Part Three: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

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 https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  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 Six, Richard Marcinko. And in these two episodes, we will be getting, you know, past just Richard and talking about kind of how the things he set in motion led to the continuing derangement of the Navy SEALs well beyond just Team Six. And back to talk with me about how things got as bad as they are now, Andrew T. Andrew, how are you doing?

• 0:37Speaker 01

  What's up? How's it going? I'm good.

• 0:40Robert Evans?

  Fine and dandy, Andrew. Fine and dandy.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  No war crimes this morning, so.

• 0:43Robert Evans?

  That's good. You haven't committed any, right? I can't promise that myself.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Yes, I'm so sorry. Yes. The world, possibly even SEAL Team Six. I don't know.

• 0:51Robert Evans?

  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.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  The point is, I don't know.

• 0:59Robert Evans?

  The point is, you don't know. And the point is also that you have a podcast.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  Yes, that is the point. Yes, I've been doing a Star Trek podcast with Tony Newsom, Jesse Gender. It's called Starter 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 and.

• 1:26Robert Evans?

  Excellent.

• 1:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's what I'm doing these days. One of the things, I guess.

• 1:30Robert Evans?

  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 in Infowars. 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, that's @everyoneiswrongabout. So YouTube @everyoneiswrongabout is Jordan's new thing. Yeah, that's it. And now it's time for some SEALs.

• 2:13Robert Evans?

  Not the ones with like blubber and like that people eat.

• 2:17Speaker 02

  That's the kind I prefer.

• 2:19Robert Evans?

  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.

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, they might, man.

• 2:29Robert Evans?

  I'll eat any kind of seal. Look, once, you know, I'm not gonna 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.

• 2:40Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:43Speaker 03

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• 2:47Robert Evans?

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• 3:52Robert Evans?

  Richard Marcinco commanded SEAL Team Six from its inception in August of 1980 to July of 1983. So again, not a long run as the founder and head of SEAL Team Six.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Oh my god, we're gonna get, we're not, we're going like more than one episode per year. This is like, yeah.

• 4:11Robert Evans?

  It, it, because we're getting way beyond, there's way more stuff. You wanna talk about the SEALs doing anything bad? You have to get out of Marcinco's era, because they're not doing a lot when he's running Team Six, you know?

• 4:20Speaker 01

  They're doing bad things, but mostly to their livers, it seems like.

• 4:24Robert Evans?

  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 and his frequently stated love of killing, it's tragic that he missed SEAL Team Six getting its baptism in fire on a little island called Grenada. Now, most of you millennials are too young to have any memory of this, but Grenada was one of a handful of brief little mini-wars that the US ran during Reagan and Bush one years to make us feel better about the fact that we'd lost Vietnam. We needed to get our mojo back, 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 shit about England right now.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  We just need a confidence builder. Yeah. Batting practice.

• 5:09Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Grenada and fucking Panama and then Desert Storm were like taking Cialis for like your military industrial complex after it gets like that middle-aged Vietnam, you know, limp syndrome. Yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the first, this is the first time this has happened.

• 5:25Robert Evans?

  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 US medical students who might be the next Iranian embassy hostages to deploy overwhelming and sudden US 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.

• 6:08Robert Evans?

  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 Six, you know?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Drowning because of too much gear is like...

• 6:21Robert Evans?

  That sucks. That sucks so bad.

• 6:24Speaker 01

  That's, but that also.

• 6:25Robert Evans?

  What a shitty way to die.

• 6:26Speaker 01

  It feels, I guess, that's, that's how it was gonna happen. Jesus.

• 6:30Robert Evans?

  Well, someone, again, it's the, someone probably should have checked the math on that. I don't know.

• 6:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:35Robert Evans?

  There was massive debate as to why Team Six had needed to parachute into the water with all of that gear in the first place. Because there were other ways to have accomplished the mission. And the answer seems to have been because like, well, it was cool as fuck to do it that way. And that's what we trained for, because that's the kind of stuff we're, we're into. And his book, Or notes that SEAL Team Four actually had wanted to do the mission instead of Team Six, and they were gonna use like boats. And they might have, they might have done that, quote, "had SEAL Team Six not been so eager to show off its skills in a real war." That's from Brave Men Dark Waters. And Brave Men Dark Waters is a pretty positive book towards the founding of the SEALs and their early establishment.

• 7:15Robert Evans?

  So the fact that Or is saying that they did this because they kinda wanted to see if they could, and a bunch of guys died, means something, right?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  I, I, it's, I guess the, the tiny thing that is like, is it heartening to know that, that like, right wing dorks? Have just always been around or, you know, the entire, most of everyone's lifetime?

• 7:36Robert Evans?

  And they're always really bad at estimating risk.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:40Robert Evans?

  Estimating how likely things are to work for them.

• 7:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:44Robert Evans?

  Unfortunately, they're also try, likely to take certain risks, which is why a lot of people don't, 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, SEAL Team Six was again tasked with a special mission. This time, they were asked to seize the government house and protect the governor general, who was a representative of the British government because Grenada was a Commonwealth. And so the job was like, they would infiltrate and like, get this guy and evacuate him, and he would like, sign a thing declaring the US invasion legal, right? That was kind of why they wanted Team Six there. But the, the mission gets fucked from the jump. And they wind up under heavy fire, getting really badly injured, surrounded in this building by APCs.

• 8:24Robert Evans?

  And they, 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, they've gotten themselves in a bad situation.

• 8:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:41Speaker 01

  Then the adults have to come rescue these lunatics as usual.

• 8:45Robert Evans?

  The adults being the Marines.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 8:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they took a break from eating crayons to go save the Navy SEALs.

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:53Robert Evans?

  Two other units from Team Six were sent to accomplish other tasks. One had to set beacons on an airfield and the other had to disable a radio transmitter. After the short conflict was over, there were serious questions asked by war planners. Had everything Team Six had been asked to do been necessary? Did we need to use these guys for this? The failures witnessed in Grenada helped spur the creation of a new Joint Special Operations Command. They're basically reforming JSOC and now it will include all special forces and not just a few specialized units. Now, the SEALs fought this. One way they'd establish 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

• 9:36Robert Evans?

  because being integrated to JSOC 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, take out a terrorist, handle a hostage situation.

• 10:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask a broad question? I guess, which is like something I've, you seem like you definitely would underknow this more than me, which is that like, the JSOC of it, why, besides branding, or is it just branding, why the fuck do we have so many different types of elite guys?

• 10:22Robert Evans?

  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 rescue, hostage operations, assassinations, kidnapping. Whereas a unit like the Green Berets, for example, are like the guys, at the start of Afghanistan, you drop a handful of them into like, a village and their job is to build up a militia of locals and like, train them and teach them how to like, fight as a unit and stuff in order to help them accomplish the US's goals. And that's a very different skillset than the SEALs. The Green Berets are obviously meant, need to be competent fighters, but they're supposed to be really good at like, working with locals and not just killing them. Because that's kind of the point. That's why you won a Green Beret, right?

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 11:04Robert Evans?

  Delta Force is also, I mean, and these kind of do get muddled, especially today. Like, what is Delta Force used for as opposed to the Team Six is?

• 11:11Speaker 01

  As opposed to the Rangers, as opposed to...

• 11:14Robert Evans?

  Right. There's a lot of them and they all have specializations ostensibly, right?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I guess to me it's just the era of like helicopters, drones. It just seems more like G.I. Joe than anything else.

• 11:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and there's an argument to be made for that. Again, not one that a lot of these guys will make, but there is an argument to be made that like sometime, especially like today, a lot of these units have like overlapping capabilities and like purposes that it's kinda, yeah, anyway.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  Right, right. Okay.

• 11:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah, so when we left off with Richard Marcinko, 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 into Navy bases.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 11:52Robert Evans?

  So while he is starting that job, that's when like Grenada is going on, right? Because he's out of the, of Team Six by that point. So, let's get back to Richard for a little bit. When we left off, Marcinko 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. Uh, he was also supposed to use them to kidnap sensitive employees of said facilities to test their security, uh, protocols. This latter remit gave Marcinko 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 kidnapped victims to carry out intense workouts and would like mock them for their performance.

• 12:33Robert Evans?

  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.

• 12:42Speaker 01

  I, 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.

• 12:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 12:52Speaker 01

  That would be, you know, probably funny enough, honestly.

• 12:55Robert Evans?

  Yeah. There's a great script in this tale. Um, I'm surprised it hasn't been made into a movie. Um, 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 C.U. showed you up. But then Marsenko's Red Cell started crossing paths with a man named Ronald Sheridan. Now, Ron was not a soldier, but the civilian head of security for a naval weapons facility. He had criticized the flaws in the red team analysis of his facility when they'd shown up on site and he had denied Marcinco the use of his facilities to plan their operations. He's like, basically, okay, if you want to try to bust in, you can't like use facilities on the base for your planning, right?

• 13:40Robert Evans?

  If you're trying to cosplay as an enemy, you can't like prep inside the base, you know?

• 13:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:46Robert Evans?

  Because they won't get to.

• 13:47Speaker 01

  Get your own Motel 6 asshole.

• 13:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, get your own, that's literally what he's saying, right? And Marcinco does not love this. So I'm gonna 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." So from the jump, they shouldn't be at this guy's house and they are. On March 20th, 1986, the Red Cell moves in to kidnap Ron Sheridan.

• 14:34Robert Evans?

  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.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:05Robert Evans?

  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 SEAL killed by a housewife.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  That is so funny.

• 15:17Robert Evans?

  It's so funny.

• 15:18Speaker 01

  That's so good.

• 15:19Robert Evans?

  It's really good.

• 15:20Speaker 01

  Good, yeah.

• 15:21Robert Evans?

  Like, like I would say, I guess his security was pretty good.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:26Robert Evans?

  Like, sounds like Sheridan's got it on lock.

• 15:30Robert Evans?

  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 gotta 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 that 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.

• 16:14Robert Evans?

  Now, again, all of these Red Cell guys are SEALs, former SEALs. They're the best of the best, a lot of Team Six guys. And yet, while beating an unarmed tied up man, they still took casualties? 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.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  Only a SEAL could take down a SEAL, clearly. In both these instances, we've talked about today.

• 16:45Robert Evans?

  Well, only a civilian security employee's body can take out a SEAL.

• 16:50Speaker 01

  Or a SEAL took himself down. Yeah, well, that's true, I guess.

• 16:54Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Rob's wife later said, after her husband was returned, I wish I had shot that guy. And I get it, Margaret, that's a fair way to feel.

• 17:03Speaker 01

  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.

• 17:16Robert Evans?

  Little bits, yeah.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  I have a little, you know, wonder what's gonna happen one day. Cause one of these days, someone's gonna do something, one way or the other, I guess.

• 17:26Robert Evans?

  It probably won't be the fun version of it, but we can hope.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  It never is, I guess, yeah.

• 17:30Robert Evans?

  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? Marcinko insisted nothing abnormal happened, but he was fired from Red Cell a month later and given an admiral's mast 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 Marcinko's time as Team Six commander. The motivating incident for this was a report Marcinko had drunkenly pulled a gun during a military exchange trip to New Zealand? And Marcinko's like, this was all political, but also, and maybe it was, but also, why

• 18:14Robert Evans?

  did you drunkenly pull a gun during a military exchange trip? And that's a good reason to fire a guy, I'd say.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  Why did you bring a gun to New Zealand?

• 18:22Robert Evans?

  I mean, I'm sure, maybe he gets to, like, he's in the military. I'm sure that was normal.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Aren't you some kind of badass? You should, I'm gonna say this, I'm so sorry. If you're a SEAL, if you're the king of the SEALs, you should be able to fight New Zealand barehanded. That's all I'm saying.

• 18:37Robert Evans?

  You should be able to fight New Zealand barehanded. I mean, come on. Like, come on.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Get the fuck out of here. Get real, bro.

• 18:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So the SEALs clammed up and defended Marcinko, 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 realized what a fucking poison Marcinko 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 Marcinko had enabled and carried out in Team Six. This caused the launch of a probe in the spring of 1986, which turned into a full investigation

• 19:24Robert Evans?

  nicknamed Iron Eagle. Marcinko would later blame all of this on Eggheads and Big Navy, who he defended and lightly tortured while at Red Cell. But the lead investigator was Clifford Sibon, a former Army Ranger who earned a Bronze Star in combat. He was a huge supporter of the mission of the SEALs. He just wasn't willing to let Marcinko 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." This is like a big deal investigation. Yeah, like that's scandalous.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  Honestly crazy they kept any records, though, given the small amount I know about them.

• 20:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So, at first, the actual evidence against Marcinko seemed thin. He'd done a pretty good job covering his tracks. But eventually investigating agents found out that one of his top SEALs, a man who'd actually fought in Grenada, John Mason, had also taken trophies back from Grenada with him, AK-47s. And that was illegal. Trophy taking is illegal now. Importing automatic weapons is definitely not, you're not supposed to be doing that.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  Of the trophies, AKs is not the most illegal one.

• 20:42Robert Evans?

  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 the 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.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 21:11Robert Evans?

  That's pretty funny.

• 21:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:13Robert Evans?

  So, investigators get Mason dead to rights, and they're like, hey, you want to keep that Navy SEAL Wallace silence up? Or do you want to not go to prison? And Mason says, oh, I'll roll on Dick if it's between that and prison. So he gives them a bunch of information about widespread financial improprieties directed by Marcinko. Mason was charged with 37 counts of various kinds of fraud and offered a suspended sentence for flipping on Marcinko. He agreed and he gave the Navy info on the scam Marcinko 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 ordered, agreed to order 4,300 experimental grenades for Red Cell with SEAL Team Six sponsoring

• 21:58Robert Evans?

  the contract because it's a, Red Cell's a classified unit. So they're doing purchasing through Red Cell, right? Now, the idea was that these 4,300 experimental grenades were re-pinable. 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, Orrer 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 Marcinko and Mason had formed. So he is lying to just get startup money for a new business. Like, that's

• 22:42Robert Evans?

  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, Marcinko 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

• 23:25Robert Evans?

  career, right? Richard Marcinko, we'll hear from him a couple of times still. Old Dickies still out there. Oh, good. But he's, he's not in charge of anything. In 1987, the name of SEAL Team Six was changed to Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. 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 DEVGRU too, but like, DEVGRU is the official name, right? And as you might guess, by the fact that everyone does still call it SEAL Team Six, Marcinco's legacy was hard to eradicate, right? You can change the name, but you can't necessarily change the culture that this guy started off in there.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  It's all branding and culture. It's the real shit, I guess.

• 24:09Robert Evans?

  The branding is we're criminals and no one tells us what to do. And also, we get to murder whoever we want.

• 24:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:14Robert Evans?

  Shocking. Shocking that branding caused some problems. You know whose branding has never caused problems, though?

• 24:21Speaker 02

  I was hoping you wouldn't do that.

• 24:22Robert Evans?

  Pretty good.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  It's pretty good.

• 24:24Robert Evans?

  Pretty good. Pretty good ad pivot. All right, everybody. Go away. Well, don't go away. Listen to ads.

• 24:32Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto was right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 24:56Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients, or taking Dofetilide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 25:31Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of five-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 26:12Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, it's December of 1989. The good people of the George H.W. Bush administration have decided that the United States still has not gotten enough of its mojo back post-Vietnam. And so, we invade Panama. There are other reasons involving Manuel Noriega and 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

• 26:55Robert Evans?

  like taking notes on the stuff they're gonna be doing for a while. That's really kind of the ideal situation to invade another country.

• 27:04Speaker 01

  I mean, it's the red team, you know?

• 27:06Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  It's the red cell approach. Just live there for a little while.

• 27:10Robert Evans?

  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 tasked the SEALs with taking and capturing the airport that holds Noriega's jet, and they tasked 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 gonna give you guys heavier equipment. And we're not gonna give you, like, send in a larger unit or a unit backed up with armor.

• 27:55Robert Evans?

  We're going to send in a small group of elite SEALs with small arms to take this hangar, right? So, the guys they send in-

• 28:02Speaker 01

  This feels like the SEAL's bluff has just been called, basically. It's like, oh, okay.

• 28:06Robert Evans?

  Kind of does.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  Captain badass, you should be able to do this with like a knife.

• 28:11Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So this is not Team Six, this is SEAL Team Four. But the op is a massive shitshow, so much of one that it becomes historic. Because the SEALs, kind of, as they're approaching this hangar, they have to do so in the open, and they have like night vision. So when they get up to a certain point, they can see who's in the 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 are, all have guns trained on them. And immediately open fire, and there is zero cover. And if you watch like movies, the way Navy SEALs are, you've got something like 24, I think, Nate, like around two dozen SEALs, or more. It's like, it was a historically large group of SEALs.

• 28:54Robert Evans?

  There were huge arguments about should multiple platoons? Because we don't, 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 gonna 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.

• 29:39Robert Evans?

  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 satisfying 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 is no reason, conventional infantry should have handled this.

• 30:09Speaker 01

  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?

• 30:18Robert Evans?

  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 was, you should not have elite, highly trained operators just running into guns like that. It's stupid. Also, during the same thing, Team Six tried to capture Noriega. They didn't. In the wake of the invasion, the commander of US forces, Lieutenant General Carl Steiner, bragged that everything had gone so well, there were no real lessons to learn, which gives you an idea of why the US military sometimes makes the same mistakes over and over again.

• 30:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Cover your ass. Cover your ass. It went great.

• 30:55Robert Evans?

  Okay. So, the Persian Gulf conflict is probably gonna be the high watermark for unproblematic SEAL success at war, because commanding general Norman Schwarzkopf 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 Marsekko 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.

• 31:37Robert Evans?

  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, subterfuge and sabotage. And they're able to successfully draw two full Iraqi visions away from engaging the US in combat. And that's exactly the kind of shit SEALs are supposed to be doing, right?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 31:56Robert Evans?

  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 downed pilots, they capture an oil platform, and none of them die. So Desert Storm goes pretty well for the SEALs.

• 32:22Speaker 01

  But, but that's like, like, like, most of the time, it's always leadership, right? It's always just like, like, actually being used correctly. It's doable. They are, they are human psychos, but you can put them in the right place.

• 32:35Robert Evans?

  Schwarzkopf, number one, does not buy in to all of the bullshit around the mythology of these units, and number two, he's, he's using them to accomplish a really reasonable thing to use a small unit like that for, right? The tasks there being set.

• 32:47Speaker 01

  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.

• 32:54Robert Evans?

  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.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  Andrew, you think he has a like white bread, turkey sandwich, no seasoning with just a piece of lettuce?

• 33:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, lettuce, turkey bread, nothing.

• 33:15Robert Evans?

  You can imagine.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:17Robert Evans?

  Stormin' Norman? Absolutely.

• 33:18Speaker 02

  Hilarious.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Half a packet of mayo. Has to be a full packet.

• 33:22Robert Evans?

  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.

• 33:30Speaker 01

  Just a smell.

• 33:31Robert Evans?

  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 range of conflicts that they could draw experience from when looking and planning for the future. They'd 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 participation

• 34:16Robert Evans?

  in Operation Just Cause was held shortly after the operation, but most of the SEALs present found the briefing unsatisfactory, and a few were so disturbed that they walked out." Right? That's the briefing on like that Panama shit show?

• 34:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:27Robert Evans?

  And I don't know if they walked out because they were disturbed at how bad the planning was, or were disturbed that guys didn't want them to do shit. It's a little unclear to me.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:34Robert Evans?

  But it shows that there's this kind of institutional unwillingness to really critique as much of what they're doing. You know, you could treat critique big Navy. And that's Orr's fear for the SEALs as they go forward. And it's kind of proved to be kind of prescient.

• 34:47Speaker 01

  It's really like, these tough guys are kind of just soft baby boys at every turn as soon as criticism of any kind.

• 34:56Robert Evans?

  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 or the Green Berets, and he's talking about how the SEALs maybe in the future will need to be more like that, right?

• 35:37Robert Evans?

  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 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 Six. 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 SEALs, but stuff Special Forces guys are doing in the Trump era to heads of state.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Do you regret not going to college to write fanfic about fucking like murdering Saddam Hussein?

• 36:28Robert Evans?

  I do, I do. I mean, I would have written fanfic about writing a novel with Saddam Hussein, which remains my chief goal, you know. I'm a fan of him for his other work. I don't forgive him for, you know, for the crimes, but his romance novels, you know.

• 36:44Speaker 01

  He's an artist. You gotta separate the artist from the art.

• 36:46Robert Evans?

  That's right. That's right. It's very hard to do with Saddam Hussein.

• 36:52Robert Evans?

  So Orr Kelly also related his concern that SEALs in Panama had shown they had issues working in large multi-platoon groups. Furthermore, their extraordinary abilities only really were at their peak when they had rapid air and artillery support, right? The SEALs are only able to be the most effective when they have a lot of guys backing them. And if, you know- That had been a facet of most SEAL Ops since NOM. But that means like if you don't have access to that stuff, are they as capable? Is, are they likely to get into problems, you know?

• 37:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:23Robert Evans?

  And the global war on terror.

• 37:25Speaker 01

  It's awfully, it's awfully stone soup with the SEALs, isn't it?

• 37:27Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 37:28Speaker 01

  It's like, all you need is Navy SEALs and fucking air support and an army behind them. And they'll fucking do whatever you want, bro.

• 37:38Robert Evans?

  They're great. With all the air support they can call in, they're deadly as hell.

• 37:44Robert Evans?

  So, uh, the global war on terror would prove some of these fears prescient and give Mersinko's old unit in particular, a chance to make a name for themselves as the president's assassins. Before all that, we get to the 90s, a glorious decade of peace and prosperity. Well, nothing bad happened if you don't count the Balkans or Rwanda or several other places. Anyway, in 1992, Richard, uh, Mersinko gets out of prison and publishes the book Rogue Warrior, which is the first account of life inside SEAL Team Six, written by a SEAL. Even though Mersinko was disgraced, it timed perfectly with the post Desert Storm hype and millions of copies were sold. So the book is a stupendous hit among civilians who wanted a glimpse inside the rarefied air of special forces. And they'd already thought these guys were basically superheroes.

• 38:28Robert Evans?

  So Mersinko's bold claims didn't seem so wild, like the reader is prepped to believe anything about a SEAL Team Six guy, right? If he says he was doing crazy operations with Team Six while he was leading them, even though they really weren't doing all that much, it must be true because he founded SEAL Team Six, right?

• 38:45Speaker 01

  Well, we're also in the, we're in the Van Damme era. We're in the Steven Seagal era. Of course, this is what they do. We've seen it.

• 38:52Robert Evans?

  And it says, it says a lot about the veracity of Richard's first book Rogue Warrior, that he follows his autobiography, his nonfiction autobiography with a fiction novel series, also called Rogue Warrior.

• 39:07Speaker 01

  Hell yeah.

• 39:09Robert Evans?

  He creates a bunch of fiction novels with the same title and branding as his autobiography that's supposed to be nonfiction?

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Makes sense.

• 39:17Robert Evans?

  I think the idea is these were based on the real classified missions.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 39:20Robert Evans?

  And he can't tell you about those, you know, but yeah.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  I love when you do that voice.

• 39:25Robert Evans?

  It's my first time.

• 39:26Speaker 02

  You're so good at it.

• 39:28Speaker 01

  Based on a true story.

• 39:29Robert Evans?

  Based on a true story. That's all we need to put in the Hollywoods.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  They're like Rogue Warrior.

• 39:35Robert Evans?

  That's right. Great title. Print it. The first of the fictional Rogue Warrior novels was Rogue Warrior: Green Team, which spiraled out into the long series of subsequent novels, ostensibly based on Marcinko's real life, with him as the lead character and also on the cover. Sophie's gonna show you a copy of Rogue Warrior 2: Red Cell. That's actually Richard Marcinko. He's got, he looks like Steven Seagal.

• 39:58Speaker 02

  Hold on, Andrew, are you ready for this? Are you ready for this, Andrew?

• 40:02Speaker 01

  I don't think I am, actually.

• 40:04Robert Evans?

  Oh, man.

• 40:06Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Bummer.

• 40:10Robert Evans?

  So again, he's got a ponytail and a beard. He looks like Seagal in the 90s. Purposefully, probably. He's wearing all black. He's got like an MP5 submachine gun crossed against, over his heart like it's a fucking, I don't know.

• 40:22Speaker 01

  What a dweeb.

• 40:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 40:26Speaker 01

  It's always dweebs.

• 40:27Robert Evans?

  Oh, man. It's so sad. Okay, Richard. Okay, man. It was through these novels, which make him a rich man, that Marcinko would prove himself forever the smartest member of Team Six. Instead of risking his freedom and money by telling US government secrets like some subsequent Team Six members, he could just lie and pretend to be giving away secrets.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  Make shit up.

• 40:51Robert Evans?

  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 Marcinko wrote his bestselling autobiography Rogue Warrior, he and co-writer John Weisman 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 Marcinko himself as the hero.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 41:22Robert Evans?

  Love it, love it. I, I, I love the, the tales he couldn't tell. A riveting new novel with himself as the hero. Yeah. I'm, I'm sure these are real stories, Richard. So this is him, this, I, I picked Red Cell because we know the real Red Cell story. So here's what Richard wants people to believe what he was doing with Red Cell instead of nearly getting his men killed by a dude's wife and having another one of them seriously injure himself torturing a man. Quote, freelance security consultant Dick Marcinco is playing 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

• 42:05Robert Evans?

  nuclear materials to North Korea and Japan. With nowhere else to turn, the former Secretary of Defense recalls Marcinco to the Navy against his will to command Red Cell, a dirty dozen SEAL team Marcinco created. From infiltrating Washington's Navy Yard offices and secret special nuclear weapons depot in California to raiding a North Korean Navy base in target far out in the Pacific, the rogue warrior and his marauding SEALs fight incredible odds and increasingly dangerous enemies.

• 42:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that's real, man. Yeah, I, I love that a group of traitorous Americans are smuggling nukes to North Korea and Japan.

• 42:37Speaker 01

  Japan.

• 42:38Robert Evans?

  Allies in nuclear warfare, North Korea and Japan shaking hands. What is their plan? Why do North Korea and Japan want nukes together?

• 42:48Speaker 01

  It's just, you know, to, to... For the vibes. I guess it's Mechagodzilla?

• 42:53Robert Evans?

  Mech, it might be Mechagodzilla. That's actually possible. It's possible.

• 42:59Robert Evans?

  On September 11th, 2001, some unfortunate things went down. And at the end of it, two pretty big buildings were gone. Because the guys behind this had mostly been Saudi terrorists living in Afghanistan, the United States goes to war with Afghanistan. From the beginning, it's pretty clear that this was, you know, not gonna be a normal kind of conflict, in part because it's Afghanistan and wars don't tend to go very well there. Right? Yeah. A lot, a lot of the operational burden in Afghanistan from the beginning we knew was gonna be put on US special forces, right? And actually, at the start, when US troops first enter Afghanistan, they're basically 100% of the war effort in the earliest days. It's not long after the Twin Towers fell that the Navy SEALs,

• 43:41Robert Evans?

  who were still largely the force they'd been in the 1990s at that point, which is, you know, men trained mostly for coastal operations, who 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.

• 44:26Robert Evans?

  It's just, you're going to have a lot of fuckups in the early stages of special forces involvement. Because in part, they're still learning how to fight.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  When you drop your water type Pokémon into an earth arena.

• 44:39Robert Evans?

  Into an earth.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  This is as much as I know about that, but I feel like I'm correct.

• 44:46Robert Evans?

  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 subject it to an authoritarian rule. But, you know.

• 45:00Speaker 01

  That part's actually true. This is the closest to truth.

• 45:10Robert Evans?

  This ad is brought to you by ViiV Healthcare, the makers of Devoto Dolutegravir Lamivudine. If you're living with HIV, do learn about Devoto. Devoto is a complete HIV treatment by prescription only for some people 12 and older. Your doctor will determine if Devoto is right for you. Most HIV pills contain three or four medicines. Devoto is as effective with just two. No other complete HIV pill contains fewer medicines than Devoto.

• 45:34Speaker 05

  It is unknown if Devoto is safe and effective if you have HIV and hepatitis B. If you have Hep B, don't stop Devoto without talking to your doctor, as it may get worse or harder to treat. Don't take Devoto if you're allergic to its ingredients, or taking Defetolide due to serious or life-threatening side effects. If you have a rash or allergic reaction symptoms, stop Devoto and get medical help right away. Other serious or life-threatening side effects include severe liver problems and lactic acid buildup. If you're female or obese, you may be more at risk. Tell your doctor about your medicines or supplements, medical conditions, liver or kidney problems, pregnancy, breastfeeding, or planned pregnancy.

• 46:09Robert Evans?

  Do ask your doctor about fewer medicines. Visit devoto.com or call 1-877-844-8872.

• 46:17Speaker 04

  OnDeck is built to back small businesses like yours. Whether you're buying equipment, expanding your team, or bridging cash flow gaps, OnDeck's loans up to $400,000 help make it happen fast. Rated A+ by the Better Business Bureau and earning thousands of 5-star TrustPilot reviews, OnDeck delivers funding you can count on. Apply in minutes at ondeck.com. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval.

• 46:50Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, in January of 2002, a SEAL Team 6 officer named Vic Hyder murdered an unarmed Afghan man at the first Team 6 action of the war. Hyder 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 evacing. 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, Hyder 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.

• 47:35Robert Evans?

  He can't see for shit. And so, he keeps stumbling in their direction. And Hyder, 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 Hyder 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 Hyder is. He shot a man with a fucking cassette in his hand.

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 48:16Robert Evans?

  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?

• 48:29Speaker 01

  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.

• 48:42Robert Evans?

  Vic says that, and I'm sure he was taught that. What should tell you that that's not universal is a bunch of his men complain, right? He's an officer, a bunch of his enlisted men, the guys that are supposed to be like the real pipe hitters 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. Ah, they just don't like their officer, you know, right?

• 49:04Robert Evans?

  Hyder 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, the really intense selection process necessarily that SEALs, enlisted SEALs do. You don't necessarily go through all of the same shit if you're an officer, because it's a different job and 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 they're just psychos, right? I'm just trying to provide you some explanation for the motivation here.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  And it's obvious it could be a little of both.

• 49:51Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes, it's gotta be some of both. But the insecurity here isn't a 0% of the factor, right? Yeah. At the time of combat operations in Afghanistan, Team Six had about 200 operators split into three assault teams, blue, red and gold. Each team got a mascot and proving that Navy SEALs are no different than 15 year olds. This immediately started to get out of hand, right? Because they get way too into their fucking mascots. Now, the biggest problem is that red team has a Native Ameri-, stereotypical Native American warrior as their mascot, right? And they call themselves the Red Men.

• 50:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:26Robert Evans?

  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.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Jesus Christ, yeah.

• 50:38Robert Evans?

  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, and some enlisted guys, that's how they describe it, that it's a metamorphosis. These guys really believe.

• 51:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:05Robert Evans?

  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.

• 51:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:13Robert Evans?

  And they get way into the idea.

• 51:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:16Robert Evans?

  Right? That's all I'm saying.

• 51:18Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:18Robert Evans?

  Please don't take this as they know what anything. 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.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:29Robert Evans?

  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. Now.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 51:38Robert Evans?

  This had not happened at the start of the, when Hyder's and this isn't start immediately, right? But Hyder 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, he's, among other things, he's a guy who feels like, I need to prove I deserve to be here.

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 51:54Robert Evans?

  By being ultra violent.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Right. So the classic small man bully.

• 51:59Robert Evans?

  Right.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Like five.

• 52:00Robert Evans?

  Very small man.

• 52:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:01Robert Evans?

  On March 6th, 2002, Lieutenant Commander Hyder led more than 20 SEAL Team Six 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 US Air Force before the SEALs went in. Some operators protested having the Air Force bomb the convoy. They're like, our job is to like be super discriminating guys who can get really close and we could know if, because they didn't really know, is this convoy bad guys 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.

• 52:45Robert Evans?

  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 fucks some of these guys up, right? It's a pretty awful thing to see and not all of these guys are completely dead inside and fine with that. Despite the fact that it's immediately clear, none of these people were involved in anything. Hyder and several SEALs continued to treat them as combatants. Per Cole's book, quote, "Hyder 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 partly, partially alive, faced out, his back to me, and he rolled over. I shot him, finished him. He was dying, but he rolled over and I didn't know whether he was armed or not. That was the end of that.

• 53:29Robert Evans?

  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 he might have had a weapon, so I shot him.

• 53:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, mentioning, 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.

• 53:49Robert Evans?

  And there's some, some other SEALs who were there at the time who do complain about this, say like, well, they had weapons, but they were family weapons. Like it's Afghanistan, people, it doesn't, like they're not Al Qaeda because they have a gun, you know? That's just life out here. So according to Hyder, 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 Hyder shoots this wounded man, who was unarmed, by the way, Hyder 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 Hyder's actions, reports them to his team leader.

• 54:32Robert Evans?

  He's like, look, I shot this guy because I thought I 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 Hyder 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

• 55:14Robert Evans?

  that there are SEALs who are grossed out by this, who report him. There's also SEALs who think it's cool and who don't have a problem with it. Right. And in this instance, maybe Hyder 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 Britt Slobinski are in a Chinook, looking for a bin Laden soaring over a mountain that they'd been told had no enemy presence when

• 55:56Robert Evans?

  they get hit with an RPG. Petty Officer First Class Neil Roberts falls from the bird, right? He'd been, you know, the chopper has like, I think it's ramped down and he's standing out there and it gets hit and he falls. And he falls and hits so hard that he bends the stock of his rifle on the way down. So he doesn't have the normal armament that he would have even. They think he's, you know, they don't know if he's dead or not, but the pilot can't stop to rescue him. So they have to get back. And when they return to base with that chopper, Slobinski 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,

• 56:37Robert Evans?

  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 Afghan, that Afghan people, right?

• 57:07Speaker 01

  That's pretty standard for these guys. Like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Can't do that to us.

• 57:13Robert Evans?

  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 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, "If you

• 57:56Robert Evans?

  asked me to go living with the pigs, I can't go live with them." 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 it's going to happen to some of them. And that's going to be bad to morale because otherwise, things get much worse and you wind up defeating your own attempts to win hearts and minds and stop people from trying to kill your dudes, which

• 58:40Robert Evans?

  is what happens in Afghanistan. There's a direct correlation in province, a lot of provinces, between war crimes committed by Navy SEALs and excesses by US Special Forces and the number of Taliban fighters in activity and recruitment and whatnot, right? This stuff pisses people off. Just like I mean Abu Ghraib around the same time in Iraq, really pisses people off, right? It pisses a lot of Iraqis off. It generates more resistance because it's horrifying to see Americans doing stuff like this to dudes in your country. And this, you know, this is the thing that frustrates me most in some ways about the SEALs, which is that they understand that their job is to be extraordinary and they're very proud of that, but 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

• 59:25Robert Evans?

  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 massacring civilians. I would say that's an elite unit. When you do this kind of shit, were you just like the Taliban?

• 59:41Speaker 01

  Right.

• 59:42Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 59:43Speaker 01

  That part, right.

• 59:43Robert Evans?

  Why do I feel better about you than them?

• 59:45Speaker 01

  We forgot what the actual elite part is. Yeah, of course.

• 59:46Robert Evans?

  Right, exactly.

• 59:47Speaker 01

  Just a little bit of fucking self-control.

• 59:49Robert Evans?

  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.

• 59:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 59:57Robert Evans?

  Because you're better than them, if you are. But you're not, right?

• 1:00:01Speaker 01

  I never have.

• 1:00:01Robert Evans?

  And they want to be while acting the same way, right?

• 1:00:06Robert Evans?

  Anyway, and I think part of the reality is that like, Richard Marcinko and a lot of Team Six guys after him just wanted to be really well-funded and supported pigs, you know, unfortunately.

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Right, right, right.

• 1:00:17Robert Evans?

  That attitude is still present among some people in Team Six in 2002, and almost 20 years after Marenko'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 hearkened back to the old UDT days, from the men more poured in Marenko's mold. And this would come to a head in early March of 2002, after Hyder'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 Six men meet at Bagram Air Base to discuss what Hyder 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

• 1:00:59Robert Evans?

  we do? And they talk, and the claim that Cole reports in his book is that 35 of the 40 guys wound up agreeing, we can shoot them and move on, but we don't mutilate them. That's not honorable, right? But five guys are like, I think I should be able to mutilate people. I don't know if that's the actual ratio. It doesn't seem impossible to believe. And I think the ratio would be a lot worse today, to be honest, you know? I can believe that in 2002, maybe that that's much earlier, right?

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Well, it's like the bad apples thing. It's just like the bunch is getting spoiled, guys.

• 1:01:27Robert Evans?

  Exactly. And this this bunch who vote not to mutilate corpses are still responsible for helping to spoil the rest of the apples because even though they agree, we don't do that, that's not honorable. And they don't like Hyder, 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?

• 1:01:55Speaker 01

  Jesus.

• 1:01:55Robert Evans?

  This is Marcinco's favorite way of dealing with SEALs who didn't fit in, right? Um, just, you know, icing them out of the of the of the team. But it also means that the established standard is that guys who commit war crimes get iced out and not punished and often continue their military careers elsewhere. This is well known to the rest of the Navy. Susan Razer, a retired Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent, told Matthew Cole her opinion that, quote, "The SEALs believe that they can handle the discipline themselves. That's equal or greater to what 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?

• 1:02:40Robert Evans?

  You get some of this in an account of that meeting by a retired, that big SEAL meeting about whether we should mutilate corpses. Uh, and this is from a retired non-commissioned SEAL. Fifi, that's Roberts, was mutilated. And then we had to address a very important question. How do you get the guy's head straight to mitigate any retaliation for Fifi? Otherwise, we knew it's going to get out of control. A third of the guys literally think they're Apache warriors. Then you had the Muslim way of moving ahead. I understand the desire. I don't condone it, but there was definite retaliation. Right?

• 1:03:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:07Robert Evans?

  So again, you've got this guy who'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.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Robert Evans?

  That's this guy's argument.

• 1:03:30Speaker 01

  And we're the good guys.

• 1:03:31Robert Evans?

  And we're the good guys, though. Even though you really can't tell the difference from looking at all the brains splattered on the ground.

• 1:03:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, God.

• 1:03:38Robert Evans?

  So in this account, Hyder'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. Hyder, 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 Hyder 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 Hyder did that mutilation should get fucked up. Like, stuff like that happens. People forget, like, it's war fucks with your mind even if you're there. I don't, I don't, I literally don't know. But so many guys talk about this that like, I think, well, I know what the likeliest thing is, right?

• 1:04:23Robert Evans?

  It's more or less the story that most of these SEALs told, Cole. A lot of, or several SEALs told Cole. So Team Six leadership analyzed Hyder's performance after their deployment and concluded that he'd been a dangerous officer for several reasons. Despite being a ground commander, he'd repeatedly killed perceived enemies on his own rather than having his men do it. And again, the officer 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.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:51Robert Evans?

  Then that kind of means you're not doing your job as an officer, right?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  Right. It's like one thing if the assistant manager pulls a slurpee himself, but like.

• 1:04:57Robert Evans?

  Yes.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Robert Evans?

  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 Marcinko seeded into the unit. Officers and enlisted have very different, but not lesser, job descriptions. That's the way it should work, right? You need both. However, Marcinko's culture totally venerated the enlisted man and demonized officers. So insecure guys like Hyder 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.

• 1:05:33Speaker 02

  We did it.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  Yay. Oh, still grim, still grim as fuck.

• 1:05:39Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:40Robert Evans?

  It's gonna get grimmer.

• 1:05:44Robert Evans?

  I don't know why I said it that way.

• 1:05:45Speaker 02

  Andrew, you wanna do a plug?

• 1:05:47Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. Um, 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 Star Trek. That's me, Tony Newsome, our producer is Jesse Gender. We're also on YouTube. Uh, I'm watching a lot of Star Trek for the first time. They're watching a lot of Star Trek for like the billionth time. So, uh, yeah, it's, 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.

• 1:06:19Robert Evans?

  Well, listeners, why don't you all take a racism break and we'll be back on Thursday.

• 1:06:24Speaker 02

  Huzzah.

• 1:06:25Speaker 01

  Peace.

• 1:06:28Speaker 02

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