Behind the Bastards - Part Two: Richard Marcinko: The Founder of SEAL Team 6

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

We continue the life and times of Richard Marcinko as he enters the Vietnam War and immediately commits numerous war crimes for the CIA. Then he gets to invent SEAL Team 6!See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

World Zone Media. Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast that, again, I did the you're listening now a bit. 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? Uh, 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 mirthful life of constant war crimes. The SEAL Team 6 guy, old Dickie Marks, Richard Marsenko. Can I ask a question? Not to be glib. Why is SEAL Team 6, like, is there, I assume, one through five, or is this like a James Bond situation? We'll talk about that. Don't worry. We'll talk about that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's actually a fun story. All right. 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 SEAL Team 6, you might think like, well, that's like six guys or 10. No, there's like hundreds of guys. Like SEAL Team 6, there's a lot of Team 6 guys. Got it. Okay. Okay.

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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, you're killing informants and, and are you, like, informants bringing in for you're 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? 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 fuckloaded dudes, right? Yeah. Based off of it. Now that we know also, it's like just mostly because someone told them to. Yeah. Because some guy 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 U.S. military that are exempt from them. But practically, the seals don't have to abide by the rules of war, right? Right. These guys are nearly always. To go into battle on Dexedrine, 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 finger 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.

Couriers often turned out to be nothing but fishing boats. Purported Viet Cong bases burned to the ground where sometimes just poor collections of huts inhabited by simple peasants. Cool. So, you know, they're fighting a fun war. That's Richard Marsenko's baptism of fire. 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 might have a use for them like they did for the Frogman, but the CIA 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 going to have long hair, they're going to 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, one last hit. One last hit. Yeah, one last hit. But then I'm going clean. I'm going clean from special operators. Oh, God. The seals were seen like some sort of immoral activity because they often did immoral things. In his book, Alpha, David Phillips uses the terms.

There's different, 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 used. are 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? Right. The pirates are CIA assassins, 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, 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. Because it's hard to not kill people that you don't mean to in gun fights, actually. Right, right, right, right. When you're on speed, especially. It's a lot harder to not kill people at gun fights when you're wired to the gills on speed and haven't slept in four days. Yeah. But, but, right. But even if you're one of the, the, the. the good guys.

Like, 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 they believe that's what the seals are for. They're there because they're really good at killing.

We have an account by one member of an early pirate platoon, Michael Beannan, and his platoon was stationed in the Mekong Delta. And Benan 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 Viet Cong operatives to tasks like sneaking into a village at night to assassinate a village chief and making it look like the Viet Cong had done it. When the intel told them to do it to Viet Cong tax collectors, they would, according to Bein, 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. Beanan 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 like European military historians in the early part of the 20th century that primitive war was basically playing around, right? You'd have two sides show up and they'd throw some like weak arrows at each

other. And then once a couple of guys got injured, they'd kind of back off. And they didn't really usually have the hunger for like real. The reality is the opposite. In fact, nearly everything that like, basically everything that we see is like special forces style tactics is all stuff that Europeans stole from indigenous warriors, right? These are all like kind of raiding and ambush tactics that literally Europeans learned. They called it the skulking method of war in the Americas, right? Because they weren't, 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, right? 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 guarantees 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. It's 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 wear the skin of a defeated enemy, like a costume 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 U.S. 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, right? This is something that Beinin writes about in his account is them like taking parts of bodies. And again, as a ritual, you're supposed to cut the throat of a dude who might, is often a civilian, right? Yeah. Eddie Gallagher killing that 16-year-old kid in Mosul, that was not a break with tradition. That was longstanding 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, you know, war, you know, a lot of these, these, these indigenous cultures have really brutal methods of like warfare and like, no, 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 hasn't changed. It brutalizes the men who do it. Right. Yeah. And if you're going to send men to do that, you really, it's very hard to stop them from taking trophies and cutting up 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. Bean and 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 into battle 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 find their dad, it would blow up killing or maiming them, guaranteeing further death and terror. Like, that's no less, like, 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 for existential. Like, you don't believe that they're going to come find you. Right, right. You are not literally in danger of your culture being exterminated by this. You have no reason to be there. You live 6,000 miles away. Like, why are you in Vietnam?

Former seal lieutenant Bob Carey later wrote about a 1969 raid he led to assassinate a target in a rural village. On the way, they encountered an elderly man and a woman sleeping in a bedroom with three little kids. To stop them from mourning 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 gun them all down with automatic weapons. In their after-action report, they claim to have killed 21 Viet Cong 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 base downrange 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 but think of when I was in Erbil, which is in northern Iraq, it's the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan during the fighting against ISIS in Mosul. I was sitting up in like a coffee house that was like a couple floors up. It's sort of this like grand bizarre 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 has 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, 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 that signed at that base bar says, right? I'm here for the fucking violence because it's fun, you know? Patriarch, you bad. No, these guys are fine. Yeah, these guys are doing good. They're doing good. Richard Mersenko fit in perfectly among this crowd. As Phillips writes, he, quote, went by the name Demo Dick and called his,

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 guerrillas. 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 like these kind of going back to like a lot of these indigenous warrior cultures that have even been around up into the modern era, the SEALs very consciously patterned

themselves a lot after, 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 like, we're there, like, you know, 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, 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, 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 or cosplay. That's the thing. It's like, we, the taxpayer are just like... Paying to these guys to cosplay as ancient warriors. We're like footing the bill for these psychos. And I guess the only...

Yeah. Yeah. Completely unnecessarily and it never works. Yeah. Yeah. They get like our side, like they have a lot of fun. Some of them, a lot of them get obviously very traumatized. But like guys like Barsenko 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 indiscriminate 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 Meili 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 just a lot of them are complaining like, oh, after Milai, 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, you just kept getting worse. You lost. Like, they won. Vietnam won. Like, that's the only, the only tiny sliver of like, again, fucking, 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 when both sides are like 100 guys, if you can kill all hundred of the other guys, then, yeah, sure.

Like, you actually can end that problem forever, right? Yeah, 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 and to themselves dig in harder, right? It does not get you what you want. Yeah. 21 years later, after, you know, this period of time, in 1992, Marsenko wrote Rogue Warrior, which gave him a chance to whitewash his own conduct in that of the Seals and Tire. 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. Marsenko, 51 years old, comes across as less the genuine warrior than a comic book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Deplanning 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 Marsink 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 about like badass colonial warriors,

murdering non-white people, right? It's like a pulpy thing to say. Yes, yes, exactly. It's not a real recollection. I mean, honestly, it is like basically just like an updated like Conan the Barbarian novel. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's particularly funny in Warhammer books because 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, yeah, it 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 Nam. The best example of this is a mission that occurred on March 13, 1967. A seal team, including Marsenko, were inserted to Dung Island on the path of a Viet Cong 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 carriers, but I wanted each of my guys to experience killing a human being. That was the point of the mission, really. Now, this is like just a gang initiation.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. tank initiative. Exactly. Yeah, but this is like just the Navy SEALs. Our taxpayer dollars is fun to them. Jesus Christ, dude. It's cool. It's cool stuff.

Yeah. I love quiet professionals. Yeah. Now, this is important because Morsenko 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, my men are under heavy fire and we barely got out of there with their lives. And so Marsenko 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 Marsenko says that he yells at this guy. Now, Cole, the author of Code Over Country, actually interviews Bailey and one other member of Marsenko's unit. And both of these guys were like, no, Richard was lying.

That's not at all how it meant. Bailey heard, first off, Richard was not on the radio. Bailey didn't hear anything. At 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 was unmistakably American, he recalled. I could hear Marcinco hollering. They had lost all degree of military discipline in a supposedly hairy area. Bailey's radio man told them they'd turn their radio off for the ambush and forgot to turn it back on after killing, not a Viet Congurier, but a couple of fishermen, the radio men 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 murdering. You're like playing with the corpses and laughing, you know? Obviously, that's saying he was never in danger. They're Navy SEALs in 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? Me. Yeah, Sophie. But also, Sophie. Ads.

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Listen to Podlandia. Ayo rewatch on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And we're back. So, I give more anecdotes of Marsenko's experiences in Vietnam, but Richard lies about everything. It's worth noting that military historian David Andrade looked into Marsenko's claims for Soldier of Fortune magazine of all publications. and I would not, I don't, I don't tend to credit them as being a particularly credible, uh, credible, periodical. Yeah.

Is if fucking soldier of fortune is like, we should probably check the 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 shit, right?

Like, that's what a POG is. It's a pretty funny title for the article. Here's Cole's description of the article. The article also found another instance from Marcinko'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 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'm like, yeah, it happens. Anyway, so remember that, both with Dick, and any time 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 because 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 of a unit that we know is largely inaccurate. Right. Fun stuff.

So Dick starts that tradition of being a fantasist and a huge braggard 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 Or Kelly 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 braggard. So it's not like universal, but he is popular within the seals. He's popular with the worst guys, which makes sense. 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.

to 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 away 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 Lonnan, brother of Lawn-Nole, who had been president of the country. Marcyenko was well-loved, if not revered by the Cambodian officer corps and the troops too. He had a sort of Lawrence of Arabia-esque leadership quality about him,

Worthington says. Marsingo had never laid an eye on Lonnan, 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's talking about are the guys who lost to the Khmer Rouge. So he trained the military that lost. Yeah, yeah. I mean, of course.

Is this becoming a pattern? Yeah. That's, yeah, that's how we roll. That's how we roll in the seals. He trained the brutal authoritarian military that war crimes so enraged rural Cambodians that it provided fuel for the Khmer Rouge. So at one point in the 1970s, Dick panicked a top Navy officer during a visit to the Pentagon when the officer noted that Marsenko had a pistol stuffed in his sock. Now, let me tell you something about carrying a gun. 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 a 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 a, And they didn't really do that with holsters back then. But ideally, your holster is made out of a rigid plastic material so 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 Marsenko never carried a gun without a round in the chamber. And 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 Marsenko to present a briefing at the Pentagon and then called the session off because he was so embarrassed by Morsenko's flamboyant

profanity. Now, this is evident in the book Rogue Warrior. Richard's favorite word is Cockbreath, which he uses 11 times in his autobiography. I don't know if it's been used more in a book, but I don't know. I probably not, right? Weird little guy. You'd have to try. At one point, he calls his own men positively,

Mary murdering cockbreadth 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 in all your fucking kind, you sorry, shit for brains, cock-breadth, 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. Say what you will, but like Ari Aramley had a 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 insults repeated and they're not very creative. The bleakest moment of Marsenko's career before the end came in 1980 when Jimmy Carter had U.S. 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, U.S. Special Forces until the modern area 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 and 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 had a lot of people. A lot of people will say this is why Carter lost. Yeah. 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. Well, I guess this is more on the air, the pilot guys, but yeah. 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 J-Soc 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 in the very best case scenarios.

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, not just, again, he did a lot of, there's a lot of critiques of Garding. 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. So, J-Soc is formed to coordinate between these different special forces teams for the president. And Marsenko is tasked with building the Navy contribution to J-Soc. 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 describes like the whole problem with big Navy, he's great at politics. 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. It's a legitimate skill he has.

Marsenko 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, Marsinco 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 Morsenko was armed with

a Pry 1, Priority 1, that permitted him to take the men in 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, Marcinko was commander of an entirely new unit, which he named Seal Team 6.

This is where that starts. And this forms an important part of Team lore, which you had brought up, right? Are there 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 counterterrorism training, right? So SEAL Team 6 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, Marcinko decides he really likes the idea of naming them seal team six is a disinformation tactic to trick the commies. 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, like, oh, this is clever, right? You know? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I don't know. Yeah, it's children. We're, it's like, you know, at best, like a 13-year-old logic.

Yeah, yeah, that's fine. Yeah. 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. Yeah. You really have to fight that part of the effect. So in an article for Rolling Stone, Matthew Cole notes,

Marcinko 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. Mar Sincco wanted men who were adept at all the traditional seal skills, shooting, underwater diving, skydiving, mountain climbing, but who also had or could develop tradesmanlike 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 Marsenko. 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 Marcinko'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? Criminal cartels and gangs are famously creative. Yeah, they get shit done. They can get shit done. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

The downsides are they're not the type of people you want to do this. You could find other creative people, I guess, is what I would suggest. You probably don't want to make more of these people in any society and give them, like, guns and the right to do whatever they want. that might be a bad idea. 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 the- 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. So membership in Sealed Team 6 was thus mostly restricted to alcoholics. Does he think he's fucking Stalin? What is happening?

Yeah, we need to, you know what we really need? And this team full of heavily armed badasses who are unaccountable to any laws is drinking problems. That's got to be key. I want these guys to be hungover or 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, Marsenko offered him a beer and said, you might not fit in when he's. 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 gin, Bombay, team members, East Coast weaned on rum Coke at St. Thomas

during annual winter training. I polished these skills in attache training. converted to gin. Gin 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, I'm not how I drink. He's like, I'm not like the other girls, gin bomb bay. Alcohol's a tool that I use tactically to defeat my enemies, who are also my men. Yeah. Your employees? Cool.

I mean, again, at least it's like, I mean, 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 cost some issues too. To justify his selections to command, Marsenko 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. He also, That is true. 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, you have to cater to sociopath. 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, Marcinko'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. Marsenko 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 avoid killing, you know, the hostages and what, right? And whatnot. They have to be able to develop these skills.

Now, does Morsenko ever really care about avoiding civilian casualties? Is that ever a priority of Team 6? Highly debatable. But that's how they're build, 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. It's the only way to develop the skills they need to do the kind of job that we have.

I mean, it'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 murderers, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know who are just murderers? No, no, no. Okay, well, don't think about that.

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They could be anybody. 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. Marsenko had been made a commander by this point, which put him above most of the other

SEAL officers and ensured he pretty much always got what he wanted. He's received a lot of praise on down the years for his creation, but even in the early days of Team 6, 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 or 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 watch his 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 100 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 all keyed 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, right? And I might argue that the great majority are hardworking moral people. It depends. You know, some seal units do abide by the rules of engagement and don't commit war crimes constantly, and some don't. It does seem to depend on like the ratio of the pirates to the Boy Scouts kind of in 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 Marcinco and individual and Navy SEALs, 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, yeah. It's a consequence. 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 in saying, like, we want you to commit a bunch of murder for the government, right? Good people don't want to do that job all that often.

And if they are good people when 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. Yeah. 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 Mar Sincco 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 6 guys both get called Jedi by other seals and, per another seal officer, a paramilitary fit.

Club. Right? Yeah. Still, the officer who called him a fitness club wanted to join Team 6 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, Marcinko billed the government for lodging his entire command in Washington, D.C.

It was later found that the hotel he built never existed. And the seals had bunked on a yacht in the Potomac owned by a buddy of Marsenko or something like that. And he'd just taken the money he'd build the Navy. and he did this all the time. This is normal standard operating procedure for Richard Marsenko. We know he engaged in similar acts of financial fraud at least 37 times. During the like three years, he led SEAL Team 6.

So about once a month. He's doing this like monthly. This is like very common for him. Nobody notices at first. Marsenko is a rising star and it's widely agreed that he had accomplished something great in getting a hundred-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. Right, right, right. 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, at least the Vikings are on our side. Yeah. And just like, it's like, do we need the Vikings?

Yeah. But is that really necessary to modern war? We actively don't need them. I don't know that I think so. Yeah. I think this might be a detriment on the whole. Yeah. Marsenko 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-ranking semen with more respect than I did most captains and Commodores. 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.

Like, okay, Richard. Okay, man. We get it, buddy. Now, there are good reasons Mar Sinko was a legend to many of his operators. During his time, Marsenko 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 seven. 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 dick shit. Yeah. Now, Marsenko's problems with the Navy began when Lieutenant William McRaven. And that's the guy who would.

was running the seals, by the way, when bin 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 notes as a bunch of irregularities. And part of, I should note here, Marsenko has his pick of enlisted men. Officers are assigned to Team Six.

So a lot of his conflicts come with the officers because he doesn't get too. pick them, right? They are not his chosen guys, in other words. Right. So as soon as you're only there to either be like jumped in or to narc on him. Yeah. Right. Exactly.

Exactly. And McRaven narks on him because 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. Like 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, Marcinco fires McRaven. Decades later, he still claimed the man had been sent to Team 6 as an infiltrator. McRaven got his running orders from the West Coast.

Something Marcinco writes, right? That this guy, he was a spy sent by the West Coast SEALs to infiltrate my elite East Coast unit because 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 Tupac? I don't mean. That doesn't seem right, actually. But okay.

Well, they all said the N word just about the same amount just of a real different tone. Marsenko sure does. I don't know McRaven, but Marsenko 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 having as Morsenko 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 Marsenko.

Right. So his total period of time commanding Team 6 after forming it is like three years. And they never like, I don't think they really do much. Well, he's like they're training. They're getting up to speed. Like he's not there for any of like 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 Marsenko, Captain Robert Gormley, found the unit in awful shape.

He found that Marsenko had, quote, constantly misled his superiors in 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 obsec. Yeah. Can't file accurate finance reports because, like, I, uh, the, the country. 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 6 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 Braggs, selling military weapons to criminals for money to buy drugs. Anyway, cool stuff. That's not a Team 6 thing, but it's just good times. thing, just the thing that we all pay for. Why do we pay taxes again? This is crazy. You know, 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 drinking 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, like, yeah, the SEALs, like Team 6 did some cool training stuff, but also they weren't very as good as they could have been because Marsenko didn't really care about training as much as he cared about drinking after a point. Like he's ending X.

Fuck it. Fuck it. Let's just go drink. All right. All right. You guys done it off. Come on. Yeah.

And you see this kind of casual attitude to the things that are supposed to be serious. Then Eddie Gallagher is accused of like 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, like, joke about it. Like, ha, yeah, it's funny, you know?

Like, and people would be like, but you're not, 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, because he didn't care about not hitting civilians, you know? Right, right, right. Allegedly, this is what some guy, I wasn't there. I don't know, I'm not a Navy's eel.

I'm just saying what some guys said to another guy who wrote a book, you know, a book called Alpha. Very good. you should read it. So despite the praise that Mar Sinko 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 Gormley to drink with the unit on Virginia

Beach. It was an awkward night. The operators were insubordinate to Gormley. So he left, but Marsenko kept drinking as Cole writes. Morsenko decided to continue drinking elsewhere. he had a command aide drive him in a modified Mercedes-Benz sedan. One of three he had custom built and shipped to the United States, which he frequently used as his personal car.

That night, Marcinko's driver fell asleep in the early morning hours and rear-ended another car, causing significant damage to both vehicles. I will just say it is sort of remarkable. Great warrior. This type of guy always drives the dictator Mercedes, like kind of across any culture. It's the only car they want. It's 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 throughout, you know, as soon as Mercedes were around, there was a psycho who just gathered. Oh, this is a psycho asshole car. A cult of personality, a violent cult of personality who got driven around it. Yeah. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it's just like if you show up drunk to a car dealership.

If 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 right now. Get on the road immediately. So in true dick fashion, he ordered his staff not to report the accident, but they refused to cover it up because, again, he's about to leave. So I'm not going to commit a crime for you. You're out the door.

So, and this says a lot. Mersenko, a big part of what he establishes in Team Six is loyalty. That's part of like the team. Team six, you know, the oath that the seals take. And the way Marcinco establishes this is like, you don't rat on your boss, on your fellow guys. 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. That's about right, too. Yeah. So he gets a 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 Marsenko'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? Because people just think he's cool. Yeah. Because people's brains are poisoned by, like, fucking, you, because again, like, oh, you need dirty men to protect, you know, 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, Marcinco talks all the time about, like, these big, these admirals who come 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 really buy into everything Marsenko says, right? Well, but that's a thing. He doesn't hate officers for real.

No, he just needs a cudgel with which to beat office, you know, like, oh, oh, I thought you were cool. Yeah, he needs an 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 because they got drunk. That's not really key to the warfighter ethos.

I don't think this is going to help the U.S. win anywhere. Yeah. It's warlord shit. Yeah. It's warlord shit. It's not like a soldier in a democratic nation shit. I mean, it is. I mean, objectively.

It is. It shouldn't be. It shouldn't be. Yeah. Marcinco was initially transferred to teach at the National War College. But he got lucky. On October 23, 1983, a truck loaded with T&T, 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. Is it dear old dick? Is it dear old dick? It's dear old dick, yeah. It's always, it's always like, it's, the problem is it's just always some like, she'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 laws.

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? Because the enemy is not going to, 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, this is play acting, motherfucker. Yeah, you're cause playing now. 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 of 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 Marcinko 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 going to 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 going to rip your clothes off and buying intact if you don't want them to think that that might happen. That's like a weird thing to say if you're not trying to scare people.

Right? 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 aspects of this need to happen, but not the way he is going to do it. No. He also saw the red cell as his chance to get revenge on the poindexters

who'd screwed him out of Team 6, so he made sure to recruit his best guys from Team 6 for the Red Cell, along with some of the best dudes from other teams. since his new unit was classified. He basically had Team 6 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 that Big Navy doesn't want them to think about, he'll be so beloved. They'll make his team the near Tier 1 guy, right? They'll be like, wow, we really need your guy. We have to send you on special missions now. You're so good. You've proved that we really need you, Richard. Like, this is like some Barry Zuckercorn shit. He's supposed to just sneak in and like tag someone with a Nerf gun and just be like,

could have been, this could have been bad, bro. It's going to be so much worse than that. So one of his first actions was to chat test security at the Charleston Navy base. And Brave Men, Dark Waters, or Kelly, describes Marcynco'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 with shit. And so the fact that they prove that, like, where our operators 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 Marsenko 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 6 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. Not well, but yeah. Yeah. But right. Every second of this is infuriating, obviously. Yeah. There's so much, among other things, like one of the worst cartels in Mexico

was formed from Mexican Special Forces guys who were trained by like U.S. Green Berets and then took that training in order to like make a cartel that worked really well. And it's very common, by the way, even in the U.S. for like cartels. 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 documented cases of this. It's like it's the private sector version of this public sector thing. It's the same job. Some of them go into fucking, you know, Blackwater. I mean, the modern equivalent of Blackwater. And yeah, some of them work for a fucking cartel, right?

It's not everyone who gets out of that, but it's not none. Yeah. And it's the same. It's important. It's the same. job 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 cartel is going to have me do, right? Like, I'm ready to do this job, you know, if you're still physically and mental capable if it hasn't if the work hasn't run you through just occasionally use pliers at 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 uh yeah i uh we'll we'll talk a lot more about this uh 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. And we have to throw one of our employees under the bus and they go to prison for life, for life. So every time we do a three-parter, just think of that, you know? 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. Yes. Yes, not me, but someone else. Good stuff. Anyway. That's the episode. You got to plug a old to plug? Are we done?

Yeah. Yeah, plug your pluckables. Yeah, Star Trek. It's my new Star Trek podcast with Tony Newsom, Jesse Gender. It's on the same feed as Yo's racist used to be. We're having a lot of fun. Come listen. Everyone here probably loves Star Trek enough.

I'm new to Star Trek. That's the thing. So don't feel like you've got to be a Star Trek fan to get into it. 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 Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix,

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