Part One: Richard Marcinko: The Founder of SEAL Team 6

This week Robert tells Andrew Ti the story of Richard Marcinko, the founder of SEAL Team 6 and patient zero of tacticool "operator" culture. (4 Part Series) Sources: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1989/07/14/navy-retiree-arms-maker-indicted/e175edc4-e44d-4f4c-ba0f-750f393a9e87/ https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/27/us/richard-marcinko-dead.html https://www.nytimes.com/1992/04/19/books/in-short-nonfiction-731592.html?searchResultPosition=1 https://archive.is/F9PY3 https://www.forever-wars.com/teamwork/ https://www.wired.com/2011/02/special-opsforces-could-use-a-breather-commander/?ref=forever-wars.com https://www.badgamehalloffame.com/rogue-warrior/ https://archive.is/UX4bb#selection-1973.0-1973.503 https://www.cbsnews.com/news/a-different-era-a-different-seal/ https://www.yahoo.com/news/story-richard-marcinko-rejected-marines-144219526.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACuQ4Uwa-deYGH3XjHUkjzLSSNtHqywJJmLzQ6p8IQ47bxUuctt558PTcUjQopVO5YciWUSCa8-Vxb0kWB1ru5BVsttBWLxFZkebdt8pDo925e2bdtxWqLPqTtMuO_lXu-KISzYfRbk351GO4GeoWkNX4ejReU448VUaoAGQwplC https://www.yahoo.com/news/story-richard-marcinko-rejected-marines-144219526.html?guccounter=1&guce_referrer=aHR0cHM6Ly93d3cuZ29vZ2xlLmNvbS8&guce_referrer_sig=AQAAACuQ4Uwa-deYGH3XjHUkjzLSSNtHqywJJmLzQ6p8IQ47bxUuctt558PTcUjQopVO5YciWUSCa8-Vxb0kWB1ru5BVsttBWLxFZkebdt8pDo925e2bdtxWqLPqTtMuO_lXu-KISzYfRbk351GO4GeoWkNX4ejReU448VUaoAGQwplC https://www.businessinsider.com/6-wild-facts-about-the-deadly-creator-of-seal-team-6-2018-8?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=yahoo.com https://www.businessinsider.com/6-wild-facts-about-the-deadly-creator-of-seal-team-6-2018-8?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=yahoo.com https://tacticalshit.com/shocking-epstein-files-claim-seal-team-six-founder-richard-marcinko-implicated-in-mexico-child-sex-ring-allegations/ https://mexiconewsdaily.com/news/epstein-files-mexico-ambassador/ https://www.twz.com/43667/enlisted-seal-team-six-operators-piloted-leased-aircraft-according-to-founder-richard-marcinko https://medium.com/@petraivanigova/performance-vs-trust-why-trust-always-wins-cde97726db2e https://archive.is/gGQVq#selection-3243.0-3261.472 https://archive.is/ZAqW0#selection-6121.0-6125.172 https://calhoun.nps.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/7df2b114-d722-4b5b-b013-29375b27c3af/content https://archive.is/8R1RB#selection-2665.0-2687.182 https://archive.org/details/roguewarrior0000marc_o0n9/page/n375/mode/1up 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, the only podcast that you're listening to right now unless you have multiple sets of ears or have had some sort of invasive surgery to like add additional like, like hearing organs to your body so that your life is one undifferentiated cacophony of noise. And if you have done that, why?

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Okay, I have an answer because I could produce more podcasts. It would make me-

• 0:31Robert Evans?

  Yeah, Sophie, you are the one person who needs-

• 0:33Speaker 02

  Grindset, baby.

• 0:34Robert Evans?

  Yeah, grindset. That's right. That's right. Wire all of the audio directly into your brain. Speaking of things I want to wire into my brain, Andrew T., one of my very favorite guests. How are you doing, buddy?

• 0:47Speaker 02

  That's available. Like, we could probably make that a product.

• 0:50Speaker 01

  Andrew's hair is long, is also so long and luscious now.

• 0:54Robert Evans?

  I know. Andrew Beach Boys T.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  We're at a moderate. I know. Yeah, it's summer. It's summer. It's maybe never gonna stop being summer in Southern California.

• 1:03Robert Evans?

  That's right. It is always summer in Southern California.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  At this point. Um, yeah. Maybe perpetually. I had the most distressing thing that happened to me is I went to Santa Barbara and distressing but not, um, I guess box crab is now very, very readily available in Santa Barbara when it didn't used to be necessarily in such-

• 1:25Robert Evans?

  I'm gonna need you to-

• 1:25Speaker 02

  ...

• 1:26Robert Evans?

  Box crab?

• 1:27Speaker 02

  Box crab.

• 1:28Robert Evans?

  Like, like the animal?

• 1:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30Robert Evans?

  Oh, okay, okay, okay. I thought, was it like a restaurant? Okay, like, literally the animal box.

• 1:35Speaker 02

  No, the animal is available. The little delicious spiky guys. And the way the, the, like Fisher guy and the, um, like restaurant people were talking, I, I mean, they know it's climate change.

• 1:48Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 1:48Speaker 02

  But I think they're like, they're trying not to talk about it. It's just like-

• 1:52Robert Evans?

  It bums everybody out.

• 1:54Speaker 02

  All of a sudden, I guess, I don't know, I, crabs just decide they want to live here now.

• 1:59Robert Evans?

  A lot of stuff suddenly changed.

• 2:04Robert Evans?

  Well, Andrew, you are, normally, you've put it on pause. You're the host of a podcast called Yo, Is This Racist?

• 2:11Speaker 02

  That's correct.

• 2:12Robert Evans?

  That's right. And you are, you are pausing it to do a Star Trek show with Tony Neesum and Jesse Gender, right?

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, we're, we're, I think we can cleanly say we're, we're doing the Star Trek show as the main thing. Yo, Is This Racist might come back. But yeah, we're doing Starter Trek. That's a show where Tony and Jesse are huge. Tony was on Star Trek. Jesse loves Star Trek, knows so much about it. They both know more than me because I only ever watched Star Trek extremely stoned in syndication. So I recognize shit. Basically, every episode is me doing the Leonardo DiCaprio meme of like pointing at the screen like, I know that, but I don't understand it. Like, it's been in my eyes before, but I don't know what the fuck it is, or what the context is, or what the history is. So.

• 3:01Robert Evans?

  Well, that is exciting. But I figured this week, we could give Yo, Is This Racist fans one last little hurrah, because I want to ask you an Is This Racist question.

• 3:11Speaker 02

  Oh, good. Oh, yeah, yeah. Maybe I'll just, I'll bring back Yo, Is This Racist just for here.

• 3:16Robert Evans?

  Is this racist? The Navy SEALs.

• 3:22Speaker 02

  I, listen, my only, like, experience with this train of thought is that, that people, people generally say that, like, law enforcement and military, the higher up you get, like, the closer to boots on the ground, like, regular ass, like, you know, guys with no impulse control and anger issues, boots on the ground, the more racist it is. So I think there's, my, my guess is, I feel like there's a chance that it's less racist than your average Navy man.

• 3:58Robert Evans?

  That is, that's actually not true, at least as regards the US military. And I, I mean, How we determine the amount of racism in something, but the military as a whole is fairly diverse, like the US military is a very diverse institution. Special forces, particularly the highest echelons of special forces are a lot whiter than the rest of the military.

• 4:19Speaker 02

  Sure, that makes sense.

• 4:20Robert Evans?

  To a degree that's kind of uncomfortable when you also look at like where some former Delta guys who are now political figures and some former SEALs wind up.

• 4:29Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 4:30Robert Evans?

  This episode is not actually about the Navy SEALs as a whole, but we are talking about SEAL Team Six. This is gonna be a two-part episode because I want to talk about how SEAL Team Six went from like, you know, another special forces unit where they were, the term you would hear a lot was like, quiet professionals, you know? These guys are incredibly good at what they do and they don't talk about it because that's kind of the point of like special ops, right? To now like every third Navy SEAL, or at least Team Six guy, it seems like has a fucking book and a podcast and they're all over the media, they're running, they're fucking Republican congresspeople, you know? So how did we get there? And how did we simultaneously get to the point where like, the Navy SEALs are now way

• 5:13Robert Evans?

  better known for their scandals, for shit like Eddie Gallagher stabbing a 16-year-old kid in the neck for a reenlistment ceremony in Mosul than they are for even like fucking killing Bin Laden? And all of this comes back. Like, the reason why all of the shit with the Navy SEALs is as messy and as fame-hungry and as crimey as it is today, it all starts with the guy who founded SEAL Team Six, a fella I can't wait to tell you about, named Richard Marcinko. Have you ever heard of Richard?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Nope.

• 5:43Robert Evans?

  Oh, yeah. Well, this is gonna be a hoot.

• 5:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, can't wait.

• 5:54Robert Evans?

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• 7:29Robert Evans?

  So, before we talk about him, I want to kind of lead you in to the reason I wanted to talk about this at all, which is that the Navy SEALs and like the kind of Special Forces look, the operator look, is one of the more dominant, like, styles in American pop culture these days? And this is, you can see this all over the fuckin' internet. If you happen to be particularly a male who has looked up anything related to firearms or survival gear or talked about that stuff on social media-

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Or how to sharpen a knife, can I just say?

• 8:00Robert Evans?

  Or how to sharpen a knife, yeah.

• 8:01Speaker 02

  That's how my YouTube algorithm got poisoned. I literally was trying to learn how to sharpen knives during lockdown.

• 8:06Robert Evans?

  A very valuable skill.

• 8:07Speaker 02

  Immediately, like, within like 20 minutes.

• 8:12Speaker 02

  It was like Nazi shit. It was incredible, actually.

• 8:15Robert Evans?

  Yeah. And so if you're, if you have done stuff like that on the internet, you've probably run across ads on your social media feed that look something like this. And Sophie's gonna put it out. It's an ad for, it says, "The Pipe Hitters Union." They're advertising their spring break special, 15% off storewide. And there's like a picture behind the ad of, you can just sort of see close in the center of a man's chest. He's wearing body armor. He's got like a tattooed hand and it's holding, he's holding an AR-15 across his chest in like a low ready, right?

• 8:44Speaker 01

  Not the Pipe Hitters Union, honey.

• 8:47Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  Honey!

• 8:48Robert Evans?

  The Pipe Hitters Union, yeah.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Honey!

• 8:52Robert Evans?

  This is, he's got, you can also see his like chin. There's a slight shadow of a beard. This is like a very clear sort of tactical apparel look, which is based on the look of US Special Forces operators. Now, the fact that this business sells tactical and Special Forces themed apparel should be obvious from the context of the ad. But what are pipe hitters? Have you guys heard that term before?

• 9:15Speaker 02

  I just assumed it was, you know, weed smokers, bro.

• 9:19Speaker 01

  That, and just in my, I've heard that in a girly pop conversation.

• 9:25Robert Evans?

  No, definitely not. That's not what it means. So, the short answer for what pipe hitters are is it's a modern synonym for like a Special Forces badass who kills people for the US government. And the long answer is that pipe hitters are a big, like, pipe hitters are why the US can't win wars anymore, right? The pipe hitter ethos and ideology has locked us into this sort of, I would argue, this kind of mental way of looking at how conflict should proceed that makes us incapable of actually winning most of the fights that we start. Anyway, it would be accurate to point out that the term pipe hitter has now crossed into the civilian world, as this ad shows, and become a general way for guys who think they're badasses to brand themselves. Now, much like the word "based," the term's

• 10:06Robert Evans?

  origins start in drug lingo, which also, by the way, Special Forces, massive drug problems. Like, there's a fuckload of drug issues all across US Special Forces.

• 10:17Speaker 02

  Right, right, right.

• 10:18Robert Evans?

  And a pipe hitter, originally, the lingo originally is someone who smoked particularly opium from a pipe, although some people will say crack, but I do think it's more from opium, just based on when it started being said. And here's how-

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Because these were dudes in Afghanistan, presumably, right?

• 10:34Robert Evans?

  I mean, and before, yeah. For sure. But I think Vietnam too. But here's how The Soldiers Project describes the military origins of the phrase. "It gained widespread popularity among the Special Forces and SEALs after it was featured in the iconic movie Pulp Fiction. The term was associated with someone who could be depended upon in the midst of combat. And the military usage of the term 'pipe hitter' was initially a description heavily trained operators used for themselves. It was an internal term, right? If you were a Green Beret or a SEAL guy, a SEAL team guy, right? Or a Delta guy, you might call yourself and your buddies a pipe hitter, or pipe hitters, right? But today, it's more commonly an aspirational term used by people who are desperate to embody it and usually seek to do so for buying things, right?

• 11:16Robert Evans?

  And here's a fun example, from the Student of the Gun Company, which offers tactical training and books like "The Pipe Hitter's Guide to the Citizens or Regular Defense Corps." For $10.99, what a deal! And you can see the cover of this self-published book, there's like four schlubby-looking dudes with, it looks like AK, various AK-style guns and like quasi-civilian tactical gear in like a grayscale foggy photo of a city behind them that looks kind of post-apocalyptic. And the best way I can describe like the way these men are dressed is like it's race, riot, or chic, right? Like, that's how they all look. They're all dressed like Kyle Rittenhouse a little.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, or how Kyle Rittenhouse thinks he's dressing.

• 11:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah. The product description of this book reads as follows. "Building upon the widespread popularity of the original Pipe Hitter's Guide, this book will take the lessons from the original text and build upon them. The Citizens or Regular Defense Corps is a modern incarnation of many successful programs used throughout history for the defense of a community during times of crisis." And I intended to look up that first Pipe Hitter's book and I found myself falling down a rabbit hole of related text, including "A Pipe Hitter's Guide to Access Denial" and "A Pipe Hitter's Guide to Small Arms and Weapons." Both of these are by Nicholas Orr. And I had to look into this guy. So I found Nicholas Orr's personal website, and it turns out that name is, quote, "The nom de plume for a civilized barbarian, a savage gentleman with 30-plus years of operational and combat experience in the..."

• 12:44Robert Evans?

  United States and overseas. The author has carried a gun during innumerable assignments worldwide as a member of the United States military, as a military contractor and an executive protection agent. I don't know if any of that's true. It's not under a real name. Doesn't sound real.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Like, yeah. I, this, I mean, the small, like, sliver of, I don't know, silver lining to all this stuff is, this is just like identical to the like dimmock people in the eighties and nineties kind of vibe, the, the, the like, um, bloodsport guy, like all the fake, like, like, like white martial arts guys that could like kill you with three moves. And they, I, I guess what I mean is these guys have always existed with basically the same guns, same mindset.

• 13:28Robert Evans?

  And, and also they have always worshipped the special forces aesthetic. And that has always been like the coolest thing and that this guy hierarchy is a special forces dude, or a dude with special forces experience. Um, and again, I don't know if Nicholas or is ever served in the military. This is just some dude fucking rebranding like old military training manuals to, to make a buck.

• 13:52Speaker 02

  Extreme strip mall karate vibe.

• 13:54Robert Evans?

  Right. Exactly, exactly. But this guy's whole shtick is the perfect embodiment of what pipe hitter has become, right? It's a branding term to sell the illusion of special, secret special forces knowledge and violent hyper competence to insecure white dudes who feel like they're like one book and maybe one gun away from being like John Wick, right? Buy a $6,000 pistol and enough books about tactical shit, then maybe I'll be that cool. Um, and even before it reached the civilian word, pipe hitting, pipe hitter as a term was an act of branding. Special forces guys at the dawn of the GWAT, the global war on terror, took a term from a popular recent movie and used it to define themselves how they wanted to be seen as gruff tattooed badasses who didn't follow the rules but got results.

• 14:39Robert Evans?

  And that's why when disgraced Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher got off the hook for the series of war crimes that he had committed, thanks to Donald, President Donald Trump's intervention, he created the Pipe Hitter Foundation. And Sophie will show you the website for the Pipe Hitter Foundation. But yeah, I mean, Again, for an idea, Eddie Gallagher, this guy was such a fucking maniac. His colleagues were doing shit like shooting above people's heads so that they would take cover so that Eddie wouldn't murder them. Cause he was just shooting every civilian he could find in Mosul to try to rack up a kill count that would let him like market himself as the next Chris Kyle. Like that's, that's what this guy is alleged by a bunch of his colleagues as having done, right?

• 15:19Speaker 01

  Bad representation by Ray Band here.

• 15:22Robert Evans?

  But there's not any good representation of Ray Band in the GWOT.

• 15:25Speaker 01

  And bad, bad representation to women named.

• 15:28Speaker 02

  The main step up in the pipe hitter ethos is these meta glasses. Just the idea to be, to look like this and be a, like an easy creep.

• 15:37Speaker 01

  Bad representation for people named Andrea.

• 15:41Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  This website's amazing.

• 15:43Robert Evans?

  Awful stuff. It's incredible shit, right? We'll talk about Eddie in the very end of these episodes. Cause this, a lot of what we're talking about with both Richard Marcinko and with, you know, the, the history of, of kind of this, this conflict in Team Six between these quiet operators and these like maniac murderer publicity hounds, right?

• 16:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:00Robert Evans?

  Is what births Eddie Gallagher in a lot of ways. Now, special forces guys have been seen as cool pretty much since we invented them, but their popularity really rocketed up after the Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, which is a little ironic because basically everyone is there was like, it's the easiest mission we ever had. It was not hard. We were not in, the main danger was that we fucked up our own helicopters because they, we didn't, like the, a pilot was like, if you're gonna land, you can't land a helicopter in like a walled in environment like that, it'll fuck up the rotors. And they were like, well, you're fired. And then the thing the guy said happened. Not quite as professional as they often come across. But yeah, since 2011, the term has made its way back from the military into movies like Sicario.

• 16:45Robert Evans?

  That's kind of the first place I seem to remember hearing it in like a pop culture sense.

• 16:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I saw it in theaters.

• 16:51Robert Evans?

  Right, right, right. It's a good movie.

• 16:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 16:53Robert Evans?

  And also a wide array of products marketed to civilians who want to feel like more special, more like special forces dudes when they're at, say, the gym, you know? Here's another example from the Pipe Hitters Union, right?

• 17:04Speaker 01

  Honey.

• 17:04Robert Evans?

  And my favorite is probably this original Pipe Hitter t-shirt that shows, this is part of, like, a series where it's like the founding fathers reimagined as, like, special forces gangster badasses. You've got, like, fucking George Washington with a tomahawk, and Teddy Roosevelt's got a machine gun across his shoulder. He's, like, shirtless, heavily tattooed. He's got a jug of hard liquor, right? And you can, you can see in this ad how much this product line really relies on the aesthetic of the operator and what the aesthetic of the operator is, because Teddy's not depicted as a regular soldier. He's got a gun over his shoulder, he's shirtless, he's muscular, he's covered in tattoos, and he's drunk, carrying what looks to be a jug of moonshine. And all of these elements, including constant illegal intoxication,

• 17:47Robert Evans?

  are central aspects of real-life special forces culture. Now, I would define the Pipe Hitter aesthetic today as a man, usually bearded, wearing weapons, armor, and gear, but no uniform, so to speak, who operates as a soldier but is unaccountable to anyone, really. And today, every right-wing influencer who can pull off posing with a gun has tried to ape this aesthetic at least a little bit. And as an example, here's Andrew Tate posing for Instagram. He's got the plate carrier, he's got a gun, he doesn't have a beard, so he's got one of those skull masks around his face. And by the way, his plate carrier is riding too low. You want to have that thing up higher. You see that, there's, like, right underneath-

• 18:24Speaker 01

  He looks dumb as shit.

• 18:25Robert Evans?

  If you're watching this in the video, right underneath where his mask ends, there's, like, three or four inches of open real estate before the armor starts that's just like, "Well, that's just your heart, bro." Like, "You want to have that thing covered?"

• 18:36Speaker 01

  He looks really dumb.

• 18:39Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 18:39Speaker 02

  The skull, the skull gator, too. That's the big-

• 18:42Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The skull gator's a big part of this aesthetic, too, for sure. Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 18:47Robert Evans?

  Now, we're gonna look this week into the first Pipe Hitter, the man who created the template for this kind of guy, and also who literally invented SEAL Team Six, Richard Marenco. Now, the Navy SEALs were already- Well known when an operator with SEAL Team Six killed Osama Bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But before that day, they were simply among the best special forces units that the US kept in its arsenal. And in all honesty, prior to Abbottabad, their public record wasn't all that impressive, really. Any sufficiently, we'll talk about that. Any sufficiently nerdy ROTC kid, when I was growing up, would have told you that like, well, Delta Force is the more elite unit, right? That was certainly like the, the, the, the attitude then. But after Bin Laden, there was not really any question anymore. The SEALs,

• 19:32Robert Evans?

  and Team Six in particular, were the premier military badasses of the American imagination. So yeah, anyway, I think I've hyped this up enough. I'm gonna start with the story of our actual topic this day. But first, here's some fucking ads.

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  They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 23:09Robert Evans?

  And we're back. Richard was born on November 21st in 1940 in Lansford, Pennsylvania, in the home of his grandmother. Now, his hometown was a mining community and coal was the big business of the day. His ancestors were Czech on both sides. And in his autobiography, he described the ethos of the men in his family line and in Lansford as a whole as "they were born, they worked the mines, they died." Right? So understandable that he's gonna want to get out of this, right? Now, we'll be discussing his autobiography Rogue Warrior, not just as a historical document, because it's a terrible historical document, but it is in and of itself, an important piece of history. Because the book Rogue Warrior

• 23:52Robert Evans?

  is the first Navy SEAL tell-all, right? It is the first true story book written by a former operator for the purpose of turning himself into a brand, right? There were books about the SEALs before. And by the way, if you're looking for like a good book about the SEALs in, because I used to know a SEAL Team One guy who was fought in Vietnam. And the book he recommended was, I think it was called Hunters and Trackers. That was like, he said, was very true to his experience. Marcinko's book covers Vietnam heavily, but it's nearly all lies, right?

• 24:21Speaker 02

  That makes sense.

• 24:23Robert Evans?

  It's an important historical book, right? Because every one of these Navy SEAL fucking books that's come since in the modern era, there's two of them from two different guys who were part of the Osama operation who claimed to have shot him. Neither of them killed Osama Bin Laden. And everyone knows that, right?

• 24:39Speaker 02

  Oh, God. I'm just gonna, this is also like LA comedy community stuff. And I don't remember who it was. And I don't know the story. But basically, someone, I forget who it was, they, you know, podcast listeners might be able to find this, but someone like LA comedian wise, basically went on a date with another person who, I don't even know if they're actually a Navy SEAL, but claimed to have killed Osama Bin Laden also.

• 25:04Robert Evans?

  The, the, if you actually like the, the serious and, and good reporting on that has shown and proven basically, because they've talked to a bunch of guys who are, the guy who actually killed him was a dude whose nickname is Red, we don't know his real name, and he does not talk, right? Like, that's, that's what people say about the guy who actually did it. We'll talk about that too, because, again, it, because two different people who were there on the day they killed Bin Laden were both there with the primary purpose for them being to write a book about it later, they both, like, fucked up and broke the rules and like, did, broke ranks and left their colleagues exposed during the raid to try to get there faster to shoot him so that they could write a book about it? It's very funny. And that's all downstream of Rogue Warrior, right?

• 25:47Robert Evans?

  Like, Marcinko not only starts Team Six, but he establishes that this is a way to make a fuckload of money after you get out of the Navy SEALs, right? So, again, don't take anything he says in this literally, and assume a degree of artistic license, when Marcinko describes that his family was too poor to buy boots to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, right? I don't doubt that they were poor, but he's probably exaggerating a little bit. From an early age, Richard seems to have identified with his maternal grandfather, Joe Pavlik, who he described as a cantankerous, short, barrel-chested, shot-in-a-beer, hard-drinking son-of-a-bitch with a square face and leasheded Breznev eyebrows, who worked the mines all his life and never complained about it once. Maybe this guy existed, right? If he didn't, you know, then Marcinko just invented this personality to graft onto a

• 26:31Robert Evans?

  real guy, because it was way more convenient, right? This is part of, he, he has, this is a political work in part for him too, so a lot of his book is him outlining the guys he considers, these are examples of good people, and these are examples of bad people, right?

• 26:45Speaker 02

  Right, right, right. It's also like, that's, that's what everyone sees their grandpa as, like, give or take.

• 26:51Robert Evans?

  Yeah, and so, maybe it's that, because this, this sounds like maybe how you'd idealize a person, but this is not how you'd describe like, a real person you knew well. This is a description of a character in a screenplay, right? Here's, here's Richard again. "He was a real Hellraiser, one of those archetypal tough guys you see in working-class bars, with big, white, labor-toughened hands that look as if they were designed to go around old-fashioned beer glasses." Get it? That's all aesthetic. He's not telling us anything about what his grandpa actually did, or like said. He's just talking about like his hands and how he's like an archetypal tough guy in a working class bar. That's just not, that didn't sound real to me. That's not how like.

• 27:26Speaker 02

  Well, or it's not at all unique.

• 27:28Robert Evans?

  But I wouldn't describe it in that way.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  Scrape that surface. That's like fucking 3,000 guys in that town of 5,000 people.

• 27:35Robert Evans?

  Exactly. That's a picture. That's not a man, right? Anyway, Richard says that he was independent from a young age, right? His, his family is not very functional, right? His parents are fighting all of the time and so he's just kind of doing his own shit. He starts working his own paper route at age five. By age seven, he says he's leaving on his own for a day or two at a time to explore the woods and the wilderness around him. He claims his parents weren't big on education and says his dad probably dropped out of school around eighth grade. While his mom may have gotten to ninth or 10th, and that I don't, I don't doubt.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:10Robert Evans?

  I, I mean, that's true of my grandparents, right? I mean, my grandpa, I think, had an eighth grade education. Yeah.

• 28:16Robert Evans?

  I haven't found any accounts that contrast with this. So again, we, and I don't, I don't have trouble taking that stuff as read. Yeah. Uh, when he was in seventh grade, the mines closed down and so his family had to move to New Brunswick. Because the school was so diverse, he writes, he got into a series of fights, walking to and from class. His uncle moved in with them at one point after he had a brother and the five of them had to cram into a small apartment. Richard remembered his parents fighting constantly and since his uncle would take his mom's side, his dad kind of stopped showing up at home. All the unrest furthered Dick's tradition of avoiding his family as he became an adolescent. He got a series of odd jobs, pin setter for a bowling alley, altar boy. And as an adolescent, he worked as a waiter at a lunch place near the Rutgers campus. He claims to have worked 120 hours a week during the summer.

• 29:00Robert Evans?

  He says the Italian owner of the place treated him like a son and started giving him wine, which Richard developed a taste for. And by age 13, he was a daily drinker. I also don't doubt this. Richard is a hardcore alcoholic his entire life. This is certainly true. When he was 15, Richard claims he pretended to be an 18-year-old freshman at Rutgers and started dating a young teacher named Lucette, who he met at a fraternity party that he snuck into. The lie fell apart when she was hired to fill in for a teacher in his high school French class. She, he's like dating this girl and she shows up to teach at his high school? I don't know if this is true.

• 29:34Speaker 02

  This is wild to put it, this is.

• 29:37Speaker 02

  Autobiography.

• 29:38Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 29:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 29:39Robert Evans?

  He, he does want you to think this is cool, that like, he was.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:43Robert Evans?

  I mean, being statutorily raped by an adult.

• 29:47Robert Evans?

  But also that she didn't know, like.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:49Robert Evans?

  That's part of why I kinda doubted is he thinks this is awesome and he's telling you this because he thinks it makes him look cool. That he's getting laid like hell when he's a kid. So by the time of his senior year, Richard was no longer showing up to class at all. He claims that he was dating an Italian woman, quote, married to a guy 27 years her senior and in serious need of vigorous humping and pumping.

• 30:09Speaker 02

  Right.

• 30:09Robert Evans?

  Again, this is from his autobiography.

• 30:14Speaker 02

  I hated that. That was so. This is a guy.

• 30:17Robert Evans?

  It's really gross.

• 30:18Speaker 02

  This is certainly this kinda guy.

• 30:21Robert Evans?

  Absolutely. Eventually he dropped out of high school and this is almost the first specific detail of his life that we can independently verify. He definitely drops out of high school. I can, I can check that off as behind the bastards true fact about Richard. He tried to join the Marine Corps at this point. Eisenhower had just sent the Marines to Lebanon. And Richard wrote after seeing them on TV, I liked their dress blues and their swords. So he shows up at a USMC recruiting office and he asks the sergeant, what can I do? I want to get a gun and go shoot a few bad guys. How can I do that? And the sergeant, and it tells you how like insane Richard must have appeared because recruiting sergeants will say anything to get you to sign that paper. And this guy's like, well, you gotta graduate high school. We don't just hand a gun to you, right?

• 31:05Robert Evans?

  Like, he's clearly off put by this kid.

• 31:09Robert Evans?

  Like dudes who joined the Marine Corps will tell you how hard it is to make a recruiting sergeant not want to get you to sign that paper immediately.

• 31:18Robert Evans?

  You have to seem insane.

• 31:20Speaker 02

  Right. This'll hurt me to pass him on more than it will to like get the additional number. Jesus Christ.

• 31:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, my conscience won't allow this and I'm a recruiting sergeant.

• 31:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:32Robert Evans?

  So Richard says that he got disheartened after this because he knew by the time he did all of the training shit that was required, the Lebanese problem would be solved and he wouldn't get to shoot anybody. So he decided not to join the Marines and fucks off and spends the summer partying and getting laid. Richard starts dating seriously for the first time at this point, and he writes that, "When I wasn't catting around with other women, quote, "I discovered that we liked each other." That's how he describes falling in love, is when I wasn't cheating on her, I had a good time with her.

• 32:01Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:02Robert Evans?

  That's love for Richard.

• 32:03Speaker 02

  Good for him. And mostly good for her. Especially good for her.

• 32:08Robert Evans?

  Yeah. The less time you spend with this guy is probably on the whole helping you. Regardless, Richard abandons her that fall when she goes, well, I mean, I don't know, they break up, right? She goes to college and he volunteers for the Navy. I shouldn't call that him abandoning her. It's a pretty natural split at that age. He reports for duty in October 1958 and goes to boot camp in Great Lakes, Illinois. In the great book Code Over Country, Matthew Cole writes, "Shortly after enlisting, Marcinco, a radio man, saw The Frogman, the 1951 movie, uh, film depicting UDT force heroics in World War II, and knew he needed to join the underwater demolitions teams." So, we need to talk about the UDTs, right? The underwater demolitions teams. Um, because

• 32:50Robert Evans?

  while Richard was living his first five years of life, right? That's during World War II, 40 to 45, military history was being revolutionized by the formalization of a kind of unit that had always existed, Special Operations Forces, right? These have always been a part of warfare in every society and every place that's done formal war, right? You could look at the Greeks who hid in the Trojan Horse as like an example, whether or not that was literally true, that's an example of like a kind of operation that an oper- an early operator would carry out, right? The kind of elite, highly trained soldiers, spies and assassins that would do the work that modern states have spec ops guys do, right? This has always been a thing. And during World War II, the development of technology mandated the creation of highly

• 33:31Robert Evans?

  trained soldiers capable of extremely niche operations, particularly doing complicated underwater shit. In the United States, because this, this happens, like the British have, you know, the SAS. And shit like this has this is independently happening in a number of places. The Germans have the falschform Jaeger's, which a lot of, um, I mean, a lot of American special forces culture is descended from these different from Nazi special forces units, right?

• 33:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 33:54Robert Evans?

  Um, as well.

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Unsurprising.

• 33:56Robert Evans?

  Yeah, unsurprised, just like a lot of, they were very influential and a lot of like small unit tactic development.

• 34:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:00Robert Evans?

  Um, and for the US, a lot of this process started in the Pacific. The storming of Betty O Island by the second Marine Division and the Tarawa Atoll was a hideously bloody affair. And the reason why it was such a fuck up is basically they calculated the tide because you need to know what the tide's going to be to like have the boats moving in the proper way to get all of the dudes on shore at the right time so that one set of them isn't exposed and just getting shot to shit. Right? But the, there was a special kind of tide that day that if they'd had someone out ahead of the landing boats, who could have gone back and said, hey, it's a different kind of tide, you need to all, then it would have avoided a horrible, bloody situation. Right? And so the Navy decides we need specialist divers who can scout out coastal areas ahead of a landing,

• 34:44Robert Evans?

  measure the depth of exactly figure out the tide, find and disable mines before landing craft come in. Right? Like, these are our first real special forces units. So the Navy had started training underwater demolitions teams before Tarawa. Uh, and these guys are more commonly known at the time as frogmen. That's like the, the colloquial term. And they're cool, by the way, like kids in World War Two are like reading feverishly stories about Navy frogmen. These are some of the, like, some of the first G I Joes are frogmen.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I was gonna say, it's like G I Joe mentality. You need a water guy, you need an ice guy, you need a flying guy.

• 35:21Robert Evans?

  Exactly.

• 35:21Speaker 02

  You need a guy that is, looks like rocks.

• 35:25Robert Evans?

  Yes, it looks like rocks for some reason.

• 35:31Robert Evans?

  So the first men in the line of descent of the Navy SEALs were Navy CB volunteers who took special training in Fort Pierce, Florida, to learn how to fulfill this new role. Because the work of the underwater demolition teams was known to be so demanding and difficult, officers and enlisted members of these units went through the same training and were expected to handle the same tasks and work together in units so small that you couldn't have. The traditional divide between officers and enlisted men. One thing that's noted as being weird about frogmen is they all just called each other by their first names. Right? Hey. And you're not, you're not supposed to do that in the normal mil- now that said, I have known some people who were in units that would say that like after months of heavy combat, you kind of stop. Some of that stuff matters a lot less, right? Right, right, right. A lot of like, right?

• 36:14Robert Evans?

  In the book Alpha, which is a great read about Navy SEAL alleged war criminal Eddie Gallagher, author David Phillips writes this about the first frogmen. "They'd been formed from civilian workmen in the New Deal 1940s America, and they embraced the eras and formal attitudes of blue collar solidarity and equality." So these men were soldiers, right? But they also carried no weapon besides a fixed blade diving knife, which is a major thing that differentiates them. These, these guys are badasses and they are widely renowned, but not because of their killing ability. That is not at all why they're, they're like respected, right? They're respected because the thing that they have to do is both totally necessary for the success of naval operations and insanely dangerous.

• 36:52Robert Evans?

  During D-Day, UDT swimmers were the very first people ashore at Omaha Beach and had to clear the way for landing craft with zero cover. And again, for an idea, these guys are not in a boat. They are swimming ashore in like shorts with a knife and flippers maybe, right? They're basically naked and they're swimming directly into guns. Fifty-two percent of the unit were made casualties in a single day. A rate of loss no normal military unit could be expected to endure without complete collapse. The frogmen proved incredibly valuable in World War II and obviously more in the Pacific theater than the Atlantic. And because of this, they were allowed to live by different rules than other soldiers. Phillips notes that they had little use for discipline that regular troops were expected to live under.

• 37:36Robert Evans?

  They refused to shave their hair, wear proper uniforms, march or salute as a rule. Officers outside the unit complained that they looked like criminals and hooligans, not soldiers. But from the book Alpha, they were not an attack force. They were a crew of workmen out to do an insane job. They could be as crazy as they wanted, right? And that is, that's a, then that's still a big part of the, and it's not a problem really in World War II, right? Because for one thing, what they're doing is objectively heroic and good. I'm not just talking about the cause of the war. They're not- Doing anything to harm, like, they're not killing people directly. They're protecting their fellow soldiers and risking their own lives to do it, right?

• 38:16Speaker 02

  Right. It's sort of, it's sort of like the engineering version of the medic.

• 38:20Robert Evans?

  Yes, yes.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  It's just like they're doing logistics under fire.

• 38:24Robert Evans?

  And there is like demolitions work that does kill people that they do, but that's not the primary thing that they are, they're up to. And it was not easy to train men to do this kind of work. From Code Over Country, quote, "The final week of training culminated with the men forced to do a trench on the Atlantic Beach while explosives were set off nearby for an hour. The goal was to ensure that each man that they would send into enemy water had proved they could handle the stress. Many couldn't. Between 60 and 75% dropped out by the end of the week." Right? And a part of what they're doing, the way they will frame it is we're looking for men who are immune to shell shock. Now, that's not a thing. Your brain is affected by it, or it isn't. But depending on the explode, the force of the blast and how close you are. But some people are like better at handling it and not collapsing until much later. It destroys them, right?

• 39:09Robert Evans?

  So this is the start of Hell Week, which is still a very famous part. I'm sure it's the thing everybody knows about Navy SEALs today, right? Now, we know that exposure to explosives like this causes CTE. But again, at the time was that this is like hardening them and showing like who's immune to shell shock.

• 39:23Speaker 02

  I mean, some stuff gets hardened, some stuff gets softened.

• 39:27Robert Evans?

  Yep.

• 39:30Robert Evans?

  Now, we'd never really trained a unit like this before. And this was also a top secret unit because we didn't want the enemy to know like what these guys were capable of doing. And those two facts together bred an immediate kind of elitism within the ranks of the guys who made it through training. The first UDT training leader was Lieutenant Commander Draper Kaufman, and he was a very observant man. Because so many wannabe frogmen washed out and because UDT swimmers weren't held to the same expectations of discipline, they had a tendency to view themselves as better than their peers. As Cole writes, "Kaufman and his officers were concerned that elitism would pervade their ranks, but the needs of the war won out, and this problem would only get worse in the years to come." Post-war, stories of these formerly-secret elite units captured the imaginations of countless

• 40:14Robert Evans?

  young Americans. And in the wake of World War II, the brass in our growing military-industrial complex saw opportunity. The Pentagon had partnered with Hollywood during the war years to spread propaganda. Now that the Cold War was beginning, our national propaganda needs had changed. Military planners felt the wars of the future could be won by air power, with anything on the ground handled by small, elite teams of highly-trained soldiers. In 1951, a Navy-Hollywood partnership produced "The Frogman," which starred Richard Widmark and was designed to make UDT teams look fucking awesome. This is one of the very first, like, Hollywood-US military joint-production propaganda movies. And the original theatrical trailer for this classic is still on YouTube, and I have to assume that Richard saw the

• 40:57Robert Evans?

  trailer as a kid, too. So here's a clip to give you an idea of what must have been appealing about this to the young man.

• 41:05Robert Evans?

  From top-secret records filmed with the cooperation of the Department of Defense comes the thrilling story of these pin-footed, goggle-eyed, beach-blasting heroes. They fight like men from another world, but they've got Brooklyn, Texas, and Missouri written all over their hearts. You're a brave man, all of you are. You wouldn't be in this outfit. Nobody questions that. But your kind of bravery comes 10 cents a dozen and isn't worth a hoot more when the chips are down. This is great. So I love, I love this 50 shit.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  It's so fascinating to put yourself back in the audience mindset of, like, in cooperation with the US Navy being like a positive thing, like, ooh, jugs.

• 41:47Robert Evans?

  Well, and honestly, like, that whole thing about, like, they've got, you know, Texas and, you know, all their, the home states written all, and just like, yeah, there is something that does a little, like, these are, like, the original Frogman were just working-class men forced by circumstances to endure insane danger in an overall noble struggle. And that's pretty cool, right? And they could not be further from modern-day Navy SEALs, right?

• 42:10Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:11Robert Evans?

  Modern SEALs are descended from these guys? Not at all alike, honestly, really.

• 42:15Speaker 02

  Right.

• 42:15Robert Evans?

  Now, young Richard Marcinko sees this movie, and he loses his shit. He remembers it having lots of action, lots of heroism, and lots of songs. One of these songs was the official UDT team "Fight Song," which ended with these words: "Out in front of the Navy, where you really get the heat, there's a bunch of crazy bastards pulling off some crazy feat." And that's, that line, particularly those last two lines, that just completely writes over Richard's mind. Like, that's software that just reprograms his fucking brain, right? He never wants to be seen as anything else for the rest of his days. So, Richard, who basically parented himself half his childhood, finds this really appealing. And he specifically recalls thinking, "Hey, I could do that," after leaving the theater. And his logic

• 43:00Robert Evans?

  for thinking this was, "I mean, I was a reasonably aggressive sort of person. I'm really violent. That job looks great for me." Now, Richard had to spend a couple of years living the life of a normal enlisted sailor before he was able to try out for the UDT teams. They don't just let you join and do that. His first attempt was foiled by a broken hand, and his second was, according to him, nearly thwarted by his commanding officer, who he describes as, "Oh, boy, the ugliest female I'd ever set eyes on in my life. I called her the big female ugly commander, or big fuck for short." Cool. Now-

• 43:38Speaker 02

  You know, that sentence didn't go where I thought it was gonna go, so-

• 43:41Robert Evans?

  Yeah, how could you have guessed where that was headed? How could you have guessed? Maybe this lady existed. I can't disprove that. It does kinda seem a little unlikely, but it's not impossible. Women were first allowed to enlist in the Navy in 1908, but initially only as nurses. Secretary of the Navy Josephus Daniels, who was weirdly woke for 1917, famously asked, "Is there any law that says a yeoman must be a man?" Right? Is there any law that says, like, a young sailor has to be, like, a man?

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 44:08Robert Evans?

  And he started letting Navy ladies join the naval reserve while men were away during World War I. In World War II, a separate Women's Naval Auxiliary was created, the Waves. And they have, like, the Wax is the Air Corps version, right? The Waves and the Wax are, like, the kind of ladies auxiliary during World War II. And post-war, the Women's Armed Services Integration Act brings women into the armed forces properly, but obviously, and they're still limited today in what roles they can serve, less than they were then. The first female Navy officers had just been commissioned in 1948, and so 58 is when this is all happening. Marsekko could have had a lady CO, right? But it seems likelier that this is a lie he created because this caricature of a lady officer symbolizes everything wrong with what he called "big Navy," right?

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 44:54Robert Evans?

  This is also a term you'll hear in the SEALs to this day, "big Navy." And I think Richard, I'm not sure if he's the origin point, but he's certainly one of them.

• 45:01Robert Evans?

  So yeah, I don't know how seriously we should, we should take this, but this is something that like he wants us to believe. Richard writes, quote, "Big fuck was also a rulebook creature." And he will later decide that basically all of the Navy's problems comes from people following the rules too strictly. In the book Brave Men Dark Waters, O'Reilly writes that some of the guys who served with Marsekka would later claim that as a second-class radio man, he bragged that he would one day be the chief of naval operations. So, you know, he's, he's, he's got a mouth on him and he thinks he's hot shit, but soon he's going to get like the chance to prove that he is because he gets transferred to the UDT training. I don't know why he claims that he beats off, first he beats up one of his peers for

• 45:44Robert Evans?

  being a whiner and then that gets him into a fistfight with his chief petty officer, who he beats up so badly that he gets transferred to UDT training to keep everyone else safe. And I think that's a lie. I don't think that's true.

• 45:57Speaker 02

  That's famously how that works.

• 45:59Robert Evans?

  Yeah, I think that's the kind of lie a guy like Richard Marsekka tells.

• 46:05Robert Evans?

  I do, I have an uncle who punched his training officer in the Marine Corps and he does not have a cool story like that. He has, he got the shit beat out of him and in major trouble. Major, major trouble story.

• 46:16Speaker 02

  Yeah. Oh, I was just too, too tough. They had to, they had to promote me.

• 46:21Robert Evans?

  They had to put me in the UDT to protect the others. Now you know who I want to protect, really? The only thing I want to protect, you know? If the Navy SEALs are there to protect America from terrorism, then I'm the Navy SEALs of protecting these products and services from you not listening to them? Yeah, that works. That's an ad transition.

• 47:11Speaker 03

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• 47:45Speaker 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. She was starting to get worried and get scared for her safety. Stories of survival.

• 48:06Speaker 06

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

• 48:12Speaker 04

  Cases that everyone else called closed. They can't convict her, right? Like, she has so much evidence. 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.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  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.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  You never know who that devil is because he's wearing a disguise. Sometimes it's a police uniform. Listen to What Happened to Her? on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  If there's a million times more digital intelligence than there is biological intelligence, it's hard to imagine humans being in control in that scenario.

• 48:58Speaker 05

  I'm Walter Isaacson, host of the new podcast, The Builders. Right now, we're living through an AI arms race. So I went directly to the people shaping that future. Elon Musk, Dario Amenah, Alex Carr, Fei-Fei Li, Palmer Lucky. Because I wanted to understand what the most consequential builders believe, what they fear, and where they think this is all.

• 49:22Speaker 03

  Silicon Valley is always saying the cliche thing about the way to predict the future is to create it. Well, yeah, it's up to us.

• 49:32Speaker 05

  But when you say us, who's us? Is it 400 people that you know in Silicon Valley? Is it me down here in New Orleans? They're brilliant, controversial, and they're already shaping the future. The question is, whose imagination do we want to live in? This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity. Listen to The Builders on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 50:06Robert Evans?

  And we're back. So, Richard claims he got transferred to UDT training, right? And he does, you know, I just don't know exactly what leads to that. He completes his UDT training in 1961. This is a decade after the frogmen was released. That same year, President John F. Kennedy authorized the Pentagon to examine ways to develop new counter-guerrilla forces. This included establishing new special operations teams as separate components of the existing underwater demolitions teams. And this is what, like, JFK is why we have the Navy SEALs, right? He's the, effectively, the father of the Navy SEALs, right? Right. Now, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion in mid-1961 prompted Kennedy to address Congress. And everyone remembers the bits where he stated his plan for the

• 50:50Robert Evans?

  US to put a man on the moon, but Kennedy also asserted that the country needed to prepare to fight the new kinds of proxy wars that had come to define the Cold War. These next-generation frogmen would need to be trained and armed to fight guerrilla conflicts, assassinating local leaders and military figures, and carrying out acts of sabotage, and then blending back into the jungle or the wilderness, whatever, right? Oh, God. Captain William Hamilton Jr., a UDT man from World War II, who was one of the people who was tasked with creating the Navy SEALs, described the kind of men that he was looking for to populate this new unit, right? So, at the birth of the Navy SEALs, this is, like, specifically the job description. "They had to be more than killers, all muscle and neck and attack-dog mentality. I wanted, demanded, creative men who operated with

• 51:34Robert Evans?

  their brains as well as with their muscles. Men of courage, dedication to duty, sacrifice, personal dexterity and intelligence. Team and mission must come first. At the same time, they must be individuals, near rogues, in fact. Rough men, tough men who could kick ass and operate outside protocol."

• 51:50Robert Evans?

  And you can see why you might want that, right? If you're looking at a unit that's got to operate without support, you know, for long periods of time, they have to be intelligent and creative and they have to have like, knowledge outside of what you'd expect from a normal soldier in order to be able to to kind of like pivot and think on their feet, right?

• 52:07Speaker 02

  It's but it's like the same as like finding an emperor. It's like you need those things, but you don't want anyone who would describe themselves as those things.

• 52:16Robert Evans?

  Right, and the other part of it, you need those things, but the training is basic, is mostly like, are you okay with guys screaming at you and blowing stuff up next to you and yelling at you while you're really cold, right? And that doesn't necessarily like guarantee that they'll be able to do all these things. And part of the issue is that you will, there will always be guys like this in the SEALs who are legitimately like just incredibly talented and skilled and have a like wide variety of knowledge, but there's also guys who are there because they really just want to kill people, right? And this, the fact that from the beginning, they're like, well, we understand that these guys have to be kind of like rogues, there has to be like a criminal element to them if they're going to be able to do the job right. That that was baked into the SEALs from the beginning and it has always been a cause of problems for them.

• 53:01Robert Evans?

  And it's because they, this, like, Richard is going to be this guy to a fucking T, right? One of these rough men with of the criminal element. Yeah, like it's, it's, they couldn't have made the job more perfectly for how he saw himself. Richard attended UDT class 26. 20% of his teammates passed the intense training. So, most people dropped out, including, he noted in his autobiography with Glee, "most of the officers, they just couldn't take it." He would claim he found that perversely enjoyable. Again, he really, he's going to be an officer later, but he really hates officers, like very performatively. After four weeks, he graduates. Training for the SEALs at that point involved none of the diving instruction that it like previously had and that it would later have, right?

• 53:45Robert Evans?

  They're not really learning to be swimmers at this point, nearly as much as they had in the past and would in the future. And Dick's largest difficulty during training came with courtesy of his bowels. Here's the book Rogue Warrior. "I had a problem with Hell Week. I developed a case of the runs. In today's Navy, that would probably be enough to get me excused. Not in 1961. They stopped for nothing. The solution was speed. I discovered as they ran me up and down the beach that if I ran fast enough, the smell of what ran down my leg and into my boot got left behind for the next boat crew to enjoy." Oh, man.

• 54:16Speaker 02

  So he, right, so he was just in, in a soft, permissive era.

• 54:20Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  And, and, oh, God.

• 54:23Robert Evans?

  Well, he was in an era where all they cared about was like, can you handle the, the physical difficulty of this?

• 54:29Speaker 02

  The running.

• 54:29Robert Evans?

  We don't care if you're like mentally fit, if you're crazy, if you're like a, an asshole.

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Right.

• 54:34Robert Evans?

  Like, are you, are you comfortable shitting yourself while running? Basically, it's the primary determining factor. And so he's laughing, like, a lot of these smarter guys who probably have a lot of the other skills that might be useful, aren't tough enough to make it through, whereas he is. And this is, this is always going to be a factor of pride for him. So after he graduates Hell Week, he writes that he and his classmates were confident as $500 hookers. They were sent for 10 weeks of training at St. Thomas and given, he claims, unlimited women, a never-ending supply of aged booze and fresh lobsters and all the deadly toys you could ever want to play with. I don't really know how accurate that is to Navy SEAL training, if they give you unlimited liquor and women. But I believe the deadly toys.

• 55:15Speaker 02

  That's like Blofeld's style. That's like, like how Goldfinger recruits. Also, I watched out with the lobster, Mr. Soft Stomach, come on.

• 55:25Robert Evans?

  Yeah.

• 55:26Speaker 02

  Can't have that much.

• 55:26Robert Evans?

  Yeah, come on. You really think you should be eating lobster right now, man? You got the runs? I think I might know why.

• 55:34Robert Evans?

  He makes repeated mentions of his drinking in this book. About once a page in his, in the opening of his autobiography, Marcinko talks about how much he likes to drink. A little earlier, with describing the kinds of men who made it through Hell Week, he mentioned that some guys, like him, spent all of their downtime at the bar. The reality is that he was a hardcore alcoholic, who at this point was already beginning to drink problematically and would be addicted his entire working life in Special Forces. Despite his constant complaining about how bad officers are, Richard almost immediately got his high school equivalency exam and went through OCS so that he could become an officer. So much of his book is talking, and then he goes through like, and then I, I became an officer, but I had to like, study the officers like they were aliens to learn how to become one, but I never really became one, you know?

• 56:18Robert Evans?

  I just got the rank, but that was never me, you know?

• 56:20Speaker 02

  Right. He's just a tough guy trying to get ahead, bro.

• 56:23Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I think he's trying to protest too much. Now, as a reminder, the SEALs don't exist, I mean, I, I just said SEAL training. They, they're still not quite, like, it's, it's still like, it's 1962, so it's like the year after this training, the SEALs are officially formed. So he's, he's kind of in a similar situation to like, uh, former governor Jesse Ventura. Like Ventura is a little earlier, but Ventura was UDT and then gets kind of grandfathered in as a SEAL, right?

• 56:50Robert Evans?

  So, "The new SEAL unit would be similar to the old in some ways. The standard unit of organization was still the number of men who could fit on a small boat, five enlisted and an officer. The name SEAL came from their expected area of expertise, sea and land operations. Their insignia was the Triton, with a flintlock and an eagle on it." Because it, and, people immediately are like, that kind of looks like the Budweiser logo? So people call it the Budweiser, too? Captain Hamilton, who handled training at first for these Navy SEALs, wanted creative, criminal-minded men. He sent his first team members to take classes from former thieves to learn safe-cracking and hotwiring vehicles. This was all justifiable by the parameters of the jobs he expected they'd be assigned.

• 57:33Robert Evans?

  What kind of jobs would the Navy need a bunch of heavily-trained, heavily-armed criminals to accomplish, you might ask? Well, let's talk about that. Who do you think was the first outside US governmental organization to see the potential in a unit of killers with criminal training who were unaccountable to a standard hierarchy? Who do you think found that really appealing?

• 57:55Speaker 02

  I mean, Scott, FBI at the time, right?

• 57:58Robert Evans?

  Nah, it's the CIA. It's the CIA. It's the CIA. Yeah. Now, the CIA had recently inaugurated something called the Phoenix Program in Vietnam. This classified operation was based on the widespread belief that the Vietcong were only able to function because there was this shadow network of supporters in South Vietnam that enabled them, and the best way to defeat the insurgency was to kill these people. So as early as 1967, the year that Marsekko first shipped to Vietnam as a SEAL, his job was carrying out Phoenix missions all over the war front. CIA informants would provide the agency with info, and they'd send it to the SEALs, who would murder, kidnap, and ambush whoever they thought they needed to. Each of these raids would gather more intel, which would be used to plan further murders

• 58:43Robert Evans?

  and raids. And we call it a different thing now, but this is how counterterrorism strategy in US Special Forces worked in Afghanistan and Iraq too, basically. It hasn't changed since Project, like, elements of it, they try to do less war crimes sometimes now than the old Project, uh, uh, uh, fucking Phoenix guys did, but it's the same basic idea, right? You do raids, you gather info, you do more raids, and you often just wind up murdering guys, right?

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 59:08Robert Evans?

  Both in Vietnam and in Iraq, and it's just often just murder squads, right?

• 59:11Speaker 02

  Right, right, right, right. Sort of some Stasi-type shit.

• 59:14Robert Evans?

  Yeah. You're kind of just trying to, at a certain level, it becomes just we're killing as many of the male population in this area as we can. That's Vietnam, that's Iraq, and that's Afghanistan, right? This isn't really debatable.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  Right. And eventually, we'll win. Eventually, they'll be on our side.

• 59:33Robert Evans?

  It hasn't worked ever, but like, it's got it at some point, you know? We'll kill our way to the bottom of this barrel. Now, we'll talk about how well all of this works in Vietnam and for Richard Marsekko and, and later, but I think this is a good place to end part one. How are you feeling, Andrew T? You think the Navy SEALs are gonna, gonna pull it together and, and become?

• 59:55Speaker 02

  I mean, they're only getting worse, so.

• 59:58Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's really all downhill from World War II. But that's American military history in a nutshell.

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  It's true. It's, it, it, uh, World War II was sort of our Batman Begins. It like set a tone that actually every subsequent thing based off it, uh, really, really fucked us as a, as a global concern, basically.

• 1:00:17Robert Evans?

  Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's pretty bleak.

• 1:00:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Robert Evans?

  I don't know. But hey, it's those frogmen were pretty cool, you know? And you know who else is pretty cool, Andrew? You.

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Thanks, man.

• 1:00:31Robert Evans?

  Plug your pluggables?

• 1:00:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, you know what? Well, if we just kind of yada yada our way that a 23rd century, you could just go to Star Trek times. Um, yeah, I don't know. Andrew T. Starter Trek. Um, that's it. I don't know. Please listen if you like it. We're, we're, we're really having fun doing it. And yeah, it's really, and it's on YouTube also. That's the thing.

• 1:00:54Robert Evans?

  I, I, I will, speaking of Special Forces and Star Trek, one of my favorite episodes of T and G is the episode where they like accidentally take on like a crazed Special Forces operative from some alien race that has been like arrested by his own people because they made them too good as killers. And you know, he's on like a, he's on like a ship full of Starfleet people who are like really good utopian people and have, are absolutely not prepared to deal with them. It's, it's a fun episode.

• 1:01:21Speaker 02

  It's sort of like Rambo. It's like they just dropped Rambo on board.

• 1:01:24Robert Evans?

  It, it's like they dropped Rambo in like a kindergarten.

• 1:01:30Robert Evans?

  Worf is not prepared.

• 1:01:33Speaker 02

  All right. I can't wait. We'll have you on for that.

• 1:01:36Robert Evans?

  Great.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  We'll be back with part two. Bye.

• 1:01:40Speaker 02

  Peace.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  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.

• 1:02:18Speaker 07

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