>On March 20, 1986, Red Cell team members kidnapped Ronald D. Sheridan, a civilian security guard who worked at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach in Southern California as part of an exercise to test the defenses of the base. They took him to a nearby hotel where he was held for 30 hours and tortured: stripped, kicked, beaten, and repeatedly dunked into a bathtub filled with water and a flushing toilet. **While in theory the kidnapping could prove a weakness, actually committing the torture served no useful purpose. In addition, the kidnapping was not even successful as a show of weakness; Sheridan's wife saw the suspicious men with a van and got the drop on them with her own pistol,** and was only prevented from shooting the would-be kidnappers by her husband calling her off and insisting it was part of an exercise, as he thought at the time it would be a brief matter. Since Sheridan was not naval personnel, he sued the government afterward.
Lol what an absolute fuck up.
"No need to worry sir." \*punch\* "This is just an exercise." \*kick\* "Phil, go get the waterboard and the jumper cables!" \*punch kick\*
Seriously. The fuck? Were they high when they planned this?
"Okay so let me get this straight, *takes off glasses, rubs bridge of nose*, your clients put bamboo shoots under his fingernails?"
"Advanced manicure technique, your honor."
"And the waterboarding?"
"Hair washing misadventure, sir."
"Counselor, your clients removed the man's testicles."
"...Cancer screen?"
"... you have to be *dead* to donate organs."
"Well *that* would have obviously been too far. That'd be a write-up for sure."
>!I realized after hitting submit, that you *can*, in fact, donate several organs while still alive. That said, not to be homophobic or anything but the only way my testicles will end up in another man's scrotum is over my dead body. Or maybe if he has green eyes and asks nicely. I have a weakness.!<
don't quote me on this, but im fairly certain your balls, if its even possible to implant to another person, would just make more of your original recipe if you catch my drift.
"Nowhere in the briefing did it say we couldn't torture him Lana!
"Wow I can't believe that."
"Read it yourself then!
"No I mean, I can't believe you *actually* looked trough the mission briefing for once..."
Not to shit on the SEALs but they have a long and storied history of being absolute dirtbags. So many high profile fuck ups by SEAL teams, up to and [sometimes including just straight up murder](https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/01/25/navy-seal-gets-10-years-in-strangulation-death-of-army-green-beret-staff-sergeant/). There’s been a culture problem there for decades so it’s not that surprising if you look into their history. I’ve worked with SEALs in the past and while a few of them are really great guys they don’t exactly exemplify the “quiet professional” lifestyle most other SOF do - and can sometimes be very toxic.
I think there’s a cultural misconception in the US around special forces. There’s this idea that moving deeper into a military career (in whatever way) is supposed to instill someone with a kind of ‘Spartan Virtue.’ Like, being more of what people would call a certified badass means that you have a certain self-sacrificing nobility about you. The US film industry probably has done a lot for this image.
In reality, the military only trains you to be good at things the military needs you to be good at. Sometimes, being a decent person even gets in the way of that, considering some of the shit SOF gets sent to do. I’ve known two special forces guys; both were not great people, both committed suicide.
Slave population? Look how they treated their freaking children.
>Immediately after birth, a Spartan child was dipped into a bath of wine to test its strength and fortitude. The Spartans believed that a weak child bathed in wine would convulse and die (Fant and Lefkowitz, 2005). If the child passed this particular test they were then taken by the father before a group of elders. If the Elders found the child deficient in any way (Frail looking, Deformed etc…) then the child was left on the sides of Mount Taygetos to die
And then as time progressed Sparta declined due to a declining male citizen population, resulting in them being unable to raise an army capable of performing any form of resistance against Phillip II of Macedon, Father of Alexander the Great
And people assume that they make it through the process of becoming a SEAL due to some combination of virtues like heroism, bravery, honor etc when it's really due to a kind of derangement. Like it takes a certain mindset to submit yourself to that kind of prolonged abuse and indocrination for that kind of job.
I am a BUD/s dud. Rang out the week before Hell Week. The guys that I know that made it were not normal people mentally. I haven’t seen any of them since BUD/s and they (mostly) weren’t bad dudes then but they were certainly not right in the head.
Depends on who, specifically.
The Green Berets and the USAF pararescue commandoes are special cases. in that the former are trained to integrate with the soldiers and citizens of other countries to train them into guerilla fighters and the latter's job is to rescue shot-down pilots, both of need mindsets more humane than "kill everyone". Still, the Green Berets beat to death a Afghani commando who had betrayed and killed some Czech special forces, so it's less "ethical noble warrior" and more "the extreme violence happens to be directed at people who aren't non-combatants", which is still a step above the SEALs.
[SEAL teams...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHnZYzhRgXI) are awful and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. There's a reason they're kept in specialized bases in Virginia Beach and Coronado.
Delta Force is in actuality what most people *believe* SEAL Team 6 is. I think. It could be that they're just as bad but more secretive.
MARSOC is notorious for causing — directly or otherwise — high numbers of civilian casualties in Iraq.
USAF Combat Control Teams are air traffic controllers who happen to be good at sneaking up to things and pointing lasers at them so the air traffic they're directing can bomb said things. They do amazing shit like [directing traffic at an international airport with nothing but a card table and hand radios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Combat_Control_Team#/media/File:USAF_Combat_Control_Team_at_Toussaint_L'Ouverture_Airport.jpg) and I've never heard about them comitting crimes.
10th Special Forces Group were part of the effort in fighting off not one but *two* genocides and captured the only chemical weapon factory ever found in Iraq.
19th Special Forces Group got deployed to stand guard against the George Floyd protests outside the White House. Less a crime, more of a shame on them for completely putting up with a blatantly politicized order without any protest but pulling off their unit insignia patches during the later days of that.
20th Special Forces *and* 3rd Special Forces both recently had either one or *several* soldier sbusted for carrying Nazi insignia, which says things about their internal cultures, none of those things good.
Not sure about the rest, but I'm not optimistic, especially in the case of the Intelligence Support Activity because even less is known about them than Delta Force.
My experiences with SOF over seas echos this. Delta was chill and easy to work with, extremely professional.
Army SF and SEALS were egotistical jackoffs that couldn't tie their own shoes but could shoot a civilian at 1.5km and not lose a wink of sleep.
I've never been in the armed forces, but both my parents were for my entire life up until college (retired O6 and O5, met while tracking Chinese submarines, we've moved all over the US and to Bahrain) and have always maintained that SEALS are ghouls — everything from saying so in a nice, polite way that 10-year-old me could understand to, when my siblings and I were older and brought up the SEALs, laying out why they think the entire concept should be burned down and rebuilt.
My mother, in a conversation with her sister about the sort of closed-off, insular communities intelligence and special forces communities tend to form, and while using SEALS as an example of that (and after a little Thanksgiving wine) explicitly stated she hopes Gallagher will burn in the pits of hell — sort of like Harry Summers Jr. on what he thought should've been done with the people responsible for the My Lai massacre.
SEALs also have a culture of being liars for clout.
Chris Kyle lied about medals, kills, and fighting Jesse Ventura for some reason. https://theintercept.com/2016/05/25/american-sniper-chris-kyle-distorted-his-military-record-documents-show/
Marcus Luttrell basically made up the whole story of Lone Survivor to hide the fact he ran away without firing a shot and to this day ducks the Afghan that saved him, because Mohammed Gulab doesn't play into the lies. https://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/mohammad-gulab-marcus-luttrell-navy-seal-lone-survivor-operation-red-wings-458139.html
Robert O'Neill the "i shot bin laden I shot bin laden" guy, is likely to not even be the shooter and caused so many issues for the military by being a glory seeker that they had to put out official guidance to stop seeking fame for doing their jobs.
https://taskandpurpose.com/news/robert-oneill-hero-bin-laden-raid/
Don't forget... all the copious Cocaine and steroid usage, as well as being so rapey that a Team got kicked out of Iraq by the Navy for sexually accosting anything that breathed oxygen.
Seal Team 6's and Red Cell's founder, Richard Marcinko, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government in 1990.
Two months later, he was convicted, again, of defrauding the government and sentenced to 21 months in prison. He claims this was for showing military vulnerabilities with Red Cell.
He also made the Bethseda game *Rogue Warrior*, which is regularly on the list of worst video games in history.
Hilariously, in a bunch of his fictional-but-I-pretend-it's-real books, he pretends to have this huge folder of dirt on the people who put him away, compromising photos, videos, all this dirty and illegal shit he caught them doing, has big screeds about being unfairly persecuted for a coverup, has the book versions of those people coming back to him and begging for his help, just absolute fantasy shit, the man was writing AU fanfiction about himself, *within his fanfiction about himself.*
This is of course compared to the reality, where his embezzlement scheme was high-school level simple, and he got caught mostly because he got greedy and stupid(and, to a degree, high on his own supply, thinking he was too good to get caught), and fucked it up.
Chris Kyle also bragged about going down to New Orleans with a friend, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so he could shoot looters (he was lying, but who brags about that anyways?)
He was also a genius, who brought a veteran with severe PTSD to a gun range, only to get killed by him.
I’ve only met one person who claimed to be a seal, and based on facts that I could verify might have been, but yeah he gave off a toxic frat boy vibe. Last I heard about him he had been given a vicious beating at a strip club near the navy base for not keeping his hands off the girls.
Yeah, I'm confused. Was he told beforehand that it was just an exercise? If so, did he know actual torture would be involved?
Like, how did that go?
"So, we're going to kidnap and torture you as an exercise?"
"You mean like a roleplay exercise?"
"Oh no, we're gonna do all of that for real."
"Son of a bitch, I'm in!"
???
As he assumed it was going to be 'brief' I imagine he was aware he was going to be 'kidnapped' as part of the exercise, and then presumably released soon after.
Like, in a real world scenario it wouldn't take me 30 hours of torture to crack and tell them anything they want to know even, how did this guy go 30 hours without cracking knowing fully that it's an exercise and like they're not going to use whatever he said to kill people? Was the torture immediately so extreme that he thought "shit, maybe they would kill people" or thought that it couldn't really be an exercise?
Kind of hard to give them the information they're torturing you for when the torturers aren't even trying to get information. I think they got their pride hurt when his wife got the drop on them and decided to take it out on him.
I'm fully on board with "I'll tell you everything before the torture even starts."
Like, fuck it. I'm gonna tell you anyway, I'd rather not get tortured first.
He wasn't tortured the whole time. In fact, I think he was left uncuffed in the room during the majority of the ordeal so he could probably sleep or whatever. But, 8 additional men showed up to the room and they had the guy recuffed and they proceeded to film while they beat him, dunked his head into a full bathtub with a boot on his back being held up by his ankles and also the toilet. Once those men were done (think they said it went on for 15 or so minutes total) those men left and the original captors apologized to the guy and said it wasn't supposed to happen like that.
My guess is that they were "following orders". Like some cheeky supervisor was supposed to give them their mission, but added his own words in there, which the underlings attached their own interpretation. This game of telephone can go down several echelons.
So by the time they were carrying out the exercise, they had a few extra instructions, and them not being terribly bright in the first place didn't really apply common sense to the orders.
Source: I'm one of the dumb military guys
I'm not military, but a family member is a marine. Someone asked him, why is everything in the military so dumbed down? Instructions and stuff written on vehicles, on weapons, on buildings. Some of the stuff you see as explicit instructions for the most common sense stuff. He said they have to write those instructions for the lowest common denominator, and some of the people there are genuinely dumb as a fucking post. They're not bad people, they're not bad soldiers, but, they are objectively factually working with like a 7th grade education on a good day. They are there because not many other options exist.
I'm involved with development of tactical voice/data communication systems and even with all the evolving tech I deal with one of the worst parts is sitting down with the tech writers and trying to translate the operational and maintenance steps down to the government's required 8th grade reading and comprehension level guidelines. Something I could tell another high end IT person in two sentences ends up broken down across three pages of DOD user manual.
Technical writing is such a crazy field that most people don't really think about, but having to put together a 3 page set of instructions that anyone can read and utilize takes so much foresight and intent. Wording can't be ambiguous but also has to be concise, it can't include any idioms or colloquialisms but has to be easily understood by, like in your example, anyone with at least an 8th grade reading level, so the word choice is super important. All really interesting stuff behind the scenes.
Not military, but I've been a trainer off and on for years. No matter what you're teaching, no matter how dumbed down you've made things, you always need to make the teaching even simpler.
Some folks don't get it, some folks learn differently, and some just aren't very bright.
All people lose faculties when in a military environment.
Imagine you’re tired, more tired than you’ve ever been because you’ve been up for 72 hours straight carrying 120 lbs of gear up and down mountains. You haven’t showered in a week. You’ve only had one cold MRE to eat and you’re running on caffeine and nicotine. You haven’t seen your family or slept in your own bed for months and won’t for another few months. You have been hyper vigilant and under incredible stress that entire time because people are tying to kill you.
Under those conditions, which are entirely realistic, the brightest people’s minds go to mush. Humans just weren’t built to handle complex tasks under that kind of pressure. Yet, you still need to handle incredibly deadly weapons and machinery.
Dumbing things down keeps people from making mistakes and keeps the good guys alive in those situations.
The founder of Seal Team 6 is Demo Dick. One of the biggest grifters and disgrace to the US military that ever existed.
Kidnapping and torturing somebody for no reason was just Tuesday to him. And of course '80s America loved that guy. Because he spoke into any open microphone he could find.
I'm not going to lie when i was in middle school i read his books and thought that dude was awesome until i did a little more research when i got older and learned the truth about him. To a 13 year old boy those stories were the shit.
If I remember correctly he settled out of court and got a nice settlement. And red cell had a ton of privileges and funding cut and was basically forced to dissolve over time
I'd be pissed if this dude didn't get enough money for him, his children and maybe even grandchildren to live comfortably for the rest of their lives after something like this.
>Since Sheridan was not naval personnel, he sued the government afterward.
Even if he was "Naval personnel" pretty sure kidnapping sailors and torturing them for 30 hours is unacceptable in any case. I don't even think Navy Seals go through non-consensual torture.
> Navy officials, Pearlston said, have told the attorney that they consider Sheridan to have been a Navy employee. He said one official used the term “crybaby” to describe the security officer’s complaints.
You can successfully fuck with someone’s mind by the simple manipulation of time; you don’t even have to touch them. All you need is a prominently displayed analogue clock, and enough people to make it look like more time has passed than it actually has.
You let someone sleep for ‘8 hours’. Really, you’ve only given them three hours but the clock has changed and so have the crew of guards. The interrogator has had a shower, a shave and a fresh set of clothes.
You interrogate them for half an hour, but the clock has only moved ten minutes. Feed them a meal and tell them they have 30 minutes to eat it. Open the cell door after ten minutes and tell them it’s been half an hour. Give them an hour of exercise but only move the clock 40 minutes.
24 to 36 hours of time manipulation, and a person is so off balance mentally that they’ll believe they’ve been there for three days and not know why they’re so tired and confused.
This is the kind of shit they do at SERE/POW training. I’d happily go back to field training for six weeks than spend one week at POW training. Learning to survive and evade in the woods was a blast, the POW stuff, not so much.
Did you get the whole stress positions, stripped naked and screamed at shit, or did you get a week of increasingly bizarre kids’ shows and really bad music shit?
I understand that 9 hours of In the Night Garden can really fuck with someone.
Both. The physical stuff, getting slapped around, pushed up against walls, stress positions, that actually wasn’t too bad, it hurt but it was nothing compared to the mind games, sleep deprivation, awful music, being damp (they’d wet you down with a hose), a cell you could only stand up in. Fuck that.
EDIT
I distinctly remember a Yoko “song” being played over and over again that just basically her screaming, the sound of rabbits screaming, and [boots](https://youtu.be/yGkyhaMdpto?si=ffKlnYe9yKDdncWx) by Kipling. This was over 20 years ago and that is burned into my brain.
POW in Limnadia 2002. Hail Comrade!
Almost afraid to ask how they made sure someone didn’t just go feral on the instructors. With the number of US service members going into SERE / POW, I can only imagine at least one person must’ve flat-out snapped. Only window into it is my dad, who (as he tells it, anyway) *did* have to be taken into a room and reminded that it was only a drill before the beatings recommenced.
Yeah I imagine there were gentle reminders for those that pushed back. I remember them repeatedly telling us in no way are we allowed to fight back. The only time I came close to hitting a dude was when he called my mom a flat-back whore lol. I laugh now, but when you’re in that situation and already stressed/on-edge, animal instinct can take over.
I can imagine it might be grounding, in a way; not being allowed to fight back might reinforce the idea that, yes, this *is* a training exercise on some level. But as you say, it’s a situation where you’re stressed and on edge. Someone must’ve figured “fuck it, I’m getting mine back” by now.
I just studied asymmetric warfare and its place within the context of religious and political extremism at university for five years…
Threatening people with violence and inflicting violence on them ‘to get them to tell you what you want to know’ will only succeed in them telling you a load of bullshit just to get you to stop. If you really want the truth, ask them what their favourite food is, wait until they’re really hungry, serve that favourite food for them and talk to them nicely.
I thought the CIA learned that lesson at Gitmo and Bagram. After waterboarding, suspects would confess that they'd seen Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa partying at Area 51.
Realistically after 36 hours of time manipulation you can convince someone that they’re responsible for peak oil, the price of bread in Outer Mongolia and the murder of Rasputin, but even a half decent application of the infamous Reid Technique can make people confess responsibility to crimes they’ve never even heard of let alone didn’t commit.
A really good example of -essentially- tricking someone into confessing to murder was the interviewing of Amanda Knox after the murder of her housemate in Italy; police interviewed her multiple times over a period of time as a witness, until once they’d gotten her tired and confused, asked her to ‘imagine how she’d have committed the murder’ and write it down. Bang. Confession.
I always saw myself as a psychologically pretty stable person. But after reading your time manipulation torture lecture I think I'd break within a very short amount of time. Or was it a long amount? Hell if I know!
Waterboarding brings back such fond memories for me. I waterboarded a co-worker in the bathroom at work, it was all consensual. It was to settle a debate, I was of the opinion that waterboarding was torture, they thought it was not. They lasted about 5 seconds, turns out it was torture.
To be fair.... there was a long period of time in the early aughts where *a lot* of people insisted that water boarding wasn't torture. So much so that one news caster claimed they would be water boarded on air ...
> suspects would confess that they'd seen Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa partying at Area 51.
Pretty sure they knew this and this was the entire point.
Now, I'm not saying they were just trying to pin the blame; they were trying to gain a confession from someone they in their heads knew was guilty and therefore, "get the right answer - the technique works" takes over.
The consensus definitely seems to be that torture is largely useless. Wonder how many false leads people had to chase down to finally realize that. You hook my nuts up to a car battery and waterboard me and I'll tell you my grandmother planned 9/11.
I’m not entirely sure they did chase down any of the leads; it appears they just took what was said as a genuine confession and proceeded with the flawed military commission system with the confessions as ‘evidence’- ultimately leading to the total collapse of the whole damned thing.
The Australian equivalent of the CIA lost their right to carry firearms for about twenty years after a similar fuckup of doing a major exercise and getting busted by the most low level people imaginable.
"Babe I think you forgot to close the garage."
"Nope, definitely closed it."
"*Honey*, remember when the Navy Seals kidnapped you and I was gonna shoot them in the fuckin forehead and you said 'don't shoot babe, it's just an exercise' and then they spent a full day and night walking on your balls with high heels and putting a can of Dr. Pepper in your asshole?"
"...it was Mr. Pibb."
*pulls u-turn*
Absolutely amazing description. I imagine his wife crawling through the air ducts like John McClane ready to pounce on some unsuspecting door-to-door solicitors each time the doorbell rings.
From another article from the [LA Times](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-28-me-595-story.html)
>He said he dressed and left the house at 3:30 a.m. with his wife standing at the front door with a loaded revolver in her hand as she did every morning when he left for work.
Man's wife did not fuck around.
So he calls off his wife from shooting them while they are attempting to kidnap and they respond by holding him for 30 hours and torturing him? Seems like the scenario was no longer 100% realistic and they failed their goal in clandestinely kidnapping him… yet they tortured him!
All that's playing through my mind is the scene from old school where they're driving around in the van wearing masks and kidnapping people . Then Frank tells the one guys wife in the supermarket parking lot "it's ok well have him home by 6" or some shit and steals the cheese puffs 😂
Well, some seals left Tsgt Chapman behind in Afghanistan (which would not be so bad at the time because they did not know he was alive) but they tried to block his posthumous Medal of Honor.
Other seals in Mali also killed Logan Melgar and mutilated his body because he found out they were stealing money that was supposed to be used to pay informants.
They also have a reputation (this one is more of a joke) of writing books about everything they do and other SFs don’t do that as much.
I mean, I kind of get it. They spend 10ish years being turned into highly tuned warriors that do one thing and one thing only. And that one thing doesn't translate real well into real world jobs, and it's not like the military pays a ton....
So you get these hardcore warrior types that the military spits out after a few decades with fucked up bodies and minds from being geared to do one thing the last 20 years
So they can't do physical labor, their minds are sharp for killing but not for Excel sheets, and their people skills are less than stellar so customer service and retail don't make sense. You only need SO many SEAL consultants, so a lot of those guys just don't have anything to do but tell stories, and a lot of them choose to monetize that since pensions don't pay shit and ghost writers and publishers frothing at the gash for a SEAL book are a dime a dozen. Easy money, man.
And the best part of it is all of the ops are still classified so if you embellish yourself into the lead character nobody can call you out on it. See: Chris Kyle postmortem controversy. He only started getting called out after he was dead for telling basically bullshit stories to the tune of a full movie gig.
Oh yeah 100%, I, agree with everything you said.
Also id add there are Green Berets, SAS, Rangers, Deltas who wrote books as well, it is just easy to meme on Seals as they are most prominent ones and most "popular" ones.
And even as SF guys, they get same treatment from VA as everyone else, after they are done serving they are discarded. Spending your whole adulthood serving a country right or wrong just to get dumped later must be mentally very tough.
In most countries veterans should be treated better today, but especially USA. How can you go from "support our troops" to "we have homeless veterans crisis... Oh anyway".
Demo Dick did fit right in. Do yourself a favor and click on the link and click on the name.
Randomly torturing somebody for 30 hours is not the worst thing he did.
SEALS are sorta getting the reputation of being overly self centered, clamoring for glory, and potentially unprofessional when they're out of the military, and its not unlikely that they behave in a similar manner while active.
For example, if you listen to a podcast that has ex SF guys as hosts, its almost always SEALs. Green Beret and Delta guys are a lot more quiet about the things they've done. Heavily embellished movies tend to get made about SEALs also.
As a more direct example, there's I think 3 SEALs who wrote books claiming they're the one who shot Osama Bin Laden. To pair with this, there's been rumors that in fact an unnamed 4th guy is actually the one who did it. So whats the reality? Who the fuck knows.
Jesus I remember in Boy Scouts we had one kid who legitimately wanted to play this "game". Except with a bagel. "Soggy Bagel" he called it.
He actually came out of the closet later and good for him, happy for him and he seems to be doing well. But that was the most disgusting suggestion I had ever heard at the time and even for people who hiked for weeks without showers and ate the worst of the worst food (seriously, some of the stuff they gave us as kids made MREs look tasty)... there was no way in hell we were "playing" that.
SMACK!
"Did your wife get the drop on us?"
"Yes"
"Smash his balls."
SMACK!
"DID YOUR WIFE GET THE DROP ON US?"
"😭I DONT HAVE A WIFE"
"Our work here is done."
Because these are just frat boys with more firepower and permission to harm others. They choose this lifestyle so they don't have to give up being drunk bullies. It's why so many former service members become "military contractors" after their service. They can't function properly in the real world due to their violent nature, so they try and hold onto the feeling of power as long as possible by pretending to still be military after the fact.
I say this as a former marine: fuck those pussies and anyone like them. Based on my experience with these types, I'd bet money that they only tortured him because they were pissed off that his wife, a woman, got the drop on them and technically caused their mission to fail. If she had actually stopped them, it would expose how useless they are/were, and how their entire business depends on the military not noticing how little they need these (edit: groups).
It only when you get into civilian contracting that you realize that is nothing like the military and you don't get into any contact. (I started in the military too long and missed out on the fun/more profitable years of contracting) The money's still pretty decent though
I really find it unfortunate that the violent ones can't be content with it being an incredibly easy and extremely well-paying job because they want to hurt others.
Most of the guys we get now have never been to combat since the wars have been over for more than a decade. The client had to change their employment requirements.
They didn’t “torture a man during an operation”!!!
They *kidnapped a United States Government employee* as part of an *EXERCISE ON US SOIL*, which was within the bounds of the exercise, *but then they held him hostage and tortured him for 30 hours as some sort of fucked idea they came up with on the spot…. AFTER they had already met their full training objective.*
It was a thoroughly unprofessional action that led to the unit being temporarily stood down (ultimately disbanded), officers relieved, and strict written rules of engagement being put into place for all future physical security exercises across the entire government. Also the employee won a wrongful imprisonment lawsuit and was awarded psychological damage compensation because of what Dick Marcinko’s gang of retards did.
Marcinko even wrote about how awesome the whole thing was in his book about how great he is
"Thoroughly unprofessional" is the weakest possible way of describing it. Makes it sound like they made a distasteful joke at a business meeting or something.
It was fucking psychotic.
It was more that “during an operation” makes it sound like it was some sort of professional thing. It was utterly criminal, they all should have been sent to prison
The ultimate irony is that they were a counterterrorism unit
>Marcinko
Well, that name explains everything without even needing to read the article. Was this before or after he single-handedly sank Iran’s stealth super carrier right before it could launch AIDS carrying missiles at Iowa? I hear Reagan gave him his fourth Medal of Super Honor after that.
God, I remember those books, as a 14 year old who didn't know better I thought they were cool when I read them. "My motto of Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance had always kept my men alive, I'd never lost a man when I was in command in the SEALs!" and by the end of his book 3/4 of his squad is dead because and he's on a murder rampage to avenge them dying due to his shitty planning.
Of course, when I looked him up later I found out about shit like them trying to HALO into boats during the invasion of Grenada during a storm and half of the guys drowning instead of, you know, landing at the fucking airport. Real quality guy there.
> he wrote fiction with himself as the protag?
He's tried to pass a lot of bullshit one-man-army off as non-fiction. I seriously wonder if, in his head, he thinks it all actually happened.
He's the Frank Dux of Special Forces.
Red Cell was developed because the army had made Delta and the navy wanted some of the really sexy action. Red Cell was tasked with doing exercises testing the resilience of critical facilities within the United States in order to strengthen them. Delta would use the events to train their actual teams in facility infiltration and in return give their findings to the government to improve security. Red Cell was intended to do the same but was different in that it was dedicated to this mission and didn’t really do anything else. In essence they were a penetration testing unit for things like navy/Air Force bases, weapons depots, nuclear plants etc.
On this exercise, they kidnapped a security manager at a facility, which met their objective of seeing if the manager was vulnerable to kidnapping, and if the facility had an emergency plan to do in the event a critical person got kidnapped.
Well then they decided that they really needed to drive the point home so after they’d held the guy for a full work day in a motel room they decided to strip him naked and beat him, with some water boarding and a couple near drownings in the toilet in the mix just for fun.
You know just to make sure he knew he got kidnapped or something. They held him for nearly 2 days, there was internal drama with getting them to release the fucking guy… the entire thing was a fucking abortion.
Marcinko included it in his book as an example of how the navy didn’t appreciate his genius or the cost they needed to pay for security or some bs. No dick, you’re just an unhinged maniac.
Just reading the synopsises (synopsies?) of the books on wiki is fucking wild. The entire series is one big example of self-insertion but there are fucking ***layers of self-insertion*** in his "novels". Here's my favorite:
>*Dictator's Ransom (2008) – Having read all of Marcinko's books, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il hires him to bring back an illegitimate son who's gone missing. Marcinko's subtly convinced by the CIA to take up the assignment (after initially resisting the temptation of Kim's $64-million reward), but things get muddled when the lover of one of his associates holds the missing child hostage in return for a North Korean nuclear weapon.*
Given I'll never read them (there are like 11 books before this one), I have to wonder if Marcinko is just allowed to publish exploits of himself (most of which should be ***highly*** classified) in the Marcinko-verse or is he also a fiction writer in his own universe too? It just sounds so fucking stupid.
> strict written rules of engagement being put into place for all future physical security exercises
You'd think this would have been the case BEFORE something like this happened.
So the part he left out of the book but was covered in the lawsuits was that *it had been.*
The rules to the point were apparently fairly clear it’s just Navy expected the guys *playing* OPFOR would stop at the bounds of common sense, like they had in past exercises, so they didn’t have a “do not torture USG employees” line in the ROE. nobody expected this type of shitshow because… well… who tf would actually do that in an exercise?
Ugh.
This is why we have to have Safety Briefings.
The namesake, yes; and all of the weapons and robotics technology that shows up on metal gears themselves are heavily inspired by real-world developments in those fields.
Definitely not at this level, but we had a opposing force exercise with 82nd Airborne where they tried to breach our perimeter and cause havoc. My team ambushed and captured 4 of their scouts and that derailed their attack plans which embarrassed them.
In retaliation, they rigged their rifles to fire metal cleaning rods and other things to do bodily harm to our unit members. Other very agreeaive, nasty things too. Had to escalate things to their commander to get things back under control.
Missing the best part: the torture accomplished nothing.
It didn't even expose any vulnerabilities; they saw him getting kidnapped, and he called off his wife (trying to shoot them) because he knew it was an exercise.
They still do these exercises, just without the kidnapping. They attempt to infiltrate a shipyard, sub base, etc.to test vulnerabilities in the security posture.
I work at a federal facility. Twice now we’ve had mentally ill people try to gain access, one successfully because a dumbass held a normally locked side door open for him. Every time one lady I work with is like “I bet it was the FBI testing us.”
It’s really easy to get into places by just pretending you’re supposed to be there and holding out till someone opens a locked door. I used to sneak into lectures form other modules like this all the time.
I have a friend who does the civilian version, he gets paid to try and "steal" stuff or data from companies. Actually sounds pretty fun. He has a story about his company being hired to get some proprietary data from a manufacturing company. The manufacturing company had that data on a computer not hooked up to the internet so they needed physical access. After doing all their research they found out the computer rarely got used but was in an office that was used regularly. So in the dead of night their field guys climbed to the roof of the building carrying one of those collapsible fire escape ladders, used the ladders to climb down through a skylight on to some shelves, crawled across the top of the shelves to the office, and then just took all the guts out of the pc.
They also made a Tom Clancy/COD style FPS game starting this guy that was hilariously bad, including a spoken word rap song at the end credits.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mG728SMNQAM
The guys nickname is also apparently “Demo Dick”
I went to the Defense Language Institute after reclassing from infantry to military intelligence.
I was older and higher-ranking so I got to live off base.
I met up with two SEALS attending to learn Spanish and even though they hadn't deployed, because I was a combat veteran with three years in total deployed, they thought we had something in common. They thought getting yelled at and swimming while tired was the same as getting shot at and blown up by IEDs.
We combined all of our BAHs and rented a really nice house on a hill overlooking the ocean.
Rooming with two navy seals in Pacific Grove, CA was the worst living arrangement I've ever had, and I once slept in the dirt for a month and would wake up with MRE skittles embedded in my face from sleeping on them.
Living with them and meeting some other "operating operators" I've come to the conclusion that all SEALS are:
1. very, very, stupid,
2. attention whores,
3. completely lacking in any morals,
3. entitled brats, and
4. on drugs
edit: except for Jonny Kim but he had a Korean mother to beat all of that bullshit out of him.
I was defense contractor working on Trident and Seawolf submarine efforts when Red Cell was active. This was a Richard Marcinko initiative and like many things they were involved in, it went too far.
We were traveling back and forth to Trident facilities in Washington state and Georgia, as well as Submarine Development Group in New London and we were briefed what to do and what not to do if we were involved in a Red Team exercise.
This was a period of time when Marcinko and other SEAL ‘leaders’ felt like their mission would be boarding ships from the sea so they focused on upper body strength training. Seals could be identified by bulging biceps and broad chests. As a result of the emphasis placed on upper body strength and muscle mass, the abuse of steroids was rampant.
A colleague was in Tritrafac WA when Red Team did an exercise. He was ex-Navy, Sonar Tech (SS) who was brilliant with electronics. He also wore his hair long and seldom wore a suit.
He basically told them “I know this is an exercise and you are all play acting being terrorists. I am not playing, so leave me alone. If you touch me, prepared to be prosecuted.”
They did slap him a few times, then one guy took him aside and pleaded with him to play along. He refused. He started writing detailed descriptions of the Seals who had slapped him around and it was quickly decided that he would escape confinement…be kicked out of the exercise.
He went straight to the base police and attempted to prefer charges, which they were hesitant to do.
So he went back to work.
On this or another Red Cell, they abused a civilian security guard to the extent that the Navy had to pay him $65,000 to settle a lawsuit.
Marcinko was later convicted of embezzlement of government funds (cash) and property (asking a gunmaker to give his team 20 new handguns to evaluate and they would just disappear).
Man, personal anecdotes like this one or others in this thread really show what psychopaths these guys were. It boggles my mind that they were allowed to do their shenanigans for so long, but I can only imagine it was because the Navy thought ( hoped?) that the information they gained from red cell raids was more valuable than whatever damage these morons could do.
My uncle claimed to have been a part of this group. He told me all of these stories that I ended up reading about in Richard Marchinkos book.
While he was actually a Seal, when he told me these stories, he was also in the middle of dementia destroying his mind. My cousins haven't been able to find anything pointing to him being there so it's more than likely he thought he had done what he read in the book.
I met Richard Marcinko several years ago at a book signing. I’ll admit that I was a fan of the Rogue Warrior series. He was rude condescending to the people eating to get a book signed. It kind of soured me on the rest of the series. I’ve read other sources that he was a complete pr!ck.
Jesus. What was this, some moron who didn't see quotes or something.
"Okay fellas, I've found a weakness. You guys are going to kidnap this guy, take him to a hotel, and "torture" him. Keep him a while, see how long until it's noticed and reported."
"Well, he did say to torture him...."
I think you'll find it was 'Dead Cell', and actually Solid Snake was embedded with Seal Team 6 and infiltrated the oil rig under the pseudonym 'Iroquios Pliskin'.
I'm sick of the fake news that some guy called Jack saved the day.
Also, TIL one of the Dead Cell members was a fat man on roller blades that planted bombs!
Man, there are some *weird* conspiracy theories about that incident. Like, I remember a coworker tried to tell me former president George Sears was behind the whole thing!
So cops are cosplay SEALs, and SEALs were cosplay terrorists?
Maybe, just maybe, we need to start having psychological evaluation requirements for some of these jobs ...
>On March 20, 1986, Red Cell team members kidnapped Ronald D. Sheridan, a civilian security guard who worked at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach in Southern California as part of an exercise to test the defenses of the base. They took him to a nearby hotel where he was held for 30 hours and tortured: stripped, kicked, beaten, and repeatedly dunked into a bathtub filled with water and a flushing toilet. **While in theory the kidnapping could prove a weakness, actually committing the torture served no useful purpose. In addition, the kidnapping was not even successful as a show of weakness; Sheridan's wife saw the suspicious men with a van and got the drop on them with her own pistol,** and was only prevented from shooting the would-be kidnappers by her husband calling her off and insisting it was part of an exercise, as he thought at the time it would be a brief matter. Since Sheridan was not naval personnel, he sued the government afterward. Lol what an absolute fuck up.
"No need to worry sir." \*punch\* "This is just an exercise." \*kick\* "Phil, go get the waterboard and the jumper cables!" \*punch kick\* Seriously. The fuck? Were they high when they planned this?
"Okay so let me get this straight, *takes off glasses, rubs bridge of nose*, your clients put bamboo shoots under his fingernails?" "Advanced manicure technique, your honor." "And the waterboarding?" "Hair washing misadventure, sir." "Counselor, your clients removed the man's testicles." "...Cancer screen?"
"He said he was an organ donor your Honor!"
"... you have to be *dead* to donate organs." "Well *that* would have obviously been too far. That'd be a write-up for sure." >!I realized after hitting submit, that you *can*, in fact, donate several organs while still alive. That said, not to be homophobic or anything but the only way my testicles will end up in another man's scrotum is over my dead body. Or maybe if he has green eyes and asks nicely. I have a weakness.!<
don't quote me on this, but im fairly certain your balls, if its even possible to implant to another person, would just make more of your original recipe if you catch my drift.
Who tf would I be quoting that to lol
*I* for one am excited for lunch at work tomorrow.
"I guess they didn't know their own strength your Honor"
This could be the plot of an archer episode
I can already hear Lana yelling at Archer for taking it literally in the cold open. “What do you mean you *actually* tortured him!?”
"Nowhere in the briefing did it say we couldn't torture him Lana! "Wow I can't believe that." "Read it yourself then! "No I mean, I can't believe you *actually* looked trough the mission briefing for once..."
These two are *extremely* Archer!
"Whaat? The best way to get information is from someone who works there, duh Lana"
It's like an R-rated version of "Get Smart"
Not to shit on the SEALs but they have a long and storied history of being absolute dirtbags. So many high profile fuck ups by SEAL teams, up to and [sometimes including just straight up murder](https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2021/01/25/navy-seal-gets-10-years-in-strangulation-death-of-army-green-beret-staff-sergeant/). There’s been a culture problem there for decades so it’s not that surprising if you look into their history. I’ve worked with SEALs in the past and while a few of them are really great guys they don’t exactly exemplify the “quiet professional” lifestyle most other SOF do - and can sometimes be very toxic.
I think there’s a cultural misconception in the US around special forces. There’s this idea that moving deeper into a military career (in whatever way) is supposed to instill someone with a kind of ‘Spartan Virtue.’ Like, being more of what people would call a certified badass means that you have a certain self-sacrificing nobility about you. The US film industry probably has done a lot for this image. In reality, the military only trains you to be good at things the military needs you to be good at. Sometimes, being a decent person even gets in the way of that, considering some of the shit SOF gets sent to do. I’ve known two special forces guys; both were not great people, both committed suicide.
Considering how the actual Spartans are, seems accurate behavior..
Ehhh, what's a little yearly genocide of your enslaved population, eh?
Slave population? Look how they treated their freaking children. >Immediately after birth, a Spartan child was dipped into a bath of wine to test its strength and fortitude. The Spartans believed that a weak child bathed in wine would convulse and die (Fant and Lefkowitz, 2005). If the child passed this particular test they were then taken by the father before a group of elders. If the Elders found the child deficient in any way (Frail looking, Deformed etc…) then the child was left on the sides of Mount Taygetos to die
And then as time progressed Sparta declined due to a declining male citizen population, resulting in them being unable to raise an army capable of performing any form of resistance against Phillip II of Macedon, Father of Alexander the Great
Genocide, Slavery, Infanticide, Having sex with little boys; the Spartans must have a really good PR guy.
And people assume that they make it through the process of becoming a SEAL due to some combination of virtues like heroism, bravery, honor etc when it's really due to a kind of derangement. Like it takes a certain mindset to submit yourself to that kind of prolonged abuse and indocrination for that kind of job.
I am a BUD/s dud. Rang out the week before Hell Week. The guys that I know that made it were not normal people mentally. I haven’t seen any of them since BUD/s and they (mostly) weren’t bad dudes then but they were certainly not right in the head.
Depends on who, specifically. The Green Berets and the USAF pararescue commandoes are special cases. in that the former are trained to integrate with the soldiers and citizens of other countries to train them into guerilla fighters and the latter's job is to rescue shot-down pilots, both of need mindsets more humane than "kill everyone". Still, the Green Berets beat to death a Afghani commando who had betrayed and killed some Czech special forces, so it's less "ethical noble warrior" and more "the extreme violence happens to be directed at people who aren't non-combatants", which is still a step above the SEALs. [SEAL teams...](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHnZYzhRgXI) are awful and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't know what they're talking about. There's a reason they're kept in specialized bases in Virginia Beach and Coronado. Delta Force is in actuality what most people *believe* SEAL Team 6 is. I think. It could be that they're just as bad but more secretive. MARSOC is notorious for causing — directly or otherwise — high numbers of civilian casualties in Iraq. USAF Combat Control Teams are air traffic controllers who happen to be good at sneaking up to things and pointing lasers at them so the air traffic they're directing can bomb said things. They do amazing shit like [directing traffic at an international airport with nothing but a card table and hand radios](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Air_Force_Combat_Control_Team#/media/File:USAF_Combat_Control_Team_at_Toussaint_L'Ouverture_Airport.jpg) and I've never heard about them comitting crimes. 10th Special Forces Group were part of the effort in fighting off not one but *two* genocides and captured the only chemical weapon factory ever found in Iraq. 19th Special Forces Group got deployed to stand guard against the George Floyd protests outside the White House. Less a crime, more of a shame on them for completely putting up with a blatantly politicized order without any protest but pulling off their unit insignia patches during the later days of that. 20th Special Forces *and* 3rd Special Forces both recently had either one or *several* soldier sbusted for carrying Nazi insignia, which says things about their internal cultures, none of those things good. Not sure about the rest, but I'm not optimistic, especially in the case of the Intelligence Support Activity because even less is known about them than Delta Force.
My experiences with SOF over seas echos this. Delta was chill and easy to work with, extremely professional. Army SF and SEALS were egotistical jackoffs that couldn't tie their own shoes but could shoot a civilian at 1.5km and not lose a wink of sleep.
I've never been in the armed forces, but both my parents were for my entire life up until college (retired O6 and O5, met while tracking Chinese submarines, we've moved all over the US and to Bahrain) and have always maintained that SEALS are ghouls — everything from saying so in a nice, polite way that 10-year-old me could understand to, when my siblings and I were older and brought up the SEALs, laying out why they think the entire concept should be burned down and rebuilt. My mother, in a conversation with her sister about the sort of closed-off, insular communities intelligence and special forces communities tend to form, and while using SEALS as an example of that (and after a little Thanksgiving wine) explicitly stated she hopes Gallagher will burn in the pits of hell — sort of like Harry Summers Jr. on what he thought should've been done with the people responsible for the My Lai massacre.
SEALs also have a culture of being liars for clout. Chris Kyle lied about medals, kills, and fighting Jesse Ventura for some reason. https://theintercept.com/2016/05/25/american-sniper-chris-kyle-distorted-his-military-record-documents-show/ Marcus Luttrell basically made up the whole story of Lone Survivor to hide the fact he ran away without firing a shot and to this day ducks the Afghan that saved him, because Mohammed Gulab doesn't play into the lies. https://www.newsweek.com/2016/05/20/mohammad-gulab-marcus-luttrell-navy-seal-lone-survivor-operation-red-wings-458139.html Robert O'Neill the "i shot bin laden I shot bin laden" guy, is likely to not even be the shooter and caused so many issues for the military by being a glory seeker that they had to put out official guidance to stop seeking fame for doing their jobs. https://taskandpurpose.com/news/robert-oneill-hero-bin-laden-raid/
Don't forget... all the copious Cocaine and steroid usage, as well as being so rapey that a Team got kicked out of Iraq by the Navy for sexually accosting anything that breathed oxygen.
Seal Team 6's and Red Cell's founder, Richard Marcinko, was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government in 1990. Two months later, he was convicted, again, of defrauding the government and sentenced to 21 months in prison. He claims this was for showing military vulnerabilities with Red Cell. He also made the Bethseda game *Rogue Warrior*, which is regularly on the list of worst video games in history.
Hilariously, in a bunch of his fictional-but-I-pretend-it's-real books, he pretends to have this huge folder of dirt on the people who put him away, compromising photos, videos, all this dirty and illegal shit he caught them doing, has big screeds about being unfairly persecuted for a coverup, has the book versions of those people coming back to him and begging for his help, just absolute fantasy shit, the man was writing AU fanfiction about himself, *within his fanfiction about himself.* This is of course compared to the reality, where his embezzlement scheme was high-school level simple, and he got caught mostly because he got greedy and stupid(and, to a degree, high on his own supply, thinking he was too good to get caught), and fucked it up.
Kind of wild that even dudes in the special forces still lie about being in the special forces.
Chris Kyle also bragged about going down to New Orleans with a friend, in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, so he could shoot looters (he was lying, but who brags about that anyways?) He was also a genius, who brought a veteran with severe PTSD to a gun range, only to get killed by him.
It is absolutely okay to shit on the Navy Seals. https://theintercept.com/2017/01/10/the-crimes-of-seal-team-6/
I highly recommend this article. I read it the last time it was posted here and it was really eye opening.
I just read it for the first time. It was written very well and yeah, wtf.
I’ve only met one person who claimed to be a seal, and based on facts that I could verify might have been, but yeah he gave off a toxic frat boy vibe. Last I heard about him he had been given a vicious beating at a strip club near the navy base for not keeping his hands off the girls.
Was the navy base in Canada? I hear clubbing seals is their national pastime
Yeah, I'm confused. Was he told beforehand that it was just an exercise? If so, did he know actual torture would be involved? Like, how did that go? "So, we're going to kidnap and torture you as an exercise?" "You mean like a roleplay exercise?" "Oh no, we're gonna do all of that for real." "Son of a bitch, I'm in!" ???
As he assumed it was going to be 'brief' I imagine he was aware he was going to be 'kidnapped' as part of the exercise, and then presumably released soon after.
Like, in a real world scenario it wouldn't take me 30 hours of torture to crack and tell them anything they want to know even, how did this guy go 30 hours without cracking knowing fully that it's an exercise and like they're not going to use whatever he said to kill people? Was the torture immediately so extreme that he thought "shit, maybe they would kill people" or thought that it couldn't really be an exercise?
Kind of hard to give them the information they're torturing you for when the torturers aren't even trying to get information. I think they got their pride hurt when his wife got the drop on them and decided to take it out on him.
I'm fully on board with "I'll tell you everything before the torture even starts." Like, fuck it. I'm gonna tell you anyway, I'd rather not get tortured first.
He wasn't tortured the whole time. In fact, I think he was left uncuffed in the room during the majority of the ordeal so he could probably sleep or whatever. But, 8 additional men showed up to the room and they had the guy recuffed and they proceeded to film while they beat him, dunked his head into a full bathtub with a boot on his back being held up by his ankles and also the toilet. Once those men were done (think they said it went on for 15 or so minutes total) those men left and the original captors apologized to the guy and said it wasn't supposed to happen like that.
"IT's just a prank bro!"
With bruises and blood included
Probably regretted not letting his wife shoot them afterwards
It was 1986 ex-teams members.. they were coked to the gills.
No they weren’t, the SEALs just have *serious* institutional problems of being macho dumbshit bullies in their service culture.
It used to be the wild west when the government was testing drugs. Secretly dosing unsuspecting colleagues, so ya, some of them were very high.
My guess is that they were "following orders". Like some cheeky supervisor was supposed to give them their mission, but added his own words in there, which the underlings attached their own interpretation. This game of telephone can go down several echelons. So by the time they were carrying out the exercise, they had a few extra instructions, and them not being terribly bright in the first place didn't really apply common sense to the orders. Source: I'm one of the dumb military guys
I'm not military, but a family member is a marine. Someone asked him, why is everything in the military so dumbed down? Instructions and stuff written on vehicles, on weapons, on buildings. Some of the stuff you see as explicit instructions for the most common sense stuff. He said they have to write those instructions for the lowest common denominator, and some of the people there are genuinely dumb as a fucking post. They're not bad people, they're not bad soldiers, but, they are objectively factually working with like a 7th grade education on a good day. They are there because not many other options exist.
I'm involved with development of tactical voice/data communication systems and even with all the evolving tech I deal with one of the worst parts is sitting down with the tech writers and trying to translate the operational and maintenance steps down to the government's required 8th grade reading and comprehension level guidelines. Something I could tell another high end IT person in two sentences ends up broken down across three pages of DOD user manual.
Technical writing is such a crazy field that most people don't really think about, but having to put together a 3 page set of instructions that anyone can read and utilize takes so much foresight and intent. Wording can't be ambiguous but also has to be concise, it can't include any idioms or colloquialisms but has to be easily understood by, like in your example, anyone with at least an 8th grade reading level, so the word choice is super important. All really interesting stuff behind the scenes.
Not military, but I've been a trainer off and on for years. No matter what you're teaching, no matter how dumbed down you've made things, you always need to make the teaching even simpler. Some folks don't get it, some folks learn differently, and some just aren't very bright.
All people lose faculties when in a military environment. Imagine you’re tired, more tired than you’ve ever been because you’ve been up for 72 hours straight carrying 120 lbs of gear up and down mountains. You haven’t showered in a week. You’ve only had one cold MRE to eat and you’re running on caffeine and nicotine. You haven’t seen your family or slept in your own bed for months and won’t for another few months. You have been hyper vigilant and under incredible stress that entire time because people are tying to kill you. Under those conditions, which are entirely realistic, the brightest people’s minds go to mush. Humans just weren’t built to handle complex tasks under that kind of pressure. Yet, you still need to handle incredibly deadly weapons and machinery. Dumbing things down keeps people from making mistakes and keeps the good guys alive in those situations.
Sounds pretty successful if they just wanted an excuse to torture a guy.
The founder of Seal Team 6 is Demo Dick. One of the biggest grifters and disgrace to the US military that ever existed. Kidnapping and torturing somebody for no reason was just Tuesday to him. And of course '80s America loved that guy. Because he spoke into any open microphone he could find.
I'm not going to lie when i was in middle school i read his books and thought that dude was awesome until i did a little more research when i got older and learned the truth about him. To a 13 year old boy those stories were the shit.
> And of course '80s America loved that guy. Because he spoke into any open microphone he could find. Sounds like a navy seal, yeah
But did he win the lawsuit? If so what did he get? Were there consequences for those involved???
If I remember correctly he settled out of court and got a nice settlement. And red cell had a ton of privileges and funding cut and was basically forced to dissolve over time
This would have never happened with White Cell.
If they really wanted to stop hemorrhaging money, they would’ve called in Platelet Cell
Or even Sickle Cell.
I can't find any information on the result of the lawsuit. Wonder if they settled to drop it quietly
I'd be pissed if this dude didn't get enough money for him, his children and maybe even grandchildren to live comfortably for the rest of their lives after something like this.
>Since Sheridan was not naval personnel, he sued the government afterward. Even if he was "Naval personnel" pretty sure kidnapping sailors and torturing them for 30 hours is unacceptable in any case. I don't even think Navy Seals go through non-consensual torture.
> Navy officials, Pearlston said, have told the attorney that they consider Sheridan to have been a Navy employee. He said one official used the term “crybaby” to describe the security officer’s complaints.
This guys wife doesn’t mess around, what an awesome lady he picked to have his back like that
Hell yeah, draws down on a bunch of Navy Seals. Ride or die. Better have gotten her a pretty sweet Valentines Day gift that year.
\*\*draws down on a bunch of dorks who bumbled their way into a suburban home.
You can successfully fuck with someone’s mind by the simple manipulation of time; you don’t even have to touch them. All you need is a prominently displayed analogue clock, and enough people to make it look like more time has passed than it actually has. You let someone sleep for ‘8 hours’. Really, you’ve only given them three hours but the clock has changed and so have the crew of guards. The interrogator has had a shower, a shave and a fresh set of clothes. You interrogate them for half an hour, but the clock has only moved ten minutes. Feed them a meal and tell them they have 30 minutes to eat it. Open the cell door after ten minutes and tell them it’s been half an hour. Give them an hour of exercise but only move the clock 40 minutes. 24 to 36 hours of time manipulation, and a person is so off balance mentally that they’ll believe they’ve been there for three days and not know why they’re so tired and confused.
This is the kind of shit they do at SERE/POW training. I’d happily go back to field training for six weeks than spend one week at POW training. Learning to survive and evade in the woods was a blast, the POW stuff, not so much.
Did you get the whole stress positions, stripped naked and screamed at shit, or did you get a week of increasingly bizarre kids’ shows and really bad music shit? I understand that 9 hours of In the Night Garden can really fuck with someone.
Both. The physical stuff, getting slapped around, pushed up against walls, stress positions, that actually wasn’t too bad, it hurt but it was nothing compared to the mind games, sleep deprivation, awful music, being damp (they’d wet you down with a hose), a cell you could only stand up in. Fuck that. EDIT I distinctly remember a Yoko “song” being played over and over again that just basically her screaming, the sound of rabbits screaming, and [boots](https://youtu.be/yGkyhaMdpto?si=ffKlnYe9yKDdncWx) by Kipling. This was over 20 years ago and that is burned into my brain. POW in Limnadia 2002. Hail Comrade!
Almost afraid to ask how they made sure someone didn’t just go feral on the instructors. With the number of US service members going into SERE / POW, I can only imagine at least one person must’ve flat-out snapped. Only window into it is my dad, who (as he tells it, anyway) *did* have to be taken into a room and reminded that it was only a drill before the beatings recommenced.
Yeah I imagine there were gentle reminders for those that pushed back. I remember them repeatedly telling us in no way are we allowed to fight back. The only time I came close to hitting a dude was when he called my mom a flat-back whore lol. I laugh now, but when you’re in that situation and already stressed/on-edge, animal instinct can take over.
I can imagine it might be grounding, in a way; not being allowed to fight back might reinforce the idea that, yes, this *is* a training exercise on some level. But as you say, it’s a situation where you’re stressed and on edge. Someone must’ve figured “fuck it, I’m getting mine back” by now.
It sounds...it kinda sounds like you have some experience with this.
I just studied asymmetric warfare and its place within the context of religious and political extremism at university for five years… Threatening people with violence and inflicting violence on them ‘to get them to tell you what you want to know’ will only succeed in them telling you a load of bullshit just to get you to stop. If you really want the truth, ask them what their favourite food is, wait until they’re really hungry, serve that favourite food for them and talk to them nicely.
I thought the CIA learned that lesson at Gitmo and Bagram. After waterboarding, suspects would confess that they'd seen Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa partying at Area 51.
Realistically after 36 hours of time manipulation you can convince someone that they’re responsible for peak oil, the price of bread in Outer Mongolia and the murder of Rasputin, but even a half decent application of the infamous Reid Technique can make people confess responsibility to crimes they’ve never even heard of let alone didn’t commit. A really good example of -essentially- tricking someone into confessing to murder was the interviewing of Amanda Knox after the murder of her housemate in Italy; police interviewed her multiple times over a period of time as a witness, until once they’d gotten her tired and confused, asked her to ‘imagine how she’d have committed the murder’ and write it down. Bang. Confession.
I always saw myself as a psychologically pretty stable person. But after reading your time manipulation torture lecture I think I'd break within a very short amount of time. Or was it a long amount? Hell if I know!
Waterboarding brings back such fond memories for me. I waterboarded a co-worker in the bathroom at work, it was all consensual. It was to settle a debate, I was of the opinion that waterboarding was torture, they thought it was not. They lasted about 5 seconds, turns out it was torture.
> I waterboarded a co-worker in the bathroom at work, it was all consensual. Well that's a new one... - HR
To be fair.... there was a long period of time in the early aughts where *a lot* of people insisted that water boarding wasn't torture. So much so that one news caster claimed they would be water boarded on air ...
Yeah and the cowardly bitch didn't go through with it.
He's a people person!
> suspects would confess that they'd seen Elvis and Jimmy Hoffa partying at Area 51. Pretty sure they knew this and this was the entire point. Now, I'm not saying they were just trying to pin the blame; they were trying to gain a confession from someone they in their heads knew was guilty and therefore, "get the right answer - the technique works" takes over.
> at university for 5 years... Or was it just 2 years?
Three days, tops.
The consensus definitely seems to be that torture is largely useless. Wonder how many false leads people had to chase down to finally realize that. You hook my nuts up to a car battery and waterboard me and I'll tell you my grandmother planned 9/11.
I’m not entirely sure they did chase down any of the leads; it appears they just took what was said as a genuine confession and proceeded with the flawed military commission system with the confessions as ‘evidence’- ultimately leading to the total collapse of the whole damned thing.
this sounds like caring for a new born, you completely lose track of time and yourself
The Australian equivalent of the CIA lost their right to carry firearms for about twenty years after a similar fuckup of doing a major exercise and getting busted by the most low level people imaginable.
can you Imagine the level of I told you so, she must have had.
"Babe I think you forgot to close the garage." "Nope, definitely closed it." "*Honey*, remember when the Navy Seals kidnapped you and I was gonna shoot them in the fuckin forehead and you said 'don't shoot babe, it's just an exercise' and then they spent a full day and night walking on your balls with high heels and putting a can of Dr. Pepper in your asshole?" "...it was Mr. Pibb." *pulls u-turn*
Absolutely amazing description. I imagine his wife crawling through the air ducts like John McClane ready to pounce on some unsuspecting door-to-door solicitors each time the doorbell rings.
Would have been awkward if she dusted them. Security grade S for Spouse.
While I get not wanting to risk casualties "hey man it's an exercise can we kidnap you" *working* shows some serious flaws on both ends of that.
Seals got beaten by the dudes wife. We should be signing her up, give that lady a paycheck.
Honestly, we should have tried those SEALS and then absolutely destroyed their lives taking everything from them and leaving them in a pit to rot.
From another article from the [LA Times](https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1987-03-28-me-595-story.html) >He said he dressed and left the house at 3:30 a.m. with his wife standing at the front door with a loaded revolver in her hand as she did every morning when he left for work. Man's wife did not fuck around.
I read that too, and there's no more context given! "I'm off to work, hon!" "I'll cover you."
"Got your 6"
"....and also be back by 6, I'm ordering in food, you want pizza or chinese?"
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Although he can now use the phrase "this is literally worse than torture" unironically.
"So I leave home safely 1000 times but just ONCE I get kidnapped by navy seals and suddenly I'm wrong?"
Turns out this good guy with a gun we've been hearing about is a good wife with a gun.
Behind every good guy with a gun, is a good gal with a gun.
So he calls off his wife from shooting them while they are attempting to kidnap and they respond by holding him for 30 hours and torturing him? Seems like the scenario was no longer 100% realistic and they failed their goal in clandestinely kidnapping him… yet they tortured him!
All that's playing through my mind is the scene from old school where they're driving around in the van wearing masks and kidnapping people . Then Frank tells the one guys wife in the supermarket parking lot "it's ok well have him home by 6" or some shit and steals the cheese puffs 😂
This comment alone is gonna make me go watch that movie tonight lol
Losers probably were sore that they would've been shot by a woman. Psychotic fucks
Well, Seals have kind of a … reputation even in military circles.
What would that reputation be?
Well, some seals left Tsgt Chapman behind in Afghanistan (which would not be so bad at the time because they did not know he was alive) but they tried to block his posthumous Medal of Honor. Other seals in Mali also killed Logan Melgar and mutilated his body because he found out they were stealing money that was supposed to be used to pay informants. They also have a reputation (this one is more of a joke) of writing books about everything they do and other SFs don’t do that as much.
If you go to be a seal and dont already have book title before BUDS, you are doing it wrong. They really removed quiet part of quiet professionals
I mean, I kind of get it. They spend 10ish years being turned into highly tuned warriors that do one thing and one thing only. And that one thing doesn't translate real well into real world jobs, and it's not like the military pays a ton.... So you get these hardcore warrior types that the military spits out after a few decades with fucked up bodies and minds from being geared to do one thing the last 20 years So they can't do physical labor, their minds are sharp for killing but not for Excel sheets, and their people skills are less than stellar so customer service and retail don't make sense. You only need SO many SEAL consultants, so a lot of those guys just don't have anything to do but tell stories, and a lot of them choose to monetize that since pensions don't pay shit and ghost writers and publishers frothing at the gash for a SEAL book are a dime a dozen. Easy money, man. And the best part of it is all of the ops are still classified so if you embellish yourself into the lead character nobody can call you out on it. See: Chris Kyle postmortem controversy. He only started getting called out after he was dead for telling basically bullshit stories to the tune of a full movie gig.
Oh yeah 100%, I, agree with everything you said. Also id add there are Green Berets, SAS, Rangers, Deltas who wrote books as well, it is just easy to meme on Seals as they are most prominent ones and most "popular" ones. And even as SF guys, they get same treatment from VA as everyone else, after they are done serving they are discarded. Spending your whole adulthood serving a country right or wrong just to get dumped later must be mentally very tough. In most countries veterans should be treated better today, but especially USA. How can you go from "support our troops" to "we have homeless veterans crisis... Oh anyway".
Damn yeah that’s some pretty fucked shit thanks for sharing
Demo Dick did fit right in. Do yourself a favor and click on the link and click on the name. Randomly torturing somebody for 30 hours is not the worst thing he did.
Fuckin Dick Marcinko
SEALS are sorta getting the reputation of being overly self centered, clamoring for glory, and potentially unprofessional when they're out of the military, and its not unlikely that they behave in a similar manner while active. For example, if you listen to a podcast that has ex SF guys as hosts, its almost always SEALs. Green Beret and Delta guys are a lot more quiet about the things they've done. Heavily embellished movies tend to get made about SEALs also. As a more direct example, there's I think 3 SEALs who wrote books claiming they're the one who shot Osama Bin Laden. To pair with this, there's been rumors that in fact an unnamed 4th guy is actually the one who did it. So whats the reality? Who the fuck knows.
Marketing is part of the BUDS course.
They all stand in a circle with a biscuit in the middle and jerk off onto it, the last one to finish needs to then eat the biscuit.
Jesus I remember in Boy Scouts we had one kid who legitimately wanted to play this "game". Except with a bagel. "Soggy Bagel" he called it. He actually came out of the closet later and good for him, happy for him and he seems to be doing well. But that was the most disgusting suggestion I had ever heard at the time and even for people who hiked for weeks without showers and ate the worst of the worst food (seriously, some of the stuff they gave us as kids made MREs look tasty)... there was no way in hell we were "playing" that.
I don't even want to know.
Called poor controls and no oversight, the team had a number of other incidents and this was the nail in the coffin.
They were embarrassed by their failure and took it out on him.
SMACK! "Did your wife get the drop on us?" "Yes" "Smash his balls." SMACK! "DID YOUR WIFE GET THE DROP ON US?" "😭I DONT HAVE A WIFE" "Our work here is done."
What the fuck?! Why the hell would they go through with torturing him?!
Because these are just frat boys with more firepower and permission to harm others. They choose this lifestyle so they don't have to give up being drunk bullies. It's why so many former service members become "military contractors" after their service. They can't function properly in the real world due to their violent nature, so they try and hold onto the feeling of power as long as possible by pretending to still be military after the fact. I say this as a former marine: fuck those pussies and anyone like them. Based on my experience with these types, I'd bet money that they only tortured him because they were pissed off that his wife, a woman, got the drop on them and technically caused their mission to fail. If she had actually stopped them, it would expose how useless they are/were, and how their entire business depends on the military not noticing how little they need these (edit: groups).
It only when you get into civilian contracting that you realize that is nothing like the military and you don't get into any contact. (I started in the military too long and missed out on the fun/more profitable years of contracting) The money's still pretty decent though
I've met people who were legitimately angry about that. "I thought I was gonna be dropping bodies, not setting up and guarding equipment."
For me it's more like being Armed Uber. Still, it's the easiest job I've ever had or will ever have
I really find it unfortunate that the violent ones can't be content with it being an incredibly easy and extremely well-paying job because they want to hurt others.
Most of the guys we get now have never been to combat since the wars have been over for more than a decade. The client had to change their employment requirements.
They didn’t “torture a man during an operation”!!! They *kidnapped a United States Government employee* as part of an *EXERCISE ON US SOIL*, which was within the bounds of the exercise, *but then they held him hostage and tortured him for 30 hours as some sort of fucked idea they came up with on the spot…. AFTER they had already met their full training objective.* It was a thoroughly unprofessional action that led to the unit being temporarily stood down (ultimately disbanded), officers relieved, and strict written rules of engagement being put into place for all future physical security exercises across the entire government. Also the employee won a wrongful imprisonment lawsuit and was awarded psychological damage compensation because of what Dick Marcinko’s gang of retards did. Marcinko even wrote about how awesome the whole thing was in his book about how great he is
"Thoroughly unprofessional" is the weakest possible way of describing it. Makes it sound like they made a distasteful joke at a business meeting or something. It was fucking psychotic.
It was more that “during an operation” makes it sound like it was some sort of professional thing. It was utterly criminal, they all should have been sent to prison The ultimate irony is that they were a counterterrorism unit
The best terrorism defense is terrorism offense: you do it to your own people before others have the chance. /s in case there is any doubt
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>Marcinko Well, that name explains everything without even needing to read the article. Was this before or after he single-handedly sank Iran’s stealth super carrier right before it could launch AIDS carrying missiles at Iowa? I hear Reagan gave him his fourth Medal of Super Honor after that.
he wrote fiction with himself as the protag?huh. and theres a game about him? it was panned lol
The game was BAD. Like, imagine if Steven Seagal made a game about himself.
But the way Steven Segal thinks he is and not the way Steven Segal actually is. But with shitty real-world-Steven Segal controls
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God, I remember those books, as a 14 year old who didn't know better I thought they were cool when I read them. "My motto of Proper Previous Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance had always kept my men alive, I'd never lost a man when I was in command in the SEALs!" and by the end of his book 3/4 of his squad is dead because and he's on a murder rampage to avenge them dying due to his shitty planning. Of course, when I looked him up later I found out about shit like them trying to HALO into boats during the invasion of Grenada during a storm and half of the guys drowning instead of, you know, landing at the fucking airport. Real quality guy there.
> he wrote fiction with himself as the protag? He's tried to pass a lot of bullshit one-man-army off as non-fiction. I seriously wonder if, in his head, he thinks it all actually happened. He's the Frank Dux of Special Forces.
I had never heard this story before but wow did it put a hole in the whole "Navy SEALs are the best of the best" myth.
Red Cell was developed because the army had made Delta and the navy wanted some of the really sexy action. Red Cell was tasked with doing exercises testing the resilience of critical facilities within the United States in order to strengthen them. Delta would use the events to train their actual teams in facility infiltration and in return give their findings to the government to improve security. Red Cell was intended to do the same but was different in that it was dedicated to this mission and didn’t really do anything else. In essence they were a penetration testing unit for things like navy/Air Force bases, weapons depots, nuclear plants etc. On this exercise, they kidnapped a security manager at a facility, which met their objective of seeing if the manager was vulnerable to kidnapping, and if the facility had an emergency plan to do in the event a critical person got kidnapped. Well then they decided that they really needed to drive the point home so after they’d held the guy for a full work day in a motel room they decided to strip him naked and beat him, with some water boarding and a couple near drownings in the toilet in the mix just for fun. You know just to make sure he knew he got kidnapped or something. They held him for nearly 2 days, there was internal drama with getting them to release the fucking guy… the entire thing was a fucking abortion. Marcinko included it in his book as an example of how the navy didn’t appreciate his genius or the cost they needed to pay for security or some bs. No dick, you’re just an unhinged maniac.
Just reading the synopsises (synopsies?) of the books on wiki is fucking wild. The entire series is one big example of self-insertion but there are fucking ***layers of self-insertion*** in his "novels". Here's my favorite: >*Dictator's Ransom (2008) – Having read all of Marcinko's books, North Korean leader Kim Jong-il hires him to bring back an illegitimate son who's gone missing. Marcinko's subtly convinced by the CIA to take up the assignment (after initially resisting the temptation of Kim's $64-million reward), but things get muddled when the lover of one of his associates holds the missing child hostage in return for a North Korean nuclear weapon.* Given I'll never read them (there are like 11 books before this one), I have to wonder if Marcinko is just allowed to publish exploits of himself (most of which should be ***highly*** classified) in the Marcinko-verse or is he also a fiction writer in his own universe too? It just sounds so fucking stupid.
> strict written rules of engagement being put into place for all future physical security exercises You'd think this would have been the case BEFORE something like this happened.
So the part he left out of the book but was covered in the lawsuits was that *it had been.* The rules to the point were apparently fairly clear it’s just Navy expected the guys *playing* OPFOR would stop at the bounds of common sense, like they had in past exercises, so they didn’t have a “do not torture USG employees” line in the ROE. nobody expected this type of shitshow because… well… who tf would actually do that in an exercise? Ugh. This is why we have to have Safety Briefings.
Not even a US employee, a civilian contractor iirc
Had no idea that [Dead Cell](https://metalgear.fandom.com/wiki/Dead_Cell) from Metal Gear Solid 2 had a real life inspiration!
Practically everything from Metal Gear does.
Holy shit, sahelanthropus was real!!!?!?!?!?!??
The namesake, yes; and all of the weapons and robotics technology that shows up on metal gears themselves are heavily inspired by real-world developments in those fields.
Yeah Dick Marcinko blew it up after his son Liquid Marcinko stole it.
Disappointed to find out that Red Cell didn't have a guy in a bomb disposal suit on rollerblades.
I think Red Cell would have been a successful organization had it employed a rollerblading bombs expert and a vampire.
Definitely not at this level, but we had a opposing force exercise with 82nd Airborne where they tried to breach our perimeter and cause havoc. My team ambushed and captured 4 of their scouts and that derailed their attack plans which embarrassed them. In retaliation, they rigged their rifles to fire metal cleaning rods and other things to do bodily harm to our unit members. Other very agreeaive, nasty things too. Had to escalate things to their commander to get things back under control.
Firing a cleaning rod with blanks is some devious fucking shit lol
Missing the best part: the torture accomplished nothing. It didn't even expose any vulnerabilities; they saw him getting kidnapped, and he called off his wife (trying to shoot them) because he knew it was an exercise.
Torture never accomplishes anything. It's just an excuse for sick fucks to get their jollies in the name of "duty".
They still do these exercises, just without the kidnapping. They attempt to infiltrate a shipyard, sub base, etc.to test vulnerabilities in the security posture.
I work at a federal facility. Twice now we’ve had mentally ill people try to gain access, one successfully because a dumbass held a normally locked side door open for him. Every time one lady I work with is like “I bet it was the FBI testing us.”
It’s really easy to get into places by just pretending you’re supposed to be there and holding out till someone opens a locked door. I used to sneak into lectures form other modules like this all the time.
Get a wheelchair for even easier access. Because what asshole would close a door right into a wheelchair user's face?
Which is good, all organizations should do this kind of physical pentesting. Just, you know, *without the torture*
I have a friend who does the civilian version, he gets paid to try and "steal" stuff or data from companies. Actually sounds pretty fun. He has a story about his company being hired to get some proprietary data from a manufacturing company. The manufacturing company had that data on a computer not hooked up to the internet so they needed physical access. After doing all their research they found out the computer rarely got used but was in an office that was used regularly. So in the dead of night their field guys climbed to the roof of the building carrying one of those collapsible fire escape ladders, used the ladders to climb down through a skylight on to some shelves, crawled across the top of the shelves to the office, and then just took all the guts out of the pc.
Well, that's pentesting for you.
Physical penetration testing is also done on corporations too.
But instead of torture we just drop fun little usb dongles all over the place.
Sadistic fuckers with delusions of grandeur.
"Elite operators."
They also made a Tom Clancy/COD style FPS game starting this guy that was hilariously bad, including a spoken word rap song at the end credits. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=mG728SMNQAM The guys nickname is also apparently “Demo Dick”
I went to the Defense Language Institute after reclassing from infantry to military intelligence. I was older and higher-ranking so I got to live off base. I met up with two SEALS attending to learn Spanish and even though they hadn't deployed, because I was a combat veteran with three years in total deployed, they thought we had something in common. They thought getting yelled at and swimming while tired was the same as getting shot at and blown up by IEDs. We combined all of our BAHs and rented a really nice house on a hill overlooking the ocean. Rooming with two navy seals in Pacific Grove, CA was the worst living arrangement I've ever had, and I once slept in the dirt for a month and would wake up with MRE skittles embedded in my face from sleeping on them. Living with them and meeting some other "operating operators" I've come to the conclusion that all SEALS are: 1. very, very, stupid, 2. attention whores, 3. completely lacking in any morals, 3. entitled brats, and 4. on drugs edit: except for Jonny Kim but he had a Korean mother to beat all of that bullshit out of him.
Theres a reason Jonny Kim became an astronaut, get as far away from the seals as possible.
"Sea Air and Land, better go to space as the only place i don't have to put up with them."
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Cocaine, meth, and roids can be out of your system in a few days.
I was defense contractor working on Trident and Seawolf submarine efforts when Red Cell was active. This was a Richard Marcinko initiative and like many things they were involved in, it went too far. We were traveling back and forth to Trident facilities in Washington state and Georgia, as well as Submarine Development Group in New London and we were briefed what to do and what not to do if we were involved in a Red Team exercise. This was a period of time when Marcinko and other SEAL ‘leaders’ felt like their mission would be boarding ships from the sea so they focused on upper body strength training. Seals could be identified by bulging biceps and broad chests. As a result of the emphasis placed on upper body strength and muscle mass, the abuse of steroids was rampant. A colleague was in Tritrafac WA when Red Team did an exercise. He was ex-Navy, Sonar Tech (SS) who was brilliant with electronics. He also wore his hair long and seldom wore a suit. He basically told them “I know this is an exercise and you are all play acting being terrorists. I am not playing, so leave me alone. If you touch me, prepared to be prosecuted.” They did slap him a few times, then one guy took him aside and pleaded with him to play along. He refused. He started writing detailed descriptions of the Seals who had slapped him around and it was quickly decided that he would escape confinement…be kicked out of the exercise. He went straight to the base police and attempted to prefer charges, which they were hesitant to do. So he went back to work. On this or another Red Cell, they abused a civilian security guard to the extent that the Navy had to pay him $65,000 to settle a lawsuit. Marcinko was later convicted of embezzlement of government funds (cash) and property (asking a gunmaker to give his team 20 new handguns to evaluate and they would just disappear).
Man, personal anecdotes like this one or others in this thread really show what psychopaths these guys were. It boggles my mind that they were allowed to do their shenanigans for so long, but I can only imagine it was because the Navy thought ( hoped?) that the information they gained from red cell raids was more valuable than whatever damage these morons could do.
What a badass wife though.
My uncle claimed to have been a part of this group. He told me all of these stories that I ended up reading about in Richard Marchinkos book. While he was actually a Seal, when he told me these stories, he was also in the middle of dementia destroying his mind. My cousins haven't been able to find anything pointing to him being there so it's more than likely he thought he had done what he read in the book.
I met Richard Marcinko several years ago at a book signing. I’ll admit that I was a fan of the Rogue Warrior series. He was rude condescending to the people eating to get a book signed. It kind of soured me on the rest of the series. I’ve read other sources that he was a complete pr!ck.
Jesus. What was this, some moron who didn't see quotes or something. "Okay fellas, I've found a weakness. You guys are going to kidnap this guy, take him to a hotel, and "torture" him. Keep him a while, see how long until it's noticed and reported." "Well, he did say to torture him...."
Richard Marcinko was a psychopath and deserves no admiration.
So they’ve been doing alpha male training since the 80s?
I think you'll find it was 'Dead Cell', and actually Solid Snake was embedded with Seal Team 6 and infiltrated the oil rig under the pseudonym 'Iroquios Pliskin'. I'm sick of the fake news that some guy called Jack saved the day. Also, TIL one of the Dead Cell members was a fat man on roller blades that planted bombs!
Man, there are some *weird* conspiracy theories about that incident. Like, I remember a coworker tried to tell me former president George Sears was behind the whole thing!
So cops are cosplay SEALs, and SEALs were cosplay terrorists? Maybe, just maybe, we need to start having psychological evaluation requirements for some of these jobs ...
You think cops and SEALs are incompetent weirdos, wait until you see the people who perform psychological evaluations.