The U.S. Navy SEa-Air-Land (SEAL) units were not entirely absent from popular culture. Thomas Magnum of Magnum P.I. was a Navy SEAL, and so too Mitch Buchannon from Baywatch. The Navy SEALs also had some film appearances, as in Disney paramilitary-action-for-kids film The Rescue, and the SEALs' own would-be Top Gun-type film, creatively titled . . . Navy SEALs. Still, those very examples prove just how much less cultural cachet the SEALs had relative to the Green Berets in the '60s, the '70s, the '80s, in a situation that can seem the reverse of today's. Obviously that had a lot to do with the SEALs drawing the assignment of raiding Osama bin Laden's hideout and the adulation that followed from that, not least how for several years afterward a big movie lionizing the SEALs with a portrayal of what were at least supposed to be their real-life activities was an annual Hollywood tradition, producing the blockbusters Zero Dark Thirty, Lone Survivor and American Sniper, as well as a multitude of more thoroughly fictional portrayals like Act of Valor (which dramatized a typically made-in-Hollywood plot but had the novelty of using real-life SEALs as performers in the film)--and two television series' (the History Channel's SIX, and CBS' SEAL Team, which starred David Boreanaz and ran for seven seasons). Meanwhile it seems at times that you can't look at the coverage of the country's electoral races without coming across mention of a former SEAL running for office somewhere, and often getting it (seven members of the SEALs in the current Congress), as they frequently lean heavily on their Navy SEAL image in the campaign, sometimes more than they ought to have done. (Consider, for example former Missouri governor Eric Greiten's parody-proof 2022 ad.)
Still, the SEALs were gaining in prominence a long time before that, with their profile already rising in the '90s (as seen in The Rock, and G.I. Jane), and Richard Marcinko's emergence as a public figure rather important to that. The founder of the famous SEAL Team Six Marcinko published his (ghostwritten) autobiography back in 1992, which, aided by a storm of media publicity, became a major bestseller (making the New York Times hardcover list for 15 weeks), and launched a series of (ghostwritten) action-adventure novels billed as "sequels" telling of "missions" Marcinko undertook after his official departure from the Navy that could not be presented to the public in any other way (Rogue Warrior: Red Cell et. al.) also having their bestseller list presence. In spite of that, and advisory work on various TV shows and films (including, besides the expected shoot 'em up action-adventure stuff, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas), Marcinko's adventures never got the big-screen treatment, but there was a video game (titled, of course, Rogue Warrior), all as Marcinko parlayed the publicity and the image it brought him into a talk radio show and a career as a writer and speaker on business leadership-management-team-building stuff for executives who like to pretend they are conquerors. Yet it also seemed the case that in spite of Marcinko doing so much to put the SEALs at the forefront of public consciousness the figure was, in exactly those years when the celebration of the SEALs shot into the stratosphere, pretty marginal in the whole business, and it does not seem unreasonable to say something about why that was--the more in as it can seem telling indeed of American attitudes toward the armed forces over the period.
As those familiar with Marcinko may recall the title of his autobiography was Rogue Warrior, foregrounding the idea of Marcinko not as the impeccable member of his service but that archetype of the then-still-very-much-alive paramilitary culture, the swaggering individualist, the "conformist nonconformist" who breaks the rules in the course of doing what must be done to keep the public safe, infuriating the cowardly higher-ups anxious to keep up political appearances so that they are ever out to get him in so much Anti-Establishment-from-the-right storytelling. Certainly this was the case in Marcinko's account of his conduct of the "Red Cell" operation, through simulated raids showing up the security of Navy facilities again and again in ways that outraged a good deal of the brass--all as, to go by what Marcinko says, they framed him for taking kickbacks from a grenade manufacturer, after which he did time in prison and ultimately left the Navy under a cloud. The Dirty Harry of the U.S. Navy, this was undeniably part of his cachet, and so too the extent to which, in this era in which the right bemoaned the supposed dominance of political correctness, and being politically incorrect seemed to so many a daring act of rebellion, the extent to which the exceedingly un-p.c. Marcinko, if undeniably an officer, did not seem a "gentleman" in any sense of the term, and indeed held that in his line of work it was a good and even necessary thing for a SEAL officer to not be a gentlemen. Reading Marcinko's biography, or his novels, one finds Marcinko reminding them again and again that SEALs and those at the tip of the spear whose work is killing people and breaking things generally live out on the edge, that it is a dark, wild place naturally inhabited by dark, wild people, with Marcinko apparently not joking when he told them that his old mentor Roy Boehm sought candidates for the unit in the brig because that way he knew they had at least a little much-needed "felony and larceny" in them, in contrast with the straight arrows who wouldn't cut it out where they were headed--with all that meant for what he thought about the quashing of aviator careers by the Tailhook scandal, or aspirations to making the armed forces a "female-friendly" environment, at a time in which even the generally stridently right-wing members of the circle of prominent military thriller writers to a man broke ranks with the Pat Buchanans to support the idea of "women in combat" (in the case of Army officer Harold Coyle's Scott Dixon thrillers, even women in ground combat, as he made Nancy Kozak a series character from Trial by Fire forward).
What served a Marcinko well with the audience for paramilitary culture arguably served him less well in a period in which the news and entertainment media lined up behind what many in the government hoped would be a looking-back-at-the-Greatest-Generation-through-rose-tinted-glasses World War II-style promotional effort for the War on Terror. That meant, at least at a surface, official, level, not anti-Establishment right-wingerism of the post-Vietnam Dirty Harry variety, but classic True Blue patriotic pro-Establishment center-right "bipartisanship" and "unity" behind a hard right line that, however Dirty Harry it could be in practice, made blatant Dirty Harryism not just unseemly but injurious to the mood they wanted to foster, and at any rate superfluous because the right-wingers were getting what they wanted, with for the time being everyone behind it (or so marginalized or scared into silence they couldn't give the lie to the image of bipartisan unity). Meanwhile, the more in as feminism was so much on board with the War on Terror, and so much a rationale for what was being done, a Marcinko-like attitude toward gender wasn't helpful. So (at least where what was put before the cameras was concerned) the officer and a gentleman was in, the rogue warrior out. That the particular rogue warrior in question, whether innocent or guilty of the charges made against him, had left under a cloud, with some powerful enemies behind him; that the wars in Southeast Asia, and even the "post-Vietnam" period, so significant in Marcinko's story, were becoming, as one Naval Academy instructor had it, as remote as the Peloponnesian War to the cohort of young people just then preparing for the grave duties of a commission; that Marcinko had already had much more than the proverbial fifteen minutes of fame while newer folks like Marcus Luttrell were getting theirs; could not but have further diminished the media's eagerness to get him on their show, and indeed encouraged many to see Marcinko as "yesterday's man," the more in as they were less than sure that he could even be called "yesterday's hero," especially as Marcinko never seems to have tried to "clean up his image" or make concessions to changing social attitudes (Marcinko, apparently, never changing his mind about his old unit being no place for a woman). And even as the early World War II redux vision of the War on Terror (very quickly) unraveled, and the Dirty Harry attitude was often evident not just in the subtext where it had always been present, but very conspicuously in the text, some of this stuck. Thus Marcinko's post-military media figure career continued, but his cachet never again became what it had been in the '90s as today the preference for a sanitized, officer-and-a-gentleman image of even the roughest and toughest military units endures in a country where even those most eager for bigotry and brutality expect that their real-life Navy SEALs should be suitable for presentation as the leads in squeaky-clean Doris Day-ish Hallmark Channel romantic movies, and reacted with great hostility to any suggestion that they were not, such that the darker side of these things comes up only in exposés of the kind investigative journalists like Matthew Cole publish in alternative media outlets like The Intercept. If often giving mere hints of how ugly things really get in that world, the authors of such still get denounced as unpatriotic, left-wing attacks on national heroes, and for the most part seem to have had little effect on the celebratory, post-2011 image of the Navy SEALs and the special forces generally among the American public.
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