The complicated legacy of Dick Marcinko and the early days of SEAL Team 6
Frumentarius | January 13, 2022
The recent death on Christmas Day of former Navy SEAL and founder of SEAL Team 6, retired Commander Richard “Dick” Marcinko, marked the loss of one of the SEAL community’s most famous (some might say infamous) and commanding personalities. Perhaps the most widely-recognized picture of Marcinko was the photograph that graced the cover of his 1992 bestseller, “Rogue Warrior.”
The flint-eyed, bearded, muscular Marcinko stares right through the camera lens and into your soul. His black, Trident-adorned shirt — unbuttoned to reveal a patch of steel wool chest hair — is so deeply charcoal-colored that it fades almost into the background, matched only by the deep dark of Marcinko’s merciless eyebrows. If the photo makes a hardened Marcinko look like he was just released from prison, that is because the photo was taken after Marcinko was, in fact, just released from prison.
MarcinkoAmazon.com
And therein lies the paradoxical essence of “Demo Dick” Marcinko: a fierce, dedicated American commando, who stood up one of the nation’s premier counter-terrorism and special missions units, and who was also a convicted felon who ran that same unit, at times, like an outlaw motorcycle gang.
I won’t completely rehash the formation of SEAL Team 6 here, as the official account can be found in a number of books and other documents. However, I will share a bit of the SEAL Team lore that surrounded Marcinko’s founding of ST-6, and its earliest days in the 1980s. Don’t, by any means, take this as gospel truth, but more as an oral history that has come down from contemporaries of Marcinko back in those first couple decades of the SEAL Teams.
When Commander Dick Marcinko was given the responsibility of forming SEAL Team 6 in the wake of the 1979 Iran hostage crisis, he was in a staff position at the Pentagon, having already previously served as the commanding officer of SEAL Team 2. He knew he needed to form the command quickly, and get it off the ground and operating, if it were to be seen as successful.
https://www.sandboxx.us/blog/the-complicated-legacy-of-dick-marcinko-and-the-early-days-of-seal-team-6/
