America’s wars are generally remembered via static, highly sanitized stone memorials. Washington, D.C., is the mecca for these idols, their sharp lines and clean narratives filling much of the National Mall. In 2017, then-President Donald Trump ratified legislation authorizing a new memorial to be built here, honoring America’s most recent conflict: the global war on terrorism.
The law designates a foundation—composed largely of post-9/11 veterans—to design, fund, and build the memorial. It’s helmed by Michael “Rod” Rodríguez, a former Green Beret soldier and medic with 10 deployments under his belt and plenty of scars to show for it, including PTSD, traumatic brain injuries, vision issues, and what he’s called a “chemical dependency,” though, per his Instagram, Rodríguez is now sober. His war record—complemented by his friendship with former President George W. Bush, who bonded with Rodríguez while oil-painting his portrait—makes him a seemingly perfect steward for his generation’s war memorial. But there’s another part of his biography that makes Rodríguez an exemplar: He, like so many others, spent time at Fort Bragg, America’s largest military base.
Rodríguez trained to be a Green Beret at Bragg, then concluded his career there teaching sniper skills to fledgling special operators. The 251-square-mile installation is in a landlocked part of North Carolina that’s peppered with prickly pine woods, cookie-cutter housing developments, and strip malls. Bragg itself is home to a suite of legendary Army divisions and the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, an exceedingly opaque umbrella organization for the special operators who defined and largely fought the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the Army’s tier-one mission group, Delta Force, and the SEAL Team Six crew that offed Osama bin Laden.
In his engrossing new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, investigative journalist Seth Harp argues persuasively that Bragg serves as a perfect living memorial for the forever wars, not simply because it trained and housed the men most caught up in the wars’ crux but also because the base and its environs exemplify the bone-deep domestic damage that the conflict spawned.
Harp digs into the region’s thrumming undercut of plunder and violence, tracing a bloody trail that includes bullet-riddled bodies, sexual assault, a suspicious drowning, and a severed head. In July 2022, one man even fell from the sky.
Harp chronicles some of the more troubling goings-on in this haunted region and the secretive, self-destructive warrior culture that has defined it for decades. He sums up this atmosphere through certain conventional characters and accoutrements—namely troops with souped-up trucks, dysfunctional relationships, and damaging drinking habits—but also with truly shocking details that eerily echo the conflicts’ corrupt dynamics abroad. Specifically, Harp digs into the region’s thrumming undercut of plunder and violence, tracing a bloody trail that includes bullet-riddled bodies, sexual assault, a suspicious drowning, and a severed head. In July 2022, one man even fell from the sky.
At the center of this activity is a sea of narcotics. As Harp reports, many troops who fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and then returned home to Bragg came to view drugs as a virtual panacea: a convenient accelerant for their battlefield aggression, an effective salve for their battlefield pain, and a lucrative revenue source for peacetime. One paratrooper he speaks with from Bragg’s 82nd Airborne Division neatly divides the operator culture into two camps: “You have the teetotalers, the guys who are…super Christian, warriors for God. No drugs, no alcohol, super goody-goody, by the book. Then you have the guys who are just complete fucking derelicts, constantly doing nefarious shit.”
Like Harp, the Global War on Terrorism Foundation rightly recognizes Bragg’s importance. Rodríguez and other representatives have repeatedly visited Bragg and consulted with dozens of military personnel on the memorial’s themes and design. What insights emerged from these discussions are unclear, though whatever creation ultimately emerges will likely elide uncomfortable questions in favor of something simple and stoic, a granite creation, I’d guess, with poetic text nodding to the memorial’s stated goal, to “honor, heal, empower, and unite.”
Crime and drug use have historically suffused armed conflict. The American Civil War, for instance, was pickled by alcohol. Afterward, the Union experienced a burst of violent suicides and brutal crimes perpetuated by veterans. A similar pattern played out during Vietnam. In the seminal 1974 government report “The Vietnam Drug User Returns,” sociologist Lee Robins found that a third of soldiers fighting the tail end of the war had used amphetamines or barbiturates. Twenty percent were addicted to heroin, and more than 50 percent had smoked marijuana. A common reason for using these drugs, Robins found, was that it made soldiers feel less afraid.
The government was culpable in this drug use: During Vietnam, the Defense Department issued hundreds of millions of sedatives, antipsychotics, and stimulants to soldiers; not surprisingly, the soldiers’ substance abuse only got worse after the war. One 1980 government survey found nearly thirty percent of service members had used an illicit drug in the previous month. In some units, the number of recent users hovered around 40 percent.
Many Vietnam veterans went on to commit crimes at home. Some were unambiguous reactions to battle, as when multiple Purple Heart recipient John Coughlin fired multiple shotgun rounds—some of them striking a police station—following a visit to the graves of two friends and fellow service members in Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1978. During this chaos, Coughlin shouted, “The gooks are here!”
Other tragedies were slow burning. Harp chronicles the demented unraveling of Jeffrey MacDonald, a Special Forces doctor stationed at Bragg who was eventually convicted of murdering his wife and two young daughters in their beds in 1970. (The case was famously chronicled by Joe McGinniss in the controversial bestseller Fatal Vision.) “Army investigators,” Harp writes, “were convinced that MacDonald, deprived of sleep and strung out on amphetamines that he used to keep slim and work long hours, had committed the crime in a fit of spontaneous rage.” (MacDonald’s fantastical alibi at trial was that a band of murderous hippies whacked out on LSD had killed his family.)
By 1986, a staggering 20 percent of American inmates in state penitentiaries reported prior military service; a full quarter of those in federal prison also had served. Two years later, the Department of Veterans Affairs found that nearly half of Vietnam veterans diagnosed with PTSD had been arrested or sent to jail at least once. A number had been charged with felonies or committed violent crimes.
The War on Terror was destined to supercharge this problem. This would be America’s longest war, which, absent a draft, placed the burden of fighting on far fewer shoulders. The unrelenting recycling of troops to and from the front lines caused super strains of combat trauma, which research has conclusively tied to substance abuse, violence, and other criminal behavior.
The military worked zealously to keep the problem under wraps, though a string of disturbing incidents burst into public view. They include the homicidal spree of soldiers at Colorado’s Fort Carson in 2008, plus mass shootings at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009 and 2014, respectively. In 2020, a male soldier at Fort Hood also killed a 20-year-old specialist named Vanessa Guillen, spurring a righteous albeit largely unsuccessful public reckoning with military violence against women.
Bragg quietly racked up a shocking rap sheet, with much of the base’s bad behavior tied to JSOC, and, specifically, the highly secretive operators within Delta Force. It wasn’t until Harp’s tireless investigative work in his previous reportage for Rolling Stone, further fleshed out in this book, however, that this shocking pattern of drug-fueled criminality came into public view
Early in the book, a Delta Force guy named Billy Lavigne is, according to Harp, “allowed to walk out of the jailhouse a free man” hours after killing a fellow operator.
Harp shows that JSOC members expect privacy and generally enjoy impunity, noting that military brass protected and even encouraged their untoward violence on deployments, while chummy police and patriotic judges often brushed off their domestic misdeeds. “They show up in their Class A uniforms looking great,” one local detective tells Harp, explaining that this sharp getup is often enough for a judge to dismiss charges out of hand. Early in the book, a Delta Force guy named Billy Lavigne is, according to Harp, “allowed to walk out of the jailhouse a free man” hours after killing a fellow operator. “Waiting for him outside,” Harps writes, “in a menacing convoy of lifted pickups, was a group of his Delta Force teammates.” What could have been a first-degree murder case was quickly and quietly closed.
The military has also made it a practice to construct super secretive hideouts for its elite operators. In the Middle East, many were cloistered in a concrete-block air hangar at a base called “Camp Anaconda.” At Bragg, they’re ensconced in a sprawling complex known as “the Building,” a logistics hub and military man-cave par excellence featuring weaponry, pool tables, and well-stocked mahogany bars.
One of JSOC’s esteemed leaders was General Stanley McChrystal, a shrewd and egotistical West Point graduate who deployed them on a campaign in Afghanistan he deemed “F3EAD,” short for Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, and Disseminate. This translated to a high tempo of night raids, in which operators tracked down and killed enemies while collecting and analyzing any intelligence they stumbled upon.
Special operators often described this work, rather innocuously, as “mowing the lawn.” Strangely enough, however, the more lawns they moved, the more poppy plants bloomed. Harp writes that America’s formidable enemy in Afghanistan, the Taliban, had, amidst its broader campaign of repression, forbidden and even drastically reduced heroin production in the years before American troops touched down. “Within a year of the Taliban’s ouster,” Harp writes, “opium production had returned to record levels.” Specifically, the amount of Afghan land under poppy cultivation more than tripled from 2003 to 2004. “By 2005, heroin production in Afghanistan had increased by a mind-bending 7,514 percent. In 2007, the country’s annual output of pure heroin approached a thousand metric tons.” Harp compares this output to that of Mexico, which clocked a far-distant second place, producing just fifty tons in the same period.
While drugs resurged, the number of enemy combatants remained steady. Harp writes that “more than half the Afghans killed or abducted by JSOC operators were targeted by mistake.” By killing innocent people, special operators from Bragg and elsewhere were spawning evermore more radical enemies, including ISIS—a group with a gnarly legend owed largely to its gruesome beheadings, but also its reliance on the drug Captagon, a stimulant that temporarily imbues its users with superhuman energy.
Harp claims that, rather than reining in the impulses of his special operators, McChrystal suppressed reporting of civilian body counts and “made a show of lecturing soldiers in the conventional Army—third-tier infantrymen—about the need for tightened rules of engagement.” Special operators, meanwhile, were spared the dressing down. Facing few restraints and little accountability, operators became the rare class of front-line troop able to partake in the spoils of war. “The Army would give my husband and his team hundreds of thousands of dollars to pay to get information,” Lauren Grey, an Army wife at Bragg for more than a decade, tells Harp. “But instead of really giving the money to informants, they brought it home taped to their bodies.”
Special operators copped sick trucks, chrome rims, and nice cribs. Some bought fast-food franchises. Others parlayed their earnings—along with their skillset, and, perhaps, some Afghan poppy—to become drug lords, carjackers, or gunrunners.
Money, and the men who made it, poured into Bragg, and spilled out into surrounding communities. Special operators copped sick trucks, chrome rims, and nice cribs. Some bought fast-food franchises. Others parlayed their earnings—along with their skillset, and, perhaps, some Afghan poppy—to become drug lords, carjackers, or gunrunners. In her interview, Grey describes Bragg as “the wild, wild West,” its proverbial cowboys being men like her husband, a legendary operator who was mentally transformed and physically hobbled over eight grueling deployments. He became a “conscienceless killer,” Grey explains before offering a fascinating and highly unusual addendum about how the war changed him. “Greed,” she explains, “was his number one thing.”
As Afghanistan’s heroin industry resurged, an increasing number of American troops were whetting their whistles. In 2012, the DoD’s office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness reported a troubling uptick in opioid use within the ranks. “The percent of positive specimens containing morphine increased six-fold between 2007 and 2011, indicative of possible heroin,” the report found. The rate of positive tests remained a minor figure, though it was likely an undercount: Testing for heroin use was not then widespread, and Harp maintains that operators strung out on black tar heroin and other narcotics were often given advance notice of an upcoming test.
As Harp notes, CIA spooks and other agents of American foreign policy have long worked with narcotics kingpins, including the Contra rebels in Nicaragua, the Corsican mafia, and the Panamanian president Manuel Noriega. American intelligence officials were also allegedly complicit in heroin trafficking during Vietnam, in large part via an airline they covertly owned called Air America.
America’s man in Afghanistan was Hamid Karzai, whom Harp describes as a “rumored heroin addict,” and whose half-brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, was a bona fide heroin kingpin in Kandahar. Karzai’s defense minister, Muhammed Fahim, was also tied to the trade. These and other figures with connections to American intelligence and the military undertook a series of shady deals with American backing, including a bridge constructed in 2007 by the Army Corps of Engineers that fortified a major drug trafficking route in Tajikistan.
Working hand-in-glove with reputed drug lords amid a culture of impunity inculcated a criminal mindset among many of the operators who returned. Harp expertly braids the brutal, extralegal history of the war with a series of painstakingly reported portraits of the men who moved through these conflicts while simultaneously descending into drug abuse, criminality, and violence. It’s a rogue’s gallery that includes more than a few imposing Delta operators, a corrupt highway patrol officer, and a young Army specialist with an LSD habit.
Lavigne, the aforementioned Delta Force member, provides the book’s narrative spine. He’s an imposing but ultimately tragic figure, a man fundamentally altered by the forever wars who joined the Army seven months before 9/11 before spending what Harp calculates as “a total of forty-one months and twenty-two days in combat.” As he became increasingly drenched in state violence, Lavigne turned to drugs and embraced crime interpersonally. He sold narcotics, killed his best friend, then, in late 2020, turned up dead in a wooded area of Fort Bragg alongside an Army veteran named Timothy Dumas. Lavigne’s story, and others, tell a lot about the effects of the war on the men who fought it, as well as the galling passivity of brass unwilling to intervene with either help or punishment.
While Harp succeeds in illuminating the contours of his eponymous “Fort Bragg Cartel,” a few vital details prove elusive. His reporting is repeatedly stymied by bureaucrats, with key FOIA requests denied or partially redacted, including around Lavigne’s mysterious murder. Harp also searches for a potentially game-changing blackmail letter against the cartel, written by Dumas and stored on a thumb drive. Yet shortly after law enforcement finally agrees to provide Harp a copy of the drive’s content, he is informed that it has been seemingly wiped clean.
As Harp notes, many of the men he’s investigating are experts at “information warfare,” a contention powerfully backed up by Courtney Williams, a former civilian intelligence specialist at Bragg who provided operators with forged passports, fake backstories, and front companies. “They are so well trained at diversion and misinformation,” she tells Harp. “They are experts at covering things up. I would not put anything past them. They have no morals. They think they have no accountability, because they don’t.”
Harp concludes by detailing a series of showy but ultimately unsuccessful efforts in 2023 to purge Bragg of its evils, part of a longer pattern involving operators in which investigations “go on forever and peter out inconclusively.” In one case, an ambitious Special Agent named Maegan Malloy goes undercover and secures evidence of substance abuse and drug dealing among military police officers at Fort Bragg, which she subsequently provides to Army prosecutors. From there, however, the brass “quietly dropped all of the trafficking charges.”
Meanwhile, the operator mindset is highly venerated at the Army’s Special Operations Museum at Fort Bragg, which depicts badass operators, their heavy equipment, and the cool missions they’ve accomplished. This image is further bolstered by a pack of former pipe hitters, as operators are sometimes known, undertaking information warfare via podcasts, product launches, and Patreon pages. Perhaps the most controversial figure in this bunch is former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher, who was accused of violent war crimes by his platoonmates only to ultimately duck the most serious charges thanks to a stunning turnabout by a key witness in military court, then was granted clemency by Trump, which allowed him to retire in good standing. Since then, Gallagher’s launched a full-fledged influencing career, complete with sponsored content for everything from hot salt to gun silencers.
Earlier this year, Robert O’Neill, the former Navy SEAL who claims to have killed Bin Laden, publicized his newest venture, as a legal drug dealer. According to the New York Post, O’Neill is now hawking marijuana in New York State, with signature strains evocative of military service, like “Shooter-Hybrid” and “Warrior-Sativa.” O’Neill told the Post that, in his personal experience, pot “helps to get rid of the noise,” though he quickly clarified that he only developed his habit after getting out of uniform. “One of the general rules in the military is ‘zero tolerance,’” he contended.
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