Behind the Bastards - Part Three: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

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

All Zone Media. 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 Marsingo. And in these two episodes, we will be getting past just Richard and talking about kind of how the things he's set in motion led to the continuing derangement of the Navy SEALs well beyond just Team 6. and back to talk with me about how things got as bad as they are. Now, Andrew T. Andrew, how are you doing?

How's it going? I'm good. Fine and Andy, Andrew, fine and Danny. Have no war crimes this morning, so. That's good. You haven't committed any, right? I can't promise that myself. The world, 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. The point is, I don't know. The point is, you. 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 Gender. 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 muddling my way through. And it's really fun. We're on podcast places and YouTube.

Excellent. Yeah, that's what I'm doing these days. Awesome, 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, you know, no longer being produced. But the hosts of that are two great guys, Dan and Jordan, who did wonderful work documenting Alex Jones and actually helping with like the legal fight against him and Info Wars. And they both have new projects. So I just wanted to let you know because a lot of our listeners listen to their stuff.

Dan has a new podcast called Show Me State of Mind, and Jordan has started a YouTube series of short video essays called At or that's At Everyone is Wrong About. So YouTube at Everyone is wrong about is Jordan's new thing. Yeah, that's it. And now it's time for some seals. Not the ones are like blubber and like that people eat. Well, I guess our Navy Seals have some blubber, but they're pretty skinny usually, right? Yeah. I mean, I doubt they'd taste very good.

Maybe. I wouldn't try one. 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.

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And listen now. This is Chelsea Handler from Dear Chelsea. Every week, the news gets worse. The world gets crazier. And Yamanika is here to tell whoever's responsible, you're the problem. Do you know I just found out who Sidney Sweeney was? If he got a bunch of women,

then I should have a bunch of women. your men. Do better or do less so I don't have to do so much. I'm Yamanika and I'm out. Listen to you're the problem with Yamanika on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Richard Marsenko commanded Sealed Team 6 from its inception in August of 1980 to July of 1983. So again, not a long run as the founder and head of Seal Team 6. Oh my God. We're going to get, we're going like more than one episode per year. This is like, yeah. Because we're getting way beyond.

There's way more stuff. You want to talk about the SEALs doing anything bad? You have to get out of Mercinko's error because they're not doing a lot when he's running Team 6. They're doing bad things. But mostly to their livers, it seems like. Yeah, 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 6 getting its baptism and fight.

of 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 U.S. ran during Reagan and Bush won years to make us feel better about the fact that we'd lost Vietnam. We needed to get our mojo back, and the only way to do that was to invade some countries that had no chance of fighting back whatsoever. You can look at the Falklands if you want to say, sorry. I don't need to talk confidence-in-in-li-in right now.

We just needed confidence-builders. Batting practice. Yeah, Grenada and fucking Panama and then Desert Storm were like taking Seattleis 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 time this has happened. Yeah, 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 a boat broke. So not a great first run for Team 6, you know? Oh man. Drowning because of too much gear is like... That sucks. That sucks so bad. But that also... What a shitty way to die. 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. There was massive debate as to why team 6 had needed to parachute into the water with all of that gear in the first place, because there were other ways to have accomplished the mission. And the answer seems to have been because, like,

well, it was cool as fuck to do it that way, and that's what we trained for because that's the kind of stuff we're into. And his book, Orr notes that Seal Team 4 actually had wanted to do the mission instead of Team 6, and they were going to use, like, boats. And they might have done that, quote, had Sealed Team 6 not been so eager to show off its skills in a real war? That's from Brayette. And Brave Men Dark Waters. And Brave Men Dark Waters is a pretty positive book towards the founding

of the seals in their early establishment. So the fact that Orr is saying that they did this because they kind of wanted to see if they could and a bunch of guys died means something, right? I guess the tiny thing that is like, is it heartening to know 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, yeah. Unfortunately, they're also likely to take certain risks, which is why a lot of people don't fight back.

But that's a separate question. So a day and a half after the drowning, during the actual invasion of Grenada, Sealed Team 6 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 common. wealth. 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 U.S. 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 accomplish their political goal. But like it slows the invasion, a bunch of like regular Marines have to rescue the seals because they've gotten themselves in a bad situation. Yeah. Yeah. The adults have to come rescue these lunatics as usual. The adults being the Marines.

Right. Right. Yeah, they took a break from eating crayons to go save the Navy SEALs. Yeah. Two other units from Team 6 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 6 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 J-Soc 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 Jashok brings them a lot more money. And by 1990, it's ensured that the seals have expanded to more than 2,000 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 to take out of terrorists. Handle a hostage situation. Can I ask a broad question, I guess, which is like something I've, you seem like you definitely

would under know this more than me, which is that like the J-Soc 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 U.S. goals. And that's a very different skill set than the SEALs. The green berets are obviously meant 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 won a Green Beret, right? Right, right, right. Delta Force is also, I mean, and these kind of do get muddled, especially today. Like, what is Delta Force to use for as opposed to Team 6? As opposed to the Rangers. As opposed to. Right.

There's a lot of them, and they all have specializations. Got it. Instantly, right? Yeah, yeah. I guess to me, it's just the era of, like, helicopters, drones, it just seems more like G. G.I. Joe than anything else. Yeah, and there's an argument to be made for that.

Again, not that a lot of these guys will make, but there is an argument to made that, like, 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 Morsenko, 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 supposed to break in a Navy bases. So while he is starting that job, that's when like Grenada is going on, right? Because he's out of Team 6 by that point.

So let's get back to Richard for a little bit. When we left off, Marsenko 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 Marsenko 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. Yeah. 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 was easy to dismiss people saying, hey, but they're really dicks to us. It's like kind of sour grapes because you're not good at your security and the sea showed you up. But then Marcinko'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 Marsenko the use of his facilities to plan their operations.

He's like, basically, okay, if you want to try to bust in, you can't, like, use facilities on the base for your planning, right? If you're trying to cosplay 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 Marsiggo 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 Arturo Farias, showed up at Sheridan's home, they had already gone too far. From the jump, they shouldn't be at this guy's house, and they are. On March 20th, 1986, the red cell moves into kidnap Ron 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 show them his badge and Ron agrees to go with

him for the good of the exercise although I think you could agree they beat the exercise. Yeah. 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 killed by a housewife. That is so funny. That's so good. It's really good.

Good. Yeah. Like I would say I could. guess his security was pretty good. Yeah. Like, sounds like Sheridan's got it on lock. But 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,

If fucker wants to leave, tear him a 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. Former SEALs. They're the best of the best.

A lot of Team 6 guys. And yet, while beating an unarmed, tight-up man, they still took casualties? One 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. Only a seal could take down 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 his wife. Or a seal took himself down. Yeah, well, that's true. 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. Little bits. Yeah. I am a little, you know, wonder what's going to happen one day. Because one of these days, someone's going to do something, one way or the other, I guess. It probably won't be the fun version of it, but we can help.

It never is, I guess. Yeah, yeah. So the fact that his guys had beat up the student filmed it didn't look good for Marcinko. So he had the tape edited to remove the worst of the beating. But Sheridan reported the abuse and the Navy got access to the full video. Marcinco insisted nothing abnormal happened, but he was fired from Redsell a month later and given an admiral's mask this time. Now, his clout held up yet again. It ensured him a slap on the wrist punishment.

But a month later, the Navy opened an investigation into Marsenko's time as Team 6 commander. The motivating incident for this was a report Marsenko had drunkenly pulled a gun during a military exchange trip to New Zealand. Like, and Morsenko's like, this was all political. But also, and maybe it was, but also, why did you drunkenly pull a gun during a military exchange ship? 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 to take, like, he's in the military. Aren't you some kind of badass?

You should, I'm going to say this. I'm so sorry. He should, he, 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 I'm saying. You should be able to fight New Zealand barehanded. I mean, come on. Like, come on.

Get the fuck out of here. Get real. Yeah. So the seals clammed up and defended Marsenko. And for a while, it seemed like he'd get away with this, too. But after the word got out that Richard was about to be promoted to captain, a bunch of officers inside Navy special forces flipped out. And these are not like big Navy guys.

These are special forces guys. And they 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.

Marsenko 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 Simon, a former Army ranger who'd earned a bronze star in combat. He was a huge supporter of the mission of the seals. He just wasn't willing to let Marcyenko 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 Six headquarters,

and carted away the team records, about 50 boxes of them. It was an extraordinary scene, a government agency raiding, in effect, one of the Navy's most secret and most vital military units. So it's like a big deal investigation. Yeah. Like, that's scandalous. Honestly crazy they kept any records, though, Giffin. It is, yeah.

The small amount I know about them. Yeah. So at first, the actual evidence against Marcinko seemed thin. a pretty good job covering his tracks. But eventually investigating agents found out that one of his top seals, a man who had actually fought in Grenada, John Mason, had also taken trophies back from Grenada with him, AK-47s. And that was illegal. Trophy taking is illegal now.

Importing automatic weapons is definitely not. You're not supposed to be doing that. Of the trophies, AKs is not the most legal one. The really illegal one. Yeah. And look, would it be tempting? Were I and John Mason's? Of course.

You can't expect superhuman self-control. That's why you build guide rails into 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 investigators get Mason dead to rights, and they're like, hey, you want to keep that Navy seal wall a silence up or do you want to not go to prison? And Mason says, oh, I'll roll on Dick if it's between that in prison. So he gives them a bunch of information about widespread financial improprieties directed by Marsenko. Mason was charged with 37 counts of various kinds of fraud and offered a suspended sentence for flipping on Marsenko. He agreed and he gave the Navy Info on a scam Morsenko had just perpetrated. During his red cell days, Dick had cooked up a scheme with.

Mason after Mason had left the Navy and was a civilian working for a contractor. Marcinko agreed to order 4,300 experimental grenades for Red Cell with Seal Team 6 sponsoring the contract because 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 repinnable. So if you pulled out the pin, you could change your mind later, I guess, and like put it back in so you could make the grenade safe. and 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 startup money for a new business.

Like, that's the purpose here. is like they're creating a con grenade buy in order to steal money from the Navy that they will then put into a business for their civilian lives, right? So that was the idea. But Mason gets the money first and he blows all of their money on fancy cars and like a lavish office space for the – I don't even know what the business was supposed to be. So in 1987, Marcinco is tried in federal court with bribery and conspiracy. The first trial ends in a hung jury. And the second in 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 Marsingal, we'll hear from him a couple of times still. Old Dickies still out there. Oh, good. But he's not in charge of anything. In 1987, the name of SEAL Team 6 was changed to Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or

Dev Gru. And this is the official name today. They're no longer called Team Six. People still call them Team Six. Yeah. All the time. Yeah, yeah. People, I mean, a lot of people know they're called DevGrew too, but like DevGrew is the

official name, right? And as you might guess, by the fact that everyone does still call it SEAL Team Six, Marcy 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 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, cause some problems. You know whose branding has never caused problems, though? I was hoping you wouldn't do that. It's pretty good. It's pretty good.

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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. And so we invade Panama. There are other reasons involving Manuel Noriega and cocaine, but we went over those in our Behind the Bastards 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 slapdash. Panama shouldn't have been, in part because like while they're planning it, we have bases there. So we literally have like our guys planning the invasion, just like walking around. And like 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. Yeah.

It's the red cell approach. Just live there for a little while. 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. They tended to be nice to American soldiers.

That was the attitude of the government at the time. And so the Bush administration doesn't want to have a lot of civilian casualties to explain. It doesn't want damage to a lot of infrastructure, right? They just want Noriega out and to be able to, like, you know, do their own stuff, right? So they test the seals with taking and capturing the airport that holds Noriega's jet, and they test them with doing it only with small arms. So we're not going to try to take this out with an airstrike, and we're not going to give you guys heavier equipment. Right.

And we're not going to send in a larger unit or a 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 our- This feels like the SEALs bluff has just been called, basically. It's like, oh, okay. Kind of does. Kind of does. Captain Badass. You should be able to do this with like a knife. Yeah. So this is not Team 6. This is SEAL Team 4, 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 nice. vision. So when they get up to a certain point, they can see who's in the hangar, but that's also

the point at which they're like 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 there's like a dozen or so guys, dudes in there who 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 was a historically large group of seals. There were huge arguments about should multiple platoons, because seals don't train to fight that way at this time.

Should they have sent in, like, I think it was two platoons. But they outnumbered the enemy two to one. Again, in the movies, they would have killed these guys in a second. But this is real life. And it doesn't matter how well trained you are in real life. If you are in the open, 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 more. They take like half the unit out of commission almost instantly. Now, the SEALs do eventually accomplish the mission, but not because they take, like, the hangar gets abandoned by these guys. They like leave after a while. And it's just, it's a really bad time. Like the SEALs have a horrible time.

A lot of them die or get horribly injured. Noriega never even tries to go for his jet. So their sacrifice is completely meaningless. And their opponents flee rather than being defeated in a sadist. flying way. It's the worst it could have gone. And again, it's because this is not a thing any guys should be doing. We know if you just send dudes directly into the maw of a machine gun, they die. It doesn't matter if they're seals. There's no reason. Conventional infantry should have handled this with a tank. Is this 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 vibes? If something like that were to happen, that's kind of the idea. Is that like this. incredibly valuable unit that's highly trained, was sent in to do something that 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 U.S. 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 U.S. military sometimes makes the same mistakes over and over again. Cover your ass. Cover your ass. It went great. Okay.

So the Persian Gulf conflict is probably going to be the high watermark for unproblematic seal success at war because commanding general Norman Schwarzkoff hated special forces. He's very distrusting of special forces. He only wants the West Coast SEALs participating because they're seen as less problematic. I think that's some of Richard's legacy still. He probably would have been annoyed if he wasn't still in prison in March of 1990. Now, maybe because there weren't guys like Marsenko around at the time, the seals get integrated effectively into a broader military apparatus during Desert Storm. At one point, like one of the things that the seals do are used to do is a six-man unit is sent in to create a diversion.

Like they're basically swimming by a coast and they're trying to like fake and make it look like an invasion is coming by carrying out acts of like subterfuse and sabotage. and they're able to successfully draw two full Iraqi visions away from engaging the U.S. in combat. And that's exactly the kind of shit seals they're supposed to be doing, right? Right. Like, that's undeniably useful. It does require people who think outside the box. It requires courage and creativity. And it saved a bunch of lives, net.

Like, that's a good example of how you could use guys with this sort of training, right? So they can be used effectively, you know? Outside of that, seals track and remove sea mines. And they do search and rescue for down to pilots. an oil platform, and none of them die. So Desert Storm goes pretty well for the seals. But that's like most of the time, it's always leadership, right? It's always just like actually being used correctly.

It's doable. They are human psychos, but you can put them in the right place. Schwarzkopf, 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 for lunch.

Yeah. Yeah. Fellow, I read his autobiography as a kid. He was a bland fellow. Weirdly enough, he grew up in Tehran as a child, which is kind of strange. His dad was like an ambassador or something. It's very strange. Andrew, you think he has a like white bread, uh, turkey sandwich, no seasoning with just a piece of lettuce. Yeah, lettuce. He's one of the whitest men, you can imagine. Yeah. Storm and Norman? Absolutely. Half a packet of mayo. Has to be a form of packet. Half a packet of mayo. But just next to the sandwich.

Like my grandpa used to just open a bottle of vermouth when he was mixing his martinis, that kind of idea. Just a smell. Towards 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 of conflicts that they could draw experience from when looking and planning for the future.

They had been successfully integrated into the modern warfighting machine of the United States. And this is where the book Brave Men Dark Waters ends. An author Orr Kelly notes that a couple of points that he felt like worried him about the organization's future. So this is Orr 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 participants. in Operation Just Cause was held shortly after the operation, but most of the SEALs present found the briefing on satisfactory, and a few were so disturbed that they walked out, right? That's the briefing on like that Panama shit show. And I don't know if they walked out because they were disturbed at how bad the planning was or disturbed that guys didn't want them to do shit. It's a little unclear to me. But it shows that there's this kind of institutional unwillingness to really critique as much of what they're doing. You know, you could critique Big Navy. And that's Orr's fear for the SEALs, they go forward.

And it's got to prove to be kind of prescient. It's really like these tough guys are kind of just soft baby boys at every turn as soon as criticism of any kind. To never be mean to them and always treat them like special angel boys. Yeah. It's weird for as tough as they claim to be. So there's a real debate post-Gulf War about the purpose of Navy SEALs and what it should be in a world where guided missiles had relieved them of many of their previous duties of doing

sabotage. Well, we don't need to send like some guys in flippers to sabotage a refinery. we can shoot a missile at it, right? In his book, Orr noted that Seals had previously focused primarily on their ability to influence events by violence in contrast with the Army Special Forces and that they might need to learn more about how influencing hearts and 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? And even then, some SEALs 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 of their involvement in Desert Shield and the 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 former member of the team while at the Naval Postgraduate School wrote a study of how the team might be used to carry out clandestine assassination attempts. His thesis remains highly classified. Cool.

Just thinking about, you know, stuff that's not necessarily the SEA. But our stuff special forces guys are doing in the Trump era to heads of states. Do you regret not going to college to write fanfic about fucking like murdering Saddam Hussein? I do, I do. I mean, I would have written fanfic about writing a novel with Saddam Hussein, which remains my, 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 got to separate the artist. That's right. That's right. And the artist is very hard to do with some of the same. So Orkelly 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 NOM. 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? And the global war on terror... It's awfully stone soup with the seals, isn't it?

Yeah. It's like, all you need is Navy seals and fucking air support and an army behind them, and they're fucking do whatever you want, bro. 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 Morsenko'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, well, nothing bad happened if you don't count the Balkans or Rwanda or several other places.

Anyway, in 1992, Richard, Mersenko 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 Mar Sinko 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 a glimpse inside the rarefied air of special forces. And they'd already thought these guys were basically superheroes. So Mar Sincco'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 Sealed Team Six, right? Well, we're also in the Van Dam era. We're in the Steven Seagal era. Of course. This is what they do.

We've seen it. It says a lot about the veracity of Richard's first book, Rogue Warrior, that he follows his autobiography, his non-fiction autobiography with a fiction novel series, also called Rogue Warrior. What? Hell yeah. He creates a little bit. bunch of fiction novels with the same

title in branding as his autobiography that's supposed to be nonfiction. Makes sense. I think the idea is these were based on the real classified missions. Of course. You can't tell you about those, you know, but yeah. I love when you do that voice.

It's my first of a love based on a true story. Based on a true story. That's all we need to put in the Hollywoods. 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 Wollong series of subsequent novels, all ostensibly based on Marsenko's real life, with him as the lead character and also on the cover. Sophie's going to show you a copy of Rogue Warrior II, Red Cell. That's actually Richard Marsenko. He's got, he looks like Steven Segal. Hold on. Andrew, are you ready for this?

Are you ready for this, Andrew? I don't think I am, actually. Oh, man. Oh, bummer. Again, he's got a ponytail and a beard. He looks like Seagall in the 90s. Purposefully probably. He's wearing all black.

He's got like 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 dweeps, huh? Oh, man, it's so sad. Okay, Richard. Okay, man.

It was through these novels, which make him a rich man, that Marsenko would prove himself forever the smartest member of Team 6. Instead of risking his freedom and money by telling U.S. government secrets, like some subsequent team six members, he could just lie and pretend 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 Marsenko wrote his best-selling autobiography, Rogue Warrior, he and co-writer John Weissman were bound by government restrictions and could only tell a fraction of his incredible story.

Now the tales he could not tell, the secrets he could not reveal, explode in 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 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, 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 Marsenko is playing terrorist at Tokyo's Narita Airport,

easily penetrating the facility's 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 nuclear weapons depot in California to raiding a North Korean Navy base and target far out in the Pacific, the rogue warrior and his marauding seals fight incredible odds and increasingly dangerous enemies. Yeah, that's real, man. Yeah, I love that a group of traders Americans are smuggling nukes to North Korea and Japan.

The plan. Allies in 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, to... For the vibes. I guess it's Mecca Godzilla. Mecca.

It might be Mecca Godzilla. That's actually possible. That'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 most... mostly been Saudi terrorists living in Afghanistan. The United States goes to war with Afghanistan. From 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 of the operational burden in Afghanistan from beginning we knew was going to be put on U.S. Special Forces, right? And actually at the start, when U.S. troops first inter Afghanistan, and they're basically 100% of the war effort in the earliest days. It's not long after the Twin Towers felt that the Navy SEALs, who were still largely the force they'd been in the 1990s at that point, which is men trained mostly for coastal operations who specialized in hunting, tracking, and destroying.

Afghanistan was new terrain and a new kind of war to them. And when it began, most of them had no combat experience. And there were a lot of lessons that are going to be learned in Afghanistan, and not all of it is going to be, I mean, there are a lot of lessons that are going to be learned in blood in Afghanistan, and it's not just going to be seal blood. Them fucking up is going to cost a lot of other people their lives. Some of this is just an 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 fuckups in the early stages of special forces involvement because in part, especially, you're still learning how to fight. When you drop your water type Pokemon into an Earth arena.

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.

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And we're back. So, in January of 2002, a SEAL Team 6 officer named Vic Heider murdered an unarmed Afghan man at the first Team 6 action of the war. Heider had been leading a team to capture Al Qaeda 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, but they can't see who's shooting at them.

And then around the same time, an old man is just kind of walking because they're just out in Afghanistan, and there's just a dude who lives there. And he's walking around. And because it's dark, 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 Hider, 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 this elderly man to death, right? The thing that had been in his hand that Hider 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 Vic Heider is. He shot a man with a fucking cassette in his hand. Right, 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? Yeah. Well, and you could argue that these guys clearly have been told they are so valuable as humans that their life is worth much more than any random person, you know, the potential that they might be hurt means the other person has to die. Vic says that, and I'm sure who's taught that, what should tell you that that's not universal is a bunch of his men complain, right? Yeah.

He's an officer, a bunch of his enlisted men. The guys that are supposed to be like the real pipters are like, that's fucked up, dude, you just murdered an old guy. And they complain, and it gets put down to officer enlisted rivalry. Eh, they just don't like their officer, you know? Right? Jesus. Haider was not well liked in the unit for stuff like this.

One reason, and this is a reason that also causes a lot of fucked up behavior, is that some officers don't all go through like the really intense selection process necessarily that enlisted seals do. Right. 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. It's not every officer who does this, but some of these guys, and it comes sometimes from insecurity. I'm sure some of them would do that if they were an enlisted man, too, because there's just psychos, right? I'm just trying to provide you some explanation for the motivation here.

It's obviously it could be a little of both. Yes, yes. It's got to be some of both. But the insecurity here isn't to zero percent of the fact. Right. It makes sense. 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 stereotypical Native American warrior as their mascot, right? And they call themselves the Redmen. 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 into Native American warriors. This is something that officers in the team who are critical of the culture will say, and some illicit guys. That's how they describe it, that it's a metamorphosis. These guys really believe. Right.

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. Right. I have never gotten enough detail 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 scalps. Of course.

This had not happened at the start of the, when Hider's an avi... This isn't start immediately, right? But Hider is one of the guys who kind of starts the ladder of escalation of brutality that helps lead in that direction, right? And he's, among other things, he's a guy who feels like, I need to prove I deserve to be here by being ultra-violent. Right. So the classic small man bully.

Right. Like five. Very small man. Yeah. On March 6th, 2002, Lieutenant Commander Heider led more than 20 SEAL Team 6 operators in two Chinooks on a mission to kill or 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 U.S. Air Force before the seals went in. Some operators protested having the Air Force bomb the convoy.

They were like, our job is to like be super discriminating guys who can get really close and we could know if the, because they didn't really know is this convoy bad guy. or 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 Chinooks 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 where men are trying to shield their children and wives from the gunfire of the ship that these seals had just been in. And it fuck some of these guys up, right? It's a pretty awful thing to see. And not all of these guys.

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, Haider and several seals continued to treat them as combatants. Per Cole's book, quote, Heider 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 Heath had shot. He was partially alive, faced out, his back to me, and he rolled over.

I shot him, finished him. He was dying, but he rolled over and I didn't know whether he was armed or not. That was the end of that. Hyder said that his single shot had blasted open the man's head. So there's this guy who isn't dead and this instead of trying to render aid, he's just like, well, I thought I might have had a weapon. So I shot him. Yeah. mentioning 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 it, 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 Heider, 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 Heider shoots this wounded man, who was unarmed, by the way, Heider 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 Hider's actions, reports them to his team leader. He's like, look, I shot this guy because I thought he needed to, and then he just mutilates this guy, kills this guy when he doesn't need to and mutilates his corpse. Like, 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 Haider 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 grossed 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. Right.

And in this instance, maybe Heider 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? 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 Brits Slabinsky are in a initiative.

Chinook looking for a bent laden, soaring over a mountain that they'd been told had no enemy presence when they get hit with an RPG. Petty officer first class, Neil Roberts, falls from the bird, right? He'd been, you know, the chopper has like, I think it's ramped down, and he's standing out there, and he 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 returned the base with that chopper, Slabinsky gets in another chopper with the rest of his men, and they head back to rescue Roberts. But in the interim period, Roberts had been found by Al-Qaeda fighters, and they 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 that Afghan people, right? That's pretty standard for these guys. Like, whoa, 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 schoolyard 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 the kind of thing there should be accountability. The military should be cracking down on this shit more, right? Like, this is not the sort of thing that should be allowed to happen. It's also, if you're going to vote to send guys to war like this, stuff like this is going to happen. He is right about it.

If you ask me to go living with the pigs, I can't go live with the. The pigs are anyone you ask to go murder people 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 punish those guys immediately and incredibly harshly, even though you know what's going to happen to some of them. And that's going to be bad to morale because otherwise things get much worse and you wind

up defeating your own attempts to win hearts and minds and stop people from trying to kill your dudes, which is 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 and activity and recruitment and whatnot, right? This stuff pisses people off. Just like 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. they think this really only extends, there's too many of them, think that this really only extends to their ability to kill, not their ability to keep 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, were you just like the Taliban? Right. Right. That part, right. Why do I feel better about you than them? elite parties. 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? Um, 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? unfortunately. Right, right, right. That attitude is still present among some people in Team 6 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 Morsenko's mold. And this would come to a head in early March of 2002 after Haider's mutilation of the wounded man

and after Roberts Ridge, right? So this is all going down in, like, the spring of 2002. Roughly 40 SEAL Team 6 men meet at Bagram Air Base to discuss what Heider had done and what had happened to Roberts 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's much earlier, right? Well, it's like the bad apples thing. It's just like the bunch is getting spoiled, guys. Exactly. And this bunch who vote not to mutilate corpses are still responsible for helping to spoil the rest of the apples. Because even though they agree, we don't do that, that's not honorable.

And they don't like Heider, 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? Jesus.

This is Marcinco's favorite way of dealing with SEALs who didn't fit in, right? Just, you know, icing them out 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 Razor, 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 the criminal justice system would give to that person. And reading between the lines, I think that at least some of this refusal to hold their own accountable

comes from a fear that a lot of the saner seals have of their more piratical peers and colleagues, 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-commission seal. Fifi, that's Roberts, was mutilated. And then we had to address a very important question. How do you get the guys 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 her 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 he's trying to defend his unit, but he's too, honest to be like, yeah, but like these guys are, a lot of these guys are literally insane. And the fact that like some of these Taliban guys are pretty out there 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, yeah, yeah. That's this guy's arguing. And we're the good guys.

And we're the good guys, though, even though you really can't tell it the difference from looking at all the brains splattered on the ground. Yeah, God. So in this account, Haider's mutilation gets sort of grandfathered in under the general belief that we have to allow some kind of retaliation from the craziest of the seals in order to keep the units functional. Heider, 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 Haider 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 actually don't know who's right. You know, to be honest, it's entirely possible someone besides. sides Heider did that mutilation, shit get fucked out. Like, stuff like that happens. People forget, like, it's war fucks with your mind even if you're there.

I don't, I don't, I literally don't know. But so many guys talk about this that, like, yeah, I think I know what the likeliest thing is, right? It's more or less the story that most of these seals told Cole. A lot of, there are several seals told Cole. So Team Six leadership analyzed Heiders' 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. on his own rather than having his men do it. And again, the officer is supposed to be able to fight.

You need to sometimes, but you're there for other reasons. You're the officer. There's a reason. If you're constantly just shooting dudes that you don't like need to, then that kind of means you're not doing your job as an officer, right? Right. It's like one thing if the assistant manager pulls a slurpee himself. Yes.

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And does it once. But if you're constantly doing it, like, you're kind of not doing your other job. And one former seal called this a total breakdown of operational tactics. This also gets back to something. Marsenko seated 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, Marsenko's culture totally venerated the enlisted man and demonized officers. So insecure guys like Haider 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. Yay. We did it. Still grim. Still grim as fuck. Yeah. It's going to get grimmer. I don't know why I said it that way.

Andrew, you want to do a plug real quick? 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, Tawny Newsome. Our producer is Jesse Gender. We're also on YouTube. I'm watching a lot of Star Trek for the first time.

They're watching a lot of Star Trek for like the billions of 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, listeners, why don't you all take a racism break? And we'll be back on Thursday. Hazah!

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