Echoes of History: Navy SEALs Killed North Korean Civilians in 2019

On September 5th, 2025, The New York Times broke the story that in 2019, members of SEAL Team Six killed North Korean fishermen while attempting to plant a listening device on North Korean soil. On a mission in unfriendly territory that required absolute secrecy, the Navy SEALs were confronted by a boat. The SEALs did not know whether it was a  “security patrol on the hunt for them” or a fishing boat, so they opened fire on the vessel, killing everyone on board. Team Six immediately left the shoreline without having planted the device that was the reason for their presence on North Korean soil, as the plan required the SEALs to abort immediately if they encountered anyone. The entire mission was a bust, with the main objective left unaccomplished and the only result being dead civilians. Strangely enough, something extremely similar happened almost exactly fifty years earlier.

On February 25th, 1969, members of SEAL Team One’s Delta Platoon entered the Vietnamese hamlet of Thanh Phong with the objective of capturing a local leader of the Viet Cong. When they left Thanh Phong, they had killed almost twenty Vietnamese civilians. The exact details of what happened in Thanh Phong are still disputed: most of the SEALs claim that a majority of the civilians died when the SEALs reacted to what they believed was enemy fire, only to discover when they stopped shooting that “‘we had killed only women, children, and old men.” One of the SEALs, Gerhard Klann, alongside a Vietnamese witness, said that the SEALs actually rounded up the civilians in the hamlet and massacred them. The reasoning Klann gave for this action was that “if they let them go the villagers might alert the enemy.” It is impossible to work out exactly what happened in Thanh Phong because the SEALs who were there did not talk about it for almost thirty years. The only reason why it ever came to media attention was because the SEAL commander at Thanh Phong, Bob Kerrey, went on to have a political career which included stints as a Governor, Senator, and as a credible candidate for President of the United States.

In both cases, while on a mission in the dead of night in unfriendly territory in Southeast Asia, Navy SEALS killed civilians in what may have been cases of mistaken identity. Past the surface-level similarities of the circumstances of these killings, there are also similarities in the disparities between the reported reasons why the SEALs may have opened fire, both in North Korea and Vietnam. The main disagreement between members of the North Korea operation, as described by the New York Times, was precisely how close the fishing boat was: “Mini sub pilots” reportedly said that “the boat seemed a safe distance away” and that “they doubted the mini-subs had been spotted,” while “the SEALs on the shore saw it differently… the boat seemed to be practically on top of the mini-subs.” After they discovered that they had fired upon unarmed fishermen, rather than a North Korean patrol, the SEALs “pulled the bodies into the water to hide them from North Korean authorities.” Additionally, “one added that the SEALs punctured the boat crews’ lungs to make sure their bodies would sink.” The SEALs fired to make sure whoever was on that boat would not cause a “surge of military action in the area” by exposing their presence to the North Korean military, like the kind of surge the US detected after the SEALs left. This reasoning is very similar to the explanation Klann gave for why Delta Platoon “deliberately executed the unarmed women and children for fear they would reveal the team's position to the Viet Cong.” These actions beg the question of what might have happened if the SEALS did not err on the side of caution as they did in Thanh Pong and in North Korea, and instead made the oppsite decision to leave the civilians alive.

In June 2005, four Navy SEALs entered the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan in search of a local anti-American militia leader, in what was referred to as Operation Red Wings. They were ambushed by local militia, and three of the four SEALs were killed, alongside six more SEALs and ten members of the United States Army, who died when their helicopter was shot down trying to assist the ambushed SEALs on the ground, in what the US Navy describes as “the single largest loss of life for Naval Special Warfare since World War II.” The US Navy page on Michael P. Murphy, one of the SEALs who died, and who received the Medal of Honor for his actions posthumously, claims that the “The SEAL mission was compromised when the team was spotted by local nationals, who presumably reported its presence and location to the Taliban.” This is in reference to a couple of goat herds who discovered the SEALs. After deliberating amongst themselves, the SEALs ultimately decided to let them go despite their fears that the goatherds would alert the Taliban, which the goatherds promptly did. Therefore, the decision to let them go caused all the deaths that occurred that day. Marcus Luttrell, the only surviving SEAL from the initial four man team, claims to have cast the deciding vote to free the goat herders, and that it was “the stupidest, most Southern-fried, lame brained decision I ever made in my life.” 

It is not known for certain that Operation Red Wings failed because those goat herds told the Taliban about the SEALs position: others have pointed out that the SEAL’s position could have been revealed any number of other ways. Nor can any causative relationship be drawn between Operation Red Wings and what took place in either Thanh Phong (on account of the latter having taken place 35 years earlier) or North Korea (since the SEALs there did not initially know if they were firing on civilians or not). However, the US Navy does claim on its Medal of Honor page for Michael P. Murphy that Operation Red Wings was compromised by “local nationals.” There are US Naval Academy lessons on it as part of “the moral dilemmas of modern warfare” and whose “Questions for Discussion” include “Did the Navy SEALs make the right decision to let the Afghan goatherds go free?”  To the US Navy, the decision by the SEALs to let the goat herds go probably resulted in the deaths of all the SEALs except Luttrell, and the question of whether the SEALs should have killed them instead is a legitimate “moral dilemma.” 

The Thanh Phong killings, Operation Red Wings, and the 2019 SEAL landing in North Korea are all publicly known for reasons unrelated to the decisions to shoot or not shoot civilians who could have endangered the SEALs’ positions. At Thanh Phong, it was the future war heroism and political career of Bob Kerrey, who commanded Delta Platoon. In Operation Red Wings, it was the heavy casualties sustained by the SEALs, the high awards received by some of those involved, including a posthumous Medal of Honor for Michael P. Murphy, and a NYT bestseller about it written by the only surviving SEAL, Marcus Luttrell. For the North Korea landing, it was the special significance of US-North Korea negotiations around nuclear weapons. There are likely innumerable other instances of Navy SEALs, not to mention other American special operations units, firing on civilians, intentionally or otherwise, in an attempt to prevent the enemy from learning their positions. The way American special operations units handle future instances of these moral dilemmas will continue to shape foreign perceptions of America going forward, as they shed light on the value that American soldiers place on the lives of non-Americans in comparison to their own.