Part Four: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

Summary

Podcast Summary: Behind the Bastards

Episode: Part Four: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

Release Date: July 23, 2026
Host: Brett (Behind the Bastards main host), with co-hosts (likely Tawny Newsome and/or Jesse Gender), plus Andrew, and guest commentary from others.

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Episode Overview

This episode continues the multi-part series on Richard Marcinko, founder of SEAL Team 6, but shifts focus to the culture of derangement and deterioration within the Navy SEALs—tracing how a “bad guy” legend turned a prestigious special operations unit into a subculture of violence, war crimes, and unchecked egos. The hosts dissect key turning points in wars from Afghanistan to Iraq, the influence of pop culture and “warrior literature” on SEAL mentality, and how the SEAL brand grew into a celebrity pipeline—often rewarding recklessness, lies, and brutality.

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Key Topics & Insights

The SEALs' Descent into "War Porn" and Brutality

• Afghanistan's "Bleed Out" Videos ([03:28]):
  • SEALs in Afghanistan began sharing "bleed out videos"—graphic footage of wounded enemies dying, casually watched among teammates.
  • Brett: “One viewer later described these as war porn. The operator responsible… yeah, they’re war porn. It’s like videos of guys getting executed and dying and like bleeding to death.”
  • These actions mark a normalization of trophy-taking and body desecration in the digital age.

The Lone Survivor Mythology vs. Reality

• Operation Red Wings (Lone Survivor) ([05:01]–[12:48]):
  • The real Ahmed Shah was neither a Taliban nor a top Al Qaeda associate, disputing SEAL claims.
  • Marcus Luttrell’s book/movie dramatizes an epic battle and moral dilemma around killing civilians, heavily distorting what happened.
  • Brett debunks the myth: "The idea that Luttrell fought until he could do nothing more is simply not true… Mag pouches had full magazines in them, but he had no gun, which suggests he didn't really do much of any shooting." ([10:55])
  • Consequence: Luttrell’s version sells the public and new SEALs a sensationalized, 'us-against-the-savages' narrative—laying groundwork for SEAL celebrity culture.

The SEAL Gold Rush: Books, Movies, and Fame

• SEALs as Celebrity Authors/Movie Subjects ([12:48]):
  • Luttrell’s “Lone Survivor” makes a fortune, Mark Wahlberg plays him.
  • The DOD attempts to recruit more SEALs using media productions like Act of Valor (starring real SEALs), further blending reality with self-mythology.
  • Brett: “Marcinko had started the pattern, but Luttrell makes it obvious to every new SEAL… this job could be a path to riches after you quit.”

Lowering Standards, New Blood—and More Trouble

• Recruitment & Standards Drop ([15:24]):
  • To meet the ramped-up recruiting targets during Iraq and Afghanistan, selection standards drop, letting in less stable, less competent candidates ("pirates").
  • This opens the door for infamous figures like Eddie Gallagher.

Rules of Engagement and the Erosion of Morality

• Chris Kyle, Jocko Willink, and the Ramadi Kill Counts ([16:49]–[19:44]):
  • Team 6 sends an observer to Ramadi where “record” insurgent kills are being claimed, highlighting a culture of indiscriminate shooting.
  • Brett cites Matthew Cole: “In the chaos of Ramadi, an unarmed individual fleeing gunfire could be seen as a civilian or an insurgent who had just hidden his weapon…”
  • Notable Quote: “Their assumption was that because they were dropped into a war zone, everyone in the city was the enemy. After they shot a woman... after they shot a kid... there was no discretion over who they were killing.” ([18:54])
  • Chris Kyle accused of “plugs” (killing civilians mistaken for combatants, exaggerating his record, and shooting at unarmed people for ‘kills’).

The Devil’s Guard and SEALs’ Fascination with Violence

• Corrosive Literature ([24:43]):
  • SEALs begin to pass around "The Devil's Guard", a Nazi-glorifying pulp novel, as an instruction manual.
  • Brett (quoting a SEAL Team 6 investigator): “These fucking morons read the book... and believed it... In reality, it's bullshit. But we all see what we want to see.”

Corpse Mutilation: Canoeing and Tomahawk Fetish

• Canoeing Dead/Wounded Enemies ([30:51]):
  • “Canoeing” involves shooting a corpse in the head to split the skull.
  • Missions begin requiring “scraps of skin” for DNA—leading to excessive mutilation.
• Red Squadron & Tactical Tomahawks ([32:53]):
  • Commander Hugh Wyman Howard commissions custom tomahawk hatchets—intended as ‘symbolic,’ but used for post-mortem mutilation.
  • Brett: “Howard was often heard asking his operators whether they'd gotten blood on your hatchet when they returned from a deployment.” ([35:55])
  • Notably, modern combat all but eliminates the need for melee weapons—making their use only feasible against helpless victims.

Military Accountability: Rotating, Not Fixing

• War Crimes Go Unpunished ([38:32]):
  • Multiple cases of SEALs shooting children, women, or mutilating corpses result in quiet rotations—never prosecutions.
  • "No investigation into an unjustified killing has ever resulted in formal disciplinary action against a member of SEAL Team 6." ([38:28])

The SEALs’ Dysfunction Becomes Uncontainable

• Conflict with CIA ([39:00]):
  • CIA team members (many former SEALs) grow so concerned over extrajudicial killings during joint missions that Team 6 briefly faces operational restriction.
  • Reforms under Admiral McRaven prove superficial, as both the Pentagon and President Obama require SEALs and their ‘low footprint’ for ongoing operations.

Pop Culture & the SEAL Feedback Loop

• SEALs’ Brand Immunity ([41:20], [48:13]):
  • With media and public adulation, the SEALs operate above consequence.
  • Brett: “The American people seem to be really into them... it's kind of hard to just go after these guys... no one's incentivized to really fix them.”

Fact vs. Movie: Captain Phillips & The Problem with the "Perfect" SEAL

• Captain Phillips Rescue ([43:18]–[48:12]):
  • Hollywood portrays a flawless rescue; reality involves off-script killing.
  • One pirate left wounded and unarmed is reportedly stabbed 91 times after the SEALs board.
  • $30,000 cash disappears from the lifeboat; no one is charged.
  • Brett: "That didn’t make it into the movie..." ([47:45])

SEALs as Fame-Seekers: Killing Bin Laden and Self-Promotion

• Abbottabad (Bin Laden Raid) ([52:03]):
  • Two SEALs famously dispute who shot bin Laden, both write books, neither is truthful.
  • Actions to claim credit (e.g., re-shooting the already-dead body) expose the narcissism cultivated within the Teams.
  • Brett: “By the time the mission to kill bin Laden happened, two of the 23 seals present that day entered action with an active plan to profit...” ([53:15])

The Fate of Richard Marcinko

• From Legend to Grinch Consultant ([54:14]–[56:18]):
  • Marcinko, original author of SEAL self-glorification, spends his last years as a failed pundit and bizarrely, as a “torture consultant” for Jim Carrey on The Grinch set.
  • Dies 2021 at age 81.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On the Devil’s Guard book:

  • "These fucking morons read the book the Devil's Guard and believed it... It's bullshit. But we all see what we want to see." — (Brett, quoting SEAL Team 6 leader) [25:59]

• On SEALs' use of tomahawks:

  • "Howard was often heard asking his operators whether they'd gotten blood on your hatchet when they returned from a deployment." — [35:55]

• On rules of engagement in Ramadi:

  • “Their assumption was that because they were dropped into a war zone, everyone in the city was the enemy. After they shot a woman... after they shot a kid... there was no discretion over who they were killing.” — (Brett, quoting retired senior SEAL) [18:54]

• On self-mythologizing:

  • “Marcinko had started the pattern, but Luttrell makes it obvious... this job could be a path to riches after you quit.” — [12:48]

• On the “Captain Phillips” rescue:

  • “When [SEAL] arrives, he finds Phillips in the boat with one surviving wounded pirate... the Navy SEAL with the knife kills the pirate as soon as he enters… [stabs him] 91 times.” — [46:29]

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Important Timestamps

• 03:28 — SEALs begin creating and sharing “bleed out” war porn videos.
• 06:14–12:48 — Full breakdown and debunking of the “Lone Survivor” mission and its mythology.
• 15:24 — Drop in SEAL recruitment standards, rise of celebrity SEALs.
• 16:49–19:44 — Observations on Chris Kyle and Jocko Willink's unit in Ramadi; indiscriminate violence.
• 24:43–25:59 — The spread of “The Devil’s Guard” Nazi pulp book within SEALs.
• 30:51 — Normalization of “canoeing” enemy corpses.
• 32:53–36:58 — The “tactical tomahawk” craze in Red Squadron; ceremonial weapons as real tools for mutilation.
• 38:28 — Unpunished war crimes; internal critique.
• 39:00–40:59 — CIA-initiated accountability clashes; temporary reforms.
• 43:18–48:12 — Captain Phillips rescue analyzed: Hollywood vs. reality; subsequent coverups.
• 52:03–54:14 — “No Easy Day,” conflicting bin Laden kill stories.
• 54:14–56:18 — Marcinko’s decline; tortured career trivia ("The Grinch").

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Tone & Language

Throughout, the hosts use sharp, irreverent humor and a skeptical, critical tone—mocking Hollywood mythmaking, military-PR, and the SEALs’ own self-image while foregrounding accounts of unethical behavior, structural failings, and the real damage of these “bastard” legacies.

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Final Thoughts

This episode demystifies the modern Navy SEAL by laying bare the cultural, ethical, and practical failures that define their post-9/11 history. From pop-pulp Nazi novels to mass-produced memoirs and video games, a combination of self-glorification, low standards, and public adulation enabled a cycle where brutishness, insubordination, and even outright war crimes faced little to no accountability. The SEAL’s most famous missions—from Afghanistan to Captain Phillips to bin Laden—are exposed as much more complicated, ethically fraught, and often outright farcical than the American public is led to believe.

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For those unfamiliar with the episode, this summary offers both the factual timeline and the provocative, original commentary that defines Behind the Bastards’ approach.

Transcript

[Andrew]

Call Zone Media.

[Brett]

Welcome back to behind the Bastards, a podcast where we are now in our fourth episode of our series on Richard Marsenko, the founding of SEAL Team 6, and the continuing derangement of the Navy SEALs. This episode featuring focusing much more on the continuing derangement of the Navy seals.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah, it's not getting better.

[Brett]

I guess it is getting better.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

It was pretty bad at the start. So, yeah, maybe I'm wrong.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

Really fast. Really fast.

[Mangesha Teegular]

Right away.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Sheryl Swoopes]

This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.

[Ben Nadifray]

Thirty years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City.

[Brett]

Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors? Who will you trust? The people five miles overseas.

[Ben Nadifray]

This is a story about neighbors turning on each other and what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough.

[Brett]

But we're not stopping, are we?

[Ben Nadifray]

Listen to revisionist. The Staten island problem on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Brett]

150 years ago, they were hunting us down to kill us, and now they're hunting down immigrants to deport them.

[Rebecca Nagle]

This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sheryl Swoopes]

Hey, everybody. I'm Tareka Fosta Brasby. What's up, y'?

[Mangesha Teegular]

All?

[Sheryl Swoopes]

I'm your girl, Cheryl.

[Brett]

Swoooo.

[Sheryl Swoopes]

When you tune in to a new episode of our podcast, Levels to this, you're definitely gonna get some spy CWNBA analysis. But we're more than just hoops, and the real conversation is what we actually bring. It's been really, really cool seeing kind of these women just really step into their power off the court and understand that they are basketball.

[Andrew]

Right?

[Sheryl Swoopes]

And they're not asking for commission. Listen to levels to this with Strobe Swoops and Tarika Foster brasby on the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mangesha Teegular]

I'm Mangesha Teegular, and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I talk to scientists, biopunks, curmudgeons, Blue Zoners, super seniors, and Goa's top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us. And I get into a bit of trouble along the way.

[Brett]

I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. Make it look more defined. They say it works.

[Andrew]

I don't know.

[Mangesha Teegular]

Listen to Skyline, how to live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Brett]

In Afghanistan, the seals were exposed to the kind of tempo of activity that they had never known, and killing became an everyday affair. In some cases, this had a brutalizing effect. Within months of Robert's Ridge, Red Team operators had started filming what they called bleed out videos and showing them to other seals at Bagram. One viewer later described these as war porn. And the operator responsible. Yeah, they're war porn. It's like videos of, like, guys getting executed and dying and, like, bleeding to death, you know, after being, like, wounded.

[Sheryl Swoopes]

It's dark, bro.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah. Trophy taking in the digital age is like.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah,

[Brett]

yeah. The operator responsible for these war porn bleed out videos was ultimately forced out of Team six after pistol whipping a fellow Navy SEAL while drunk on base the next year. That's what got him out, not the videos. He fucking pistol whipped one of his mates on base. After Robert's Ridge, the number of allegations of brutality and war crimes among SEALs, particularly Team 6 members, but not exclusively in the field, continued to percolate out. As In Vietnam, the SEALs often persecuted their own little war. In Afghanistan, one kidnapping mission would lead to information about a caravan smuggling guns or an isolated Al Qaeda cell, and that would lead to more emissions and so on. While the war itself had stalled into something of a quagmire as the US struggled to rebuild a functioning government, the SEALs delivered what looked like a constant string of wins. Enemies destroyed, arms seized, high value, targets captured and killed. That all changed on June 27, 2005. A four man seal team had been dropped in to go after a local leader named Ahmad Shah. Now this is. There's a movie starring Mark Wahlberg called Lone Survivor that's about this mission. And if you watch the movie or you read the book, Lone Survivor, which is by the lone survivor of this mission, Marcus Luttrell, he will describe Ahmed Shah as a major Al Qaeda guy. He's close to bin Laden. He's one of Bin Laden's top guys. There's no evidence these guys knew each other in any real way. There's no evidence Shah's not with the Taliban. He. He's a local warlord. There's a lot of them in Afghanistan. And he's not even particularly hostile to the US at this point. Right. This is a guy who could have maybe gone a couple of ways, but then we send dudes to kill him. And you know what happens if someone sends dudes to kill you? You probably take that bad people don't like it.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

That really clarifies how things are gonna go. Yeah, okay.

[Brett]

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

[Mickey Rourke (voice in Rogue Warrior clips)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

But they always refer to him as a Taliban. He was not. He simply wasn't. That's a lie. Shaw and his men heard the distinct twin rotor sound of a Chinook descending with seals, and they mobilized to ambush them. Marcus Luttrell, a Navy Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class with the SEAL team, would later blame a group of local herdsmen for giving them up to Shaw. In like, the movie about Luttrell's book, they, they, they come up to these guys and they like, capture them and hold them for a while and they have this debate about, should we kill them? If we don't kill them, they're gonna run and they'll tell the Taliban and we'll get ambushed. And the. The seals are like, no, you know, we can't. They're civilians. They run out. We're not gonna murder them. And, and eventually they let these guys go. And Luttrell's group does meet some herders and they leave. And Luttrell does blame them for, like. But there's no evidence of that. And in fact, we actually have evidence from Ahmed Shah and his people that kind of contradicts that, that they were already moving in when those guys were like. That didn't really lead to the ambush happening, honestly. But if you frame it that way, then that means seals are always Justified in killing any civilians they come across in the field.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

You gotcha.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

It's cowboy.

[Brett]

Cowboys in the movie, in the book, Right. Yeah, I'm not. Here's what actually happened. And this is a description by Matthew Cole from the book Code Over Country. And this is based on the actual evidence of what happened in that fight. Shaw grabbed his small force, as few as seven, but no more than ten, and quietly stalked up the ridgeline in the early morning hours as the seals settled into a covered observation post, Shaw and his men had the advantage of both the high ground and familiarity with the terrain. They hit the Americans with an overwhelming attack from AK47 rifles, a PK machine gun, and rocket propelled grenades, which forced four SEALs down the nearby sheer mountainside. Now, the SEALs do manage to fight on for more than an hour, but they're like running and don't barely can see like who they're shooting at a lot of the time. There's video from Ahmed Shah and his men. He has a videographer with them as they are ambushing and taking out this unit of Navy seals. And in the video, and you can hear Shah has a guy who's repeatedly saying, guys, surrender, if you surrender, like we will take you captive. And he's saying it in English. Now, if you were to tell that, I think, to a lot of Americans, they say, well, obviously these guys would kill any Americans they got number one. They've captured Americans and not killed them a bunch in the past. Yeah, there's Lots of evidence of this. Number two, you don't know that at all that war was not nearly settled at this point in time. They just assumed these guys are. Maybe they didn't hear. Obviously, that's entirely possible, but if they did, they may have just assumed that these guys were monsters and would never have actually, like, taken them in. It was a fate worse than death or whatever. So they fight to the death, and Shaw's men are willing to oblige them. And at the end, again, in the movie, Latro keeps his rifle basically the whole time. I think he drops it and flees and runs away because his guys are getting killed. He like the way it's been described and the way Luttrell tells it, at least it's told it at least once, I think, in more recent days, is that, like, his officer was. Got himself into a dangerous position to try and call in for help and able to reach to tell them that they'd been ambushed and then got killed because, like, the position he had to get in to get a signal. And Luttrell fucking panics and runs. At least in one interview I've heard he calls it. He says that he felt like it was an act of cowardice to run because he drops his gun. Now, realistically, again, even well trained, experienced people break under the worst possible circumstances. You can't overwhelm human nature. People are going to flee at a certain point. That said, the idea that Luttrell fought until he could do nothing more is simply not true. He is rescued later by a local Afghan dude who just sees a wandering Navy SEAL who decides to help this man who's clearly terrified and out of it and unarmed. And that guy reported that when Latrell came up to him, all of his mag pouches had full magazines in them, but he had no gun, which suggests he didn't really do much of any shooting. Yeah, which also happens in ambushes. You're just running, you know, you've got so much to do, you know, that's

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

what you should do. You should get out of it.

[Brett]

You may be completely unable in that situation to actually provide effective counter fire. You know, and probably at some point when everybody starts getting hit and you realize it's hopeless, you fucking panic and you bolt, right? To try to survive and save yourself. That's the real story. And in objective terms, that's not shameful. You were in a terrible situation. You had no fucking way to deal with it, and you ran like fuck. But that's not a good story. That's not a good movie. So a quick reaction force with eight more SEALs and eight Army Special Forces guys is dispatched in a Chinook to rescue these dudes when they're under fire. But it gets hit and destroyed by another one of Shah's men, killing everyone on board. Which makes this the deadliest day and Navy SEAL history. Again, they get another 16 people killed, including eight more SEALs, because they fly in another fucking Chinook. The first thing they had done that had alerted them the enemy, and they get blasted again because they're not going in with proper cover. They're going in too quickly. And they're assuming the enemy's not as smart as they are. Right. They're underestimating these guys. That's why they get beaten. And this is a defeat by the Navy seals. There's no other way to look at it. Luttrell is eventually rescued, and after he's saved, the Navy gives him time off to write a book about his heroic survival because they see this as a great way. We're going to need way more of these guys. We just got a bunch more killed. Latrell puts out a book. Maybe we can get some more marks in here, you know, turn them into seals, send them a die in Afghanistan. So Marcus does a huge media tour. Lone Survivor becomes a bestseller, and he makes a bunch of money. I think this is the first SEAL that I'm aware of that makes a fortune off of doing a Navy SEAL book. After Marcinko. Right, Right. I can't say it to 100%, but this is like the first one, the War on Terror era, certainly.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Right.

[Brett]

All across the teams, cash register signs started ringing. Luttrell's book is so successful, and the fact that and his movie does pretty well. Marky Mark plays him. That's a big hit. A lot of guys want to be played by Marky Mark. Marcinko had started the pattern, but Luttrell makes it obvious to every new SEAL in the global war on terror that this job could be a path to riches after you quit. Right, Right. So the same year the DOD. The same year that this all happens, 2005, the DOD issues an order to the Navy to bring in 500 new enlisted SEALs in five years. One of the things they start doing to try to do this is they start producing a movie that we'll talk about a little later called act of Valor, starring real Navy seals. It's awful. It's dog shit.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

I kind of remember that. Yeah.

[Brett]

That doesn't come out until 2012. And obviously Luttrell in his book is Part of that, and I'm quote from a 2016 article in the New York Times discussing like the effort to increase the number of seals. The average increase in the force of the previous decade was just 5 annually. The United States was fighting simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and SEALs were getting killed, wounded, or just burned out and leaving the service. The command decided that a movie aimed at high school athletes would be the best way to draw in more recru. The film project though took years. Act of Valor was released in 2012, grossing 81 million at theaters around the world. And this was an attempt to do a new frogman, which is what brought Marcinko in. It is funny enough to be worth watching. But like the plot is there's these two Russian villains, right? And one of them is like a Russian mobster who's like working for the Russian criminal cartel, moving drugs. And one of them becomes a Chechen Muslim terrorist and they're both like working together because obviously Chechen Muslim terrorists and like Russian crime love working together.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

So insane.

[Brett]

So fucking crazy.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Holy shit. I do like the idea that all new sales, I just think all new seals should also have to submit a writing sample on top of everything else to get in.

[Brett]

Give us a spec script.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Got to make sure that novel is going to be good. A short story. Short story is fine.

[Brett]

You want to make a harder hell week? Have these fuckers bash out a fucking full screenplay in under seven days. You know,

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

it would measurably make them better at not being.

[Brett]

It would probably get you a better quality of seal. Yeah, you can make them do boat stuff too at the same time. It's fine. So to do this, in order to increase the number of people getting into the seals, the seals had to reduce their standards and start accepting candidates who were less competent and maybe less mentally stable. Right. Navy brass had repeatedly tried to cull the pirates from the ranks of the seals in the pre global war on terror era. But now letting more of them in is the only way to fulfill their orders. Right. If you're trying to get hyped up, people who get hyped up on the dumbest movie ever, they're not going to be guys, by and large, who overwhelmingly are motivated to follow the rules of war. One of the first members of this new generation was a troubled young man named Eddie Gallagher. And we'll talk a little bit more about him later in these episodes. In 2006, Seal Team 6 sent a sniper, James Foreman, to Ramadi in Iraq to observe a pair of Seal Team 3 platoons who were supporting training the Iraqi army and also aiding Marines in a major battle. Ramadi is like the big battle after Fallujah that becomes a center of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq. Early reports had shown that, like, wow, you know, even though they're just there to, like, train guys and help the Marines out a bit, their snipers are racking up an insane body count. They're killing, like, way more guys than SEAL snipers have ever reported killing before. And this one sniper, Chris Kyle, is really getting a lot of them. So they send foreman out. Team 6 does to be like, is there anything Team 6 is the most elite team, and the other SEAL teams can learn about what these guys are doing in Ramadi. Right. Is it maybe that they found out and invented some new and incredibly effective counterinsurgency tactics? Right. So Chris Kyle, you've probably heard of him. He's the American Sniper guy.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yep.

[Brett]

His commanding officer was current podcaster Lieutenant Commander Jocko Willock.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Oh, God.

[Brett]

Who also makes, like, protein bars now and stuff.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah, yeah. Podcaster and podcaster and chef.

[Brett]

Considering how famous Jocko and Chris are today, you might expect Foreman to have been really impressed by what these guys were doing and been like, yeah, they've got a lot to teach the rest of the teams. Instead, he walked away deeply concerned that they were ignoring the rules of engagement. I'm gonna quote from the book Code over country again. According to two Team six leaders, what troubled Foreman most, however, was what he witnessed once the seals got into contact after being fired apart. The seals could make individual determinations as to who presented a threat, and that could be unarmed Iraqis, including women and children. In the chaos of Ramadi, an unarmed individual fleeing gunfire could be seen as a civilian or an insurgent who had just hidden his weapon. A child walking to the store as SEAL snipers engaged a nearby insurgent through the sniper's scope, appear as a potential enemy maneuvering in some manner, and therefore engaged in the battle. An Iraqi mother standing on a nearby street holding a cell phone and a bag of groceries could be shot because an IED had been set off down the street and the seals concluded her cell phone was the detonator. The judgment was left to the seals to determine who was the threat and by extension, who lived and who died. Foreman reported to a superior that Willink's young SEALs shot unarmed men, women and children. The SEALs declared threats, according to 2 seams Team 6 leaders. A retired senior SEAL officer told me that Foreman's account of Ramadi was seen inside Team Six as an ominous sign that seals had lost their moral compass and that the United States may have lost the war. There was no discretion over who they were kill. The officer told me their assumption was that because they were dropped into a war zone, everyone in the city was the enemy. After they shot a woman who was going to say she wasn't going to set off a bomb once they shot a kid who's going to say he wasn't serving as a spotter for the enemy. Yeah, and.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

Yeah, Right. You just start blasting whoever the fuck that.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

The, the fact that the army had like, Eddie or the Navy had any, like, oh, we should, we should research this, like, obviously was that.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

And this is, this is a tactic some people will argue is valid in counterinsurgency. It's called reconnaissance by fire sometimes. Right. Where you're basically shooting so that you'll get shot at and you can see where the enemy is. And obviously, like sometimes. Yeah, that is like I've been in that situation not as a guy with a gun, but the dude, like, it's, it's a thing that happens in war. Right. But the, you know, Foreman is a combat veteran. He knows what that's supposed to look like. And he is saying, I think they're just kind of mostly shooting random people. Right. At least no one. I mean, that's what these Other guys in the unit say Foreman's report concluded, I'm not in the Navy SEALs. One retired SEAL told Cole, quote, they had no supervision and they were looking for body count because they thought it was cool. So people inside the unit think that too. Foreman was particularly upset with Chris Kyle, whose colleagues had started jokingly calling him the Legend because he seemed to be a legend in his own mind. And now it's just printed on T shirts like that was her real nickname. Kyle was accused of constantly exaggerating or lying about how many people he'd killed, even to his own teammates. One senior SEAL eater later told Cole that Foreman had reported they're shooting kids as spotters. Whoever was used as a spotter, Kyle shot, quote, a young, unarmed male had been forced by insurgents to spot the seals. Kyle's teammates manning the sniper roof and scope, refused to shoot the young male because he was unarmed. They would not take the shot. The retired SEAL leader recounted. So he, referring to Kyle, just jumps on the gun and plugs the dude in the street. When the guy's family runs out to help him, he shoots them too. Only he misses. And then he calls four enemy killed in action for his confirmed kills. He was lying about the number of his confirmed kills. It's not only allegedly is Chris shooting people he doesn't need to, but he's also just, like, missing sometimes. Like, I got him. I totally got him.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Right?

[Brett]

That's according to their story as related in the book Alpha. It's a very weird one, but I think he's. My interpretation is that Gallagher, after Chris Kyle got super famous and got a movie, Gallagher just wanted to do what it lie. Just do that, whatever he could in order to get more kills than Chris and become more famous. That's I think, what his goal was, right? Because Chris Kyle got rich and made a bunch of money. And, you know, fair enough, I guess. After his time in Iraq, Kyle wrote a bestselling SEAL book, which was published in 2012, which was later turned into the 2015 blockbuster movie American Sniper. He was played by Bradley Cooper. And you know, even though Kyle dies not long after this in a really messed up turn of events, his whole story is going to be very inspiring to Eddie Gallagher, a troubled young man whose early life had left him with two crime or the military. In other words, he was exactly the kind of guy Richard Marcinko selected for.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Sounds like one option. Sounds like me.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Right.

[Brett]

But then 2004, they say yes because there's not enough seals. Right. This is right before the Pentagon's like, we need 500 more. Right. So he gets in and you know, he's one of those guys with kind of looser standards. He graduates Hell Week the same year that Luttrell becomes a lone survivor. And Eddie's first years as a SEAL saw him acclimating to the organization, while Marcus Luttrell became a best selling author and eventually kind of a movie star. In the years that followed, the seals only grew more famous. And unfortunately, they also grew increasingly comfortable flouting the rules of war. If you remember Robert's Ridge, that disastrous SEAL op in Afghanistan where that guy fell off the chopper and got abandoned by his friends on accident. Well, he had been killed. After he was killed and the Taliban had mutilated his corpse, guys like Slabinski, his former boss, and other high ranked seals had started passing around a book to each other. This was published in 1971 and it's titled the Devil's Guard. You ever heard of this book, Andrew?

[Andrew]

Mm.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Mm.

[Andrew]

I don't like the name.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Remember when these dipshits pass around books now? It's just like. Like Nazi podcasts.

[Brett]

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

[Andrew]

It's all Twitter and podcasts.

[Brett]

That is unfortunate.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Tweet threads.

[Brett]

Tweet threads. Unfortunately, this book did do some damage. So the book claims to be the very true story of a former SS officer who took a bunch of his old comrades to join the Foreign Legion and fight in Vietnam. And these guys. There were a bunch of SS guys who fought from the Foreign Legion in Vietnam. But this book is nonsense. As Matthew Cole wrote in an article for the Intercept, the novel, which glorifies Nazi military practices, describes counterinsurgency tactics such as mass slaughter and desecration and other forms of wanton violence as a means of waging psychological warfare against the savage Vietnamese. These fucking morons read the book the Devil's Guard and believed it, said one of the former SEAL Team 6 leaders who investigated Slabinski and Blue Squadron. It's a work of fiction billed as the Bible, as the truth. In reality, it's bullshit. But we all see what we want to see. Slabinski and The Blue Squadron SEALs deployed to Afghanistan were frustrated, and that book gave them the answers they wanted to see. Terrorize the Taliban and they'd surrender. The truth is that such stuff only galvanizes the enemy. Yeah, and that's a former SEAL officer saying that. Right. Is that, like, this is deliberately harmful and these guys are idiots.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

I mean, it's really hard to do when you do have. So, like, some of the people do are exceptional, at least in, like, a physical way. And some of them are also just, like, smart guys and think enough that they don't fall for all of the bullshit completely. Even in. You can talk about, like, morally, what do you think overall? Is it moral to be a Navy Seal? I certainly wouldn't argue in the 21st century it is. But that doesn't mean, like, everyone in that feels the same about all this stuff. Sure, sure, sure. Yeah. But I don't know. This is a pretty good time for an ad break. Andrew. I didn't have a really good plug into it, but we're doing it now. You can't stop it. Why would you? I won't.

[Ben Nadifray]

Thirty years ago, an island off Manhattan almost brought down New York City.

[Brett]

Who will you trust? Your friends and neighbors, or you trust the people five miles overseas?

[Ben Nadifray]

This is a story about neighbors Turning on each other. And what happens when a forgotten place decides it's had enough?

[Brett]

We reached for a feeling that exists in this city. But we're not stopping, are we?

[Ben Nadifray]

I'm Ben Nadifray, and for my new series on Revisionist history, I took a deep dive into Staten Island's attempt to secede from New York city in the 1990s, and what it all has to do with the politics of resentment that dominate America today. Listen to Revisionist the Staten island problem on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Sheryl Swoopes]

Hey, everybody, I'm Tareka Fosta Brasby. What's up, y'?

[Andrew]

All?

[Sheryl Swoopes]

I'm your girl, Sheryl Swoo. When you tune in to a new episode of our podcast, Levels to this, you're definitely gonna get some spy CWNBA analysis.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I see a lot of men who get into the space because now it's a hot product and that grinds my gears to dust.

[Sheryl Swoopes]

But then the conversation goes on and levels up beyond basketball. It's been really, really cool seeing kind of these women just really step into their power off the court and understand that they are basketball, right? And they're not asking for permission because on Levels to this, the game is always the starting point. But we're more than just hoops and the real conversation is what we actually bring. This is Levels to this, the podcast about all the levels of stuff that women go through. Listen to Levels to this with Sheryl Swoopes and Tarika Foster brasby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Mangesha Teegular]

I'm Mangesha together and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive. This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones, and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us. I learned about some rad science.

[Brett]

I can make a brain for you. And then we can test what drug is the best for your brain as opposed to his brain.

[Mangesha Teegular]

Here are some hard truths.

[Brett]

I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year

[Mangesha Teegular]

acceleration and get myself into a world of trouble.

[Brett]

I'd say probably start bone smashing.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

That doesn't work.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Make it look more to find.

[Brett]

They say it works.

[Andrew]

I don't know.

[Mangesha Teegular]

Listen to Skyline Drive how to live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Brett]

The declaration which is full of these beautifully rendered, you know, sentences and paragraphs about enlightenment ideals, does also have this darker history to it.

[Rebecca Nagle]

Why is it important for the darker part of the Declaration of Independence in the American Revolution? Why is it important that Americans know about it?

[Brett]

Well, if we don't understand the full context in which our nation was founded, we won't understand the full context in which our nation now finds itself.

[Rebecca Nagle]

I'm Rebecca Nagle. Gohin Tawa Don Jalika Yetli KE la citizen of Cherokee Nation.

[Brett]

Are you guys big Chiefs fans? Hell, yeah.

[Rebecca Nagle]

This is First America, the true story of how the United States came to be and how we got to this present moment. Listen to First America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

[Brett]

We're back. So, starting in 2005, freshly read up on the Devil's Guard. Navy steals. And this starts with Team Six guys, but it does spread, I think, to other teams over time. But it's really. It's a. It's. It's known particularly for being a Team Six thing. They start canoeing dead and wounded enemy fighters. That's the term they use. And canoeing is a term for if somebody's, like, dead or, like, just wounded and otherwise harmless, you shoot them in the upper forehead in such a way that you crack open their skull and spill their brains. That's called canoeing. Right. One, four. And this is something, obviously, if you're in gunfights, some guys are going to get hit. It happens accidentally from time to time, and that's probably what happens. Like, One former Team 6 leader tells Cole that it starts as, like, accidents, but people decide it looks like cool. So it becomes a meme to shoot dead guys and wounded guys to do this to their heads. And 2007 is really when this, like, picks up in a big way. And that's not the only form of corpse mutilation that the Navy SEALs are doing during the global war on terror. On some missions, they start being required to bring back a scrap of skin for DNA testing. And of course, once they're told you've got to bring back part of these guys, dudes start carrying big knives and skinning dead enemies much more than the enemy requires because it's fun.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Right?

[Brett]

Right. Right. Now this is a war crime.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah, Yeah. I mean, also, the DNA. Isn't that what, like, hair and saliva is for?

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

You definitely basically asked for it.

[Brett]

You really pretty much did.

[Andrew]

Jesus.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Sure.

[Brett]

And it's symbolic because it's very funny. You often come across like tactical Tomahawks being sold and people will say like, will the Navy SEALs use them? They're actually really effective even still in the modern day combat weapon because the seals still use that. That's complete fucking horseshit that only an idiot believes, right? Can you kill a man with a tomahawk? Sure. Tomahawks are really fucking heavy in cumbersome for the job. Especially the tomahawks Winkler is making. These are not like very lightweight, like absolute minimalist tomahawks. They're like big and heavy. They're a bad thing to carry into a modern battlefield where you have silenced fucking guns, right? And you Also, you're the SEALs, you have access to modern, lightweight, purpose built tools for anything you need. But Tomahawks are cool and like the old Indians used them, right? You know, the guys that we wear on our patches used them, didn't they? And there's also this thing because the old frogmen had always carried knives and some of them had killed guys with knives. In World War II, the Crowning Seal achievement was to kill an enemy with a knife, right? Or some sort of edged weapon. Because that's extremely rare in modern war. Very rarely are there. Sometimes it does happen. There are times when people have to and have had to defend themselves with edged weapons in modern combat, it does occasionally occur. There's a fucking bayonet charge by British troops in Iraq that worked. But that's so wild. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It does not happen often, right?

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

And because it doesn't happen often, guys who really want to be able to say that, like the term is that they've been blooded. Right. This goes back to Vietnam. Right. You cut a man, you feel his hot blood cover your fingers and then you're blooded. Even though, like, maybe he wasn't an enemy. Maybe he was just like a fisher and you just like kill the dude for no reason. Yeah, yeah. I'm going to quote from Cole's article in the intercept again. By 2007, when Howard and Red Squadron showed up with their hatchets in Iraq, internal reports. According to a former Seal Team 6 leader with direct knowledge of operators using the weapons to hack dead and dying militants were provided to both commanding officers of SEAL Team 6 at the time, Captain Scott Moore, and his deputy Captain Tim Sysmanski. Howard, who declined to answer questions from the Intercept, rallied his seals and others before missions and deployments by telling them to bloody the hatchet. One SEAL I spoke with said that Howard's words were meant to be inspirational, like those of a coach, and were not in order to use the hatchets to commit war crimes. Others were much more critical. Howard was often heard asking his operators whether they'd gotten blood on your hatchet when they returned from a deployment.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

Right. Because it's not a great weapon in a modern war. Yeah, exactly. The odds that you will be in a situation where the only way to defend yourself is a fucking tomahawk in the 2000s and you're festooned with guns and also better fighting knives. Like, it's just nonsense. So I quoted earlier that Team Six officer who talked about how some of the Red Team guys, like, experience a metamorphosis of identity and Persona and start believing they're Native American warriors. This guy told Cole about the Tomahawks, guys are going out every night and killing everything. The hatchet was too intimate, too closely aligned with a tomahawk to have been a good idea. The former seal, who himself had served in Red during his career, said that by giving operators the weapon of their battle fueled Persona, Howard sent an unmistakable message to his men. Use it. That's when you Take away a hatchet. The retired SEAL said not provide them.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brett]

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

[Andrew]

Yeah.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

I mean, some of them.

[Brett]

We send kids to war.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Young men. Young, young men.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah, yeah. You're gonna. You're gonna hurt someone. You're gonna. Some shit's gonna. It's not gonna turn out well.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

In the years since Marcinko left the Boy Scouts, Team 6 leadership had really emphasized the ability of highly trained SEALs to discriminate as key to their value. SEALs don't hit people who aren't a threat. Right. That mostly held in the very earliest days of the war, but it kind of. It starts to crumble pretty quick. Right. Seals initially, who fail at this, who hit civilians, as we talked about, it's happening very quickly. And initially they're forced out of the team. Teams, if they do that. Right. But within a few years, that stopped happening. As much as Cole writes in code over country. In 2007, for example, a Gold Squadron sniper was pushed out according to a former SEAL Team 6 leader, after he killed three unarmed people, including a child, in at least two different operations. He was allowed to return to the regular SEAL teams. No investigation into an unjustified killing has ever resulted in formal disciplinary action against a member of SEAL Team 6.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Sure.

[Brett]

Probably not great.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Unsurprising, but yeah, yeah.

[Brett]

The SEALs also continued their long working relationship with the CIA during the GWAT in 2008, Gold Squadron operators deployed near Jalalabad with CIA officers for a raid on an insurgent STEL. SEALs were ordered to capture and detain six men sleeping inside. Instead, all six sleeping men were canoed. The CIA guy who was with them and who himself was a retired seal. The CIA sends like a former SEAL with this unit to monitor and he's pissed and he complains to his bosses that, like, these guys just murdered everybody. Like we had them dead to rights, they were asleep and they just shoot everybody in the head to take pictures of them. Basically, yeah. And so the CIA gets pissed and starts complaining to the seals. And this erupts in a massive conflict between SEAL Team 6 and CIA officers stationed in Kabul. The SEALs, like SEAL leadership, kind of gets involved eventually, and there's a deal made with the CIA station chief. Gold Squadrons redeployed back to the United States. And there's, like, a period in which the seals are kind of, like, pulled in a bit. Right. They're stopped from operating in the way that they had been temporarily, as things are. There's, like, attempts that are made to kind of, like, reform some of the disciplinary problems that have become too obvious to ignore. But complaints like these, not just from the CIA, but from regular army and Navy units and from Afghan officials, continue to build. And the Navy never really does much more, and the SEAL command never does much more than, like, rotate a guy or rotate a unit. There's no desire for accountability. They're not punishing people. Right.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Of course.

[Brett]

And they're not fixing the problem, you know. So Admiral William McRaven becomes head of JSOC, and he polls team six temporary. This is right around the time Obama gets elected. And he pulls Team 6 temporarily back from action. And then he pauses SEAL and JSOC operations for two weeks in February of 2009 as reforms are sketched out and hastily attempted. So after Obama gets in, people are sick of the ugliest days of the war on terror, what they assume will be the ugliest days of the war on terror. And, you know, Obama puts McRaven in a guy who'd been fired from the SEAL Team 6 by Marcinko for being too much of a wet blanket. So he at least seems like a good guy actually, to give that job. Right. Initially, it seems like he's going to cause some, like, major reforms, but he never gets enough of a handle on this unit. He's not. Because it's kind of impossible for him to. The way the unit culture is. I. I shouldn't say impossible. He never tries hard enough. That's the issue, really. He never makes it that much of a priority because it's kind of scary.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah. But it's like, you know, you. You with them enough. It's just like they're coming after you. Who knows? Like, they're. A lot of them are, like, not above that, clearly.

[Brett]

Yeah. The American people seem to be really into them. You know, it's kind of hard to just, like, go after these guys and, you know, that doesn't. That's not an excuse. But I think that's why McRaven, that's why none of this is going to go as far as it all.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah. No one's incentivized to really fix them.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah, yeah.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

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

[Andrew]

Stop.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Come on.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

2009 is the year the Navy SEALs rescued Captain Phillips from those Somali pirates. If you've seen the movie about this with Tom Hanks playing Captain Phillips, you know the basics, right? This is a very famous moment. Phillips is trapped in this tiny lifeboat with three pirates and there's like a $30,000 in cash, because when he'd been kidnapped off the boat, they had, like, petty cash that he took to try to, like, here, maybe take the cash and don't kidnap the boat. Didn't work out. So it fill ups 3 Pirates and that bag of cash, which is important, are in this tiny covered boat. And the Team six drops, like, they drop into the water and like, I guess, get to the boats or whatever, a handful of Team 6 snipers who are, like, stationed on a naval vessel. And there's this whole process where they get to tow the vessel in and negotiate. And the snipers are waiting until they can hit. In the movie, the snipers are waiting the whole time until they can see all three simultaneously to drop them all simultaneously, because that's the only way to save the hostage from getting killed in counter fire. Right? And in the movie, this all goes very quickly and cleanly, and one assumes legally and according to plan. That's not true. That movie is not fully accurate. President Obama had Only authorized Admiral McRaven in charge of the operation to use deadly force if it was immediately necessary to save the captain. But McRaven is managing the op remotely. He's. I think he's in Afghanistan. I think it might have been Iraq, but I think it's. He's not anywhere near the operation. He's in a different country in an operations center, and there's an officer, and the seals on. On the ground are commanding the actual effort. So Raven, he thinks he should have clout. He's in charge. But SEALs don't like to listen. Right. And because the way McRaven gave the orders to the SEALs, they technically felt that while the way he phrased the orders, we could technically shoot whenever we feel the timing is best, even though he doesn't really want them to shoot. So McRaven does not want this to end in bloodshed. His hope is that negotiations could still work. But These Seal Team 6 guys are some of the pirate type, and they respect McRaven no more than Marcinko had when he'd fired the dude. So as soon as they get a chance to shoot all three pirates, they shoot them all without asking for approval. Now, in the movie. Have you seen that movie, Andrew?

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

I have a long time ago, but,

[Andrew]

yeah, I've seen it. Yeah.

[Brett]

They all die in the movie right away.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

Seals are incredible. They never. They would never like. There's no wounded man left alive. Perfectly surgical.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Brilliant.

[Brett]

That's not accurate. So after they drop these guys, two officers make their way to the lifeboat. They're, like, crawling over rope to get there. One of them's got a knife in his teeth, you know, because it looks really fucking badass. And when he arrives, he finds Phillips in the boat with one surviving wounded pirate. Phillips is unharmed, and the pirate does not appear to have been armed or capable of harming anybody. And I want to emphasize this because the Navy SEAL with the knife kills the pirate as soon as he enters. Now, I know what you're thinking and how Hollywood would depict this if they'd chosen to show that a Navy SEAL stabbed that man to death is like one really cool surgical motion, like a badass. Because, like, that's what it would be. If this guy was a danger and you only had a knife to defend yourself, you'd have to quickly use it. Fucking horseshit. You want to know how many times this Navy SEAL stabs this unarmed pirate kid who's wounded?

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

I mean, I'm sure I don't, but 91 times, right? Right. He's like a prison assassin.

[Brett]

Special training. He's a trained knife fighter. Yeah. No, he's just fucking around with a knife and a wounded kid. You might also remember from that movie, that $30,000 that's supposed to be there, Whatever happened to that? Here's code over country, quote. FBI agents inspected the lifeboat after it had been towed up to the Bainbridge, documenting the crime scene and the evidence. Captain Phillips told investigators he'd seen the $30,000 in cash he'd given his captors during the ordeal on the lifeboat and at one point felt it when his captors gave him a bag to lean against. Yet the FBI agents couldn't locate it aboard the lifeboat. The vessel had been monitored second by second throughout the standoff, and no one had seen anything go overboard. No one could account for the disappearance of the cache. Investigators zeroed in on two seals, the operators who first boarded the lifeboat. The FBI and NCIS conducted an investigation during which the two operators submitted to a polygraph. The results were inconclusive. The seals were never charged, and the money was never recovered. Go now. I might say the Navy SEALs have a documented history from Vietnam of stealing money, at least in Vietnam, to spend on drugs. Maybe that's what happened here. I don't know. I wasn't there. But that didn't make it into the movie.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah, well, again, the shots need to get taken because otherwise how they're gonna get that 30k G?

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

I don't. They all kind of blend together to me. The sort of Call of Duties and Rainbow Sixes and all this shit from that era.

[Brett]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is Rainbow Six esque. I found a review in the Bad Game hall of Fame. It's pretty fun.

[Andrew]

Sick.

[Brett]

The original design. The design concept for Rogue Warrior was an ambitious thing. Set in present day North Korea, the game would have seen players control a squad led by Richard demodik Marcinko as you relieve the country of their nuclear launch capabilities. This campaign would have provided Optional 4 Player Cooperative Play, presumably allowing each player to take the role of one of the squad's individual members. The role of Richard Marcinko would be played by actor Mickey Rourke, fresh off from his Academy Award nominated performance as Randy the ram Robinson in 2008's the Wrestler. And in a press release put out by Bethesda in cooperation with Blind Light llc, an organization established to facilitate the involvement of Hollywood actors in video games. The game's executive producer, Todd Vaughn is quoted as saying, Mickey Rourke Absolutely 100% captures Marcinko's raw and gritty personality.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

That actually, that part does seem about right.

[Andrew]

Yep.

[Brett]

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

[Mickey Rourke (voice in Rogue Warrior clips)]

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

[Brett]

Okay, okay, I think that's enough.

[Andrew]

Is this an episode of Sons of Anarchy?

[Brett]

What's happening?

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

It does, it does. Should they just let Mickey Rourke go

[Andrew]

after a while, just saying slurs and shit.

[Brett]

Yeah.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Holy shit.

[Brett]

But I didn't know that would make it much different from the wrestler. Great movie though, honestly. Yeah, really funny. Really funny stuff from Mickey Rourke here. Yeah. I don't know, we could talk more about what happens in that game, but the plot is fucking nonsense and very silly and I think it's. I just wanted you guys to hear Mickey Rourke pretend to be Richard Marcinko before we talk about Osama bin Laden and the Abbottabad raid in Pakistan that kills bin Laden and makes Seal Team 6 a household name right now. The raid isn't worth going into in a ton of detail here. That's not really what we do. There's movies that you can find and a lot of. We all. Most people lived through this and remember the media coverage. Right. What I'll tell you is that wasn't in a lot of media coverage, which is that the seals who were present seemed to pretty universally agree it was like a comparatively simple and easy mission. Even though one of the books about it, I think is called no Easy Day.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Right.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

Right? Right. Before one of them can write a book.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

What's very funny is that reports indicate Bissonnet and o', Neill, the two guys who write These conflicting books were friends at one point and initially planned to co author a book on the raid, but they broke up before it happened. And they were both, it seems like they were kind of competing the day of the raid to try to get there first. And both have been accused of having expose their teammates in some ways while trying to do that. One of these dudes actually shoots Bin Laden after he's dead in the head and he's like, I had to do it, he was still alive. But it like, it makes it harder to identify the body and so they have to like take it back and stuff and it increases risk for the whole unit. Basically the time that this adds to the mission. The main thing you should take away from the real what actually happened in Abbottabad is that by the time the mission to kill bin Laden happened, two of the 23 seals present that day entered action with an active plan to profit from their experiences. And this was important enough to these men, the best of the best, that they were willing to endanger themselves and their teammates and the mission to get it done. The second of these books came out in 2014, two years after the movie Zero Dark Thirty was released based on the raid. Over those same years, Navy Seals were elected to congress, published multiple best selling books and in general grew to become a massive brand, which they are today this day. For his part, Richard Marcinko spent the global war on terror years trying with minimal success to become a media pundit. He really wanted to be like a right wing influencer and he just didn't have the mental agility. He wasn't in with the new technology enough, I don't think to really make it work.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

It's honestly surprising. He isn't like, yeah, yeah, you know what I mean?

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Just like. Or just anyone fight back. Honestly.

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Perfect.

[Brett]

People have heard about this. The way it's usually described is that the makeup and costume Jim Carrey was wearing was so fucking awful and horrible that they had you bring in a Navy SEAL to talk to him about, like, techniques that you're taught in, like, seri. To resist torture. Right. In order for him to endure it. And I'd heard that for men. I was like, I guess that makes sense. Like, those guys do get taught those techniques. That's like a real thing. I didn't realize it was Marcinko. Like, that's so crazy. What are the odds? So, yeah, he probably got an IMDb credit for fucking the Grinch movie.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

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

[Brett]

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

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Oh, my God, that's so amazing. For essentially, by the way, just doing the calm app.

[Brett]

Yeah, yeah, the Calm app. Jim Carrey from Nate being the Grinch so much.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

Marcinko died of a heart attack. Fucking Finally. On December 25, 2001. He was 81 years old.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Oh, my God.

[Brett]

2021. Jesus. 2021, he was 81 years old.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

That's wild. Yeah.

[Brett]

Long life.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Listen, usually those guys never die, so good for mostly alcohol, probably.

[Brett]

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

[Mangesha Teegular]

Yeah.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

Yeah.

[Brett]

I don't know, Andrew. Plugables.

[Co-host (possibly Tawny Newsome or Jesse Gender)]

All right. Well, hardly any war crimes over at Starter Trek or a new podcast which is still on the same. It's like the same feed as Yo's this Racist, which we're putting on hold for a little while. It's me, Tawny Newsome. Jesse Gender again. I've watched almost no Star Trek intentionally, and they've watched a ton. So I'm just going through it. They're telling me what the hell's going on. It's fun. We're all writers in some way. TV writers and just making. I know how TV is made, but don't know how Star Trek is made. Turns out those are pretty different, actually.

[Andrew]

Interesting.

[Brett]

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

[Andrew]

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, Visit our website, coolzone media.com or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Full video episodes of behind the Basterds are now streaming on Netflix, dropping every Tuesday and Thursday. Hit remind me on Netflix so you don't miss an episode. For clips in our older episode catalog, continue to subscribe to our YouTube channel, YouTube. Com@ BehindTheBastards. We love about 40% of you. Statistically speaking,

[Sheryl Swoopes]

this is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed human.