No one could make sense of Eddie. Two years of intense training in which every step and sweep of a rifle was graded seemed to evaporate once he hit Mosul. The bold leader who had pushed Alpha to the top spot in Team 7 seemed to abandon the platoon as soon as he stepped into combat. To the men, he appeared to lose sight of any larger purpose of the targeted lethality that the platoon could unleash, and instead became fixated on the lethality itself.
In the context of Alpha’s short time in Mosul, Eddie’s actions made little sense, but in the longer memories of the SEAL Teams he was no anomaly. He was a SEAL raised by other SEALs. His actions reflected a learned behavior passed down from the men who had come before him. He was part of an unsanctioned subculture in the SEALs that prized killing above nearly everything else, including, in some cases, the rule of law. And in his own way, he may just have been trying to fit in.
The SEALs had a reputation as heroes, but also a troubled past the organization had done its best to hide, even from itself. For generations the SEALs had secretly clashed with a dark subgroup in their own ranks—parasites who fed on the same core values and lore that the SEALs held most dear and used them for their own ends. It was a loose, informal, and secretive group—not a club but a culture. They considered themselves the real SEALs, the best of the best, artisan killers—the true warriors unafraid to perform the grisly acts of war that politicians and admirals too often pretended didn’t exist. Because war was dirty and lawless, they saw no point in trying to be any different. There was no membership in the group, though its influence could be seen everywhere. It went by many names and as often by no name at all. The followers were at different times called “hunters” or “pipe hitters.” Since they were sailors, but also the bane of the Navy, they often just called themselves “pirates.”
The Navy SEAL Teams were created in 1962 by President John F. Kennedy, who as a commander of a small patrol torpedo boat in World War II had seen the outsized value of small units in big fights and understood, as one early SEAL put it, “that a well-trained David can kick Goliath in the balls.” SEAL stood for “Sea, Air, and Land” and represented all the capabilities of the new force. The Navy wanted commando troops able to strike underwater, on the beaches, or from the air. They wanted small, independent teams smart and flexible enough to blow up bridges, cut communication lines, train resistance fighters, and assassinate foreign targets, then slip away unnoticed. They needed to be able to adapt and react with almost no oversight as conditions changed, so the Navy gave them a level of independence unheard of in the rest of the force. In the Navy’s fleet of ship drivers and jet pilots, there was only one group that seemed suited for such a dangerous and physically demanding mission: the UDTs, or Underwater Demolition Teams—the original Navy frogmen.
Twenty years earlier, at the onset of World War II, the American military realized that defeating the Nazis and the Japanese would depend on making a series of successful amphibious invasions, but many of the critical landing beaches bristled with mines and massive iron obstacles scattered on the sand like jacks to keep Allied ships from hitting shore. Other beaches, especially in the Pacific, were guarded by coral reefs.
The Allies learned early that they could have the best ships and the best troops, but if they couldn’t land and seize critical ground, they had nothing. In one early battle in the Pacific, on the island of Tarawa, Marines trying to land hit an unseen reef hundreds of yards from shore. Under withering fire, men laden with heavy equipment jumped into the water. Some immediately sank and drowned, others were mowed down by Japanese machine guns as they tried to wade in. More than a thousand Marines were killed trying to take the tiny island, another two thousand were wounded.
In desperation, the Navy created the Underwater Demolition Teams. The UDTs’ mission was to swim silently to beaches before amphibious landings, chart the depths, defuse mines, and blow up obstacles by hand to clear the way. The work was basic but harrowing. Sailors had to swim hundreds of yards to shore, often under fire, using only primitive swim fins and masks. They worked with simple plumb lines and slates for recording depths and satchels full of explosives for destroying obstacles. The frogman’s weapon of choice—his only weapon—was a fixed-blade knife. It was the only thing a diver could carry, and it was guaranteed never to jam or misfire. It became a symbol of the Teams. To this day, as a reminder of the frogman heritage, every new SEAL is given a ceremonial version of the same fixed-blade Navy knife that the frogmen carried.
With World War II going full steam, the Navy didn’t have time to train explosives experts, so it rounded up anyone with workable civilian experience: hard rock miners, roughnecks, and demolition crews. Then UDT leaders put them through a punishing physical gauntlet of running and swimming. The idea wasn’t so much to train men to do a job but to strip away those who didn’t have the right stuff. If the Navy could find the men who wouldn’t quit despite cold, exhaustion, pain, and psychological punishment, then it had found men who would not question an order to leave the safe, armored hull of a destroyer and slip alone, nearly naked, into the dark sea to swim toward an enemy island armed only with a knife.
Often the frogmen had to swim to the beaches while the Navy was bombarding the shore and the enemy was firing back. Casualties could be high. During the D-Day invasion of France, UDT swimmers were the first ashore on Omaha Beach. Swimming through waters choppy with machine gun fire, they dashed onto the sand to clear the way for the first landing craft. With no cover, they were shot to pieces. The casualty rate for the frogmen that day was fifty-two percent.
The men who volunteered for that kind of work were like nothing the Navy had ever seen. Over centuries the Navy had developed a culture of white-tablecloth order and discipline that had changed little since the time of British frigates. A ship captain acted as lord and commander. A strict hierarchy of officers and sailors ensured that the many specialized operations of a ship ran smoothly. The frogmen were a different breed. They had been formed from civilian workmen in New Deal 1940s America, and they embraced the era’s informal attitudes of blue-collar solidarity and equality.
They operated in small teams—usually just a half dozen men in a rubber boat. There was little distinction made between officers and enlisted sailors. They all endured the same training, ate the same chow, slept in the same bunks. During missions, they all jumped into the same dark water where, as the early frogmen noted, there was no place on their bare shoulders for rank or epaulets. Low-level enlisted men and officers all routinely used only first names.
For generations the military ground forces have insisted on discipline and attention to detail. Haircuts, uniform standards, exact marching, and crisp salutes were all part of a tradition of obedience hammered into every activity to keep troops in line when the shooting started. The frogmen, with their New Deal culture, had little use for any of it. After all, they were not an attack force, they were a crew of workmen out to do an insane job. They could be as crazy as they wanted.
On ships the Navy and frogman cultures clashed immediately. Sailors were forced to wear uniforms and keep busy in the sticky South Pacific while frogmen lazed about the decks in shorts, smoking and playing cards. One admiral complained in frustration to the officer in charge of the UDTs that he considered the frogmen “the most unruly bunch of Navy men” he had ever seen. The officer reportedly replied, “Yes, sir, but they got the job done.”
The UDT swimmer’s dangerous work gave the low-ranking frogmen a special status in the Navy. They had a swagger that transcended rank because no one in the Navy could succeed without them, and no one in the Navy wanted to trade places. “They considered all of us as crazy as they had ever seen,” said a frogman who had helped clear the beaches on Okinawa in 1945. “They thought the idea of swimming into the beaches almost naked was insane, and they wouldn’t have our jobs for anything.”
That World War II experience created the mold for the frogmen for generations. They were part of the Navy, but not really sailors. The Navy needed them but didn’t necessarily want them. And the frogmen didn’t just accept that rogue outsider status; they wore it like a badge of honor.
When Kennedy ordered the Navy to create the SEALs, the Pentagon naturally looked to the UDTs. Though the SEAL mission was far outside the scope of the Teams’ beach-clearing missions, the frogmen were better suited for the job than anyone else in the Navy. They were tough, fearless, and in great shape. Nearly all of the first SEALs came from the UDTs. And they brought the frogman culture with them. They had the same egalitarian brotherhood of shared burdens and first names. They had the same rough edges and disdain for Navy hierarchy. And they had the same attitude toward military rules and regulations: What may be necessary on a battleship or submarine or even in a traditional infantry battalion wasn’t just a burden for a small squad of crack commandos inventing a whole new type of modern warfare, it was a joke.
The SEALs stressed independence and unconventional thinking, and they had a certain admiration for outsmarting the military bureaucracy. It all fell under a guiding principle they called “being creative.” That principle became institutionalized as old frogmen rose in rank and trained new generations. The philosophy survived Vietnam and the Cold War and was passed down to the modern SEALs fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. It was embraced at nearly every rank. “In a wartime environment, it is about being creative, and you can be very creative within the rules,” Admiral William McRaven, who led the SEALs during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound, said in an interview after he was named one of the four runners-up for Time’s Person of the Year in 2011. “The leadership gives them the opportunity to be creative because they’re specially selected, they’re specially trained, they’re specially equipped.”
The SEALs saw the freedom to be creative as their greatest tactical asset. That they weren’t too rigid about old ideas of saluting or haircuts, that they gave relatively low-ranking enlisted men the freedom to make big decisions, and that they were not locked into dogmas about the right way to fight—these were what gave them the edge over enemies. But that freedom also gave SEALs enough slack to drift into dark waters.
If the original frogmen of World War II had the crucible of the South Pacific to mold their culture and identity, the SEALs created by Kennedy had Vietnam. It was a vastly different experience. The SEALs stopped being combat swimmers and became jungle fighters. The missions were different, and so were the potential dangers. Perhaps the biggest danger was one that has always stalked elite warriors: the danger of becoming so focused on the craft of killing that you forget why you are killing in the first place.
The frogmen of World War II had to be physically strong and almost recklessly brave, but they didn’t have to know much about killing, nor how to create a culture that could protect against killing’s corrosive effects. They had long been courageous and irreverent misfits, not proper warriors. But in Vietnam, the SEALs got dropped into a guerrilla war against a shadowy enemy force often disguised in civilian clothing. Their enemy fought dirty, with no respect for laws. And with the creativity and latitude to make their own tactics, some SEALs decided to fight even dirtier.
In 1962, just after the SEAL Teams were formed, small groups of SEALs started inserting covertly into South Vietnam. At first they worked only as advisors, helping to train South Vietnamese troops to counter Viet Cong guerrillas, but as the United States got drawn deeper into Vietnam, so did the frogmen. Teams started working with the CIA on a classified operation called the Phoenix Program, designed to destroy the political infrastructure of the Viet Cong. The CIA believed that the Viet Cong had a secret network of village leaders, tax collectors, and messengers spread throughout the country that allowed the insurgency to thrive while hiding in broad daylight. Taking out those civilians would strangle the enemy. By 1967, squads of SEALs were running Phoenix missions all over the country. The CIA had a web of informants gathering intelligence. That intelligence was passed to the SEALs, who ran ambushes, kidnappings, and assassinations.
Those groups of SEALs, often numbering fewer than two dozen, had almost no oversight. They were technically sailors under the command of the Navy, but the small groups of machine gun–carrying ground-pounders usually operated far inland from any Navy command. Sometimes their closest overseers were on the other side of the ocean. Army and Marine units overlapped in some of their terrain but had little say over the SEALs. “They essentially reported to themselves,” former SEAL commander Tom Hawkins, who commanded a platoon in Vietnam, wrote in his book The History and Heritage of U.S. Navy SEALs. In ideal circumstances, that freedom to be creative cut through layer after layer of military bureaucracy. But it also meant SEALs could raid and kill with next to no accountability.
The SEALs started looking and acting less and less like professional American military troops and more like the guerrillas they fought. They pulled off identifying patches, dog tags, and any other insignia that could mark them as American. They often carried foreign-made weapons to look more like the Viet Cong. Their missions were classified, so other American troops often had no idea what to make of these small groups of men with long hair, strange weapons, and no identifying insignia. They moved almost exclusively at night, often wired on Dexedrine or other kinds of speed. When the mission was to slip in to snatch or kill the enemy, stealth and camouflage became critical. Many started wearing black pajama shirts and going barefoot so they wouldn’t leave American boot prints.
On missions SEALs smeared themselves with camouflage paint, giving rise to their nickname during the war: the men with green faces. They carried pistols with silencers, called “hush puppies,” that could kill without waking up a village. When silencers proved hard to come by, some settled for crossbows. “I wanted to be as sneaky as I could be and I didn’t bother trying to follow Hoyle’s rules,” Lieutenant Commander Roy Boehm, who was one of the first SEALs in Vietnam, recalled in an oral history. “You can’t play by the rules when you’re the only person reading the book. The kind of enemy we would be fighting would be sneaky, underhanded, and fight as dirty as he could. So we had to be better at that than he was.”
With the Phoenix Program churning out a steady number of targets for the SEALs, squads would sneak in silently at night, grab villagers, and bring them back for interrogation. Those straightforward night missions gradually branched off on darker avenues until it was hard to find the light again. The intel SEALs received was often suspect. A farmer might finger his neighbor over an old grudge. A corrupt official might turn in someone to whom he owed money. Fishing boats the SEALs ambushed because someone said they were used by Viet Cong couriers often turned out to be nothing but fishing boats. Purported Viet Cong bases burned to the ground were sometimes just poor collections of huts inhabited by simple peasants.
Not all SEALs crossed into such dark territory. Likely not even most. But in Vietnam the freedom SEALs had to be creative enabled pirates fixated on killing. Mike Beanan, a twenty-year-old new guy in the Mekong Delta during the height of the fighting, found himself assigned to a platoon full of pirates. In an account he published under an assumed name after he came home, he described how the whole squad descended into savagery. The job mutated from identifying and killing Viet Cong operatives to tasks like sneaking into a village at night to assassinate a village chief and making it look like the Viet Cong had done it. When intel told them to hit Viet Cong tax collectors, they would, according to Beanan, “rob them of all the money and, of course, kill them. And then report that all the money was destroyed in the fire fight.” Then they’d use the money to party.
The SEALs carried machine guns and assault rifles, but the baddest, meanest, truest way to kill people was still the original frogman’s weapon, the knife. It was silent; it was pure. It put minimal distance between the hunter and the act of killing, and for some pirates in the Mekong it became an almost ceremonial execution tool. “It’s called ‘getting wet,’ cutting somebody’s throat with your knife so the blood would go all over you so you…It was a ritual,” Beanan recalled. He said his platoon leaders told him to do it to some villagers. He refused but said many others did not.
Often pirates would cut off an ear or other part of the body as a trophy. They would then smear their signature green face paint on the body and leave it as a calling card. “It was a business, and the business was terrorism,” Beanan said. The techniques were designed to have the maximum impact on the villagers, he said. “Finding a loved one with a green face and stabbed—in the middle of the road—was incredible terror.”
When SEALs snatched a sleeping target from a village, they would sometimes booby-trap the door of a hut with a grenade set to go off on the next person who came out. “And these are like families, little kids and stuff,” Beanan recalled. “It was something you just didn’t think about. You just did it.”
The SEALs soon earned a reputation among conventional troops as savages. An Army general in Vietnam told Hawkins to clear his SEALs out of his area of operations, adding, “You SEALs are assassins. I don’t want you here.”
Often the shift toward terror tactics was done with the knowledge and sometimes at the direction of the officers in charge. Richard Marcinko, a young lieutenant who commanded a SEAL platoon in the Delta, went by the name “Demo Dick” and called his men “Marcinko’s Merry Band of Murdering Marauders.” Village by village, his team destroyed rice supplies, blew up fishing boats, and burned houses. Demo Dick liked to booby-trap the bodies of those his men had killed before they moved on from a village. “It made me feel good to hear an explosion after we’d left the area,” he later wrote in his memoir, Rogue Warrior. As time went on, Demo Dick and his men began to not just dress like the guerrillas that they were fighting, “we began to think like guerrillas, getting spookier and spookier and dirtier and dirtier.” Demo Dick’s superior officers were largely on the other side of the Pacific, and he reveled in the freedom to be creative. “There’s something to be said about the purity of a small war,” he said. “For the SEALs it was instant gratification. You would write up a patrol order, go out there, and shoot the bastard. Either you’d win, or you’d lose. It was black and white, no gray. And that’s music, that’s the epitome of life for a warrior.”
Except it wasn’t black and white. There was gray. Lots and lots of it. Small groups of heavily armed Americans who didn’t speak the language and didn’t understand the culture suddenly had to decide who in Vietnam was a friend and who was an enemy. Enemy often became the default. Civilian casualties were considered part of the equation.
Unsuspecting villagers could be silenced with a knife or hush puppy so a mission could go forward. In 1969 Bob Kerrey was a twenty-five-year-old lieutenant leading a squad of SEALs in Vietnam. One night they crept into a remote delta village to do a “take out” on a Viet Cong target. On the edge of a village they encountered an old man and woman sleeping in a hut with three children. Afraid that they might sound the alarm, the SEALs dispatched all five with their frogman knives. Down the path, the SEALs encountered another group of about a dozen women and children. The element of surprise now lost, they killed the villagers with machine guns.
Then, with the lieutenant watching, the unit covered up what they had done, reporting to commanders back at their base that twenty-one Viet Cong had been killed in action. Kerrey later became a United States senator.
Captives the SEALs brought in were routinely tortured by CIA and South Vietnamese authorities with electric shocks or beatings and often summarily executed. Some were interrogated aboard helicopters, then thrown overboard. During a 1971 congressional hearing after the Phoenix Program was shut down, the director of the CIA admitted that the program had killed 20,587 suspects. At the same hearing, an Army intelligence analyst who had witnessed torture and executions called Phoenix Program an “indiscriminate murder program.”
With the hearings creating bad press at home, the Navy put all SEALs in Vietnam in time-out in 1971 and forced them to take a written test on the rules of engagement. Most of the SEALs soon left the country. “Some members of the commando teams in the field have become afraid that their activities might bring down on them the kind of prosecution that convicted First Lieutenant William L. Calley Jr. in the massacre of civilians in My Lai,” a New York Times reporter who visited the region that year reported, referring to Army soldiers’ infamous slaughter of hundreds of unarmed villagers. On the wall in the Mekong bar the commandos frequented, the reporter noted, was a sign that read, “People who kill for money are professionals. People who kill for fun are sadists. People who kill for money and fun are SEALs.”
The guys who didn’t have a taste for blood tended to get out after one enlistment. The guys who did not only stayed, they got promoted. Soon many of the pirates were the men in charge, training the next generation. The Mekong jungle practice of silently killing unsuspecting targets became rooted in training, where one student going through in the 1980s noted that “the use of a knife, garrote, and sentry stalking are taught by men who have done it for real.”
Many pirates who came home from Vietnam had even less use for Navy discipline and formality than the frogmen they had evolved from. One of them was Demo Dick. The world of the SEALs, he said, “was rough-and-tumble macho, full of fuck-you-very-much tough talk and I Am the Baddest Motherfucker on the Block attitude…T-shirts and shorts were the uniform of the day, and if your hair wasn’t quite perfectly combed, well, tough titty, dickhead.”
Vietnam created a divide in the SEALs. There were men, sometimes derisively called “boy scouts,” who saw law and order as vital both to the mission and to the brotherhood’s soul. And there were pirates who saw that stance as hopelessly naïve and against the very reason the SEALs were created. To them that law-and-order stuff was a useful beard for visiting dignitaries but not how things really worked. The purpose of the SEALs was to do the nation’s covert dirty work. Commando groups like theirs were created specifically to go beyond what was officially sanctioned—and do it quietly and deniably. The Teams weren’t there to look good, they were there to hit hard. And they had to be packed with pipe-hitting pirates willing to do the work. The pirates didn’t see themselves as parasites in the SEAL Teams, they saw themselves as the true SEAL Teams, the real brotherhood. Everything else was just window dressing.
The two views of the brotherhood clashed repeatedly. Early in his career, William McRaven, who eventually rose to the rank of admiral in command of all SEALs, was fired from a platoon commander job by Demo Dick for being too much of a rule follower. “He was a bright guy, but he didn’t like my rude and crude way,” Marcinko later said. “If I was a loose cannon, he was too rigid. He took the special out of special warfare.” Pirates and boy scouts never agreed to coexist, but neither side ever managed to get full control of the Teams either. The Navy repeatedly tried to put the boy scouts back in control, but the autonomy and freedom built into the foundation of the Teams always left enough crevices for pirates to survive and breed.
In pirate culture, killing was the purpose of the SEALs and its truest expression. That culture gradually influenced the entire Teams. The SEALs were a brotherhood of elite warriors, and lethal force was their craft. They took a certain pride in the art of doing it up close. In the hypercompetitive SEAL hierarchy, experience was everything. A guy who had been to combat had more cred than a guy who had not. A guy who had killed in combat ranked even higher. And the method mattered. Getting a kill from a distance with a rifle was one thing. Shooting a man point-blank after kicking in a door was another. And killing someone with the frogman’s original tool, the knife—having the skill and the guts to stab a guy at arm’s length, close enough to hear his breath and watch the life drain from his eyes—in some circles that was seen as the ultimate. The SEALs’ arsenal evolved to include killer drones and Javelin missiles, but the reverence for the knife never went away.
In 1986 a team of Navy SEALs emerged silently out of the dark Mediterranean Sea and crept onto a beach in Libya. They wore no patches and carried Soviet bloc weapons to hide their identity. Once on the beach they mapped out the Libyan defenses in case the United States needed to invade, then blew up communications lines and other targets to cause calculated chaos. On their way out, they strategically dropped a few butts from Israeli and Syrian cigarette brands before silently disappearing back into the blackness of the sea. It was a textbook clandestine SEAL mission, a stealth strike designed to confuse and destabilize the Libyan dictatorship. Details of the raid have never been publicly disclosed by the Navy. The operators who completed the mission are still unknown.
That is the identity that the SEALs have always wanted to project to the world: elite, nameless professionals, part James Bond, part Aquaman, able to strike with such stealth and precision that they are long gone before anyone knows they were there. In reality, though, the pirate culture, fueled by aggressive overconfidence, ego, and a thirst for destruction, repeatedly led to fiascoes.
After Vietnam, Demo Dick Marcinko was put in charge of all SEALs on the East Coast. Then he was given a new mission that would shape the SEAL culture for generations: create a super-secret counterterrorism squad that could hit anywhere in the world. At the time there were only two SEAL Teams, one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. In a feint meant to confuse potential enemies, he called the new unit SEAL Team 6.
Demo Dick packed 6 with his friends from Vietnam. Two of his four squadrons created unit patches that looked a lot like a pirate flag. To fill out the ranks he took a creative approach, rejecting top candidates in favor of middle-of-the-pack “shitbirds” who he figured would work harder and have a knack for unconventional thinking. In his memoir, he said he wanted “dirtbags.” “Dirtbags with union skills—truck drivers, crane operators, bricklayers, electricians, longshoremen. But I wasn’t looking for just any dirtbags. I wanted motivated dirtbags.” He let his men wear earrings and grow long hair and bushy beards. Many looked more like members of a biker gang than a crack military unit. In 1980 he gathered his new team at a base auditorium near Virginia Beach and got up on stage in front of a huge American flag to give the assembled band of pirates, marauders, and dirtbags a welcoming address. “You know what we are here to do—counterterrorism. And what does counterterrorism mean? It means that we will fucking do it to them before they fucking do it to us.” The men roared in approval.
“It’s about goddamn time, right?” Demo Dick said, pacing the floor. “For SEAL Team 6, I am fucking lifting the rules.”
The only rule he insisted on was loyalty, and not to the Navy or the nation or the Constitution. “Your loyalty must be first and foremost to your partner, your squad, your platoon, and the Team,” he told them. “I am the law, gentlemen—and my law is simple. There will be unit fucking integrity.” He paused and took on the accent of a mobster. “This command…will be like a friggin’ Mafia,” he said. “I…am the Capo di tutti capi, the Padrone. I make the offers nobody refuses. And I…I take care of everybody. What’s more, we’re a family. And you never talk family business outside the family.” It didn’t take long for the ideas of loyalty in Team 6 to spread through the SEALs.
The SEALs emerged from Vietnam as good guys. They were almost unknown to the public, so they carried none of the culture baggage of a despised war. In post-Vietnam pop culture of the 1980s, soldiers were often portrayed as damaged or even criminal: village burners and baby killers. Not the SEALs. The only pop culture SEAL to emerge after the war was Thomas Magnum from Magnum, P.I.—a cool private investigator who wore aloha shirts and drove a Ferrari. The darker internal struggle was effectively kept hidden.
Throughout the 1980s many in the SEALs quietly embraced Demo Dick’s pirate philosophy, often believing so much in their own badass swagger that they spent little time on designing strategy, instead relying on needlessly complex frontal assaults. The product was one failed mission after another and a steady stream of body bags.
The first big test for the SEALs after Vietnam was the U.S. invasion of Grenada in October 1983. The tiny Caribbean nation had only a small army and almost no heavy weapons, but the Reagan administration feared it could become a springboard to spread communism throughout Latin America, so the United States invaded with nearly eight thousand troops. The SEALs were supposed to lead the charge by seizing the airport. Instead of just landing in helicopters on the runway, eight Team 6 commandos would parachute into the ocean with two speedboats, then make an amphibious landing. But delays caused the daytime jump to instead happen at night—and in a storm. The SEALs splashed down in seven-foot waves far from their boats. Four of them drowned and were never seen again. The mission was aborted.
It was the first of several tasks given to the SEALs in Grenada. All of them went hopelessly wrong. A stealth plan to rescue Grenada’s British-appointed governor-general, who was under house arrest, was undone by a botched helicopter rappel that came under fire from Grenadian troops. The helicopters pulled out after inserting only half the team, taking heavy weapons and radios with them. Surrounded, nearly all of the SEALs were soon wounded. With no radios, they were reduced to using a calling card to phone the United States and relay instructions for air strikes from gunships circling above. Eventually a company of U.S. Marines arrived to rescue them. The whole mission was supposed to take forty-five minutes. Instead it lasted twenty-seven hours.
Nineteen Americans were killed in action during the weeklong invasion. Though SEALs made up far less than one percent of the forces involved, they were twenty percent of the casualties. In the aftermath the SEALs admitted they had been underprepared and had taken needlessly complicated approaches to missions better suited for conventional troops. It was an embarrassment and a tragedy for the men who were lost. But in a culture that prized loyalty and aggression over transparency and caution, any lessons learned were quickly shelved.
During the 1989 invasion of Panama, the SEALs once again went after a series of high-value targets and once again charged into disasters. One mission was to cut off the escape of Panamanian dictator General Manuel Noriega by blowing up his Learjet. Forty-eight SEALs paddled silently up to an airport on the coast of Panama City and approached the general’s hangar across an open runway with no cover. Guarding the hangar were more than a hundred Panamanian soldiers with machine guns who easily spotted the SEALs and started mowing them down. Within minutes seven SEALs were wounded and four were dead. The SEALs eventually drove the Panamanians back, captured the hangar, and destroyed the jet, but not before they had once again accounted for nearly twenty percent of the total casualties of the entire invasion.
Part of the problem was the frogman culture itself. The UDT men of World War II were picked in part because they had the courage to do something so insanely dangerous and difficult that no one else wanted to do it. They had the freedom in the Navy to create their own rules and culture, including a culture of working around the rules. It gave them the room to do great things, but it also gave them leeway, if they wanted, to be thoroughly mediocre. The belief that loyalty trumped all else built a hierarchy based on nepotism rather than merit. Demo Dick built what one SEAL later called a “cult of personality” around himself, drove a Mercedes bought with government money, and often held planning meetings in the back booth of a local bar. The belief that rules and regulations were an obstacle led to a lack of discipline and, in some cases, a poorly trained force.
The frogmen at their foundation also had a culture of daring. They had long been the ones who did jobs no one else was willing to do. Fear was one of the few things they had no tolerance for. That foundation resulted in groups of SEALs repeatedly concocting missions with pointless levels of risk because no one wanted to speak up and be labeled a coward.
Demo Dick Marcinko ended up getting convicted of a kickback scheme to help a buddy sell grenades to the Navy and was sent to prison in 1990, a short time after he retired. Men like Bill McRaven, whom Demo Dick had fired, moved up in the command structure and made strides to professionalize the force. Demo Dick’s name was mentioned less and less. The SEALs became more formal and more disciplined, and in the years since have been responsible for countless military successes, many of which are still classified. The pirate culture ebbed, but its disdain for rules, its Mafia-like focus on loyalty, and its fascination with killing up close proved hard to eradicate, especially after 2001, when platoons of SEALs were sent to Iraq and Afghanistan to hunt terrorists.
In many ways, the war on terror was Vietnam all over again. SEALs were dropped into foreign countries with unfamiliar cultures where they didn’t speak the language. They had to tell enemies from allies in a fight with no uniforms. Their commanding officers were often far away. They grew bushy beards and went around in civilian ball caps, advertising to other troops that they were too elite for regular military standards.
Just like in Vietnam, a force with a poor understanding of language or culture too often measured success in terms of kill counts. And just like in Vietnam, the SEALs got mixed up with CIA agents who didn’t mind torture. A few months into the Iraq war, SEALs from Team 7 were working with CIA agents at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, where, according to later court filings, they punched and kicked detainees, broke fingers, twisted testicles, and gouged eyes. One detainee was found dead in a prison shower. Photos emerged of his body packed in ice.
Faced with a vicious insurgency, just as in Vietnam, some SEALs decided the way to win was to fight even dirtier than the enemy. If the game was terror, they were determined to play to win. In 2006, a new commander took over one of SEAL Team 6’s squadrons. In an homage to the Native American warrior on their unit patch, he presented each SEAL with a custom-made ceremonial combat tomahawk and urged them all while they were in Iraq to “bloody the hatchet.” Several men started carrying their hatchets on operations and before long some guys were using them to kill enemies or hack their dead bodies.
As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan got dirtier, SEALs got pulled into the muck. Operators began shooting enemy fighters through the top of the head in a way that split the skull open. They called it “canoeing” because the shot split the head wide open like a canoe. They left the bodies behind like a calling card, a way to telegraph terror to the enemy and the local population, just like the frogmen in Vietnam who had painted their victims’ faces green.
Demo Dick was gone, but the idea of fierce loyalty to teammates remained. SEALs covered up for one another or stayed silent. In a decade of high-tempo operating, the SEALs were faced with uncounted investigations for misconduct, but less than a half dozen ended in criminal charges. At those trials, SEAL witnesses either refused to testify or testified that nothing had happened. In the longest period of war in the nation’s history, when SEALs played an outsized role in combat missions, none were convicted of beatings or killings in war zones.
A new version of the pirate culture seemed to spring up organically in platoons all over the Teams. In Ramadi in 2006, American Sniper Chris Kyle and his platoon in SEAL Team 3 started spray-painting their trucks, body armor, and helmets with the scowling black skull emblem of a heavily armed comic-book antihero called the Punisher. The Punisher was a gun-toting vigilante who made his debut in 1974 and soon became a kind of Dirty Harry embodiment of white suburban outrage, fighting crime with massive handguns and none of the hindrances of the rule of law. Early promotional posters read, “If you’re guilty, you’re dead.” He was the perfect symbol for a nation hungry for payback after September 11.
The Punisher emblem embodied the belief that rule of law was a hindrance to the true pursuit of justice and that guys with guns on the ground were far better equipped to decide who was guilty than officers in the rear. “We wanted people to know, We’re here and we want to fuck with you,” Kyle wrote in his memoir. Spray-painting Punisher skulls on all of the equipment was his platoon’s version of psyops, he wrote. “You see us? We’re the people kicking your ass. Fear us. Because we will kill you, motherfucker.”
Like Eddie, Kyle claimed to have more sniper kills than any SEAL in history. But by his own telling, he was repeatedly investigated for needless deaths of civilians, and members of his own platoon started to openly question his shots. In his memoir he described killing two insurgents riding on a scooter together in Ramadi with a single bullet. Kyle said he saw the pair plant an IED before he pulled the trigger. But the Army investigated and found no IED. A short time later, Kyle shot a man walking on a busy street in broad daylight, claiming he had a gun. The man’s wife complained to authorities that he had been walking unarmed to a mosque. The Army again investigated and had enough doubts that it shut Kyle’s whole platoon down for the rest of the deployment. SEALs in Kyle’s platoon grew so suspicious of his shots, that while some SEALs called him “the Legend,” others in his platoon called him “the Myth.”
At the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, while platoons were quietly sharing photos of the enemies they’d “canoed” and Kyle was selling books celebrating all his kills, Eddie was coming up through the Teams, learning the ropes from older frogmen who carried knives and wore pirate patches on their uniforms. Pieces of the pirate worldview forged in Vietnam and Afghanistan lay scattered all over the Teams by the time Eddie arrived at BUD/S. An operator who wanted to embrace the pirate ethos had only to pick the pieces up.