I was exhausted and ready for sleep but picked up my copy of Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, just to read a couple of pages, but ended up reading five chapters because it’s like a gritty Tom Clancy novel, though Clancy wouldn’t touch this aspect of the military world. And it’s not a novel—Harp’s revealing the dark side of our military’s special forces units. It’s rare that a book gives me an adrenaline rush like this, but each chapter, is either informative in a huh-I-didn’t-know-that way, or just shocking in a holy-fucking-shit way.
I don’t usually like to spend a lot of time on writer’s bios—I prefer to think about the text itself. But Seth Harp’s an interesting guy: Went to law school, while serving in the Army National Guard. Saw one tour of duty in Iraq, became Assistant Attorney General for the State of Texas. He could’ve risen higher into politics, or switched to a high-paying private practice, but instead quit and re-invented himself as journalist—no journalism degree needed or desired. He’s the perfect writer to cover American foreign military operations, and has a clear writing style.
The main framework of The Fort Bragg Cartel follows the killing of Green Beret Sergeant First Class Mark Leshikar by Delta Force Master Sergeant William Lavigne, near Fort Bragg, in front of each’s two daughters. Harp investigates what happened (since it was covered up by local and federal authorities) but more importantly why. Which takes him back to the start of the United States military’s use of Special Forces in Vietnam, and to the life of Lavigne, from a regular decent kid from northern Michigan, to a trained killer with a huge kill list, who ends both using and dealing drugs, seemingly with the knowledge and seemingly implicit approval of his supervisors. It also involves the United States endless wars, especially post-9/11 where, Harp reveals, most of the fighting and action has happened away from any already-minimal MSM coverage.
Afghanistan especially, biggest producer of heroin in the world after the US invasion, becomes the place where Special Forces units (regular military too) begin to become part of the whole drug operation. The drugs of choice for Special Forces are cocaine and methamphetamines, but the big temptation is money. Special Forces units have more freedom and permissions to make shipments back and the forth to the US, without inspections, so that The Fort Bragg Cartel, any and all military bases, foreign and domestic (especially domestic) have become major supply centers. In a time when our government is lying to us about invading Venezuela to stop the flow of drugs, which we know is a lie, they’re curiously willfully ignorant of what’s coming in our back doors.
“Special Forces” is the umbrella name for a number of elite military groups, ostensibly under the command of the US Army, plus the Navy Seals, though as Harp shows, they’ve become essentially a fifth arm of the US military, and receive their orders directly from the President and a few top generals. These groups include, but aren’t limited to, the Navy Seals, Airborne, the Green Berets, and especially Delta Force, if not the biggest of the groups, then the most entrenched and organized. And powerful. Delta Force, probably (Harp hints about one or two more secretive ones) are the most elite—other Special Forces soldiers in the other groups aspire to join Delta Force. Sergeant Leshikar had been turned down for Delta Force, and Harp speculates that his resentment had something to do with the incident with Sergeant Lavigne. In any case, there are resentments and rivalries among the different groups, heightened by the fact that they’re business rivals too—a Special Forces gang war.
Readers may remember a few strange stories that’ve popped up in the mainstream news in the last 20 years, about murders and bodies of soldiers found near Fort Bragg. No real explanation was ever offered. But, as Harp writes, it’s way more than just a few deaths, just a few murders. And it’s not just soldiers. For example, according to Harp, in just one year, 2002, four wives, three of special forces soldiers, were killed by their husbands. The stories were mostly covered up, distorted, the killings blamed on an anti-malarial drug, though the thing those soldiers all had in common was that they were just recently deployed to Afghanistan, which the United States had invaded in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
The Fort Bragg Cartel is about the idea of blowback: that our government’s and soldiers actions overseas end up having consequences back home. The violence given, the violence experienced, the drugs taken to deal with those experiences, and the drugs harvested and sold, the lack of any real justification for any of it, all affect our soldiers’ mental and spiritual lives, and the lives of those around them.
The implications are horrifying. Families of these soldiers are destroyed. Communities around Fort Bragg (and, one assumes, other bases) suffer the influx of drugs and the crime that comes with it. Any local authorities around military bases like Fort Bragg are sympathetic if not outright friendly with these Special Forces. Any crimes committed—up to and including rape and murder—only get a handshake and “Thank you for your service.”
The military leadership knows what’s going on, and covers it up, which amounts to permission. Whether our elected politicians know, or care, may not matter. Special Forces do their job. That is, people they’re told to kill, are killed. As are some other people they’re not told to kill. I wonder if it’ll take some disaster committed by coked-up elite soldiers for any change to happen. In the meantime, if some soldiers die, there are always more eager young men willing to learn how to become killers.