Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six | Matthew Cole (throwback ep)

Original airdate 3/11/22 The Navy SEALs are, for most Americans, the ultimate heroes. Their 2011 killing of Osama Bin Laden was celebrated as a victory in the War on Terror. Former SEALs rake in thousands of dollars as leadership consultants for American corporations. And young men who want to join the military dream of serving in their elite ranks. But as recent revelations have shown, the SEALs have lost their bearings. In Code Over Country, investigative journalist Matthew A. Cole tells the story of the most celebrated SEAL unit, SEAL Team 6, revealing the dark, troubling pattern of war crimes and deep moral rot hidden behind the heroic narratives. From their origins during the World War II and their first test during the Vietnam War, the SEALs were trained to be specialized killers with short missions. But as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan turned into the endless War on Terror, their carefully-managed violence spiraled out of control. Drawing on years of reporting, Cole follows SEAL Team 6's history, the high-level decisions that unleashed their violence, and the coverups that prevented their crimes from coming to light. Code Over Country is a much-needed reckoning with the unchecked power of the military -- and the harms enacted by and upon soldiers in our name. Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six https://www.amazon.com/Code-Over-Country-Tragedy-Corruption/dp/1568589050 Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse TrueWerk ⬇️ https://truewerk.com/house use code "HOUSE" for 15% off! 01:04 Defining "Code Over Country" (Code of Silence) 15:32 Origins of SEAL "Pirate Culture" 31:01 The "Warrior Class" and Accountability Failure 1:00:15 Commander Howard and Hatchet Desecration 1:56:06 Melgar Murder: Immediate Cover-up Focus 2:02:01 Reasons for OBL Mission Selection 2:04:09 Importance of ROE and the "Gray Shoot" Standard 2:20:51 Dropping CQD Training and Ethical Screening 2:27:38 Slabinski Award Signaling "The Cover-up Wins" 2:29:02 The Core Problem: Lack of Internal Accountability Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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

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  The Team House with your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 1:42Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Team House, episode 136. I'm Jack Murphy here with my co-host, David Park. Tonight, we have Matthew Cole on the show. He is an investigative journalist and the author of Code Over Country. This is a book about SEAL Team Six and the war on terror and a lot of things that have happened. Essentially, this is a book, I think, really about subculture. Subculture in special operations and where it comes off the rails. And we're gonna really take a deep dive on this subject and on Matthew's book tonight. Just a little heads up, we are gonna talk about some graphic content here tonight. War crimes, sexual assault, like there's some pretty grisly stuff in here, just a heads up.

• 2:27Jack Murphy?

  Some of you are sensitive to that kind of stuff.

• 2:29Speaker 06

  Is that a trigger warning?

• 2:30Jack Murphy?

  That's a trigger warning, man, because people are gonna be big triggered in the live chat today.

• 2:36Jack Murphy?

  So you know it's coming. So Matthew, if you could just start off telling us a little bit about yourself and kind of what was your entryway into journalism? And then eventually covering a really specific type of journalism, you know, we've had some people on here. Sean Naylor and Jessica Denati and David Phillips, like there's, but there's not many of us, right? You can count them on, you know, two hands, two and a half hands. People who cover special operations and JSOC. What was kind of your path into journalism and then winding up in a very specific field?

• 3:12Speaker 07

  First, I'm really grateful for you guys having me on. I'm really glad that you gave me an opportunity to talk about the book.

• 3:19Speaker 07

  I was a graduate student of journalism at Columbia when nine 11 happened. And it is absolutely the case that nine 11 and being in New York and downtown. I was about a block and a half from the Twin Towers from 5am to 8am that morning. And then eventually made my way back over after both buildings had come down.

• 3:47Speaker 07

  Nine 11 focused what I was interested in in journalism. And almost immediately, I was particularly drawn to understanding what had gone on in Afghanistan. And so after graduate school, I really just tried to figure out how as a, basically as a freelance reporter, how to get myself to Afghanistan. And more importantly, I always felt that when I was watching news coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that, you know, I don't know what the sense was, there was something missing to me. It was very cookie cutter, which isn't to denigrate the reporters on the ground who were doing in some cases, a very good job under.

• 4:30Speaker 07

  Difficult circumstances, but at that time, you know, it was all embeds. And so there was a limitation on the kind of story that you could do. And so I decided to go to Pakistan on my own, you know, in 2005 and do a reporting trip up in northwest Pakistan, which at the time, although it wasn't the Fatah, it was, it was, it was dicey. And when I was there, I was very close to the Afghan border, Nuristan, and I went, as it happened, I think I landed in Pakistan probably a week after the lone survivor incident had occurred in Afghanistan. And I was, at that time, reporting more about the CIA, and I was really struck by

• 5:11Speaker 07

  the notion, I was talking to people who lived in this valley that was near Afghanistan, and I, and I asked, would ask them, you know, did they have any signs or indications that there was a war going on, you know, about an eight-hour walk away over the mountains? They said, no, you know, there's very little is different, you know, there's some people who come through and, you know, there's some white guys, there's some Taliban guys that come through, but, you know, they don't bother us and we don't see much difference. And they certainly don't hear or see anything in the sky. And I thought, I was really interested in the notion that there was this sort of invisible line at the border that differentiated one side from the other and that there was this war going on. And so I ended up embedding, a little less than a year later, in Afghanistan and went up to Kunar in Nuristan.

• 5:56Speaker 07

  And at that time, I was reporting mostly on, on the CIA, but I started doing more military coverage or reporting, but, you know, abroad. And, you know, you sort of do one piece at a time. I, I think I've probably always just followed whatever subject I thought was interesting or question I had about something. And I, I think I've always looked for trying to understand what it, what are we not seeing here? What is the public not seeing? And so, you know, I, I went, I covered the CIA pretty extensively for, you know, about 10 years. And as, at, towards 2009, I was a investigative producer at ABC News, and I started getting

• 6:41Speaker 07

  interested in JSOC and Blackwater. And so I started pulling that thread. And, and about two years into reporting on Blackwater, Eric Prince, and JSOC, I, I was working on something about Stanley McChrystal at the time, and I...

• 6:59Speaker 07

  You know, someone showed up at my door, so to speak, who mentioned hatchets and SEAL Team Six. And to be honest with you, at that time, I didn't really know anything about SEAL Team Six. I mean, I knew they existed, but I had no, no knowledge whatsoever of their culture. And, or where they fit into the world of JSOC. And, you know, but basically I had someone saying, look, if you really are, want to find something troubling, you got to look into why guys in my unit are carrying hatchets on the battlefield. And that was the beginning. That was the start. It was not a direct path. It was a lot of zigging and zagging as I was working on other things.

• 7:41Speaker 07

  But the more I worked on it, the more I found that, that there was, was bigger than just a story of hatchets. And, you know, I think, I probably, this book is, is ultimately a reflection and the result of how I go into a, a subject or a topic, which is, I would just want to know everything that, that's happened. And I really want to know everything, I like to think of it as in three dimensions, you know, which is the good, the bad, and the ugly. And the more I learned, the more I could see, well, the good has been told over and over, and it's been told very effectively, the Navy SEALs in general, SEAL Team Six in particular.

• 8:25Speaker 07

  But the story had a bunch of key omissions to it. And those omissions were enough to, you know, really change our understanding and what the public should know and understand about, you know, what the unit had become, especially after nine 11.

• 8:40Speaker 06

  Kind of, I'm just really, really curious about you graduating from, from school, and then ending up in Pakistan reporting on CIA. How, like, how did all that start? Like, how, how do you start reporting on the CIA? Like, you know?

• 8:57Speaker 07

  Is a good question. I, you know, I, you know what I did? I, I can tell you actually the beginning and probably the first part of it, which is, I was just reading books. I read every book that I wanted to read. You know, after nine 11, Actually, go back a little bit. Since the ninety-three, the first bombing of the World Trade Center in nineteen ninety-three, for whatever reason, I could, I knew, I can tell you where I was at each major terrorist attack from ninety-three until two thousand and one. And after the embassy bombings in ninety-eight, although I couldn't remember his name, when

• 9:39Speaker 07

  I watched the second plane hit the second tower on nine eleven, I knew who it was. I couldn't remember his name, I didn't, Al Qaeda didn't mean anything to me, but I could, I actually remembered his face and what, you know, it was a very common image that time with, with more of a white turban, a little more, looking a little more Saudi than he was looking, you know, like he was living in Afghanistan. And, you know, so I had an interest, right? So after nine eleven, I had even more of an interest to understand what had happened, how did it come to this, what, what had occurred? I mean, you know, there was nothing, nothing special about that. I think there were a lot of Americans that felt that way. And so I was interested in the CIA.

• 10:21Speaker 07

  I was, I was, when I was in graduate school, I was already a huge fan of Seymour Hersh at The New Yorker. And I was just reading everything that I could to help me make sense of what world, how the world had just changed, at least from the American perspective. And I started reading every book written by someone from the CIA. That was what I did. And the, one of the first that I read at the time was, was Bob Behr's book. And so what I did was, I was a jour, you know, a student journalist. I found a way, it took me a long time, actually, but I eventually got Bob Behr on the phone. And I said, I'm a journalist and I want to figure out how to find people like you and get people like you to talk. And he gave me a few pointers and it, you know, it was nothing mind blowing, but it

• 11:06Speaker 07

  was enough to sort of give me a sense of what I did. And then at that time, you know, the first three years or so after nine eleven and, and the invasion in Afghanistan, a lot of the guys who were in the CIA were writing books. You know, you had Gary Shroen, then you had Gary Bernstein. And so there were, I could read the books and then I'd find, you know, I'd find them, I'd reach out and I would start to, to, you know, report, basically. And that's all it was. It was not, you know, it was just a question of. Talking to, talking to people in that community and trying to understand the difference between what they were saying, what I thought I was seeing, and then what the public was seeing. And there was always a difference. And, you know, sometimes it was because the government was actively lying.

• 11:51Speaker 07

  Sometimes it was because it's just really hard to, you know, work on, on these kind of stories. And it's not easy with a daily deadline, you know? So, you know, that was, that was how I did it. It wasn't, it certainly was not anything special at all.

• 12:06Speaker 06

  That's very interesting.

• 12:08Jack Murphy?

  I would like to jump into the book and start with Ralph Penny. There's, I mean, this is about a special operation subculture coming off the rails, but although that was accelerated by the war on terror, I think you really point to in the book about how the precursors were kind of always there in the culture. This sort of pirate outlaw culture was at least a faction within the SEAL community. And I think the story about Ensign Penny really tells how dark that really got.

• 12:42Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, you know, the, at the end of the day, I, I went into writing this book, I had, you know, a cursory knowledge of the history of the SEALs and felt obviously that there's not any way that I could write about present day SEAL Team Six if I didn't get into, you know, its origins. And so I started at the beginning, which is in World War II. And, you know, let's lay out here for a second that historically, the combat swimmers and UDT, the frogmen, as they were known in World War II, had a tradition and a subculture completely outside of the regular Navy even then.

• 13:23Speaker 07

  And, and, and a lot of what we know today of the SEALs, you can see in what was going on in 1943. Movies, Hollywood films in 1951, they had their own chant and song, which, you know, made it very clear that they were, you know, crazy motherfuckers. They were the craziest bastards in the Navy, the toughest. And so there are, there are, it's like in their DNA, right? There's, there's something to them and they're a really small unit, right? We're not talking about the history of the 82nd Airborne or parts of the Army. They're a separate from the Navy and very specialized. Which means that whatever cultural issues they have, they're more concentrated.

• 14:06Speaker 07

  And one of the stories that I had heard over the years was an incident about a young ensign, an officer who had just graduated from BUDS in the late 70s. Who was essentially pushed to his suicide after being hazed shortly after getting out of graduating from BUDS. And it was one of those stories where, you know, that everyone, everyone had heard something. Oh, I know that story. I heard that story. And then you start to ask, no one knew anything, right? And it was all over the place. But I had a couple of sources who said, no, it's real. It happened and, you know, initially it took, took me a couple of months just to figure out what, what the victim's name was.

• 14:48Speaker 07

  And it was Ensign Ralph Stanley Penny, who had been a Air Force Academy graduate. He had his own really fascinating story, which was that his father was a Colonel and a pilot in the Air Force who had fought, flown a ton of missions in Vietnam and was a decorated war hero. And his son wanted, who had the same name, wanted to do as his dad did and become a pilot, but he had terrible vision. And so by the time he got through part of the Air Force Academy, it became clear that he couldn't really be, he was never going to fly. And so he chose instead to join the Navy to get into BUDS and become a SEAL.

• 15:30Speaker 07

  At that time, there, you know, it was, you could go into UDT or end up as a SEAL. So he just wanted to be a frogman. And his father, his mother and father, according to his sister who survives him, were very against him going. They were religious. The father's experience in Vietnam with the SEALs was that they were drinkers and killers. And he didn't want that for his boy. And they basically, it was not allowed to be talked about when it became clear that Ensign Penny was going to sign up and go to BUDS. And

• 16:11Speaker 07

  So, you know, as I was digging, I realized there wasn't just something bad at the end of the story, there was really something interesting and sad and compelling about what had happened to him. It took a while, but ultimately, you know, what occurred was he joined, he joined his team, was UDT 21 on the East Coast, a little bit early because he had done, because he had been in the Air Force, he had already done his jumps, he was already certified as a skydiver. So, he got to go early while the rest of his bud's class went to Fort Benning to do their courses there and get their certification.

• 16:53Speaker 07

  And the officers there decided, since he was gonna be checking in soon, that they would send him on a training evolution, early with a platoon. And it was not gonna be the platoon that he was gonna join, but he was gonna, he'd get a little bit of experience. So he was given to a platoon who was led by then a Lieutenant Joseph McGuire. We can get into him later. And they go down to St., they go down to Vieques, where there was a, SEALs had a training station. And on a liberty weekend, he goes with a E6 or an E7, who was a Vietnam veteran named

• 17:38Speaker 07

  Eddie Leisure, Fast Eddie Leisure. It was a, considered one of the best, you know, best operators in the SEALs during Vietnam, was highly regarded. And he had become, he'd gone, he sort of moved around, but he didn't want to become a chief. So he must have been an E6, because he had refused. I talked to some people who had served with him and knew him, and he had actively avoided becoming a chief because he didn't want to be in charge, he didn't want to do any paperwork. So he did some training, dive training. And liberty weekend, he takes Penny to St. Thomas. And St. Thomas during the 50s and 60s had been the winter home of the East Coast SEALs and UDT, and had a, was a, you know...

• 18:25Speaker 07

  A long tradition in the SEALs of going to St. Thomas, whether you were on training or later in Vieques and traveling or in Liberty, and getting drunk for the weekend, as all good sailors and servicemen do when they have R and R or time off. And, but St. Thomas was, had a very liberal social dynamic and community at the time, and a very open gay community at the time. And so there was a tradition in the SEALs with frogmen. When they were out drinking, when they ran out of money, the youngest guy in the team was, they would get him drunk,

• 19:08Speaker 07

  and they would then sell him off to one of the gay men at the bars for money, so that the rest of the team could drink. And so, as it was described to me, you know, it was, they didn't do it every time, and they didn't do it to everyone, but it was frequent. It was very much frequent, and it was part of the hazing culture. And it was very much "don't ask, don't tell" what happened the next day. So, fast forward to 1979. Penny goes with Eddie Leisure, and they go out for a night on the town, and Leisure gets him drunk. And over the course of the night, they're at a bar. At that time, and you'll forgive some of these awful terms, I'm just using the language that was common then,

• 19:51Speaker 07

  as it was described to me by my sources down there. They had, you know, essentially transgender men dressed as women. They were known as Benny Boys in the SEALs and in St. Thomas at the time. And so, Penny was at the bar. He was getting progressively drunk. He was drinking with a Benny Boy, and wasn't clear, eventually he became so blackout drunk, it was clear that he didn't know that this was a man. Nonetheless, he went back to the hotel, and Leisure basically came back to the room, and found him, let him be, came back the next morning to get Penny.

• 20:35Speaker 07

  And basically said, you know, you slept with a man. And when he got, they got back to Vieques, Leisure told the rest of the platoon, the quote was that we sold them to a fag, which was, you know, I want to point out here for people who may buy the book, that in the Penny section, I have a quote from an officer, retired SEAL officer, who describes this older tradition in St. Thomas. And that quote actually was an on the record quote of Dick Marcinco. I didn't put his name in because he doesn't come into the book till later and I didn't want to confuse it.

• 21:14Speaker 07

  But with him passed on and, and under the circumstances, he described in great detail what they did and how they did it. And it was confirmed by others who, who served with Leisure and with, with Marcinco. So Penny was apparently very, very distraught. And let's just also say that, you know, Eddie Leisure is now dead. He died a few years later. We will probably never know what happened that evening. The, the, it's virtually unknowable. What is absolutely the case is whatever did or did not happen, when Ensign Penny woke

• 21:55Speaker 07

  up the next day and came out, he was told, who had, and had no memory because he was blacked out, that he had slept with a man. And he was unbelievably upset. And what became clear is he came back, the, the, the whole team was told, the whole platoon was told. And then Penny, on the way flight back to Virginia Beach, was very distraught and, and made a statement on the plane that this stuff was not going to stand, that he was gonna, he was gonna do something about it. He was very agitated, is the point.

• 22:33Speaker 07

  They got back the week before Memorial Day, a few days before Memorial Day, Ensign Penny goes and buys a 22 caliber.

• 22:45Speaker 07

  caliber pistol in Virginia and a few days later he shoots himself in the head. It was a small caliber bullet. The death was very messy and awful, actually. And later that became a running joke also at Little Creek. One of the SEALs in his unit described a, you know, they would have, after he had died, getting on the, the, the mic for the, for the, for the whole Little Creek and saying something along the lines of, "Inston, Inston Penny, Inston Penny, you're wanted in the armory to clean your weapon." Joke being that, you know, he had failed to clean his weapon and

• 23:26Speaker 07

  so it had misfired on him and not, not killed himself properly, basically. And, you know, the Navy did an investigation very quickly. The, they determined their results were that he was depressed and he had taken his life because he was depressed. There was no mention of St. Thomas. There was no mention of Eddie Leisure. There was nothing about what had occurred. And so, and, and when the father, Penny's father came with the mother, he confronted the officers and the commander at the base and said, "This is, this story doesn't make any sense. I know you killed him. My boy wasn't depressed."

• 24:09Speaker 07

  You know, they said, he was, you know, they didn't challenge him. They thought he was inconsolable and, and just said, "We're sorry, you know, your, your son was unhappy and he, he took his own life." So, Inston Penny's surviving mother, father and sister, his sister Rebecca, they knew always that there was something wrong with the story. They, they felt, according to his sister Rebecca, that he must have been murdered because the, the story didn't make any sense. He was not murdered. There's no evidence that that was the case. But it was a, you know, obviously for the family incredibly traumatic. They never, they

• 24:48Speaker 07

  never got over it. And it was a long buried secret. And the question had always been, what did Lieutenant Joseph McGuire, who later became Commander of WarCom, know?

• 25:05Speaker 07

  When I first brought it to him, it was, I know nothing about this, this is the first I've ever heard about it. But his spokesperson did call me and say, you know, but we do have the, the 40-year-old NIS report, and I, report which by the way, has been destroyed because it's over 25 years old, they just happened to have it handy, and point out that there's no mention of St. Thomas and there's no mention of, you know, a Vietnam veteran SEAL, except that, you know, according to the spokesperson, McGuire knew that he had gone on liberty with another, another SEAL oper, you know, another veteran frogman, which is kind of an interesting thing to know, if you didn't know anything about St. Thomas.

• 25:47Speaker 06

  Right.

• 25:48Speaker 07

  And, you know, so, the question is more not whether, then Lieutenant Joe McGuire knew, the question is how could he have not known, in a SEAL platoon, when the rest of the platoon in Viet Cong knew immediately afterwards? You know, so it's, it's, I don't want to call it exactly an origin story, but you sort of get every part of this culture of cover-up and pushing people to the edge.

• 26:17Speaker 06

  I'm just, I'm just curious, man, because like, you know, his, his father said that they were drinkers and killers, but, I mean, that could kind of be applied to most special operations units in Vietnam, right?

• 26:30Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 26:31Speaker 06

  And, and even today, like, I mean, not that I'm a cool, I'm a very nice guy, but, but that, that, there, there are sort of that origin, like, why? And, and why is, why this book and why about SEALs when there are, you know, like, there have been crimes and issues and things like that with other units? Like, what, what drew you to, to the SEALs in particular?

• 27:02Speaker 07

  Sure. Let me just say one thing about the, the father's comments. I'm not cosigning the father's comments.

• 27:06Speaker 06

  Right, right, right, right.

• 27:07Speaker 07

  But I, I, what, what I took actually from That description of what the father said was more that there was some kind of intuition by a parent that their child was gonna get eaten alive. Mm-hmm. In other words, it wasn't, it's not about drinkers and killers. He was a religious guy. Look, he dropped bombs on people. Right. What's the difference between a guy with a knife and a guy who drops a, you know, a 500-pound bomb on a village? Um, in that sense, um, it was, I think, more interesting to me, and obviously, we can't know, both parents are dead, and it's, we're talking about someone's psychology, so it's not, this is not reporting per se, but from, a- as a journalist, but also as

• 27:50Speaker 07

  a father, as, you know, as a human, I took those words to really mean that on some level, there was a sense that he knew that this kid, his son, was not up for the rough-and-tumble nature of what this community was. He didn't have the temperament. Something, yeah, something, okay. So that's the first part. The second part is, to answer your question about why the SEALs, why SEAL Team Six, and why. I think that there is a, um, after, I mean, it was before the 20-year mark, but at 20 years, we are at a point where, as a country and as a public, we have to ask ourselves, what did we just come out of? What did we get out of this? What happened?

• 28:29Speaker 07

  And on the commercial side, on the sort of cultural, public, uh, you know, commercial, cultural side, the books, the movies, the podcasts, the story is one that's very unambivalent, right? SEALs and SEAL Team Six are heroes who can do no wrong. They are the best leaders. They are the best everything. It's an image that they promote most. I mean, the SEALs drive the biggest recruiting and recruitment for the Navy, okay? So there's a bigger picture here than just, um, a bunch of SEAL operators who wanna make a little money in their, in their, uh, post-military career, um, pushing how great they are and

• 29:12Speaker 07

  what they can contribute to society, of which I have no problem with whatsoever. My issue is, and I think journalistically and as an investigative reporter, the question is, is that we have this story, this very clear story, but is it true? And, you know, one of the things that I thought of when I was thinking about whether I should do a book was...

• 29:34Speaker 07

  You can have flag of your fathers forty years after the fact, or you can have flag of your fathers now. And my sources were coming to me from inside the SEAL community to say, look, we're losing a battle against guys who are the worst of our community, who have done some of the worst things, both morally, ethically, but just operationally. And they're the ones who are getting ahead, mostly in public, but also inside. And that is, from their perspective, unconscionable. It's the opposite of what we should be doing. The military, like anywhere else in our society, is supposed to be merit, there's supposed to be a meritocracy. Now, we can debate whether it is in fact that everyone, I think, can experience, can

• 30:18Speaker 07

  relate to the experience in the corporate world of watching people fail upward. And I think that in a lot of ways, Code Over Country is a case study in failed leadership. And that's really where, one of the things that I've always made myself clear to do is to really name the officers involved, not the enlisted, or senior enlisted, yes, but not the younger enlisted, because it's not their responsibility. So, the question, why the SEALs, why SEAL Team Six? Because they made themselves a public source of... A brand. An absolute brand. And by the way, a very powerful brand. They're really good at it. They're fantastic.

• 31:00Speaker 07

  You know, I mean, it's the old Duffel Blog thing about BUDs, the BUDs course, the book writing course at BUDs, you know, and it's a joke, obviously, but it's funny because it has some truth to it. And so, as an investigative reporter, if someone, I mean, I want to jump ahead for a second, but you take a story, take two stories, like Matt Bissonette and Rob O'Neill, right? If they don't write books about what they did and what they were involved in, I'm not going to spend any time as an investigative reporter. Going into what the story is or isn't, right? I mean, unless, it's not about them. I don't care.

• 31:39Jack Murphy?

  They put themselves out there.

• 31:40Speaker 07

  Right. You want to make, you know, a couple of million dollars telling this heroic story of yourself. And you don't want to write things down that are accurate, or you tell, you tell the story in a way that's not, that's inaccurate. I think you're, you, and so that's a small case, but that's, the answer is writ large, right?

• 31:57Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 31:58Speaker 07

  If you're a organization, or a community, or a culture that wants to make money and earn fame and sort of put yourself up at this, at this place culturally, then it better be true.

• 32:15Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 32:15Speaker 07

  And, and there's plenty of truth in a lot of these stories that have been made public, but it's always the parts that are missing. And the public is, you know, the public doesn't, I mean, you guys can appreciate this because you've experienced this. One of the things that I was, I sort of had an aha moment at some point writing this book where I realized that what the public doesn't get when they get virtually any news story about a military event, they have no context.

• 32:41Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 32:41Speaker 07

  I mean, none, because very few Americans have been to war.

• 32:46Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 32:47Speaker 07

  Very few Americans have put on a uniform, right? That's a, an issue. And so, and going back 20 years after, you know.

• 32:55Jack Murphy?

  SEAL Team Six is probably the one unit, one military unit that you can name and people understand what that is.

• 33:00Speaker 07

  It's a global brand.

• 33:01Jack Murphy?

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• 35:12Speaker 00

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• 36:27Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I think that is a, you know, I think the subtitle of this book could have been "The Secrets of SEAL Team Six," could have also been "The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly." They've done some incredibly heroic work. They've done some great work. I know a lot of good SEALs from SEAL Team Six. And I would venture to say that most are good. But there is a steady core in the SEALs and at SEAL Team Six. And the thing is, is that, you know, your listeners know the difference between the SEALs and SEAL Team Six. But what people don't fully appreciate is that when you have a unit this elite, whatever they do, eventually trickles down into the white side of the SEALs. And so that's how you get Eddie Gallagher, right?

• 37:10Speaker 07

  That's where you get, where it's like, you know, to be expected, kind of, that eventually you're gonna have, you know, someone said to me when I was interviewing a former SEAL and member of SEAL Team Six about Eddie Leisure, and they said, you know, "After Vietnam, we had 20 or 30 Eddie Leesures in the teams." And later, you know, not later, actually, prior to that, when I interviewed someone during the Gallagher, during the court martial, it was, you know, "We have 20 or 30 Eddie Gallaghers in the teams. There's nothing special about them." In that sense, what was special was that there were a bunch of kids who came and decided that, you know, they would put their careers in jeopardy to try to stop them, right? So, you know, that's the motivation behind.

• 37:55Speaker 06

  So, let me ask you then, what is the difference between?

• 38:02Speaker 06

  Something like this happening at SEAL Team Six by something that happened this in SF or Rangers or like are we just looking at individual like these these bad seeds? You know, the these people that, you know, get through their screening process and and do things that, you know, whether in combat or or back home, you know, um, you are war crimes illegal, things like that? Is there a difference between like when it happens in the SEAL community and when it happens someplace else?

• 38:34Speaker 07

  No, I mean, look, crimes of war and violations of the laws of war are are the same regardless of who commits them. I think the question is, is what do you do about them and what is the the frequency? But it's beyond that. There is a there are legal questions, there are ethical questions, and there are moral questions. And SEAL Team Six and the SEALs are very unique in their ethical, particularly ethical, but in in in some cases moral and legal issues. They have problems and the the the real issue is they just won't deal with it.

• 39:14Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 39:15Speaker 07

  I mean, the the the the reason why this book exists is because they couldn't clean up their own shop.

• 39:21Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 39:22Speaker 07

  Period, right? And and I think, you know, we were talking a little bit about this before we went on. Delta had some of the same problems early in the war. They had war crimes issues. They were very aggressive. They lost a lot of guys. They were not asking questions. There was not a whole lot of supervision. Rock was a mess, was, you know, as you know, very you both know very well, a battlefield that was just chock full of targets. The guys who were committing wanton acts of

• 39:58Speaker 07

  Desecration, mutilations, war crimes in Delta were all quietly let go afterwards. They weren't brought up on charges. There was no court martial. There was no UCMJ. They were, when the deployment was over, they were given time to sort of process through, and then they were just asked to leave. And there was no, there was no answer or explanation. That is something that, you know, they, they took care of their viruses. The, you know, they had an illness.

• 40:23Speaker 06

  So they policed their own.

• 40:24Speaker 07

  They policed their own because, because the integrity of the unit was always greater than any individual member of the unit. And that is a cultural issue. And I'm not an expert on Delta. I ask everyone that I talk to, especially in, in Delta and in the SEALs, what's the difference between you guys? And I don't just mean how you hold your guns or how you, you know, attack a target. What are the cultural issues? And that is the, the biggest one, that there are, there's a standard. It has to be met every day. And at Team Six, historically, it is the opposite. Once you're in, the standards are relaxed. And there's also this team issue. The SEALs make it through BUDs. You become a SEAL by working as a team.

• 41:08Speaker 07

  Six in a boat, right? And that concept is what makes, gets you through, and that creates incredibly intense bond. One that I think is, is often the envy of other units. They're, you know, really close knit. The problem is, is that when things go bad, you never want to see your buddy kicked out or screwed over.

• 41:26Speaker 06

  Right.

• 41:27Speaker 07

  So the, the instinct is.

• 41:28Speaker 06

  It becomes a question of loyalty.

• 41:30Speaker 07

  Yeah. Let's fix this in-house. Keep it in-house. And that's what Marcinco did when he set up SEAL Team Six. And he said so explicitly.

• 41:35Jack Murphy?

  There's a lot in your book about Marcinco and about how it kind of was founded on this pirate culture. But I, I do want to skip ahead and talk about how these problems got accelerated during the War on Terror. And I was wondering if you could tell us about what really happened at Roberts Ridge and how that really.

• 41:54Jack Murphy?

  Started accelerating the problems that the unit was have and led to other things. But if you could tell the story.

• 42:02Speaker 07

  Sure. So the battle at Roberts Ridge was at a mountaintop known as Takkar Ghar in eastern Afghanistan in March, early March of 2002. The SEALs were part of the SOF unit, a recon element for a larger, big army push into what the military believed at the time was the last valley of stronghold of Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. And there was a deadline to meet. And the SEALs, a small SEAL recon element from SEAL Team Six from Red Team, went in by helicopter. One of the SEAL, one of the operators, Neil Roberts, fell out the back of the helicopter

• 42:46Speaker 07

  after the helicopter was hit by enemy fire at the top of the mountain. They then, the helicopter recovered. Eventually, the team, the surviving team went back in looking for him. That led to the, another ambush and extended firefight with some Al Qaeda fighters. It was a very entrenched position. Neil Roberts was killed pretty quickly. The SEALs didn't know that, but he was killed pretty quickly. And then the combat control man, who was the CCT attached to the Red Team, John Chapman, was struck. The two other SEALs in the, in the group were hit.

• 43:31Speaker 07

  They blew smoke and retreated to save the remaining guys. Chapman was left, believed to be dead. Turns out, he was not dead. He was, he later recovered from his wounds and fought alone at the top of the mountain for about an hour before a QRF comes in with Rangers primarily. Another, somewhere, I think there's a total of seven who died that day. There was another five. They were not all Rangers, four Rangers, I think, and another Air Force, maybe a PJ, who was killed on the, on the mountain. Ultimately, they, they got the, they, the Americans won, took control of the mountain. But they lost.

• 44:16Speaker 07

  Seven servicemen, as I said, the first member of SEAL Team Six. In the aftermath of Roberts Ridge, the SEALs discovered that Neil Roberts had been mutilated and that the enemy, in fact, it had been seen on the ISR coverage as it was happening in certain places. One of the guys, the enemy had tried to cut off his head and almost did, but it failed. And when his body is brought back to Bagram, and this I didn't know until I did the book. And I actually had to ask you guys whether this was normal. I was told that this was very unusual and not normal.

• 44:58Speaker 07

  They basically had most of his teammates, almost all of them, come in and view the body in that condition. And that there was a long, and actually I talked to some people who were there when it was happening, and there was a long line waiting. Needless to say, it was a very traumatic event. They had lost their first teammate. Chapman died. There's a, you know, secondary scandal and issue with Chapman that we can get into later. But suffice to say, what happens here is sort of two things. SEAL Team Six, for the first time in their history, is in real war and combat. Right? The reality is, is that until 9/11,

• 45:39Speaker 07

  in JSOC and when Special Operations SEAL Team Six was JV to Delta. It just was. They never got the, they never got picked for the missions. They finally broke through in Bosnia with one of the snatches. And so they started to pick up steam, but they were never the first choice. Now they were at war and SEAL Team Six is on the front lines. And they get, they face, get faced with a horrific situation in which, you know, their team leader, Britt Slavinsky, is essentially ordered to go up to the top of a mountain

• 46:19Speaker 07

  and violating all the basic principles of reconnaissance against his own recommendation to his officers. Officers, and I just want to stop here and say that one of the things that is most interesting, I think, about understanding the culture, and you know, I think that's obviously true at Delta as well, but SEAL Team Six, Dick Marcinco built the unit so that the officers command, but the senior enlisted lead. And so when Slavinsky says, I need 24 hours more, and he is told basically, shut up and get to the top. He's following his orders. And so it's not, you know, it's not his responsibility that they were sent up there.

• 47:00Speaker 07

  But it's also the capitulation from the E7 or the E8, who definitely knew better than the two men who were ordering him up there, right? He knew better. And it's something that he said, you know, in the interviews that I published, he talks about. He knew he was violating this, this, this cardinal, you know, this basic rule of recon. And it was eating at him immediately, right? So they sort of have this really awful event. They have this horrific thing happen to one of their teammates. And in the immediate aftermath, and I mean immediate, they went on a, some of them, not all of them.

• 47:41Speaker 07

  Some of the unit went on for what later became known as revenge ops. They were after blood. And so, you know, it's trite, but they went up one way and they came down another, right? They, the guys who were on that mountain did not come back down the same. And it, and it trickled through most of the team because of the nature of the way the unit was. And there was this sort of other element, you know, which is that we can get into the squadrons, but at the time it was red team and they were known as the red men. They, they had a mascot, a Native American mascot. And so there was this, this identity issue that grew. And in the immediate aftermath, there were, you know, there were war crimes very quickly afterwards,

• 48:26Speaker 07

  within 24, 36 hours by the SEALs, some of the SEALs, including one of the officers. And so. It's your starting point of understanding post nine eleven, how things change and I you know, some of it is obviously they had a culture of cover ups in the SEALs and in SEAL Team Six Unit. But the other thing is, is let's be honest, right? It was war for the first time. These guys were seeing war for the first time.

• 48:50Speaker 06

  Well, not only was it war, but they saw a friend of theirs, a teammate, you know, somebody who they had spent time with, you know, who they knew personally, having been savaged, you know, not just killed, but savaged. And, and I can, I can definitely understand sort of that mentality of all right, well, let's get some, right?

• 49:14Speaker 07

  I don't think, you know, I think that it is fair to say that, that most people can, can relate or appreciate to that feeling.

• 49:21Speaker 06

  Right.

• 49:21Speaker 07

  So the notion that there is an eye for an eye and justice needs to be served, you know, that there needs to be revenge. I think what your officers will tell you is, is that that's all well and good, but we have a law, we have rules and regulations and we need to keep it within the bounds of what's acceptable. And I think, you know, what someone said to me one time was, you know, it wasn't that there was ever really one moment where we had just gone, where the whole unit had gone totally off the rails. What they said was, on each deployment, there were groups of guys in each squadron that would go too far.

• 50:04Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:05Speaker 07

  But what would happen is they were never pulled back, never.

• 50:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:09Speaker 07

  In fifteen, in twenty years. And so the officers never did anything about it. And so each deployment, the line moved. So that by ten years later, you know, and I get into it in the book, you get Britt Slabinski, seven years later, actually from that instance, five years later, asking for a head on a platter. And there's a debate about whether it was metaphoric, or whether it was literal, but some of his men took it as a direct order.

• 50:33Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:33Speaker 07

  And tried to obey and comply with it. And that was just one of what was a very bad and very rough deployment in which there was a view that The only way to defeat the Taliban was to be more savage than the savages.

• 50:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 50:49Speaker 07

  Right? To humanize the enemy and treat them as as they treat the civilian population.

• 50:54Speaker 06

  Right. And so it's not just it's not just warfare, but there's also psychological warfare involved.

• 50:59Speaker 07

  And so what I would say is is that what you there is a through line from what happened in the in the immediate aftermath of Roberts Ridge. Um, to what happens later, right? It's a it's a it's a culture. Um, and it's a there's a lack of accountability. Um, you know, and that's that's part of one of the one of the central stories, unfortunately.

• 51:23Speaker 06

  And so where were the officers? Why weren't the officers pulling them back or or like saying, hey? Like we like we need to change these guys out. Like we need we need somebody to come in and fill in for them so they can decompress. Cause like they're wound really tight right now.

• 51:38Speaker 07

  It's an excellent question. Um, the shortest answer is is that in many of the cases, not all, but many of the cases. The officers who were leading these men were, you know, at SEAL Team Six, the respect for officers from the enlisted comes from guys. Who had the kind of experience they did, who had gone through green team, who were, you know, were trained and qualified as assaulters. After nine eleven, in several cases, because they had to surge up numbers. Officers were allowed in who had not gone through green team. So immediately you have a problem. Because those officers have no respect from the enlisted. And so the officers are leading from behind. And from the position of they need the respect of the men and the way to be respected is to be liked.

• 52:20Speaker 07

  You don't get liked by by being enforcing discipline and good order, you know, good order and discipline as the Navy requires it. And so what you have are are officers who look the other way. You have officers who encouraged it. Sometimes not using, you know, there's a one of the things that's hard to write about are all the euphemisms and and, you know, there's no directed. It's it, you know, they sent messages just with looks, you know, with body language.

• 52:46Jack Murphy?

  Could you dive a little bit deeper into the culture of each of the squadrons? Because I think this part is really interesting in how each squadron in. Dev group has its own identity and how that kind of expressed itself over the years.

• 52:59Speaker 07

  Yeah, sure. So, you know, there are historically, the squadrons were red, well, original ones were were gold and blue, which reflected the colors of the Navy at the time. Red is quickly added into it. Later, there is gray, which are boats. There's black and eventually silver. That's the rough. Each then develops a name. They have their own flag and identity. Gold were the Crusaders, were the Knights, depending on the year that shifted.

• 53:32Speaker 07

  The Red Squadron were the Red Men and had a Native American mascot with two tomahawks across.

• 53:40Speaker 07

  Blue are the Pirates with the Jolly Roger flag. Black, which is an intelligence, I actually don't know their name, but they have a horse with with two lightning bolts. And then later, silver, they're the Raiders. They have sort of a shield, but one of everything. They've got a knife. They've got a hatchet and a skull face to sort of reflect all of them because they were the newest of the units. The, the, what you're asking about is really about the three, blue, gold.

• 54:14Jack Murphy?

  The assault squadron.

• 54:15Speaker 07

  Yeah, the original assault squadrons, blue, gold, and red. And prior to nine, there was always a culture involved. They were defined in different generations. The, but there, the Native American subculture in the, you know, one of the traditions in Red Squadron was to, once you were drafted into the squadron after making it through selection and green team, you had to yard in and yarding in, you had to wear a traditional and I don't know which tribe, Native American. Headpiece and then you had to to drink a yard of beer that had a I don't know if it was remember which hard alcohol it is at the bottom and if you could do that you you were in

• 54:59Speaker 07

  and they had a culture which was known as sort of harder not smarter they were their culture was you met violence with more violence and you solve problems by being stronger and bigger right that was a the psyche that had developed within that unit blue had you know different parts and and different places their subculture you know the way I really understand most of the subculture was in the kind of unfortunately the kind of atrocities and and desecration they each had their own kind of desecration basically and and it could

• 55:39Speaker 07

  move around but the you know blue used knives and were known for skinning red used the hatchets

• 55:51Speaker 07

  gold there's some things that I didn't put in the book sometimes it was because I didn't want to there's enough's enough there's only a certain amount of of you know some of this stuff is gruesome and it was gold had the different style is the best way I could say it and they had some things that they did that were pretty disturbing what they had all in common was they were sort of you know one of the senior enlisted said to me look there there are sort of three responses in our guys in how they experience violence some their first instinct upon experiencing up close intense violence that is the business recoil

• 56:35Speaker 07

  and they self-select out and actually after Roberts Ridge there were a lot of guys in red team that left SEAL Team Six several left the SEALs altogether

• 56:45Speaker 07

  It wasn't spoken about, it was just understood that it was, hey, it's not for me. There was another kind which fits along, you know, I think culturally more of the red squadron, red team, which was to meet violence with more violence. There was a third, which I think is the most, actually the most interesting, the hardest to write about because it, as an outsider, which is that there were some who saw art as some, violence as a sort of art, which is to say, you use it the least amount possible and only when necessary, and you're looking for solutions to a problem. I mean, I think, by the way, it's probably common in other units, right?

• 57:25Speaker 07

  You're given a task and you're looking for a way to not kill, to accomplish your mission. And a lot of the, the operators and the senior enlisted who were described to me fitting in that category, for whatever reason, fell into blue. And I don't know, actually, I can't speak to why that culture within the Pirates may have existed. They also had, you know, they were off the rails for a couple of years. They just have different, you know, it's the way they compete with each other, it's the way they differentiate from each other, and it happened organically.

• 58:01Speaker 06

  I mean, in some cases, I would think that like violence, you know, you meet violence with more violence is an appropriate solution. But you're talking about not just violence, not just violence of action or hitting targets harder or expanding operations, but we're going into skinning, we're going into things that are probably not healthy expressions of, of that type of violence.

• 58:33Speaker 07

  Yeah, and I'm not, I'm not, I'm not, I'm not suggesting that meeting violence with more violence is necessarily wrong.

• 58:40Speaker 06

  Right.

• 58:40Speaker 07

  And in any way illegal. It is, you know, as you can tell me, right, the job is one of aggression, but it is also, and you know, the What everyone will tell you from SEAL Team Six, of course, is that the main skill is knowing when to be aggressive and when not to be aggressive. When you dial it down to the most basic thing, it's when to shoot and when not to shoot. When you're justified.

• 59:07Speaker 06

  The escalation of force.

• 59:08Speaker 07

  The escalation of force. And so I think that it is on all of these things, you have in a soft unit, you're living on a knife's edge. And you need a leash, you need some kind of discipline to hold it together, or you go to the wrong side. And I think at SEAL Team Six in particular, they have this problem, they ride this edge, they recruit and select for guys who are hyper-aggressive, who look to cut corners, to solve problems and come up with solutions. If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying concept, right? And the problem is, is that what, and this is someone, these are SEALs telling me this, older SEALs telling me this, that was fine prior to 9/11, but no one in the military

• 59:49Speaker 07

  thought about the effects of 15 to 20 years of warfare in up-close violence.

• 59:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 59:56Speaker 07

  On the secondary and tertiary effects for operators.

• 59:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, I don't think many of us, certainly not myself, have a problem with shooting terrorists in the face, you know, in combat. But I want to talk about some things that I do think are problematic. Tell us about the bleed-out videos. What was that about?

• 1:00:15Speaker 07

  Well, there was one SEAL in particular, early on, in Red Team, who was on some of the early deployments, whose job was filming after the operation to identify, you know, who had been killed and, you know, give, you know, sort of crime scene photos, if you will, for headquarters and higher. And he took a particular glee in replaying the videos in their hooches, basically back at Bagram. Afterwards, he'd get the group together and watch the videos over and over and would

• 1:00:56Speaker 07

  do a sort of countdown of watching people expire. And, you know, in and of itself, it was, it's tasteless, but it's not necessarily legal. What the members of SEAL Team Six, the leaders of SEAL Team Six that I had interviewed who told me about them said was...

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  The problem was, it was a very easy-to-spot sign early on that there was a lust for this. There was something that was inappropriate going on in terms of...

• 1:02:43Jack Murphy?

  About making snuff films?

• 1:02:45Speaker 07

  Yeah, about the enjoyment part.

• 1:02:47Jack Murphy?

  Something might be wrong.

• 1:02:47Speaker 07

  It was a sign that there was something that needed to be reined in and watched closely, right? In and of itself, it may not be you weren't going to bring someone up on charges on it, but it was a sign that there was a problem, and no one would say anything about it. They were sort of laughing, and it kept on going for... You know, it went on for about two deployments, I think. And that SEAL later was kicked out because he struck a teammate. He got drunk on deployment and pistol-whipped one of his teammates. So, you know, and then the CIA hired him.

• 1:03:16Jack Murphy?

  What about, you mentioned in the book also that they were staging martial arts matches at some point?

• 1:03:23Speaker 07

  Said in the book?

• 1:03:24Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:25Speaker 06

  Well, uh, the martial arts, I mean, cause he, he talked about, uh, Dwayne Dieter, right? And that, and then they like-

• 1:03:32Jack Murphy?

  No, no, no, not that.

• 1:03:34Speaker 06

  They're the martial arts match?

• 1:03:35Jack Murphy?

  It's all right. We can go on to, uh, the, the scalping.

• 1:03:39Speaker 07

  I, well, you can ask me that. I thought that was something that I didn't put in, um, which if I didn't put in, I can, you know, I, I, I don't want to, it's reportable if it's in the book. If it's not in the book, you know, while, while I may have enough to support it, uh, in terms of recording, I don't wanna-

• 1:03:57Jack Murphy?

  It's, it's mentioned in the book. Um, but I mean, we can, we move on to the, uh, the, the hatchets. And if you can tell us how they migrated into, uh, into SEAL Team Six, how these guys started carrying them and, and I mean, what the hell they were carrying them on target for?

• 1:04:14Speaker 07

  Um, so there was a, uh, prior to nine 11, there was a, a SEAL operator named Kevin Holland, who was in Red Team, who was a, uh, avid outdoorsman and was, uh, I don't know if he's from North Carolina. I think he's from North Carolina and he happened to be friends with, um, the bladesmith, uh, Daniel, uh, Dan Winkler, who at the time was best known in that community for having made all of the, um, appropriate, uh, era pieces, weapons for the movie Last of the Mohicans. And, um, Holland ended up leaving the SEALs prior to nine 11. After nine 11, he wanted to come back. SEAL Team Six said he would have

• 1:04:55Speaker 07

  to do a deployment on the white side. He refused, so he, uh, asked Delta if he could join. They said, if you can pass the, uh, the course, you know, in this election, you're in. He became a member of C Squadron, um, and he got Winkler to, um, excuse me, to make, uh, these- Hatchets, Tomahawks for his teammates in Delta. They were numbered, the original ones on the handles had like 001, I don't know if it was two digits, three digits, 01 or 001 up through, you know, 10 or 11. And they were deployed, they were used by and carried by Delta in the early years of the war in Iraq, 04, I think, 05.

• 1:05:41Speaker 07

  At that time, SEAL Team Six was being assigned to do deployments, onesies, twosies, do deployments with CAG. And the SEALs saw, and the, some of the SEALs who were from Red Team and then later Red Squadron, understood, you know, Kevin Holland was, was a former Red Squadron guy. And they sort of, you know, came upon the idea that, hey, we're Red Squadron, we're the Red Men, we should have these Tomahawks. So, Red Team at that time was led by a young commander named Wyman Howard. And Howard and his Master Chief, Jimmy Lindell, came up with the idea of getting donors to pay for making them, they're custom made.

• 1:06:27Speaker 07

  I think on the, the commercial market, they cost 600 bucks. I think to make, they're about 300 bucks. So, he got people to donate 3, $350 to have them made. And then would hand them out to every member of Red Squadron who had a year of service in the Squadron.

• 1:06:47Speaker 07

  At that same time, Howard was giving sort of pep talks about, because it was the Red Men, about bloodying your hatchet, getting, you know, getting blood on your hatchet. Well, at times it was a euphemism for, you know, did you shoot, did you, did you kill? You know, were you, were you in action and in combat? And unfortunately, those were words and just the right encouragement for guys in Red Squadron to start using the hatchets. Not everyone carried them, by the way, I've talked to plenty of people in Red Squadron who felt that there was zero military utility or use for them, others who thought You know, it's great for knocking down locks and doors, but yes, they use the hatchets.

• 1:07:30Speaker 07

  Some of them use the hatchets to desecrate bodies, in part to leave a message for the enemy when they picked their comrades up on the battlefield to bury them, that Red Squadron had been there, that the Americans had been there, that there was psychological, there was a psychological warfare component to it. It wasn't a direction, it wasn't an order, it was known, it was understood, it was going on, it was well-known within SEAL Team Six. And there's another case going back to, you know, asking where are the officers and what are they doing? You know, as long as there weren't reports coming up to the O5 level or the O6 level, or outside the unit that this was going on, you know, who felt bad

• 1:08:12Speaker 07

  for the enemy? And that took on a life, but I think it's, it, it happens to be pretty symbolic about, of, you know, the lawlessness and the, the, the sort of renegade culture that took over at, you know, during the, the peak of, of the wars.

• 1:08:30Jack Murphy?

  I'll just read this briefly, and if you don't want to comment deeper on it, it's, it's fine, but this is on 149. "The commanding officer of SEAL Team Six at that time, Captain Scott Moore and his deputy captain, Tim Simansky, received reports from the battlefield. Their operators were using the weapons to hack dead and dying militants. The reports were not limited to Howard's Red Men. Small groups within the command were skinning the dead, and others practiced mixed martial arts on detainees. The news that American servicemen were engaged in such senseless brutality would seem to shock the conscience. But at the command, no one said or did anything about it."

• 1:09:08Speaker 07

  Okay, so, at the time that those reports came in, I believe in, sometime in 2007, and at the time, Gold Squadron had been deployed in Iraq, and the description of Gold Squadron, again, let's make the caveat here, we're not talking about everyone in a squadron, we're not even talking about everyone in a troop. We are talking largely about onesies, twosies, but they traveled. It, it was like having a little virus that would go from one group to another, especially if they moved from one squadron to another. They were, as it was described to me, there were some operators in Gold Squadron

• 1:09:53Speaker 07

  who would hit a compound, would separate the men from the women and the children. As it was described to me, if you knew who the bad guy was, or there was someone who got lippy and aggressive, there was a period of time where Team Six operators, again, not all of them, would bring your offender into a room, two SEALs, one would stand by the door with his uniform on, everything, his equipment on, the other one would explain, you know, here's a question, did they do it through a translator?

• 1:10:36Speaker 07

  Basically, he would take off his gear and say, "We're gonna grapple. If you can win, you can walk out of here." It was never possible, of course, because the teammate was always standing there, and they would grapple and use their skills to kill a target. They were on-site, so there were all sorts of legal gray areas, they were not detainees, because they had not yet been detained, and part of the purpose was to take that individual out to the rest who were getting TQ'd, tactical questioning, and make it very clear verbally and non-verbally that this is what happens if you don't cooperate.

• 1:11:18Speaker 07

  As it was explained to me, this was not done willy-nilly with guys who, you know, the people that they were practicing their MMA and martial arts skills on were not innocent, they were legitimate targets, not in that scenario, let's be clear. This was not an acceptable thing, but in the...

• 1:11:36Speaker 06

  But they were bad guys.

• 1:11:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, for the lack of a better term, they were bad guys, and in the spectrum of things, no one in the US military was going to have any concern about this particular individual having been deceased.

• 1:11:51Speaker 07

  You know, it's it's a pretty awful and upsetting description of of it. There was a, you know, I looked into it a lot. One of the descriptions I got of why was the guys didn't have the ability to use their martial art training and skills in any other capacity. They had done all of this training. They were aggressive. They were doing a lot of missions out. You know, I can't tell you how many of those incidents there were. There was more than one. That I can say. And I, the only reason why I wasn't sure, I couldn't remember what I had put in in the book.

• 1:12:32Speaker 07

  There are certain, you know, I try to limit it sometimes to sort of the top level. But, you know, it's sort of self-explanatory. It's a pretty awful thing. And I think, you know, I think all of this fits in the category of there's so much that we don't know, you know, there is more that will never be shared outside of those who were there. And it's a, you know, it's a very dark place. You know, there were some, some really bad stuff that went on.

• 1:13:06Jack Murphy?

  Tell us more about Wyman, who seems to be at the center of a good deal of this. And what, he's the commander of WarCom now?

• 1:13:14Speaker 07

  He is the, he's a two-star rear admiral.

• 1:13:16Jack Murphy?

  He's been pitched in the press, I mean, in the Associated Press as like the guy who's coming to clean everything up.

• 1:13:20Speaker 07

  That's, he's very good at media. And he has done, by the way, let's give him credit where credit is due. Since he took over WarCom in the aftermath of the Eddie Gallagher stuff, he has instituted some changes to the way the SEALs are organized and the way they're trained, especially the officers, that the leadership courses and stuff like that, that are going to be beneficial. They will be, you know, they're, they're good. I will say that there's certainly a very strong feeling that Howard's changes.

• 1:13:53Speaker 07

  With the size and makeup of the platoons of the Whiteside SEALs is a quantity, you know, getting rid of the notion of quantity over quality and going back the other way to pre 9/11. There's another, you know, more cynical view, which is that if you dump the number of SEALs and you keep a good, a larger portion of them from going abroad, you're going to have fewer problems, which is, you know, what you hope for when you want to ride out a two-year term and tour, get your third star and move on. Wyman Howard is your absolute best example of what SEAL Team Six was and what it became after 9/11.

• 1:14:37Speaker 07

  Howard is a descendant of, I think, two admirals on either side of his family. His father was a captain in the Navy. He Naval Academy graduate, was a West Coast SEAL. I think he was SEAL Team One and SEAL Team Eight. He was, at one point, the lowest-ranked officer at his rank on the East Coast, I believe. He was eventually allowed to select for, he wasn't selected. He failed selection to SEAL Team Six. However, at the time, the deputy commander of SEAL Team Six had been his OIC

• 1:15:19Speaker 07

  and his superior at his previous SEAL Team, liked him and convinced Bert Callan to let him go into Green Team. He was brought into Green Team and the instructors at Green Team were told that unless he, you know, I've been using this hypothetically, unless he kills someone during training, you can't fail him. And so he was allowed to pass. Now, by the description of guys who were in his, in his class at Green Team, he was not the worst. He was in the middle. He was kind of mediocre. Not the worst, definitely not the best. Point was, was that he actually hadn't earned his way in to SEAL Team Six, right? The standard was relaxed so that, and as one person said, Callan said, "Look..."

• 1:16:04Speaker 07

  I was told he could do paperwork very well. He was smart and he was gonna help us administratively. Goes through the green team, gets into green team, gets put into red team, he gets fired or pushed out at red team. 9/11 happens, he's in what later became black team. He basically got pushed forward. He was in Afghanistan early as part of the AFO. Working for Scotty Miller and resurrected his career. He goes back as the OIC of red team a few years later. At that point, they were still teams and not squadrons. And he does this thing, what makes Howard unusual is that he ultimately did essentially two,

• 1:16:47Speaker 07

  I guess they call it a double pump. He did two rotations as the leader of red. First it was as red team and then later as the commanding officer of red squadron. And so he had an unusually long period of time at red squadron. And at that time, with that group and their Native American identity and pushing of the hatchets, you start to see, and remember, again, it's red squadron that went through what happened up on Roberts Ridge, right? When those guys who get drafted into red go into the team room, there is Neil Roberts bent weapon on the wall. As a reminder of, you know, the sacrifice and what they lost.

• 1:17:31Speaker 07

  And so Howard is, by all accounts, incredibly intelligent, very bright, very hardworking. And, you know, was known to essentially look the other way. When his men were out using the hatchets to desecrate bodies.

• 1:17:50Speaker 07

  There were, you know, he ultimately ended up as the commanding officer of SEAL Team 6 as a captain. Went to JSOC, then he was at, he did a stint at one of the DOD, I don't remember if it was.

• 1:18:08Speaker 07

  It was NGA, I can't remember which of the intelligence agencies he served in. He got a job in the Pentagon and then he ended up at SOCCENT down in Tampa and then he ended up at WarCom. And so if you sort of take his example singularly, a guy who was not qualified or didn't qualify to make it to SEAL Team Six, but because of connections was allowed to, right? And at that time, the skipper at SEAL Team Six, Joe Kernan, sorry, at the time which 9/11 happens, they plus up, at that time, he would only promote and allow in officers who'd come from the Naval Academy. Right.

• 1:18:50Speaker 07

  So there was, you know, within a culture, there was another subculture, elitism, you know, a mix between a country club and a fraternity, right? And you had someone who wasn't qualified or hadn't qualified, got in anyway, you know, sort of the syndrome of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth. Right. Right? And then you end up in a leading, very aggressive guys. And how do you maintain their respect? How do you earn their respect? It's not through discipline. Uh huh. That's how it's been described to me. There are, most of the operators that I ever interviewed who worked under or for Wyman loved him. He was highly aggressive.

• 1:19:30Speaker 07

  He matched, he very much looked at what McChrystal was doing and was putting out and matched it. If you, you know, if you're not out operating, you're not, you ain't doing it right. It's very aggressive. Later, there were problems at SEAL Team Six under his command with officers who disagreed with how aggressive he was. I was told recently that in the Afghan papers, there is a lot of description of Howard's leadership on the battlefield in Afghanistan and criticism about the over-aggressiveness and posture of the unit. I haven't seen them myself, so I can't comment about, you know, how accurate that is. But he's sort of your best example.

• 1:20:12Speaker 07

  He has, he's got a, I think, he's got a story.

• 1:20:19Speaker 07

  That started and also gives you a sense of the SEAL Team Six, at least part of the SEAL Team Six culture of the branding. He and his younger officers used to sit around and discuss how great, how great they were as leaders amongst themselves. And the logic went like this. Red Squadron are the best operators at SEAL Team Six. SEAL Team Six is the best unit in the US military and SEAL, Red Squadron officers lead these men ergo. Red Squadron officers are the best leaders of men. And therefore, when we are out of the military, we should become, our officers should become senators and presidents. That story was down. Meanwhile,

• 1:21:01Speaker 07

  that was discussed among Wyman and his younger, his junior officer corps at a time. It was a running joke at the rest of the command with the officer corps that it was all invented, that it was this presumption that there was something special about them. You know, we can get into the question of SEALs and leadership and SEALs later, but by the time he ends up in Tampa as a, I don't know if he had a second star yet, but definitely had a one star. The story now went like this. There's a group of SEAL Team Six officers who have selected me to be the first member of SEAL Team Six to run for president of the United States. And, you know, I actually, I wanted to double check that recently because

• 1:21:43Speaker 07

  I put it, I did an excerpt for the book at The Intercept and I put in some new stuff in there. And I called a source from the Pentagon who knew Wyman well. And I said, you know, I had already heard the story from several people from the SEALs, but I called a friend at the Pentagon. And I said, have you ever heard this story about Wyman, you know, running for president? He said, are you kidding me? Howard tells anyone who will listen, he is going to be the first SEAL Team president. In American history. So you get a sense of the ambition, right? And the mindset, which, you know, a massive ego, you know, often, I think most people would agree, has very little self-awareness.

• 1:22:27Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:22:28Speaker 07

  You know, he's someone who I think when he went to Congress and AP covered it, his posture was, "We are humble," right? I mean, everyone who's ever worked with him and that has a word that has never come across anyone's mouth.

• 1:22:40Jack Murphy?

  Humble.

• 1:22:41Speaker 07

  Humble. I mean, that was his problem at SEAL Team Six, was that there was virtually no humility.

• 1:22:46Jack Murphy?

  What do you think this guy's propensity? I mean, whatever people think about SEALs or SEAL Team Six or whatever, as a previous commander of SEALs said, "We have a problem that needs to be addressed." Is Wyman the guy? I mean, can he do it? Can he reform and get them back on track?

• 1:23:04Speaker 07

  I think, as someone said to me, when Wyman was chosen as the commander of War Comm, it was truly a case of picking the fox to guard the hen house. You cannot expect a SEAL Team Six leader who was part of the creation of the problem and is also a product of the problem at SEAL Team Six that filtered down into the larger community over two decades to possibly be the person who could deliver the message that we have to clean up. Now, he's smart and he can make changes. And as I said, some of his fixes have been described to me as being very good.

• 1:23:44Speaker 07

  And in a couple of years or within a generation, there'll be a better officer corps to some extent. That's about as far as it goes. And I think, you know, I mentioned earlier or before we went on that there's a story, I'm gonna break a story, I think, when the Ukrainian, assuming that there's any kind of resolution in Ukraine, but in the future, in the not-too-distant future, that is another, it's a smaller SEAL scandal, but it's a scandal and it will reflect exactly this issue, which is Wyman is not, Wyman Howard is not responsible at all for all of, you know, the problems. He's, he's, he...

• 1:24:24Speaker 07

  is a great example of where their culture went wrong, how it didn't correct itself. And so the notion that he should be picked or being the leader of the larger community, I think is, you know, I've talked to a lot of current SEAL officers who were frankly disgusted when he was picked. Now, they had a thin bench and there was some recognition that on paper, he was probably ideal, but they were not happy. The SEALs who were in the command long enough, who've been around and have worked with Howard, were not happy.

• 1:24:58Speaker 06

  Now, is it possible they just had an ax to grind?

• 1:25:02Speaker 07

  There are always axes to grind and it very well could be that there are people who simply don't like him. There are a lot of people who don't like him. There are a lot of people who do like him. I try my best, I think, to recognize the difference between someone who doesn't like someone because of their personality and someone who can point to, hey, here are, you know, are things A, B, C, D, and E that this person did when they were in charge that were fundamentally wrong or misguided and certainly disqualifying for promotion, let alone, you know, such a position. So it's always the case. Look, I think, you know,

• 1:25:45Speaker 07

  as an investigative journalist, as any journalist, when you're dealing with stories like this, everyone has some ax to grind. My job is to try to figure out what that ax is.

• 1:25:53Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:25:53Speaker 07

  And, and, and adjust for it and not, you know, accept what it is, recognize where it is. You know, you find out that someone hates someone because, you know, that someone slept with someone's wife and that there's a, there's a personal beef or animus and that may be it. That doesn't mean that what they're saying isn't true.

• 1:26:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:26:10Speaker 07

  So.

• 1:26:11Jack Murphy?

  In the, in the book, I mean, one of the things that people have to understand about the war on terror is that none of these units work by themselves, that there are all these enablers, that there's a joint special operations task force and on and on and on with these different commands and task forces and so on. One of the elements the SEALs got detached to at various times was the Omega Teams. There's a very interesting story in your book about how a CIA officer tried to complain about some of these behaviors and to try to blow the whistle on it internally in the bureaucracy. Could you tell us about that and what happened to that guy?

• 1:26:46Speaker 07

  Sure. First, I want to just say that that one of the sources for that section was at that time was a member of the CIA, employee of the CIA, but who was a former SEAL and had a long experience with the SEALs and SEAL Team Six. It's important, again, going back to just context and understanding, you know, where some of this information comes from and what the significance is of who's telling you. It's now I'm blanking on the year, but I think we're talking about 2008 or 2009 timeframe.

• 1:27:29Speaker 07

  I think 2009. There had been a series of joint operations going out. They weren't always Omegas that were going out together. Sometimes it was just, especially in Jalalabad, the agency would use Six to help them conduct operations if they didn't have much of a paramilitar, they didn't have a ground branch. And what they kept seeing was a over aggression. There was, in fact, at that time, and we can get into this, there was an incident in which they had gone out on an operation, basically the CIA said, "Look, we want you

• 1:28:11Speaker 07

  to get these guys, these four guys out. We know they're in there." You know, they went in at 2:00 in the morning, 3:00 in the morning. SEAL Team Six goes in, I think at that time it was Gold, Gold Squadron went in. The targets were all sleeping, they were all armed, you know, had weapons next to them, they were legitimate targets. They did a countdown and they...

• 1:28:36Speaker 07

  Canoed, I think, six of the eight that were killed in the operation, came back out and were showing off the photos of what they had just done. The CIA in particular,

• 1:28:47Speaker 07

  the agency officers there were furious because the guys that they had been asked to go out and get and detain, they wanted for interrogation and further intelligence exploitation. The mission was not to kill them. They were legitimate targets in the sense that they had weapons near them in their bed, but they were all sleeping. So it was, you know.

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• 1:30:22Speaker 07

  Possible to take them into custody. That incident, along with several others like it, led to a former member of SEAL Team Six who was then working for Ground Branch, named Rick Smethers, Richard Smethers, who had been at O6 and had once been the captain at BUDS.

• 1:30:43Speaker 07

  He complained loudly to SEAL Team Six, first through the CIA and then to SEAL Team Six. Basically, their guys were off the rails and that they were committing war crimes and it was costing them in their area of operations. It got very heated between the two sides and Smethers and the CIA basically warned that if they didn't pull Gold Squadron at the time, they were going to go to the press with these accusations. There was a gentleman's agreement, in part because Smethers was a former member of SEAL Team Six and very respected from his era. He had been skipped over, actually, to be skipper of SEAL Team Six prior to 9/11.

• 1:31:28Speaker 07

  And some people felt that the reason why he was complaining was because he was bitter about that, but that's an aside. As it happened, Gold Squadron was set to leave and I don't remember which squadron was replacing them, but it happened to be that there was going to be a natural cycle anyway. And SEAL Team Six basically asked CIA to pull Smethers and let him cool down outside of Afghanistan, go home and, you know, basically cool the temperature down. And so they did, but there was an acknowledgement on all sides, both sides, that SEAL Team Six was committing war crimes. They were violating the rules of engagement, they were violating the laws of armed combat.

• 1:32:12Speaker 07

  But, you know, you piss inside the tent, right? And so they came up with a solution in which both sides were happy in the immediate, near term, you know? And there was never any accountability. And that was a great example, again, of, you know, I think, I think the book is filled with incidents where there could have been accountability and there wasn't. I think what, one thing to keep in mind is, is that it's, these are only the ones that are known because they became, at least internally, that something happened that triggered... That other people knew about. That other people knew about. Much of what went on, went on between two or three guys on the... Operation in a, in a room, right? We'll never know about those things.

• 1:32:55Speaker 07

  And unless someone who was there talks about it, there's nothing to, it's, it can't be known.

• 1:33:01Speaker 06

  Right. And, but that could be said about any unit, like, you know, like, we, we don't like know when, when it gets down to that small size. But sort of what you're kind of talking about on this is the overall, the officer enlisted, the, the, the, the tendency to not self-correct, but to just let things keep going, even if it's a few guys are like, they're like the, you know, the, when you, when you like pith of fish that schools like, you know, like the rest of the school follows it because, you know, that's how they, that's how psychology works, right? That's how we work. Um, and I, I mean, some of the behaviors we're talking sounds sociopathic.

• 1:33:45Speaker 06

  And the, one of the things about sociopaths is they always have a stronger frame of reality, I think, than, than the people around them. They are 100% certain that their cause is right and, and whatnot. And it's how like relationships go right and whatnot with, right? So if you have a bunch of people who are emotional, angry, you know, at war, and then you have one person that isn't, you know, that is doing these types of things, it sort of makes it a norm.

• 1:34:16Speaker 07

  Yeah. You know, I, I once interviewed a former, um, command master chief of SEAL Team Six,

• 1:34:24Speaker 07

  from prior to nine 11, who told me that in the eighties, when, uh, the last of the Vietnam era SEALs were in the unit, one of the things they passed down to the younger guys about their experience in Vietnam, was that if just one guy in the team was committing war crimes, it created a psychological cloud over the, in time, over the rest of the team.

• 1:34:53Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:34:53Speaker 07

  That there were these non-verbal, you know, that these were things that weren't necessarily discussed, but they became a, uh, it was like. A disease, a virus that would pass through the rest of the unit and go on for the rest of their lives. And, you know, I will tell you that, that, that plenty of the officers gave, you know, had conversations like this with some of, with their men, you know, look, don't do anything out there that you don't want, that you can't live with. Right. Because you have to live with it for the rest of your life. Right. The problem is, is that there are people who think that they can live with it. Right. Or wanted to see and test the waters, right? And so that's not necessarily a strong enough guide as, you know, if you're saying that one night and then the next night you're saying, you know, uh, did you get your hatchets bloodied? Right.

• 1:35:37Speaker 07

  You know, what, what'd you do with your hatchets kind of thing? And so the, I think the, the psychological component to this is really important. And it was one that I asked Marcinco about, you know, what kind of screening did you do? Well, we only had the Minnesota test. Well, yeah, but you had a psych, right? And, and, you know, so you screened and I interviewed that psych and he, you know, he said, yeah, there was no screening. Marcinco picked who he liked. And, uh, Marcinco said, yeah, I had the shrink there so that when the Navy assessed what I, the unit that I was creating on paper, I looked like I was doing all the right things. Right. And the psychologist, the shrink, his name was, uh, Dr. Mike Whitley,

• 1:36:18Speaker 07

  who I interviewed actually not long before he, uh, he died shortly after. Um, as it is Marcinco, I don't want to get a reputation. Um, and, uh, what Whitley said was, look, there were a lot of great guys in the first couple of, in the first group of, of SEAL Team Six, but there were several sociopaths. Right. There was absolutely no way to screen them out because they hadn't done any. The screening was, as Marcinco said, who could drink with me? Who someone else had recommended, who could drink with them and who could handle their liquor with me? Right. And who they had served with, and that was the, that was the system that they used. And I, you know, the other one, I interviewed one of the Team Six's XOs that, that, um, handled selection after Marcinco. And he said, it was exactly what was going on.

• 1:37:02Jack Murphy?

  It's interesting that, uh, Delta had the same problem with their initial intake of guys that the psychologist pointed to one guy was like, no, don't take this guy. And I was told Beckwith overruled him and said, no, we want this guy because he's so good. That was Marshall Brown, who turned out to be a serial rapist and is still in federal prison to this day. So, I mean, the lesson I think is the selection process works when you actually use it.

• 1:37:27Speaker 07

  Well, but you know, but you know, you guys can correct me if I'm wrong is I understand it. The Delta's psychological portion of the selection screening is much more rigorous and specific than SEAL Team Six.

• 1:37:40Jack Murphy?

  Nowadays, I don't think that would ever happen, but this was way back in 1980.

• 1:37:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:37:45Jack Murphy?

  You know?

• 1:37:46Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:37:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, and I think another thing I wanted to follow up on real quick or point out, I guess, is that, you know, there's something to be said for having some empathy for the operators, even ostensibly war criminals. You see like people flipping out just that we have a conversation, an open conversation like this. You know, these guys are warfighters, leave them alone. And it really brought that to head when you were talking about how a lot of guys think they can handle this and they can't. And they acted like big badasses on target wanting to scalp people. Okay, here we are 10 years later and a lot of those dudes are cracking up. And they're cracking up, they're having severe issues with PTSD. Combine that with traumatic brain injuries.

• 1:38:33Jack Murphy?

  These guys are, a lot of these guys are really struggling and I think there's a case to be made now that they need help, but I mean, also there's a lesson for leaders now. Right, right at this moment, to police this kind of behavior.

• 1:38:49Jack Murphy?

  With the, the longevity and the and the responsibility of taking care of your troops long term. And, and, and you know, maybe I, I understand how a younger soldier doesn't have the maturity or the wisdom to really understand that or think long term like that. But there is a responsibility on the leadership, if nothing else, to police that kind of behavior. And that's another way of taking care of your soldiers.

• 1:39:14Speaker 07

  That, you know, I'm, Jack, I'm really glad that you, you raised that point because it's something that my sources for the last five or six years have said.

• 1:39:25Speaker 07

  Sort of privately, you know, in describing what their motivations were for talking and what they wrestle with and were upset, most upset with. And I just give you an example, I'm gonna paraphrase a little bit. Between, there were about four, I don't like to get into the difference between which sources are officers and which are are NCOs. I will tell you that that I was most, always most surprised that the the toughest language I heard about the disgust and the frustration came from the NCOs. And given what their, the dynamic, they basically were just disgusted with the the failure of of their officers to to get a hold of the problem when they were warned.

• 1:40:09Speaker 07

  One of the things that someone said to me once that that really shook me was, look, and again, I'm paraphrasing, we failed these guys. We sent these guys out into a meat grinder. Over and over and over again, we gave them none of the tools to handle the parts that that we gave them no warning or or ability to handle what they were gonna experience and come back. And there was a line that we had to hold for them because of this issue, right? That if they cross that line, they're not, we're not gonna send you to jail. We need to pull you back and teach you, we don't do this, right? That's how you fix it. It wasn't, the the the genesis of this book and is not, oh my god, all of these guys have to go to jail.

• 1:40:53Speaker 07

  It came from SEALs who were SEAL leaders, SEAL Team Six leaders, who were saying, we failed these kids. I failed these kids. I tried to do this. I tried to do that. Some retired and left the military because they tried to get SEAL Team Six leaders to to deal with war crimes. And they were ignored. They were refused. We don't have a problem. It's not a problem. I don't know what you're talking about. I mean, it was, it was a, and and so the the the empathy here is, and again, it goes back to why I don't name, for the most part, I don't name the younger operators. I think part of what I was trying to do in the book, and I know that it's probably hard for people to understand, that most people understand this, especially if you're

• 1:41:38Speaker 07

  coming from the perspective that this is some kind of anti-SEAL book. It's not. What this is, is a description of failed leadership and how you, what the cost is to the men who do it. And I think, although it may be subtle, one of the ways I tried to do that in the reporting was the tone that I took in writing about it. I made a very concerted effort to never be strident about any of what, you know, the wrongdoing and never to try to, you know, I tried to pull my punches a little, actually, in the reporting because you, you just want to get the message across through the information. You let the information speak

• 1:42:23Speaker 07

  for itself and the reporting, the facts speak for itself. There was no need to editorialize or to suggest that, you know, anything, there's some kind of inherent evil here and all like that. And that came from, very much from my sources who were saying, look, the people who are suffering here are the guys that we sent out there who did 13 to 15 deployments, whose families are silently suffering because they don't even have a name for the, yes, it's PTSD, yes, they're trauma, but they don't have a name for how it is affecting, it will affect their family now, it will affect their next generation of their family because of the way, you know, the kids are raised in that environment. And although

• 1:43:05Speaker 07

  they have some of the best psychologists and they do, you know, they have a great post-career community for supporting each other and they have, there are some initiatives that I've heard about that seem promising. Overall, they don't do much, right? I mean, Matt Bissonette said it in his book, I mean, his second book, you know, he said, "We get trained at everything to the T." He said, "But they do not train us whatsoever for the emotional toll and impact of what being on the speeding train will do to you."

• 1:43:34Speaker 06

  Right. Well, I mean, you know, Flib still, you know, I think, I mean, I hope he's treating it, I don't know, but, you know, he's very, you know, he was open about the post-traumatic stress he has. You know, I think Latrell, you know, when he talks about, you know, feeling like a coward, you know, like... You know, and I think those are the things I think that like, and there are going to be people who watch this and think this is an anti SEAL episode.

• 1:44:03Jack Murphy?

  If not anti American.

• 1:44:04Speaker 06

  Or anti American or anti whatever. And, and I'll tell you just for myself, I'm all about killing the bad guys. I mean, fuck them up, right? They're, they're bad guys. Like that, that's, you know, I, I even, I agree with some worthy off the book, you know, off the board type methods, but, but it doesn't do the war effort. It doesn't do the unit and it doesn't do the soul any good to, to get caught up in the combat as anything other than combat, anything other than, you know, the mission. When it become, when you make it personal, when you make it personal, when, when you engage in, you know, you know mutilations

• 1:44:47Speaker 06

  or things like that, the person is dead. Regardless of any of that, that's something that, that lives, like, that's not something I, I think that most people, like, you know, like you said, it's a virus, right? It's like suicide. If, if a suicide happens in a unit, it's a memetic. It's a meme. It's a virus of the mind. It spreads and, and suicides will, will increase in that unit. But, but social behaviors are the same type of thing. This is the same type of thing that there are people who would never, there are SEALs who would never in their entire life do something like this. It wouldn't occur to them. But

• 1:45:30Speaker 06

  if it becomes sort of this thematic thing where it's acceptable.

• 1:45:35Jack Murphy?

  And normalized.

• 1:45:36Speaker 06

  Normalized, then, you know, when we're in this environment of combat and chaos and emotions and loss and we're dealing with all these different things. You know, we're, we're vulnerable, right? And so to be subjected to that and then to not have anybody, the officers, reach in and, and, and, and yank that back.

• 1:45:58Speaker 07

  Even out there flapping.

• 1:45:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, to have the, to, to not, you know, and to cover it up. And I'm not, again, I'm not saying send the guys to jail, like, take care of them. Like, make it so this isn't a normal thing because 20 years from now, like you said, this is a family thing, right? And then it becomes a generational thing.

• 1:46:18Speaker 07

  You know, one of the stories in the book, speaking about Slab, was this incident in 2007 with, I think he was an E6 at the time, maybe an E, I think it was E6, who, his commanding officer caught a glimpse of him trying to cut a head off of a, of a Taliban fighter that they had killed in an operation. And Slabinski, who was the master chief at the time, had told his men that he wanted a head on a platter. And there was, you know, some of the older guys heard it as, as it could have easily been, which was just metaphorical and, and Slab being dramatic, but the younger guys didn't know the difference. And so, and there had been a ton of groupthink within, within their unit at the time, within their troop in particular.

• 1:47:01Speaker 07

  And there had been war crimes going on for the whole deployment. And that young man, they, they covered it up. They got out of the NCIS investigation. Everyone was cleared. But that SEAL, that operator, eventually, I think, took another eight years or so, he eventually, basically became medically unfit to deploy. He was a psychological mess. He left the unit after he pulled himself from deploying. They sent him to the, the psychs. He was not fit. They sent him to Group Two, to the White Side where he could, and at, at that point, he said he didn't want to, said to others, not to me, that he ever wanted to deploy again. And as I understand it, he has spent years in intensive therapy.

• 1:47:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:47Speaker 07

  Because he was young and impressionable and with a group of seasoned enlisted, not officers, enlisted members of SEAL Team Six, who believed that...

• 1:48:01Speaker 07

  Chopping the heads off the enemy. Right. Was gonna win the war. Right. And there were, you know, th- they, there was some pulling back of guys after that incident. There was some yelling, um, but they also covered it up and there was zero accountability. Fast forward three years later, when Slavinsky is gonna come back, uh, for a senior position at the command, the officers and the, and the other master chiefs at the command voted him out, basically refused to let him back in. They blacklisted him. And that actually acts as the only time that, that I know of, um, and anyone else knows of, that SEAL Team Six held any of their own accountable for this failure of leadership

• 1:48:46Speaker 07

  and, and, and war crimes. And it, and, and as someone said to me, that we're never gonna send him to, to the brig. We were never gonna send him to NCIS or, or rat him out. We just never wanted him back at SEAL Team Six. Right. We wanted to send a message. Now, fast forward to that, he gets awarded a medal, is upgraded to the Medal of Honor. And that became, you know, there is, just as Gallagher was, and I think, um, you know, Dave Phillips did just a fantastic job in Alpha, describing the cultural war inside the teams, um, between, you know, the, the, the good and the ugly, really, is what it is. Right. And unfortunately, the ugly really won in that case. Um, you know, when Slavinsky

• 1:49:31Speaker 07

  gets kicked out of SEAL Team Six, or blacklisted is the more accurate, it's a good description of when some, where the, they were able to right the ship on their own. It's an example. It's a, it's a singular example, which is part of the problem. When he gets awarded the upgrade to the Medal of Honor, it is absolutely a message to everybody else in SEAL Team Six and in the teams that the cover-up wins. Mm-hmm. That there is, you know, you are giving out the highest Award for valor, the military, the government gives out. And it's not a question of what may or may not have occurred up on top of Takar Gar. Although we, that's certainly an issue that was, that was brought, you know, Chapman.

• 1:50:15Speaker 07

  But regardless of that, and that's not one that I, I, I, you know, never fought in need, need, you know, thigh deep snow on the top of a mountain, you know, under an ambush.

• 1:50:28Speaker 07

  But for everything that occurred after the fact, which by the way, regulations of the Medal of Honor are, you know, their actions and conduct after an event are, are part of the consideration. And there were multiple incidents with Slavinsky. He was, you know, punted from a unit because of war crimes and for, for illegal allegations of illegal orders. Right. And so when he won the upgrade, there were guys, I, my phone was, it was just the groaning. You know, I'm disgusted. We're disgusted with, with, with the message that's ascending to everybody else in the teams.

• 1:51:11Speaker 07

  Who knows? And, and the truth, right? So, and that, that's what the book is about. It's not, I'm not trying to make a judgment. I'm literally just trying to put out the story as it is, as it was and as it is.

• 1:51:23Speaker 06

  I, I feel as though the, the whole Chapman Medal of Honor episode, even notwithstanding a Slavinsky, like not, but, but what the SEALs did, what the SEAL Command did during that, that speaks more to me about the overall, like not speaks more to me, but that to me is more demonstrative of the, the problem with, with the SEAL Command, that, that SEAL culture. Then it were not than any of these other things, but I think it, it is easier to point to that.

• 1:52:06Speaker 06

  Outside of saying, well, you know, you have coverups on regular army bases, right? Where, you know, there's a sexual assault and the commanding officer covers it up because he doesn't want it to be his problem.

• 1:52:16Speaker 06

  And again, I agree that there's this history of this where it's in the command. I'm just saying that the whole Chapman Medal of Honor thing shows sort of what that naval command, what that SEAL command, how they act. Because when it came, when Chapman's name came up, they immediately, immediately turned on him. You know, and here was somebody who, Slavinsky originally for his, you know, here is the air, the air cross, right?

• 1:52:50Speaker 07

  No, that he would get the Navy cross.

• 1:52:52Speaker 06

  Or, uh, no, for Chapman.

• 1:52:54Speaker 07

  Oh, for Chapman, yeah, sorry.

• 1:52:55Speaker 06

  Who, you know, Slavinsky had said, he saved our lives. When he took bunker one, he saved our lives, right? Give it, I hope he gets any award. Then when it comes to the upgrade, the SEALs are so fervently against it and undermining it and, and everything else. And to me, that is like, who does that?

• 1:53:16Jack Murphy?

  That's, yeah, that's the part that's dishonorable about it. I mean, a botched operation that happens, you know?

• 1:53:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I don't even blame Slavinsky for leaving him per se because nobody knows what was going on. They were under heavy fire. There was snow on the ground. You know, Robert's body was there, that Slavinsky never acknowledged. It could be that he thought that was, nobody knows. Like, I don't even necessarily blame him for that because in the fog of war, the only person who knows what happened is the person that's there. And even sometimes they don't know what happened. But, but the way the Navy handled it is like, okay, that's, that's what you expect, you know, or that's what that reputation.

• 1:53:56Speaker 07

  That's the tell. And I, I, you know, the reason, the reason why that story ultimately is, you know, the central sort of spine of the book with three chapters, because it's a, you know, it's a tragic saga of, you know, the, the, the best and the worst. And yes, the worst part about it is not, you know, even what happened up on the mountain at all. What if the worst was the, um, the way in which they went 14 years after the event, everything that they claimed. Happened now changed so that they could protect their brand, their honor, their guy. And that is the part that, you know, is dishonorable. That's the part that's, I think,

• 1:54:37Speaker 07

  the, the, you know, for, for people not in the SEALs who served in the military, who have served with the SEALs, that's the thing you hear the most is like, yeah, well, that's how they are, right? And, and I don't, I don't like to make generalizations. I haven't, you know, I haven't served. I've never served with a SEAL. I, I can't speak to that. But as a reporter, that story is prevalent. That's the story you hear over and over, which is, you know, they have, their brand looks like this and they make a lot of money with that brand. And anything that goes against that brand or suggests that they are not totally heroic and totally flawless, or that the story that they told may not be as accurate as they, as it, as they proceed, you know, made it sound, they circle the wagons.

• 1:55:22Jack Murphy?

  Speaking of which, there's one thing I definitely wanted to ask you about, about somebody who's not interested in profiting off the brand necessarily, or, or at all. We've heard a lot about the bin Laden raid. There's a lot about it in your book. We've heard a lot about O'Neill and Bissinat, a lot out there about those guys. Tell us about this one operator whose call sign was Red.

• 1:55:45Speaker 07

  Red. Yeah. Well, Red should be known as the SEAL operator who fired into bin Laden and effectively killed him in Pakistan in 2011. He was at the head of the stack that went up. I think, in fact, as it happens, he also shot bin Laden's son on the second, second deck. And as I understand it, and I think as I reported in the book, he fired two shots, at least two shots. The first hit bin Laden grazed him somewhere, not quite clear if it was the hip or the leg, but then he got him center mass. And at that point,

• 1:56:29Speaker 07

  bin Laden fell back into the room and onto the ground, a key detail, because everyone else who came in. Into the door afterwards fired into him while he was down on the ground. According to my sources. And although it's no longer available, I will tell you that on Twitter about a year ago, a member of the unit who was there confirmed my version of what was reported and what the version that's in this book and describes O'Neill, I think, as being the fourth guy through the doorway and the fourth man to shoot Bin Laden. So Red, you know, is one guy who said-

• 1:57:09Speaker 06

  A silent professional.

• 1:57:10Speaker 07

  Silent professional and, and, you know, I think I quote quoted one of his former teammates who, who know Bissinette and O'Neill very well, who said, you know, the genius of what they had done in constructing their versions of the story was that there was really only one person who could contradict them and that guy's never going to talk. I, I think my, my, the last I checked, I believe he's no longer in, I think he's out. And, you know.

• 1:57:40Jack Murphy?

  It's just-

• 1:57:40Speaker 07

  Never hear from him, I guess.

• 1:57:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, there's a little part of it that kind of like makes me smile, I guess, because there's this dude out there who killed high value target number one, first guy through the door, smokes Bin Laden, historic shot, has nothing to say about it, he's out there living his best life, I guess, you know, and good for him.

• 1:57:58Speaker 07

  You know, I think the, what is interesting to me is that what I, you can sort of surmise from, from listening to all of this is, is that in general, the SEALs that are out making the most money, telling the most stories are not necessarily the ones who are held in the highest esteem inside. And what you hear over and over is again, you know, there was a terrible irony that it is not the best of our community that is out representing us. It's sort of like an inverse relation, which is not to say that, that, you know, O'Neill's teammates loved him, Bissinette's teammates loved him.

• 1:58:42Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:58:43Speaker 07

  They've got lots of problems with them, but that doesn't mean that they-

• 1:58:45Speaker 06

  But Bissinette, by all accounts, was a great operator.

• 1:58:49Speaker 07

  Phenomenal operator.

• 1:58:50Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 1:58:51Speaker 07

  And-

• 1:58:51Speaker 06

  And, and they're courageous, it's not like-

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• 2:00:08Speaker 06

  Like they're coward, like they're, they're, they're good operators, they're courageous, just maybe.

• 2:00:13Speaker 07

  There's nothing, there's, nothing in the reporting here is about how they're bad SEALs or bad soldiers are not good at their job. They're incredibly good at their job.

• 2:00:24Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:00:25Speaker 07

  Right? The question is not about whether they're, what they did on their best day. The question is what they did on their worst day.

• 2:00:30Speaker 06

  It's not about whether they got two Silver Stars that are happy with the one they got.

• 2:00:35Speaker 07

  Right. That, that, there's.

• 2:00:36Speaker 06

  That's a deep cut, Dave. It's a full send. A full send, as a kid said.

• 2:00:40Speaker 07

  And, and, you know, the, the, I, I, it's not a, I will say, obviously, as a reporter who is writing about this stuff, I'm not, I'm not going to win any popularity contests. I've gotten, over the years, some fantastic hate mail about, on reporting on this stuff. And I, I, you know, I read it all. I enjoy some of it. But I think it's really, really important for the, you know, I don't think that this book is going to change anyone's life. I think that. It's the book that as a citizen, as an interested citizen, wants to know what

• 2:01:23Speaker 07

  happened in America's name during the wars, part of it, right? We know, look, there are plenty of books and stories about all the great and heroic deeds. There's no shortage of them, and I have nothing against them whatsoever. I do happen to have a fealty towards the truth and think that that's like, kind of really important. It's like a, you know, a must have. And I think that the American public deserves to understand what the consequences of a blank check for 20 years of war are for the men who served, for the institutions that refused to hold itself accountable, and ultimately for the civilian leadership that allowed

• 2:02:05Speaker 07

  it to happen, who were supposed to oversee the officers. And I think that that's, that's what's supposed to happen in a democracy, and that's not partisan. That's not a, you know, this isn't a left book, this isn't a right book. I mean, I think it's, I think it's fair to say that almost every one of my sources leans to one party, and, and it's not the party that, you know, a lot of people will think I vote for. My work is nonpartisan in that it is just geared towards understanding and finding out uncomfortable truths, because that's what I imagined journalism was supposed to be when I started.

• 2:02:39Jack Murphy?

  Your book does contain, I mean, there are two other vignettes in the book that I thought were very illuminating, to say the least, was, I think these are the most complete accounts I have read about the Captain Phillips rescue, the Lyndon Norgrove rescue that went bad, and the heinous murder of Sergeant Logan Melgar. I don't know, I know we're kind of starting to run low on time.

• 2:03:04Speaker 07

  Which one do you really want to hear about?

• 2:03:09Jack Murphy?

  I think that the Norgrove one is very well-written. I think the Melgar one, we should probably dive into because it's pretty bad.

• 2:03:19Speaker 07

  Yeah, you know, you want me to start from the top? I mean, I don't know how much you, the reader, your audience.

• 2:03:26Jack Murphy?

  I think they're all familiar with that a couple SEALs murdered a Green Beret in Mali. And our audience has a general familiarity, at least with that story.

• 2:03:37Speaker 07

  Okay, so the Logan Melgar story unfortunately acts as like a sort of, you know, capstone on this post 9/11 forever wars and SEAL culture. You know, these two operators, one who had only been in country for 24 hours,

• 2:04:03Speaker 07

  basically set up to haze and that was their description in haze, I think.

• 2:04:08Jack Murphy?

  Wasn't it like professional remediation?

• 2:04:10Speaker 07

  That was, yes, the language that was used in court to downplay what they were doing was comical if it weren't for the fact that someone ended up dead. I think my point is, is they, the SEALs and the two Marine, I think it's, you call them Raiders?

• 2:04:29Jack Murphy?

  Raiders, yeah.

• 2:04:29Speaker 07

  Raiders did not intend to kill

• 2:04:32Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:04:34Speaker 07

  Melgar. What I reported both at The Intercept and in the book was Melgar, first of all, they didn't get along. Melgar, their personalities, they were sharing a house or an apartment, a compound, and they didn't get along. Melgar became aware that one of the SEALs who later kills him, and the second member from SEAL Team Six, had been stealing from a operational fund for informants. It was cash, you get a lot of written receipts, it's a well-known

• 2:05:09Speaker 07

  means of making a small amount of money on deployment. It's been going on. It's not just in SEAL Team Six, but it particularly at a tier one because there's so much autonomy and so little oversight.

• 2:05:22Speaker 07

  And had in somewhere, I don't know if he had confronted him, but they knew that he knew. And as I understand it, and I think when you both listened to the testimony in court during the court martial and read between the lines, it's pretty clear, I think one of the guys involved said it was, they were going to sexually assault him and film it and use it essentially as blackmail.

• 2:05:46Speaker 06

  They said that they were gonna, that they were going to, they were gonna have the Mali guy like fake sexually assault him.

• 2:05:55Speaker 07

  The SEAL said that.

• 2:05:57Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:05:57Speaker 07

  Kevin Maxwell, who was the Marine Raider who ended up flipping second, said that, no, the plan was they were going to sexually assault him in a, in some manner, I believe it was, because that's why it came up with Operation Tossed Salad.

• 2:06:19Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:19Speaker 07

  They were gonna use, and in fact, my, according to my sources, the Malian guard that they picked, that they asked to come, was chosen because, for whatever reason, in their group, they knew that that was a particular thing that he liked to do.

• 2:06:36Speaker 06

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:06:36Speaker 07

  And so they said, you want to do this on this guy? He says yes, and so he's in the room, they're going to film it, and they're gonna show Melgar the film of it afterwards and as a form of blackmail. Shut up, you know, professional remediation.

• 2:06:51Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 2:06:52Speaker 07

  In, in the term that Adam Matthews, the member of SEAL Team Six who was also involved, would later say. They were incredibly drunk, and Melgar fought back, which they didn't.

• 2:07:06Speaker 06

  And Melgar was not drunk, he had been in his room.

• 2:07:08Jack Murphy?

  He didn't drink, period.

• 2:07:09Speaker 07

  We'll get, we'll get.

• 2:07:10Jack Murphy?

  He didn't drink at all.

• 2:07:11Speaker 07

  No, he did drink, but he was not drunk at the time he died. We'll get into that in a second.

• 2:07:16Speaker 07

  He fought back during the resistance, the plan was to choke him out quickly, film this thing, this act, some form of it, and then, you know, when he came to, they would show him and, and, and hold it over him. He came to after the initial chokeout, and so Tony Dedolf, who is now currently in military prison, after pleading, I can't remember if he pled homicide or involuntary manslaughter, he's got 10 years. Chokes him out a second time, this time pressing his, the way his body was in position.

• 2:07:56Speaker 07

  His face was in to the bed, in low, uh, Melgar's face was into the bed. And he choked him out and he, he crushed his, uh, his trachea. I mean, he crushed his throat, um, and he was dead. They then, um, you know, started the CPR and trying to revive him. That failed. Um, I think the thing that I was struck most by, and I'll start with this, cause this ultimately is the point. Two of America's most highly trained operators who the government spends over the course of a career, millions of dollars

• 2:08:37Speaker 07

  to train and then maintain their training, plus all of the equipment and everything that goes with. Are standing over a now deceased Green Beret fellow American, a service member. And they have a choice.

• 2:08:58Speaker 07

  They can do the right thing, or they can do the wrong thing. And with his body still warm, they immediately began to engage in a cover up. And the point that I think this story is really about is, is that if two of America's best can make that decision

• 2:09:22Speaker 07

  after killing one of their own, not on a battlefield, not with an enemy, not with a legitimate target, with a roommate. You have to ask yourself.

• 2:09:32Speaker 06

  How'd we get to that point?

• 2:09:33Speaker 07

  What the hell else has been going on? Because there is, um, you know, there, there is, again, accidents happen, right? I'm not.

• 2:09:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:09:43Speaker 07

  I'm, I, everything that I've just described, by the way, sounds an enormous amount like the instant penny. You know, it's.

• 2:09:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's weird that hazing has, has like these homoerotic things. Like to me, hazing is like smoking up, you know, smoking up privates, making them do pushups till, you know, till he sweats blood.

• 2:10:02Speaker 07

  There's a, in, in, in particular with the SEALs, hazing, uh, there, there is some that's just like torturous. There are others that is very homoerotic, you know, very homoerotic.

• 2:10:14Speaker 07

  I'm not a psychologist and I didn't delve into the book.

• 2:10:16Jack Murphy?

  We have a bunch of user questions I'm gonna hit you with real quick here, Matthew. Marcelo says, "Why did McRaven give the UBL mission to SEAL Team Six even after issues on the Captain Phillips mission? Seems like Delta could have handled that mission."

• 2:10:30Speaker 07

  Well, two reasons. The first practical one was that the SEALs had, SEAL Team Six had the Afghanistan AO and had been truly training and preparing for a mission there. That's one part of it. There's a second part of it, which is McRaven in particular was very fond of the commanding officer of the Red Squadron at the time and may have played that into favor. What people don't realize, and I'm not sure, you know, some of this has been published before, he actually initially had chosen the Rangers to lead, to be in command of SEAL Team Six on the ground for the mission, which led to a blow up during

• 2:11:10Speaker 07

  the, during the read-in to Pete Van, Captain Pete Van Hoosier at the time, and that didn't happen. So it was, you know, and the other thing is, is by the way, Admiral Craven's a SEAL, and, you know, he may have been a four-star and he's, he's, he's one of the good ones, I think, but that doesn't mean he isn't parochial.

• 2:11:30Jack Murphy?

  Carlos asks, "Could you guys discuss why and if rules of engagement and standards of professional conduct on and off the X are important to these types of units? There seems to be some sentiment that there's, that they should be allowed to do anything."

• 2:11:45Speaker 07

  That, that tier-one guys should be allowed to operate on their own?

• 2:11:50Jack Murphy?

  I think that's what he's saying, that there's a lot of people out there who are like, "Fuck the ROE, we don't need any ROE."

• 2:11:55Speaker 07

  Well, I mean, you know, and, and I think that ultimately, the next question is, "And then what?" Right? The next, if there is, there are rules of, of, there are laws of war, and they're there for a reason. The US signed up for them, we, everyone who serves in a uniform agrees to it, they are bound by it, and whether it's popular or not, and, you know, that doesn't mean that there isn't lots and lots of gray room, but as, as one of my sources always said was, You know, they give SEAL Team Six and Delta so much latitude legally. It's not hard in that way. It's rarely actually an issue. And that's why the old standard SEAL Team Six was if you had one gray shoot, you were gone.

• 2:12:39Speaker 07

  One incident where you shot someone who wasn't armed, regardless of the answer being they're maneuvering. Doesn't matter, right? There's the difference between threat and non-threat. That changed after nine 11.

• 2:12:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:12:49Speaker 07

  And again, the standard dropped. And I think to, I think most SEAL Team Six operators would agree that that standard is important.

• 2:13:00Jack Murphy?

  I, I'll just add on that point real quick that, yeah, I think the rules of engagement are important, but the ROE is separate from international law. The ROE meets or exceeds international law. It has to, and the ROE is blessed off on and signed off on by unit commanders on the ground.

• 2:13:18Speaker 07

  Right.

• 2:13:19Jack Murphy?

  And a lot of times their ROEs and their interpretations of the laws and the interpretations of how they get to the ROE is fucked up. A lot of times they don't know the law themselves. They don't even have the background to begin to understand the law. And that's when you see asinine restrictions put on soldiers that don't make sense.

• 2:13:38Speaker 06

  Like you have to fill out a report every time you fire a weapon.

• 2:13:41Jack Murphy?

  Well, that's done to cover their ass afterwards. But I, I mean, when you find like in Afghanistan where we had troops under fire in contact with the enemy and we could not call in aircraft to drop bombs on them. That's because the commanders on the ground don't fucking understand their own ROE.

• 2:13:57Speaker 06

  And ROEs, I mean, they, I think they change too, like if.

• 2:14:02Jack Murphy?

  From deployment to deployment.

• 2:14:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, ROEs change, but, but there's a massive difference between having an ROE that is like, you can only shoot somebody who is engaging you versus you can only shoot somebody who's holding weapon versus I'm just going to shoot everybody on target regardless of what they're doing. And I'm not saying that's what the SEALs were doing. I'm just using that as an example.

• 2:14:26Jack Murphy?

  Jackson says, do you foresee pirate culture dying off anytime soon in SEALs, I assume? It seems like social media, games, movies and books glorify war crimes and hatchets, which we have seen these hatchets appear in various forms of media over the last like 10 years.

• 2:14:43Speaker 07

  No, I think it's a winning brand. It's a, it's a money-making machine. I think that there's,

• 2:14:51Speaker 07

  there's still a conflict inside the SEALs about this, a cultural conflict. I think the, the rogue side is very much winning and, and probably with smaller numbers as a, as a very

• 2:15:06Speaker 07

  loud minority within the teams, but I don't think that there's, I don't think it's going anywhere.

• 2:15:11Speaker 06

  I, I mean, there's something, there, pirate culture is attractive and, and I mean, there, there are things about it, you know, the whole kind of Marine Corps, you know, improvise a death and overcome. It, it's, but, but like, but what specifically is pirate culture, right?

• 2:15:29Jack Murphy?

  I'll say, like, I had someone contact me once getting upset with something I said and he was like, because he's like, listen, man, the thing with the hatchets, like after my first firefight, my teammates gave me a tomahawk. And I was like, dude, that's not what I'm talking about. I don't have any problem with that whatsoever. Like, goes up on your wall, it's a memento, that's cool. Like, yeah, why not?

• 2:15:51Jack Murphy?

  All the other stuff beyond that.

• 2:15:53Speaker 06

  I'll tell you right now, I carried a tomahawk for like two ops and when I realized it was completely, because I wanted, I wanted, I, I wanted a hatchet kill. What can I say? I'm not gonna like hit somebody when they're dead, but, but then when I realized how absolutely unfeasible it is.

• 2:16:09Jack Murphy?

  I'm lugging this thing around.

• 2:16:11Speaker 06

  You've got your primary, you've got your secondary. How in the hell am I gonna, you know, pull out a hatchet? You know, without some dude shooting me first. So, you know, it, it never went on another op, but, but I mean, there's, there's, I don't know, I, you know where that came from was that old Vietnam Lerp painting, you know, and there, there's like a tradition or a heritage behind it, and it is a tool.

• 2:16:36Speaker 06

  I mean, so is a holligan.

• 2:16:39Jack Murphy?

  A musket.

• 2:16:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:16:40Jack Murphy?

  Elliot says, what is the current status of DevGru in this regard? What does Matthew see as the future of DevGru after the kind of op tempo that they've seen during the global war on terror?

• 2:16:50Speaker 07

  That's a really good question. Two years ago, I think at the end of the Trump administration, I asked someone at the Pentagon what the differences between Delta and SEAL Team Six were on the issue of sort of pivoting away from the global war on terror and counterterrorism. And at that time, the senior official said that Delta had done a much better job of shifting away from counterterrorism and towards more, some of the more traditional sort of genre or operations that they did, which were not necessarily kinetic, a lot more

• 2:17:29Speaker 07

  intelligence gathering and collecting and things that fit under the realm of unconventional warfare. And that SEAL Team Six had been slow. I don't know where that's at today. I think, you know, there are fewer places for SEAL Team Six right now to operate because we're not in Afghanistan, for instance, whereas Delta still obviously is Iraq, Syria. And although there's some SEALs there, it's less their area of operations. So I think that's a challenge for SEAL Team Six is to figure out how to go back to, for instance, one of something that they were very good at, which was being in part of the counterproliferation efforts against Iran and North Korea.

• 2:18:12Jack Murphy?

  Last question here.

• 2:18:12Speaker 06

  Actually, we have some, you asked us, but we have some that we missed.

• 2:18:16Jack Murphy?

  Did I, really?

• 2:18:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, they went up in chat, so I've got the super.

• 2:18:18Jack Murphy?

  Paul asks, he says, in your book, you mentioned a child medevac to Bagram after a CivCass incident, who was then cared for by JSOC and SEAL Team Six. Do you know what happened to him?

• 2:18:28Speaker 07

  He lived, the kid lived. I did know what happened to him. It's actually, it's a good story, not a bad one. I just can't remember whether the child was brought out of Afghanistan or eventually transferred. I think he actually lived, he was nursed by one of the officers. In Bagram for the entire deployment and then it had a happy ending. It was not a bad ending. I just can't remember.

• 2:18:54Speaker 06

  And you know, and that's interesting too, because that that happened right after Roberts Ridge, right? And and they go on this op, they're going to do a VI vehicle, vehicle interdiction and the Air Force bombs these vehicles instead. And the SEALs are upset about that, not because they wanted to get their kill on, but because like, nobody knew who was in these vehicles. And they go down there and they find these civilians. And you know, there may have been, you know, a SEAL who, you know, did something, you know, that was questionable. But for the most part, most of these SEALs were like concerned about these civilians and they medevaced the boy who was or the child who was still alive.

• 2:19:36Speaker 07

  That particular, you know, that particular incident, and I know I've interviewed several people who are on that operation, was very traumatic for having discovered the scene of coming upon, in particular, women and children who had been hit by the shrapnel from one of the bombs that had been missiles that had been fired by the the Air Force. And that was something that was also part of the the the you call it trauma, but the secondary tertiary effects of that first deployment in Afghanistan. There was also, as it happened, retribution from Roberts Ridge that came down in terms of the officer

• 2:20:20Speaker 07

  who was there, one of the officers. And in that case, it was it's another scenario where you had a bunch of seasoned operators being led by a Naval Academy officer who had not gone through a green team and had been put in charge as an officer who had no respect from his men. And it was because he wasn't qualified, right? He had been a boats guy. And and that was that dynamic is like playing out through through years and years at SEAL Team Six.

• 2:20:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:20:52Jack Murphy?

  Get through the rest of the questions?

• 2:20:53Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, um.

• 2:20:56Speaker 06

  First off, David A., thank you very much for the two very generous donations. Jackson, what was the, I don't know if you, you know, what is the darkest story event that you or Jack know of that didn't make it into the book and why? Is there anything?

• 2:21:13Speaker 07

  Uh, yes, there's a murder of a child in Afghanistan early in the war that while I confirmed that it happened and I know who is responsible. I did not have enough details to, you know, everything in this book is been fact-checked very thoroughly. It's been legally vetted and it has multiple sourcing. This one, although had multiple sources, I didn't have enough of the details, the narrative details to justify putting it in. But it was an example early in my reporting of describing a very talented SEAL who SEAL

• 2:21:58Speaker 07

  Team Six, as was described to me, had broken because he had done this, they covered it up and they moved on and it was, you know, enough said, I mean, you know, the murder of a child is a, is a, is a difficult one to stomach. So that didn't make it in and, you know, I, I just, just assumed probably it'll never be published.

• 2:22:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. And just real quick, because we talked about fact-checking, there was one tiny little detail in your book, right?

• 2:22:25Speaker 07

  There was. I made an error about Delta and what the requirements are. And actually I had a, someone who before you pointed it out, someone else had sent me an email, I think, I don't remember how it was written in the book, but essentially I suggested that you don't have to be in the military to join Delta, which obviously isn't true. What I really meant was you don't have to be in the Army to, to be drafted into Delta, to be selected and pass the course. And the error is regretful and all my own and future editions will have a fix.

• 2:22:56Speaker 06

  Yeah. So anybody, anybody who's like gonna nitpick that, just know that like he was just trying to say you didn't have to be in the Army and it, it didn't quite come out that way. So, anyway, um, Jackson, does Delta really do a better job policing their own in comparison to SEAL Team Six, given their recent history?

• 2:23:12Speaker 07

  Historically, yes. That's the short answer. Absolutely. I mean, I, you know, the, the, I'm sure there are plenty of things, maybe my next book will be about them.

• 2:23:20Speaker 06

  How much did pirate culture bleed over into the non-cheater parts of SEAL Team Six such as Black Squadron?

• 2:23:29Speaker 07

  Black Squadron, you know, so I intentionally did not write about Black Squadron. They had some problems and there are some issues, but there were a lot of sensitive programs that I know about that I didn't think reporting, I didn't think it was ju, I couldn't justify reporting about them in the sense that the problems there were not anywhere near what was going on in the Assault Squadrons. They have some issues, but those issues, I had to balance it against exposing some things that were, you know, pretty sensitive. And I tried to err on the side of, you know, this book, frankly, it has a lot of, it has a lot of secrets and a lot of dirt, but there's not that much that's actually classified.

• 2:24:12Speaker 06

  It's not a tell-all.

• 2:24:13Speaker 07

  It's not meant to be a tell-all.

• 2:24:14Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 2:24:15Speaker 07

  So, but, you know, they have some problems, but not as much as the Assault Squadrons.

• 2:24:20Speaker 06

  And thank you, Connor, for that. Mark, thank you very much. How many current and former SEALs did you interview for the book?

• 2:24:28Speaker 07

  Oh, I think it's in the book. Between thirty and forty, and then you start to, but that's not including, that's not including all of the people who worked with SEAL Team Six and people from JSOC and other services who were on some of the missions or who were there. So I think, you know, all, I have to look at the beginning of the book and I can't remember. I've been interviewing people for 10 years off and on, so SEALs, it's probably close to about forty, but that could be wrong, could be fifty. I have, you know, I actually have a list somewhere.

• 2:25:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:25:08Speaker 07

  But it's not on the top of my head.

• 2:25:10Speaker 06

  And I think that's one of the challenge things with your book, right, is because a lot of your sources are, you know, unnamed SEAL, former SEAL, and, and, you know, so, I mean,

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• 2:26:38Speaker 06

  We've done these people a service of, you know, listening to them corroborating their stuff, but also, I'm sure it's very hard for you as a reporter not to list your sources.

• 2:26:53Speaker 07

  There is nothing I want more than to have people on the record. This area of reporting, it's just not feasible, not in our current, you know, I don't know that it'll ever be feasible. And I think it's unfortunate. I think there is honor and anonymity in this kind of reporting. And I think that if I could write a book, or have added to the book, the details, even without names, of where, how my sources came to some of this information, what their experiences were at SEAL Team Six, how essentially this book came to be, I can assure you that it would be incredibly compelling, and far more in that sense. Not that I think there's anything in my book that's not believable.

• 2:27:38Speaker 07

  It's, I undersell it, if anything, but it would be even more compelling than what I have, because their stories are, you know, I mean...

• 2:27:48Speaker 07

  They didn't just have or, you know, courage to join, to make it, to do well in the battlefield of lead men. They had moral courage when it mattered. And that, I think, is, you know, unfortunately, you know, too rare. So, you know, and obviously, in that sense, I'm biased.

• 2:28:07Speaker 06

  Jackson, thank you. Elaborate on Blue Team being more professional?

• 2:28:12Speaker 07

  I don't know if I said more professional. I think there was an element to Blue Team as it was described to me, historically and culturally, that had some senior enlisted guys who were interested in solving the problem, whatever the mission was in the operation, where pulling a trigger was the option of last resort. They wouldn't hesitate, but there was an art. They, I mean, someone described to me a particular incident that happened in Afghanistan where they kind of were trying to imagine themselves as ninjas, how to get in and out of a place silently and make someone disappear. Not kill them, but make someone disappear because the effect of having grabbed them in the middle of the night while no one

• 2:28:57Speaker 07

  else who was in the compound sleeping was the wiser, was more terrifying to wake up to, to have someone who disappeared than to find, you know, their comrade or their family member killed. And so that's sort of what I meant.

• 2:29:11Speaker 06

  You know, one of the things that, and I don't mean to, we have a couple more questions, but one of the things that was really interesting to me is how some of the SEALs felt that when the policy became doing callouts, that that was like, sort of a chicken shit way of doing it because, you know, it was, you know, to protect the women and children, why would we give up that advantage? And that's not why callouts started, though, because, you know, so many people were taking casualties from doing this hostage rescue technique on a target where there were no hostages, that it was safer for the troops to do callouts, you know? It became, because then you do a callout, if they start shooting, you can pull off and just bomb the target. You don't have to run into a building. But it was interesting

• 2:29:56Speaker 06

  that it was the SEALs. It was the SEALs interpretation.

• 2:30:00Jack Murphy?

  It was C Squadron that got really chewed up, I think in like 2004 and they started using that.

• 2:30:05Speaker 06

  And Rangers started doing it and yeah, you know, and it became the standard because it was dumb to run into a building that would barricade against CQB, you know, where they understood the tactic and were ready for it.

• 2:30:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:30:22Speaker 06

  Paul, thank you. You spent quite a bit, a lot of the time on the book with Dwayne Dieter and we didn't get to that at all, but it was great content. What drew you to his story and do you think dropping CQD had an impact on Dev Group's problem?

• 2:30:37Speaker 07

  Yes, I think it's very clear. I make the, the book makes the inference that by dropping Dieter and CQD when they did, their ethical lapses and problems rose. Let me make a caveat here that there is, I've always known that there is another civil war inside the teams between Dieter, CQD and non-Dieter, often MMA. And I am not a expert in tactics by any reason, by any measure, and I don't try to be.

• 2:31:14Speaker 07

  What became clear early on for me was Dieter had a list. He keeps meticulous records of every training he's ever done. Dieter had a list and he was so involved with these guys at SEAL Team Six early on, that he had a list of problem SEALs in his training. Guys who, when they did the hood and the hood came off, even though they were supposedly the best wrestlers, they were flailing and they would fail. And, and, and almost actually frequently the most aggressive are the ones that do the worst in the initial hood drill.

• 2:31:51Speaker 07

  What he had was a list of all the SEALs who had issues in his training, ethical problems, signs that there was something off ethically, morally, okay? Problems with the dial up and dial down, right?

• 2:32:05Speaker 07

  It happened, and I, this is true story, was almost an identical list of everyone after three years of reporting that my sources had identified were some of the worst in committing war crimes or abetting them. And, you know, I'm not a psychologist, and I'm not even an expert in a time, but I just don't think that's coincidence. I think it was very clear that there was some connection to be drawn between a list of problems in this system and a list of problems on the battlefield and culturally. And then, as I reported more and more, what became clear was, no one disputes how good the hood is.

• 2:32:48Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:32:48Speaker 07

  I mean, that's not a, you know, I mean, Matt Bissonette takes an entire chapter of his book where he refuses to name what it is or who did it, but talks about the power of the hood, right? So Dieter was doing something right.

• 2:33:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:33:01Speaker 07

  And the fact that he was pushed out, now, you know, I know what some of the criticism is about why they targeted getting rid of CQD and Dieter, which was that they felt that he was doing too much and trying to adapt his stuff into everything, and there was a lot of pushback against that. But the reporting shows that there was a interest to commercialize and brand training outside of damn neck and the SEAL and SEAL Command to make it profitable, and Dieter wouldn't go along with it.

• 2:33:32Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:33:33Speaker 07

  And that was a problem.

• 2:33:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:33:34Speaker 07

  And so they removed him.

• 2:33:35Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:33:36Speaker 07

  And I think that there is, had they kept it, yeah, there would have been fewer problems.

• 2:33:39Speaker 06

  Well, I mean, if I'm wearing full kit, I'd rather do a muzzle strike than a double leg takedown.

• 2:33:45Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 2:33:47Speaker 06

  All right, uh, let's see here. I think, let's see, let me just make sure.

• 2:33:52Jack Murphy?

  Matthew, I want to ask you, what's been the reception to this book so far? I mean, this is the book that a lot of people, I think, in this country don't really want to hear about or read about. Um, the Navy certainly doesn't want you reading it.

• 2:34:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, it's been mixed. I mean, you know, first of all, it came out a few days before Putin decided to invade Ukraine. So unfortunately, there's been a more, a more significant and obviously more urgent story. And the news, the, the reception has been good, um, in the sense that I have gotten calls from people. Twitter DMs from people who have read it, who are in the SEALs, who are in the Navy, who thanked me for writing it. Um, and, and frankly, that's the most satisfying. I got someone who was, uh, obviously I'm not going to name them, but someone who had been a JAG for NSW, who, um, for a significant amount of time, who reached out to thank me for it and, and say that, that, um, everything in there had rung true

• 2:34:49Speaker 07

  from his experience dealing with, um, some of the officers. Um, and, you know, I, I think that this is a book that will take a little bit of time.

• 2:34:57Jack Murphy?

  To digest.

• 2:34:58Speaker 07

  Yeah, I, it's, you know, one of the things that I occurred to me when I first started writing it is that there is no, there had been no, uh, prior to Code Over Country, um, history of SEAL Team Six, or even the SEALs really, that had not been written by either someone from the SEAL community or someone who was a fan of the SEAL community. You know, it was mostly hagiography. And so in that sense, Code Over Country happens to be in many ways the most objective and certainly the most journalistic history of SEAL Team Six. And I think, you know, that there's, there's a, a long life for that.

• 2:35:35Speaker 06

  Yeah. Uh, we like, let's, uh, these people doing aside, I just want to get to their, uh, we didn't ask Elliot, did we? What is the current status of DEF Group? We did? Okay. Sorry about that.

• 2:35:46Speaker 06

  Carlos, thank you. Uh, follow up. That's why I asked, he was asked, he's the guy who asked about the ROE. Guys in chat seem to think it's okay to ignore ROE standards of profession. Look, I mean, it's easy to like, say, you know, that these guys are on the cutting edge of combat and they're in war. They have to be warriors and there, there, there is that, but there's a huge dividing line between taking the fight to the enemy. You know, laying the hate and, and doing things that are psychologically damaging to yourself and, and just not in a court.

• 2:36:18Speaker 07

  Well, there's also, the, the other thing is, it's not just, we're not talking about ROEs really. Talking about when, when something goes wrong, though, the other thing is their instinct is to cover it up.

• 2:36:26Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:36:26Speaker 07

  And there's nothing honorable in that. There's nothing just in that scenario and, and there's no internal accountability for it. So that's really, uh, you know, a bigger issue. And that's why, to your point about what happened with the Chapman incident is that what is, you know, let's forget about what happened at the top of the mountain.

• 2:36:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:36:43Speaker 07

  For a second, and let's just go to what happens when the, their image or their story is threatened.

• 2:36:49Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:36:49Speaker 07

  They turn.

• 2:36:50Speaker 06

  And, and the thing is, it wasn't even actually, they weren't even actively, the Air Force agreed to, to award him the Medal of Honor just for what happened in bunker, at bunker one, to not even talk about that he got a backup after.

• 2:37:04Speaker 07

  No, no, no, that's not, that's not true. The, the Air Force always had, there are two parts of the award and two citations.

• 2:37:10Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:37:10Speaker 07

  Two full citations. The agreement became to make the second citation, which is for the, um, after, uh, getting back up and fighting for an hour, that became classified and that was a political decision. You make it classified so that the public doesn't have to hear that, um, one guy got an award, uh, for one part, the SEAL, but you know, mistakenly left another guy behind and then that guy got back up and fought for another hour on his own. So that was too embarrassing. So that was a political decision, but what they, what they, but I want to correct you about something. What, what they did was they actively went in and changed their story and misled some of the senior officials of the Pentagon

• 2:37:51Speaker 07

  about what had happened on there and they, they, and you know, one of the things I'm most proud of in the reporting in this book is that I was able to get a transcript and the recordings of a long interview that Slavinsky did for a book in 2004, most of which was never published. And he lays out in great detail what happened up there as he remembered it. Was consistent with all the things he had said previously. It was the story that he stuck to all the way until the moment in which he was confronted with the new video and the the updated imagery and then the story changes. And that's the issue.

• 2:38:28Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:38:28Speaker 07

  It's the it's the lie.

• 2:38:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:38:30Speaker 07

  It's the it's the the untruths. It's the misstatements, right? That's where you get to the heart of of the problem and that's the code.

• 2:38:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:38:37Speaker 07

  You know?

• 2:38:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:38:41Speaker 06

  Uh, so that was the

• 2:38:45Speaker 06

  Any other nations have these issues? We've seen this with the Aussies. Anybody else?

• 2:38:50Speaker 07

  I think every country and every every military force that's ever fought in war has has these issues and I and I think actually probably true that America historically that are continue to evolve in the in the good way, which is less and less and fewer and fewer. Unfortunately, it's that what you really don't want to see is if this is being done by privates in the army, young Marines, you know, E3s, E4s, E5s. There is to some extent, it's understandable, not not

• 2:39:20Speaker 06

  Acceptable.

• 2:39:21Speaker 07

  acceptable. When you have this level of of skill of training to veer off into the illegal, the immoral, the unethical, um, it's much worse. And that's why the the officers have to be held accountable.

• 2:39:36Speaker 06

  And that and that's one of the things that struck me about the whole Melgar thing is you're not talking about a couple of 19 year olds that like got drunk. You're talking about an E6 and E7, right? Uh, you know, um, Carlos, thank you. Another question, one other argument that's out there and in this chat is the enemy does worse to our guys as civilians. So we should respond accordingly. Valid argument, valid argument, question mark. FYI, not trying to drop money to roasting, I'm just curious.

• 2:40:02Jack Murphy?

  I mean, I think this entire episode answers that question.

• 2:40:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:40:06Speaker 07

  Yeah, I don't think there's any, look, if war crimes are human, and they are, it's understandable. That doesn't mean it's justifiable. And there is a difference between, I mean, you know, and the next question is, is if it's okay to chop a guy's head off after you killed him, or chop its head off? What, what isn't okay then? I mean, the, the, there's a reason why there are lines and there's discipline.

• 2:40:28Speaker 06

  If they sexually assault a female soldier, does that mean we can go in their village, like, like it, kill them, like, kill them, if they're bad guys, kill them. But what more do you need to do after that? Um, Brendan, thank you. Brian, sorry, guys. Uh, Brian, Ron Spears Band of Brothers fame, how to decorate a career, and people want to remember for what he never wanted to brag, remember for what he never wanted to brag about.

• 2:40:52Jack Murphy?

  I was talking about one of the guys was accused of war crimes, executing German POWs during the war.

• 2:41:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a tough situation.

• 2:41:01Jack Murphy?

  It's in Band of Brothers.

• 2:41:02Speaker 06

  Yeah. But I mean, what do you do with POWs when you're out, you know, 100 miles from, anyway?

• 2:41:07Jack Murphy?

  Um, so, the book is Code Over Country by Matthew Cole. Uh, Matthew, what, what's next for you? Are you doing anything, like a book tour with the book? Do you have anything else you're working on? What, what can we expect in the future?

• 2:41:19Speaker 07

  We can expect, uh, you can expect, I've got a story coming for The Intercept where I'm an investigative reporter, um, about the SEALs, um, a scandal, small scandal, but a scandal nonetheless. Um, I'm, I think I'm now gonna do, uh, some tours. I think when we first, book first came out, uh, Omicron had still, um, mandates were all around. I think there's a little more freedom, so I hope to. Um, and I have, uh, another investigation going on that may or may not turn out to be a book, but I can't unfortunately talk about it.

• 2:41:50Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 2:41:51Speaker 06

  Well, I hope that we're some of the first people you do tell about.

• 2:41:53Speaker 07

  I will be, I will be. I'm very grateful for being on.

• 2:41:56Jack Murphy?

  Guys, you can go pick up the book on, it's ebook, it's on Amazon, it's wherever you guys shop.

• 2:42:03Speaker 07

  Audio, ebook, hardcover.

• 2:42:05Jack Murphy?

  And there's a lot more in here that we didn't cover.

• 2:42:07Speaker 06

  There's a lot of, of great content in there. And again, this isn't to hate on SEALs and say That seals are horrible human beings. This is just to show a problem in that community. It really has to do with the leadership.

• 2:42:19Speaker 07

  Seals are not horrible human beings. There's an enormous amount of honorable men who serve as seals, many of whom frankly were sources for this book.

• 2:42:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, and even even Slavinsky, even though we talked about change the problem, what he did was very courageous, you know, going up there, going up again to try to get Robert, you know.

• 2:42:35Speaker 07

  Absolutely.

• 2:42:36Speaker 06

  Like, you know, it's it's hard in these types of situations to look at a person and judge him by one action because there's so much more that goes into it.

• 2:42:45Speaker 07

  Absolutely. You know, I think that one of the things I thought as I was writing about this is that in a lot of ways, this is a book about good men doing bad things.

• 2:42:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:42:53Speaker 07

  And it's hard for people to balance or conceive of the idea that good men do bad things, bad men do good things. And that's a tough, you know, when they're when they're mixed in, it's it's tough. It doesn't fit neatly in this, you know, a black and white world where everything is is easy to identify what's good and what's bad. You know, this is a book about the grays.

• 2:43:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:43:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. So guys, don't be afraid of the book. Out of 136 episodes we've done on this show, every once in a while, there's one, like the one with David Phillips, that's like, not so cool, you know? But it's important to have these kinds of conversations and I hope we keep having them. Next Friday, we're going to have a woman on the show who served with the cultural support teams. And so she's the first CST we've had on the show. So I'm looking forward to talking to her. And I don't know, you guys got anything else?

• 2:43:47Speaker 07

  No, I'm really happy.

• 2:43:48Speaker 06

  The Intercept, where else can they find you?

• 2:43:50Speaker 07

  Yeah, The Intercept, I'm an investigative reporter. You Google me, I'm on Twitter. I don't tweet much, but you can find me there.

• 2:43:57Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, make sure you subscribe to the channel if you haven't already.

• 2:44:00Speaker 06

  During our page.

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