Richard Marcinko was a high-school dropout from a Pennsylvania coal town whom the Marines refused for want of a diploma. The Navy took him as a radioman in 1958. He talked his way into Underwater Demolition Team training, was commissioned in 1965, and went to Vietnam with SEAL Team Two, where he led some of the most aggressive small-unit operations of the war and came home with a Silver Star, four Bronze Stars and a reputation for both.
After the failure at Desert One in 1980 the Navy decided it needed a dedicated counter-terrorist unit and gave the job to Marcinko. He had six months. He named it SEAL Team Six — there were only two SEAL teams at the time — specifically so that Soviet analysts would overestimate the size of the force, hand-picked every man, and trained them on an ammunition budget larger than the rest of the Navy's combined. The team was declared ready on schedule and has been at the centre of American special operations ever since.
His next command was stranger still. Red Cell was a fourteen-man unit whose job was to attack American naval bases — to break into nuclear submarine pens, hijack aircraft, take admirals hostage in exercises and film the whole thing. It was brutally effective and it humiliated a great many senior officers, which is not a survivable combination.
In 1990 he was convicted of conspiracy to defraud the government over grenade contracts for Red Cell and served a year in federal prison. He always maintained it was retribution; the Navy maintained it was fraud. The catalogue records both, because both are on the record.
He spent the rest of his life writing — Rogue Warrior sold millions and launched a shelf of sequels — and died in 2021. Whatever the arguments about the man, the unit he stood up in six months is the one the world knows as DEVGRU.
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