https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3543951586 Richard "Demo Dick" Marcinko is one of those guys who has a lot of talk, but can actually sprint it, not just walk it. Whether or not he is a psychopath or a good person is entirely up to one's own political beliefs, genuinely. Marcinko himself is a contentious and yet, the still highly regarded father of SEAL Team SIX. Everything started with him. The beards, the jock-like culture, German H&K guns, the cult of media personalities surrounding SEALs, the drinking, the hard training, everything. It is hilarious that SEALS are known for immediately publicizing their once clandenstine careers, but it all comes back to their origins. When Marcinko was an UDT sailor in Vietnam and eventually in Team TWO, he became the face of the tip-of-the-spear operations for the American coalition and allies during the war. "Demo Dick" and "Sharkman of the Mekong Delta" were all names that, while they sound like he could have given them to himself, were actually chosen for him by invisible hand of sensational war journalism. In his early career, Marcinko was known as "The Geek", a radio signalman who only went into special forces (or SPECWAR, as the US Navy designates it and thus, Marcinko as well) some years later. "The Geek" was the type of sailor who polished even the bottom of his boots and despite toeing the line at first, he quickly became a man who would go on to lead one of the most controversial military formations of the modern era. He also later would defraud the US Military and go to prison for 21 months, effectively ending his military career. Regardless, Marcinko is actually responsible for the zeitgeist of modern military media in so many ways. Steven Seagal spent his entire life pretending he was someone like Marcinko (Ironigally, Marcinko served with a guy the Teams with a very similar name) and you may not believe this at first, but what if I told you, Marcinko is the reason we have Metal Gear Solid? Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear series draws heavily from films and books. The most obvious being Escape From New York and The Rock. Well, did you know that the SEALs in the latter mentioned filmed, among them was a former Seal who served with Marcinko? So already, we now know why SEALS are so prominent in media consciousness, even before the famous Bin Laden raid. Richard's autobiography "Rogue Warrior", which this game has absolutely fuck all to do with, was actually read by the English localization specialist for Metal Gear Solid to get a grasp on appropriate jargon. But it gets weirder. By coincidence, one of the SEALs had the codename Snake. However, Kojima likely got this code name from Escape From New York instead, which is more obvious for those who have played MGS2. But wait, MGS2? Dead Cell? Oil Rig Simulations? SPECWAR operators testing base securities? Yep, Marcinko did all of that, he started all of that. And it isn't bullshit either, it can be hard to get a copy of the original book because it has repeatedly been under CIA scrutiny time and time again. "Snake Eater" was a term, coined by then American president JFK, in reference to Army Green Berets, who Solid Snake and Big Boss were. But it was actually Marcinko, in his eternal rivalry with Green Berets (He deliberately built Team SIX in a way to be more mobile and more flexible than US Army Spec Ops) appropriated the term for his own men. OKay, okay, hear me out... Fulton recovery from Peace Walker and Phantom Pain? Guess who was the FIRST human being to ever successfully conduct a test run with a fulton recovery? Yep, Richard Marcinko. In his book, which predates Peace Walker and PP by decades, he even mentions that one of the intentions of the fulton recovery system was to "evacuate tranquilized HVTs for extraction". Absolutely wild. After his tenture in the SEALs, Demo Dick started RedCell and you guessed it, tested the security capability of American and NATO allied bases, (specifically Italian), and in cooperation with German divers, did a simulated oil rig raid. Clearly, Call of Duty took huge pages from Marcinko's book. Literally. In MW2, the oil rig raid is almost identical to the sim in the book. Even the original Modern Warfare's shipboard operation was very similar to seize, board, seizure and search operations conducted by early SEAL operatives. In the end of COD4's campaign, you get a photograph of the cast with "Doom on you, Mr Tango" scribbled in the corner. "Doom on you" is a catch phrase coined by Marcinko during his time in Vietnam, his phonetic-transliteration of a Vietnamese phrase meaning "go fuck yourself". So, why exactly is Marcinko the bedrock of modern counter-insurgency, counter-terror units and literally is the man who brought the world of post-Cold War special military operations into the public consciousness? It might have to do with the fact that he, once again, defrauded the US Government for tens of thousands, stole equipment and did outrageously illegal things (often against fellow service members) with almost no accountability, profited immensely from all of it and uhh, yeah. You see, SEALs have changed little from their original vision, but a lot in their execution. Now they are just as 'bloated' as Marcinko had hoped would not happen, in terms of red tape and yet, units like Red Squadron in Team SIX were murdering people with hatchets, executing civilians and committing many crimes that can be more or less stated to be blatant disregard for the rules of war. As the US Navy put it, Marcinko's behavior throughout his career was full of "conduct unfitting of an officer", Redcell might have also kidnapped civilian personnel during base-busting drills and ended up torturing them, basically. So yeah, it doesn't help that to civilian eyes, his actual words throughout his books come off as completely racist, unsympathetic and devoid of human empathy. Specifically with how he frequently belittled those of Asian and Middle Eastern descent. After a really high-speed, cowboy experience in Vietnam for two tours, he spent a significant amount of time in Cambodia, instructing clandestine forces and helping facilitate DoD officers, politicians and other military personnel in enjoying presence of prostitutes, which Marcinko also partook in. On the daily. Ordering human beings like roomservice. He was married with kids during all of this. Despite everything, one must recognize that Marcinko's ideology, beliefs, veneration for the Biblical Old Testament God and his wrathful ways, his adherence to archaic warriors ethos and etc, are character theatrics to help promote his businesses. But they were, at one point, merely how everyone in his time and military branch acted, holding closely these beliefs of great superiority over an inferior enemy and ignoring the fact that terrorizing an insurgency just makes that insurgency tremendously larger, more motivated and justified in their own line of thinking. Regardless, I think everyone should read his book and understand that military personnel of this caliber are professionals first, patriots sometimes and not all of them come back broken, grieving lost souls. Sometimes these people come back and they just get right into making money. The world is not a pretty place and really, the cutthroat corporate world differs little from the detatched nature of officers and their enlisted men. Marcinko has the distinction of being an enlisted man first through his actual warfighting career, but even he knows that an officer has to do the things the enlisted cannot. It is all politics and its a mess. ANd in the end, Marcinko got burned by the fire he once learned to master. So what exactly is this game? Its a cluster goat-fuck, as Marcinko would say. Marcinko in this game is 100% accurate, he actually talks and thinks this way. The plot may be fiction, but this literally is who Demo DIck was. Take that as you will.
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