Navy SEALs, Delta Force, and SOCOM general - The most "Special" groups in the U.S. Military

[RA-5C Vigilante]

Oh man, Marcus Lutrell and the Lone Survivor story is a rabbit hole. If anyone is interested in a deep dive into a nightmare of incompetence and cover-up, I recommend a writer by the name of Ed Darack, who wrote the book Victory Point. In summary, he rode with the guys who did the mop-up after Red Wings went pear-shaped. He was one of the first to really speak out on a national level that Marcus was full of shit. A good interview can be found here, where he talks about Red Wings and Extortion 17, the helicopter crash that killed a good chunk of Seal Team Six.

The big points he made: that massive ambush of hundreds of Taliban was probably a few dudes, maybe 7, points out that their command made critical, baffling mistakes, like flying a MH-47, a massive, loud ass helicopter, into a valley where the enemy was dug in and expect not to be noticed, not really making a plan, and more. Then there was the incident of not shooting the civilians, which was a whole different can of worms that led to a lot of questions about the truth of what happened. He also dug into the fact that many of these books by Seals, especially Lone Survivor, were ghost-written. In summary, the SEALs talked to the authors, gave basic details, and to a disturbing degree, make shit up or puff up their patriotism and their life stories. From the same website as the interview, and with contributions by Darack, is a great article I definitely recommend if you want to know the other side of Lone Survivor.

This part really sums it up though:
Guy writing the article asks these questions

Gets answer saying: talk to my agent. Guy asks for Marcus to stand by his words.

Spoiler: This actually happened.

"On 31 May, 2016, I received a call from Jess Stoner, who identified herself as Luttrell’s “agent for public speaking engagements and things like that.” Ms. Stoner did not identify whether or not Luttrell was present with her, but did acknowledge we were on a speaker in a vehicle. Ms. Stoner was very amicable for the vast majority of the 10-minute conversation; we established who I was and she tried to pin down why exactly I was writing the article. She mentioned several times what a great relationship she and Luttrell have with Brandon Webb, SOFREP’s founder and CEO. Ms. Stoner then claimed to be struggling between the second and third questions I asked Luttrell, and then claimed I made an error because they were the exact same question. I explained to Ms. Stoner several times that these questions were unrelated, as one pertained to the KIA on Luttrell’s team and one pertained to the KIA from the QRF, but she continued to claim they were the same question.

Finally, I told Ms. Stoner to please simply forget about those questions because the major point I wanted to understand and communicate to the SOF community is the following: “Given that Luttrell just had his lawyer issue a statement saying he stood by everything in his book, why is there such a major discrepancy between the book and what he said on 60 minutes?”

She immediately said in a completely different tone, “This conversation is over,” and hung up. A short time later, I received an email from Jessica stating, “Hi Michael, We have no comments on your questions below”.

Tl;dr, Lutrrell remarkably survived a nightmare scenario, but the entire operation was a bad idea, it didn't work, and the Navy and SOCOM used him as a prop for a heroic tale in order to cover up they fucked up super bad.

 

[1Tonka_Truck]

Thoughts on expanding the scope to SEALs and CIA contractors?

 

[Lieutenant Rasczak]

Honestly, former SOCOM lolcows could be an entire rabbit hole that hasn't even been touched. It would be interesting to look into.

 

[Justtocheck]

Thoughts on expanding the scope to SEALs and CIA contractors?

Could you please elaborate a bit on CIA contractors? Do you mean like the Benghazi soldiers? Or the CIA SAC? I know many SEALs do contracting, but I don't know much about the drama there. By all means, if you have the corn, share it.

 

[Sam Losco]

Marcinko also formed Red Cell which, in 1986, kidnapped a civilian security guard at Naval Weapons Station Seal Beach and tortured him for 30 hours to expose a potential weakness in base security.
Popo Medic did a recent video on Red Cell and covered that incident.

 

[Pitbull Victim]

Richard Marcinko

Also the star of the acclaimed video game Rogue Warrior where he was voiced by Academy Award nominated actor Mickey Rourke:

 

[1Tonka_Truck]

Could you please elaborate a bit on CIA contractors? Do you mean like the Benghazi soldiers? Or the CIA SAC? I know many SEALs do contracting, but I don't know much about the drama there. By all means, if you have the corn, share it.

The Benghazi shitshow involved a mix of CIA contractors, State Department contractors and Diplomatic Security Service employees. The 2 non-State Department employees that died were both CIA contractors. The CIA hires PMCs for... stuff. These are not CIA employees like SAC operators, who are also generally recruited from SOF. Somehow over the last 20 years, most SOF shitbirds have been employed as CIA contractors at some point.

Just from Black Rifle Coffee there's Evan Hafer, Green Beret/CIA contractor, Mat Best Ranger/CIA contractor, and Andy Stump, SEAL/CIA contractor. Hafer is friends with Mike Glover, Green Beret/CIA contractor.

There's a lot more, but my brain is ready to check out for the night.

 

[SwanSwanson]

I swear it's like the entire US military is a joke. My friend who was in JROTC in high school told me about these two idiots in the Marines who came to their class to tell them about their experiences. Neither were actual combatants, one was a helicopter repairman and the other worked some stupid logistical paper job. They came in eating KFC and had their milkshakes and made all sorts of crappy jokes, one of them said "yeah people say they don't want to join the marines because they'll die, well I've been dead for three years" nigga its because when people imagine joining the military they imagine fighting. Not exactly an insane story, both of them were white but yeah that's what happened.

 

[Justtocheck]

"yeah people say they don't want to join the marines because they'll die..."

Well, ehm, they do in fact die
Every Marine should hear this story before joining, so they get an idea of the value Govt. puts on servicemen and servicewomen's life

 

[OutInTheRain]

Extreme personalities, extreme training, and after it's all done, extreme ass kissing by society at large. I'm shocked there isn't more ex-SOF lolcows running around. If the military is the guy equivalent of "fuck it, I'll just be a stripper." Then joining any SOF unit must be the military equivalent of ghetto gaggers. At that point they are only doing it because they are irreparably fucked in the head.

 

[CptnSnshn]

Are we just speed running Jersh shooting himself in the back of the head 5 times at this point?

 

[Scarlett Johansson]

Iirc the lone survivor guy or whatever, the arab who helped him escape was even sure that he was exaggerating his story.

Idk if it was a seal but there was that asshole who flung the puppy to its death

 

[Sammich]

I'm sure Rangers and Force Recon, as well as some PMC folks (like erik prince/blackwater) might add to this as well.
Good op, fun rabbit hole for me later.

 

[Amerikaner Teddybär]

"If you want to write a book, send a SEAL. If you want somebody dead, send a Ranger." - One of my retired military friends

Rangers lead the way after all.

 

[Breadbassket]

The Navy SEALs have some pretty brutal training and the vast majority of men who try out for them will fail. Here is some excerpts from an article on the fate of the ones who don't make it which showcases the "all or nothing" mindset of some people joining which could factor into explaining why a notable amount of them go on to have massive egos when they are validated by making it into the force and why the ones that can't get in potentially develop suicidal tendencies.

The Navy attracts recruits for the SEALs using flashy images of warriors jumping from planes or rising menacingly from the dark surf. But very few make it through the harrowing selection course, and those who don’t still owe the Navy the rest of their four-year enlistments. So they end up doing whatever Navy jobs are available — often, menial work that few others want.

The recruits are almost all hyper-motivated overachievers, often with college degrees, who have passed a battery of strength and intelligence tests. But many find themselves washing dishes in cramped galleys, cleaning toilets on submarines or scraping paint on aircraft carriers.

Unlike civilian workers, they cannot quit. To walk away would be a crime. Until the enlistment is done, they are stuck.

The course, known as BUD/S, is meant to simulate the extreme stress of special-operations combat missions. Recruits who can’t take the long days of struggle and cold announce their decision to quit by voluntarily ringing a brass bell near the beach where they train.

On average, about 70 percent of each class over the last decade has rung the bell. But the rate suddenly soared in 2021, reaching as high as 93 percent.

Classes that started with 150 recruits were finishing with fewer than 10. In Navy records, nearly all the dropouts appeared to be voluntary, but sailors said that, in reality, a majority were sick or injured. It was not unusual, they said, to see men carried to the bell because they could not walk.

“We all wanted to do something extraordinary, and are now doing what feels like the farthest thing from it,” said a sailor who arrived at the selection course in 2021 with a marketing degree and good civilian job prospects, but who quit after a leg injury that required hospitalization. He now sweeps the hangar deck of an aircraft carrier.
He and others have asked to transfer to the Army or Marines, hoping to do the kind of intense work they signed up for with the SEALs. But he said his chain of command seemed determined to keep him a deck sweeper.

“It feels like prison,” he said. “I don’t feel like there is any way out. Honestly, I’ve contemplated jumping off the boat.”

Sailors who went through the course said that what separated bell-ringers from newly minted SEALs was, at times, little more than luck — whether a wrong step led to a sprained ankle, or if high bacteria counts in the ocean caused sickness. But the reverberations last for years.

Not all bell-ringers end up in work they hate. A spate of suicides in 2016 prompted the Navy to improve the options for them. Many are now trained to become divers, rescue swimmers or explosives experts. But paradoxically, sailors say, the first few to give up in each class have seemed to get the best opportunities, while those who stick it out the longest are left with the dregs.

Many go to new assignments hauling the weight of dashed dreams. They can feel cheated, angry or consumed by blame. In October, a sailor threw himself from the fifth-floor window of his barracks shortly after ringing the bell, according to two military officers with knowledge of the suicide attempt who spoke on condition of anonymity. The sailor lived, but sustained serious injuries.

The sailor cleaning bilge tanks was in a SEAL selection class in the winter of 2021, when the ocean was especially cold. By Week Two, his lungs were so full of bloody fluid that friends told him they could hear gurgling. When he asked to go to the medical clinic, he said, an instructor ordered him to do push-ups — as punishment. The next day, the sailor said, he nearly blacked out on a run that would have been easy for him when healthy. Unable to catch his breath, he rang the bell.

A few months later, the sailor was mopping floors on a ship. He was so ashamed of washing out, he said, that on the rare occasions when he could bring himself to look in the mirror, he called himself a quitter, a coward and worse. One night, he decided to drive his truck off a bridge, telling himself, “Time to ring the bell for real.”

Seconds before crashing over the edge, he said, he saw his mother’s face and jerked the truck back onto the road. In the light of the dashboard, his cheeks were streaked with tears.

 

[30+GameOvers]

I support any and all military lolcow threads, they're an untapped potential.
I don't know if a thread for them exists, but there is also plenty of milk for the opposite side of the spectrum, ie "booties": Those who go into the military doing some menial work like logistics or other non-fighting roles and then flexing muscles as if you were the Navy Seals copypasta guy IRL. Both sides are hilarious, but booties are obviously a lot more common than Seal cows or similar.

 

[bushidobrown]

There's a popular saying: "Winners write the history." Despite 'winning' so much, the Navy SEALs have done nothing but lack any sort of serious integrity while displaying loads of empty bravado.

 

[herefortheactualthreads]

I'M A FUCKING NAVY SEAL M8, I ALWAYS SEAL THE DEAL

 

[Fake Steve Franssen]

Robert O'Neill the SEAL team Six member who shot bin Laden, Yeah!, or not really. Allegedly, he was just the 4th man in the room after the SEAL who shot him. Guilty of “canoeing” the head of bin Laden, making facial identification impossible (was warned against doing this by his command but did it anyway). Claimed he was the one who killed him, despite severe inconsistencies in his story. Robert is an enterprising guy, though, who will never let the truth get in the way of a good story. Makes tons of cash thanks to his acquired fame. Is also a severe Alcoholic who has problems with the law recently and was even banned from Delta Air Lines for public intoxication.

Interesting. I didn't know what canoeing is so I found this video interviewing Matthew Cole (part two), mentioned elsewhere in the OP.

Yeah, so, one of the—I would say one of the, if not the darkest secret in the last 15 years is that over the course of the war, SEAL Team 6, as well as other elements of JSOC, were involved in something called canoeing, which is a form of firing a bullet in the top of the forehead that splits the head open in the most gruesome manner and leaves, frankly, the brain matter exposed, and looks like a—puts the head, the top of the head, in the shape of a V, with a negative space that looks like a canoe would fit in there or that a canoe went through it. And it can happen incidentally in battle, and it does happen incidentally in battle.

What I found was that for a period of years SEAL Team 6 was photographing—they photographed their dead for documentation and preservation. And for a period of years, canoed dead took up an enormous amount of space in those—in that catalog. And it was not mathematically possible. And what my sources said were, it became a sport. You shoot a person when they’re dead or dying, at very close range, for the sake of seeing the gruesome results.

Well, what happened to Osama bin Laden was hiding sort of in plain sight. The man who claims that he killed Osama bin Laden, Robert O’Neill, did an interview, a long interview in Esquire in 2013, in which he described what bin Laden’s face looked like after he shot him three times in the face and forehead. And there it is. Without using the word “canoe,” he describes this gruesome scene of splitting the top of his skull open into a V, you know, with the negative space in the shape of a V, and his brain matter exposed. And one of the points that I make in the story is, is that SEAL Team 6 then branded Osama bin Laden. That was—it’s an act of dominance, and it is a form of sport, and it’s reflexive. And it doesn’t—in this case, it does not necessarily mean that Robert O’Neill committed a war crime, but there is no question that the ritualistic manner in which and the frequency in which it occurred and the fact that it had no military necessity was criminal.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Chris Beck, who recently de-transitioned.

 

[Ghost of Wesley Willis]

Here's another one you can add to the list: Eric Greitens. Besides his SEAL career, he's also well known for his short stint as the Governor of Missouri, being forced to resign just a single year into his term amidst an impeachment proceeding in the state senate due to multiple allegations accumulating against him ranging from campaign fraud to sexual assault.