Part Four: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

Robert takes us into the modern day history of SEAL malfeasance, from kinda robbing Captain Phillips to the comedy of errors that was the raid on Bin Laden. See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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

• 0:05Robert Evans?

  Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we are now in our fourth episode of our series on Richard Marsenko, the founding of SEAL Team Six, and the continuing derangement of the Navy SEALs. This episode featuring focusing much more on the continuing derangement of the Navy SEALs.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's not getting better. I guess it is getting better. It's not getting, it was pretty bad at the start, so.

• 0:29Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Maybe I'm wrong.

• 0:30Robert Evans?

  There's a lot, I mean, we're not talking about Abu Ghraib and how that connects as much as we should. Maybe there's a lot to cover. We're not talking about like those SEALs who got in trouble for murdering a Green Beret over maybe drugs and prostitution. A bunch of like, there's a lot of stuff that we're, I mean, I'm trying to give you the hits here, but there's a, the Navy SEALs get up to a lot. A lot of different SEALs doing a lot of different things.

• 0:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. It is like, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely immediately. It is shocking.

• 0:58Robert Evans?

  Really fast, really fast, right away.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

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• 1:08Robert Evans?

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• 2:07Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it, and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 2:23Speaker 05

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• 3:20Robert Evans?

  In Afghanistan, the SEALs were exposed to the kind of tempo of activity that they had never known, and killing became an everyday affair in some cases. This had a brutalizing effect. Within months of Roberts Ridge, Red Team operators had started filming what they called "bleed-out" videos and showing them to other SEALs at Bagram. One viewer later described these as "war porn," and the operator responsible-

• 3:42Speaker 04

  Ew.

• 3:43Robert Evans?

  Yeah, they're war porn. It's like videos of like, guys getting executed and dying and like bleeding to death, you know, after being like wounded.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  That's dark, bro.

• 3:50Robert Evans?

  Yeah, it's really dark. It's really dark.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, trophy-taking in the digital age is like, ugh.

• 3:57Robert Evans?

  And there's, yeah, I can tell you when you do like war zone reporting, you will accumulate either directly or through like the people that you know, bits of footage of horrible things that like, you can't avoid taking, but you don't want to air. Sometimes you're asked not to air because it's just like a guy bleeding to death. But like, so the idea of just like taking that and like watching it with beers is pretty gross, I think.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:21Robert Evans?

  Um, yeah. The operator responsible for these war porn videos, bleed-out videos, was ultimately forced out of Team Six after pistol-whipping a fellow Navy SEAL while drunk on base the next year. That's what got him out. Not the videos, he fucking pistol-whipped one of his mates.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:37Robert Evans?

  On base!

• 4:40Robert Evans?

  After Roberts Ridge, the number of allegations of brutality in war crimes among SEALs, particularly Team Six members, but not exclusively, in the field continued to percolate out. As in Vietnam, the SEALs often persecuted their own little war in Afghanistan. One kidnapping mission would lead to information about a caravan smuggling guns or an isolated Al Qaeda cell, and that would lead to more missions and so on. While the war itself had stalled into something of a quagmire as the US struggled to rebuild a functioning government, the SEALs delivered what looked like a constant string of wins: enemies destroyed, arms seized, high-value targets captured and killed. That all changed on June 27, 2005. A four-man SEAL team had been dropped in to go after a local leader named Ahmed Shah.

• 5:22Robert Evans?

  Now, this is, there's a movie starring Mark Wahlberg called Lone Survivor that's about this mission. And if you watch the movie or you read the book Lone Survivor, which is by the lone survivor of this mission, Marcus Luttrell, he will describe Ahmed Shah as a major Al Qaeda guy. He's close to Bin Laden. He's one of Bin Laden's top guys. They, there's no evidence these guys knew each other in any real way. There's no evidence- Shah's not with the Taliban. He's a local warlord. There's a lot of them in Afghanistan, and he's not even particularly hostile to the US at this point, right? This is a guy who could have maybe gone a couple of ways. But then we send dudes to kill him, and you know what happens? You know, like if someone sends dudes to kill you, you probably like take that bad. People don't like it.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  That really like clarifies how things are gonna go, yeah.

• 6:09Robert Evans?

  Okay, I guess I know what side I'm on now.

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:12Robert Evans?

  But they always refer to him as a Taliban. Big, he was not. He simply wasn't. That's a lie. Shah and his men heard the distinct twin-rotor sound of a Chinook descending with SEALs, and they mobilized to ambush them. Marcus Luttrell, a Navy Hospital Corpsman Second Class with the SEAL team, would later blame a group of local herdsmen for giving them up to Shah. In like, the movie about Luttrell's book, they, they come up to these guys and they like capture them and hold them for a while, and they have this debate about should we kill them? If we don't kill them, they're gonna run and they'll tell the Taliban and we'll get ambushed. And the SEALs are like, no, you know, we can't, they're civilians, they're not, we're not gonna murder them. And eventually, they let these guys go. And Luttrell's group does meet some herders and they leave, and Luttrell

• 6:55Robert Evans?

  does blame them for like, but there's no evidence of that. And in fact, we actually have evidence from Ahmed Shah and his people that kind of contradicts that, that they were already moving in when those guys were, like, that, that didn't really lead to the ambush happening, honestly.

• 7:09Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:10Robert Evans?

  But if you, if you frame it that way, then that means SEALs are always justified in killing any civilians they come across in the field.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  You got it.

• 7:17Robert Evans?

  Nothing else to do. They're all informing to the Taliban, we gotta murder them whenever we come across them, you know?

• 7:22Speaker 01

  It's also just like, it's, it was your dumbass car.

• 7:26Robert Evans?

  Exactly, exactly. The idea that it's the fault of these herders and this evil Ahmed Shah, no, you guys got yourselves killed by flying in unsupported a four-man team to go after a dude you didn't need to kill.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:40Robert Evans?

  So in Lone Survivor, the movie, there's dozens of these fighters attacking the SEALs, and there's this long battle and they're firing until they got nothing left. And Marcus Luttrell, played by Mark Wahlberg, is doing everything he can, all the badass John Wick gun stuff, you know? They kill 50 or more men in every popular account before everyone but Luttrell is killed in this lengthy gun battle, right? So this epic last stand, this four-man unit holds off dozens of times their number, right? But they just get overwhelmed in the end by this vast number of savages, right? You're supposed to read that they're savages, you know, in the movie, in the book, right?

• 8:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:14Robert Evans?

  I'm not, like, here's what actually happened. And this is a description by Matthew Cole from the book Code Over Country, and this is based on the actual evidence of what happened in that fight. Shah grabbed his small force, as few as seven but no more than 10, and quietly stalked up the ridge line in the early morning hours as the SEALs settled into a covered observation post. Shah and his men had the advantage of both the high ground and familiarity with the terrain. They hit the Americans with an overwhelming attack from AK-47 rifles, a PK machine gun, and rocket-propelled grenades, which forced four SEALs down the nearby sheer mountainside. Now, the SEALs do manage to fight on for more than an hour, but they're like running and don't really, like, barely can see like who they're shooting at a lot of the time. There's video from Ahmed Shah and his men,

• 8:59Robert Evans?

  he has a videographer with them as they are ambushing and taking out this unit of Navy SEALs. And in the video, you can hear Shah has a guy who's repeatedly saying, guys, surrender. If you surrender, like, we will take you captive. And he's saying it in English. Now, if you were to tell that, I think, to a lot of Americans, they say, well, obviously, these guys would kill any Americans they got. Number one, they've captured Americans and not killed them a bunch in the past. There's lots of evidence of this. Number two, you don't know that at all. The war was not nearly settled at this point in time. They just assumed these guys are, maybe they didn't hear, obviously, that's entirely possible. But if they did, they may have just assumed that these guys were monsters and would never have actually like taken them. It was a fate worse than death or whatever.

• 9:40Robert Evans?

  So they fight to the death, and Shah's men are willing to oblige them. And at the end, again, in the movie, Luttrell keeps his rifle basically the whole time, I think. He drops it and flees and runs away because his guys are getting killed. He like, the way it's been described, and the way Luttrell tells it, at least, it's told at least once, I think, in more recent days, is that like, his officer was, got himself into a dangerous position to try and call in for help and was able to reach to tell them that they'd been ambushed and then got killed because like the position he had to get in to get a signal. And Luttrell fucking panics and runs. At least in one interview I ever heard, he calls, he says that he felt like it was an act of cowardice to run because he drops his gun. Now realistically, again, even well-trained, experienced people break under the worst

• 10:22Robert Evans?

  possible circumstances. You can't overwhelm human nature. People are gonna flee at a certain point. That said, the idea that Luttrell fought until he could do nothing more is simply not true. He is rescued later by a local Afghan dude who just sees a wandering lone Navy SEAL and decides to help this man who's clearly terrified and out of it and unarmed. And that guy reported that when Luttrell came up to him, all of his mag pouches had full magazines in them, but he had no gun, which suggests he didn't really do much of any shooting.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:51Robert Evans?

  Which also happened in ambushes, you're just running, you know, you've got so much to do, you know?

• 10:55Speaker 01

  That's what you should do. You should get out of there.

• 10:57Robert Evans?

  You may be completely unable in that situation to actually provide effective counterfire, you know? And probably at some point, when everybody starts getting hit and you realize it's hopeless, you fucking panic and you bolt, right? To try to survive and save yourself. That's the real story. And in objective terms, that's not shameful. You were in a terrible situation. You had no fucking way to deal with it, and you ran like, fuck. But that's not a good story. That's not a good movie. So- A quick reaction force with eight more SEALs and eight Army Special Forces guys is dispatched in a Chinook to rescue these dudes when they're under fire, but it gets hit and destroyed by another one of Shaw's men, killing everyone onboard, which makes this the deadliest day in Navy SEAL history. Again, they get another 16 people killed, including eight more SEALs,

• 11:42Robert Evans?

  because they fly in another fucking Chinook, the first last thing they had done that had alerted them, the enemy, and they get blasted again because they're not going in with proper cover. They're going in too quickly and they're assuming the enemy's not as smart as they are, right?

• 11:54Speaker 01

  Right.

• 11:55Robert Evans?

  They're underestimating these guys. That's why they get beaten. And this is the defeat by the Navy SEALs. There's no other way to look at it. Latrell is eventually rescued. And after then he's saved, the Navy gives him time off to write a book about his heroic survival, because they see this as a great way, we're gonna need way more of these guys. We just got a bunch more killed.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:14Robert Evans?

  Latrell puts out a book, maybe we can get some more Marx in here, you know? Turn them into SEALs. Send them to die in Afghanistan. So Marcus does a huge media tour, Lone Survivor becomes a bestseller, and he makes a bunch of money. I think this is the first SEAL that I'm aware of that makes a fortune off of doing a Navy SEAL book after Marsinko, right?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:36Robert Evans?

  I can't say it to 100%, but this is like the first one, the War on Terror era, certainly.

• 12:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 12:41Robert Evans?

  All across the teams, cash register signs started ringing. Latrell's book is so successful and the fact that, and his movie does pretty well, Marky Mark plays him. That's a big hit. A lot of guys want to be played by Marky Mark. Marsinko had started the pattern, but Latrell makes it obvious to every new SEAL in the global war on terror that this job could be a path to riches after you quit, right?

• 13:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 13:06Robert Evans?

  So the same year, the DOD, the same year that this all happens, 2005, the DOD issues an order to the Navy to bring in 500 new enlisted SEALs in five years. One of the things they start doing to try to do this is they start producing a movie that we'll talk about a little later called Act of Valor, starring real Navy SEALs.

• 13:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 13:24Robert Evans?

  It's awful. It's dog shit.

• 13:25Speaker 01

  I can't remember that, yeah.

• 13:27Robert Evans?

  It doesn't come out until 2012, and obviously Latrell in his book is part of that. And I'm gonna quote from a 2016 article in the New York Times discussing like the effort to increase the number of SEALs. "The average increase in the force of the previous decade was just five annually. The United States was fighting simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and SEALs were getting killed, wounded, or just burned out and leaving the service. The Command decided that a movie aimed at high school athletes would be the best way to draw in more recruits. The film project, though, took years. Act of Valor was released in 2012, grossing 81 million at theaters around the world." And this was an attempt to do a new Frogman, which is what brought Marsinko in.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 14:04Robert Evans?

  It is funny enough to be worth watching, but like the plot is, there's these two Russian villains, right? And one of them is like a Russian mobster who's like working for the Russian criminal cartel, moving drugs. And one of them becomes a Chechen Muslim terrorist. And they're both like working together, because obviously Chechen Muslim terrorists and like Russian crime love working together.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  And Moscow, yeah.

• 14:28Robert Evans?

  And by the way, also, the Russian criminal helping the terrorist group is based out of Costa Rica. And the whole plot is that they have a factory, I think somewhere in Southeast Asia, where they're manufacturing a new kind of deadlier suicide vest that can't be detected with x-rays. And they have a bus full of migrants that they're putting the suicide vests on and driving the bus through the tunnels under the border to attack America and create 9/11 times 50. And the Navy SEALs have to stop it by invading Mexico at the end. It's great.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  That's so insane.

• 14:59Robert Evans?

  It's so fucking crazy.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 15:02Robert Evans?

  I do look so crazy.

• 15:05Speaker 01

  I just think all new SEALs should also have to submit a writing sample on top of everything else to get in.

• 15:11Robert Evans?

  Give us a spec script.

• 15:12Speaker 01

  Kind of make sure that novel's gonna be good. A short story, short story's fine.

• 15:16Robert Evans?

  You want to make a harder Hell Week? Have these fuckers bash out a full screenplay in under seven days, you know?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  It would measurably make them better at not being cycles.

• 15:30Robert Evans?

  It would. It would probably get you a better quality of SEAL.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 15:33Robert Evans?

  You can make them do boat stuff too at the same time. It's fun. So to do this, in order to increase the number of people getting into the SEALs, the SEALs had to reduce their standards and start accepting candidates who were less competent and maybe less mentally stable, right? Navy brass had repeatedly tried to call the pirates from the ranks of the SEALs in the pre-global war on terror era. But now, letting more of them in is the only way to fulfill their orders, right? If you're trying to get hyped up, people who get hyped up on the dumbest movie ever, they're not going to be guys, by and large, who overwhelmingly are motivated to follow the rules of war.

• 16:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:09Robert Evans?

  One of the first members of this new generation was a troubled young man named Eddie Gallagher. And we'll talk a little bit more about him later in these episodes. In 2006, SEAL Team Six sent a sniper, James Foreman, to Ramadi in Iraq to observe a pair of SEAL Team Three platoons who were supporting, training the Iraqi army, and also aiding Marines in a major battle. Ramadi is like the big battle after Fallujah that becomes a center of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Early reports had shown that like, wow, you know, even though they're just there to like train guys and help the Marines out a bit, their snipers are racking up an insane body count. They're killing like way more guys than SEAL snipers have ever reported killing before. And this one sniper, Chris Kyle, is really getting a lot of them. So they send Foreman out, Team Six does, to be like, is there anything

• 16:54Robert Evans?

  Team Six is the most elite team and the other SEAL teams can learn about what these guys are doing in Ramadi, right? Is it maybe that they found out and invented some new and incredibly effective counterinsurgency tactics, right? So Chris Kyle, you've probably heard of him. He's the American sniper guy.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Yup.

• 17:10Robert Evans?

  His commanding officer was current podcaster Lieutenant Commander Jaco Willock.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  Oh, God.

• 17:15Robert Evans?

  Who also makes like protein bars now and stuff.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Podcaster and chef.

• 17:22Robert Evans?

  Podcaster and chef. Considering how famous Jaco and Chris are today, you might expect Foreman to have been really impressed by what these guys were doing and been like, yeah, they've got a lot to teach the rest of the teams. Instead, he walked away deeply concerned that they were ignoring the rules of engagement. I'm gonna quote from the book Code Over Country again. "According to two SEAL Team Six leaders, what troubled Foreman most, however, was what he witnessed once the SEALs got into contact. After being fired upon, the SEALs could make individual determinations as to who presented a threat, and that could be unarmed Iraqis, including women and children. In the chaos of Ramadi, an unarmed individual fleeing gunfire could be seen as a civilian or an insurgent who had just hidden his weapon. A child walking to the store as SEAL snipers engaged a nearby

• 18:04Robert Evans?

  insurgent through the sniper's scope appear as a potential enemy, maneuvering in some manner and therefore engaged in the battle. An Iraqi mother standing on a nearby street holding a cellphone and a bag of groceries could be shot because an IED had been set off down the street and the SEALs concluded her cellphone was the detonator. The judgment was left to the SEALs to determine who was the threat and by extension, who lived and who died. Foreman reported to a superior that Willock's young SEAL shot unarmed men, women, and children. The SEALs declared threats, according to two SEAL Team Six leaders. A retired senior SEAL officer told me that Foreman's account of Ramadi was seen inside Team Six as an ominous sign that SEALs had lost their moral compass and that the United States may have lost the war. There was no discretion over who they were killing, the

• 18:47Robert Evans?

  officer told me. Their assumption was that because they were dropped into a war zone, everyone in the city was the enemy. After they shot a woman, who is going to say she wasn't going to set off a bomb? Once they shot a kid, who's going to say he wasn't serving as a spotter for the enemy?"

• 19:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:01Robert Evans?

  And...

• 19:02Speaker 01

  But that's also like, of course, that's how you get record number like kills.

• 19:07Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Right. You just start blasting whoever.

• 19:11Speaker 01

  The fuck that, the fact that the Army had like any or the Navy had any, like, oh, we should, we should research this. Like, obviously it was that.

• 19:20Robert Evans?

  And that's, if you look into Kyle's story in his own book, he writes about a bunch of medals he didn't get and shit like, and he, again, like Marsinko, he's in real combat. He kills real armed people. He just also does a lot of not that and lying, you know?

• 19:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:37Robert Evans?

  Foreman's conclusion, apparently, was that Willock's unit only wanted to draw fire because it would give them a justification to kill whoever they wanted, right? They were kind of exposing themselves to get shot at so they could begin to start blasting, right?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 19:50Robert Evans?

  And this is, this is a tactic some people will argue was valid in counterinsurgencies, called reconnaissance by fire sometimes, right? Where you're basically shooting so that you'll get shot at and you can see where the enemy is. And obviously, like, sometimes, yeah, that is, like, I've been in that situation, not as a guy with a gun, but like, it's a thing that happens in war, right? But the, you know, Foreman is a combat veteran. He knows what that's supposed to look like. And he is saying, I think they're just kind of mostly shooting random people, right?

• 20:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 20:17Robert Evans?

  At least, no one, I mean, that's what these other guys in the unit say, Foreman's report concluded. I'm not in the Navy SEALs. One retired SEAL told Cole, quote, "They had no supervision and they were looking for body count because they thought it was cool." So, people inside the unit think that too. Foreman was particularly upset with Chris Kyle, whose colleagues had started jokingly calling him "The Legend" because he seemed to be a legend in his own mind. And now it's just printed on t-shirts, like that was a real nickname. Kyle was accused of constantly exaggerating or lying about how many people he'd killed, even to his own teammates. One senior SEAL leader later told Cole that Foreman had reported, "They're shooting kids as spotters. Whoever was used as a spotter, Kyle shot." Quote, "A young unarmed male had been forced by insurgents to spot the SEALs.

• 21:01Robert Evans?

  Kyle's teammates manning the sniper roof and scope refused to shoot the young male because he wasn't armed. They would not take the shot, the retired SEAL leader accounted. So he, referring to Kyle, just jumps on the gun and plugs the dude in the street. When the guy's family runs out to help him, he shoots them too. Only he misses. And then he calls four enemy killed in action for his confirmed kills. He was lying about the number of his confirmed kills." It's not only allegedly, he's Chris shooting people he doesn't need to, but he's also just like missing sometimes and be like, "I got him. I totally got him."

• 21:30Speaker 01

  Killing, killing kids and civilians and lying about cleaning up the family. Jesus Christ.

• 21:36Robert Evans?

  The guys who accused Eddie Gallagher, breaking a bunch, said he did this too. He would shoot and kill civilians. He would also miss. He's not a good shot. They said he would miss constantly and like just say he had killed them. And before he stabbed that kid, his guys were like, some of them were like, "Well, he seems like off. Like, what do we do? Like, cause he's just lying and shooting at nothing and saying he's killing people?" So there's this point at which they don't know how seriously to take, how deranged and dangerous he is.

• 22:00Speaker 01

  Right.

• 22:00Robert Evans?

  That's according to their story is related in the book Alpha. It's a very weird one, but I think he's, my interpretation is that Gallagher, after Chris Kyle got super famous and got a movie, Gallagher just wanted to do it, lie.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Just do that.

• 22:12Robert Evans?

  Pretend whatever he could in order to get more kills than Chris and become more famous.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:16Robert Evans?

  That's, I think, what his goal was, right? Because Chris Kyle got rich and made a bunch of money and, you know.

• 22:21Speaker 01

  And fair enough, I guess.

• 22:23Robert Evans?

  After his time in Iraq, Kyle wrote a bestselling SEAL book in 2000, which was published in 2012, which was later turned into the 2015 blockbuster movie, American Sniper. He was played by Bradley Cooper. And, you know, even though Kyle dies not long after this in a really messed up turn of events.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:40Robert Evans?

  His whole story is going to be very inspiring to Eddie Gallagher, a troubled young man whose early life had left him with two options, crime or the military. In other words, he was exactly the kind of guy Richard Marsinko selected for.

• 22:51Speaker 01

  Sounds like one option to me.

• 22:52Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. These are the greatest SEALs. Here's how David Phillips describes Gallagher's early life in Alpha. "One morning in 1999, without telling his family, he had walked into a Navy recruiting station in a strip mall in Fort Wayne, Indiana, determined to enlist. On the wall, there was a poster of a SEAL commando coming out of the water with night vision goggles and a glistening assault rifle. Eddie told the recruiter that was what he wanted to do. The recruiter laughed and said that the SEALs are not just something you sign up for." So Eddie becomes a corpsman. That's a Navy medic, but corpsmen are deployed with US Marines and, and that's what Eddie does when he finishes training. He goes to Iraq right after the invasion and he's eventually attached to a Marine sniper unit. Uh, he applies to the SEALs every chance he gets, but he gets rejected repeatedly because he's not, again, is some of these guys, he's not that good at the technical stuff, right?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:38Robert Evans?

  But then 2004, they say yes, because there's not enough SEALs.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  They got it, yeah.

• 23:43Robert Evans?

  They're starting to lose them, right? This is right before the Pentagon's like, "We need 500 more," right? Um, so he gets in and, you know, he's one of those guys with kind of looser standards. He graduates hell week, the same year that Latrell becomes a lone survivor. And Eddie's first years as a SEAL saw him acclimating to the organization while Marcus Latrell became a bestselling author and eventually kind of a movie star. In the years that followed, the SEALs only grew more famous and unfortunately, they also grew increasingly comfortable flouting the rules of war. If you remember Roberts Ridge, that disastrous SEAL op in Afghanistan where that guy fell off the chopper and got abandoned by his friends on accident? Well, he had been killed, after he was killed and the Taliban had mutilated his corpse, guys like Slavinsky, his former boss and other

• 24:25Robert Evans?

  high ranked SEALs had started passing around a book to each other. This was published in 1971 and it's titled, "The Devil's Guard." If you've heard of this book, Andrew.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  Mm-mm.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  I don't like the name.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  Remember when these dipshits passed around books? Now it's just like, like Nazi podcasts.

• 24:43Robert Evans?

  Nobody wants to read anymore. It's all podcasts.

• 24:45Speaker 04

  It's all Twitter and podcasts.

• 24:48Robert Evans?

  That is unfortunate.

• 24:50Speaker 01

  Tweet threads.

• 24:51Robert Evans?

  Tweet threads. Unfortunately, this book did do some damage. So the book claims to be the very true story of a former SS officer who took a bunch of his old comrades to join the Foreign Legion and fight in Vietnam. And these guys, there were a bunch of SS guys who fought for the Foreign Legion in Vietnam, but this book is nonsense. As Matthew Cole wrote in an article for The Intercept, "The novel, which glorifies Nazi military practices, describes counterinsurgency tactics such as mass slaughter and desecration and other forms of wanton violence as a means of waging psychological warfare against the savage Vietnamese. 'These fucking morons read the book The Devil's Guard and believed it,' said one of the former SEAL Team Six leaders who investigated Slavinsky and Blue Squadron. 'It's a work of fiction billed as the Bible, as the truth. In reality, it's

• 25:33Robert Evans?

  bullshit, but we all see what we want to see.' Slavinsky and the Blue Squadron SEALs deployed to Afghanistan were frustrated and that book gave them the answers they wanted to see. Terrorize the Taliban and they'd surrender. The truth is that such stuff only galvanizes the enemy."

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:47Robert Evans?

  And that's a former SEAL officer saying that, right? Is that like, this is deliberately harmful and these guys are idiots.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  It's so weird to occasionally hear like a rational person among these quotes in the military.

• 25:57Robert Evans?

  I mean, it's really hard to do and you do have, so like some of the people who do it are exceptional, at least in like a physical way. And some of them are also just like smart guys and think enough that they don't fall for all of the bullshit completely. Even in, you can talk about like morally, what do you think overall, is it moral to be a Navy SEAL? I certainly wouldn't argue in the 21st century it is. But that doesn't mean like everyone in that feels the same about all this stuff, right?

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 26:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, but I don't know. This is a pretty good time for an ad break, Andrew. I didn't have a really good plug into it, but we're doing it now. You can't stop it. Why would you? I won't.

• 26:34Speaker 03

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• 27:01Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her, I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 27:14Speaker 07

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 27:20Speaker 04

  Stories of survival.

• 27:22Speaker 06

  The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck because by all rights, I should be dead.

• 27:28Speaker 04

  Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 27:31Speaker 07

  They can't convict her, right? Like she has so much evidence.

• 27:35Speaker 04

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her.

• 27:44Speaker 07

  No child should ever experience that. And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it and he got a year.

• 27:54Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 28:06Speaker 06

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Here's what you missed.

• 28:11Speaker 06

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power. It's real. Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  It's raw.

• 28:26Speaker 06

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 28:36Speaker 06

  I went off. I said, "This is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein."

• 28:46Speaker 03

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 28:50Speaker 06

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the south now. And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts.

• 29:05Speaker 03

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 29:11Robert Evans?

  We're back. So, starting in 2005, freshly read up on The Devil's Guard, Navy SEALs, and this starts with Team Six guys, but it does spread, I think, to other teams over time. But it's really, it's, it's known particularly for being a Team Six thing. They start canoeing dead and wounded enemy fighters. That's the term they use. And canoeing is a term for, if somebody's like dead or like just wounded and otherwise harmless, you shoot them in the upper forehead in such a way that you crack open their skull and spill their brains. That's called canoeing, right? One form, and this is something, obviously, if you're in gunfights, some guys are gonna get hit, hit, hit there. It happens accidentally from time to time. And that's probably what happens. Like one former Team Six leader tells Cole that it starts as like accidents,

• 29:54Robert Evans?

  but people decide it looks like cool. So it becomes a meme to shoot dead guys and wounded guys to do this to their heads. And 2007 is really when this like picks up in a big way. And that's not the only form of corpse mutilation that the Navy SEALs are doing during the global war on terror. On some missions, uh, they start being required to bring back a scrap of skin for DNA testing. And of course, once they're told, "You've got to bring back part of these guys," dudes start carrying big knives and skinning dead enemies, much more than the enemy requires because it's fun.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:25Robert Evans?

  Right?

• 30:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 30:26Robert Evans?

  Now, this is a war crime.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 30:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  It's, it's, I mean, also the DNA, isn't that what like hair and saliva is for?

• 30:38Robert Evans?

  That's the idea. I think you should just get like a little bit, right? We'll talk about it more later, but they're, they're going way outside of what's necessary for DNA. And for the most part, Team Six leadership seems to want to pretend it's not happening. And again, in part because like, well, yeah, if you're sending guys out literally every night to murder people in their beds at point blank, and then you say, bring back a piece of them, it's kind of your fault if they start desecrating the corpses. Honestly, you should have known.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:04Robert Evans?

  You should have known.

• 31:07Speaker 01

  You definitely basically asked for it.

• 31:09Robert Evans?

  You really pretty much did.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  But yeah, also just lunacy.

• 31:15Robert Evans?

  Lunacy. In 2006, a SEAL officer, and this is my favorite part, a SEAL officer named Hugh Wyman Howard III takes over Red Squadron, the Red Men. And he is exactly the kind of old Navy royalty Marcinco would have hated. And I think this guy is, again, very insecure. The reporting makes it seem like this is a guy, again, who wants to, he wants to go to extreme lengths for his enlisted men to think he's cool and bond with him. And because of the unit mascot, he commissions a famous knife maker named Daniel Winkler to make a bunch of tomahawk hatchets for, for the guys in his unit. And these are supposed to be like symbolic gifts as first.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 31:52Robert Evans?

  And it's symbolic because it's very funny. You'll, you often come across like tactical tomahawks being, being sold. And people will say like, well, the Navy SEALs use them. They're actually a really effective, even still in the modern day, combat weapon because the SEALs still use them.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:05Robert Evans?

  That's complete fucking horseshit that only an idiot believes, right? Can you kill a man with a tomahawk? Sure. Tomahawks are really fucking heavy and cumbersome for the job, especially the tomahawk Winkler is making. These are not like very lightweight, like absolute minimalist tomahawks. They're like big and heavy. They're a bad thing to carry into a modern battlefield where you have silenced fucking guns, right? You have, and you also, you're the SEALs. You have access to modern lightweight, purpose-built tools for anything you need, but tomahawks are cool. And like the old Indians used them, right? You know, the guys that we wear on our patches used them, didn't they? And there's also this thing, because the old frogmen had always carried knives and some of them had killed guys with knives in World War II.

• 32:47Robert Evans?

  The crowning SEAL achievement was to kill an enemy with a knife, right? Or some sort of edged weapon, because that's extremely rare in modern war. Very rarely are there, sometimes it does happen. There are times when people have to and have had to defend themselves with edged weapons in modern combat. It does occasionally occur. There was a fucking bayonet charge by British troops in Iraq that worked.

• 33:10Robert Evans?

  But it doesn't happen.

• 33:11Speaker 01

  That's so wild.

• 33:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does not happen often, right?

• 33:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:16Robert Evans?

  And because it doesn't happen often, guys who really want to be able to say that like, the term is that they've been blooded, right? This goes back to Vietnam, right? You, you cut a man, you feel his hot blood go over your fingers and then you're blooded. Even though like maybe he wasn't an enemy, maybe he was just like a fisher and you just like kill the dude for no reason.

• 33:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:33Robert Evans?

  Yeah. I'm going to quote from Cole's article in The Intercept again. By 2007, when Howard and Red Squadron showed up with their hatchets in Iraq, internal reports, according to a former SEAL Team Six leader with direct knowledge of operators using the weapons to hack dead and dying militants, were provided to both commanding officers of SEAL Team Six at the time, Captain Scott Moore and his deputy captain Tim Sizmansky. Howard, who declined to answer questions from The Intercept, rallied his SEALs and others before missions and deployments by telling them to bloody the hatchet. One SEAL I spoke with said that Howard's words were meant to be inspirational, like those of a coach, and were not in order to use the hatchets to commit war crimes. Others were much more critical. Howard was often heard asking his operators whether they'd gotten "blood on your hatchet" when they returned from a deployment.

• 34:15Speaker 01

  Right. And also, it's like, because of course you don't use, you, you're only ever going to use your hatchet on someone who is helpless.

• 34:23Robert Evans?

  Right, because it's not a great weapon in a modern war.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:27Robert Evans?

  Exactly. The odds that you will be in a situation where the only way to defend yourself is a fucking tomahawk in the 2000s, and you're festooned with guns and also better fighting knives, like, it's just nonsense.

• 34:42Robert Evans?

  So I quoted earlier that Team Six officer who talked about how some of the Red Team guys like experience a metamorphosis of identity and persona and start believing they're Native American warriors. Well, this guy told Cole about the tomahawks. Guys are going out every night and killing everything. The hatchet was too intimate, too closely aligned with a tomahawk to have been a good idea. The former SEAL, who himself had served in Red during his career, said that by giving operators the weapon of their battlefield persona, Howard sent an unmistakable message to his men. "Use it. That's when you take away a hatchet," the retired SEAL said, "not provide them."

• 35:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 35:18Robert Evans?

  And this guy, he really is talking, that retired SEAL is talking about like SEALs like kids? And again, you kind of have to treat soldiers that way because a lot of them basically are.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:27Robert Evans?

  Right, this is reality. We send kids to war.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  They're like young men, young, young men.

• 35:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 35:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:32Robert Evans?

  Yeah. So maybe you don't give them hatchets if you don't want people to use the fucking hatchets.

• 35:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You're gonna, you're gonna hurt someone. You're gonna, some shit's gonna, it's not gonna turn out well.

• 35:42Robert Evans?

  And it's going to make all the Iraqis talk about, you know, these maniac Americans are just chopping up civilians to death? And then some of them will go blow up Americans.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 35:51Robert Evans?

  And they'll kind of be right to do so.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 35:54Robert Evans?

  In the years since Marcinco left the Boy Scouts, Team Six leadership had really emphasized the ability of highly trained SEALs to discriminate as key to their value. SEALs don't hit people who aren't a threat, right? That mostly held in the very earliest days of the war, but it kind of, it starts to crumble pretty quick, right? SEALs initially who fail at this, who hit civilians, as we talked about, it's happening very quickly. And initially, they're forced out of the teams if they do that, right? But within a few years, that stopped happening as much. As Cole writes in Code Over Country, in 2007, for example, a gold squadron sniper was pushed out, according to a former SEAL Team Six leader, after he killed three unarmed people, including a child, in at least two different operations. He was allowed to return to the regular SEAL teams.

• 36:39Robert Evans?

  No investigation into an unjustified killing has ever resulted in formal disciplinary action against a member of SEAL Team Six.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 36:47Robert Evans?

  Probably, probably not great.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  Unsurprising, but yeah.

• 36:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The SEALs also continued their long working relationship with the CIA during the GWAT. In 2008, gold squadron operators deployed near Jalalabad with CIA officers for a raid on an insurgent cell. SEALs were ordered to capture and detain six men sleeping inside. Instead, all six sleeping men were canoed. The CIA guy who was with them, who himself was a retired SEAL, the CIA sends like a former SEAL with this unit to monitor them, and he's pissed and he complains to his bosses that like, these guys just murdered everybody. Like, we had them dead to rights, they were asleep, and they just shoot everybody in the head to take pictures of them, basically.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 37:27Robert Evans?

  And so the CIA gets pissed and starts complaining to the SEALs. And this erupts in a massive conflict between SEAL Team Six and CIA officers stationed in Kabul. The SEALs, like SEAL leadership kind of gets involved eventually, and there's a deal made with the CIA Station Chief. Gold Squadron's redeployed back to the United States. And there's like a period in which the SEALs are kind of like pulled in a bit, right? They're stopped from like operating in the way that they had been temporarily as things are, there's like attempts that are made to kind of like reform some of the disciplinary problems that have become too obvious to ignore. But complaints like these, not just from the CIA, but from regular Army and Navy units and from Afghan officials, continue to build.

• 38:09Robert Evans?

  And the Navy never really does much more and the SEAL Command never does just much more than like rotate a guy or rotate a unit. There's no desire for accountability. They're not punishing people, right?

• 38:20Speaker 01

  Of course.

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  And they're not, they're not fixing the problem, you know?

• 38:24Robert Evans?

  So Admiral William McRaven becomes head of JSOC and he pulls Team Six temporarily, this is right around the time Obama gets elected, and he pulls Team Six temporarily back from action. And then he pauses SEAL and JSOC operations for two weeks in February of 2009 as reforms are sketched out and hastily attempted. So after Obama gets in, people are sick of the uglier, ugliest days of the war on terror, what they assume will be the ugliest days of the war on terror. And, you know, Obama puts McRaven in a guy who'd been fired from the SEAL Team Six by Marcinco for being too much of a wet blanket. So he, at least seems like a good guy actually to give that job, right? And initially, it seems like he's going to lead, cause some like major reforms, but he never gets enough of a handle on this unit.

• 39:07Robert Evans?

  He's, because it's kind of impossible for him to, the way the unit culture is. I shouldn't say impossible. He never tries hard enough. That's the issue, really. He never makes it that much of a priority because it's kind of scary.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. Like, we just have like a group of entitled psychos.

• 39:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And they're fucking shit up for the rest of the military.

• 39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's like, you know, you, you fuck with them enough. It's just like, they're coming after you, who knows? Like, they're, none of them are like not above that, clearly.

• 39:40Robert Evans?

  Yeah, the American people seem to be really into them, you know? It's kind of hard to just like go after these guys. And, you know, that doesn't, that's not an excuse, but I think that's why McRaven, that's why none of this is going to go as far as it ought to.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  No one's incentivized to really fix them.

• 39:53Robert Evans?

  So some of the intended reforms involved stuff like requiring SEALs to do callouts before raiding a compound to where they're like, hey, we're about to go in there. So like women and children can get to safety and maybe some people could like surrender. But the SEALs complain, well, we lose the element of surprise when we do this. And I guess what I say to that is like, hey, dipshits, if you want to be treated like heroes, you gotta act like it. That would mean like taking extra risk on yourself to avoid hurting civilians, which is like what would make you special as special forces. It kind of seems like you're just forces.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 40:24Robert Evans?

  You know? Like, I could put together a group of guys capable of shooting sleeping people to death. I think anyone could. It's not hard, like mentally maybe, but technically, doesn't take a lot of training.

• 40:36Speaker 01

  Especially, again, when you have fucking the Air Force and an army behind you, which seems to be what you also require.

• 40:44Robert Evans?

  Right. So McRaven's reforms attempted with mixed success to reduce the amount of corpse mutilation as well. All of these attempts at reform ran into two issues. Marcinco's insistence on SEALs covering for each other had only grown more entrenched in Team Six and had spread to other teams. The other issue is that the Pentagon and the president needed the SEALs more than ever once Obama took the White House, because a big thing for Obama is going to be keeping the operational footprint low, as few guys as possible in there, but still killing people. That's part of why we have drones and that's why special forces are really convenient.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  The war crimes don't stop, come on.

• 41:19Robert Evans?

  No, no, they just changed their clothes. So, speaking of people who change their clothes, I don't know, here's an ad.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:29Robert Evans?

  Boom.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  Cash flow crunch? OnDeck's small business line of credit gives your business immediate access to funds, up to $200,000, right when you need it. Cover seasonal dips, manage payroll, restock inventory, or tackle unexpected expenses without missing a beat. With flexible draws, transparent pricing, and control over repayment, get funded quickly and confidently. Apply today at ondeck.com. Funds could be available as soon as tomorrow. Depending on certain loan attributes, your business loan may be issued by OnDeck or Celtic Bank. OnDeck does not lend in North Dakota. All loans and amounts subject to lender approval. I'm Melissa Jelton, and in my new podcast, What Happened to Her? I'm bringing you new stories and conversations every week. Stories about women whose deaths were too quickly ruled a suicide.

• 42:15Speaker 07

  She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety.

• 42:21Speaker 04

  Stories of survival. The only difference between me and her, frankly, was a little bit of luck. Because by all rights, I should be dead. Cases that everyone else called closed.

• 42:32Speaker 07

  They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence.

• 42:36Speaker 04

  These stories all start in the same place, with a woman failed by a system that didn't believe her, that didn't protect her, that didn't see her. No child should ever experience that.

• 42:47Speaker 07

  And we were babies. She did all of these brave things and came out and spoke about it, and he got a year.

• 42:55Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 43:01Speaker 04

  Listen to What Happened to Her on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 43:08Speaker 07

  Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 43:11Speaker 03

  Here's what you missed.

• 43:12Speaker 06

  And the argument is, do you want to win? If you don't win, you have no power.

• 43:20Speaker 07

  It's real.

• 43:21Speaker 06

  Those are the very people who I always say vote against their own economic interests, and they complain about the very thing they're receiving.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  It's raw.

• 43:27Speaker 06

  I knew that the issue of transgender athletes was not going well with a lot of black men.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Roland Martin Unfiltered.

• 43:37Speaker 06

  I went off, I said, this is exactly what I'm talking about. Y'all gonna scream at Chanel, but you don't want to see a black luxury company in the same vein.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 43:51Speaker 06

  12 seats, those are moving south. So if you Democrats, you don't wait to 2030, you better be hitting the ground going hard in the South now.

• 44:01Speaker 07

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 44:13Robert Evans?

  2009 is the year the Navy SEALs rescued Captain Phillips from those Somali pirates. If you've seen the movie about this with Tom Hanks playing Captain Phillips, you know the basics, right? There's a very famous moment. Phillips is trapped in this tiny lifeboat with three pirates, and there's like a $30,000 in cash. Because when he'd been kidnapped off the boat, they had like petty cash that he took to try to like, here, maybe take the cash and don't kidnap the boat. Didn't work out. So Phillips, three pirates, and that bag of cash, which is important, are in this tiny covered boat. And the Team Six drops, like, they drop into the water and like, I guess, get to the boats or whatever. A handful of Team Six snipers, who are like stationed on a naval vessel, and they like, there's this whole process where they get to tow the vessel in and negotiate.

• 44:58Robert Evans?

  And the snipers are waiting until they can hit. In the movie, the snipers are waiting the whole time until they can see all three simultaneously, to drop them all simultaneously. Because that's the only way to save the hostage from getting killed in counterfire, right? And in the movie, this all goes very quickly and cleanly, and one assumes legally and according to plan. That's not true.

• 45:17Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 45:17Robert Evans?

  That movie is not fully accurate. President Obama had only authorized Admiral McRaven, in charge of the operation, to use deadly force if it was immediately necessary to save the captain. But McRaven is managing the op remotely. He's, I think, he's in Afghanistan, I think, it might have been Iraq. But I think it's, he's not anywhere near the operation. He's in a different country in an operation center. And there's an officer and the SEALs on the ground are commanding the actual effort. So Raven, he thinks he's got, he should have clout, he's in charge, but SEALs don't like to listen, right? And because the way McRaven gave the orders to the SEALs, they technically felt that, well, the way he phrased the orders, we could technically shoot whenever we feel the timing is best. Even though he doesn't really want them to shoot.

• 46:02Robert Evans?

  So McRaven does not want this to end in bloodshed. His hope is that negotiations could still work. But these SEAL Team Six guys are some of the pirate type. And they respect McRaven no more than Marcinco had when he'd fired the dude. So, as soon as they get a chance to shoot all three pirates, they shoot them all without asking for approval. Now, in the movie, have you seen that movie, Andrew?

• 46:23Speaker 01

  I have, a long time ago.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  I've seen it, yeah.

• 46:26Robert Evans?

  They all, they all die in the movie, right away. SEALs are incredible. They never, they would never, like, there's no wounded man left alive. Perfectly surgical, brilliant. That's not accurate. So after they drop these guys, two officers make their way to the lifeboat. They're like crawling over rope to get there. One of them's got a knife in his teeth, you know, because it looks really fucking badass. And when he arrives, he finds Phillips in the boat with one surviving wounded pirate. Phillips is unharmed, and the pirate does not appear to have been armed or capable of harming anybody. And I want to emphasize this, because the Navy SEAL with the knife kills the pirate as soon as he enters. Now, I know what you're thinking, and how Hollywood would depict this if they'd chosen to show that a Navy SEAL stabbed that man to death as like one really cool surgical motion, like a badass.

• 47:10Robert Evans?

  Because like, that's what it would be if this guy was a danger, and you only had a knife to defend yourself, you'd have to quickly use it. Fucking horseshit. You want to know how many times this Navy SEAL stabs this unarmed pirate kid who's wounded?

• 47:24Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm sure I don't, but...

• 47:26Robert Evans?

  91 times!

• 47:28Speaker 01

  Right, right. He's like a prison assassin.

• 47:30Robert Evans?

  Special training. He's a, he's a trained knife fighter, yeah. No, he's just fucking around with a knife and a wounded kid. You might also remember from that movie, that $30,000 that's supposed to be there? Whatever happened to that? Here's code of our country. Quote, "FBI agents inspected the lifeboat after it had been towed up to the Bain Bridge, documenting the crime scene and the evidence. Captain Phillips told investigators he'd seen the $30,000 in cash he'd given his captors during the ordeal on the lifeboat, and at one point felt it when his captors gave him a bag to lean against. Yet the FBI agents couldn't locate it aboard the lifeboat. The vessel had been monitored second by second throughout the standoff, and no one had seen anything go overboard. No one could account for the disappearance of the cash. Investigators zeroed in on two SEALs, the operators who first boarded the lifeboat.

• 48:14Robert Evans?

  The FBI and NCIS conducted an investigation, during which the two operators submitted to a polygraph. The results were inconclusive. The SEALs were never charged, and the money was never recovered."

• 48:25Robert Evans?

  Cool. Now, I might say, the Navy SEALs have a documented history from Vietnam of stealing money, at least in Vietnam, to spend on drugs. Maybe that's what happened here? I don't know, I wasn't there. But that didn't make it into the movie.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  It's also rough that the best tool we have against this is a polygraph, AKA nothing.

• 48:46Robert Evans?

  A polygraph, the thing that doesn't work? Yeah, it's all pretty silly. And it's like, again, the, this is like the operation that is the most like, why you would think someone would justify the existence of the SEALs? This incredibly nuanced, difficult rescue that only people trained to do like, three simultaneous shots like that could have pulled it off. But maybe those shots didn't need to be taken?

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 49:08Robert Evans?

  And also, what certainly didn't need to happen is like, a kid gets stabbed 91 times after he was already taken out of account, and $30,000 gets stolen?

• 49:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, again, the shots need to get taken, because otherwise, how are they gonna get that 30K, gee?

• 49:20Robert Evans?

  How are they gonna get that money? McRaven and Obama are both really pissed off initially. But that gets kept quiet, because this whole event is riotously popular to Americans, who largely ignore what happened afterwards, you know? They're just big fans of these SEALs! This increasingly becomes a pattern with the Navy SEALs, who due to their fame and the need the Pentagon has for pipe hitters with a low operational footprint, become increasingly immune to consequences and oversight the more famous they get. The same year that happens, Richard Marcinco's highly fictionalized life is turned into a video game, the same year as Captain Phillips. This video game is called Rogue Warrior, and, boy, I wish I'd gotten to play it. Did you play it?

• 50:01Speaker 01

  I don't, I, they all kind of blend together, to me. The sort of Call of Duties and Rainbow Sixes and all this shit.

• 50:08Robert Evans?

  From that era, yeah.

• 50:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:10Robert Evans?

  Yeah, this is Rainbow Six-esque. I found a review in the Bad Game Hall of Fame, that's pretty fun. The original design concept for Rogue Warrior was an ambitious thing. Set in present-day North Korea, the game would have seen players control a squad led by Richard "Demo Dick" Marcinco as you relieved the country of their nuclear launch capabilities. This campaign would have provided optional four-player cooperative play, presumably allowing each player to take the role of one of the squad's individual members. The role of Richard Marcinco would be played by actor Mickey Rourke, fresh off from his Academy Award-nominated performance as Randy the Ram Robinson in 2008's The Wrestler. In a press release put out by Bethesda in cooperation with Blindlight LLC, an organization established to facilitate the involvement of Hollywood actors in video games, the game's executive producer Todd Vaughn is quoted as saying,

• 50:55Robert Evans?

  "Mickey Rourke absolutely 100% captures Marcinco's raw and gritty personality."

• 51:00Speaker 01

  That, actually, that part does seem about right.

• 51:02Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 51:02Robert Evans?

  I gotta play you audio from this, guys. We need to hear this together. This is a selection on YouTube of all of Mickey Rourke's quotes from Rogue Warrior.

• 51:13Speaker 05

  Fuck you asshole. You gotta be fucking kidding me. Bring the noise, bitch. Send me the bill, cocksuckers. I got bullets for every one of those motherfuckers. Karl Marx, fuck Karl Marx, he's a big fucking faggot pussy. Suck my balls, my hairy fucking big balls. Wrap them around your fucking mouth. Goddamn cock breath, Tommy motherfuckers! Drop dead, motherfucker, you fucking amateurs! Hey, man, fighting, it only makes it worse. Just die like the little motherfucker you are.

• 51:37Robert Evans?

  Okay, okay, I think that's enough.

• 51:39Speaker 04

  Is this an episode of Sons of Anarchy? What's happening?

• 51:44Speaker 01

  At a certain point, it did start to feel improvised.

• 51:47Robert Evans?

  It does, it does. Shouldn't they just let Mickey Rourke go after a while?

• 51:50Speaker 04

  Just saying slurs and shit?

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, like, it feels like, it feels like, at the end of that tape, he goes like, okay, I'm ready.

• 51:58Robert Evans?

  Okay, I'm ready? It feels like his contract was just a case of tequila.

• 52:04Speaker 01

  Holy shit.

• 52:06Robert Evans?

  But I didn't know that would make it much different from The Wrestler. Um, great movie, though, honestly.

• 52:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:12Robert Evans?

  Really funny. Really funny stuff from Mickey Rourke here. Yeah, I don't know. We could talk more about what happens in that game, but the plot is fucking nonsense and very silly and, and, and just, I think it's, I just wanted you guys to hear Mickey Rourke pretend to be Richard Marsenko before we talk about Osama bin Laden and the Abbottabad raid in Pakistan that kills bin Laden and makes SEAL Team Six a household name, right?

• 52:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:37Robert Evans?

  Now, the raid isn't worth going into in a ton of detail here. That's not really what we do. There's movies that you can find all, and a lot of, we all, most people like lived through this and remember the media coverage, right? What I'll tell you is that like wasn't in a lot of media coverage, which is that the SEALs who were present seemed to pretty universally agree. It was like a comparatively simple and easy mission, even though one of the books about it, I think is called No Easy Day.

• 52:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 52:59Robert Evans?

  But like, this is actually like kind of a cakewalk.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:01Robert Evans?

  You know? Yeah. Only one of bin Laden's people even got off a shot and he was dropped pretty much immediately. I could do a whole episode, honestly, on bastardry in this mission, but for now, what you need to know is that, again, of the two, two of the Team Six guys who were there that day, wrote books about having killed bin, the guy who shot and killed bin Laden. We know neither of them did it, right?

• 53:22Speaker 01

  I mean, also, those guys, at the very least, if the Navy SEALs are gonna like just create a corps of fantasists, a SEAL rule should have to be, these two guys have to fight to the death.

• 53:35Robert Evans?

  Right, right. Before one of them can write a book.

• 53:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:39Robert Evans?

  What's very funny is that reports indicate Bissonnet and O'Neill, the two guys who like write the, these conflicting books, were friends at one point and initially planned to co-author a book on the raid, but they like broke up before it happened and they were both, it seems like they were kind of competing the day of the raid to try to get there first. And both of them accused of having like exposed their teammates in some ways while trying to do that. One of these dudes actually shoots bin Laden after he's dead in the head and is like, I had to do it, he was still alive. But it like, it makes it harder to identify the body and so they have to like, take it back and stuff and it increases risk for the whole unit, basically. The time that this adds to the mission. The main thing you should take away from the real, what actually happened in Abbottabad

• 54:23Robert Evans?

  is that by the time the mission to kill bin Laden happened, two of the 23 SEALs present that day entered action with an active plan to profit from their experiences.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 54:32Robert Evans?

  And this was important enough to these men, the best of the best, that they were willing to endanger themselves and their teammates and the mission to get it done. The second of these books came out in 2014, two years after the movie Zero Dark Thirty was released based on the raid. Over those same years, Navy SEALs were elected to Congress, published multiple bestselling books, and in general grew to become a massive brand, which they are to this day. For his part, Richard Marsenko spent the global war on terror years trying with minimal success to become a media pundit. He really wanted to be like a right wing influencer. And he just didn't have the mental agility. He wasn't in with the new technology enough, I don't think, to really make it.

• 55:09Speaker 01

  It's honestly surprising he isn't, like.

• 55:12Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:13Robert Evans?

  He was never very good at the internet. Yeah. In 2006, he wrote an op ed complaining that the media was being too mean about US torture at Abu Ghraib. He operated a private consulting firm called Red Cell International, giving security consulting, and he hosted a right wing talk show. Not good at that.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  It could be right wing dirty work. Like Joe Rogan could start it, like genuinely, if Daily Wire had any juice, they'd be doing shit like that.

• 55:40Robert Evans?

  I just love the idea of his like Red Cell and consulting firm being like, yeah, so your first real security issue is you gotta have a lady willing to shoot any one of my guys the instant they try to like break into your house. Arm your wife and tell her to shoot at anyone who looks like me.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Just like, or does anyone fight back, honestly?

• 55:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah. Uh, his main claim to fame in the 21st century is that in the year 2000, Richard Marsenko worked with Ron Howard on the Grinch movie with Jim Carrey?

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Perfect.

• 56:11Robert Evans?

  People, people have heard about this. The way it's usually described is that the, the makeup and costume Jim Carrey was wearing was so fucking awful and horrible that they had to bring in a Navy SEAL to talk to him about like, like techniques that you're taught in like Sari to resist torture.

• 56:26Speaker 01

  Oh, sure.

• 56:27Robert Evans?

  Right? In order for him to endure it. And I'd heard that for, and I was like, I guess that makes sense. Like those guys do get taught those techniques. That's like a real thing. I didn't realize it was Marsenko.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  That's so crazy. What are the odds?

• 56:40Robert Evans?

  So, yeah, he probably got an IMDb, IMDb credit for fucking the Grinch movie.

• 56:44Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. As like, as like a costume consultant?

• 56:48Robert Evans?

  So, it's like, I don't know what they would, I don't know if he's actually credited, but he gets brought in for that.

• 56:52Speaker 01

  Oh, my God. That's so amazing. So for, for essentially, by the way, just doing the Calm app.

• 56:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. The Calm app? Says Jim Carrey doesn't hate being the Grinch so much?

• 57:04Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:05Robert Evans?

  Marsenko died of a heart attack, fucking finally, on December 25th, 2001. He was 81 years old.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Oh, my God.

• 57:13Robert Evans?

  21, Jesus, 2021. He was 81 years old.

• 57:17Speaker 01

  That's wild. Yeah.

• 57:19Robert Evans?

  Mm-hmm. Long life.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  Listen, usually those guys never die, so.

• 57:24Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 57:24Speaker 01

  Good for, good for mostly alcohol, probably.

• 57:28Robert Evans?

  Yeah. He, he, he really, it was a rough story, most of that, but right at that, the end there, I was on the same page as Richard. He finally did something I can support.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:40Robert Evans?

  I don't know. Andrew? Plugables?

• 57:43Speaker 01

  All right, well, uh, hardly any war crimes over at Star Trek for a new podcast, which is still on the same, it's like the same feed as Yozus racist, uh, which we're putting on hold for a little while. Um, it's me, Tony Newsom, Jesse Gender. Uh, again, I've watched almost no Star Trek intentionally and they've watched a ton, so I'm just, uh, just going through it. They're telling me what the hell's going on. It's fun. We're, we're all, uh, writers in some way, TV writers and, and just making, you know, I know about, I know how TV is made, but don't know how Star Trek is made. Turns out those are pretty different, actually.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  Interesting.

• 58:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:21Robert Evans?

  Yeah, that makes sense. Well, I know how Behind the Bastards is made and it's not made anymore today because you've listened to it. So go away. We'll be back next week.

• 58:30Speaker 04

  Shoo, shoo, shoo.

• 58:35Speaker 07

  Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Full video episodes of Behind the Bastards are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit Remind Me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips and our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards. We love about 40% of you, statistically speaking.

• 59:09Speaker 04

  I'm Melissa Jelton, host of the What Happened to Her podcast. We're kicking off the season with the Sandra Birchmore story, a case the police wrote off as a suicide in a snowstorm. Her family never bought it and the man they suspected wore a badge.

• 59:24Speaker 05

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform.

• 59:29Speaker 04

  And you can get access to all episodes 100% ad-free with an iHeart True Crime Plus subscription exclusively on Apple Podcasts, available only to iHeart True Crime Plus subscribers. So don't wait. Head to Apple Podcasts, search for iHeart True Crime Plus and subscribe today. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin Unfiltered podcast?

• 59:51Speaker 06

  Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, oh damn, wait, hold up. They changed all of that? Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed a reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the Black Information Network.

• 1:00:11Speaker 03

  And download Roland Martin Unfiltered on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:00:17Speaker 02

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.