In December 2018, after years in legal limbo, Mathew Golsteyn was recalled to active service at Fort Bragg. It had been two years since Golsteyn went public with the details of his case, in which he shot a man he had taken captive in southern Afghanistan. Convinced that he had killed a Taliban bombmaker and done the right thing for the sake of the mission and his men, Golsteyn had refused to quietly resign after his command gave him a reprimand and stripped him of his Special Forces qualification and Silver Star. He mounted a public campaign to pressure the military into reconsidering his punishment, including an interview on Fox News in which he admitted to killing the man and defended his actions.
But this strategy backfired. After his on-air admission, the Army reopened his murder case and began aggressively investigating it. Now it was preparing to court-martial him for murder.
After years of pressure, Army investigators persuaded several of Golsteyn’s teammates to give evidence against him. They were trying to build a case that Rasoul, the man he killed, was not a Taliban bombmaker at all, but an innocent farmer who had been smeared by tribal rivals. Golsteyn was facing years in prison — even, in theory, the death penalty. He said the Army offered him a deal: Plead guilty to murder and serve two to three years in Fort Leavenworth. He refused. “I warned them,” Golsteyn told me. “I said: Last time I pulled a lot of punches. This time around, I’m gonna hurt you.”
His only hope, he thought, was to win in the court of public opinion. But he had a problem: His main advocate in Congress, Duncan Hunter, a Republican from California, was now facing federal charges of embezzling campaign funds. “I needed someone who could pick up that torch,” Golsteyn said. “I was thinking strategically: How can I undermine the Army’s position in that one place that it cares about: the public?”
By then he was divorced and had remarried a vivacious schoolteacher named Julie, who tirelessly defended her husband in interviews. On Dec. 16, shortly after Golsteyn was called back to face the court-martial, Julie went on Fox News for a segment with one of its rising stars, Pete Hegseth.
Square-jawed, well coifed and partial to stars-and-stripes-patterned ties and pocket squares, Hegseth was a leading exponent of the new attitude toward the military that was rising on the right: for the troops, but against the generals. As an infantry officer with the National Guard, he had deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Like many service members, he came away disillusioned not only by the failures of those wars but also by the realization that both military and political leaders had lied about them. Though he had ardently supported both invasions at the time, he would later describe himself as a “recovering neocon.”
In his civilian career, Hegseth had been active in the Republican Party and held jobs at two conservative veterans groups, where he was dogged by accusations of alcohol abuse and financial mismanagement. But by 2014, he had started appearing on Fox News, where he quickly found his stride speaking to a conservative audience that had lost trust in the military establishment, a historic shift that outsiders like Hegseth would leverage in their climb to power.
Within the Republican base, a new ecosystem had emerged of outspoken veterans, one that was fusing with the movement around President Trump. As podcasters and motivational coaches, tactical trainers and small-arms manufacturers, they served a civilian market fascinated with survivalism, paramilitary gear and special operations. An unapologetically muscular and masculine vision of American power was resurgent, and in this world the operator was the apex predator.
From his platform on Fox News and in his best-selling books, Hegseth linked his criticisms of the military to a broader culture war. A feckless elite had emasculated the military and made it “woke and weak,” as he put it in his book “The War on Warriors,” by forcing it to accommodate gender and racial diversity in the face of the grim necessities of warfare, which had always been won by “red-blooded American men.”
The same woke generals and politicians, he argued, had hamstrung American soldiers on the battlefield with excessive rules and overzealous lawyers from the Judge Advocate General’s Corps, or JAGs. Hegseth claimed to have seen it on his own deployments. “I was tasked with releasing Iraqi men who we knew had American blood on their hands,” he wrote. “The jagoff lawyers told us we had to do it.” Hegseth suggested that he had thought about vigilante killings: “Did we think about taking justice into our own hands? Sure we did.”
(“The position of the secretary, described in his book and to our troops today, reflects the importance of empowering our warriors and ensuring they never hesitate to close with and destroy the enemy,” the Pentagon’s chief spokesman, Sean Parnell, said in response to a request for comment for this article.)
An ardent evangelical Christian, Hegseth described war as a battle between good and evil. Defending Golsteyn, an operator accused of crossing a legal line in combat, was a natural cause for him. When Julie went on his show, he encouraged her to summarize the case and then asked how their family was holding up. “We have a brand-new baby,” she answered, as photos of the attractive couple played onscreen. Her husband, she said, “was lucky enough to survive war and has come home to be ripped apart by his own government.”
Hegseth nodded in agreement. “The rules of war get twisted in certain ways,” he said. “War heroes are being prosecuted like criminals.” He asked her what she wanted to tell the Army’s leadership. “What’s your message to them?”
“We are waiting for someone to do the right thing,” Julie said.
Golsteyn was offscreen, watching the interview from the studio. Up to that point, he had seen Hegseth as just another talking head. He didn’t realize that the host was one of Trump’s favorites and that the president regularly watched his show. He had never seriously considered that he would receive a presidential pardon. “No president would have done that,” he told me. “The last one was Abraham Lincoln, and it was mostly over deserters.”
But as he and Julie were on their way home, their phones started buzzing. Three minutes after Hegseth’s show ended, Trump posted online that he would be reviewing Golsteyn’s case.
Now that Golsteyn had the president’s attention, people came knocking: “It’s all these New York guys,” he said. One was Bernard Kerik, the former city police commissioner. Golsteyn said that Kerik, who was convicted of corruption charges in 2009, tried to get him to hire his lawyer, Timothy Parlatore, who, unknown to Golsteyn, had also negotiated a confidential payment by Hegseth in 2014 to a woman who accused him of sexual assault.
Golsteyn brushed this off and stuck with his own longtime lawyer, Phillip Stackhouse. “I am fiercely loyal,” he said. But another Stackhouse client did make the switch to Parlatore: a member of the Navy SEALs, Chief Petty Officer Edward Gallagher, who was charged that fall with killing a wounded prisoner in Iraq. (Parlatore told me he never solicited either man; Kerik died in May.)
In much of the news coverage that followed, Golsteyn’s and Gallagher’s names would be mentioned in the same breath, but the two men could not have been more different. Golsteyn was a West Point graduate who quoted Sun Tzu. Gallagher had signed up to be a sailor after a night on magic mushrooms. Golsteyn didn’t think he should vote because he believed that the military should be apolitical. Gallagher had gone to one of Trump’s early rallies to wave a SEAL flag.
Golsteyn’s teammates had lied to protect him; it was only under pressure and legal threats from the Army command that some of them had broken. Gallagher had been turned in by his own men, fellow SEALs who accused him of being an abusive, reckless leader with a history of wanton killing in Iraq and Afghanistan. Gallagher countered that his teammates were cowards who were trying to discredit him to cover their own misconduct.
“They had this vendetta,” Parlatore told me. “What really happened was a guy was accused of a crime that he didn’t commit.”
Gallagher did not respond to a request for comment, but on the podcast “The Line” after his trial was over in 2021, he admitted that his team had killed their prisoner. The man was badly wounded and expected to die anyway, so they had practiced medical techniques on him. “We killed that guy,” he said. “Our intention was to kill him.”
To Golsteyn, what Gallagher admitted was worlds away from his own case. Golsteyn had decided to kill his detainee to protect a key informant, rather than engage in the kind of gratuitous violence against a prisoner that Gallagher seemed to have admitted to. “There was no military necessity,” Golsteyn told me.
Gallagher saw war differently. While he said he followed the law, he wrote in his memoir, “The Man in the Arena,” that the enemies he fought in Iraq were some of “the most savage, evil beings I’d encountered in war zones across the world.” Eliminating them was an end in itself. “Killing those men rids the earth of evildoers. That was my mission and my job, and I felt it was a godly one.”
That was also how Hegseth and many in his audience saw both Golsteyn and Gallagher: good guys fighting bad guys. “You train someone to go fight and kill the enemy,” Hegseth said on Fox News, “then they go kill the enemy the way someone doesn’t like, and then we put them in jail.”
But as Trump publicly toyed with the idea of pardons, fierce opposition arose among the nation’s military and political elites. Writing as “head of a group of more than 170 retired admirals and generals who share a belief that fidelity to our nation’s most cherished ideals is the foundation of our security,” Gen. Charles Krulak, the former commandant of the Marine Corps, stated that pardons would “betray these ideals and undermine decades of precedent in American military justice that has contributed to making our country’s fighting forces the envy of the world.”
The debate over the pardons wasn’t a partisan one; the battle line ran right through the Republican Party. Earlier in their lobbying campaign, Julie said they had been rebuffed by Senator John McCain, himself a decorated Navy pilot and former prisoner of war. “McCain said no,” she told me, adding that he objected to the fact that Golsteyn and his teammates burned the victim’s body.
The vehemence of the pushback showed the role that war crimes played in official discourse, as a line that was supposed to separate the United States from rogue states and terrorists. If war, as Tolstoy wrote, is “the vilest thing in life,” there were essentially two ways to justify it in modern democracies: as lawful self-defense or a battle of good against evil. A war can be both, as it was in many Americans’ minds, after the attacks of Sept. 11. But as U.S. interventions overseas dragged on into chaos and disaster, the country’s leaders clung tighter to the kind of legal commitments at the heart of liberalism. “And even as we confront a vicious adversary that abides by no rules, I believe the United States of America must remain a standard-bearer in the conduct of war,” President Barack Obama said as he accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009. “That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength.”
In his speech, Obama had gestured at the irony — critics called it hypocrisy — of accepting the prize even as he was expanding a global campaign of drone warfare and raids by Special Operations. But the unspoken question was whether it was in fact possible to fight irregular conflicts lawfully — or whether, as the work of political scientists like Stathis Kalyvas attests, civil wars like those in Iraq and Afghanistan, which are battles for populations and not territory, have coercion and violence against civilians at the core of their logic.
Obama was articulating the elite consensus that America’s righteousness and lawfulness were inseparable. By contrast, Hegseth argued that our leaders were in denial about the kind of lawless conflicts the United States faced. “Should we follow the Geneva Conventions?” he wrote. “What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism?”
The debate about the war-crimes pardons became part of a larger struggle over legal restraints on the military, one whose implications were as important at home as they were abroad. Later in his first term, Trump would clash with Mark Esper, the defense secretary, and Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and would be thwarted when he sought to deploy active-duty troops to suppress protests in American streets. But Trump’s first real fight with the military leaders was over the pardons. As Esper would later write in his memoir, the issue wasn’t just leniency for war crimes; Trump was short-circuiting the military’s legal system before it had a chance to render a verdict. “General Milley and I urged the president on several occasions to stay out of it,” he wrote. “It was unfitting for the commander in chief to do what he did, and it caused a lot of ill feelings in the military.”
In the end, Trump waited out Gallagher’s trial, which was marred by the Navy’s mishandling of the case; he was acquitted of murder in July 2019 but convicted of posing for photos with a corpse. But in Golsteyn’s case, the president decided to move ahead before the trial. On Nov. 15, Trump announced he was restoring Gallagher’s rank and pardoning Golsteyn and another soldier, Clint Lorance.
At the end of our conversation at his house, I asked Golsteyn how it felt to prevail over the Army. After the president called to tell him he was pardoned, Golsteyn told me that he felt grateful but strangely empty. “I wasn’t relieved,” he said. “It felt hollow.”
For almost a decade, the struggle had consumed him. Throughout it, he was animated by the conviction that he had done the right thing. But he received absolution from a leader and a public that made no distinction between him and Gallagher. And his case had inflicted immense pain on his teammates and regiment.
“I’d been alienated from my tribe,” Golsteyn said. “No pardon could restore that.”
Even as the violence committed overseas by operators like Golsteyn was being celebrated by politicians in the United States, a wartime culture of lawlessness in Special Operations had come home to roost in another way: a wave of domestic crimes committed by soldiers with the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, many of them around Fort Bragg, home to the command’s headquarters and Golsteyn’s unit, the Third Special Forces Group.
Some of the former Green Berets I spoke to said that misconduct at home was a result of commanders tolerating rule-breaking by soldiers for the sake of the mission. “You can’t accept that type of behavior in one environment and then be shocked when it carries over in terms of how that individual behaves in another,” said Anthony Aguilar, a retired lieutenant colonel who served in Third Group.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, rule-breaking for the sake of the mission could slide into rule-breaking for personal gain. At the end of their deployments, several former operators told me, some Special Forces teams would divide up operation funds that were “left over” among themselves, handing out cash in envelopes. Others became involved in more serious crime. A federal task force investigating corruption in Afghanistan led to several criminal cases against Green Berets for fraud and theft. At the center of many of them was an Afghan contractor named Hikmatullah Shadman, who got his start as an interpreter with Third Group and who had been recommended for a U.S. visa by four Special Forces officers. He was charged in one of the largest civil forfeiture cases of the war, in which he eventually agreed to a $25 million settlement. Eight soldiers who served with the Special Forces and worked with Shadman, including two officers, were convicted of bribery-related crimes.
As the war went on, Special Forces leaders allowed an aggressive ethos to flourish on base that drew inspiration from outlaw biker culture. With their tattoos, beards and shaved heads, many Green Berets looked like extras from the popular biker TV show “Sons of Anarchy.” Soldiers spent their combat bonuses on the Harleys that filled the headquarters parking lots. Senior officers rode, including Maj. Gen. Edward Reeder, an influential leader who rose to command both the Special Forces and the Army’s special-warfare school. (Through a lawyer, Reeder declined to comment.) Reeder, as commander of Third Group’s Second Battalion, nicknamed the Bush Hogs, changed its logo to resemble Harley Davidson’s. Its motto was “We do bad things to bad people.”
Law enforcement had repeatedly warned the military that biker gangs were infiltrating the ranks, including Special Operations. One internal 2008 report by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives noted that it had “received vast intelligence concerning military and veteran motorcycle clubs affiliating themselves with documented” outlaw gangs.
A group of active-duty Green Berets founded what became the Special Forces Regiment Motorcycle Club, whose members attended events on base in their leather vests. One founder was Mark Schwartz, an officer who would go on to lead Third Group and retire as a lieutenant general. To start the club, they had to get permission from the head of the Hells Angels in Fayetteville, N.C., the rough-and-tumble city surrounding Fort Bragg, a retired Green Beret named Daniel Silcose. The Hells Angels rode and partied with the military clubs and recruited veterans, and several full-patched members worked at the base as civilian contractors.
“When you wanted to stand up a riding club or an M.C., if there’s existing clubs in the town, you have to get approval,” Schwartz told me. “There’s a bit of a culture of showing respect. The Hells Angels had a presence.”
Schwartz said that the purpose of the club was to raise money for charity and encourage camaraderie, and he denied any wrongdoing by it. “I was genuinely not aware of any illegal activity that took place while I was commander,” Schwartz said.
But some Special Forces officers considered the motorcycle clubs and their escapades to be an unacceptable threat to discipline. “They were always a problem,” said Paul Toolan, a former Third Group officer who retired as a lieutenant colonel. Part of the concern was that the clubs, where an officer might be junior to his men, were a parallel world that could subvert military hierarchy. “It could just be them, you know, getting drunk and doing something foolish,” Toolan said, “and now I kind of have that on you.”
The problem of misconduct in the ranks was compounded by the stress of the war, substance abuse and wounds, especially cognitive ones from repeated exposure to blasts during combat and training. “We accumulated an enormous amount of traumatic brain injury,” said Mike Perry, a retired Special Forces major who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. A result could be increasingly reckless and violent behavior. “I watched the community evolve from commonplace shit, like dudes cheating on travel vouchers, to homicide and human trafficking,” he said. “It does not go well when an organization that is largely left to police itself fails to do so again and again.”
To understand the scale of the problem and its connection with specific units, I collected news and police reports of incidents around Special Forces bases and obtained the personnel records of the soldiers involved, as well as vital records and court documents. The picture was one of serious crime at all levels, from young operators to senior leaders.
To give just a partial list: Two operators with Seventh Group in Florida were convicted of smuggling cocaine, and another was accused of shooting up a bowling alley, killing three people. A sex and blackmail scandal at group headquarters in Tampa, Fla., ensnared several senior leaders and led to the conviction of a major. In Washington State, the First Group commander, Col. Owen Ray, was sentenced to prison after assaulting his wife at gunpoint.
The highest-profile incident to date suggests the link between the war and blowback at home. In January, Master Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger, an active-duty Green Beret, blew up a truck packed with fireworks in front of the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas while simultaneously shooting himself.
Livelsberger was a veteran operator who served for nearly 20 years. He had shown symptoms of brain injury and might have been experiencing a psychotic break, but he also wrote that he despaired of his involvement in airstrikes against village drug labs in Afghanistan, which the U.N. reported killed at least 30 civilians in 2019.
“The U.N. basically called these war crimes, but the administration made them disappear,” Livelsberger wrote. “I was part of that cover-up.”
At Fort Bragg, which has been awash in drugs and had the highest rate of fatal drug overdoses of any base from 2017 to 2021, a Special Operations medic who had been abusing steroids killed himself and his wife. A Delta operator died by suicide while facing charges for a drunken hit-and-run that left four teenagers hospitalized. Another Delta soldier, Master Sgt. William Lavigne, was found dead in the woods alongside a former supply-unit soldier, Timothy Dumas, who worked with the Special Forces — both were involved in a drug-trafficking ring on base, according to the journalist Seth Harp in his book “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” which was published in August.
Soldiers from Third Group were involved in three separate lethal shootings off base. Another pleaded guilty to paying minors for sex. During one four-year period, 11 of the 70 majors in the group were found to have committed misconduct. One of them was the subject of a revenge-porn lawsuit in North Carolina.
The problem of crime involving operators was notable enough to prompt questions in Congress. When Gen. Bryan Fenton, the head of the military’s overall Special Operations Command, appeared before the Senate in 2023, he was asked about the crime wave. “So, General Fenton, you know, there have been a series of concerning incidents — suicides, murders, overdoses, drug-trafficking arrests — surrounding the Special Operations community at Fort Bragg,” said Senator Ted Budd, a North Carolina Republican, who wanted to know what the military was doing about it.
“I want everybody to know that is not the type of behavior that is welcomed in this formation and is not indicative of an organization in whom the nation has placed a lot of trust,” said Fenton, who served as a Green Beret and in the elite Delta Force. “I think a key piece in that one is holding folks accountable.”
Fenton stressed that a vast majority of Special Operations soldiers served honorably and were not involved in crimes. This is true, and some Green Berets I spoke to said that the problem was about individual bad apples and that the news media had a tendency to overemphasize crimes by operators. The important question, as Fenton noted, is one of accountability. Military officers are taught a basic mantra: Commanders are responsible for everything their units do or fail to do.
“The people that have done these things have come and gone,” Anthony Aguilar said. “But the problems still remain. Lavigne and Dumas are dead. Well, the drug problem got worse. So-and-so went to jail. The murders continue. What is it? It’s U.S.A.S.O.C. and S.F. Command and Third Group.”
An analysis of command assignments show that Army Special Operations has promoted officers even as their units were involved in misconduct at home and abroad. “The way we pick senior leaders in the military is by a good-ol’-boy system,” said Brig. Gen. Don Bolduc, whose last role was commanding Special Operations forces in Africa. “And the name of the game is: Cover each other’s ass.”
Rather than shake up the leadership, the head of Army Special Operations Command, Lt. Gen. Jonathan Braga, has selected the last four Desert Eagles commanders from within Third Group’s ranks. Three of those officers then went on to command the entire group. Two of them — including Col. Jason Johnston, who commanded the battalion in Kunduz when it bombed a hospital — were then picked for key positions at headquarters. Braga also chose a Third Group commander as his deputy and the Desert Eagles’ operation officer during the Kunduz strike as his executive officer.
In September, Braga was nominated by Trump for promotion to head of the Joint Special Operations Command, a position that requires confirmation in the Senate. In response to detailed questions, a spokeswoman for Braga offered a defense of his command’s record. “We have fully investigated and adjudicated the cases you cover. In each case, where justified, we have held to account those responsible for any misconduct,” Lt. Col. Allie Scott wrote. “We are confident our actions stand up to the strictest scrutiny.”
The term “blowback” was originally used by the C.I.A. to describe the unintended consequences of covert actions, but it can also refer to the broad repercussions that wars overseas have on the homeland. From the Roman Republic to France after World War II, history contains many examples of democracies that were destabilized by lawless wars abroad.
The costs of America’s longest war have become apparent: broken bodies and families, the loss of civil liberties, the growth of the surveillance state, the acceleration of a paramilitary gun culture, crime and corruption in military ranks, popular disenchantment with the establishment and, most of all, the weakening of the laws and norms that restrain the armed forces.
These changes have taken place under both Democratic and Republican administrations, but they have created an opening for a vision of unrestrained violence put forward by leaders like Trump and Hegseth.
For many of Trump’s supporters, his felony conviction only strengthened their belief that he was fighting a corrupt system. They adopted a new slogan: “I’m voting for the outlaw.” Before last November’s election, some of the generals who served in Trump’s first administration warned that he would try to use the military in illegal and unconstitutional ways were he re-elected. Still, Trump regained the White House with the overwhelming support of veterans, and most likely of active-duty service members as well, for many of whom the brass has been discredited by the failures of what Trump called “stupid wars.”
He immediately shocked the establishment by nominating Hegseth as his secretary of defense, the second in the chain of command, whose confirmation passed the Senate by a single vote. As many of his critics predicted, Hegseth’s tenure has been plagued by infighting and blunders, like his divulging military strike plans in a group chat that included a journalist. Throughout it all, Trump has backed him as they work to transform the military under a newly christened Department of War. In a push to avoid the internal opposition from his first term, Trump and Hegseth have purged the military’s senior ranks, including its top lawyers. Hegseth swore in his and Gallagher’s lawyer, Parlatore, as a reserve commander and special adviser. These moves have sent a chill through the JAG Corps that Hegseth once derided as “jagoffs.”
(Parlatore, Hegseth’s lawyer, told me he believes that the military justice system was broken and needed an overhaul. “If they are the conscience of the military,” he said, referring to the JAG Corps, “maybe you need a new conscience.” He dismissed those concerned about the moves as “partisan agitators.”)
To replace the Army’s top lawyer, Hegseth chose Maj. Gen. Bobby Christine, a former Republican U.S. attorney and National Guard officer.
“We’re just slowly eroding the rule of law until it just doesn’t exist and everyone’s comfortable with it,” said Nate Bankson, a retired lieutenant colonel and former Special Operations lawyer. “It sets the conditions for the misuse of the armed forces.”
This may also include the way the armed forces are deployed at home. Over the summer, Trump succeeded in doing something that military leaders had blocked during his first term: deploying the active-duty U.S. military to American cities. In June, he sent Marines and National Guard members in response to protests in Los Angeles, a move that was later ruled illegal by a federal judge. (The administration appealed the ruling.) He has created a standing task force within the National Guard to deploy to American cities, put armed Guard members on the streets of Washington, D.C., in August and threatened to send them to Chicago.
“President Trump inherited a Biden-era military that cared more about woke D.E.I. policies than readiness,” Anna Kelly, a spokeswoman for the White House, wrote in a statement for this article. “Now, under this President, our warfighters are prioritized, and our Commander in Chief is using our military for its intended purpose — to protect our homeland from narco-terrorists and other urgent threats. Likewise, he is using his authority to stop home-grown criminals from ravaging American communities and attacking law-abiding citizens.”
In his expansion of the military’s domestic role, Trump has mobilized the language and tactics of the war on terrorism. He has invoked the Alien Enemies Act and designated migrant gangs as terrorist organizations, rendering suspects to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center. The military has carried out deportation flights, incarcerated migrants at Guantánamo Bay and deployed troops to make arrests on the Southern border.
These public actions raise the question of what is being undertaken in secret by the nation’s special operators. Trump has ordered the military to use lethal force against drug traffickers designated as terrorists, a move that legal experts have said amounts to summary killings of noncombatants. In September, the administration announced three airstrikes on boats in international waters that they claimed were smuggling drugs to the United States on behalf of a Venezuelan gang. “We smoked a drug boat, and there’s 11 narco-terrorists at the bottom of the ocean — and when other people try to do that, they’re gonna meet the same fate,” Hegseth said on Fox News after the first strike.
This vision of unrestrained power has its roots in the 20 years of conflict waged in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Understanding the secret history of America’s longest war is about more than a reckoning with the past. Cases like Golsteyn’s and the Nerkh killings illuminate the connections between a brutal conflict overseas and a radical cultural and political shift at home that venerates the vigilante. In this way, shots fired in an Afghan village echo in our present.
Camille Baker and Victor J. Blue contributed reporting.
Matthieu Aikins is a contributing writer for the magazine and a fellow at Type Media Center.
Victor J. Blue is a photographer and a 2024 New America Future Security fellow.
Read by James Patrick Cronin
Narration produced by Tanya Pérez
Engineered by Brian St. Pierre
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