True Anon Truth Feed - Episode 163: JSUC
Aired: 2021-06-04
Duration: 01:31:35


=== Elite Team's Wild Mission (12:50) ===

[00:00:01]  An elite team of crack commandos based out of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, have been tasked on a specific dangerous mission by command.
[00:00:13]  They need to get $17 worth of crack that they will smoke through a rose they've purchased from Wild Bill's smoke shop on 3rd Street in Durham.
[00:00:24]  They will smoke this in the alleyway behind Clitoris Bar.
[00:00:29]  Awful.
[00:00:30]  What are you doing?
[00:00:31]  Afterwards, they will go home and while coming down on the crack, yell at their wife and threaten their families.
[00:00:39]  This group of men in the Navy SEALs.
[00:01:07]  Liz, if you had a rank, what would it be?
[00:01:10]  Elite tier one, alpha, triple A, excellent, perfecto, obviously.
[00:01:16]  I was, you're not going to do Lieutenant Liz.
[00:01:19]  No, I'm telling you, I'm in the, I'm, you know, I'm Q-tier, baby.
[00:01:24]  I'm like way up at the top.
[00:01:25]  Fuck.
[00:01:26]  All right.
[00:01:26]  Well, the only thing higher than that's president, so I guess I have to be president.
[00:01:30]  Nope.
[00:01:30]  Special command.
[00:01:31]  The president is just a figurehead.
[00:01:33]  Yeah.
[00:01:34]  Everyone knows that.
[00:01:34]  Everyone loves a figurehead.
[00:01:36]  So actually they would, the popular opinion would be.
[00:01:38]  You can absolutely be the figurehead.
[00:01:40]  That's fine.
[00:01:40]  I think that's good for you.
[00:01:42]  Well, I accept.
[00:01:43]  And as president, even though I'm just a figurehead, I still have this power.
[00:01:46]  You're fired.
[00:01:46]  Actually, you're demoted.
[00:01:47]  I'm not even firing you.
[00:01:48]  I'm disgracing you.
[00:01:49]  You are demoted to lieutenant.
[00:01:50]  That's so mean.
[00:01:52]  Well, you call me a figurehead, even though I was elected by the American people.
[00:01:56]  I, oh my God, you're so mean to me.
[00:01:58]  Well, we're supposed to be equals.
[00:02:00]  No, I'm the president.
[00:02:02]  Oh, my God.
[00:02:03]  Hello, everyone.
[00:02:04]  Welcome.
[00:02:04]  Hi.
[00:02:05]  This is Truanon.
[00:02:07]  My name is President Brace.
[00:02:10]  That's not his name.
[00:02:11]  My name is Liz.
[00:02:12]  We are, of course, joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[00:02:15]  Private third class.
[00:02:17]  No disrespect.
[00:02:18]  Private second class.
[00:02:20]  And we have a hell of an episode for you today.
[00:02:23]  Liz, so, all right.
[00:02:25]  Here's a little, here's the thing.
[00:02:27]  Usually in the podcast back and forth, one person talks, the other person talks.
[00:02:32]  You get into the flow of it.
[00:02:33]  Liz, what they did, what they, Liz, they call that a betrayal in the business.
[00:02:39]  Yeah, I dropped the ball.
[00:02:40]  You know what?
[00:02:40]  I didn't yes and.
[00:02:41]  She hit me with a betrayal.
[00:02:43]  I hit you with betrayal.
[00:02:44]  I said no.
[00:02:45]  I said no and no thank you.
[00:02:47]  I shut you down.
[00:02:48]  And you know what?
[00:02:49]  As Chomsky has taught us, that is not the rule of improv.
[00:02:53]  I fucking, dude, I fucking spent seven years in a fucking Masters of Improv fucking program in fucking Juilliard just to have some goddamn amateur come in here and make me.
[00:03:04]  I love, wait, okay, wait, that's, this is very cute, bit, and ha, ha, ha.
[00:03:08]  But I'm sorry, it's very funny the idea that Juilliard has like an improv.
[00:03:12]  What's Juilliard?
[00:03:14]  It's like the most prestigious arts and theater program that the idea is.
[00:03:19]  It is arts and theater?
[00:03:20]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:03:22]  And music is a huge music college, but and dance and, you know, whatever.
[00:03:27]  But I don't think that it is like a prestigious improv.
[00:03:30]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:03:31]  Well, then, yeah, I did it online.
[00:03:32]  That's a good idea.
[00:03:34]  Yeah.
[00:03:35]  Doing online improv classes.
[00:03:37]  Dude, that's so great for a lot of people, I'm sure.
[00:03:41]  Hello, everyone.
[00:03:42]  If you are doing online improv classes at this moment, please never contact this podcast.
[00:03:46]  It's over.
[00:03:47]  You don't need to do it.
[00:03:48]  Hi, we have a great episode coming up for you idiots.
[00:03:55]  I think so.
[00:03:55]  I had a lot of fun with this.
[00:03:57]  You know, I have to say, people would not think this because they have total weird sexist notions and are all secret misogynists.
[00:04:03]  That's right.
[00:04:04]  I'm looking at you.
[00:04:05]  But I love talking about the military.
[00:04:08]  Yeah, Liz was actually the center of some controversy.
[00:04:11]  She was the first female Navy SEAL.
[00:04:14]  Yeah.
[00:04:15]  Wait, ladies can't be SEALs, right?
[00:04:16]  Or can they?
[00:04:17]  Or did they just open that up?
[00:04:18]  No, I mean, there's, who gives a fuck?
[00:04:21]  Sometimes they talk about it.
[00:04:23]  No, I can't.
[00:04:24]  I know.
[00:04:25]  Chicks can't lift logs good.
[00:04:29]  That's why there's no lady loggers.
[00:04:31]  There are lady loggers, actually.
[00:04:33]  It's like on ESPN 3 at like 11 o'clock on a Tuesday in like September.
[00:04:38]  It's very weird.
[00:04:39]  Well, we have one of the premier lady logging champions with us to discuss the murders at Fort Bragg.
[00:04:47]  I'm just kidding.
[00:04:47]  We have journalists Seth Harp and Young Chonsky.
[00:04:51]  Actually, you know what?
[00:04:52]  Let's do thematic here.
[00:04:53]  Hit me with some harpsichord and bring us in the interview.
[00:04:57]  You don't have to hit us with some harpsichord there.
[00:05:03]  In a deserted square in Mogadishu, the smoldering wreck of a helicopter emits black smoke into the sky.
[00:05:12]  Liz and I repel from another helicopter that is in the air that did not get shot down.
[00:05:17]  I repel better than Liz, as I'm more used to.
[00:05:20]  I'm just, I'm sorry, but I'm just, my body is, I've shaved my body like a swimmer in order to do it.
[00:05:25]  A little lighter and a little more nimble.
[00:05:28]  I know, but now I'm totally bald, so I would go down the rope way easier.
[00:05:32]  I don't think that's weird to say.
[00:05:34]  Anyways, in the wreck, as Liz unloads with an RPK into just randomly firing into windows, into crowds, some at the ground, back at the helicopter, we uncover.
[00:05:50]  I'm sorry.
[00:05:51]  It was a bad, bad advice of me.
[00:05:54]  We uncover Seth Harp, investigative reporter from Rolling Stone.
[00:05:58]  So glad to have you with us.
[00:06:00]  Seth, an old buddy of mine, is a, like I said, investigative reporter for Rolling Stone on armed conflicts and organized crime.
[00:06:09]  And he is here to talk with us about a sort of chilling series of events, but really about kind of, I guess, a larger narrative of when the secret wars kind of come home.
[00:06:24]  And Seth, it is a pleasure to have you with us at last.
[00:06:27]  Thanks, Bruce.
[00:06:28]  Good to see you again.
[00:06:30]  Hi, Liz.
[00:06:31]  Hi.
[00:06:31]  Thanks so much for coming on.
[00:06:33]  Thank y'all for having me.
[00:06:34]  I got to say this piece in Rolling Stone, the Fort Bragg murders, is a real blockbuster.
[00:06:41]  I know a lot of people and a lot of our listeners have been asking us to cover what was a story that kind of came and went in the news.
[00:06:49]  It was weird.
[00:06:50]  I remember it kind of like popping up in the feed a little bit here and there.
[00:06:56]  Some, you know, kind of reports of people being like, huh, that's very weird.
[00:07:00]  What's going on here?
[00:07:00]  And then just kind of like, poof, like anything having to do with military members gone bad, it just kind of like disappeared from the scene.
[00:07:11]  But your piece really, I mean, it really tries to dive in and figure out what the hell was going on here.
[00:07:19]  Can you maybe just walk us through how you came upon this story and why you decided to investigate?
[00:07:29]  Sure.
[00:07:30]  I read a news report of a double homicide that took place in North Carolina on December 2nd, 2020.
[00:07:38]  So really not that long ago.
[00:07:40]  There was a deer hunter in the woods right outside Fort Bragg.
[00:07:44]  Actually, it was an area that the Army uses as a parachute drop zone.
[00:07:48]  And there were two guys laying dead around a truck.
[00:07:51]  And one of them was named Timothy Dumas.
[00:07:53]  And we might want to talk about him later.
[00:07:55]  But I would say the main character of the story was a guy named Billy Levine.
[00:08:00]  Because immediately some interesting facts started to come out about this person who was a 37-year-old U.S. Army soldier.
[00:08:08]  The first was that he was a member of Delta Force.
[00:08:13]  And, you know, you were saying earlier that the news kind of comes and goes.
[00:08:16]  There are often news stories of bad behavior by special operators, Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, what have you.
[00:08:23]  But Delta Force is really a cut above all of those organizations.
[00:08:27]  In fact, it's probably the most selective unit in the whole Department of Defense.
[00:08:32]  There's really only about 300 Delta Force operators.
[00:08:35]  So Billy Levine was part of a select group of people, to say the least.
[00:08:41]  So the fact that he was just laying dead as a result of a firefight that nobody could explain by itself raised a lot of questions, given the extremely secret, covert, sensitive, high-profile nature of the missions that Delta Force carries out.
[00:08:58]  The most recent one, most recent high-profile one being the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi in Syria in 2019.
[00:09:06]  That's the kind of operations that Delta Force does.
[00:09:10]  The second thing that emerged about Levine was that he was under investigation for trafficking drugs.
[00:09:19]  So was the other guy, Timothy Dumas, an anonymous army official leaked to CBS the day after the bodies were found.
[00:09:25]  That both of these guys were under investigation for not just for trafficking drugs, but for trafficking drugs on Fort Bragg.
[00:09:31]  The last piece, I think, came from Stars and Stripes.
[00:09:35]  So that's interesting.
[00:09:36]  That's really interesting.
[00:09:39]  That doesn't sound like something that should be happening.
[00:09:43]  Well, you know, there have been, there's cases every year of Navy SEALs or Green Berets that get caught trafficking drugs.
[00:09:48]  But again, the fact that Levine was a member of a tier one special mission unit, to use the sort of technical language, that I had never seen before.
[00:09:59]  So there's a rich, I would say a spotty but rich history of drug trafficking in the special forces.
[00:10:06]  The dots never like fully connect, but it pops to the surface every now and then.
[00:10:10]  And this seemed to be the case of it happening at the very tippy top of the Pentagon bureaucracy.
[00:10:20]  And the next thing and third thing that came out about Levine that made the story very interesting was the fact that he had been arrested numerous times in the past around in the little towns around Fort Bragg and had been let off every time.
[00:10:38]  And in fact, in March of 2018, he had killed a guy in Fayetteville and wasn't even arrested for it.
[00:10:47]  That detail blew my fucking mind because he didn't just kill a guy.
[00:10:52]  He killed another, first of all, his best friend.
[00:10:56]  And another, he was a Delta.
[00:10:57]  The other guy was a Delta guy, right?
[00:10:59]  No, the other guy was tier two.
[00:11:01]  He was special forces.
[00:11:02]  He was like what they call white special forces.
[00:11:04]  He was just a regular Green Beret.
[00:11:06]  But they had come up through the Green Berets together.
[00:11:09]  Levine had made the cut for Delta Force.
[00:11:11]  The other guy who was a bit younger, Mark Leschaker, as you said, it was his best friend.
[00:11:15]  And in fact, they had just gotten back from Disneyland.
[00:11:18]  Or I forget, what's the one in Florida?
[00:11:19]  Is it?
[00:11:20]  Disney World?
[00:11:20]  Disney World Forum.
[00:11:22]  I said that real quick.
[00:11:23]  They stared into the heart of the Epcot Center and it drove them insane.
[00:11:29]  When I was talking about drugs a moment ago, I forgot to mention that Levine himself was a heavy drug user.
[00:11:34]  I found from talking to people who knew him, from people who partied with him, people who used drugs with him, told me that he was completely strung out in particular on cocaine, but he was also into MDMA, took a lot of pills, drank very heavily, was extremely traumatized for 14 deployments.
[00:11:52]  And so he was just a guy that was kind of falling apart, unraveling.
[00:11:57]  And it was just, like I said, everyone that I spoke to described him as completely strung out.
[00:12:04]  So, yeah, the Mark Leschiger killing in March of 2018, no one knows why it happened.
[00:12:11]  There's not the least, you know, there's not even a theory of why he would have done this, but they had just gotten back from Disney World and they were both taking a lot of drugs.
[00:12:20]  Mark Leschiger, his mom and sister told me that he also struggled a lot with substance abuse with those same substances I mentioned before as Levine was, and had also been, had TBI from an IED in Tajikistan of all places.
[00:12:35]  I'll put a pen in that if you want to talk about why a guy like Mark Leschiger was there or why he would have been blown up by a bomb there in 2017.
[00:12:44]  But in any event, the killing definitely happened.
[00:12:47]  It was witnessed by both of the men had young daughters, age five and six.

=== Living Room Tragedy (04:15) ===

[00:12:51]  Tragically, they were right there in the living room of like the suburban tract home in Fayetteville.
[00:12:58]  And it happened in his living room.
[00:13:00]  And the little girls, you know, I've heard their account of it from her mom and from her grandma.
[00:13:07]  And, you know, it leaves no doubt that Levine pulled the trigger.
[00:13:13]  But, you know, the girl at her age is not really in a position to explain why it had happened.
[00:13:18]  She just said, you know, Uncle Billy was acting weird.
[00:13:21]  You know, daddy was angry, that kind of thing.
[00:13:25]  But in any event, Levine called the police on himself.
[00:13:28]  They arrived and he was taken down to the Fayetteville sheriff's headquarters in downtown Fayetteville, excuse me, the Cumberland County Sheriff's headquarters of downtown Fayetteville.
[00:13:40]  And like I said, not placed under arrest, not read his Miranda rights, not booked, not even given a drug test, even though he's whacked out of his head on God knows what.
[00:13:50]  They had been partying for days.
[00:13:53]  And a little later that night, three trucks pulled up to the police station, the sheriff's department, filled with off-duty Delta Force operators, and he was just released back into their custody.
[00:14:06]  After that, just six months after that, he was arrested for maintaining a dwelling place to manufacture controlled substances, a ton of weapons charges.
[00:14:16]  Wait, I'm sorry, maintaining a dwelling place to manufacture controlled substances.
[00:14:20]  So in my head, that brings to mind like a meth lab.
[00:14:25]  I mean, there's only so many controlled substances you can actually manufacture at home, right?
[00:14:29]  I'm pretty sure this guy was probably not refining.
[00:14:31]  Quailudes.
[00:14:31]  But yeah, maybe he was making bootleg qualudes, but in all likelihood, I mean, either making crack or, you know, I'm just saying, I think of the ones that are easy to synthesize, maybe MDMA, maybe pill, like pressing pills or something like that.
[00:14:44]  I mean, was that.
[00:14:46]  No clue.
[00:14:47]  I mean, I know he was arrested in possession of, because there's no details about this because the charges were immediately dropped.
[00:14:52]  Of course, yeah.
[00:14:53]  Yeah.
[00:14:54]  But the arrest report itself is the only thing we have, and it's actually pretty informative just due to the numerosity of the charges against him.
[00:15:00]  Like you said, one was manufacturing a controlled substance.
[00:15:04]  What that was, who knows?
[00:15:05]  The fact that's in North Carolina kind of points to meth.
[00:15:09]  But on the other hand, he was arrested in possession of Coke and crack and a scale and some other things, a crackpipe.
[00:15:16]  And again, by all accounts, like Coke was his thing.
[00:15:19]  I mean, having smoked crack a few times myself, like trying to do that while also probably doing a job like being in Delta Force, you know, I mean, that's astounding to me.
[00:15:31]  It is not good.
[00:15:33]  It is not good for your body whatsoever.
[00:15:36]  Yeah.
[00:15:37]  Well, I mean, we can probably, we'll probably get into this, but I think that there's a relationship there, obviously, right?
[00:15:43]  Where one becomes a requirement of the other.
[00:15:46]  Totally.
[00:15:47]  And an interesting twist on this story that I learned thanks to Laura Leschaker and Nicole Rick, who are relatives of Mark Leschaker, sister and our SUNY wife and sister, respectively.
[00:15:59]  And they had a lot of insight into Billy Levine's personality because apparently he wasn't sort of like just like meathead, you know, JSOC murder weirdo that you would commonly associate, I suppose, with an organization like Delta Force, I suppose, depending upon your degree of cynicism.
[00:16:17]  But he, you know, he was not like that, according to them.
[00:16:23]  He was a more thoughtful guy.
[00:16:25]  He never went to college.
[00:16:26]  He's from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, kind of grew up in a rural area, according to his, his father talked to me quite a bit.
[00:16:32]  His father was a real working class guy.
[00:16:35]  I think he was a tire salesman and a machinist.
[00:16:38]  And the Upper Peninsula in Michigan, I've never been, but I hear it's real rural.
[00:16:41]  I hear it's real country.
[00:16:43]  So that's the kind of guy that he was.
[00:16:45]  No, I didn't really get the sense that he joined for any sort of political reason.
[00:16:49]  He joined before 9-11, just before February 2001.
[00:16:54]  And it was just to get money for a dirt bike and LASIK eye surgery, according to his father.
[00:16:59]  I don't know if they still give free LASIK eye surgery to anyone who joins the military, but that was a thing they did back in the day.
[00:17:05]  And so that's why he joined.

=== Army Deaths Mystery (15:22) ===

[00:17:06]  And apparently the 14 deployments he did to virtually every theater the U.S. was engaged in after 9-11 left him really disillusioned with the wars over there, according to these women who, like I said, did a lot of drugs.
[00:17:24]  They freely admitted to doing drugs with him and drinking with him and so forth.
[00:17:28]  and said that during these you know um during these nights that they would spend out he would confess you know things that had happened things that really bothered him killing a child soldier other things that he had seen and he told nicole rick that he didn't think that the u.s should be involved in any of these conflicts so it just kind of complicates his character to a degree because clearly he was spinning out of control um clearly he was traumatized but um there was also kind of this like um at least by sort of Delta IV standards,
[00:17:58]  more of an introverted intellectual side to the guy by all accounts.
[00:18:05]  But leaving that aside, you know, these three things about, these three facts about Billy Levine and the fact that he appeared in the woods dead from a firefight that today, to date, nobody can explain.
[00:18:18]  In particular, the fact that there had to have been a third person there because Levine was found with a much of several gunshot wounds to the chest wrapped in a blanket, like an army blanket.
[00:18:33]  They call a whoopie in the army.
[00:18:34]  Like an actual, because I noticed that detail in the article, an actual, like, do they just call all blankets whoobies or is it like a specific one?
[00:18:42]  No, a whoopy is, I think it's technically, it's called a poncho liner.
[00:18:46]  Yeah.
[00:18:47]  But because it's kind of small and lightweight and warm, you know, soldiers will always have their whoopie with them.
[00:18:55]  It'll be like the first thing you'll grab.
[00:18:56]  Was it like, I mean, that would to me point to maybe, I mean, it also could just be his too, but like, you know, I mean, was it his wubie or was it like brought by someone who shot him?
[00:19:09]  Don't know.
[00:19:10]  To me, it looks so to me, it looks like he's from the details that have been reported and that I was able to learn, to me, it looks like he was killed somewhere else and then brought to that location in the woods because he was dressed in, you know, just this pair of running shorts and wrapped in a blanket and then placed in the back of his own truck.
[00:19:30]  And then the truck was left abandoned in the woods.
[00:19:32]  And then Dumas was found outside of the truck on the ground next to it with a gunshot wound to the temple.
[00:19:38]  So it would seem as though Levine was killed somewhere else and then brought there, maybe by Dumas.
[00:19:44]  And then Dumas himself was killed at that site.
[00:19:47]  But who was the third person who was there?
[00:19:49]  Because someone removed all the firearms.
[00:19:50]  There's no firearms found at the scene and there were no shell casings either.
[00:19:55]  So somebody sanitized the site.
[00:19:58]  Somebody sanitized the scene and cleaned it up and walked away from there.
[00:20:04]  And that's kind of scary because both of these guys, I haven't said anything about Dumas.
[00:20:08]  I could, but both of these guys were extremely dangerous, formidable, like, you know, people to fuck with.
[00:20:16]  Yeah, because Dumas himself wasn't special for, I keep also wanting to that old ad.
[00:20:22]  It's actually pronounced Dumas.
[00:20:26]  But Dumas wasn't special forces, although, like many, many, many good citizens in this country does like to pretend he was.
[00:20:35]  But I mean, some of the crimes that he was accused of and had charges dropped of, I mean, he shot into a family's home and was arrested for it and then just let go, which I'm sorry.
[00:20:46]  If I walk down the street right now and fire off a pistol into my neighbor's house, I have a feeling I'm going to go to jail for a little while.
[00:20:54]  Can you imagine?
[00:20:54]  Yeah.
[00:20:55]  Dumas is an equally fascinating guy and had been arrested many more times than Levine had.
[00:21:04]  How they knew each other is a complete mystery.
[00:21:06]  But Dumas had served in the 7th Special Forces Group, as you mentioned.
[00:21:10]  He wasn't an operator, though.
[00:21:12]  He was support staff.
[00:21:14]  He was a property supply officer, which is the supply sergeant.
[00:21:20]  And he people who knew him, like you said, it was very strange because I wasn't able to speak to any of his family members, but I was able to speak to people who rented houses for him because he was involved in renting houses.
[00:21:34]  He ran a nightclub.
[00:21:38]  I'm not quite sure what he's up to, but his activities kind of look like, well, he'd been arrested numerous times for assaulting women.
[00:21:45]  Plus, he was running this nightclub.
[00:21:47]  I don't know.
[00:21:48]  It would be probably irresponsible journalistically to speculate as to exactly what.
[00:21:53]  Don't worry.
[00:21:53]  I can do it, Seth.
[00:21:54]  Sounds like a Jack Ruby style pimp to me.
[00:21:59]  Just putting the facts that I'm learning from a journalist together here as a humint, amateur humint analyst like Liz and I are sounds like a pimp.
[00:22:13]  Well, so our entire podcast is dedicated to irresponsible speculation.
[00:22:19]  So that's what we're here for.
[00:22:21]  Well, to me, this guy seemed like a nightclub owner and pimp and bully and an all-around, just a bad dude.
[00:22:28]  He had been arrested for assault numerous times.
[00:22:30]  He had been arrested.
[00:22:32]  I mean, just in the last few years, he'd been arrested for smacking a woman with a bag of McDonald's hamburgers in Carthage, North Carolina.
[00:22:40]  Over in Winston-Salem, he had kicked in someone's apartment door and was arrested for impersonating a police officer.
[00:22:47]  He'd been arrested for making terroristic threats, all kinds of alcohol, countless alcohol charges, too many to mention, many theft charges, too many to mention.
[00:22:58]  And like you said, he had been arrested for discharging a firearm into an occupied dwelling place, which apparently is a crime in North Carolina, as it should be, I suppose.
[00:23:07]  I mean, that's like the specific crime that he was charged with, or not charged with, but arrested for, because all of these were dropped.
[00:23:13]  All of them.
[00:23:13]  He's never prosecuted for them.
[00:23:14]  Literally everything you just mentioned.
[00:23:16]  Everything.
[00:23:16]  Like making terroristic threats, kicking down someone's door, pretending to be a cop, shooting into a house.
[00:23:21]  And as you said, more alcohol and theft charges to count.
[00:23:25]  Not a single one he was actually charged with.
[00:23:28]  Not a single one.
[00:23:30]  No.
[00:23:31]  And he almost killed somebody when he shot into that apartment because I went there trying to learn more.
[00:23:37]  And I found some people that appeared to be most likely undocumented immigrants that spoke Spanish.
[00:23:42]  They were all crammed together in this little apartment.
[00:23:44]  It was in a really disadvantaged part of Fayetteville.
[00:23:48]  And they didn't even know what I was talking about at first.
[00:23:51]  And then finally, one of them said, oh, you mean talking about the guy who shot?
[00:23:54]  shot through our wall that night.
[00:23:57]  And they actually had a video of it happening just by pure coincidence.
[00:24:01]  One of the women had been recording a video of her little godson dancing to some music on the TV.
[00:24:07]  And you can clearly see the moment where this like black hole appears, like this little tiny black hole appears in the wall and like this cone of gypsum powder from the sheetrock shoots out.
[00:24:17]  And it missed the boy by about 18 inches, I would estimate.
[00:24:21]  And you look on the outside of the apartment, there's the bullet hole going through there, going through two other walls through a laundry room, and then coming out another apartment across the hall.
[00:24:31]  And I didn't write this in the piece because it was just deemed, well, I don't know why it was cut, but I knocked on the door of the apartment where the shot came from, and a young woman answered the door there.
[00:24:43]  She was very, she seemed to me very afraid.
[00:24:47]  She denied knowing who Timothy Dumas was.
[00:24:50]  And when I told her that he had died or that he was dead, she was visibly shocked and hadn't known that that had happened and then started talking more about how she knew him.
[00:25:01]  And I never really learned exactly what had happened.
[00:25:03]  Her story was inconsistent and it's just not credible.
[00:25:08]  But, you know, she clearly knew the guy.
[00:25:10]  He clearly had been there that day.
[00:25:12]  She was obviously afraid of him.
[00:25:15]  And I don't know why he fired a gun in her apartment through the wall.
[00:25:21]  I have absolutely no idea, but I do know that the police were there, that they had his name, that they knew what type of firearm he used, and that he just walked after that, even though he had very nearly killed a child.
[00:25:52]  So, I mean, you know, this all ends up with these two guys dead in the woods, right?
[00:25:58]  And as you said, unsolved.
[00:26:01]  Something else that's mentioned in your article is, of course, how there's been something like 44 deaths, not just murders, but deaths in total at Fort Bragg, which I believe is 44 times as many deaths as have occurred with U.S. service members in Afghanistan this past year.
[00:26:19]  And none of them have been solved.
[00:26:21]  I mean, some of them have, you know, have pretty obvious conclusions and stuff, but of the murders that have been solved.
[00:26:26]  There's a was a fairly prominent case of a beheading that that blew my mind.
[00:26:33]  I was texting with you about it the other day, but that I got really into looking at that.
[00:26:37]  And that is, there is some spooky shit going on with that.
[00:26:40]  I mean, I don't mean that in the spy way.
[00:26:43]  I mean, like, it gave me just like chills to read about.
[00:26:45]  I mean, this guy, paratrooper, goes into the woods with, with, I think, five or six of his friends, disappears without his phone, his glasses, anything.
[00:26:53]  You know, a guy's almost blind.
[00:26:55]  And then he's, he's decapitated somehow.
[00:26:59]  And it's, I don't know, a suicide.
[00:27:02]  That's the best anyone can come up with on a barren sort of stretch of stretch of land by the ocean.
[00:27:07]  But I mean, that, that one really chilled me.
[00:27:10]  And it's sort of a similar thing.
[00:27:11]  I mean, it's pretty heinous and sort of spectacular crime, or at least spectacular death.
[00:27:16]  I don't know, with no resolution.
[00:27:20]  And one gets the feeling, it's like, well, how hard are they looking into these kind of things?
[00:27:25]  I mean, what impression do you get of that?
[00:27:27]  Yeah, spooky is a great adjective for it.
[00:27:30]  I'm afraid that I really can't cast that much light on the death of Enrique Roman Martinez because it is so bizarre.
[00:27:38]  And there has been no word at all from the investigators.
[00:27:43]  But what I can tell you is that, yes, like you said, he did go camping on Memorial Day 2020 with five, excuse me, six other paratroopers.
[00:27:52]  All of these events happened in 2020.
[00:27:54]  Yeah.
[00:27:55]  The 44 that you mentioned happened in 2020.
[00:27:58]  So he goes out on Memorial Day and the next day, his friends call 911 and say that they can't find him.
[00:28:07]  All of them are members of the 82nd Airborne Division, which is an elite Army infantry division based out of Fort Bragg.
[00:28:16]  It's not special forces, but I would say it's the most prestigious division of the Army.
[00:28:24]  They're all infantry and they're all airborne.
[00:28:26]  So it's like, you call them like tier three, I guess.
[00:28:29]  But in any case, they were all paratroopers.
[00:28:31]  They were all camping.
[00:28:32]  They call 911.
[00:28:34]  They say their friend is missing.
[00:28:36]  But the kid who makes the 911 call, who, well, we agreed, we agreed with the military not to name him because supposedly he's under investigation.
[00:28:47]  But let me just, his name is known.
[00:28:48]  The kid who made the 911 call, his name is known.
[00:28:51]  And he told false information to the dispatcher.
[00:28:54]  He said that they had been looking for park rangers to ask about their missing friend.
[00:29:01]  And as it so happened, they had, they really had run into some park rangers earlier that day, had said nothing about a missing person.
[00:29:07]  And the ranger whom they talked to, the rangers, remembered this and immediately like negated publicly this kid's account.
[00:29:16]  I said, no, you didn't say anything about a missing person when we talked to you like two hours before you made the 911 call.
[00:29:22]  So something is up there.
[00:29:24]  And at first, there was no body.
[00:29:26]  It was just missing.
[00:29:28]  And then actually, it was like six months before, it was like six months later.
[00:29:33]  And just a few days after Billy Levine and Timothy Dumas were found in the woods, the army finally released the autopsy report because they had found partial remains.
[00:29:42]  And that disclosed, the examiner, the medical examiner, disclosed that not only had was the cause of death homicide, but he had been beheaded.
[00:29:50]  And in fact, they only found his head.
[00:29:52]  The rest of his body remains missing.
[00:29:56]  So that's kind of all that was out there when I started the reporting, which, and I'm afraid I wasn't able to add too much to it, except that I learned that Enrique Roman Martinez, according to his sister, was really into psychedelics and especially into psychedelic mushrooms and wanted to be a pharmacist after he got out of the army.
[00:30:21]  And that's why he had joined the army, was to get money for the GI bill to become a pharmacist.
[00:30:28]  And his friend, fellow paratrooper named Christian Romero, who's also based at Fort Bragg, told me that they were into LSD.
[00:30:38]  Both of them were into LSD.
[00:30:40]  And excuse me, Romero never told me in so many words that he himself used LSD, but it was clear, he said it's the most commonly used drawing at Fort Bragg and that Roman was into it and that multiple soldiers had offered to sell it to him and that that soldier who made the 911 call on the camping trip was not only using LSD, but dealing LSD at Fort Bragg.
[00:31:03]  So that's an interesting wrinkle on the story because, you know, like Levine's case, it also involves some kind of drug trafficking and then like an unsolved death, which is very suggestive facts.
[00:31:14]  However, it doesn't really prove anything.
[00:31:17]  I think what the conclusion that you can draw is that CID has, excuse me, Army's Criminal Investigative Division has been on this case for a year and has arrested nobody and disclosed nothing.
[00:31:33]  And those 44 deaths that have taken place at Fort Bragg, that's just the number that I was able to count, by the way.
[00:31:40]  The military won't say how many soldiers died at Fort Bragg in 2020.
[00:31:44]  So that's just what I'm able to glean from multiple sources patching it together.
[00:31:48]  So it's a reasonable inference that there have been even more.
[00:31:53]  But of the ones that have been homicides, CID has solved none of them.
[00:31:57]  CID also kind of moves in and muscles out, it would seem, the local investigators and takes over these cases and then just sits on them and just doesn't solve them.
[00:32:06]  They have solved none of them.
[00:32:09]  And there have also been, I think, five cases at Fort Bragg in 2020 where we don't even know what the cause of death was.
[00:32:16]  They just say someone was found in their bunk.
[00:32:19]  Jesus.
[00:32:21]  Yeah, the military is like Walt Disney World, actually, and Disneyland in that way, where you'll never get actual numbers of how many people die at Disneyland either.

=== Congressional Oversight Fails (10:50) ===

[00:32:29]  They keep that shit.
[00:32:30]  Oh, do they?
[00:32:32]  Oh, yeah.
[00:32:33]  Oh, yeah.
[00:32:34]  Oh, my God.
[00:32:35]  I feel like we should pause for a second because, you know, we're talking so much about Fort Bragg.
[00:32:40]  Maybe we should kind of get into actually what goes on at Fort Bragg because it is unique.
[00:32:45]  We've talked, you know, we've thrown around these words, you know, Green Berets, you know, Delta Force.
[00:32:53]  What are the other ones?
[00:32:54]  Tier 1.
[00:32:55]  Yeah, Tier 1.
[00:32:56]  Rangers.
[00:32:57]  Rangers.
[00:32:57]  Yeah, SEALs.
[00:32:58]  SEAL TEAMS.
[00:32:59]  SEALS.
[00:33:00]  Yeah, SEAL Team 6, of course, the most famous.
[00:33:04]  But can we kind of like walk through?
[00:33:06]  Because this is a really, like you say, elite is a great way to phrase it, but also just a very unique, I don't know, segment of the military.
[00:33:16]  I mean, I don't even know.
[00:33:17]  It's difficult to kind of even figure out the right words to describe how special ops are situated in our military.
[00:33:27]  Yeah.
[00:33:28]  Well, I got bad news for you all as American citizens, but there's like a military within the military now called JSOC, and it pretty much does whatever it wants and it gets as much money as it wants.
[00:33:42]  And everything that they do is totally secret.
[00:33:44]  And it answers directly to the president.
[00:33:46]  And there's no congressional oversight.
[00:33:48]  There's no meaningful congressional oversight over its activities.
[00:33:53]  And the most significant thing about Fort Bragg and the whole constellation of army bases is that it's the headquarters of JSOC.
[00:34:00]  And it's not on any map, and you can't find photos of it, but there's a compound within Fort Bragg where JSOC is physically located.
[00:34:08]  And that's just not, that's like, you know, you can say like Apple is physically located.
[00:34:12]  I don't know, Cupertino or what have you.
[00:34:14]  But those are tested office buildings.
[00:34:15]  What JSOC has actual like fleets of aircraft, weapons systems, training areas, barracks.
[00:34:21]  That's all there.
[00:34:22]  You can't see it.
[00:34:23]  You can't go there.
[00:34:24]  Everything about JSOC is secret.
[00:34:27]  And so that's the real significance of Fort Bragg is that it's the home of JSOC, but it's also the home of the tier two special forces formations of the military, of the Army, including the Green Berets, the Army Rangers, and what's called USASOC, the U.S. Army Special Operations Command.
[00:34:46]  And then, as I mentioned before, 82nd Airborne is there, which is top tier of all the Army divisions.
[00:34:53]  So Fort Bragg is like where it's at in terms of money, prestige, power, secrecy within the military.
[00:35:00]  So the thing that is always kind of almost sounds fake about JSOC is just that it has this like, I don't know, this may be a bad analogy because I'm not really familiar with it, but like an Avengers like quality to it, where it's like bringing together all of these different like top of the best cream of the crop.
[00:35:18]  And it's almost like what a child would think of, like, I'm making an army. out of the best guys in the actual army because JSOC, what it is, is it's a coalition, a popular front.
[00:35:30]  Well, I guess more an elite front of the best units from each of the different branches and bringing them all together essentially as a very specialized sort of weapon to be used.
[00:35:44]  Although that specialization has seen its area grow and grow and grow and grow and grow since 9-11.
[00:35:53]  But I mean, who makes up JSOC?
[00:35:55]  Like, what is because JSOC, I mean, it really is.
[00:35:59]  It's just like, it's a supergroup, essentially.
[00:36:01]  I mean, it's the traveling Wilburies of guys who shoot Europe some peasants in the middle of the night.
[00:36:07]  Absolutely.
[00:36:07]  Who's in it?
[00:36:09]  So JSOC really grows, emerges out of Delta Force itself, which we've talked about a little bit.
[00:36:15]  So the special forces come out of Vietnam.
[00:36:17]  Delta Force comes out of the Special Forces.
[00:36:19]  It's like the most elite of the Special Forces, most elite of the Green Berets become Delta Force.
[00:36:26]  But in 1980, there's the failed rescue of hostages in Iran, which is the biggest disaster, I would say, in Delta Force, or one of the biggest disasters in Delta Force history, where they completely failed to accomplish the mission and also lost a bunch of guys.
[00:36:40]  I'm pretty sure a lot of it was filmed as well.
[00:36:42]  So lost Jimmy Carter, the election, supposedly.
[00:36:45]  So after that, they decided to make some changes to it in order to create a more effective elite intelligence and raiding force is basically what JSOC does.
[00:36:56]  And they spun up SEAL Team 6, was created in the aftermath of the failed rescue, failed Iranian hostage rescue.
[00:37:05]  And then they also stuck some Ranger battalions with Delta Force.
[00:37:09]  And that was JSOC.
[00:37:10]  That was the Joint Special Operations Command.
[00:37:12]  And the idea was that by unifying the command over the tier one commando units of each of the service branches, that they would more effectively be able to carry out, you know, just some of the military sort of lingo, full spectrum operations.
[00:37:27]  They want to be able to do anything and everything anywhere on earth is the idea.
[00:37:32]  Whether it's rescuing hostages, whether it's carrying out assassinations, whether it's securing airfields, maybe arresting heads of state in some cases, like in Panama.
[00:37:45]  And so that was the idea.
[00:37:48]  That was the original purpose of JSOC.
[00:37:52]  And it existed for several decades, really kind of in the shadows, where it did carry out some operations, some successful, some less so.
[00:38:01]  It was very involved in the little war in Granada.
[00:38:05]  Actually, although the war in Granada is remembered kind of as a joke because it was such a small and easy target, actually for JSOC, it was very challenging.
[00:38:12]  They lost a lot of people.
[00:38:13]  Yeah, four SEALs died swimming in in order to go arrest some Grenadian teenagers or whatever they were planning on doing.
[00:38:22]  Invasion of Granada is just such a, I don't know if you've ever seen a comic book that the CIA put out, but it is one of the CIA Grenada comic book is probably a low point of a low form to begin with.
[00:38:36]  Well, that's my understanding too.
[00:38:38]  It's like JSOC was real lean for a really long time.
[00:38:42]  I mean, I know that it could like barely get any funding in like 1980.
[00:38:45]  And it was really like kind of like, I mean, it was kind of not an experiment, but it was like a real sort of like special, I mean, special project, sort of like, oh, we're just going to try this thing.
[00:38:56]  And it had a hard time kind of gaining steam, it seems, up until like through the later years of the Reagan admin when it starts to really pick up.
[00:39:08]  I mean, unsurprisingly, I think for people, students of American history who understand kind of, you know, you said, you mentioned the disaster of the Iran hostage crisis.
[00:39:20]  I would say that it's a disaster only depending on which side you're looking at it, because it was not a disaster for Ronald Reagan, who was promptly elected and ushered into power afterwards.
[00:39:33]  Or his buddy George Bush, who, of course, has his own relationship with JSOC.
[00:39:39]  Yeah, funny how that worked out.
[00:39:41]  Well, interesting, you mentioned George H.W. There's actually a great kind of like lesser works of Seymour Hirsch, All the Vice President's Men, which he wrote for the London Renewal books, where he talks about a, I don't know if unit is the right word, but a group of military operatives that were run out of the executive office building out of the vice president's office when H.W. was vice president under Ronald Reagan.
[00:40:06]  And this group of people were, I don't know exactly what to call them.
[00:40:11]  It was all very informal.
[00:40:13]  There weren't a lot of records that were kept.
[00:40:14]  Maybe there were no records kept at all.
[00:40:16]  But according to Hirsch's reporting, they carried out, I don't know how many, but the number of countries that they carried operations in was I think 15 or 20.
[00:40:25]  They it was a lot of them were in Latin America.
[00:40:28]  A lot of them were on the African continent.
[00:40:32]  And the essence of this group, according to Hirsch's reporting, was that they were elite military operators, but they were outside of the Pentagon chain of command.
[00:40:41]  They're outside the joint chiefs of staff.
[00:40:43]  So that removes them from congressional scrutiny because Congress has a lot of power over the military.
[00:40:48]  It's just, it doesn't answer directly to the president traditionally.
[00:40:52]  And I think the essence of JSOC is that it's a military that does answer directly to the president.
[00:40:57]  It's kind of like, it's kind of like, I would describe it as like a Praetorian guard, the unitary executive.
[00:41:05]  Everything it does is covert.
[00:41:08]  The chain of command goes almost directly from the president to the commander of JSOC.
[00:41:14]  And then, you know, there's just one or two steps until you get to a guy like Billy Levine.
[00:41:20]  And they're able to do things without even the Pentagon knowing.
[00:41:23]  So the Secretary of Defense himself may not even know about things that JSOC is doing, which is fairly incredible.
[00:41:28]  And Hirsch says explicitly in the article that, you know, what the unit that HW was running was the sort of original template for what JSOC be captured.
[00:41:37]  Absolutely.
[00:41:38]  Yeah.
[00:41:39]  I mean, I think that that is so important for understanding the, I mean, this is, you know, this is something that we kind of like harp on in the podcast.
[00:41:47]  And we really made a point of kind of trying to situate our series on 9-11 about is the transformation that happens from Reagan through HW.
[00:42:00]  And, you know, again, the seeds are planted much earlier in American history and then up through Clinton and Bush and Obama's tenure is remarkable.
[00:42:10]  And this, there's a real pivot point that happens at 9-11, right?
[00:42:14]  Where, but you see these seeds where, you know, HW, you know, he comes from CIA, longtime CIA guy, then director of the CIA, then, you know, running this clandestine, basically, like you say, the model for clandestine special ops that now basically like hoovers up so much, like an untraceable amount of money from the, you know,
[00:42:44]  the U.S. budget or whatever, like is completely and totally, like you say, there's no congressional oversight, no public oversight, no nothing.
[00:42:52]  And this entire program has completely and totally expanded outside of what you would even call like, you know, hostage crises on, you know, Palestinian terrorists and taking cruise ships or whatever was happening in the 80s to like, God knows what the hell they're doing.
[00:43:10]  I mean, we just, you would have absolutely no clue.
[00:43:14]  And it's, it's fucking massive.
[00:43:16]  It's massive program now.
[00:43:19]  Yes.

=== Massive U.s. Special Forces Presence (10:48) ===

[00:43:20]  And no one knows how many it is.
[00:43:22]  You know, the pre, like you said, the pre-9-11 JSOC was just kind of a small and in some ways even kind of like disreputable little part of the military that wasn't used very often, that was kind of looked at askance.
[00:43:34]  And after 9-11, the gloves absolutely came off.
[00:43:38]  And they got unlimited funding, unlimited personnel, much greater operational leeway.
[00:43:43]  I mean, and at the present, and then that trend just continuously accelerated like linearly from then until now, and it continues to this day.
[00:43:51]  And no one knows how many people are in JSOC, but the larger formation over JSOC, the SOCOM, has 70,000 people, and they all exist to support, you know, guys like Billy Levine, tier one operators, SEAL Team 6, Delta Force.
[00:44:06]  And I would say that the JSOC and special operations more generally are the whole ballgame now.
[00:44:12]  The rest of the conventional military is, you know, I don't want to say that they have essentially, they've been relegated to a civilian role, but almost they really don't do any of the real stuff, any of the real fighting, killing, and dying.
[00:44:28]  It's all been special force, special force.
[00:44:31]  I don't even know how to say that.
[00:44:32]  Special force allies.
[00:44:35]  Special forces of vacation.
[00:44:37]  It's all become special forces.
[00:44:38]  The whole world has special forces.
[00:44:40]  A real question, even how, you know, how competitive even some of the standard DOD tech is at this point.
[00:44:49]  Like, I don't know.
[00:44:50]  That's a real, that's a real question, I think, looking at like, you know, advancements in other militaries and stuff.
[00:44:57]  So the fact that they spend and direct so much into special forces is, I don't know, I always say the thing about the U.S. military is that it's muscle bound, where it's this real like vast, massive thing that can't be nimble at all in any way.
[00:45:17]  You know what I mean?
[00:45:18]  And special forces is this like, it makes sense that they would then use that as a way to have any kind of like maneuvering space around the world when the actual military like really can't.
[00:45:31]  Well, it makes sense because one of the big problems that the U.S. has sort of encountered post-World War II is that we're no longer fighting these sort of pitched battles.
[00:45:40]  I mean, aside from some instances in Vietnam and obviously certain instances in like, you know, Desert Storm and in the Iraq War, but not to a great degree, is that most of what the U.S. military functions functions are are counter guerrilla and counterinsurgency sort of thing.
[00:46:00]  And that is famously, in fact, that is one of the things that I think, even if you don't know much about warfare, that is something you might know is that the U.S. military has not been very effective.
[00:46:11]  Well, depending on sort of what criteria you're using on clamping down on insurgencies.
[00:46:17]  The reason is because it's the big, I don't know what they call it, the big green machine or whatever in Vietnam, because that's what it is.
[00:46:23]  It's this giant machine.
[00:46:24]  And famously, not too great at being able to be nimble.
[00:46:29]  What you have with JSOC is not only do you have this nimbleness, but you have this whole self-contained nimbleness.
[00:46:35]  You have your own intelligence, signals, intelligence, and human intelligence.
[00:46:38]  You have your own transportation.
[00:46:40]  You have your own, you know, you have different teams or special mission units that are dedicated to, you know, to specific tasks that you can use for those kind of things.
[00:46:51]  And so, I mean, from talking to people I know that have been in the army that have deployed in Iraq, specifically people that were there sort of in the later years, is that a lot of their role is essentially as support of JSOC.
[00:47:07]  I mean, when we had Nico on the show, I can't remember if it was on the show or was after, but he's telling me that, I mean, a lot of their job was literally just going and setting a cordon around a site where the special forces went into.
[00:47:18]  And so that's what, I mean, essentially a lot of what you do as an infantryman, if you even go out into the field at all, is to provide like a basically a ring of security around these guys who are going in and kicking in the doors and stuff like that.
[00:47:33]  And I mean, that is actually a massive shift from what the army used to be.
[00:47:39]  I mean, it's really incredible.
[00:47:41]  And not only do you have that, but you also have, I mean, I remember, remember when there was that whole hubbub about Trump being rude to the widow of the guy of the, I think it was like a SEAL that was killed.
[00:47:55]  I can't even remember what fucking country it was in, but it was in an African country that there was not a lot of press about.
[00:48:02]  In Mali, maybe.
[00:48:03]  Mali.
[00:48:03]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:04]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:04]  Because I know the French are there.
[00:48:07]  And there was all this hubbub about Trump being sort of blasé or rude or something to this widow, but not a lot of hubbub of why is this guy in Africa?
[00:48:18]  In Mali.
[00:48:19]  In Mali.
[00:48:19]  Yeah.
[00:48:19]  Like, why is anyone?
[00:48:21]  And as you mentioned.
[00:48:22]  Or Niger, maybe?
[00:48:23]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:48:24]  I can't remember.
[00:48:25]  In my head, it's Somalia, but I don't think so because I don't think that would have really surprised anybody.
[00:48:30]  But I mean, like you mentioned too, like, how is a guy getting blown up by an IED in Tajikistan in 2017?
[00:48:37]  Because it's not just JSOC replacing regular troops out on the battlefield.
[00:48:42]  It's the fact that JSOC is deploying to battlefields that I don't think most people even know are battlefields, let alone battlefields that American troops are on.
[00:48:50]  And so, I mean, can you even get a scope of like, you said this guy, 14 deployments?
[00:48:54]  I mean, where was this guy going?
[00:48:57]  Yeah, his dad didn't even know.
[00:48:59]  I mean, he definitely mentioned Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia.
[00:49:02]  I think that the African continent, particularly North Africa and Eastern Africa, also all of North Africa, really, West, East, Central, has a major JSOC footprint.
[00:49:14]  Somalia, interestingly, is kind of like a constant through line through the unit's history.
[00:49:20]  They, you know, of course, there was a Black Hawk Down incident there.
[00:49:23]  But like you said, they have little bases all over the place.
[00:49:26]  No, nobody knows exactly where they are, but it's definitely more than 12 and probably more than 20 countries.
[00:49:32]  We know that Billy Levine, the Delta Force soldier who was found dead, spoke Tagalog.
[00:49:38]  According to his military records, he had gone to Tagalog school.
[00:49:41]  So he had been in the Philippines at some point, probably fighting ISIS in, what is that island called Malawi?
[00:49:48]  Mindanao?
[00:49:49]  I think it's called Malawi.
[00:49:50]  Oh, yeah, Malawi.
[00:49:51]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:49:51]  Or he was fighting the CPP.
[00:49:54]  God knows.
[00:49:55]  God knows.
[00:49:55]  But I mean, they're everywhere.
[00:49:57]  And I think probably their heaviest footprint is in the Horn of Africa.
[00:50:01]  Somalia is a super fascinating case when it comes to any kind of talk about JSOC.
[00:50:04]  I mean, you could tell the whole story of JSOC through the lens of Somalia.
[00:50:09]  And, you know, most recently, Trump, kind of like in his last act in office, kind of like a low-key thing.
[00:50:15]  It wasn't super reported, but he withdrew all U.S. troops from Somalia, which is probably the first time that U.S. troops had withdrawn from there in 20 years or so, if not 30 years, or something like that.
[00:50:26]  I mean, they have been there more or less constantly.
[00:50:28]  I think there was a time from like in the late 90s, early 2000s, and they weren't there.
[00:50:32]  But in any event, what does it mean to say that JSOC is in Somalia?
[00:50:36]  Well, it actually means that they're quite literally there.
[00:50:38]  They like have a base and there's like there'll be like a team.
[00:50:41]  It's called, so they have different AOs, areas of operation, like Team 6 is Afghanistan, Delta Force is Iraq and Syria.
[00:50:48]  Somalia is Team 6.
[00:50:50]  So they call it holding the trident is when there'll be like a SEAL team squadron on the ground in Somalia, just sitting around waiting to get a call to just go whack some al-Shabaab, you know, warlord or whatever, or do some action against what are called pirates off the Horn of Africa.
[00:51:15]  And so they're really there, just like waiting all the time, just like, you know, sharpening their knife and cleaning their weapon.
[00:51:21]  So and that's the case in a lot of countries all over Northern Africa, a lot of failed states, a lot of frozen conflicts.
[00:51:30]  But probably their heaviest presence beside that is in northern Syria.
[00:51:35]  And I don't know if you want to talk about your experiences there.
[00:51:39]  Because you would have seen Delta Force guys probably on the ground frequently.
[00:51:42]  Well, Bris is Delta Force himself, so it makes sense.
[00:51:45]  Well, I will say that I spoke to one of your former Havales, one of your former comrades in arms over there who was involved in the Battle of Raqqa.
[00:51:53]  And he told me that he ran into a group of, you know, I don't know for sure that they're Delta Force, but you would guess.
[00:52:00]  I saw a lot of these guys during the Battle of Raqqa parked in, you know, parked in Humdees or running around MRAPs.
[00:52:06]  Or occasionally I would see them like in small fobs on the side of the road.
[00:52:10]  You would see guys like just smoking cigarettes with their shirts off or whatever.
[00:52:13]  I assume they're Delta Force because it's Delta Force's AO, but I don't actually know that.
[00:52:18]  But with the number of guys who are there, which according to the military is 500, in reality, it's more like 2,000.
[00:52:26]  I think it's safe to say that there's several hundred Delta operators there and a lot of the other guys are support staff.
[00:52:31]  I've actually interviewed a few of like National Guard people in Somalia.
[00:52:35]  Interestingly, like, I don't know how that happens, but I guess you can get called off your job as like a delivery man.
[00:52:41]  Those are like the future Mayor Pete's National Guard in Afghanistan.
[00:52:46]  The future Mayor Pete's are nowhere near Syria right now.
[00:52:48]  That's for sure.
[00:52:49]  They might get killed by accident.
[00:52:51]  Just to finish that story, you know, one of your former comrades told me that he saw a group of what I presume were Delta Force guys, and they looked like a biker gang were his words.
[00:53:03]  You know, they had tattoos on their neck, tattoos on their hands, big scraggly ass beards, long hair, all out of regulation with their uniforms, you know, all looking all bedraggled, but with the best weapons, with the best kit, with the best vehicles.
[00:53:17]  So I thought that was an arresting portrait that he kind of drew from memory of seeing these guys and the way that they roll.
[00:53:24]  And I think it's fascinating to talk about like the culture of special forces and the aesthetic of special forces, because I think that's almost been more significant than the operations that they've done.
[00:53:33]  Well, I mean, that absolutely tracks from what I've seen.
[00:53:36]  I mean, when I saw guys who kind of look like that, I mean, they didn't look anything like any sort of soldier I'd ever seen before in my life.
[00:53:44]  And I mean, and that's, that's sort of, I mean, kind of the special forces dream, right?
[00:53:49]  Like it's famously, that's where you're allowed to grow a beard.
[00:53:53]  You know, you don't have to be in regular grooming regulations or whatever with the army.
[00:53:58]  I mean, it's where you have all this like intense amount of leeway, you know, ranging from the way you dress to the way you carry out missions and stuff.

=== Special Forces Culture Shift (13:51) ===

[00:54:09]  And something you talk about with Levine is that Levine wasn't just like a, you know, a door kicker, you know, trigger puller guy.
[00:54:15]  I mean, the guy was trained in spycraft as well.
[00:54:18]  And that's, that's, I think, an important facet here is that they're almost like if you deploy, you know, a JSOC, I don't even know what they call their deployment groups or whatever.
[00:54:30]  But, you know, if you deploy them to a country, it's like you actually have almost this self-contained group that can do all of these, can wear these disguises and, you know, are trained in like basically spycraft, but also, you know, can, you know, mow down whoever they need to mow down or whoever they want to mow down.
[00:54:51]  I mean, and there's this, I think it's pretty clear that yet even more than in the regular army, there is this culture of impunity that like you see with, I mean, cases like Eddie Gallagher's, for instance.
[00:55:03]  I mean, that was one of the most fucking sickening things.
[00:55:08]  You know, you can, I mean, he slit a child's throat, essentially, and was celebrated as a hero by all of these different people.
[00:55:19]  Yeah, that really was sickening.
[00:55:21]  I mean, how evil do you have to be to be reported by your own like fellow SEALs?
[00:55:25]  And it's excessive for them.
[00:55:27]  That's really bad.
[00:55:28]  And I don't know if you've seen the video.
[00:55:31]  It's awful.
[00:55:32]  I think the last thing that that kid said, because like you mentioned, he was a child soldier, it was something heartbreaking.
[00:55:38]  He was like, you know, he was all delirious because he had been wounded.
[00:55:42]  I think he said, you know, my father told me not to join ISIS or something like that.
[00:55:46]  Because a lot of ISIS fighters are child soldiers who are totally illiterate.
[00:55:52]  They grew up in Sunni villages in the Anbar province or in Deirzor and are often conscripted into fighting.
[00:55:59]  So it's really, it was really sickening to see this roided up seal just go up there and stab him in the neck.
[00:56:04]  I've seen like ISIS teenagers and like, you know, it's no part of me was ever like, yeah, I should stab this guy in the neck.
[00:56:13]  I mean, it's ins like, I mean, it's, it's, I've known a lot of like fucked up guys in various capacities in my life.
[00:56:21]  And even the most fucked up guys I know, I don't think would have slit a child's throat in that instance.
[00:56:25]  I mean, it's just, it's heartbreaking.
[00:56:28]  Yeah.
[00:56:29]  And, you know, one of the things that Levine, I think, had really struggled with the most, according to people who knew him, was that he at some point had killed a child who was carrying, he saw a child carrying a gun and killed him.
[00:56:41]  But, you know, according to Nicole Rick, who, as I mentioned, was kind of partying with him and his brother, her brother, would talk to other Delta Force guys.
[00:56:51]  As I reported in the article, it wasn't just Levine who was allegedly using cocaine.
[00:56:59]  Nicole Rick and Laura Leschiker both observed other members of Levine's same squad using Coke with him.
[00:57:07]  And listen, far be it from me to like narcum people for using drugs.
[00:57:10]  I honestly don't care, totally against the war on drugs and pro-drug legalization.
[00:57:14]  But like, on the other hand, like Delta Force, you know, is at the tip of the spear in the war on drugs and in fact, played a role in the capture of El Chapo Guzman, a covert role in that.
[00:57:25]  That's a fascinating little sidetrack we could go on.
[00:57:28]  But they're all involved all over Latin America and so forth.
[00:57:31]  So when you have, and of course they're charged with these heavy responsibilities of carrying out these operations.
[00:57:36]  So the fact that cocaine use could be that prevalent among tier one operators is kind of disturbing, especially when you see them completely wilding out and killing each other.
[00:57:49]  Yeah, I mean, you mentioned in the article too, you know, there was a SEAL that was that was an ex-sealed, I guess, a reservist seal at that point who had been, who had been active duty and then was in reserves at the time of his arrest, who was arrested bringing 10 kilos of Coke into an airport in Florida.
[00:58:05]  And that, to me, and it talked about his deployments all over Latin America, specifically Colombia, which, you know, one guess as to what he's doing there, probably training guys that go out and kill cocoa farmers or go out and steal their cocoa or coca, excuse me.
[00:58:22]  What's the cocaine one?
[00:58:23]  It's coca.
[00:58:23]  Coca.
[00:58:24]  Yeah, coca.
[00:58:24]  I'm thinking of chocolate.
[00:58:27]  But I mean, that's that, that's, that's a big thing.
[00:58:31]  we talk about the invasion of Panama.
[00:58:33]  I mean, Delta Force, excuse me, not Delta Force, but JSOC has been all over Latin America.
[00:58:38]  And you, you know, somebody who covers conflicts, let's say, and organized crime in the area.
[00:58:46]  I mean, can you kind of give us any insight on that, like what their role is or what any parallels are specifically like with Mexico?
[00:58:55]  Yeah, sure.
[00:58:56]  You know, JSOC has never stood down from the war on drugs in Latin America.
[00:58:59]  They've been all over that from the very beginning.
[00:59:02]  It was supposed to be sort of this U.S. security paradigm after the Cold War.
[00:59:06]  It was going to be the war on drugs.
[00:59:08]  It turned out, you know, it turned out to be the war on terror.
[00:59:10]  It didn't last too long, but it still has continued to the present day.
[00:59:14]  And so you'll find special operators all over Colombia.
[00:59:18]  You'll find JSOC people in Honduras, El Salvador, as you mentioned, Mexico.
[00:59:23]  There's a lot of cooperation between Mexican security forces and JSOC, also the CIA, but I think chiefly JSOC now.
[00:59:56]  You know, one thing I'd love to talk about on this sort of general topic is the connection between Fort Bragg special forces, drug trafficking, and a Mexican army unit, Mexican sort of drug cartel now called Los Etas.
[01:00:12]  Yes.
[01:00:13]  I got tripped up.
[01:00:13]  I was about to say special forces unit because that's how they originally started out.
[01:00:17]  And Los Cetas started out, the history of them goes back to 1994 in the Zapatista uprising in southern Mexico.
[01:00:26]  And there was an elite unit of the Mexican army called the Grupo Aeromobile de Fuerzas Especiales.
[01:00:33]  It was abbreviated as Gaffe.
[01:00:36]  And Gafe was a U.S.-sponsored unit trained at Fort Bragg by Green Berets to be like an elite drug sort of anti-drug unit of the military, of the Mexican military.
[01:00:48]  In reality, it was used to suppress the peasant uprising in Chiapas in 1994 that arose in response to NAFTA.
[01:00:57]  And in an incredibly brutal way, they were also trained.
[01:01:00]  This group, Gaffe, was also trained by the Caibulas in Guatemala, who in turn received training from the United States, also at Fort Bragg, also from the same units.
[01:01:11]  Whether they're JSOC or not, I don't know exactly.
[01:01:13]  I don't know exactly what these training programs consist of.
[01:01:16]  The School of Americas is also another thing that comes up in this context.
[01:01:19]  These type of units consistently train there.
[01:01:23]  Gafe becomes the sort of, you know, what JSOC is to the U.S. military, Gafe was to the Mexican military.
[01:01:32]  And then at a certain point in the late 1990s, the Osiel Carvenas Guillén, the head of the Gulf Cartel in Matamoros, Mexico, decided that he was just going to pay these guys to defect in mosque to the Gulf cartel.
[01:01:45]  How many end up defecting?
[01:01:46]  I don't know exactly.
[01:01:47]  I don't know.
[01:01:48]  It's kind of a small number.
[01:01:50]  The Zetas quickly grow beyond their original special forces roots and come to encompass non-special forces guys.
[01:01:56]  But the first ones were probably about 12, I think.
[01:01:59]  Probably about 12.
[01:02:00]  Not that many.
[01:02:01]  They were supposed to be like the sort of bodyguard force for OCL.
[01:02:06]  Yeah, exactly.
[01:02:07]  Yeah.
[01:02:09]  And so for years, they were part of the Gulf cartel, part of trafficking drugs in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas.
[01:02:15]  And then in 2010, they split off from the Gulf and really sort of paramilitarized the drug war in Mexico and the cartel war, the narco conflict down there, which I think is important to emphasize is like one of the world's most murderous conflicts, if not the most.
[01:02:32]  I think it's second only to Syria in terms of the number of homicides that have taken place in Mexico over the last 10 years.
[01:02:39]  It's really terrible and it doesn't get talked about enough.
[01:02:42]  But in any event, the Losetas, you know, bring this special forces model, bring this like Fort Bragg ingrained model of fighting to the drug war and quickly, you know, become by far the most competent fighters in this conflict, which quickly becomes territorial, becomes, like I said, paramilitarized.
[01:03:03]  And they sort of pioneer this new model of being, what it means to be a drug cartel in which they specifically control territory.
[01:03:12]  They said, all right, from Nuevo Laredo to Reynosa, this is just now ours military.
[01:03:19]  No one can enter these areas.
[01:03:20]  Police can't enter, military can't enter.
[01:03:22]  It's ours.
[01:03:24]  And combined with that, they also use this model of, I guess the only word for it is terrorism, committing horrific atrocities that seem like just insane acts of violence, you know, like dumping a bunch of heads out of an ice chest in front of your house or hanging a bunch of bodies from a bridge.
[01:03:45]  They've been horribly mutilated or releasing awful snuff videos of people being tortured and executed to death.
[01:03:51]  Those kind of things were, those were really, I think, taken to the extreme level by Losetas.
[01:03:59]  And it's interesting just to trace this thread back to sort of this idea of special forces in Latin America in terms of suppressing unions and peasants and then getting co-opted into the drug trade and then eventually taking over the drug trade and then turning it into this terrifying conflict that we see today.
[01:04:20]  So that's just a side note to as like a really extreme example of this of the spread of this concept of special forces to the rest of the world, because the essence of special forces isn't just we're elite, we're special.
[01:04:34]  It's that the rules don't apply to us.
[01:04:36]  We can do whatever we want.
[01:04:38]  Absolutely.
[01:04:38]  It's all it's all in secret.
[01:04:42]  And, you know, it's almost like this sort of atavism to it or this sort of like regression.
[01:04:47]  These units become feral.
[01:04:49]  That's why they have beards.
[01:04:50]  That's why they don't care about their uniforms.
[01:04:51]  That's how they get tattoos on their neck.
[01:04:53]  That's why they'll, you know, commit.
[01:04:55]  That's why they'll kill people with tomahawks, for example, in like Steel Team 6 in Iraq.
[01:05:01]  So.
[01:05:02]  Yeah, it's like a cult.
[01:05:03]  It's like a statement about saying it's an acknowledgement of rules and saying there are actually rules and that we're the exception.
[01:05:11]  And so there's this sort of like two step there that's very dangerous.
[01:05:16]  You mentioned the spread.
[01:05:18]  I kind of want to go back or the spread of this idea of special forces.
[01:05:22]  I want to go back to something you said, which is just the culture and kind of the like, even the cultural image that has been developed, pushed, propagandized.
[01:05:33]  I mean, I don't even know how else to say it.
[01:05:35]  Like, I would say that this people know about the special forces because of the shit they see in the movies and on TV and on the video games and the sheer amount of, you know, don't forget that's a huge, huge spend of the U.S. military and the U.S. budget as well.
[01:05:52]  Like, I don't think it's a, I don't think it's a, it's strange for you to conjure the image of the Avengers.
[01:05:58]  Like that is a very direct thing that Marvel and Disney, aka the U.S. state propaganda machine is doing by assembling in these fucking movies, right?
[01:06:08]  I mean, that's all that, that shit is.
[01:06:10]  So like, I do think that it's been interesting watching the way that, I mean, we did a couple episodes a while back on Blackwater and Eric Prince.
[01:06:22]  And kind of like, it was interesting for me to get back in that headspace of that time of the Iraq war, where I feel like the culture around the military and the kind of image that it was projecting was very different.
[01:06:33]  I mean, it was that kind of renegade, like, but it was very patriotic.
[01:06:37]  It was very like, I mean, you know, it's like, well, we talked, what was the band?
[01:06:43]  Like the, the Everclears and the Creeds and it's this kind of like God Country, kind of like whatever, and it is like very different.
[01:06:51]  I mean, it is like there's a nihilism.
[01:06:54]  Now there is a there is like a kind of a death cult around it that I mean.
[01:07:00]  That's at least something that I pick up on.
[01:07:02]  I don't know what you guys think, but I feel like there has been a marked like shift in the culture of the kind of like and in how the special units like project themselves, which is like one thing, but also the culture, the like internal culture and kind of like the kind of people that are drawn to it.
[01:07:20]  Yeah, it's so it's so, you know, the aesthetic and cultural things around it are so interesting because if it were just an extension of the military itself and an extension of sort of the logic of what it is to be a good soldier, it would, you know, the military emphasizes being clean shaven all the time, having your uniform like spic and span, always following the rules, everyone calling everyone sir, man, ma'am.
[01:07:42]  And it's almost as if, you know, the higher up you get, the more like it's the rules, it's not that they don't apply to you, it's that they're specifically inverted or it's like the opposite.
[01:07:51]  So the aesthetic or the ideal becomes just like to look as shitty as you possibly can.
[01:07:56]  In Delta Force, they all call each other by their first names.
[01:07:59]  They don't use ranks.

=== Captain Phillips' Harrowing Escape (07:31) ===

[01:08:00]  And there's something, I can't pretend to understand it all, but there's almost something atavistic about it.
[01:08:05]  I think I used that word earlier.
[01:08:06]  It's like, it's, it's like the sort of darkness in the center that grows in the center of these lethal bureaucracies where behind the cloak of secrecy, they just get feral and fierce, you know, and I think it shows in the symbols that they use as well.
[01:08:24]  It's not just dressing like they're part of a biker gang, but it's also the use of symbols like tomahawks, skulls, arrows, ghosts.
[01:08:33]  How often do we hear about like ghost soldiers?
[01:08:35]  It's like it's very primitive sort of symbology that exists around it.
[01:08:40]  And like I said, I can't pretend to understand it all, but you kind of know it when you see it.
[01:08:45]  And it's like kind of this attitude that they exude.
[01:08:47]  And you mentioned like in the early days of the Iraq War, it was a bit different.
[01:08:50]  I think that's very true.
[01:08:51]  Like there was a certain point in which it shifted to the sort of nihilism because now like we don't see them presented culturally as like heroes.
[01:08:58]  All of the sort of ex-special forces guys that you might see in movies are all disgruntled and like just full of like this macho emo sort of butthurt for lack of a better word.
[01:09:08]  But on the topic of movies, it's so important to what they are, what special forces are and how they're perceived.
[01:09:19]  That sort of link between them and Hollywood, which is extremely robust.
[01:09:24]  You know, Brace and I were talking earlier about the case of Captain Phillips, the rescue of Captain Phillips, and I think that one's just...
[01:09:31]  Seth hit me to one of the greatest facts I've ever heard in my entire life.
[01:09:36]  Oh, yeah.
[01:09:37]  Well, it's a perfect microcosm of how JSOC operates in the world.
[01:09:42]  It's like this kind of four-step process because for those listeners who don't know, this took place in Somalia.
[01:09:49]  I think it was in 2008 or 9.
[01:09:51]  I'm not sure.
[01:09:52]  Maybe 2009.
[01:09:53]  But there was a container ship called the Mayorsk Alabama that was attacked by Somali quote-unquote pirates.
[01:10:02]  I say quote-unquote, because why are they pirates?
[01:10:03]  That's a named population.
[01:10:05]  We decide who's a pirate, who's not a pirate.
[01:10:07]  Exactly.
[01:10:07]  They're pirates because their territorial waters have been ransacked by the international fleet, Chinese ships, Japanese ships, U.S. ships as well.
[01:10:16]  The so-called pirates were really a sort of self-defense force organically in Somalia that just started hijacking ships in order to assert territorially their sovereignty, which they're at a loss to do because of the failure of their central government.
[01:10:30]  I digress.
[01:10:31]  They really did kidnap this guy, Captain Phillips, the captain of the Mayorsk Alabama.
[01:10:37]  JSOC's called in.
[01:10:38]  Like I said, there's always a SEAL squadron in Somalia that's holding the Trident.
[01:10:42]  They go into action.
[01:10:43]  And, you know, honestly, it is on some level, I've got to acknowledge, kind of cool, the sort of things that these guys do, which is, you know, in this case, jumping out of planes at a high altitude, landing in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and then swimming up to a container ship,
[01:10:59]  which is, can you imagine it's like swimming up to a floating skyscraper in this tossing seas, climbing aboard with all their sniper gear and then getting set up because the pirates had Phillips in a rowboat or towboat being towed behind the container ship.
[01:11:15]  And so they set up with their weapons and to have both of those ships on the waves, changing, moving constantly, and to be able to execute as they did, you know, these headshots, according to the military account of it, to execute three flawless headshots at the same time.
[01:11:35]  There's just not a lot of soldiers that can do that.
[01:11:38]  They can pull an operation like that off.
[01:11:40]  But they did.
[01:11:42]  And then they, step two, immediately just desecrated the shit out of all the bodies, killed anyone that double tapped all the survivors.
[01:11:53]  A lawyer who reviewed the photos afterwards, who represented, I think, one of the surviving pirates in his trial.
[01:11:59]  One went to prison in America.
[01:12:01]  That's right.
[01:12:02]  Yeah.
[01:12:02]  So the lawyer who represented him got to see the photos.
[01:12:04]  And up until that point, supposedly it had just been three shots that had killed these guys.
[01:12:09]  And he was like, no, they were shot like 19 times apiece.
[01:12:13]  So that's a consistent thing that you'll see.
[01:12:15]  Check out Matthew Cole's reporting on SEAL Team VI, The Crimes of SEAL Team VI.
[01:12:19]  That's a good article.
[01:12:20]  Like I said before, there's something sort of feral and fierce about these guys once you've got 100 plus confirmed kills, once you've done like 12 rotations in the Umbar province, you know.
[01:12:31]  So they, and then step three, they immediately steal all the money because There was $30,000 in cash in that lifeboat and it just disappeared the second the SEAL set foot on it and was never seen again.
[01:12:46]  Yeah, like they basically, because a lot of times what pirates do, I had a dream of becoming a pirate, actually not in Somali, but in the South China Sea when I was like 18.
[01:12:55]  I was like, I think I could get in on it.
[01:12:57]  They probably don't have any Americans doing this.
[01:12:59]  I would be like a good, you know, good at this.
[01:13:03]  And I realized that most of the time what they do is they basically just mug the crew members.
[01:13:07]  I mean, a lot of times they don't even take hostages.
[01:13:09]  Like, you know, you're in this tiny boat.
[01:13:11]  It's not like you're, you know, you're jimmying open all these large containers and stealing like a Mazda.
[01:13:16]  You know, you're essentially just mugging.
[01:13:18]  It's a mugging at sea.
[01:13:19]  And a lot of times these ships will have, depending on the ship, I guess, a safe with money in it.
[01:13:23]  And Captain Phillips had $30,000 in the safe.
[01:13:28]  They took it on the boat.
[01:13:29]  And then the SEALs, I guess, decided they needed to, I don't know, buy some new aim points or something.
[01:13:36]  I don't think that made it into the movie.
[01:13:38]  I don't know if it did.
[01:13:39]  Step four.
[01:13:40]  Then they make an incredibly hagiographic Hollywood movie about the operation that whitewashes step two and three and just shows step one.
[01:13:48]  Or in the case of Zero Dark 30, Whitewashes the entire operation.
[01:13:52]  Well, the thing too, about a little addendum to the Captain Phillips story.
[01:13:57]  In 2013, the Maersk, Alabama was found to have two dead ex-Navy SEALs on board from heroin overdoses.
[01:14:08]  And so everything comes full circle.
[01:14:11]  The pirates' revenge.
[01:14:12]  But yeah, these guys were, I mean, a lot of the times I got, you know, as I've said on the show before, very interested in maritime shipping.
[01:14:20]  But, you know, I got friends who, you know, sail and I, you know, I study a lot of it myself.
[01:14:27]  And, you know, a lot of times, especially if you're going through areas like this, you know, you'll have security on board.
[01:14:33]  I know for a lot of people, I've had friends that had to train in small arms, although they don't give you small arms on the ship, so it doesn't really matter.
[01:14:39]  A lot of times they have actually these giant water cannons, which I think is probably safe.
[01:14:44]  I mean, these things can really blast the shit out of you.
[01:14:47]  But yeah, two SEALs that were providing security or ex-SEALs that were providing security OD'd in their cabin.
[01:14:55]  Yeah, see, I didn't know that.
[01:14:56]  You mentioned that.
[01:14:57]  That's incredible.
[01:14:58]  I didn't know that.
[01:14:59]  But I do know that SEALs love doing drugs and are constantly getting caught for doing drugs and getting told on by their comrades for just like pumping their bodies full of heroin and methamphetamine and cocaine.
[01:15:14]  They also drink a lot, but drinking culture in the military is just a much broader topic.
[01:15:19]  They also all drink a lot.
[01:15:21]  I mean, it's so, it's difficult to talk about, at least for me.
[01:15:24]  I don't know.
[01:15:25]  We were talking a little bit about this before we were recording, but it's like on the flip side, it's like you see these horrific things that these guys are doing.

=== Haunting Heroes And Horrors (05:43) ===

[01:15:32]  I mean, it's just totally and completely like, I mean, just deranged, murderous, just off.
[01:15:40]  I mean, just awful.
[01:15:43]  Like, I mean, like you said, it's not three kill shots.
[01:15:45]  It's like 19 shots.
[01:15:46]  It's like slaughtering a kid, like beheading, you know, it's just really, really brutal crimes.
[01:15:54]  And on the other side, it's 14 deployments.
[01:15:56]  It's chewed up in like chewed up meat into the machine of like US war machine.
[01:16:03]  You know what I mean?
[01:16:04]  Like, I don't even know exactly what it takes to even get to like SEAL Team 6, to get to Delta Force level.
[01:16:12]  I mean, the amount of training that, you know, as you get through those ranks, in addition to all the deployments, like the drugs are, are, what I'm saying is the drugs become, I mean, it's a feature of the entire thing, right?
[01:16:25]  It's not a bug.
[01:16:26]  These are like a way that the machine can only keep running.
[01:16:31]  These guys just could not, this, this could not exist in any other form is kind of what I mean.
[01:16:36]  And there's something just so, I mean, and I think your article really gets at that, you know, to come full circle with the kind of like these guys shot in the head, completely abandoned bodies in the back of a pickup truck.
[01:16:50]  Like this thing is just a fucking machine that spits people out like from every which way.
[01:16:56]  Yeah.
[01:16:58]  JSOC is an organization that is absolutely drenched in blood.
[01:17:04]  It's it's really sobering to think about the number of people that like individual members of some of these units have killed.
[01:17:13]  I don't think that there's anybody on earth so psychopathic that they can kill 100 plus people in Iraq and Afghanistan, Yemen, Somali, what have you, and not have that blowback on their psyche.
[01:17:27]  It all might be different if the wars were for a good cause, but they're not and everyone knows it now.
[01:17:35]  So what do you do with that?
[01:17:37]  What do you do with that accumulated psychological baggage, that accumulated karma when you're someone like Billy Levine?
[01:17:45]  You know, an interesting thing that Nicole told me was that, you know, he said that the other Delta guys that would be sitting around his kitchen table, like snorting lines of Coke and drinking, would often boast about the number of people that they had killed.
[01:18:00]  They'd say like, oh, I had 42 confirmed kills.
[01:18:02]  And the other one guy would be like, you killed 120.
[01:18:06]  She said that Levine never talked like that and it would seem to like bother him.
[01:18:11]  And, you know, we were talking about the killing of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi.
[01:18:16]  We briefly mentioned it earlier.
[01:18:18]  And also like the Hollywood treatment of this.
[01:18:19]  One thing that they really like to do after these ops is they'll put out the heroic dog part of it.
[01:18:24]  Yes.
[01:18:24]  So yeah, you'll notice that whenever JSOC does an operation, there'll be like a, there'll be like a cool dog.
[01:18:30]  Conan was the name of the one that he was a very good boy.
[01:18:38]  I think it's just like a marketing thing where the American public loves dogs and it's so cool.
[01:18:43]  It is cool, like the idea of a Belgian Malinois being trained as a working dog, but they really do use them because dogs are useful in warfare.
[01:18:51]  They use them for all kinds of things, bomb sniffing in particular.
[01:18:54]  But Levine, interestingly, was a dog lover who would, a lot of these dogs, I think, people would be chilled to learn often is put down at the end of their service.
[01:19:05]  But there's a program where operators can adopt working dogs when they're done with their time.
[01:19:12]  And Levine was into that.
[01:19:13]  He would adopt the dogs.
[01:19:15]  And because they've all been trained to attack and are dangerous, they had all their teeth removed.
[01:19:22]  So he had Belgian Malinois with no teeth in his house that he would keep around.
[01:19:30]  Dogs that he had actually served with.
[01:19:32]  And he told a story to Nicole about one of them.
[01:19:37]  And it was one of the sort of things that stuck with him and bothered him.
[01:19:41]  And it was that he was walking through the rubble of some demolished city with this dog.
[01:19:47]  And I guess it was hungry or he just wanted to give the dog a treat.
[01:19:50]  And so he let the dog eat the brains out of a, out of a dead man's skull that was lying there dead in the rubble.
[01:20:00]  And then afterwards, apparently, like he really wished he hadn't done that.
[01:20:04]  Like, I guess he just stood there and watched that dog just eat that person's brains.
[01:20:08]  And then afterwards, it just sort of really, really stuck with them.
[01:20:12]  I found that to be a detail that was haunting.
[01:20:16]  And just the sort of overview of what you're talking about, like the sanitized Hollywood version of this versus the reality of this.
[01:20:23]  And I think the, you know, I'm not, I think there's a lot of people who join the military that have no political consciousness whatsoever and are not psychopaths and just think it's cool because they're normal, they're like just normie sort of raised in popular culture and what have you.
[01:20:41]  And some of them, of course, are going to fit a different profile, but you get into it and you're into it for years.
[01:20:47]  And then it ends up being someone like Mark Leschaker who turns to his wife one night and just says, you know, you know, you know, I'm a bad guy.
[01:20:54]  And she says, well, why, why do you say that?
[01:20:55]  Why do you say that you're a bad guy?
[01:20:56]  He says, well, I kill people for a living.
[01:20:59]  And that quote also stuck with me because it's like, yeah, that's exactly what they do.
[01:21:03]  As much as we want to make it or much as they would like to make it about how all the cool halo jumps and disguises that they wear and how good, what good shots they are and how fast they can run and how many miles they can march with a rucksack.

=== Why I Kill People (03:46) ===

[01:21:16]  Like, no, this organization exists to kill people.
[01:21:19]  That's what it does.
[01:21:21]  And the fact that it's grown so big and that there's so little accountability around it, like we don't really know what they're doing, the fact that it exists outside the traditional sort of constitutionally established chain of command, the fact that it can do any kind of military operation anywhere in the world, and the fact that there's this whole panoply of weird executive orders that authorizes them to do whatever they want, assassinations, you know, covert actions, things that the government will deny.
[01:21:49]  JSOC is the black ops component of the military.
[01:21:52]  Everything that they do is secret.
[01:21:55]  You know, shout out to Jack Murphy recently reported that Delta Force was involved in the assassination of Qasim Suleimani in 2020 in Baghdad.
[01:22:05]  They were set up on him on the airport road outside of the Baghdad airport waiting to take him out if the drone missed.
[01:22:13]  So yeah, that's JSOC.
[01:22:17]  That's where we're at.
[01:22:18]  That's what the president has at his specking call now.
[01:22:22]  Well, it's an incredible, I mean, it's an incredible piece.
[01:22:25]  We obviously will link to it in the show notes.
[01:22:29]  Highly recommend everyone, you know, take a long read with it and sit with it.
[01:22:35]  It's an incredible piece of reporting.
[01:22:37]  And thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about this stuff.
[01:22:41]  Thank you all for having me.
[01:22:41]  It was a pleasure to talk to you again.
[01:22:43]  And yeah, again, I have to echo that insane piece.
[01:22:47]  Good.
[01:22:49]  Great to see you again, Brace.
[01:22:50]  for having me.
[01:23:15]  Well, Liz, I'll tell you one thing.
[01:23:18]  That definitely gave you some second thoughts about becoming an AB SEAL.
[01:23:24]  Oh, yeah, totally.
[01:23:26]  I know.
[01:23:26]  I think you should rethink that idea.
[01:23:28]  Here's the thing is they talk about, oh, SEAL training is so hard.
[01:23:31]  I'm so wet.
[01:23:33]  Oh, I'm so wet.
[01:23:35]  Everyone is always so wet.
[01:23:36]  I'm so, oh, oh, being an ABSEAL is so hard.
[01:23:41]  I'm so wet.
[01:23:43]  This is really gross.
[01:23:44]  Oh, it's so hard being on SEAL Team 6.
[01:23:50]  I'm so wet.
[01:23:52]  So it's like, they're always talking like that.
[01:23:54]  But the thing is, it's like, what are you doing?
[01:23:56]  Swimming around like a goddamn fish?
[01:23:58]  Who's in fighting in the game?
[01:24:00]  They are.
[01:24:00]  Sometimes they are.
[01:24:02]  Who's fighting in the wall?
[01:24:03]  What are you fighting in the world?
[01:24:04]  They're doing it outside of North Korea.
[01:24:06]  That's where they're doing it.
[01:24:08]  Well, yeah, what are they looking at?
[01:24:09]  Seal is a Pyongyang.
[01:24:11]  Get the hell out of there.
[01:24:12]  Pyongyang's inland.
[01:24:13]  Here's my thing.
[01:24:14]  You know what I want to see?
[01:24:17]  This is in one of the Fest and Furious movies, which I do believe are heavily advised by former Navy SEALs, obviously.
[01:24:27]  Obviously, what?
[01:24:28]  I've never seen it.
[01:24:29]  So there, yeah, you've never seen it, so you don't fucking know.
[01:24:31]  So, but there is an, I believe it's in seven, six or seven or eight, I can't remember, but there's a scene where Ludacris has a quite ludicrous plan that they do go through, which is they drive the cars out of helicopters to land the cars onto mountains in Afghanistan, I think, to then drive and catch the whoever they're catching.
[01:24:59]  Wait, Fast and the Furious, they go to Afghanistan?

=== Why We Left YouTube (06:32) ===

[01:25:03]  Oh, yeah.
[01:25:03]  There's the, oh, this is.
[01:25:05]  I thought it was like street racing.
[01:25:06]  Well, it was.
[01:25:07]  But then at one point, The Rock, who was their enemy as he was the cop, then he becomes their kind of friend of me and friend, Hobbs, who there's an offshoot there as well, but like an offshoot movie.
[01:25:20]  But he worked for the FBI.
[01:25:23]  And so then at that point, there's a, at one point, the FBI then uses them, classic trick, street gangs, for their own purposes and asking them to help them out with some, you know, catching some bad guys.
[01:25:34]  So there is like, so yeah, they go to Afghanistan in one.
[01:25:37]  There's one where they're, they, oh, there's a great one where they actually drive a car through two glass towers in Dubai.
[01:25:47]  Like it was a big shot.
[01:25:49]  Revenge.
[01:25:50]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:25:51]  It was a big shot in the trailers for the movie, but excellent.
[01:25:55]  I mean, I'm a huge, huge fan of Fest and Furious.
[01:26:00]  Well, speaking of movies, you want something funny, Liz?
[01:26:02]  I actually already told you this, but I should tell our audience.
[01:26:05]  So Liz is always going on.
[01:26:07]  Text me at all hours of the night.
[01:26:08]  Yo, you got to watch Richard June.
[01:26:10]  We're on Jewel Watch, Jewel Watch, yeah.
[01:26:20]  Yeah.
[01:26:20]  Oh, I love this freaking fucking Paul Bart split off, spin-off or whatever.
[01:26:27]  I fucking, Paul, yeah, it's like Paul Blart.
[01:26:31]  It's like Dark Blart.
[01:26:33]  I'm fucking boys with fucking Lynn Wood now.
[01:26:36]  I have his lawyer's number.
[01:26:37]  Well, I don't.
[01:26:38]  Spoiler alert.
[01:26:39]  We're not talking about that on this episode.
[01:26:41]  Well, I'm just saying.
[01:26:43]  Now I'm basically part of the Jewel universe without ever having seen it.
[01:26:48]  Ladies and gentlemen, my name...
[01:26:51]  Actually, let me do the little credit thing first.
[01:26:54]  All right, let's talk about this.
[01:26:56]  Music in this episode by Zola Jesus.
[01:26:59]  Who are we going to have next?
[01:27:00]  The freaking blank dogs?
[01:27:03]  Oh my God, remember that band?
[01:27:05]  Little Sacred Bones joke.
[01:27:06]  Holy shit.
[01:27:07]  I forgot about Blank Dogs.
[01:27:09]  You know, I was really into that one.
[01:27:11]  Was it an EP?
[01:27:13]  Dude, Blank Dogs had some fuck two killer seven-ish.
[01:27:16]  Yes.
[01:27:16]  Yeah, When was that?
[01:27:18]  Like 2008?
[01:27:20]  That's gotta be 2008 because I wrote a Mike Sniper.
[01:27:25]  Mike Sniper, if you're listening to this, I've never forgiven you, although you probably haven't forgiven me also for the thing about to say next.
[01:27:32]  Mike Sniper wouldn't do an interview with me for MRR.
[01:27:35]  We set up the show at the knuckout because I think.
[01:27:37]  Yeah, yes.
[01:27:38]  Yeah.
[01:27:39]  He kind of glared at me at that.
[01:27:40]  That was a great show.
[01:27:41]  But he, so I made one up and I made up this really long, involved story about it's called Blank Dogs because he had seen a ghost dog that his like Mexican nanny had called Blanco Dogs.
[01:27:55]  I vaguely remember this.
[01:27:56]  Yeah, he got like mad at me for it.
[01:27:59]  You're bad.
[01:28:00]  My bad.
[01:28:01]  But here's the thing.
[01:28:02]  You can just make up interviews with people and no one will know what you're doing.
[01:28:04]  Yeah.
[01:28:04]  And if they get mad, you know what you say?
[01:28:05]  You go, oh, my bad.
[01:28:09]  My bad.
[01:28:10]  Here's, you know what I've learned too?
[01:28:11]  You could just say my bad, and people are like, okay.
[01:28:15]  Yeah.
[01:28:15]  There's no rebuttal.
[01:28:16]  It's like, whoops, my bad.
[01:28:17]  And people are like, thanks.
[01:28:19]  They call that that.
[01:28:20]  Yeah, there's nothing you can say.
[01:28:21]  That was actually the Nuremberg's first defense before they sort of revised it.
[01:28:28]  But yeah, we have Blank Dogs on deck next.
[01:28:33]  Pink Reason coming up.
[01:28:34]  I mean, we are really, we are cycling through the Cadillac.
[01:28:37]  No, thank you very much, Zola Jesus.
[01:28:39]  My name is Brace Moses.
[01:28:43]  Terrible name.
[01:28:44]  My name's Liz.
[01:28:46]  We are joined by producer Young Chomsky.
[01:28:49]  And we will see you next time.
[01:28:51]  Wait, you're supposed to say YouTube.
[01:28:53]  Oh.
[01:28:53]  Oh, my God.
[01:28:54]  Oh, God.
[01:28:55]  You know what?
[01:28:56]  Keep this in.
[01:28:58]  Keep this in.
[01:28:59]  And if we can, Young Chomsky, can you get your voice in there?
[01:29:03]  Because I want everyone to hear this.
[01:29:05]  This is, listen, this is the bane of our existence.
[01:29:08]  This is, this is, this is, I am clutching my jewel so tightly right now.
[01:29:14]  Here's the thing.
[01:29:15]  Here's the thing.
[01:29:15]  We have a YouTube channel.
[01:29:17]  And I want to be very, very clear here.
[01:29:19]  We are not YouTubers.
[01:29:21]  Can I get a nod in agreement from both of you?
[01:29:23]  Yeah.
[01:29:24]  Audience, you can't see that because we don't fucking film this.
[01:29:28]  We're not YouTubers.
[01:29:30]  We do have a YouTube channel which has the shows from this podcast on it.
[01:29:37]  If you do listen to podcasts on YouTube, one question: why?
[01:29:42]  Well, okay, so I was thinking about that.
[01:29:43]  And then I was like, hey, maybe people put them on their TV.
[01:29:47]  Like while you're cleaning the house, you put them on the TV.
[01:29:51]  You just find it on YouTube.
[01:29:52]  There it is.
[01:29:53]  And there you go.
[01:29:54]  Yeah.
[01:29:55]  Well, if you're doing that, I guess you get an exception.
[01:29:57]  But anyways, the YouTube channel is Truanon Pod, all one word.
[01:30:02]  Is that, can I get a smile?
[01:30:04]  I think it's like youtube.com/slash.
[01:30:06]  Nope.
[01:30:07]  If you just put Truanon pod into your browser, private browser, you will get our YouTube channel.
[01:30:13]  In fact, you actually get a free, you don't even have to pay for the subscriber episodes anymore.
[01:30:17]  They're just free on there.
[01:30:20]  Just kidding.
[01:30:21]  Fuck you.
[01:30:23]  Yeah, that's not true.
[01:30:24]  But I will say that no one really looks at our YouTube and we would like people to look at it because we made it and we're talking about it, which is, you know, what more can you want from us?
[01:30:35]  Yeah, I need to, yeah.
[01:30:36]  Listen, we're both taking showers after this.
[01:30:39]  I doubt.
[01:30:39]  Oh, yeah, I got a bunch of guys over.
[01:30:42]  I need to.
[01:30:43]  Oh, prize.
[01:30:44]  Come on.
[01:30:45]  What?
[01:30:46]  Listen, if I can't go to Equinox on the Lower East side, then I'm bringing Equinox showers on the Lower East Side to me.
[01:30:53]  Sorry, someone just told me there was a cruising spot like two months ago and I can't stop thinking about it.
[01:30:57]  I've never been in Equinox in my life.
[01:30:59]  They say I'm in too good of shape to go.
[01:31:02]  Let's end the episode.
[01:31:05]  Happy Pride Month.
[01:31:07]  What?
[01:31:08]  Taking a shower with a bunch of guys I met at Equinox.
[01:31:11]  Oh my God.
[01:31:13]  All right.
[01:31:13]  Bye-bye.
[01:31:34]  Come out.