously he was never in danger. Seals and Vietnam, I'm sure they definitely under fire at times, but a lot of times they're just murdering people, paired with the paragraph that I quoted earlier. It's clear that Marcinco wanted his team to notch some kills and because it was a free fire zone, he knew that he was safe to murder the first men he saw. This is emblematic of his approach to war and the Marcinco approach to war will linger among the Navy Seals long after he leaves the unit. But you know who never abandons their men in the field. Yeah. Sophie. Yeah. Sophie. Yeah. Sophie. I'm sure. Sophie. 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 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. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait 4 hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Piñero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, "You smile good that's 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. If you're seeking to try to understand the forensic science behind these cases that we hear about in the news, body bags is where you need to turn. There's no fluff. We do a deep dive into the forensics. Listen to body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Open your free iHeart app and search body bags with Joseph Scott Morgan and start listening. Hey there everybody, Amy Robock and TJ Holmes here from the Amy and TJ podcast with mid-to-relections just around the corner, we're breaking down the biggest political stories leading up to November. And some of those big political stories aren't just what's happening on Capitol Hill. 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've got a lot of members of Congress behaving badly. We got accusations, allegations flying all day long on Capitol Hill, it's just like a reality show. We're going to cover everything you need to know during this heated political season. And it starts with our morning run. Yes, go for a run with us, maybe you can take us along when you're on your actual run outside or if you don't feel like going out still. You get what we're saying. It's our morning run. It's our daily news rundown of the top stories that'll get you going before you even finish that first cup of coffee. Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeart radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And we're back. So I give more anecdotes of Marcinco's experiences in Vietnam, but Richard lies about everything. It's worth noting that military historian David M. Andrade looked into Marcinco's claims for Soldier of Fortune magazine of all publications. And I would not, I don't, I don't tend to credit the misbeing of particularly credible. - But that means that's the other way to look at it. - Is if fucking Soldier of Fortune is like - Is fact checking your chest. - We should probably check this shit out. Yeah, you are a liar. - Yeah, Andrade publishes an article called Pogue Warrior about him. And Pogue is military slang for like a soldier in like the back, like a soldier who's like stationed far back from the line of contact who doesn't actually do anything. But who like lies about having done cool, right? Like that's what a Pogue is. That's a, it's a pretty funny title for the article. Here's Cole's description of the article. The article also found another instance and from Marcinco's book in which he grossly mischaracterized what was supposed to be a seminal event in his military career losing his first seal in battle and appeared to outright fabricate a scene in Vietnam. And there's something important for people who were who weren't in the military and haven't seen combat to understand, which is like I think people are generally familiar with the idea that someone would lie about having served for like clout, right? Or that a vet who never did anything cool might lie about having seen combat. But if you can confirm that someone's like a combat veteran people don't tend to assume that they would lie about what they saw in combat. And the reality is that happens all the time. Guys who've seen heavy combat often lie about it. In part because it's very common, especially in repeated combat actions for even people who are trained and experienced to fuck up and panic under fire and screw up in situations that like they have to lie about to themselves and everyone else because it's the only way they can go on emotionally. I've, I like it, yeah, it happens. Anyway, so remember that both with Dick and anytime you see someone telling like war stories that seem like really crazy, I'll never forget a buddy of mine who was in a combat unit and saw a lot of combat. We were driving in like near the base in or one of the bases in Southern California outside of San Diego. And there's like a road named for some medal of honor winner. And I asked him like what the guy did. And he was like, oh, I don't really pay much attention 'cause it's one of those like lone survivor stories and I don't trust anyone who won an award and it's like the only guy who survived. Like anyone doing that is probably lying about what happened. That was his attitude. And I think that's generally a smart way to approach those stories, especially the story of Navy SEAL Marcus LaTrell who wrote the book "Lone Survivor," which is an account of him being the only survivor unit that we know is largely inaccurate, right? - Right. - Fun stuff. So Dick starts that tradition of being a fantasist and a huge braggart while also like having actual qualifications that make it very difficult for most people to kind of argue with you or deny what you did, right? But he's also like, he's also someone who does have a lot of popularity in the unit. A lot of guys, particularly in the pirate end of the SEALs, really like him as Orkelli writes in his book, quote, "Men who served under him in Vietnam say they would follow him anywhere. These, however, are the pirates." Again, other SEALs described him as a boastful braggart. So it's not like universal, but he is popular with-- - He's popular with the worst guys, which-- - Yeah, and that's not a small number of them, right? That's kind of an important thing, is that he is hated by a lot of SEALs, but he's liked by a lot of them. When the war ended, he remained in the now shrunken Navy SEALs. And he spent the next decade watching the military he loved languish in post-Vietnam peacetime. Outside of a war zone, his behavior made more waves among his peers, per the book Brave Men Dark Waters. Quote, "He had a way with people that permitted him to get away with behavior that as one friend said, would get me killed." He casually called strangers by racial epithets and got a smile in return. Rear Admiral George Worthington, who succeeded Marcinco as naval attaché in Cambodia in the mid-1970s, recalls a reception for General Lawnan, brother of Lawnan, who had been president of the country. Marcinco was well loved, if not reviewed by the Cambodian Officer Corps. And the troops too, he had a sort of Lawrence of Arabia-esque leadership quality about him, Worthington says. Marcinco had never laid an eye on Lawnan, but he walks up behind him and grabs him with a big bear hug, and the guy loved it. And again, that's also very telling, because the Cambodians he talked, he's talking about, are the guys who lost to the Khmer Rouge. So he trained the military that lost. Yeah, I mean, of course. Is this becoming a pattern? Yeah. Yeah, that's how we roll. That's how we roll in the seals. He trained the brutal authoritarian military that's war crimes so enraged rural Cambodians that provided fuel for the Khmer Rouge. So at one point in the 1970s, Dick Pannock, a top Navy officer, during a visit to the Pentagon, when the officer noted that Marcinco had a pistol stuffed in his sock. Now, let me tell you something about carrying guns, folks. You got two broadly speaking, two ways to carry a gun. One is just the firearm itself, either loaded or unloaded, but without a round in the chamber, right? A gun can be loaded and not have a round in the chamber. It means you've got to mag in, but there's not like, if you pull the trigger, it's not going to immediately fire a bullet, right? You have to cock it basically, or you have to charge it is the term in order to like get a bullet in there, right? The other way to carry it is with a round in the chamber. Now, most good holsters are like made out of us, and they didn't really do that with holsters back then, but ideally, your holster is made out of a rigid plastic materials that there's something hard in between the trigger and the rest of the world. That if you carry a gun with a bullet in the chamber, something can't just like poke the trigger and make it fire, two things. I'm going to assume Richard Marcinco never carried a gun without a round in the chamber. So I'm going to guess he's just got a chambered, a hot pistol with no safety shoved in a sock with nothing between that trigger and the world around it, but a sock. And I think that's beautiful. I think that's beautiful, or adds that quote, another officer invited Marcinco to present a briefing at the Pentagon and then called the session off because he was so embarrassed by Marcinco's flamboyant profanity. Now, this is evident in the book, "Row Warrior," Richard's favorite word is cock breath, which he uses 11 times in his autobiography. I don't know if it's been used more in a book, but I probably not, right? Weird little guy. You'd have to try. At one point, he calls his own men positively, Mary murdering cock breath shit for brains assholes. At another, he claims to have shouted down a higher ranking officer who graduated from the Naval Academy and at admiral relatives, saying, "Fuck you and all your fucking kind, you sorry shit for brains, cock breath, pencil, dick, numb nuts, asshole." I mean, I know it's a different era, but-- Yeah. You know what I'll say here is like, there's a way to do that. See what you were about. Like, Ari Armley had fucking horrible politics. That's like the drill sergeant from a full metal jacket, right? But he was at least really good at creatively cursing and dressing people down. Richard is not, right? Like, it's a lot of the same insult you repeated, and they're not very creative. The bleakest moment of Marcinco's career before the end came in 1980 when Jimmy Carter had US Special Forces attempt to rescue prisoners of the American embassy who were trapped in Iran. This is a very famous failure. And this is why I say like, you know, US Special Forces until the modern era had a much more mixed reputation. And this is a delta force operation, so it's not seals. On the day of the mission, Dick was almost 40. He was a Navy commander assigned to represent the seals at the Pentagon. So he had a front row seat for the disastrous attempt by delta force, which is at that point, the preeminent Special Forces unit in the country, way more elite than the seals, to save the hostages. And the whole event was a cluster fuck. One chopper hit a C-130 while refueling, which caused an explosive crash. And the delta operators bailed in time, but three Marines in a helicopter died along with five Air Force crew. The whole affair was a calamity for the Special Forces community, as well as the Carter, a lot of people will say this is why Carter lost, right? And it's definitely part of why Carter lost. And, you know, not to do too much history, that is arguably why we're in the position we're in now. Arguably why we're in the position we're in now is because delta force couldn't get there fucking, well, I guess this is more on the air, the pilot guys, but yeah, so as a result of this horrible cluster fuck, Jimmy, first off, Carter calls for an immediate follow-up attempt, but he also calls for like the Pentagon to reform the way their Special Forces unit works. And as a result of this, the Pentagon decides to form the joint Special Operations Command or JSOC to coordinate between different Special Forces teams directly for the president. And this is the birth, weirdly enough, it comes from Jimmy Carter, you can trace. The birth of Special Forces not being, well, these are units that are part of the Navy, part of the Army, and they help with these special tasks to the most elite of these units are like the president's direct guys, right? This is the president's goon squad, right? Carter really does start that in a lot of ways. I mean, this has been happening before him, but he's a major part of that, actually. He was horrified, I'm sure, by like where this led, he was trying to rescue some hostages, but that is kind of part of what leads us where we get or where we are today. - Well, it's also sort of why, like, you can't be the American president, no matter who you are without being at minimum a war criminal. - Right, you're going to be party to some horrible things as the president and the very best case scenarios, of like the most ethical guy in that job you can imagine. Which probably was Carter, like he probably, in terms of like trying to be ethical, you know, You know, not just again, he did a lot of, he's a lot of critiques. I'm just saying, grading on the presidential curve. Yeah. He simply has to be the top. He's got, he's got to be the guy who cared the most, right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, so, Jaysock is formed to coordinate between these different special forces teams for the president. And Marcinco is tasked with building the Navy contribution to Jaysock, right? And this proves something else important about Marcinco, which is that he's very good at making the right friends. And for all of his hate of like officers and politics and all these connected people, he, he describes as like the whole problem with big Navy. He's great at politics. Yeah. He's a political animal. He's really good at interfacing as an officer in a political way in order to get what he wants, right? He's great at selling his ideas to command, as a legitimate skill he has. Marcinco lays out and sells to them his vision of a new seal team with its own commanding officer in six platoons dedicated to counter terrorist missions and hostage rescue missions. To make his dream team, Marcinco would have to reach over the heads of his fellow special forces officers to steal their very best men. In the book, Brave Men, Dark Waters or Kelly writes that Marcinco was armed with a pry one, priority one, that permitted him to take the men and equipment he needed to from other commands. So he starts grabbing the guys he wants from these other special forces units. And by September of 1980, Marcinco was commander of an entirely new unit, which he named seal team six. This is where that starts. And this forms an important part of team war, which you had brought up, right? How are there five where there are five other seal teams at this point? Yeah, yeah, yeah. There were still just two. The name initially, though, referred to the fact that there had been six seal platoons that had taken counter terrorism training, right? Got it. So seal team six is made up of six platoons that had taken the specialized training. So that's why they start with the name. But because there's only two other seal teams, Marcinco decides he really likes the idea of naming them seal team six is a disinformation tactic to trick the homies. So they think there's more seals than there are, right? That may have been something after the fact. I kind of think it was just because they trained six platoons and then afterwards, oh, this is clever. Right? Yeah. But I don't know. Yeah, it's children. Yeah, it's children where it's like, you know, at 14 year old boy, yeah. That's fine. We're ruled by violent, violent 14 year old boys. Yeah. Like here's the thing about testosterone. It has its uses, but it one thing it can do is stop you from ever growing past age 14. You really have to fight that part of the effect. So in an article for Rolling Stone, Matthew Cole notes, Marcinco sought men. Who in his estimation would otherwise be athletes or criminals in the civilian world? He wanted seals who had combat experience. He later said in an interview, who had a bullet go past their head with their name on it. Marcinco wanted men who were adept at all the traditional seal skills, shooting underwater diving, skydiving, mountain climbing, but who also had or could develop tradesmen life skills. These men had to engineer solutions to any problem standing in their way to mission success, whether it required manufacturing, a quieter piece of equipment, or conceiving a quieter method for building entry, right? And that's very telling, but this is also not just Marcinco. If you remember when the seals were formed, there was some talk of like, I want them to be rogues. And he's now taking that a step forward to I want guys seal team six is guys who could have only been pro athletes or criminals, right? That's Marcinco's idea, right? Now, there's a lot of sense to this, actually, you know, the whole criminal thing is going to cause problems immediately. But if you want to form a unit of dudes who can solve serious problems using out of the box solutions on the fly, it does make sense to recruit guys like this. You know, um, criminal get cartels and gangs are famously creative. Yeah. They get shit done. They get shit done. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The downsides are they're not they're not the type of people you want to do this. You could find other creative people, I guess, is what I would say. You probably don't want to make more of these people in any society and give them like guns. Yeah. And the right to do whatever they want that might be a bad idea, um, but, you know, this also does work really well in certain ways. It's a great way to a lot of like innovative combat tactics and like operate special operations tactics are created by these team six guys because they're just kind of given freedom to do whatever they want and a bunch of money to explore and make gear and try new stuff, right? So there's aspects of what Marcinco does that are a really good idea. And I don't want to pretend like that's not the case, but Richard's good ideas are always married with his bad ones, for example, Dick is a hardcore alcoholic in 1980. And since he considered himself, I'm so shocked to hear this. Wow. Yes. Still an alcoholic. Wow. And since he considered himself the best operator ever, obviously any man who might hope to be his equal would have to drink at least as much as he did. The membership in seal team six was thus mostly restricted to alcoholics, the New York time. He's fucking stalling. What is happening? Yeah. We need to, you know what we really need in this team full of heavily armed bad asses who are unaccountable to any laws is drinking problems. Yeah. That's got to be key. I want these guys to be hung over a hammered 100% of the time. The New York Times confirmed that his recruiting interviews often amounted to boozy chats and bars. One team member told Orr that when he came for a 7 a.m. interview, Marcinco offered him a beer and said, you might not fit in when he declined. He did ultimately admit the man, but one of Marcinco's officers admitted, to be with him you had to drink, to be in the in crowd. I drink when I want to drink. This went against the grain. And when he was interviewed by Orr for the book Brave Men Dark Waters, Marcinco didn't even try to deny this. Instead, he wrote Orr a letter explaining his alcohol preferences. Especially Jen, Bombay, team members East Coast, weaned on rum coke at St. Thomas during animal, annual winter training. I polished these skills and attach a training and converted it and converted to Jen. Jen is powerful, but my safest drink I can consume more. It demoralizes the opponent drinking mixed drinks or slurring while I casually rant and rave. I do play head games. I use booze as a tool. It's very telling too that like people he's drinking with are his opponents that he wants to demoralize. He's like, that's not how I drink. He's like, I'm not like the other girls, Jen, Bombay, alcohol is a tool that I use tactically to defeat my enemies who are also my men. Yeah. You're employees. Cool. I mean, you're good. At least it's like, I mean, they're all they're all, if their only job is commit war crimes, at least they're sluggish and hung over sometimes. At least they're fucking drunk. Yeah. This is going to cause some issues too. To justify his selections to command, Marcinco hired a psychologist to evaluate his picks and rubber stamp them per an interview he gave to Cole. It was a fallacy. We were normal according to me. If I was fucked up, then we were all fucked up. That's true. That is true. That is true. Yeah. I think that's true. He also told Cole this, if you want to call them sociopaths, you can. That's how you get the enlisted in charge. They are the talent. So if you want the enlisted to be in charge, if you want the talented, like you have to cater to sociopaths, that's who you're looking for in this job. He's very direct about it. Concentrating this specific group of men and giving them unlimited funding for weapons and training resulted in the creation of a uniquely skilled group of soldiers. And to give you an idea of the kind of proficiency these guys developed, Marcinco's SEAL Team 6 fired more rounds training in their first six months of existence than the entire United States Marine Corps used in training for a whole year. Yeah. That's how much these guys are practicing. They are really good with guns. Marcinco saw his men as artisans of violence, and a shoot house was built to practice for incredibly niche hostage rescue situations. That's the idea is we're going to be, we need these guys to be able to in order to avoid killing, you know, the hostages and what they have to be able to develop these skills. Now, does Marcinco ever really care about avoiding civilian casualties? Is that ever a priority of Team 6? Highly debatable. But that's how they're built, right? That's how they're sold to command. That's why he's able to claim this is necessary. I need this many bullets. The only way to develop the skills they need to do the kind of job that we have. That's also probably a lie you could pretty easily tell yourself. I mean, why else would you, you know, you do have to live with yourself? Yeah, and that's all, nobody wants to think of, most people don't want to think of themselves. It's just like murderists, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know who are just murderists. No, no, no, no, absolutely not. Don't think about that. Just think about these ads. I survived. And I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I just remember this low-taunting voice next to my ear saying, "Shut up, don't say anything." 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Listen to Amy and TJ on the iHeart radio app Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your podcasts. And we're back. And Sophie has informed me that none of our sponsors are ruthless murderers. I did not. I did not, especially especially if the Washington State Highway Patrol ads are the police ads just ran. I cannot, I cannot vouch for all of our sponsors because I have no idea who they are. But that's the level of trust you have in them. That's the level of trust we have. They could be anybody. Hitler could be running an ad. I would have no way of knowing. Literally. Seals also trained for high altitude insertion and every other cool thing they could find someone to teach them. Marcinco had been made a commander by this point, which put him above most of the other seal officers and ensure he pretty much always got what he wanted. He's received a lot of praise down on down the years for his creation. But even in the early days of team six other seal officers looked at what he was building with worry and brave men dark waters or quotes one of these officers. You get a bunch of people smart, strong, aggressive and you require them to kill other people. You are requiring guys to do some really tough things. They are going to go in and find that terrorists are women, terrorists are children, anybody. You're up close. This is very personal. The psychologist looks at whether you can blow a hole in a man two feet away and watches brains come out the other side of his head and do it. You give them this training. I'm talking about concentrating year after year on parachuting, making guns, sniper shooting, scaling mountains, swimming, diving. You give them all this training and require them to kill people. Not from 100 yards away, not from 200 yards away, not from 30,000 feet with a bomb, but from three feet away. Can you imagine that group of people together? All of a sudden in that group of 150 or 200 men who are so highly trained, I'll key it up and required to do such hazardous things, you are going to find some amoral people. They're there because they're smart and aggressive and they have no morals. You have guys who have no morals will do anything. That's how you get a reputation for being really bad. But the great majority are really dedicated, straight, hardworking people. The reason the amoral man doesn't get his way more is that a lot of people watch him. He is controlled. But you are going to find that kind of person when you have a group of people required to perform with these people are required to perform. I might argue that the great majority are hardworking moral people. It depends. Some seal units do abide by the rules of engagement and don't commit war crimes constantly. Some don't. It does seem to depend on the ratio of the pirates to the Boy Scouts guy to vend them at the time or whatever. But he's making a good point, right? That as much as we want to condemn and should condemn our Cinco and individual and Navy seal guys who commit war crimes, all of their crimes are inevitable by their existence. You can't have these guys and have them. You can't have any group of guys who are trained to do this and supposed to do the kind of shit that we send Navy seal that to do who don't turn into this. It can't be done. It's a consequence of yeah. There's no it's brutalizing. You can try to minimize some things, right? There is more that certainly should be done to control and punish. You can punish certainly when they commit war crimes to try to make it less common. But this is always going to be a problem when you're concentrating the most violent and skilled men together and saying like, we want you to commit a bunch of murder for the government. Good people don't want to do that job all that often. And if they are good people and they start, they don't stay that way long because they're shooting people in the head from three feet away every day. It's bad for you to do that. You have to be a bad person after a period of time. It fucks you up in pretty profound ways. Another officer told Orr that when Marcinco came to him to recruit from his unit, he was surprised that he took not the best performers, but quote uniformly the scum. The fact that these guys had so much attention and resources lavished on them certainly bred jealousy and a mixed reputation team six guys both get called Jedi by other seals and per another seal officer a paramilitary fitness club. Yeah. Still the officer who called him a fitness club wanted to join team six because they got all of the best gear and all of the best missions and they also had no real oversight. At one point during the early 1980s, Marcinco build the government for lodging his entire command in Washington, DC. It was later found that the hotel he build never existed. And the seals had bumped on a yacht in the Potomac owned by a buddy of Marcinco or something like that. And he just taken the money he'd build the Navy. And he did this all the time. This is normal standard operating procedure for Richard Marcinco. We know he engaged in similar acts of financial fraud at least 37 times during the like three years he led seal team six. So about once a month, he's doing this like monthly. This is like very common for him. Nobody notices it first. Marcinco's a rising star. And it's widely agreed that he had accomplished something great in getting a 100 man special forces team up and running in just three months within a year or so of team six's creation many insiders regarded seal team six as being as good as Delta Force if not better. But the skill they exhibited was displayed alongside their faults, including a team wide penchant for apocalyptic drinking. Team six guys from the jump get in trouble for starting fights for like being just incredibly violent rowdy drunks and causing problems everywhere they fucking go. But that's sort of the problem. Yeah. It's just that then the mythology for like the you know, people is like, oh, we got fight. At least the Vikings are on our side. Yeah. It's just like, it's like, is that really a necessary to modern war? I know that I think so. I think this might be a detriment on the whole. Marcinco clearly saw this as more evidence that he was the good kind of officer writing. I played havoc with their system. I treated my lowest drinking semen with more respect than I did most captains and comedors. I ate and drank with my enlisted men and chiefs. I threw loud parties. I said fuck to flag rank officers. I said fuck. I'm cool. Yeah. Okay. Okay, Richard. Okay, man. We get it, buddy. Now there are good reasons Marcinco was a legend to many of his operators. During his time, Marcinco hurt his leg training overseas and decided he could manage well enough that he just kept working on it because he didn't want to take medical leave. And he avoided the doctor until 17 months later, he was diagnosed with a broken leg. Such a moron. And again, yeah, it's really dumb because he had to get at that point. It was so bad that he had to get a special procedure that his fucking military health care wouldn't cover. And he had to borrow money from one of his enlisted men in order to get like a sports medical procedure done on himself because he was such a dipshit. Yeah. Now Marcinco's problems with the Navy began when lieutenant William McRaven. And that's the guy who was running the seals, by the way, when Ben Laden gets killed was transferred to team six as an officer. Now, McRaven comes from Navy royalty. And so Marcinco hated him immediately. For his part, McRaven was a by the book officer and seems to have been one of like the boy scout side of things. And as soon as he gets into team six, he notices a bunch of regularities. And part of I should I should note here, Marcinco has his pick of enlisted men. Officers are assigned to team six. so a lot of its conflicts come with the officers because 'cause he doesn't get to pick them, right? They are not his chosen guys, in other words. - Right, they're only there to either be like, jumped in or to Nark on him. - Yeah, right, exactly, exactly. And McRaven narks on him, 'cause he notices a bunch of irregularities and how operators are filing their travel vouchers, and he complains to his superior officer who says in essence like, "Hey dude, don't ruin this for us." We got a good thing going here, right? And so this guy then tosses McRaven's gear out of their cabin, and when they get back from training, Mersinko fires McRaven. Decades later, he still claimed the man had been sent to Team Six as an infiltrator. McRaven got his running orders from the West Coast, 'cause something, Mersinko writes, right? That this guy, he was a spy, simply the West Coast seal, to infiltrate my elite East Coast unit, 'cause they hated me. - It is telling that, like all things in a petty criminal enterprise, there's East Coast, West Coast beef. - That's right, that's right. - He is the biggie in this one. And I guess McRaven is two-pock? I don't know. - Yeah. - That's right. - That's the same right, actually. But okay. - Well, they all said the end word just about the same amount, just for the real different tone. - Mersinko sure does. I don't know, McRaven, but Mersinko for sure does. - Yeah, I feel pretty confident about that one too. - Yeah, in code over country, Cole gives a good explanation of how many other seal officers and outside Navy officers saw this. As Mersinko, having upended the chain of command and sent a signal to his men that no officer beside Dick mattered. He credits this with the decision senior officers in the Naval Special Warfare Division made a few months later, which was to replace Richard Mersinko, right? So his total period of time commanding team six after forming it is like three years. And they never like, I don't think they really do much. Well, they're training, they're getting up to speed. Like he's not there for any of the shit that makes them famous, but he leaves a mark that was pretty much universally agreed to still affect the unit to this day. The officer who replaced Mersinko, Captain Robert Gormley found the unit in awful shape. He found that Mersinko had, quote, constantly misled his superiors and the chain of command under the guise of operational security, right? In other words, he lied in order to like steal from the Navy and said that the reason why he had to lie was opsec. Yeah, he can't file accurate finance reports 'cause like the commies might find out that I'm stealing money to buy drugs. And Richard is alleged to have had a pretty serious cocaine problem. A lot of team six guys are alleged to have had pretty serious cocaine problems that they were stealing from the Navy. Yeah. You know what happens? A decent amount up to the present day is special forces guys, particularly at Fort Bragg, selling military weapons to criminals for money, to buy drugs anyway, cool stuff. That's not a team six thing, but it's just, just a thing that we all pay for. Yeah, why do we pay taxes again? This is crazy. I love paying taxes and knowing that it goes to this shit. Gormley also found widespread alcoholism among the team to be a serious problem. He wrote, "Dick insisted upon everyone "dringing with him whenever he wanted "and as long as he wanted. "On exercises, they seldom finished the entire scenario "because as soon as things got tough, "Dick would step in, abort the exercise "and take the troops drinking." And so in Gormley's view, the team six did some cool training stuff, but also they weren't very as good as they could have been because Marcinco didn't really care about training as much as he cared about drinking after the point. But he's ending X. Fuck it, let's just go drink. All right, all right, you guys did it enough, come on. Yeah, and you see this kind of casual attitude to the things that are supposed to be serious to them. Eddie Gallagher is accused of one of the first weird signs some of his younger unit mates got is during training before they headed over to Iraq when they would like do the shoot houses. He would just be shooting the civilian targets that he wasn't supposed to hit and joke about it. Like, haha, yeah, it's funny, you know? Like, and people would be like, but you have to, doesn't he have to pass training and he would just like clear it with his friends, so he didn't have to actually pass. Like, 'cause he didn't care about not hitting civilians, you know? - Right, right. - Allegedly, this is what some guy, I wasn't there. I don't know, I'm not an AVZL. I'm just saying what some guy said to another guy who wrote a book, you know? People called Alpha, very good, you should read it. So despite the praise that Marcinco gets for creating a team with unique skills, he likely had the very low operational tempo of the early 80s to thank for the fact that his men were never tested too hard while he was in command. His last hurrah came in June of 1983 when he invited Gormli to drink with the unit on Virginia Beach. It was an awkward night. The operators were insubordinate to Gormli, so he left, but Marcinco kept drinking as coal rights. Marcinco decided to continue drinking elsewhere. He had a command aid drive him and a modified Mercedes-Benz sedan. When a three, he had custom built and shipped to the United States, which he frequently used as his personal car. That night, Marcinco's driver fell asleep in the early morning hours and rear-ended another car, causing significant damage to both vehicles. - I just say, it's sort of a mark of war here. - Great war here. This type of guy always drives the dictator, Mercedes, like kind of across any culture they want. The only car they want. Right? Yeah, the dictator Mercedes is a true human universal. - Yeah, it's so wild. - Yeah, it is kind of beautiful. We're all really the same deep down, even our psychopaths. - Yeah, every culture. - Every culture. - Every culture, after all, you know, as soon as Mercedes were around, there was a psycho who just gathered. - Oh, this is a psycho-assul car. - A cult of personality, a violent cult of personality got driven around it. - Yeah. - Yeah, it's just like if you show up drunk to a car dealership, they don't even ask they hand you the keys to a Dodge Ram. Right? - Yeah. - We'll figure out the financing later. You need to be driving this 2,500 light now. - This is for you. - Yeah. - And get on the road immediately. (laughing) - So in true dick fashion, he ordered his staff not to report the accident, but they refused to cover it up. 'Cause again, he's about to leave. So I'm not gonna commit a crime for you. You're out the door. - Yes. - He has a lot, Mersinko, a big part of what he establishes in Team Six's loyalty. That's part of like the Team Six, you know, the oath that the seals take. And the way Mersinko establishes this is like, you don't rat on your boss, on your fellow guy. If they commit crimes, if they're stealing, we're a wall. We don't talk to anybody. We don't talk to Big Navy. We don't talk to the NCIS investigators. We don't do any of that stuff. Because we're a loyal warrior brotherhood. Richard talks about that all the time. As soon as he gets sent to a captain's mast, he rolls on his driver and blames him for the accident. (laughing) - That's about right too. - Yeah. So he gets to slap on the wrist for this. Anyone else in Dick's position would have been forced into early retirement. But such was the awe with which Mersinko's rogue warrior pirate personality was held by some Navy admirals that he was given another chance to create another elite unit. This time with even less oversight, he gets the same job again after blowing it. How? 'Cause people just think he's cool. - Yeah, 'cause people's brains are poisoned by like fucking, 'cause again, like, oh, you need dirty men to protect your fucking life. That's like, sort of sounds good when it's dirty hairy I guess? - Yeah. - But like, what the fuck are you talking about? But whatever, this is how we run our world. What were those shirts you saw Robert? I'm just-- - I'm only here for the violence. - Yeah. - Yeah. - And fucking, Mersinko talks all the time about like these big, these admirals who come from these admiral families. But those are a lot of his big backers too. There are admirals that love him. And they're usually guys who like didn't do anything all that cool, but like they say they really buy into everything Mersinko says, right? - Well, but that said so. He doesn't hate officers for real. He just needs a accountability. - A cudgel with which to beat office. You know, like, oh, yeah, I thought you were cool. - Yeah, he needs to excuse for like why people are always giving him shit for like fucking up constantly. And it's because these officers don't understand what real warriors do. And it's like, well, real warriors don't need to like steal money from the government and ram their fucking Mercedes into the back of a civilian's car 'cause they got drunk. That's not really key to the warfighter ethos. I don't think he's gonna help the US win anywhere. - Yeah, it's war, it's war, large shit. - Yeah, it's war, large shit. It's not like a soldier in a democratic nation shit. I mean, it is. - Yeah. - I mean objective, but it shouldn't be. - It shouldn't be. - It shouldn't be. - Yeah. Uh, Mersinko was initially transferred to teach at the National War College. But he got lucky. On October 23rd, 1983, a truck loaded with TNT was detonated outside of a Marine barracks in Beirut and killed 241 Americans. Admiral Lyons, who was one of his biggest backer in the Navy, who's the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, suggested that the Navy create a special team to test security in their facilities and says, I know the guy for the job, right? - Right. - So. - Is it Daryl Dick? - Yeah. - Is it Daryl Dick? - It's Daryl Dick, yeah. - It's always, it's always like, the problem is that it's just always something like he's so crazy, it just might work shit. Like people think that's like real. - Well, I mean, there's an element that it is. There are real things called red teams that exist to this day and everything from like, actual like military operational security to like, like a corporation will hire a red team to see like, is our website secure, right? - Oh sure, sure, sure. - Yeah, right. Like that is like a thing you do want to do this, right? But you don't necessarily need them to be completely immune to like all law. - Yes. That's not necessary, right? But Dick argues, in order to really be able to work like the enemy, we have to be completely classified. and completely free from any kind of oversight, right? 'Cause the enemy is not gonna, there won't be oversight of the enemy, right? So if you want me to know, do what the enemy could, you have to give me this kind of freedom, right? - It's also like-- - So the red-- - This is play acting, motherfucker. - Yeah, well, you're, you're calling-- - I was playing now. - Yeah. - You're not even in danger. Well, actually, he is going to wind up endangering his men somehow in this job. So the red cell is an super classified unit that was tasked with breaking into U.S. military facilities and even kidnapping officers and civilian employees to demonstrate weaknesses and security protocols. They are kidnapping people. - Yeah. - Now, depending on who you ask, Richard was either very good at this or deeply irresponsible to the extent of criminality. Dick's ultimate plan was to carry out mock terror attacks on 50 bases, spending $125,000 per attack. Advanced warning was given, so the officers at these bases and the security people knew that there's going to be an exercise, but you won't know the form it takes, right? And when Marcinco told showed up to explain what was going to happen to them, he tried to psych them out. His job was to scare these people and he took a lot of pleasure in that. One veteran recalled, he'd go into a briefing and say, "We won't break any skin, we won't draw any blood, "no broken teeth, everything else is mine." He would tell women, "We're not gonna pull the skirt "over your head and tie your hands behind your back." He wanted to get attention. He enjoyed twisting tails, right? You don't like tell women in an office, don't worry, we're not gonna rip your clothes off and bind and tie, if you don't want them to think that that might happen. It's like a weird thing to say, if you're not trying to scare people, right? - Yeah. - It's also like, what is this fucking, right, it accomplishes, he gets to do his thing, of course. - Again, the basic idea, sure, you want some guys to test, and that aspects of this need to happen, but not the way he is going to do it. He also saw the red cell as his chance to get revenge on the point dexter, so he'd screwed him out of Team Six. So he made sure to recruit his best guys there from Team Six for the red cell, along with some of the best dudes from other teams. Since his new unit was classified, he basically had Team Six sign for everything he wanted to buy and wound up purchasing enough gear to operate multiple full seal teams. Now again, these guys don't need guns, but he's buying tons of them. He's buying because his hope is that, once he's exposed all the security flaws and the regular Navy, the big Navy, doesn't want them to think about, he'll be so beloved, they'll make his team the near tier one guy, right? They'll be like, wow, we really need you guys. We have to send you on special missions now. You're so good. You prove that we really need you, Richard. - This is some very sucker corn shit. He's supposed to just be in and tag someone with a Nerf gun and just feel like, this could have been bad, bro. - It's gonna get so much worse than that. - So one of his first actions was to chat security at the Charleston Navy base. And Brave Men, Dark Waters, or Kelly describes Marcinco's team as showing up to areas that stored nuclear weapons, quote, "Dressed in scroungy clothes, unshaven and with long hair "and that they spent several days rummaging about "through which they were never challenged." And so he's able to show that like, yeah, we just had some guys like show up in this nuclear facility looking like shit. And nobody like asked what they were doing there or tried to like stop them from rooting around. So this is kind of his proof of concept, right? And it does probably show a real security. Like this is the fucking post, Vietnam, US military. I have no trouble believing that he did in fact find security was shit. And so the fact that they prove that like, where our operatives were able to get this close to nuclear weapons, right? Without even trying is what secures him the job. And so from this point forward, Richard Marcinco is in charge of yet another elite unaccountable military unit. So we'll talk about what happens with the red cell and we'll talk about what happens to the Navy SEALs and Team Six after that next week. How are you doing? How are you feeling, Andrew? Good. God, I mean, the only thing that makes it not as bleak is like, I guess life has more or less functioned with these fuckers roaming around. Sure, I know, well, yeah. Yeah, but right. Every second of this is infuriating, obviously. Yeah. There's so much for among other things, like one of the worst cartels in Mexico was formed from Mexican special forces guys who were trained by like US green arrays and then took that training in order to like make the cartel that worked really well. And it's very common, by the way, even in the US, for like cartel and like people who are running large criminal enterprises to recruit from former special and current special forces guys, including Delta guys. This happens. There's document cases of this. It's like, it's the private sector version of this public sector thing. It's the safe job. Some of them go into fucking, you know, black water. And it's, I mean, the modern equivalent of black water. And yes, some of them work for a fucking cartel, right? Is that everyone who gets out of that? But it's not none. Yeah. And it's the same. It's the problem. It's the same job. Yeah. Is why this could happen is because we create this job that doesn't do us, doesn't create, do anything for us, except cause problems. Yeah. Before and after. Yeah, all I was ever, my job was in the military, was just to kill people, right? That's like all they wanted me doing is just going and gunning down strangers every night. And that's all the cartels gonna have me do, right? Like, I'm ready to do this job, you know? If you're still physically and mentally capable, if it hasn't, if the work hasn't run you through, just occasionally use pliers in an interesting way to fucking make a, make a different kind of tripod in the field or whatever. Yeah. Yeah. Other than that. Anyway. It's cool stuff. Yeah. I, we'll talk a lot more about this, about all this good stuff. But first, you know, another week has to pass because you're only legally allowed two episodes behind the bastards a week. Sometimes we give you a third, but every time we do that, it's a felony. you have to throw one of our employees under the bus and they go to prison for life, for life. So every time you do a three-parter, just think of that. - You got them out of it. Get them out of it, Robert. Just call up. - No, I don't know. - I don't believe in being unaccountable. It's important for us to be accountable, you know? - That's right, you'll do the crime. Someone else does have to do the time. - Someone else will pay the time. - Yes, yeah. - Yeah. - Yeah, me, but someone else. - Uh, good stuff. Anyway, let's see if it's that. - You got a plugable to bug? Are we done? - Yeah. - Yeah, plugable, plugable. - Oh, sure. - Yeah, starter track. It's my new Star Trek podcast with Tony Newsome, Jesse Gender. It's on the same feed as you know, as this racist used to be. We're having a lot of fun. Calm listen. Everyone here probably loves Star Trek enough. I'm new to Star Trek, that's the thing. So don't feel like you got to be a Star Trek fan to get into it. - Mm-hmm, yeah. But you should be a Star Trek fan. It's good, you know? - I'm getting there. - Yeah, anyway, I don't know. Don't join the military, avoid that if you can. - We're done. - 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. To get 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/atBahNeVastard. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking. 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