# Part Two: Richard Marcinko: The Founder of SEAL Team 6

An episode of [Behind the Bastards](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1373812661), 16 Jul 2026, 1 h 09 min.

Audio: https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/pscrb.fm/rss/p/traffic.omny.fm/d/clips/e73c998e-6e60-432f-8610-ae210140c5b1/e5f91208-cc7e-4726-a312-ae280140ad11/9e601100-91c5-49e0-8af2-b48900093d1f/audio.mp3?utm_source=Podcast&in_playlist=d64f756d-6d5e-4fae-b24f-ae280140ad36

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

## Transcript

[0:01] Speaker 1: Also media, Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, the podcast
[0:08] Speaker 1: that again I did that year. Listening now a bit anyway,
[0:11] Speaker 1: I'm Robert, you know me. We're talking about Richard, the
[0:14] Speaker 1: Navy Seals guy, you know, and and my guest is
[0:17] Speaker 1: again Andrew T.
[0:18] Speaker 2: Andrew. What are you doing, buddy?
[0:20] Speaker 3: Ah good? Still here? Still alive. Yeah, it's a little
[0:24] Speaker 3: it's it's warm, but I'm alive. This is great.
[0:26] Speaker 1: It's warm, but you're alive, just like everyone else in
[0:28] Speaker 1: the eternal summer that is increasingly gripping the world. Well, yeah,
[0:32] Speaker 1: let's distract ourselves from our problems by thinking about a
[0:36] Speaker 1: man who lived a charm and mirthful life of constant
[0:40] Speaker 1: war crimes. The Seal Team six guy, Old Dicky marks Richard.
[0:47] Speaker 3: A question, not to be glib. Why is Seal Team
[0:51] Speaker 3: six like, is there I assume one through five? Or
[0:54] Speaker 3: is this like a James Bond situation.
[0:56] Speaker 2: We'll talk about that, don't worry, we'll talk about that.
[0:58] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's actually a fun story. But yeah,
[1:03] Speaker 1: at this point, initially there are like two teams, but
[1:07] Speaker 1: each team is like hundreds of guys, right, They're divided
[1:09] Speaker 1: into platoons and stuff.
[1:11] Speaker 2: So it's not.
[1:11] Speaker 1: When you hear like Seal Team six, you might think like, well,
[1:14] Speaker 1: that's like six guys or ten. Now there's like hundreds of.
[1:16] Speaker 2: Guys like Seal Team six.
[1:18] Speaker 1: There's a lot of Team six guys. Okay, okay, yeah,
[1:22] Speaker 1: exactly right. So when we ended last episode, the newly
[1:32] Speaker 1: formed Navy Seals along with newly made Navy Seal Richard Marsenko,
[1:37] Speaker 1: had been shipped to Vietnam and started partnering with the
[1:39] Speaker 1: CIA to carry out Phoenix missions all over the waterfront, right,
[1:44] Speaker 1: And you know these are you're killing informants and are
[1:48] Speaker 1: like informants bringing in for You're killing and capturing guys,
[1:51] Speaker 1: You're having them tortured by the CIA, You're getting more info,
[1:54] Speaker 1: You're going after other guys. You know, it's this kind
[1:56] Speaker 1: of self perpetuating loop of targets, right, that's what they
[2:00] Speaker 1: create with with Phoenix, and that's what the Seals are.
[2:04] Speaker 1: They're kind of fighting their own separate war that's occurring
[2:08] Speaker 1: alongside the rest of Vietnam. But it's really just like
[2:11] Speaker 1: the Seals and the CIA murdering a fuck loaded dudes, right, yeah, and.
[2:17] Speaker 3: Based off of it now that we know also, it's like, yeah,
[2:20] Speaker 3: just mostly because someone told them to yeah, because.
[2:23] Speaker 1: Some guys said, like, yeah, this guy's definitely a facilitator
[2:27] Speaker 1: for the Viet Cong or whatever, and often for less
[2:30] Speaker 1: reason than that, as we'll discuss right now. Because seals
[2:32] Speaker 1: report to themselves, they can kill for the CIA without
[2:35] Speaker 1: any issues or without abiding by any of the rules
[2:38] Speaker 1: of war. Right Like, there's the Seals are supposed to
[2:40] Speaker 1: abide by the rules of war. They're not supposed to
[2:43] Speaker 1: be any units in the US military that are exempt
[2:45] Speaker 1: from them. But practically the Seals don't have to abide
[2:49] Speaker 1: by the rules of war, right right. These guys are
[2:52] Speaker 1: nearly always to go into battle on dexa dream. They
[2:55] Speaker 1: will avoid sleeping for debt speed. That's just like straight
[2:58] Speaker 1: up old style speed, so they are wired as fuck
[3:01] Speaker 1: on speed. They're usually operating at night, and the fact
[3:04] Speaker 1: that they are both highest tits not sleeping for days.
[3:07] Speaker 1: Killing people at night means they screw up constantly. These
[3:11] Speaker 1: guys kill the wrong people all the fucking time. Phillips ads.
[3:15] Speaker 1: The intel Seals received was often suspect. A farmer might
[3:18] Speaker 1: finger his neighbor over an old grudge. A corrupt official
[3:21] Speaker 1: might turn in someone to whom he owed money. Fishing
[3:24] Speaker 1: boats the seals ambushed because someone said they were used
[3:26] Speaker 1: by viet Cong couriers often turned out to be nothing
[3:29] Speaker 1: but fishing boats. Purported viet Cong bases burned to the
[3:31] Speaker 1: ground were sometimes just poor collections of huts inhabited by
[3:34] Speaker 1: simple peasants.
[3:36] Speaker 3: Cool, so you know.
[3:37] Speaker 1: They're fighting a fun war. That's Richard Marsenko's baptism of
[3:40] Speaker 1: fire light a lot of huts on fire. In Code
[3:43] Speaker 1: Over Country, Matthew Cole writes that from the Jump, Navy
[3:46] Speaker 1: brass were hesitant to embrace the seals because, among other things,
[3:50] Speaker 1: they're not like working for the Navy a lot of
[3:52] Speaker 1: the time, like the Navy muney have a use for them,
[3:55] Speaker 1: like they did for the Frogment, but the CIA is like, not,
[3:57] Speaker 1: we got.
[3:57] Speaker 2: Some of these guys to do.
[3:58] Speaker 1: They actually don't ask. They're going to show up on
[4:02] Speaker 1: board periodically when they need a break, and they're going
[4:04] Speaker 1: to be like, they're gonna have long hair, they're gonna
[4:06] Speaker 1: smell like shit, and they're all going to be doing
[4:08] Speaker 1: illegal drugs on your boat and just don't say anything, right,
[4:12] Speaker 1: you're not allowed to. Maybe brass don't like that all
[4:16] Speaker 1: the time, right, Seals often get a reputation of looking
[4:19] Speaker 1: and acting like insane criminals. Cole quotes a seal captain
[4:22] Speaker 1: at the time who told him we had no status,
[4:25] Speaker 1: no standing in the regular Navy. Some part of the
[4:27] Speaker 1: Navy saw us as a sort of quasi criminal element,
[4:30] Speaker 1: not a respected profession that should only be used in
[4:32] Speaker 1: desperate circumstances, and when you were through using it, you
[4:35] Speaker 1: would stop forever, like it was some sort of a
[4:37] Speaker 1: moral activity. So the Navy kind of treated them like drugs,
[4:41] Speaker 1: like the speed they were on.
[4:43] Speaker 3: Just one less, one less hit, one less hit.
[4:45] Speaker 2: Yeah, one last hit, but then I'm going clean. I'm
[4:47] Speaker 2: going clean.
[4:47] Speaker 1: From special operators, the seals were seen like some sort
[4:53] Speaker 1: of a moral activity because they often did immoral things.
[4:56] Speaker 1: In his book Alpha, David Phillips uses the terms there's different.
[5:00] Speaker 1: This is again there's like a thousand or so seals
[5:02] Speaker 1: in Vietnam, I think at the height so, and there's
[5:04] Speaker 1: factions within them. They're not all the same, and they're
[5:06] Speaker 1: not all doing the same kinds of missions. They're not
[5:08] Speaker 1: all doing Phoenix missions for the CIA.
[5:11] Speaker 3: Right.
[5:11] Speaker 1: Seals do other stuff too, obviously, to to kind of
[5:15] Speaker 1: describe the split between them and his book alpha. David
[5:18] Speaker 1: Phillips uses the terms boy scouts and pirates to divide
[5:21] Speaker 1: kind of the two broad ideological ends of the Navy Seals.
[5:25] Speaker 1: The boy Scouts are more or less the direct descendants
[5:28] Speaker 1: of the old style of UDT operator. Right, we are
[5:32] Speaker 1: professionals doing a really insanely dangerous job. But the job
[5:36] Speaker 1: is fundamentally there because it is supposed to save lives
[5:39] Speaker 1: in the long run.
[5:40] Speaker 2: Right.
[5:41] Speaker 1: The pirates are cia assassins, right, we'd to kill people.
[5:45] Speaker 1: I don't give a shit, right, right, Like, I'm just
[5:47] Speaker 1: here for fucking blood. Right, That's my only interest in
[5:49] Speaker 1: anything that I'm doing. And the conflict between boy scouts
[5:53] Speaker 1: and pirates is still present today in the Navy Seals.
[5:56] Speaker 1: Right on one end are the quiet professionals, and on
[5:59] Speaker 1: the other end are the fucking maniacs and the you know,
[6:02] Speaker 1: the quiet professionals are always the guys who have been
[6:05] Speaker 1: in charge up until very recently. And Seal branding because
[6:08] Speaker 1: like the Seal Oath, there's a lot in there about
[6:10] Speaker 1: like part of why we train so much so that
[6:13] Speaker 1: we don't shoot civilians. You know, we can we can
[6:15] Speaker 1: target and very you know, discriminatingly only get the bad guys, right, Like,
[6:19] Speaker 1: that's why you send in the seals, is we're the
[6:20] Speaker 1: most discriminating way in order to get your man, and
[6:23] Speaker 1: we won't hit anyone that we don't mean to. And obviously,
[6:26] Speaker 1: like that's the branding. The reality is sometimes they're just
[6:28] Speaker 1: a lot of times they're just killing people, you know, Yeah,
[6:31] Speaker 1: because it's hard to not kill people that you don't
[6:34] Speaker 1: mean to in gun fights. Actually, when you're on speed especially,
[6:39] Speaker 1: it's a lot harder to not kill people like fights
[6:42] Speaker 1: when you're wired to the gills on speed and haven't
[6:44] Speaker 1: slept in four days.
[6:45] Speaker 3: Yeah, but right, but even if you're one of the
[6:49] Speaker 3: good guys, like, yeah, good.
[6:52] Speaker 1: I'm not again, I'm not trying to make an objective
[6:55] Speaker 1: moral term. I'm talking about how the people within the
[6:57] Speaker 1: unit see themselves and the breakdown the right, Like, you
[7:02] Speaker 1: don't have to think of the boy Scouts as literally
[7:04] Speaker 1: good people. That's dependent upon your own belief about ethics. Right.
[7:08] Speaker 2: The pirates just.
[7:09] Speaker 1: Want to kill people, though, right, and they believe that
[7:11] Speaker 1: that's what the Seals are for. They're there because they're
[7:13] Speaker 1: really good at killing. We have an account by one
[7:16] Speaker 1: member of an early pirate platoon, Michael Beanan and his
[7:19] Speaker 1: platoon was a station in the Mekong Delta, and Beanan
[7:22] Speaker 1: wrote later an anonymous account of his experiences in this
[7:25] Speaker 1: unit that he published afterwards. This is how Phillips describes
[7:29] Speaker 1: it in the book Alpha. The job mutated from identifying
[7:32] Speaker 1: and killing Vietcong operatives to tasks like sneaking into a
[7:35] Speaker 1: village at night to assassinate a village chief and making
[7:37] Speaker 1: it look like the Vietcong had done it. When the
[7:39] Speaker 1: Intel told them to do it to Vietcong tax collectors,
[7:41] Speaker 1: they would, according to Beanan, rob them of all money
[7:44] Speaker 1: and of course kill them, and then report that all
[7:46] Speaker 1: the money was destroyed in the firefight. The money would
[7:48] Speaker 1: then be used to buy drugs and prostitutes. Beanan also
[7:51] Speaker 1: wrote about the obsession pirates had for close quarters blood
[7:54] Speaker 1: letting or getting wet. Per Beanan, this meant cutting somebody's
[7:57] Speaker 1: throat with your knife so the blood would go all
[7:59] Speaker 1: over you.
[7:59] Speaker 2: It was ritual.
[8:00] Speaker 1: His platoon leaders told him to do it to some villagers.
[8:03] Speaker 1: He refused, but said that many others did not. And
[8:08] Speaker 1: this is something I want to get into. I've been
[8:09] Speaker 1: reading a book about prehistoric warfare lately, and it includes
[8:13] Speaker 1: a lot because there was this belief that, particularly by
[8:16] Speaker 1: a lot of like European military historians in the early
[8:18] Speaker 1: part of the twentieth century, that primitive war was basically
[8:21] Speaker 1: playing around.
[8:22] Speaker 2: Right.
[8:23] Speaker 1: You'd have two shides show up and they'd throw some
[8:24] Speaker 1: like weak arrows at each other, and then once a
[8:26] Speaker 1: couple of guys got injured, they'd kind of back off,
[8:28] Speaker 1: and they didn't really usually have the hunger for like
[8:31] Speaker 1: real The reality is the opposite. In fact, nearly everything
[8:34] Speaker 1: that like every basically everything that we see as like
[8:36] Speaker 1: special forces style tactics is all stuff that Europeans stole
[8:40] Speaker 1: from indigenous warriors.
[8:42] Speaker 2: Right.
[8:42] Speaker 1: These are all like kind of rating and ambush tactics
[8:44] Speaker 1: that literally Europeans learned. They called it the skulking method
[8:48] Speaker 1: of war in the Americas, right, because they weren't they
[8:51] Speaker 1: hadn't practiced. That was not the way Europeans fought at
[8:53] Speaker 1: the time at which that was they started coming over
[8:55] Speaker 1: into the Americas. And you'll hear a lot about some
[8:58] Speaker 1: of the different because primitive warrior cultures. Number One, war
[9:02] Speaker 1: was often genocidal, Right, If one tribe is going, you
[9:05] Speaker 1: often wipe out the other side if you beat them
[9:07] Speaker 1: if you can because that's the thing that guarantee you
[9:09] Speaker 1: to the most safety. And there's a lot of trophy
[9:11] Speaker 1: taking all over the world. This is in Europe, this
[9:13] Speaker 1: is in Southeast Asias, in the Americas, and all sorts
[9:16] Speaker 1: of it. You know, you have scalping in some areas,
[9:17] Speaker 1: you have the taking of whole heads. There are some
[9:19] Speaker 1: cultures that would literally and these are multiple parts of
[9:22] Speaker 1: the world, take the entire skin, and in some places
[9:24] Speaker 1: even where the skin of a defeated enemy like a
[9:26] Speaker 1: costumes sometimes and when you read about this, it's often
[9:31] Speaker 1: pointed as like, wow, the brutality of like ancient warfare.
[9:34] Speaker 2: Now this is just war.
[9:35] Speaker 1: It's still the same. The US military does this. They're
[9:37] Speaker 1: taking heads in World War Two, they're taking ears in
[9:40] Speaker 1: Vietnam and other body parts. Seals are often described as
[9:43] Speaker 1: taking ears. Right, this is something that being In writes
[9:45] Speaker 1: about in his account.
[9:46] Speaker 2: Is then like.
[9:46] Speaker 1: Taking parts of bodies. And again, as a ritual, you're
[9:50] Speaker 1: supposed to cut the throat of a dude who might
[9:53] Speaker 1: is often a civilian. Right, Eddie Gallagher killing that sixteen
[9:56] Speaker 1: year old kid in Mosul, that was not a break
[9:59] Speaker 1: with tradition, That was long standing tradition within at least
[10:02] Speaker 1: a chunk of the seals according to accounts from Vietnam.
[10:07] Speaker 2: Right.
[10:07] Speaker 1: And so this is when people talk about like, oh,
[10:09] Speaker 1: you know war, you know a lot of these these
[10:12] Speaker 1: these these indigenous cultures have really brutal methods of like warfare.
[10:15] Speaker 1: And now that's just war man. That's everyone who winds
[10:18] Speaker 1: up agreeing to do the kind of warfare where you're
[10:20] Speaker 1: just like ambushing a village at night and murdering everybody,
[10:24] Speaker 1: if that's the shit you're doing, and we do that too, right,
[10:27] Speaker 1: it utilizes.
[10:28] Speaker 2: The men who do it right.
[10:30] Speaker 1: And if you're gonna send men to do that, you
[10:32] Speaker 1: really it's very hard to stop them from taking trophies
[10:35] Speaker 1: and cutting off and becoming very deranged by what they've done.
[10:39] Speaker 1: And throughout time and history, different cultures have built in
[10:42] Speaker 1: ways to try to provide accountability or to even there
[10:46] Speaker 1: were some ritual ways of like cleansing some some indigenous
[10:49] Speaker 1: cultures even had this understanding that like and there was
[10:52] Speaker 1: a ritual way to ensure that we believe the people
[10:54] Speaker 1: who go out to war is in something a different
[10:57] Speaker 1: person than they are when they're at peace, and there's
[10:59] Speaker 1: this ritual to kind of transition them back, right, and
[11:03] Speaker 1: don't We never built that into our cultures, so we
[11:05] Speaker 1: just kind of pretend these people are always like acting
[11:08] Speaker 1: like heroes as opposed to cutting off pieces of dead
[11:12] Speaker 1: enemies and murdering civilians in the woods. But they often do.
[11:15] Speaker 1: They often do. Beamed and described the business of the
[11:18] Speaker 1: Navy Seals in Vietnam as terrorism against Vietnamese villagers. Quote
[11:23] Speaker 1: finding a loved one with a green face and stabbed
[11:25] Speaker 1: in the middle of a road was incredible terror. In
[11:27] Speaker 1: other words, the Navy Seals would abduct someone in the night,
[11:30] Speaker 1: paint their face green because they would go intobut it
[11:32] Speaker 1: with green faces, right, and then they would stab them
[11:35] Speaker 1: and leave their corpse in the road for their families
[11:36] Speaker 1: to find. And after abducting the victim, they would also
[11:39] Speaker 1: often wire the door of their hut to explode, so
[11:42] Speaker 1: when their children opened it to try to like find
[11:44] Speaker 1: their dad, it would blow up, killing or maiming them,
[11:46] Speaker 1: guaranteeing further death and terror. Like that's no less like
[11:52] Speaker 1: like you, that's no less brutal than the shit people
[11:54] Speaker 1: were doing ten thousand years ago in any way, shape
[11:56] Speaker 1: or form, in any meaningful manner, right.
[11:59] Speaker 3: Arguably because you don't have to and you're like, you
[12:03] Speaker 3: don't believe that they're going to come find you.
[12:06] Speaker 1: Right right, You are not literally in danger of your
[12:08] Speaker 1: culture being exterminated by this.
[12:10] Speaker 2: You have no reason to be there.
[12:11] Speaker 1: You live six thousand miles away, Like, why are you
[12:14] Speaker 1: in Vietnam. Former Seal Lieutenant Bob Carey later wrote about
[12:19] Speaker 1: a nineteen sixty nine raid he led to assassinated target
[12:22] Speaker 1: in a rural village. On the way, they encountered an
[12:24] Speaker 1: elderly man and a woman sleeping in a bedroom with
[12:27] Speaker 1: three little kids. To stop them from warning anyone else,
[12:29] Speaker 1: they killed all five with their knives. Immediately after this,
[12:33] Speaker 1: they fucked up and ran into a dozen women and
[12:35] Speaker 1: children out in the open, and since they lost the
[12:37] Speaker 1: element of surprise, they just gunned them all down with
[12:39] Speaker 1: automatic weapons. And their after action report they claim to
[12:42] Speaker 1: have killed twenty one Viet Cong fighters in a firefight. Yeah,
[12:47] Speaker 1: just women and children, stabbing babies to death in the
[12:52] Speaker 1: their sleep, right, and to be killed in the firefight.
[12:55] Speaker 2: Yeah cool?
[12:56] Speaker 1: Right now again, the first Seals are hunters and trap
[13:00] Speaker 1: of men, and they grew to worship mastery over the
[13:02] Speaker 1: killing arts. Any personal flaws were forgivable, and a truly
[13:05] Speaker 1: talented killer. One New York Times article noted that at
[13:08] Speaker 1: a seal based down range in Vietnam, operators hung a
[13:11] Speaker 1: sign above the base bar that read, people who kill
[13:14] Speaker 1: for money are professionals. People who kill for fun arsadists.
[13:18] Speaker 1: People who kill for money and fun are seals, right,
[13:22] Speaker 1: and reading that I couldn't have a think of when
[13:25] Speaker 1: I was in Urbill, which is in northern Iraq, it's
[13:27] Speaker 1: the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan during the fighting against ISIS
[13:30] Speaker 1: and Mosel I was sitting up in like a coffeehouse
[13:33] Speaker 1: that was like a couple floors up. It's sort of
[13:35] Speaker 1: this like Grand Bazarre area in the center of the city,
[13:38] Speaker 1: and there's like I noticed, like a couple of big
[13:40] Speaker 1: white dudes like milling around in this market area and
[13:43] Speaker 1: they're like, you know, they're big, muscular, covered in tattoos, bearded,
[13:47] Speaker 1: and one of them has a T shirt on that
[13:49] Speaker 1: just says I'm only here for the violence, which is
[13:52] Speaker 1: like you can find them online commonly. I don't know
[13:55] Speaker 1: if those guys were might have been some form of
[13:57] Speaker 1: fucking media, but there were probably contractors and they not
[14:00] Speaker 1: necessarily combat. Most of those guys were doing like drone work, right,
[14:03] Speaker 1: Like most of the contractors I met were nowhere near,
[14:06] Speaker 1: but you still saw that kind of aesthetic on them
[14:08] Speaker 1: all the time.
[14:09] Speaker 2: Right, I'm only here. It's the same thing.
[14:11] Speaker 1: I'm only here for the violence, right Like that's that's
[14:14] Speaker 1: the same thing that that sign of that base bar says.
[14:17] Speaker 2: Right, I'm here for the fucking violence because it's fun.
[14:19] Speaker 2: You know.
[14:22] Speaker 3: These guys are fine.
[14:24] Speaker 2: Yeah, these guys are doing good. They're doing good.
[14:27] Speaker 1: Richard Marsenko fit in perfectly among this crowd. As Phillips writes,
[14:30] Speaker 1: he quote went by the name Demo Dick and called
[14:33] Speaker 1: his men Marsenko's merry band of murdering marauders. Village by village,
[14:37] Speaker 1: his team destroyed rice supplies, blew up fishing boats, and
[14:40] Speaker 1: burned houses. Demo Dick liked to booby trap the bodies
[14:43] Speaker 1: of those his men had killed before they moved on
[14:45] Speaker 1: from a village. It made me feel good to hear
[14:47] Speaker 1: an explosion after we'd left the area, he later wrote
[14:50] Speaker 1: in his memoir. Over several deployments, Marsenko described his men
[14:54] Speaker 1: getting spookier and dirtier as they began to think more
[14:58] Speaker 1: like gorillas. He loved the free that he and his
[15:00] Speaker 1: unit were given to de vised new tactics and pick targets.
[15:03] Speaker 1: He later wrote this about Vietnam, a war that killed
[15:06] Speaker 1: close to four million people. There's something to be said
[15:09] Speaker 1: about the purity of a small war. For the Seals.
[15:12] Speaker 1: It was instant gratification. You would write up a patrol order,
[15:15] Speaker 1: go out there and shoot the bastard. It was black
[15:17] Speaker 1: and white, no gray, And that's the music. That's the
[15:19] Speaker 1: epitome of life for a warrior.
[15:23] Speaker 2: And like, here's the thing.
[15:25] Speaker 1: The Seals are very kind when I talked about like
[15:27] Speaker 1: ancient prehistoric warriors and also like these kind of going
[15:30] Speaker 1: back to like a lot of these indigenous warrior cultures
[15:33] Speaker 1: that have even been around up into the modern era.
[15:35] Speaker 1: The Seals very consciously pattern themselves a lot after particularly
[15:39] Speaker 1: American Native American warriors. That's like a major thing now
[15:43] Speaker 1: but especially later in Seal culture. And so this idea
[15:46] Speaker 1: is really common, right that like we're there, like you know,
[15:49] Speaker 1: we're living the warrior's life and it's this perfect this
[15:51] Speaker 1: like cycle of violence where we're just constantly going out
[15:54] Speaker 1: and killing more people is.
[15:55] Speaker 2: Exactly like that. That's the purity of what we do.
[15:59] Speaker 1: And it doesn't nothing but lose wars as far as
[16:01] Speaker 1: I can tell, Like, if that's the idea epitome of
[16:04] Speaker 1: life is if you say what you want about the
[16:06] Speaker 1: ethics of these ancient warriors and every continent on Earth
[16:09] Speaker 1: who practiced such brutal, often genocidal tactics they had to
[16:14] Speaker 1: and they won or they died.
[16:16] Speaker 2: This is like this is just murder cause play. That's
[16:19] Speaker 2: the thing. It's like, we're the taxpayer, are just like
[16:22] Speaker 2: paying these guys to cosplay as.
[16:25] Speaker 3: We're like footing the bill for these psychos.
[16:28] Speaker 1: And I guess the only yeah, yeah, completely unnecessarily and
[16:33] Speaker 1: it never works. Yeah, Like yeah, they get like our side,
[16:38] Speaker 1: like they have a lot of fun, some of them,
[16:40] Speaker 1: a lot of them get obviously very traumatized. But like
[16:42] Speaker 1: guys like Barsenko have a lot of fun. But it
[16:44] Speaker 1: doesn't work right, right, An Army intelligence analyst later called
[16:48] Speaker 1: the Phoenix program, which killed at least twenty one thousand people,
[16:51] Speaker 1: indiscriminate murder. In nineteen seventy one, the Navy pulled all
[16:55] Speaker 1: seals out of action and made them pass a test
[16:57] Speaker 1: on the rules of war. Right, because there's so many
[17:00] Speaker 1: reports that these guys are just murdering people. After the
[17:02] Speaker 1: Meli massacre. Mini Seals refuse to go to Vietnam entirely because,
[17:06] Speaker 1: as The New York Times reported, they were scared of
[17:09] Speaker 1: being prosecuted for war crimes that they were undeniably committing.
[17:12] Speaker 1: There's this A lot of them are complaining, like, oh,
[17:13] Speaker 1: after me, Lie, I don't even want to go there anymore. Right,
[17:16] Speaker 1: what's even the point if we can't fight the war
[17:18] Speaker 1: the way they'll win it? And like, you guys got
[17:20] Speaker 1: to fight that war for years and it just kept
[17:23] Speaker 1: getting worse. You lost, like they won, Vietnam won.
[17:27] Speaker 3: Like that's the only the only tiny sliver of like again,
[17:32] Speaker 3: fucking like silver lining is like, this really doesn't work.
[17:37] Speaker 3: They like, for all the life great, you know your
[17:40] Speaker 3: comfort needs hard men kind of shit. It's like it
[17:43] Speaker 3: never has once worked.
[17:45] Speaker 1: It doesn't it again, it does when when both sides
[17:48] Speaker 1: are like one hundred guys. If you can kill all
[17:50] Speaker 1: hundred of the other guys, then yeah, sure, like you
[17:52] Speaker 1: actually can end that problem forever. Right, But modern war
[17:57] Speaker 1: these are nations of millions and millions and millions of people.
[17:59] Speaker 1: It doesn't work that way. All you do is piss
[18:02] Speaker 1: everyone off and raise the level of brutality and anger
[18:06] Speaker 1: and motivate the enemy to fight and to themselves dig
[18:09] Speaker 1: in harder, Right, it does not get you what you want?
[18:13] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[18:14] Speaker 1: Twenty one years later, after you know this period of time,
[18:17] Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety two, Marsenko wrote Rogue Warrior, which gave
[18:20] Speaker 1: him a chance to whitewash his own conduct in that
[18:22] Speaker 1: of the Seals entire. And before I get into that more,
[18:25] Speaker 1: I want to quote from this New York Times review
[18:27] Speaker 1: of books review for an idea of This is how
[18:29] Speaker 1: they describe his writing style. Mister Marsenko, fifty one years
[18:33] Speaker 1: old comes across as less the genuine warrior than a
[18:35] Speaker 1: comic book superhero who makes Arnold Schwarzenegger look like little
[18:38] Speaker 1: Lord Fauntleroy. To planning for his first combat assignment, he writes,
[18:41] Speaker 1: he inhaled deeply and knew instantly I was going to
[18:44] Speaker 1: like Vietnam a whole lot. He revels in the wonderful
[18:47] Speaker 1: lethal odor of cordite wafting over me and tells us
[18:51] Speaker 1: that after one particularly hair reaction, I dreamt of warm
[18:53] Speaker 1: women and cold beer. And I want to highlight something
[18:57] Speaker 1: I found kind of revealing here. Because Marsenko talks about
[18:59] Speaker 1: the coreite lethal odor of cordite wafting over me. You
[19:02] Speaker 1: may have heard that, especially if you read weirdly enough
[19:04] Speaker 1: warhammer books. Cordite is a kind of smokeless bullet propellant
[19:10] Speaker 1: that was developed in eighteen eighty nine. It had a
[19:12] Speaker 1: very unique scent and became famous because a lot of
[19:14] Speaker 1: Victorian earin novels of colonial British warfare loved to describe
[19:18] Speaker 1: the cordite stink of battlefields.
[19:20] Speaker 2: Right.
[19:21] Speaker 1: Cordite actually stopped being produced in the mid twentieth century
[19:24] Speaker 1: and would have been out of production by the time
[19:26] Speaker 1: Marsenko was having his gunfights, and also most of the
[19:29] Speaker 1: AMMO that would have been in Vietnam was not made
[19:32] Speaker 1: by people whoever used cordite in their bullets.
[19:35] Speaker 2: Right. I'm sure he would have encountered.
[19:37] Speaker 1: There's a lot of weird bullet types floating around Vietnam
[19:41] Speaker 1: at varying points. I'm certain he encountered chordite sometimes, but
[19:45] Speaker 1: this was definitely not like. This was something either his
[19:47] Speaker 1: ghostwriter added because it's a common thing to put in
[19:50] Speaker 1: books like this, or it's something he stuck in because
[19:53] Speaker 1: it reminded him of books that he read as a kid.
[19:54] Speaker 1: Brought out like badass colonial Warriors murdering non white people, right,
[19:58] Speaker 1: it's like a pulpy thing to say, yes, yes, exactly, Court,
[20:01] Speaker 1: it's not a mule recollection. Yeah, I mean honestly, it
[20:06] Speaker 1: is like basically just like an updated like Conan the
[20:08] Speaker 1: Barbarian novel.
[20:09] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[20:10] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
[20:11] Speaker 1: It's particularly funny in Warhammer books because you're like, okay,
[20:13] Speaker 1: so you're saying, forty thousand years from now, we go
[20:15] Speaker 1: back to using the shit that they decided was bunk
[20:17] Speaker 1: in the fifties.
[20:19] Speaker 2: Really well, that is a lot of the war Heeber aesthetic,
[20:23] Speaker 2: to be fair.
[20:24] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does fit a little maybe.
[20:28] Speaker 2: Now.
[20:28] Speaker 1: The combat scenes in Rogue Warrior are remarkably inaccurate, despite
[20:32] Speaker 1: being pinned by a man who undeniably saw combat with
[20:35] Speaker 1: the Seals and no. The best example of this is
[20:37] Speaker 1: a mission that occurred on March thirteenth, nineteen sixty seven.
[20:41] Speaker 1: A Seal team including Marsenko were inserted to Dung Island
[20:44] Speaker 1: on the path of a Vietcong smuggling route. This was
[20:47] Speaker 1: a free fire zone, which meant the Seals would be
[20:49] Speaker 1: free to kill anyone they saw out after curfew. In
[20:52] Speaker 1: Rogue Warrior, Marsenko describes the mission as them waiting to
[20:55] Speaker 1: kill a courier and recover intel. But quote, the killing
[20:58] Speaker 1: was an important element for a couple of reasons. First,
[21:01] Speaker 1: that's what we were in Vietnam for. Second, you never
[21:04] Speaker 1: know whether you can kill someone until you do it.
[21:06] Speaker 1: I wanted to make sure each member of Bravo, that's
[21:08] Speaker 1: his squad, was up to the task. In other words,
[21:11] Speaker 1: we didn't need to kill these courriers, but I wanted
[21:13] Speaker 1: each of my guys to experience killing a human being, right,
[21:17] Speaker 1: that was the point of the mission. Really, Now this is.
[21:22] Speaker 3: Just a gang initiation or sorry, like a fiction exactly.
[21:26] Speaker 1: Yeah, but this is like just the Navy seals. Our
[21:28] Speaker 1: taxpayer dollars is fun to them.
[21:30] Speaker 2: Jesus Christ.
[21:31] Speaker 3: It's cool.
[21:32] Speaker 1: It's cool stuff. Yeah, I love quiet professionals. Now this
[21:36] Speaker 1: is important because Marsenko goes on to claim that after
[21:38] Speaker 1: downing the courier and moving to recover his body, Bravo
[21:41] Speaker 1: unit came under heavy fire from all sides and had
[21:43] Speaker 1: to radio for extraction. That's when Lieutenant Larry Bailey, who's
[21:47] Speaker 1: a seal officer driving their boat, failed to rescue them,
[21:50] Speaker 1: and the team had to retreat under heavy fires. Bullets
[21:53] Speaker 1: are slicing through the bark because this lieutenant, this officer
[21:56] Speaker 1: fucks up. My men are under heavy fire and we
[21:59] Speaker 1: barely got out of there with their lives. And so
[22:01] Speaker 1: Marcinko writes that he attacks Bailey when they finally reached
[22:04] Speaker 1: the boat. I pleaded for covering fire, and you were
[22:06] Speaker 1: so goddamn far up river you were out of goddamn
[22:09] Speaker 1: radio range.
[22:09] Speaker 2: Is that bad enough for you, you pussy?
[22:11] Speaker 1: That's what Marcinko says, that he's goals at this guy.
[22:14] Speaker 2: Now.
[22:15] Speaker 3: Oh.
[22:15] Speaker 1: The author of Code over Country actually interviews Bailey and
[22:20] Speaker 1: one other member of Marsenko's unit, and both of these
[22:22] Speaker 1: guys were like, no, Richard was lying. That's not at
[22:24] Speaker 1: all how it was heard. First off, Richard was not
[22:28] Speaker 1: on the radio. Bailey didn't hear anything. At no point
[22:31] Speaker 1: was Richard like begging to be picked up because they
[22:33] Speaker 1: weren't under fire right. In fact, Bailey eventually decided to
[22:37] Speaker 1: go check on Bravo himself because it was weird that
[22:39] Speaker 1: they hadn't radioed for so long. Quote as they crept inland,
[22:43] Speaker 1: I could hear some guys laughing, Bailey said. The laughing
[22:46] Speaker 1: was undimistakably American. He recalled, I could hear Marcinko hollerin
[22:49] Speaker 1: they had lost all degree of military discipline in a
[22:52] Speaker 1: supposedly hairy area. Bailey's radio man told them they'd turned
[22:55] Speaker 1: their radio off for the ambush and forgot to turn
[22:57] Speaker 1: it back on. After killing not a viet Cong k
[23:00] Speaker 1: but a couple of fishermen, the radio men told Bailey,
[23:03] Speaker 1: we have our first war souvenirs and pulled out a
[23:06] Speaker 1: bag filled with ID cards and a watch. Cool say,
[23:10] Speaker 1: they just killed some fishermen and they're not in any danger.
[23:13] Speaker 1: They're partying. You're just with the corpses and laughing.
[23:17] Speaker 3: You know.
[23:19] Speaker 1: Obviously that's saying he was never in danger. The Navy
[23:21] Speaker 1: Seals and Vietnam, I'm sure they've definitely under fire at times,
[23:24] Speaker 1: but a lot of times they're just murdering people. Paired
[23:27] Speaker 1: with the paragraph that I quoted earlier, it's clear that
[23:29] Speaker 1: Marsenko wanted his team to notch some kills, and because
[23:32] Speaker 1: it was a free fire zone, he knew that he
[23:34] Speaker 1: was safe to murder the first men he saw. This
[23:37] Speaker 1: is emblematic of his approach to war, and the Marsenko
[23:40] Speaker 1: approach to war. Will linger among the Navy Seals long
[23:42] Speaker 1: after he leaves the unit. But you know who never
[23:47] Speaker 1: abandons their men in the field. Me, yeah, Sophie. Sure,
[23:53] Speaker 1: but also ads podcasts huzza.
[24:05] Speaker 2: And we're back.
[24:07] Speaker 1: So I give more anecdotes of Marsenko's experiences in Vietnam,
[24:12] Speaker 1: but Richard lies about everything. It's worth noting that military
[24:16] Speaker 1: historian David Andreid looked into Marsenko's claims for Soldier of
[24:19] Speaker 1: Fortune magazine, of all publications, and I would not I don't.
[24:23] Speaker 2: I don't tend to credit them miss being a particularly
[24:26] Speaker 2: credible Uh.
[24:28] Speaker 3: But that's the other way I look at it is
[24:30] Speaker 3: if fucking Soldier of Fortune is like.
[24:32] Speaker 2: Fashion, we should check the shit out. Yeah, you are
[24:36] Speaker 2: a liar.
[24:38] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[24:38] Speaker 1: Andreid publishes an article called Pogue Warrior about him, and
[24:43] Speaker 1: pogue is military slang for like a soldier in like
[24:45] Speaker 1: the back, like a soldier who's like stationed far back
[24:49] Speaker 1: from the line of contact. He doesn't actually do anything,
[24:51] Speaker 1: but who like lies about having done cool. Sure, right,
[24:54] Speaker 1: Like that's what a pogue is. That's it's it's a
[24:56] Speaker 1: pretty funny title for the article. Here's Cole's to description
[25:00] Speaker 1: of the article. The article also found another instance from
[25:03] Speaker 1: Arsenko's book in which he grossly mischaracterized what was supposed
[25:06] Speaker 1: to be a seminal event in his military career, losing
[25:08] Speaker 1: his first seal in battle, and appeared to outright fabricate
[25:11] Speaker 1: a scene in Vietnam. And there's something important for people
[25:15] Speaker 1: to we who weren't in the military and haven't seen
[25:16] Speaker 1: combat to understand, which is, like, I think people are
[25:19] Speaker 1: generally familiar with the idea that someone would lie about
[25:21] Speaker 1: having served for like clout right or that event, who
[25:24] Speaker 1: never did anything cool might lie about having seen combat.
[25:28] Speaker 1: But if you can confirm that someone's like a combat veteran,
[25:31] Speaker 1: people don't tend to assume that they would lie about
[25:33] Speaker 1: what they saw in combat. And the reality is that
[25:35] Speaker 1: happens all the time. Guys who've seen heavy combat often
[25:40] Speaker 1: lie about it, in part because it's very common, especially
[25:44] Speaker 1: in repeated combat actions, for even people who are trained
[25:47] Speaker 1: and experienced to fuck up and panic under fire and
[25:50] Speaker 1: screw up in situations that like they have to lie
[25:53] Speaker 1: about to themselves and everyone else because it's the only
[25:56] Speaker 1: way they can go on emotionally.
[25:57] Speaker 2: I've like, yeah, it happens anyway.
[26:03] Speaker 1: So remember that, both with Dick and anytime you see
[26:06] Speaker 1: someone telling like war stories that seem like really crazy.
[26:09] Speaker 1: I'll never forget a buddy of mine who was in
[26:12] Speaker 1: a combat unit and saw a lot of combat. We
[26:14] Speaker 1: were driving in like near the base in or one
[26:17] Speaker 1: of the bases in southern California outside of San Diego,
[26:21] Speaker 1: and there's like a road named for some Medal of
[26:23] Speaker 1: honor winner, and I asked him, like what the guy did?
[26:24] Speaker 1: And he was like, oh, I don't really pay much
[26:26] Speaker 1: attention because it's one of those like loan Survivor stories,
[26:28] Speaker 1: and I don't trust anyone who won an award, and
[26:30] Speaker 1: it is like the only guy who survived, Like anyone
[26:32] Speaker 1: doing that is probably.
[26:33] Speaker 2: Lying about what happened.
[26:37] Speaker 1: I think that's generally a smart way to approach those stories,
[26:40] Speaker 1: especially the story of Navy Seal Marcus Latrell, who wrote
[26:43] Speaker 1: the book Loan Survivor, which is an account of him
[26:46] Speaker 1: being the only survivor for unit that we know is
[26:48] Speaker 1: largely inaccurate. Right, fun stuff. So Dick starts that tradition
[26:54] Speaker 1: of being a fantasist and a huge braggart while also
[26:57] Speaker 1: like having actual qualifications that make it very difficult for
[27:01] Speaker 1: most people to kind of argue with you or deny
[27:04] Speaker 1: what you did. Right, But he's also like he's also
[27:09] Speaker 1: someone who does have a lot of popularity in the unit.
[27:12] Speaker 1: A lot of guys, particularly in the pirate end of
[27:14] Speaker 1: the Seals, really like him. As or Kelly writes in
[27:17] Speaker 1: his book, quote, men who served under him in Vietnam
[27:20] Speaker 1: say they would follow him anywhere. These, however, are the pirates.
[27:24] Speaker 2: Again.
[27:24] Speaker 1: Other seals described him as a boastful bragger. So it's
[27:27] Speaker 1: it's it's not like universal, but he is popular within
[27:31] Speaker 1: the popular with the worst guys, which yes, and that's
[27:34] Speaker 1: not a small number of them, right. That's kind of
[27:36] Speaker 1: an important thing is that he is hated by a
[27:38] Speaker 1: lot of Seals, but he's liked by a.
[27:40] Speaker 2: Lot of them.
[27:41] Speaker 1: When the war ended, he remained in the now shrunken
[27:44] Speaker 1: Navy Seals, and he spent the next decade watching the
[27:46] Speaker 1: military he loved languish in post Vietnam peacetime outside of
[27:50] Speaker 1: a war zone. His behavior made more waves among his peers.
[27:53] Speaker 1: Per the book Brave Men, Dark Waters, quote, he had
[27:56] Speaker 1: away with people that permitted him to get away with
[27:58] Speaker 1: behavior that has one friend's would get me killed. He
[28:01] Speaker 1: casually called strangers by racial epithets and got a smile
[28:05] Speaker 1: in return. Rear Admiral George Worthington, who succeeded marsinco as
[28:09] Speaker 1: naval lettache in Cambodia in the mid nineteen seventies, recalls
[28:12] Speaker 1: a reception for General lawn Nan, brother of lawn Nole,
[28:15] Speaker 1: who had been president of the country. Marsenko was well loved,
[28:17] Speaker 1: if not revered, by the Cambodian officer corps and the
[28:20] Speaker 1: troops too. He had a sort of Lawrence of Arabia
[28:22] Speaker 1: esque leadership quality about him. Worthington says, Marsino had never
[28:25] Speaker 1: laid an eye on Lawnnon, but he walks up behind
[28:28] Speaker 1: him and grabs him with a big bear hug, and
[28:29] Speaker 1: the guy loved it. And again that's also very telling
[28:34] Speaker 1: because the Cambodians he talked, he's talking about are the
[28:37] Speaker 1: guys who lost to the Khmer rouge. So he trained
[28:40] Speaker 1: the military that lost. Yeah, yeah, I mean, is this
[28:45] Speaker 1: becoming a pattern?
[28:46] Speaker 3: Yeah, that's yeah.
[28:47] Speaker 2: That's how we roll, That's how we roll in the seals.
[28:51] Speaker 1: He trained the brutal, authoritarian military that's war crimes so
[28:57] Speaker 1: enraged rural Cambodians that it provided fuel for the Khmer roote.
[29:03] Speaker 1: So at one point in the nineteen seventies, Dick panicked
[29:06] Speaker 1: a top Navy officer during a visit to the Pentagon
[29:09] Speaker 1: when the officer noted that Marsinko had a pistol stuffed
[29:12] Speaker 1: in his sock. Now, let me tell you something about
[29:15] Speaker 1: carrying a gun, folks. You got two, broadly speaking, two
[29:19] Speaker 1: ways to carry a gun. One is just the firearm itself,
[29:24] Speaker 1: either loaded or unloaded, but without a round in the chamber. Right,
[29:27] Speaker 1: a gun can be loaded and not have a round
[29:29] Speaker 1: in the chamber. That means you've got a mag in.
[29:30] Speaker 1: But there's not like if you pull the trigger, it's
[29:32] Speaker 1: not going to immediately fire a bullet.
[29:33] Speaker 2: Right.
[29:33] Speaker 1: You have to cock it basically, or you have to
[29:36] Speaker 1: charge it, is the term in order to get a
[29:39] Speaker 1: bullet in there.
[29:39] Speaker 3: Right.
[29:40] Speaker 1: The other way to carry it is with around in
[29:42] Speaker 1: the chamber. Now, most good holsters are like made out
[29:46] Speaker 1: of us and they didn't really do that with holsters
[29:48] Speaker 1: back then. But ideally your holster is made out of
[29:50] Speaker 1: a rigid plastic material, so there's something hard in between
[29:53] Speaker 1: the trigger and the rest of the world, so that
[29:55] Speaker 1: if you carry with a gun with a bullet in
[29:57] Speaker 1: the chamber, something can't just like poke the trigger and
[30:01] Speaker 1: make it fire.
[30:03] Speaker 2: Two things.
[30:04] Speaker 1: I'm gonna assume Richard Marsenko never carried a gun without
[30:07] Speaker 1: a round in the chamber, So I'm going to guess
[30:10] Speaker 1: he's just got a chambered hot pistol with no safety,
[30:14] Speaker 1: shoved in a sock, with nothing between that.
[30:16] Speaker 2: Trigger and the world around it but a sock.
[30:20] Speaker 1: And I think that's beautiful. I think that's beautiful.
[30:24] Speaker 2: Or adds that quote.
[30:25] Speaker 1: Another officer invited Marsenko to present a briefing at the
[30:27] Speaker 1: Pentagon and then called the session off because he was
[30:30] Speaker 1: so embarrassed by Marsenko's flamboyant profanity. Now this is evident
[30:38] Speaker 1: in the book Rogue Warrior. Richard's favorite word is cock breath,
[30:41] Speaker 1: which he uses eleven times in his autobiography.
[30:44] Speaker 2: I don't know if it's been used more in a book,
[30:46] Speaker 2: but I probably not right or weird guy.
[30:51] Speaker 1: Yeah, you'd have to try. At one point, he calls
[30:54] Speaker 1: his own men positively Mary murdering cock breath shit for
[30:59] Speaker 1: brain's asshole. At another he claims to have shouted down
[31:02] Speaker 1: a higher ranking officer who graduated from the Naval Academy
[31:05] Speaker 1: and at admiral relatives, saying fuck you and all your
[31:09] Speaker 1: fucking kind you sorry shit for brain's cock bread pencil
[31:11] Speaker 1: Dick numbnuts, asshole.
[31:16] Speaker 2: Fun. I know it's a different era, but yeah, you.
[31:20] Speaker 1: Know what I'll say here is like there's a way
[31:22] Speaker 1: to do that suit you a But like Ari Eirmley
[31:24] Speaker 1: had a fucking horrible politics. That's like the drill sergeant
[31:26] Speaker 1: from a full metal jacket, right, but he was at
[31:30] Speaker 1: least really good at creatively cursing and dressing people down.
[31:34] Speaker 1: Richard is not right, Like, it's a lot of the
[31:37] Speaker 1: same insults eat it and they're not very creative. The
[31:41] Speaker 1: bleakest moment of Maarsenko's career before the end came in
[31:44] Speaker 1: nineteen eighty when Jimmy Carter had US Special Force his
[31:47] Speaker 1: attempt to rescue prisoners of the American embassy who were
[31:49] Speaker 1: trapped in Iran. This is a very famous failure. And
[31:52] Speaker 1: this is why I say, like, you know, US Special
[31:56] Speaker 1: Forces until the modern era had a much more mixed reputation,
[31:59] Speaker 1: And this is a this is a Delta Force operation,
[32:02] Speaker 1: so it's not Seals. On the day of the mission,
[32:04] Speaker 1: Dick was almost forty. He was a Navy commander assigned
[32:07] Speaker 1: to represent the Seals at the Pentagon, so he had
[32:09] Speaker 1: a front row seat for the disastrous attempt by Delta Force,
[32:12] Speaker 1: which is at that point the pre eminent special forces
[32:15] Speaker 1: unit in the country, way more elite than the Seals,
[32:18] Speaker 1: to save the hostages, and the whole event was a clusterfuck.
[32:22] Speaker 1: One chopper hit a C one thirty while refueling, which
[32:24] Speaker 1: caused an explosive crash, and the Delta operators bailed in time,
[32:28] Speaker 1: but three Marines and a helicopter died, along with five
[32:31] Speaker 1: Air Force crew. The whole affair was a calamity for
[32:35] Speaker 1: the special Forces community as well as the Carter. A
[32:38] Speaker 1: lot of people will say this is why Carter lost. Yeah, right,
[32:41] Speaker 1: and it's definitely part of why Carter lost, and.
[32:44] Speaker 3: You know, not to do too much history, that is
[32:49] Speaker 3: arguably why we're at the position we're in now.
[32:51] Speaker 1: Arguably why we're in the position we're in now because
[32:53] Speaker 1: Delta Force couldn't get their fucking well. I guess this
[32:55] Speaker 1: is more on the air the pilot guys, but yeah, yeah,
[33:00] Speaker 1: So as a result of this horrible cluster fuck, Jimmy
[33:03] Speaker 1: first off, Carter calls for an immediate follow up attempt,
[33:05] Speaker 1: but he also calls for like the Pentagon, to reform
[33:08] Speaker 1: the way their special Forces unit works, and as a
[33:10] Speaker 1: result of this, the Pentagon decides to form the Joint
[33:12] Speaker 1: Special Operations Command or JAYSOCK to coordinate between different special
[33:17] Speaker 1: forces teams directly.
[33:18] Speaker 2: For the president. This is the birth.
[33:20] Speaker 1: Weirdly enough, it comes from Jimmy Carter. You can trace
[33:23] Speaker 1: the birth of special forces not being well. These are
[33:25] Speaker 1: units that are part of the Navy, part of the army,
[33:28] Speaker 1: and they help with these special tasks to the most
[33:31] Speaker 1: elite of these units are like the president's direct guy, right,
[33:35] Speaker 1: this is the president's goon squad.
[33:38] Speaker 2: Right.
[33:38] Speaker 1: Ye, Carter really does start that in a lot of ways.
[33:40] Speaker 1: I mean, this has been happening before him, but he's
[33:43] Speaker 1: a major part of that. Actually, he was horrified, I'm
[33:47] Speaker 1: sure by like where this led. He was trying to
[33:49] Speaker 1: rescue some hostages. But that is kind of part of
[33:52] Speaker 1: what leads us where we get or where we are today.
[33:55] Speaker 3: Well, it's also sort of why, like, you can't be
[33:58] Speaker 3: the American president, no matter who you are, without being
[34:00] Speaker 3: at minimum of war criminal.
[34:02] Speaker 1: Right, You're going to be party to some horrible things
[34:05] Speaker 1: as the president, and the very best case scenarios of
[34:08] Speaker 1: like the most ethical guy in that job, you can imagine,
[34:12] Speaker 1: which probably was carter like he probably in terms of
[34:15] Speaker 1: like trying to be ethical, you know, not this again.
[34:18] Speaker 2: He did a lot of there's a lot of critiques
[34:20] Speaker 2: of course.
[34:21] Speaker 3: Grading on the presidential curve. Yeah, he simply has to
[34:24] Speaker 3: be the top.
[34:25] Speaker 2: He's got he's got to be the guy who cared
[34:27] Speaker 2: the most, right.
[34:28] Speaker 3: Yeah. Yeah.
[34:30] Speaker 1: So Jaysock is formed to coordinate between these different special
[34:33] Speaker 1: forces teams for the President, and Marsenko is tasked with
[34:36] Speaker 1: building the Navy contribution to Jaysock, right. And this proves
[34:39] Speaker 1: something else important about Marsenco, which is that he's very
[34:42] Speaker 1: good at making the right friends. And for all of
[34:44] Speaker 1: his hate of like officers and politics and all these
[34:48] Speaker 1: connected people he describes as like the whole problem with
[34:51] Speaker 1: big Navy, he's great at politics. He's a political animal.
[34:55] Speaker 1: He's really good at interfacing as an officer in a
[34:58] Speaker 1: political way in order to get what he wants.
[35:01] Speaker 2: Right.
[35:01] Speaker 1: He's great at selling his ideas to command. It's a
[35:03] Speaker 1: legitimate skill he has. Marsenko lays out and sells to
[35:07] Speaker 1: them his vision of a new seal team with its
[35:10] Speaker 1: own commanding officer and six platoons dedicated to counter terrorist
[35:14] Speaker 1: missions and hostage rescue missions. To make his dream team,
[35:17] Speaker 1: marsinco would have to reach over the heads of his
[35:20] Speaker 1: fellow Special Forces officers to steal their very best men.
[35:23] Speaker 1: In the book Brave Men, Dark Waters, or Kelly writes
[35:26] Speaker 1: that Marsenko was armed with a pri one Priority one
[35:29] Speaker 1: that permitted him to take the men and equipment he
[35:31] Speaker 1: needed to from other commands. So he starts grabbing the
[35:34] Speaker 1: guys he wants from these other Special Forces units, and
[35:38] Speaker 1: by September of nineteen eighty Marsinko was commander of an
[35:41] Speaker 1: entirely new unit, which he named Seal Team six. This
[35:45] Speaker 1: is where that starts, and this forms an important part
[35:48] Speaker 1: of team war which you had brought up, Right, How
[35:50] Speaker 1: are the five? Were there five other Seal teams at
[35:52] Speaker 1: this point? There were still just two. The name initially, though,
[35:56] Speaker 1: referred to the fact that there had been six Seal
[35:58] Speaker 1: platoons that had taken counter terrorism training. Right, So Seal
[36:02] Speaker 1: Team six is made up of six platoons that had
[36:05] Speaker 1: taken the specialized training, So that's why they start with
[36:08] Speaker 1: the name. But because there's only two other Seal teams,
[36:11] Speaker 1: Marsinko decides he really likes the idea of naming them
[36:14] Speaker 1: Seal Team six is a disinformation tactic to trick the Bobbies,
[36:18] Speaker 1: so they think there's more seals than there are. Right,
[36:22] Speaker 1: that may have been something after the fact. I kind
[36:24] Speaker 1: of think it was just because they trained six platoons
[36:26] Speaker 1: and then after we said, oh this is clever, right,
[36:28] Speaker 1: you know, but I don't, I don't know.
[36:32] Speaker 3: Yeah, and the children where it's like, you know, at
[36:35] Speaker 3: fourteen year old year old Yeah, yeah, that's fine.
[36:38] Speaker 2: Yeah, we're ruled by violent, violent fourteen year old boys. Yeah.
[36:43] Speaker 1: Like, here's the thing about testosterone. It has its uses,
[36:46] Speaker 1: but it it One thing it can do is stop
[36:50] Speaker 1: you from ever growing past age fourteen. Yeah, you really
[36:55] Speaker 1: have to fight that part of the effect. So in
[36:58] Speaker 1: an article for Rolling Stone, Matthew Cole notes Marcinko sought
[37:02] Speaker 1: men who, in his estimation, would otherwise be athletes or
[37:05] Speaker 1: criminals in the civilian world. He wanted seals who had
[37:08] Speaker 1: combat experience, he later said in an interview, who had
[37:10] Speaker 1: a bullet go past their head with their name on it.
[37:13] Speaker 1: Marsenko wanted men who were adept at all the traditional
[37:15] Speaker 1: seal skills shooting, underwater diving, skydiving, mountain climbing, but who
[37:19] Speaker 1: also had or could develop tradesman life skills. These men
[37:22] Speaker 1: had to engineer solutions to any problems standing in their
[37:24] Speaker 1: way to mission success, whether it required manufacturing a quieter
[37:27] Speaker 1: piece of equipment or conceiving a quieter method for building entry. Right,
[37:32] Speaker 1: And that's very telling. But this is also not just Marsenko.
[37:35] Speaker 1: If you remember when the Seals were formed, there was
[37:37] Speaker 1: some talk of like, I want them to be rogues,
[37:39] Speaker 1: and he's now taking that a step forward. Do I
[37:41] Speaker 1: want guys Seal Team six guys who could have only
[37:44] Speaker 1: been pro athletes or criminals? Right, that's Marsenko's idea, right now,
[37:49] Speaker 1: there's a lot of sense to this. Actually, you know,
[37:52] Speaker 1: the whole criminal thing is going to cause problems immediately,
[37:55] Speaker 1: but if you want to form a unit of dudes
[37:57] Speaker 1: who can solve serious problems using out of the box
[38:00] Speaker 1: on the fly, it does make sense.
[38:02] Speaker 2: To recruit guys like this.
[38:04] Speaker 1: You know, criminal cartels and gangs are famously creative.
[38:10] Speaker 3: Yet done, they can get shit done. Yeah yeah, yeah.
[38:15] Speaker 3: The outsides are they're not They're not the type of
[38:18] Speaker 3: people you want to do this. You can find other
[38:21] Speaker 3: creative people. I guess is what I would say, you.
[38:23] Speaker 1: Probably want to make more of these people in any
[38:25] Speaker 1: society and give them like guns and the right to
[38:28] Speaker 1: do whatever they want. That might be a bad idea,
[38:34] Speaker 1: but you know this also does work really well in
[38:36] Speaker 1: certain ways. It's a great way to a lot of
[38:38] Speaker 1: like innovative combat tactics and like operate special operations tactics
[38:42] Speaker 1: are created by these Team six guys because they're just
[38:46] Speaker 1: kind of given freedom to do whatever they want and
[38:49] Speaker 1: a bunch of money to explore and make gear and
[38:51] Speaker 1: try new stuff. Right, So there's aspects of what Marsinko
[38:55] Speaker 1: does that are a really good idea, And I don't
[38:57] Speaker 1: want to pretend like that's not the case, but Richard's
[38:59] Speaker 1: good ideas are always married with his bad ones. For example,
[39:04] Speaker 1: Dick is a hardcore alcoholic in nineteen eighty and since
[39:07] Speaker 1: he considered himself the.
[39:09] Speaker 3: I'm so shocked to hear this, wow.
[39:12] Speaker 1: Still an alcoholic wow, And since he considered himself the
[39:16] Speaker 1: best operator ever, obviously any man who might hope to
[39:19] Speaker 1: be his equal would have to drink at least as
[39:21] Speaker 1: much as he did. So membership in Sealed Team six
[39:24] Speaker 1: was thus mostly restricted to alcoholics.
[39:28] Speaker 2: The New York Times, He's fucking Stalin what is happening? Yeah,
[39:32] Speaker 2: we need to you know, what we really need.
[39:34] Speaker 1: And this team, full of heavily armed badasses who are
[39:36] Speaker 1: unaccountable to any laws, is drinking problems.
[39:40] Speaker 2: That's gotta be key.
[39:42] Speaker 1: I want these guys to be hungover or hammered one
[39:44] Speaker 1: hundred percent of the time. The New York Times confirmed
[39:47] Speaker 1: that his recruiting interviews often amounted to boozy chats and bars.
[39:51] Speaker 1: One team member told Or that when he came for
[39:53] Speaker 1: a seven am interview, Marcinko offered him a beer and
[39:56] Speaker 1: said you might not fit in. When he declined, he
[39:59] Speaker 1: did ultimately admit the man, but one of Marsenko's officers
[40:02] Speaker 1: admitted to be with him, you had to drink to
[40:04] Speaker 1: be in the in crowd. I drink when I want
[40:06] Speaker 1: to drink. This went against the grain, and when he
[40:10] Speaker 1: was interviewed by Or for the book Brave Men, Dark Waters,
[40:13] Speaker 1: Maarsenco didn't even try to deny this. Instead, he wrote
[40:16] Speaker 1: Or a letter explaining his alcohol preferences, especially Gin Bombay
[40:20] Speaker 1: team members East Coast weaned on rum coke at Saint
[40:23] Speaker 1: Thomas during Animal Annual winter training. I polished these skills
[40:27] Speaker 1: in atache A training and inverted it and converted to gin.
[40:29] Speaker 1: Gin is powerful, but my safest drink. I can consume more.
[40:32] Speaker 1: It demoralizes the opponent drinking mixed drinks or slurring while
[40:36] Speaker 1: I casually rant and rave. I do play head games.
[40:39] Speaker 1: I use booze as a tool. It's very telling too
[40:42] Speaker 1: that like people he's drinking with are his opponents that
[40:44] Speaker 1: he wants to demoralize.
[40:46] Speaker 2: He's like, that's not how I drink. He's like, I'm
[40:49] Speaker 2: not like the others. Gin and bombay.
[40:51] Speaker 1: Alcohol is a tool that I use tactically to defeat
[40:54] Speaker 1: my enemies who are also my men.
[40:57] Speaker 3: Yeah, you're employee cool.
[40:59] Speaker 2: I mean you're at least it's like, I mean they're
[41:02] Speaker 2: they're there.
[41:03] Speaker 3: If their only job is a commit war crimes, at
[41:05] Speaker 3: least they're sluggish and hungover. Sometimes at least they're fucking drunk.
[41:08] Speaker 1: Yeah, this has going to cost some issues too. To
[41:11] Speaker 1: justify his selections to command, Marcinco hired a psychologist to
[41:14] Speaker 1: evaluate his picks and rubber stamp them. Per an interview
[41:17] Speaker 1: he gave to Cole, it was a fallacy. We were normal.
[41:20] Speaker 1: According to me. If I was fucked up, then we
[41:22] Speaker 1: were all fucked up. Also true, that's true. He also
[41:29] Speaker 1: towed Cole this, if you want to call them sociopaths,
[41:32] Speaker 1: you can. That's how you get the enlisted in charge.
[41:34] Speaker 1: They are the talent. So if you want the enlisted
[41:38] Speaker 1: to be in charge, if you want the talented you'd like,
[41:41] Speaker 1: you have to cater to sociopaths. That's who you're looking
[41:43] Speaker 1: for in this job. He's very direct about it. Concentrating
[41:46] Speaker 1: this specific group of men and giving them unlimited funding
[41:50] Speaker 1: for weapons and training resulted in the creation of a
[41:52] Speaker 1: uniquely skilled group of soldiers. And to give you an
[41:54] Speaker 1: idea of the kind of proficiency these guys developed, Marsinko's
[41:58] Speaker 1: Seal Team six fire more rounds training in their first
[42:02] Speaker 1: six months of existence than the entire United States Marine
[42:05] Speaker 1: Corps used in training for a whole year. Yeah, that's
[42:10] Speaker 1: how much these guys are practicing.
[42:12] Speaker 2: They are really good with guns.
[42:16] Speaker 1: Marsenko saw his men as artisans of violence, and a
[42:19] Speaker 1: shoot house was built to practice for incredibly niche hostage
[42:22] Speaker 1: rescue situations. That's the idea is, we're going to be
[42:25] Speaker 1: We need these guys to be able in order to
[42:27] Speaker 1: avoid killing, you know, the hostages and what rather than whatnot,
[42:30] Speaker 1: they have to be able to develop these skills. Now,
[42:32] Speaker 1: does Marcinko ever really care about avoiding civilian casualties? Is
[42:35] Speaker 1: that ever a priority of Team six? Highly debatable? But
[42:39] Speaker 1: that's how they're build, right, That's how they're sold to command.
[42:42] Speaker 1: That's why he's able to claim this is necessary. I
[42:45] Speaker 1: need this many bullets the only way to develop the
[42:47] Speaker 1: skills they need to do the kind of job that
[42:49] Speaker 1: we have.
[42:50] Speaker 3: I mean, it's also probably a lie you could pretty
[42:53] Speaker 3: easily tell yourself. I mean, why else would you? You know,
[42:56] Speaker 3: you do have to live with yourself.
[42:57] Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's also nobody wants to think of Most
[42:59] Speaker 1: people don't want I think in themselves.
[43:00] Speaker 2: It's just like murderers, right, yeah, but you know who
[43:04] Speaker 2: are just murderers? No?
[43:05] Speaker 1: No, no, okay, well don't think about that. Just think
[43:09] Speaker 1: about these ads.
[43:17] Speaker 2: And we're back.
[43:18] Speaker 1: And Sophie has informed me that none of our sponsors
[43:22] Speaker 1: are ruthless murderers.
[43:23] Speaker 3: I did not.
[43:25] Speaker 2: I did not, especially.
[43:26] Speaker 1: Especially if the Washington State Patrol ads are the police.
[43:30] Speaker 2: As just ran, I cannot.
[43:33] Speaker 3: I cannot vouch for all of our sponsors because I
[43:35] Speaker 3: have no idea who they are.
[43:37] Speaker 2: But that's the level of trust you have in them.
[43:39] Speaker 2: That's the level of trust. Mean, they could be anybody.
[43:41] Speaker 2: They could be anybody. Hitler could be running an ad
[43:44] Speaker 2: I would have no way of knowing. Literally.
[43:48] Speaker 1: Seals also trained for high altitude insertion and every other
[43:51] Speaker 1: cool thing they could find someone to teach them. Marcinko
[43:54] Speaker 1: had been made a commander by this point, which put
[43:56] Speaker 1: him above most of the other Seal officers and ensured
[43:58] Speaker 1: he pretty much always got what he wanted. He's received
[44:01] Speaker 1: a lot of praise down on down the years for
[44:03] Speaker 1: his creation, but even in the early days of Team six,
[44:07] Speaker 1: other Seal officers looked at what he was building with
[44:09] Speaker 1: worry and brave men dark Waters or quotes one of
[44:12] Speaker 1: these officers. You get a bunch of people, smart, strong, aggressive,
[44:16] Speaker 1: and you require them to kill other people. You are
[44:18] Speaker 1: requiring guys to do some really tough things. They are
[44:21] Speaker 1: going to go in and find that terrorists are women,
[44:24] Speaker 1: terrorists or children, anybody. You're up close. This is very personal.
[44:28] Speaker 1: The psychologist looks at whether you can blow a hole
[44:30] Speaker 1: in a man two feet away and watch his brains
[44:32] Speaker 1: come out the other side of his head, and do it.
[44:34] Speaker 1: You give them this training I'm talking about concentrating year
[44:37] Speaker 1: after year on parachuting, making guns, sniper shooting, scaling mountains, swimming, diving.
[44:42] Speaker 1: You give them all this training and require them to
[44:44] Speaker 1: kill people, not from one hundred yards away, not from
[44:46] Speaker 1: two hundred yards away, not from thirty thousand feet with
[44:48] Speaker 1: a bomb, but from three feet away. Can you imagine
[44:50] Speaker 1: that group of people together, all of a sudden, In
[44:53] Speaker 1: that group of one hundred and fifty or two hundred
[44:55] Speaker 1: men who are so highly trained, all keyed up, and
[44:57] Speaker 1: required to do such hazardous things, you are going to
[44:59] Speaker 1: find some amorl people. They're there because they're smart and aggressive,
[45:03] Speaker 1: and they have no morals. You have guys who have
[45:05] Speaker 1: no morals will do anything. That's how you get a
[45:08] Speaker 1: reputation for being really bad. But the great majority are
[45:11] Speaker 1: really dedicated, straight, hard working people. The reason the a
[45:15] Speaker 1: moral man doesn't get his way more is that a
[45:16] Speaker 1: lot of people watch him. He is controlled. But you
[45:19] Speaker 1: are going to find that kind of person when you
[45:21] Speaker 1: have a group of people required to perform with These
[45:23] Speaker 1: people are required to perform right, And I might argue
[45:26] Speaker 1: that the great majority are hardworking, moral people. It depends
[45:31] Speaker 1: you know. Some seal units do abide by the rules
[45:33] Speaker 1: of engagement and don't commit war crimes constantly, and some don't.
[45:37] Speaker 1: It does tend seem to depend on like the ratio
[45:40] Speaker 1: of the pirates to the boy Scouts guide of end
[45:42] Speaker 1: them at the time or whatever. But he's making a
[45:45] Speaker 1: good point, right that as much as we want to
[45:48] Speaker 1: condemn and should condemn arcinco and individual and Navy seal
[45:51] Speaker 1: guys who commit war crimes, all of their crimes are
[45:55] Speaker 1: inevitable by their existence. You can't have these guys and
[45:58] Speaker 1: have them. We can't have any group of guys who
[46:01] Speaker 1: are trained to do this and supposed to do the
[46:04] Speaker 1: kind of shit that we send Navy seale to do,
[46:07] Speaker 1: who don't turn into this. It can't be done.
[46:10] Speaker 2: It's a consequence. Yeah, yeah, consequence. It's brutalizing.
[46:14] Speaker 1: You can try to minimize some things, right, There is
[46:17] Speaker 1: more that certainly should be done to control and punish.
[46:20] Speaker 1: You can punish certainly when they commit war crimes, to
[46:23] Speaker 1: try to make it less common. But this is always
[46:25] Speaker 1: going to be a problem when you're concentrating the most
[46:28] Speaker 1: violent and skilled men together in saying like we want
[46:31] Speaker 1: you to commit a bunch of murder for the government, right,
[46:35] Speaker 1: good people don't want to do that. Job all that often,
[46:38] Speaker 1: and if they are good people when they start, they
[46:40] Speaker 1: don't stay that way long because they're shooting people in
[46:43] Speaker 1: the head from three feet away every day. It's bad
[46:45] Speaker 1: for you to do that. Yeah, you have to be
[46:48] Speaker 1: a bad person after a period of time. It fucks
[46:51] Speaker 1: you up in pretty profound ways.
[46:55] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[46:56] Speaker 1: Another officer told or that when Marsenko came to him
[46:59] Speaker 1: to recruit from his youth, he was surprised that he
[47:01] Speaker 1: took not the best performers, but quote uniformly, the scum.
[47:05] Speaker 1: The fact that these guys had so much attention and
[47:07] Speaker 1: resources lavished on them certainly bred jealousy. In a mixed reputation,
[47:12] Speaker 1: Team six guys could both get called Jedi by other
[47:14] Speaker 1: Seals and, per another Seal officer, a paramilitary fitness club. Still,
[47:21] Speaker 1: the officer who called him a fitness club wanted to
[47:23] Speaker 1: join Team six because they got all of the best
[47:25] Speaker 1: gear and all of the best missions, and they also
[47:28] Speaker 1: had no real oversight. At one point during the early
[47:31] Speaker 1: nineteen eighties, Marsenko build the government for lodging his entire
[47:35] Speaker 1: command in Washington, d C. It was later found that
[47:38] Speaker 1: the hotel he built never existed, and the Seals had
[47:41] Speaker 1: bunked on a yacht and the Potomac owned by a
[47:43] Speaker 1: buddy of Marsenco or something like that, and he'd just
[47:46] Speaker 1: taken the money, he'd build the navy. And he did
[47:48] Speaker 1: this all the time. This is normal standard operating procedure
[47:54] Speaker 1: for Richard Barzenko. We know he engaged in similar acts
[47:56] Speaker 1: of financial fraud at least thirty seven times during the
[47:59] Speaker 1: three years he led Seal Team six, So about once
[48:02] Speaker 1: a month, he's doing this like monthly. This is like
[48:05] Speaker 1: very common for him. Nobody notices at first. Marsinko's a
[48:09] Speaker 1: rising star, and it's widely agreed that he had accomplished
[48:12] Speaker 1: something great in getting one hundred man special forces team
[48:15] Speaker 1: up and running in just three months. Within a year
[48:18] Speaker 1: or so of Team six's creation. Many insiders regarded Seal
[48:21] Speaker 1: Team six as being as good as Delta Force, if
[48:23] Speaker 1: not better, But the skill they exhibited was displayed alongside
[48:27] Speaker 1: their faults, including a team wide pinchant for apocalyptic drinking.
[48:33] Speaker 1: Team six guys from the jump get in trouble for
[48:35] Speaker 1: starting fights for like like being just incredibly violent, rowdy
[48:40] Speaker 1: drunks and causing problems everywhere they.
[48:42] Speaker 3: Fucking go, right, I mean, but that's the problem. Yeah,
[48:47] Speaker 3: it's just that that then the mythology for like the
[48:51] Speaker 3: you know people is like, oh, we we got at
[48:54] Speaker 3: least the vikings are on our side. Yeah.
[48:57] Speaker 1: It's just like it's like, yeah, but is that really
[49:01] Speaker 1: necessary to modern war?
[49:03] Speaker 2: We actively don't.
[49:04] Speaker 3: I think so.
[49:06] Speaker 1: I think this might be a detriment on the whole.
[49:10] Speaker 1: Marsinco clearly saw this as more evidence that he was
[49:13] Speaker 1: the good kind of officer, writing, I played havoc with
[49:16] Speaker 1: their system. I treated my lowest drinking seamen with more
[49:19] Speaker 1: respect than I did most captains and commodorees. I ate
[49:21] Speaker 1: and drank with my enlisted men in chiefs. I threw
[49:24] Speaker 1: loud parties. I said fuck to flag rank officers. I
[49:27] Speaker 1: said fuck, I'm cool. Yeah, okay, okay, Richard, okay, man,
[49:31] Speaker 1: we get it, buddy. Now there are good reasons Marsinko
[49:34] Speaker 1: was a legend to many of his operators during his time.
[49:37] Speaker 1: Marsinko hurt his leg training overseas and decided he could
[49:40] Speaker 1: manage well enough that he just kept working on it
[49:43] Speaker 1: because he didn't want to take medical leave, and he
[49:45] Speaker 1: avoided the doctor until seventeen months later he was diagnosed
[49:49] Speaker 1: with a broken Lake such a moron, and again, yeah,
[49:54] Speaker 1: it's really dumb because he had to get at that point,
[49:56] Speaker 1: it was so bad that he had he had to
[49:58] Speaker 1: get a special procedure his fucking military healthcare wouldn't cover,
[50:02] Speaker 1: and he had to borrow money from one of his
[50:03] Speaker 1: enlisted men in order to get like a sports medical
[50:06] Speaker 1: procedure done on himself because he was such a difficual.
[50:10] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[50:11] Speaker 1: Now, Marsenko's problems with the Navy began when Lieutenant William McRaven,
[50:15] Speaker 1: and that's the guy who was running the Seals by
[50:18] Speaker 1: the way, when Bin Lanen gets killed, was transferred to
[50:20] Speaker 1: Team six as an officer. Now, McRaven comes from Navy royalty,
[50:24] Speaker 1: and so Marsenko hated him immediately. For his part, McRaven
[50:28] Speaker 1: was a by the book officer and seems to have
[50:30] Speaker 1: been one of like the boy scout side of things.
[50:33] Speaker 1: And as soon as he gets into Team six he
[50:34] Speaker 1: notices a bunch of irregularities and part of I should
[50:38] Speaker 1: note here Marsinko has his pick of enlisted men officers
[50:41] Speaker 1: are assigned.
[50:43] Speaker 2: To Team six.
[50:44] Speaker 1: So a lot of his conflicts come with the officers
[50:46] Speaker 1: because he doesn't get to pick them right. They are
[50:48] Speaker 1: not his chosen guys in other words, right, so only.
[50:52] Speaker 3: There to either be like jumped in or to knark
[50:56] Speaker 3: on him.
[50:57] Speaker 1: Yeah, right, exactly exactly. And mcgraven on him because he
[51:00] Speaker 1: notices a bunch of irregularities and how operators are filing
[51:03] Speaker 1: their travel vouchers, and he complains to his superior officer,
[51:06] Speaker 1: who says an x in essence like, hey, dude, don't
[51:08] Speaker 1: ruin this for us, Like we got a good thing
[51:11] Speaker 1: going here, right, And so this guy then tosses mcraven's
[51:15] Speaker 1: gear out of their cabin and when they get back
[51:17] Speaker 1: from training, Marsenco fires McRaven. Decades later, he still claimed
[51:21] Speaker 1: the man had been sent to Team six as an infiltrader.
[51:23] Speaker 1: McRaven got his running orders from the West Coast something uh,
[51:27] Speaker 1: Marsinco writes, right that this guy he was a spy
[51:30] Speaker 1: sent by the West Coast Seals. He infiltrade by elite
[51:32] Speaker 1: East Coast unit because they hated me.
[51:35] Speaker 3: This is it is. It is telling that, like like
[51:38] Speaker 3: all things in a petty criminal enterprise, there's East Coast
[51:41] Speaker 3: West Coast beef.
[51:42] Speaker 1: That's right, that's right. He is the biggie in this one.
[51:46] Speaker 1: And I guess McRaven is.
[51:47] Speaker 2: Tupac, I don't. Yeah, that's the same, right actually, but.
[51:51] Speaker 3: Okay, well they all said the N word just about
[51:54] Speaker 3: the same amount, just to a real different tone.
[51:57] Speaker 1: Marcinko sure does. I don't know McRaven, but Marsenko for
[52:03] Speaker 1: sure done.
[52:03] Speaker 3: Yeah. I feel pretty confident about that one too.
[52:06] Speaker 2: Yeah.
[52:06] Speaker 1: Uh. In Code over Country, Cole gives a good explanation
[52:10] Speaker 1: of how many other seal officers and outside Navy officers
[52:13] Speaker 1: saw this as having as Marcinko having upended the chain
[52:16] Speaker 1: of command and sent a signal to his men that
[52:19] Speaker 1: no officer beside Dick mattered. He credits this with the
[52:22] Speaker 1: decision senior officers in the Naval Special Warfare Division made
[52:25] Speaker 1: a few months later, which was to replace Richard Barsenko. Right, So,
[52:30] Speaker 1: his total period of time commanding Team six after forming
[52:33] Speaker 1: it is like three years, and they never, like I
[52:35] Speaker 1: don't think they really do much while he's like they're training,
[52:38] Speaker 1: they're getting up to speed, like he's not there for
[52:40] Speaker 1: any of like the shit that makes them famous. But
[52:43] Speaker 1: he leaves a mark that pretty much universally agreed to
[52:46] Speaker 1: still affect the unit to this day. The officer who
[52:49] Speaker 1: replaced Marsenko Captain Robert Gormley found the unit in awful shape.
[52:54] Speaker 1: He found that Marsenko had quote constantly misled his superiors
[52:57] Speaker 1: in the chain of command under the guise of operational
[52:59] Speaker 1: secuitre ready right. In other words, he lied in order
[53:03] Speaker 1: to like steal from the Navy, and said that the
[53:06] Speaker 1: reason why he had to lie was op sack. Yeah,
[53:08] Speaker 1: can't file accurate finance reports because like I, I the
[53:12] Speaker 1: commis might find out that I'm stealing money to buy drugs.
[53:15] Speaker 2: And Richard is alleged to have had a pretty serious
[53:17] Speaker 2: cocaine problem. A lot of Team six guys are alleged to.
[53:20] Speaker 1: Have had pretty serious cocaine problems that they were stealing
[53:22] Speaker 1: from the Navy. Yeah, you know what happens a decent
[53:27] Speaker 1: amount up to the present day is Special Forces guys,
[53:29] Speaker 1: particularly at Fort Braggs selling military weapons to criminals for
[53:34] Speaker 1: money to buy drugs. Anyway, cool stuff. That's not a
[53:37] Speaker 1: Team six thing, but it's just good time saying, just a.
[53:41] Speaker 3: Thing that we all pay for. Yeah, why do we
[53:44] Speaker 3: pay taxes? Again?
[53:45] Speaker 2: This is crazy?
[53:46] Speaker 1: You know, I love paying taxes and knowing that it
[53:48] Speaker 1: goes to this shit. Gormley also found widespread alcoholism among
[53:53] Speaker 1: the team to be a serious problem. He wrote, Dick
[53:56] Speaker 1: insisted upon everyone drinking with him whenever he wanted, and
[53:58] Speaker 1: as long as he wanted. On exercises, they seldom finished
[54:01] Speaker 1: the entire scenario because as soon as things got tough,
[54:04] Speaker 1: Dick would step in, abort the exercise and take the
[54:07] Speaker 1: troops drinking. And so, in Gormley's view, like yeah, the
[54:11] Speaker 1: Seals like Team six did some cool training stuff, but
[54:14] Speaker 1: also they weren't very as good as they could have
[54:16] Speaker 1: been because mar Singo didn't really care about training.
[54:18] Speaker 2: As much as he cared about drinking. After a point,
[54:21] Speaker 2: like he's ending X, fuck it, fuck it, let's just
[54:24] Speaker 2: go drink.
[54:25] Speaker 3: Nah. Right, you guys done it enough? Come on.
[54:28] Speaker 1: Yeah, And you see this kind of casual attitude to
[54:30] Speaker 1: the things that are supposed to be serious. Then Eddie
[54:32] Speaker 1: Gallagher is accused of like one of the first weird
[54:35] Speaker 1: signs some of his younger unit mates got is during
[54:37] Speaker 1: training before they headed over to Iraq, when they would
[54:39] Speaker 1: like do the shoot houses, he would just be shooting
[54:41] Speaker 1: the civilian targets that he wasn't supposed to hit and
[54:44] Speaker 1: like joke about it, like aha, yeah, it's funny, you know,
[54:47] Speaker 1: Like yeah, and people would be like, but you're not.
[54:49] Speaker 1: You have to doesn't he have to pass training? And
[54:52] Speaker 1: he would just like clear it with his friends, so
[54:54] Speaker 1: he didn't have to actually pass, like because he didn't
[54:56] Speaker 1: care about not hitting civilians, you know.
[54:58] Speaker 2: Right, Allegedly this is this is what some guy I
[55:01] Speaker 2: wasn't there. I don't know.
[55:02] Speaker 1: I'm not nave of Zeel. I'm just saying what some
[55:03] Speaker 1: guys said to another guy who wrote a book. You know,
[55:06] Speaker 1: a book called Alpha, very good. You should read it.
[55:09] Speaker 1: So despite the praise that Marsenko gets for creating a
[55:11] Speaker 1: team with unique skills, he likely had the very low
[55:14] Speaker 1: operational tempo of the early eighties to thank for the
[55:17] Speaker 1: fact that his men were never tested too hard while
[55:19] Speaker 1: he was in command. His last IRAQ came in June
[55:21] Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty three, when he invited Gormley to drink
[55:24] Speaker 1: with the unit on Virginia Beach. It was an awkward night.
[55:28] Speaker 1: The operators were insubordinate to Gormley, so he left, but
[55:32] Speaker 1: marsinco kept drinking. As Cole writes, Marsenko decided to continue
[55:36] Speaker 1: drinking elsewhere. He had a command aid drive him in
[55:38] Speaker 1: a modified Mercedes Ben Sedan one of three he had
[55:41] Speaker 1: custom built and shipped to the United States, which he
[55:44] Speaker 1: frequently used as his personal car. That night, Marsinko's driver
[55:47] Speaker 1: fell asleep in the early morning hours and rear ended
[55:49] Speaker 1: another car, causing significant damage to both vehicles.
[55:53] Speaker 2: I would just say, warrior, great.
[55:57] Speaker 3: This type of guy always drives the Dictator Mercedes like
[56:02] Speaker 3: kind of across any.
[56:03] Speaker 2: Only car they want.
[56:04] Speaker 1: It's the only car they want, right, Yeah, the Dictator
[56:06] Speaker 1: Mercedes is a true human universal Yeah.
[56:09] Speaker 2: It's so wild, Yeah it is.
[56:12] Speaker 1: It is kind of beautiful. We're all really the same
[56:14] Speaker 1: deep down, even our psychopaths.
[56:16] Speaker 3: Yeah.
[56:17] Speaker 2: Every culture, every culture, every culture.
[56:21] Speaker 3: After aout, you know, as soon as Mercedes were around,
[56:23] Speaker 3: there was a psycho.
[56:24] Speaker 2: Who oh, this is a psycho asshole car, a.
[56:27] Speaker 3: Cult of personality, of violent culture personality got driven around it.
[56:31] Speaker 1: Yeah mmmm yeah. It's just like if you show up
[56:34] Speaker 1: drunk to a car dealership, they don't even ask. They
[56:37] Speaker 1: hand you the keys to a Dodge.
[56:38] Speaker 2: Ram, right.
[56:39] Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll figure out the financing later. You need to
[56:42] Speaker 1: be driving this twenty five hundred this.
[56:43] Speaker 3: Night for you.
[56:44] Speaker 2: Yeah, get on the road immediately.
[56:50] Speaker 1: So, in true Dick fashion, he ordered his staff not
[56:52] Speaker 1: to report the accident, but they refuse to cover it
[56:55] Speaker 1: up because again he's about to leave, So like, I'm
[56:57] Speaker 1: not going to commit a crime for you, You're out
[56:58] Speaker 1: the door. And this says a lot.
[57:01] Speaker 2: Macinco.
[57:02] Speaker 1: A big part of what he establishes in Team six
[57:04] Speaker 1: is loyalty. That's part of like the Team six, you know,
[57:06] Speaker 1: the oath the Seals take, and the way Marsinko establishes
[57:10] Speaker 1: this is like, you don't rat on your boss, on
[57:12] Speaker 1: your your fellow guys if they commit crimes, if they're stealing.
[57:16] Speaker 1: We're a wall. We don't talk to anybody. We don't
[57:19] Speaker 1: talk to big Navy, we don't talk to the NCIS investigators,
[57:23] Speaker 1: we don't do any of that stuff because we're a
[57:25] Speaker 1: loyal warrior brotherhood. Richard talks about that all the time.
[57:29] Speaker 1: As soon as he gets sent to a captain's mast,
[57:32] Speaker 1: he rolls on his driver and blames him for the accident. Yeah,
[57:39] Speaker 1: so he gets a slap on the wrist for this.
[57:41] Speaker 1: Anyone else in Dick's position would have been forced into
[57:44] Speaker 1: early retirement. But such was the awe with which Marsenko's
[57:47] Speaker 1: rogue warrior pirate personality was held by some Navy admirals
[57:51] Speaker 1: that he was given another chance to create another elite unit,
[57:55] Speaker 1: this time with even less oversight. He gets the same
[57:58] Speaker 1: job again after doing it, how because people just think
[58:03] Speaker 1: he's cool.
[58:04] Speaker 3: Yeah, because because people's brains are poisoned by like fucking you.
[58:10] Speaker 3: Because again, like, oh, you need dirty men to protect
[58:15] Speaker 3: you know, your fucking life. That's like sort of sounds
[58:17] Speaker 3: good when it's dirty, Harry, I guess yeah, but like
[58:21] Speaker 3: what the fuck are you talking about? But whatever, this
[58:23] Speaker 3: is how we run our world.
[58:25] Speaker 2: Well, what were those shirts you saw, Robert, I'm just.
[58:28] Speaker 1: I'm only here for the violence. Yeah, And and fucking
[58:31] Speaker 1: Marsenco talks all the time about like these big these
[58:34] Speaker 1: admirals who come from these admiral families and they but
[58:37] Speaker 1: those are a lot of his big backers too. There
[58:39] Speaker 1: are admirals that love him, and they're usually guys who like,
[58:42] Speaker 1: didn't do anything all that cool, but like they they
[58:45] Speaker 1: really buy into everything. Marcinko says, right, well.
[58:48] Speaker 3: But that's the sing.
[58:48] Speaker 2: He doesn't hate officers for real.
[58:51] Speaker 3: He just needs he hates accountability, a cudgel with which
[58:55] Speaker 3: to beat office, you know, like, oh, oh yeah, I
[58:57] Speaker 3: thought you were cool.
[58:59] Speaker 1: Yeah, he needs an excuse for like why people are
[59:01] Speaker 1: always giving him shit for like fucking up constantly. And
[59:03] Speaker 1: it's because these officers don't understand what real warriors do.
[59:06] Speaker 1: And it's like, well, real warriors don't need to like
[59:08] Speaker 1: steal money from the government and ram their fucking Mercedes
[59:11] Speaker 1: into the back of a civilian's car because they got drunk.
[59:13] Speaker 1: That's not really key to the war fighter ethos. I
[59:16] Speaker 1: don't think this is going to help the US win anywhere.
[59:21] Speaker 1: Your lord, shit, it's yeah, it's war lord shit. It's
[59:25] Speaker 1: not like a soldier in a democratic nation. Shit. I
[59:28] Speaker 1: mean it is, yeah, I mean objective, but it shouldn't.
[59:31] Speaker 3: It shouldn't.
[59:31] Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
[59:33] Speaker 1: Uh. Marsenko was initially transferred to teach at the National
[59:37] Speaker 1: War College, but he got lucky. On October twenty third,
[59:40] Speaker 1: nineteen eighty three, a truck loaded with T and T
[59:42] Speaker 1: was detonated outside of a Marine barracks in Beirut and
[59:44] Speaker 1: killed two hundred and forty one Americans. Admiral Lyons, who's
[59:47] Speaker 1: one of his biggest backer in the Navy, who's the
[59:50] Speaker 1: Vice Chief of Naval Operations, suggested that the Navy create
[59:53] Speaker 1: a special team to test security in their facilities and says,
[59:57] Speaker 1: I know the guy for the job, right, right, So Dick,
[1:00:01] Speaker 1: is it dear old Dick.
[1:00:03] Speaker 2: It's Dearald Dick.
[1:00:04] Speaker 3: Yeah, it's always it's always like it's the problem is
[1:00:09] Speaker 3: that it's just always some like it's so crazy it
[1:00:11] Speaker 3: just might work shit, Like people think that's like real.
[1:00:15] Speaker 1: Well, I mean there's an element that it is. There
[1:00:17] Speaker 1: are real things called red teams that exist to this
[1:00:20] Speaker 1: day and everything from like actual like military operational security
[1:00:23] Speaker 1: to like like a corporation will hire a red team
[1:00:26] Speaker 1: to see like is our website secure? Right?
[1:00:29] Speaker 2: Yeah, right, like that is like a thing.
[1:00:30] Speaker 1: You do want to do this, right, but you don't
[1:00:33] Speaker 1: necessarily need them to be completely immune to like all laws.
[1:00:37] Speaker 1: That's not necessary, right, But Dick argues, in order to
[1:00:42] Speaker 1: really be able to work like the enemy, we have
[1:00:44] Speaker 1: to be completely classified and completely free from any kind
[1:00:49] Speaker 1: of oversight, right because the enemy is not gonna there
[1:00:52] Speaker 1: won't be oversight of the enemy. Right.
[1:00:54] Speaker 2: So if you want me to know do what the
[1:00:56] Speaker 2: enemy could, you have to give me this kind of freedom.
[1:00:58] Speaker 1: Right.
[1:00:58] Speaker 3: It's also red This is play acting, motherfucker.
[1:01:01] Speaker 1: Yeah, well your cause playing now you're not even in danger. Well,
[1:01:06] Speaker 1: actually he is going to wind up endangering his men
[1:01:09] Speaker 1: somehow in this job. So the Red Cell is an
[1:01:13] Speaker 1: super classified unit that was tasked with breaking into US
[1:01:16] Speaker 1: military facilities and even kidnapping officers and civilian employees to
[1:01:21] Speaker 1: demonstrate weaknesses and security protocols. They are kidnapping people now.
[1:01:27] Speaker 1: Depending on who you ask, Richard was either very good
[1:01:29] Speaker 1: at this or deeply irresponsible to the extent of criminality.
[1:01:33] Speaker 1: Dick's ultimate plan was to carry out mock terror attacks
[1:01:37] Speaker 1: on fifty bases, spending one hundred and twenty five thousand
[1:01:40] Speaker 1: dollars per attack. Advanced warning was given so these the
[1:01:44] Speaker 1: officers at these bases and the security people knew that,
[1:01:46] Speaker 1: like there's going to be an exercise, but you won't
[1:01:48] Speaker 1: know the form it takes. Right, And when Marsenko told
[1:01:51] Speaker 1: showed up to explain what was going to happen to them,
[1:01:54] Speaker 1: he tried to psyche them out. His job was to
[1:01:56] Speaker 1: scare these people, and he took a lot of pleasure
[1:01:58] Speaker 1: in that, and recalled. He'd go into a briefing and say,
[1:02:02] Speaker 1: we won't break any skin, we won't draw any blood,
[1:02:04] Speaker 1: no broken teeth, everything else is mine. He would tell women,
[1:02:08] Speaker 1: we're not going to pull the skirt over your head
[1:02:10] Speaker 1: and tie your hands behind your back. He wanted to
[1:02:12] Speaker 1: get attention. He enjoyed twisting tails. Right, you don't like
[1:02:16] Speaker 1: tell women in an office, don't worry, We're not going
[1:02:18] Speaker 1: to rip your clothes off and bind intact if you
[1:02:20] Speaker 1: don't want them to think that that might happen. It's
[1:02:22] Speaker 1: like a weird thing to say if you're not trying
[1:02:24] Speaker 1: to scare people. Right.
[1:02:27] Speaker 3: It's also, yeah, what what is this? Fucking right? It
[1:02:31] Speaker 3: accomplishes he gets to do his thing.
[1:02:33] Speaker 1: Of course, again the basic idea of sure, you want
[1:02:35] Speaker 1: some guys to test, and that's aspects of this need
[1:02:38] Speaker 1: to happen, but not the way he is going to
[1:02:40] Speaker 1: do it. He also saw the Red Cell as his
[1:02:44] Speaker 1: chance to get revenge on the Poindexter. She'd screwed him
[1:02:47] Speaker 1: out of Team six, so he made sure to recruit
[1:02:49] Speaker 1: his best guys there from Team six for the Red Cell,
[1:02:53] Speaker 1: along with some of the best dudes from other teams.
[1:02:55] Speaker 1: Since his new unit was classified, he basically had Team
[1:02:58] Speaker 1: six sign for everything he wanted to buy and wound
[1:03:01] Speaker 1: up purchasing enough gear to operate multiple full seal teams.
[1:03:05] Speaker 1: Now again, these guys don't need guns, but he's buying
[1:03:09] Speaker 1: tons of them. He's buy it because his hope is
[1:03:11] Speaker 1: that once he's exposed all the security flaws and the
[1:03:14] Speaker 1: regular Navy that big Navy doesn't want them to think about,
[1:03:17] Speaker 1: he'll be so beloved they'll make his team the near
[1:03:20] Speaker 1: tier one guy right right. They'll be like, Wow, we
[1:03:22] Speaker 1: really need your guy. We have to send you on
[1:03:24] Speaker 1: special missions. Now you're so good.
[1:03:26] Speaker 2: You've proved that we really need you. Richard, Like this
[1:03:28] Speaker 2: is like some.
[1:03:29] Speaker 3: Very suckercorn shit. He's supposed to just sew it in
[1:03:32] Speaker 3: and like tag someone with a NERF gun and just
[1:03:35] Speaker 3: be like, could have been this could have been bad.
[1:03:38] Speaker 1: Bro, it's gonna said, it's so much worse than that.
[1:03:42] Speaker 1: So one of his first actions was to chat test
[1:03:44] Speaker 1: security at the Charleston Navy Base and Brave Men Dark
[1:03:47] Speaker 1: Waters or Kelly describes Marsinko's team as showing up to
[1:03:51] Speaker 1: areas that stored nuclear weapons quote, dressed in scroungy clothes, unshaven,
[1:03:55] Speaker 1: and with long hair, and that they spent several days
[1:03:58] Speaker 1: rummaging about, through which they were never challenged. And so
[1:04:01] Speaker 1: he's able to show that like, yeah, we just had
[1:04:02] Speaker 1: some guys like show up in this nuclear facility looking
[1:04:05] Speaker 1: like shit, and nobody like asked what they were doing
[1:04:08] Speaker 1: there or tried to like stop them from rooting around.
[1:04:11] Speaker 1: So this is kind of his proof of concept, right,
[1:04:13] Speaker 1: and it does probably show a real security Like this
[1:04:15] Speaker 1: is the fucking post Vietnam US military. I have no
[1:04:18] Speaker 1: trouble believing that he did, in fact find security with shit,
[1:04:21] Speaker 1: and so the fact that they prove that, like where
[1:04:25] Speaker 1: our operators were able to get this close to nuclear
[1:04:27] Speaker 1: weapons right without even trying is what secures him the job.
[1:04:30] Speaker 1: And so from this point forward, Richard Marsinko was in
[1:04:32] Speaker 1: charge of yet another elite, unaccountable military unit. So we'll
[1:04:36] Speaker 1: talk about what happens with the Red Cell, and we'll
[1:04:39] Speaker 1: talk about what happens to the Navy Seals and Team
[1:04:41] Speaker 1: six after that next week.
[1:04:43] Speaker 2: How are you doing?
[1:04:44] Speaker 1: How are you feeling, Andrew?
[1:04:45] Speaker 2: Good?
[1:04:46] Speaker 3: God? I mean, the only thing that makes it not
[1:04:49] Speaker 3: as bleak is like, I guess life has more or
[1:04:52] Speaker 3: less functioned with these fuckers roaming around. Sure not well,
[1:04:58] Speaker 3: but yeah, yeah, but right, every every second of this
[1:05:02] Speaker 3: is infuriating. Obviously, there's there's so much.
[1:05:05] Speaker 1: Among other things, like one of the worst cartels in
[1:05:08] Speaker 1: Mexico was formed from Mexican Special Forces guys who were
[1:05:12] Speaker 1: trained by like US green Berets and then took that
[1:05:15] Speaker 1: training in order to like make a cartel that worked
[1:05:18] Speaker 1: really well. And it's very common by the way, even
[1:05:21] Speaker 1: in the US for like cartel and like people who
[1:05:24] Speaker 1: are running large criminal enterprises to recruit from former Special
[1:05:28] Speaker 1: and current Special Forces guys, including Delta guys.
[1:05:31] Speaker 2: This has the case of this.
[1:05:34] Speaker 3: It's like it's the private sector version of this public
[1:05:37] Speaker 3: sector thing. It's the same job.
[1:05:39] Speaker 1: Some of them go into fucking you know Blackwater, and
[1:05:42] Speaker 1: I mean the modern equivalent of Blackwater, and yeah, some
[1:05:44] Speaker 1: of them worked for a fucking cartel.
[1:05:45] Speaker 2: Right.
[1:05:45] Speaker 1: It's not everyone who gets out of that, but it's
[1:05:48] Speaker 1: not none. Yeah, and it's it's probably it's the same job.
[1:05:53] Speaker 3: Yeah. Is why this could happen is because we create
[1:05:56] Speaker 3: this job that doesn't do us. Does it create do
[1:06:00] Speaker 3: anything for us except cause problems? Yeah?
[1:06:03] Speaker 2: Before and after?
[1:06:05] Speaker 1: Yeah, all all I was ever my job was in
[1:06:08] Speaker 1: the military was just to kill people. Right, That's like
[1:06:10] Speaker 1: like all they wanted me doing is just going and
[1:06:14] Speaker 1: gunning down strangers every night, And that's all the cartel's
[1:06:17] Speaker 1: going to have me do.
[1:06:18] Speaker 2: Right, Like I'm ready to do this job.
[1:06:20] Speaker 1: You know, if you're still physically and mentally capable, if
[1:06:23] Speaker 1: it hasn't, if the work hasn't run.
[1:06:24] Speaker 3: You through, just occasionally use pliers in an interesting way
[1:06:28] Speaker 3: to fucking make a make a different kind of tripod
[1:06:31] Speaker 3: in the field or whatever. Yeah. Yeah.
[1:06:34] Speaker 2: Other than that, it's cool stuff.
[1:06:37] Speaker 1: Uh yeah, I uh well, we'll talk a lot more
[1:06:41] Speaker 1: about this, about all this good stuff. But first, you know,
[1:06:45] Speaker 1: another week has to pass because you're only legally allowed
[1:06:48] Speaker 1: two episodes behind the Bastards a week. Sometimes we give
[1:06:51] Speaker 1: you a third, but every time we do that, it's
[1:06:53] Speaker 1: a felony and we have to throw one of our
[1:06:55] Speaker 1: employees under the bus and they go to prison for
[1:06:57] Speaker 1: life for life. Well, so every time we do a
[1:06:59] Speaker 1: three parr or just think of that.
[1:07:00] Speaker 3: You know, you got them out of it.
[1:07:02] Speaker 2: Get them out of it, Robert, just call up.
[1:07:05] Speaker 3: No, I don't know.
[1:07:06] Speaker 1: I don't believe in being unaccountable. It's important for us
[1:07:09] Speaker 1: to be accountable.
[1:07:10] Speaker 2: You know, that's right. You'll do the crime someone else
[1:07:13] Speaker 2: does have to. Someone else will pay the time, someone else.
[1:07:18] Speaker 2: Good stuff. Anyway, plug a bug, are we not?
[1:07:23] Speaker 3: Yeah? Yeah, Starter Trek, it's my new Star Trek podcast.
[1:07:29] Speaker 3: With Tony Newsome jesse Gender. It's on the same feed
[1:07:32] Speaker 3: as Jos's racist used to be. We're having a lot
[1:07:34] Speaker 3: of fun. Come listen. Everyone here probably loves Star Trek enough.
[1:07:40] Speaker 3: I'm I'm new to Star Trek that's the thing.
[1:07:43] Speaker 2: So don't feel like you got to be a Star
[1:07:44] Speaker 2: Trek fan to get into it. M yeah, but you
[1:07:48] Speaker 2: should be a Star Trek fan. It's good, you know.
[1:07:50] Speaker 3: I'm getting there. Yeah.
[1:07:52] Speaker 1: Anyway, I don't know. Don't don't join the military. Avoid
[1:07:57] Speaker 1: that if if you can, We're done. Behind the Bastards
[1:08:05] Speaker 1: is a production of cool Zone Media. For more from
[1:08:07] Speaker 1: cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or
[1:08:11] Speaker 1: check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
[1:08:14] Speaker 1: wherever you get your podcasts.
[1:08:16] Speaker 2: Full video episodes that Behind the Bastards are now streaming
[1:08:19] Speaker 2: on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday.
[1:08:21] Speaker 1: Kit remind me on Netflix you don't miss an episode.
[1:08:24] Speaker 1: For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe
[1:08:27] Speaker 1: to our YouTube channel YouTube dot com slash at Behind
[1:08:30] Speaker 1: the Bastards. We love about forty percent of you, statistically speaking,

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