Part Four: How The Navy SEALs Lost Their Mind

**Andrew** (0:01)
Call zone media.

**Robert Evans** (0:05)
Welcome back to Behind the Bastards, a podcast where we are now in our fourth episode of our series on Richard Marcenko, the founding of SEAL Team Six and the continuing derangement of the Navy SEALs. This episode featuring, focusing much more on the continuing derangement of the Navy SEALs.

**Sophie Buddle** (0:21)
Yeah, it's not getting better.

**Robert Evans** (0:24)
I guess it is getting better.

**Sophie Buddle** (0:27)
It was pretty bad at the start, so.

**Robert Evans** (0:29)
Yeah, maybe I'm wrong. 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.

**Sophie Buddle** (0:51)
Yeah. It is like, you know, absolute power corrupts absolutely immediately.

**Andrew** (0:57)
It is shocking every time.

**Robert Evans** (0:58)
Really fast, really fast, right away.

**Andrew** (1:01)
Yeah.

**Robert Evans** (1:09)
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, a good team of 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 guys getting executed and dying and bleeding to death after being wounded. Dark, bro. Yeah, it's really dark. It's really dark.

**Sophie Buddle** (1:41)
Yeah, trophy taking in the digital age is like, ugh.

**Robert Evans** (1:46)
And there's, I can tell you when you do warzone reporting, you will accumulate either directly or through the people that you know, bits of footage of horrible things. You can't avoid taking, but you don't want to air. Or sometimes you're asked not to air because it's just like a guy bleeding to death.
But so the idea of just taking that and watching it with beers is pretty gross, I think.

**Andrew** (2:08)
Yeah.

**Robert Evans** (2:10)
Yeah. The operator responsible for these war porn videos, bleed out videos, was ultimately forced out of Team Six after pistol whipping a fellow Navy seal while drunk on base the next year.

**Sophie Buddle** (2:20)
That's what got him out.

**Robert Evans** (2:21)
Not the videos he fucking pistol whipped one of his mates.

**Andrew** (2:24)
Yeah, yeah.

**Sophie Buddle** (2:25)
Yeah.

**Robert Evans** (2:25)
On base.
After Robert's ridge, the number of allegations of brutality and war crimes among seals, particularly Team Six members, but not exclusively, in the field continued to percolate out. As in Vietnam, the seals often persecuted their own little war in Afghanistan. One kidnapping mission would lead to information about a caravan smuggling guns or an isolated al-Qaeda cell, and that would lead to more 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 27th, 2005 A four-man seal team had been dropped in to go after a local leader named Ahmad Shah. Now, 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 Ahmad 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's a local warlord. There's a lot of them in Afghanistan. And he's not even particularly hostile to the US at this point, right? This is a guy who could have maybe gone a couple of ways. But then we send dudes to kill him. And you know what happens? You know, like if someone sends dudes to kill you, you probably like take that bad.

**Sophie Buddle** (3:53)
That people like it. Like clarifies how things are going to go. Yeah.

**Robert Evans** (3:57)
OK, I guess I know what side I'm on now.

**Sophie Buddle** (3:59)
Yeah.

**Robert Evans** (4:00)
But they always refer to him as a Taliban. He was not. He simply wasn't. That's a lie. Shah and his men heard the distinct twin rotor sound of a Chinook descending with SEALs, and they mobilized to ambush them. Marcus Luttrell, a Navy Hospital corpsman, second class with the SEAL team, would later blame a group of local herdsmen for giving them up to Shah in like the movie about Luttrell's book.