The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

by Seth Harp

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025
A Forbes Best True Crime Book of 2025

“Probably the most gripping, memorable, eye-opening book I’ve read in months.” —David Wallace-Wells, The New York Times

“Propulsive.” —The Washington Post

“Engrossing. . . . Truly shocking.” —The New Republic

“The Fort Bragg Cartel opens like a nonfiction thriller and never lets up. A page-turning investigation into the dark side of our forever wars.”
—Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Ghost Wars and Directorate S

A groundbreaking investigation into a string of unsolved murders at America’s premier special operations base, and what the crimes reveal about drug trafficking and impunity among elite soldiers in today’s military

In December 2020, a deer hunter discovered two dead bodies that had been riddled with bullets and dumped in a forested corner of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. One of the dead men, Master Sergeant William “Billy” Lavigne, was a member of Delta Force, the most secretive “black ops” unit in the military. A deeply traumatized veteran of America’s classified assassination program, Lavigne had done more than a dozen deployments in his lengthy career, was addicted to crack cocaine, dealt drugs on base, and had committed a series of violent crimes before he was mysteriously killed. The other victim, Chief Warrant Officer Timothy Dumas, was a quartermaster attached to the Special Forces who used his proximity to clandestine missions to steal guns and traffic drugs into the United States from abroad, and had written a blackmail letter threatening to expose criminality in the special operations task force in Afghanistan.

As soon as Seth Harp, an Iraq war veteran and investigative reporter, begins looking into the double murder, he learns that there have been many more unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg recently, other murders connected to drug trafficking in elite units, and dozens of fatal overdoses. Drawing on declassified documents, trial transcripts, police records, and hundreds of interviews, Harp tells a scathing story of narco-trafficking in the Special Forces, drug conspiracies abetted by corrupt police, blatant military cover-ups, American complicity in the Afghan heroin trade, and the pernicious consequences of continuous war.

Genres: Nonfiction, History, True Crime, Crime, Audiobook, Politics, Military Fiction

356 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 12, 2025

Reviews

[Kyle Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In response to the strange 1 star review that immediately showed up about this brand-new book (Rachel, who blocked comments on her review):

These are weird conclusions that are being drawn and it makes me feel like you didn’t actually read it? Or misunderstood it?

If you don’t believe that proxy wars exist and that our military/ intelligence agencies have a huge influence in other parts of the world (like Ukraine) you can look them up yourself! The CIA has released a lot of their past crimes to their database due to the Freedom of Information Act.

Giving this book a very lazy one star review (with nonsensical statements about it) before it’s even released, and with just enough likes to put it at the top rly feels like weird opposition propaganda from either the several ops groups listed in this book trying to deaden the impact or from some far-right bot farm. Nothing stated in this book was unbelievable and had sources and first-hand accounts for everything.

[Matthew Petti · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most jaw-dropping pieces of investigative journalism I have ever read. Full review in Reason Magazine: https://reason.com/2025/08/12/how-eli...

[Hammerhead · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rachel comment locked "review" above only actual criticism toward the content of the book is that a victim of a murder in the very first case of book is potrayed in a good light by his own family.
The rest are accusations of the author being a conspiracy theorist without any reference to the actual content of the book. Regardless of the author alleged opinions, this book deal with documented incidents which can be verify by court record, police report and newspaper.
If you are interested, you can find review of this book by the Washington Post and the New York Times which certainly have no sympathy with these opinions.

[Benjamin · Rating 5 out of 5]

As someone that lived in Fayetteville for the better part of 18 years this book is very important to me. Anyone who has lived there long enough can tell you how sinister things are and how wrong things feel. Thank you Seth for shining some light on the situation here.

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

received an ARC from netgalley, became suspicious of the author when he spent pages telling me about a man doing drugs and drinking through his daughter's 6th birthday trip to disneyworld then tried to convince me that the man was a doting father. more suspicions arose while reading and i DNF when the author stated point blank that covid-19 escaped from a us-funded biolab in china. it's a shame bc he's an engaging writer.

update: i finished the book because i couldn't look away, and in the course of the rest of it the author tries to convince you that america started the war in ukraine, that yanukovych was a democratically elected ruler, that assad was a good guy and preferable to any other government, and that the war in ukraine is over and america lost. i can't get over these politics, which seem to be coming from another reality.

UPDATE: your weird comments will not change my opinion of this book, and i'm not a bot or a military plant. i just didn't like this book. go outside.

[Adam McPhee · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book that feels like a definitive statement on the War of Terror, or at least this phase of it. Reminded me of Generation Kill, but from the other end of a hard twenty years. Very cinematic. Harp could've just listed all of these parallel cases of under-investigated violence or given us a table, but instead it's a staccato beat, hammering in the point of the book: the war has come home.

[Daniel Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

an important book and a story that needs to be told. however, the author can't keep his politics out of his writing. had he simply told the story and let the facts speak for themselves the book would have been more powerful.

[Charlotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be honest, I‘m having a hard time rating this, and here‘s why:
It‘s a fascinating investigation that makes astonishing, yet in principle believable, claims, and I was pretty rapt the entire time.

Here‘s the problem: The author also repeats some things that are basically conspiracy myths as facts, and since I know those are not true — or at the very least presented very disingenuously, presumably to fit with the authors political views — I‘m not so sure about how much to trust the rest, in particular the claims about covert operations of the US military abroad.

To be clear, nobody is apolitical, and I am not somebody to complain about the author giving a political view — however, here it seems like the author doesn‘t want to admit that‘s what he‘s doing, and instead presents things as fact that are at best a disingenuous description of the circumstances, and that I very much disagree with. I‘m also not calling the author MAGA — it doesn‘t seem like he is, but I think he is letting his anti-imperialist views (which I share) blind him to certain realities.

Examples:
- The author presents the idea that the COVID virus “escaped from a US-funded lab” as a fact — so here it’s not just that there is no scientific evidence that this is true; it’s really a conspiracy myth at this point, even though certain US security agencies (aren’t we being critical of those?) have endorsed it. Furthermore, calling the lab “US-funded” is clearly meant to paint this lab in a sinister light that in no way corresponds to reality.
- The Euromaidan revolution in Ukraine is called a “US-funded coup against a democratically elected president”, which is absolutely not what happened and makes a mockery of Ukrainian’s struggle for democracy and independence from Russia.
- The same is true for the author’s implication that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is the US’ fault and “a US proxy war” — Ukrainians would in large parts not agree with this. They are fighting for the continued existence of their state, that Putin has multiple times said he wants to destroy. Why is the author letting his hatred of the US military make him a Putin stooge? Shameful.
- Other conflict journalists have literally talked to Russian anti-government saboteurs who have conducted some of the operations that are being attributed to US special forces in this book with no evidence. Weak.

So yeah, these things make me doubtful how reliable the narrative is when it’s talking about what happened in Tajikistan or Afghanistan, sorry, even though that would align with my political views.

[danny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I tore through this book, which almost makes me a little suspicious of it as a work of nonfiction/journalism - as the chapo guys said in their interview w the author (yes its true I still listen sometimes), it reads like a novel in some of the best ways. And to lead with a minor quibble, I do think there are ways in which this book gets repetitive on certain themes/facts and can feel a little tooo assertion-heavy (I noticed this most when it came to stating lab-leak theory as accepted fact, which makes me feel it was also present elsewhere in ways I was just more inclined to reflexively accept), and I'd be curious to hear how other journalists (not the propagandist type, but maybe like a Ryan Grim or Jeremy Scahill) would rate the quality of research, sourcing, and writing.

So yes, I think I'm definitely the kind of anti-imperialist (read: american hating) reader that this book is for, which doesn't mean that most of the things contained in it aren't verifiably true. The book covers a LOT of ground, and I sometimes worried it was maybe over-inclusive with examples, recounting such a large number of army/JSOC overdoses and murders that it took away from the impact of the stories it slowed down to tell in depth - the Lavigne/Dumas murders, but also the chilling Roman-Martinez shrooms-trip turned decapitation story.

All of that aside, I think the book is an incredible - and incredibly gripping - narration of the so-called 'global war on terror' and the rise of special forces/operations as both a concrete, widespread technique of conducting imperial warfare and also an almost libidinal part of the (white) american male id.

One of the things I was thinking about by the end of the book was how, per Foucault, the barracks resemble the prison, with notable inversions when it comes to power. But both institutions emerge as drug-riddled, corrupt, shielded-from-accountability laboratories for engineering misery and despair. Not to mention places that concentrate and disappear social iniquities and afflictions. So many of the stories and themes could have been taken out of accounts I've heard personally or read about in the context of prison, down to the objectively-heartbreaking phenomenon of families in search of answers and utterly - and without recourse - stonewalled by heartless bureaucracies. And of course, the whole "bases are in the south in part because of the civil rights movement" and focus on geographical context surrounding Fort Bragg also made me sort of crave a Ruth Gilmore-style geographical analysis of how bases operate. I'm sure it's out there, to be fair, I would just be interested in finding it.

As a total side note, this is a really good companion piece to Blowback, and in particular the season about Afghanistan.

Would really recommend to anyone looking for a gripping, very disturbing narration of (some of) the excesses and indignities of the US military.

[viy]

it's well written, engaging, read the whole thing in a day. Shame he couldn't really develop certain lines further, or stick certain concrete conclusions, but we'll wait for the american glasnost.

[Trent · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was tough to read, it’s hyperbolic to the point of becoming a histrionic display of non-objective nonsense. I was a lawyer on Fort Bragg, and knew by name every lawyer mentioned in the book. Much discussed in this book is factually accurate, but presented in such an unpalatable way it’s hard to believe anything he’s written. It was made with an eye toward capitalizing on outrage instead of bringing information to light. I do not recommend this book.

To help you understand, if the author Seth Harp saw me crying he would write: “he was emotionally unhinged and barely in control,” if Seth Harp saw me drinking a beer he would write: “he was a sloppy addict who was constantly drenched in alcohol,” if Seth Harp saw me happy he would write: “as a result of an unknown cocktail of chemicals he was prone to an unnatural habit of smiling.” He writes to some dark and sinister aesthetic rather than reporting, and it makes me question everything he reveals. When is the play-acting real information?

Even basic things have to be turned film noir even if the depictions lack narrative coherence. Sometimes Fort Bragg is a pockmarked wasteland of scrubby pines suitable for nothing, yet somehow the towns nestled amongst those same pines like Pinehurst, Whispering Pines, and Southern Pines are idyllic (and on a side note home to some of the nation’s most beautiful golf courses).

The land is said to be “scarred from military maneuvers” yet it’s considered one of the finest examples of pine forests in the state due to the controlled forest fires used to keep the forest pristine and usable. Large gaps in the forest are maintained to land parachute troops from the 82d Airborne Division (because it’s not safe to land paratroopers in trees) and it’s even the habitat of a rare woodpecker Mr. Harp didn’t mention. It’s whatever he wants it to be, as long as it’s dark and sinister.

Those are small complaints, but they become annoying when a place like Lake MacArthur is in “a remote corner” of the post in one chapter, and then too crowded with security guards for a criminal to think to venture there when it suits a different narrative.

When it comes to substantive material the tendency to state speculation as fact or attribute malevolent intent where it doesn’t exist is just ridiculous. The idea of a courtroom cover up is laughable. As they say: everything is a mystery if you don’t know how anything works. The success rate for those cases is worse than 50% and that data was in the same Fort Hood report Mr. Harp say he looked through. That’s not a cover up, it’s statistics.

The rest is the same nonsense we are always fed. There is a singular and monolithic bad guy filled with evil goals focused on the small and niche concerns of confused and hurt people. There isn’t malevolent intent driving every action, just a reality of confusion, contradiction, drug-addled conspiracies, and complex emotional actors whose motivations are a mystery even to themselves. Turning hurt confusion into conspiracy theories serves no one.

[Corto · Rating 5 out of 5]

During the 1980’s I met a lot of Vietnam Veterans from all branches of the military. There were a few who were still battling addiction that stemmed from their time in-country, and one guy - a former Army LOACH crew chief whose face and hands bore massive scars from being burnt by white phosphorus. He and I talked about the prevalence of drugs in Vietnam - and he told me that he had no problem getting off heroin when he returned to the United States because, “It was just so pure over there. When I got back home, the heroin here was cut so much, it didn’t do anything for me, so I quit. Never did it again.” At the time, being all of 14, I just associated the prevalence of drugs in Vietnam with the weed and psychedelics boom of the hippie movement. It being the 80’s, I thought the scourge of drugs was over in the military. It was Reagan’s America, everything was bright, shiny, and new. We had moved on from the decadent indulgence of the 60’s and the “Me Generation” that the hippies had become. And it was a good thing too. The father of a friend of mine had been an Army psychologist during Vietnam, and was assigned to a very discreet program treating returning soldiers who were heavily addicted to drugs. He said that it was a horrific and widespread problem, but didn’t elaborate. In my naïveté, I was glad that we’d solved that problem and our new Army was as clean as a whistle.

Fast-forward 15-20ish years, and every once in a while during the GWOT, I’d read news items about drugs in Afghanistan - which I wasn’t surprised about. I was well-acquainted with Afghanistan’s history as a prolific producer of drugs like heroin and hashish. Surely it would surprise no one, if during a tour of duty, a psychologically traumatized grunt would seek refuge in some hash, or god forbid, heroin. We’ve seen this movie before, right? But SF people doing drugs? No way. Up to the GWOT, I’d met and known a wide panoply of military personnel, including SF guys who’d fought in Korea, Vietnam, Central America, and Afghanistan (in the 80’s). I could not envision *any* of those dudes doing drugs - *especially* drugs like cocaine - at least not while they were in the military.

As I write that, it occurs to me, I have to take it back. I knew one guy who cut his teeth in Korea as an infantryman, served in Vietnam as an SF soldier, then served in Central America and Afghanistan in one of the specialized units mentioned in this book. He told me that during Vietnam the Army gave him speed to stay awake on missions (for several days at a time), debriefed him with sodium pentothal, then gave him benzos so he could sleep. As I think back on the scene he was in when I met him, I’m pretty goddamn sure he must’ve been doing a ton of coke through the 80’s. Seth Harp’s characterization of the SF community tracks for me. An SF guy I knew during the GWOT who was very religious, and though not a teetotaler (but not a heavy drinker either), was definitely not doing any drugs. No way in hell. These two SF guys in comparison with each other were very different.

This lengthy preamble serves to basically support a very simple personal observation: I shouldn’t have been surprised by this book, but I was. I mean…this book details a military drug culture that I thought had died out with Vietnam. (Except for that ex-paratrooper I met who started trafficking drugs while he’d been stationed in Panama in the late 70’s.) In a way, the status of America’s Special Operations Forces community, and Fort Bragg as Harp describes it now, seems *worse* than the 60’s.

The way I see it, the military is designed for one thing: to exert force, threaten force, and kill. Bottom line. Kill, or demonstrate the ability to kill our enemies anytime, anyplace, anywhere. When you train men to kill, it fucks them up. When men - even highly trained men - kill, it really fucks them up. And what do you do when you’re fucked up? You self-medicate. It makes sense to me, that a modern, highly trained group of “assassins” (perhaps the most highly trained in the world) like the Delta Force guys who go on deployment after deployment, and mission after mission, that their psyches are a bubbling stew of trauma and rage. Not to mention the fact that the trauma and rage are exacerbated by steroids and military-issued speed. It’s a perfect storm, because as Dr. Jonathan Shay noted in Achilles in Vietnam (an excellent evaluation of the nature and ramifications of combat stress) the military does not do anything to “deprogram” its combat arms personnel.

This creates cultures on bases like Fort Bragg and Fort Hood, and JBLM that pose a risk to life and limb for the conventional and support troops stationed there, as well as for dependents and townies. When the main purpose of these places is to (literally) facilitate violence, it’s ridiculous to think it won’t seep out beyond its intended and acceptable venue where it’s meant to be expressed. To circle back on this ramble, I’m surprised by the prevalence of drug use in this era, *not* the violence instinctively doled out by operators doing their best to maintain their mental stability. I mean …DO THEY NOT DO PISS TESTS ALL OVER THE ARMY, ALL THE TIME!?!! Harp asserts that the military establishment, especially in relation to Delta Force, turns a blind eye to drug abuse…and I suppose if you have a secret corps of assassins, it makes sense to let them do whatever the fuck they want. How can you train men like that - men who have the most difficult skill-set to attain - and *not* cut them some slack when it comes to doing whatever the fuck they need to do to unwind? I’m not saying it’s morally right, I’m just saying it’s understandable. I can imagine the brass looking at the domestic damage committed by Delta and SEAL guys and saying, “We need these guys to walk into countries, kill the people we need killed and then vanish into thin air. A spouse here or there, or a bystander, or an enlisted POG who wanders away from a beach party, is acceptable collateral damage when compared to meeting the needs of our national security requirements.” *That* makes sense to me too. Life is cheap when your business is killing for your country. And when you’re trained to a fever pitch. I can only imagine the things these guys have seen and done.

I have some opinions on how Harp conceptualizes our military, our allies, and our country in general. But, I won’t offer those here. I’m not on the same page as he is politically. All in all, this was a fascinating and important book. It peels back the glamorous facade of elite soldiering, and lays bare the harsh truth of what soldiering is and has *always* been. It’s ugly.

Kudos to Harp. I haven’t felt this nihilistic since the first time I saw Apocalypse Now.

I’ll be watching the news to see if Harp ever has a fatal “car accident”. Good luck man.

[Julie · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Fort Bragg cartel refers to an elite force created by the U.S. government to do its so-called "wet work"—clandestine missions that involved assassinations and mass killings of our strategic enemies—which turned to extracurricular activities during and after their tours to... I guess essentially sustain their combat adrenaline rush and sense of power, as well as to manage the PTSD and boredom that haunted them Stateside. I don't suppose the powers that be who created these über-soliders really cared, beyond achieving their tactical objectives. The men who form these special ops military units, particularly the Navy Seals, and ultra-secretive Delta Force that is the focus of Seth Harp's investigative book, are trained to become fighting machines. But despite the expectation that these men develop nerves and muscles of steel, they are still fallible humans who crack under pressure, like anyone else. But few anyone elses have to live in the pressure cooker these soldiers do, or are routinely prescribed methamphetamines and steroids to get through their work detail. Or have the knowledge of spy craft, weaponry, and combat tactics.

Harp's book centers on a few of these men—there are unsolved murders, rampant drug trafficking, and coverups on an industrial scale. Seth Harp, an investigative journalist, writer for Rolling Stone, and a combat veteran who served in Iraq, writes with authority and flair. This is a shocking book, but hardly surprising to anyone who has been paying attention since Vietnam. The Fort Bragg Cartel is a haunting, infuriating, unputdownable read.

[Carter Kalchik · Rating 2 out of 5]

5 stars for on the ground reporting, 1 star for the every so often baffling shit.

There clearly is a deep and undermining rot inside U.S. special forces. And even if there wasn’t, there clearly is an absurdly large amount of drug dealing and using in and around Fort Bragg. And suicides. And murders.

Harp did frankly heroic work reporting on it, although he never really did get to the bottom of everything, mostly because the military wants to sweep all this under the rug. Although, the existence of this book does seem to belie the omnipotent power of special forces to suppress their misdeeds.

And then, like every dozen pages or so, you’ll walk over these weirdo land mines. Harp credulously reports that U.S. special forces have technology that can “view you through your TV.” That Muammar Qaddafi was merely an “idiosyncratic Arab nationalist.” That Assad’s only crime was being a foe of Israel. That the U.S. provoked Russia into invading Ukraine as a pretext for “forever war”. This is after the U.S. perpetrated a “coup” against the “democratically elected” President Viktor Yanukovych. Oh, and that COVID “escaped from a U.S.-funded biolab in Wuhan, China.”

Maybe I can forgive the tech stuff because I’m not sure how savvy Harp is given that he referred to documents that were “leaked to a server called Discord.” Taken as a whole, though, this is a particular conspiracist worldview with which I’m deeply familiar and calls into question much of the rest of the book.

If you just take the investigative reporting, this is good stuff and even brave. The on the ground reporting is pretty thorough and Harp has extensive quotes and sourcing. But any time he strays into interpretation or analysis, I’m left to wonder how this worldview has potentially slanted things.

[Bonnie_Rae]

This is heavy, dark reading that covers the dark, awful side of the special forces/operations culture of corruption, coverups, and excess. I had to re-read several passages multiple times to absorb what I was reading. The informants - parents, siblings, friends, neighbors, witnesses - were incredibly brave and honest with their recollections and opinions. What the children saw and suffered - oftentimes at the direct actions of their fathers - is something no child should ever endure. This book covers murders, domestic violence, sexual assault, violent attacks, suicides, substance abuse, trafficking, and warfare.

Seth Harp has a definite bias in his writing, which I largely share. He never misses an opportunity to dunk on the New York Times for their credulous and lazy reporting (one reporter didn't check their work and mixed up Fort Hood and Fort Bragg). He comes right out and says the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab in Wuhan, China - which I do not believe. He even claims a military dog developed a taste for human brains and gore, which I don't believe. It feels akin to real life stories about starving or sick feral animals eating the flesh of dead people or carrion.

He also throws in several ten dollar words for good measure, a habit from writers that annoys me. Having to stop, look up the word, and then get back into the flow of reading is something I hate doing.

However, I think this is a necessary book akin to Matthew Cole's Code Over Country: The Tragedy and Corruption of SEAL Team Six, David Phillips's Alpha: Eddie Gallagher and the War for the Soul of the Navy SEALs, and Michael Hastings's The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan. This is a book that will stick with you for a very long time, so before you go in I feel you should know the violence and destruction practically encouraged and nurtured by the self-serving, self-destructive USASOC will stick with you.

[Cheryl R. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is both deeply disturbing and totally plausible. It demonstrates the consequences of America’s forever wars. One of the prime causes of PTSD is moral injury, where the person essentially can’t live with what they have seen or done. Perhaps the ambivalent treatment of Vietnam veterans might not be the worst thing we’ve ever done to veterans. The worst treatment may be how we have ignored what we’ve asked the GWOT veterans to do, and then ignored the invisible wounds those acts have created. When considering whether they are the perpetrators or the victims themselves, the answer is perhaps “it’s complicated”.

[Nathan Mannes · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one went crazy thank you TrueAnon

[Dan · Rating 4 out of 5]

An eye opening look into what happens when you create an unaccountable army of throat-slitters for capitalism. Harp's reporting in this book is a strong callback to 1970s exposes of the intelligence community, showing how hidden behind the secrecy of "national security" what goes on is really just wanton criminality of the worst kind. 25 years of infinite warfare, justified by an intelligence operation planned for years by the US, Saudis, and Israelis has killed millions of people, destroyed dozens of nations, all to make the worst people on the planet richer and more powerful. While it can't be surprising that creating a praetorian guard with total impunity to do whatever they want would lead to some enormous crimes, Harp's investigation reveals the details of just how depraved the world of secret murderers really is.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

At the fringes of my usual reading but picked this up after listening to an interesting interview on a lawfare podcast. Listened to the audiobook on a roadtrip (fairly boring narrator).

The true crime parts and the focus on the special forces units were the most interesting parts. The broader disquisitions on the GWOT felt tired. My biggest issue was wondering about sourcing a lot of the time. And I’m just not sure what’s normal to include/not include about that in a book of this nature. But there were parts pinging my doubt throughout.

Then, in introducing COVID era, Harp simply states as fact in passing: “On March 4th, North Carolina reported its first case of COVID-19, a highly contagious respiratory disease that escaped from a US-funded bio lab in Wuhan, China.” Record scratch. Say what now? If that can be stated as if proven fact with no discussion or sourcing, then how much confidence can I have in anything Harp states? Especially where he isn’t explicit about the source of information. (We also get some weird bits about the cause of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, etc.) Hard to appreciate the interesting parts of this book when feeling more and more suspect of the reporting as I went.

I almost would’ve preferred this as a true crime podcast, because then at least I would’ve heard many of the people in their own voices to get a better sense of them and we probably would’ve hewn closer to that story. Also, I probably wouldn’t have paid for a podcast.

[Pete Warden · Rating 1 out of 5]

Impressive reporting, bad history

I came to this book with high hopes, the interviews and personal stories the author has gathered are deeply moving, and the statistics are shocking. I'm not familiar with the military world he describes, so I had to rely on him as a narrator to understand the bigger picture. Unfortunately he lost credibility with me when he described the origin of COVID unequivocally as a lab leak, a theory that most experts don't agree with. I thought that might be an aberration, but soon after he bent over backwards to blame the US for somehow forcing Russia to invade Ukraine.
Those weird takes on topics I know something about left me doubting his reliability on everything else he covered. it's unfortunate because the book covers a very important topic, but I can't recommend non-fiction that indulges in poorly-sourced conspiracy theories that aren't even particularly relevant for the central theme.

[Olivia Sessum · Rating 1 out of 5]

biggest waste of my time and money

my fav quote from this book is when the author unequivocally asserts that covid 19 was made in a us funded bio lab in china

also when he calls a cia officer a "cia special agent"

also when he says the us caused the war in ukraine

lost all credibility and authority after that

fuck this book i hate it so much

[Kaylee · Rating 4 out of 5]

jesus christ

[cruis'n esoterica · Rating 4 out of 5]

the most disturbing nonfiction account of warfare’s domestic toll i've read. with the exception of the countless dumbfounded exes, girlfriends, wives, and mothers, each figure leers horribly over the proceedings, profoundly capable and desirous of murder far beyond the limit of the human soul. darkly, they’re all aware of this: while the monotonous maudlin recollections brought on by depressants equally mute their restraints and intensify their guilt, you get the sense (and, if i remember correctly, Harp outright says) that killing is the real addiction. there are multiple images involving a gleeful Operator brandishing one of his countless weapons in prosecution of some stupid personal grievance only to be talked into putting the gun away, at which point his frayed, tooth-clenched rage disintegrates into weepy, clownish “I’m a killer, I’m a bad guy, I’ve done bad things, I’m just a killer…” Harp wants you to see Operator culture for what it is--pathetic, deluded, flaccid--but i often felt like these instances only made this story’s monsters even less human. we are reminded constantly, not just by Harp’s sources but by Harp himself, that main character Billy Lavigne is a man transformed, out of his depth, an erstwhile good sweet human turned nightstalker by the vampiric American war monster. i never felt like this was entirely successful.

the episodes involving talkative cop-turned-drug kingpin Freddie Wayne Huff are often a welcome, bizarrely human reprieve, though by the end he feels terrifyingly close to slipping into a the clutches of something far beyond even his likably sharp understanding. there are other glimpses of humanity as well: Courtney Williams’ chapter, centered on Fort Bragg’s all-female team of undercover identity manufacturers, their skillsets, and the abuses they suffer at the hands of their Operator colleagues, is fascinating amidst all the grotesquery. the chapter that follows, centered on Erin Scanlon, is extremely distressing, examining the multitudinous examples of one-sentence suffering Fayetteville women endure throughout the rest of the book in cruel bureaucratic detail.

Harp’s Fayetteville is always dark and cold and leafless; zombie addicts rove about and the agonizingly normal strip-mall brewpubs are all peopled with far more lucid, more threatening revenants. the woods are everywhere and even the creeks are black. expertly, his Fort Bragg feels like a huge unidentifiable shape or face, likely because security is just that tight. i thought about Slender Man a lot while i was reading this, possibly because the figure’s Marble Hornets iteration is called “the Operator,” possibly because (as every folklorist has now attested) it’s so tied up in Forever War and Information Age anxieties, or possibly because the power of the American death machine feels so ancient, intangible, and supernatural that i can’t help but graft them onto some sort of meme bogeyman. i’m not saying that this book’s horrors feel unreal; rather, they feel so real that the idea of coexisting with them requires a kind of psychological realignment that i would imagine is akin to an suddenly finding yourself believing in the idea of Hell.

“A lot of strange things happen around Fort Bragg and are never explained,” Harp says late in the third act, utilizing a kind of cheeky understatement that he struggles to resist. while it did make me laugh, this line follows the most deranged third-act turn i’ve ever encountered in a nonfiction book. it is very, very similar to a shift that occurs in 2666, a book with nonfiction qualities that is thankfully at least marginally fictional. “A lot of strange things happen around Fort Bragg and are never explained” feels like it’s bringing us out of that demented spiral, back into the world Harp wants to present: these Operators are pathetic, Fort Bragg is a powderkeg, the coverups are laughable, the American military is increasingly failing at its mission, both to grow its own ranks and to win wars. but as much as i don’t want to be around these men, i don’t not want to be these men. i think, in critiquing Operator culture through objectively portraying the darkest elements of the Special Forces, Harp presents us with something that is less alienated and alienating than it is decadent. i don’t not want to sit around all day belting overpriced whiskey and cigars in one of the most top-secret places in America. a world where i could effortlessly threaten enemies and manipulate cops seems pleasant, if not aspirational, and like all postmodern men, i love nothing more than tearfully wallowing in my own perceived badness. with all that in mind, the evil cackle that rattles off the epilogue’s last page seems scarily prescient, victorious. i wonder if we even stand a chance.

[Rowan Lister · Rating 3 out of 5]

Harp’s recounting of the various horrors perpetrated by certain special forces operators and his criticism of the culture on Fort Bragg in general is well researched and supported. Bragg has a higher rate of drug use, uxoricide, and homicide than any other U.S. military base, and the military police and brass turn a blind eye to much of it. There have been some very suspicious deaths that local authorities and military police aren’t keen, or aren’t willing, to solve anytime soon.

However, he goes off the rails with a bit more of a hysterical or sensationalistic tone, which leaves the reader a bit skeptical. He also wades into some popular conspiracies. No problem there, just be warned that he does.

In terms of structural issues, as one friend put it “you can tell he had like three Rolling Stones articles in there and was just kinda trying to fill in the space between them with any content he could.”

[Connor Mellas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Horrifying stuff. My guy Seth needs to keep his head on a swivel writing about these psychos.

[Christopher Mclaughlin · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Fort Bragg Cartel will hook you with the first two chapters. They tell the story of Delta Force operator Billy Levine and his best friend Green Beret Mark Leshikar. I don’t want to spoil anything for readers, so I’ll just say read the damn book. The book is well researched, Seth Harp gets some things wrong, but he gets a lot more right, and as a voracious reader believe me all nonfiction gets things wrong. 3rd Group, Green Berets, JSOC, Delta Force, these are incredibly complex networks operating out of Fort Bragg. Operators under JSOC are covert, and they report directly to the Executive with little to no Congressional oversight.

Because everything they do for the military is covert it is unacceptable for operators in JSOC to be under oath in a court of law or to be incarcerated. This is less true for Tier 2 operators like Green Berets, but the level of impunity they receive in Fayetteville, North Carolina, the home of Fort Bragg, is still astonishing. Murder, rape, drug trafficking, all of these felonies can be made to go away. Victims are promised by Fort Bragg CID that if the investigations are transferred to them from civilian court they’ll receive the justice they deserve. They don’t. Local, county and state police departments, attorneys and judges are complicit.

This is an important book. SOCOM and JSOC don’t want operators acting as criminal organizations. Operators don’t want that either. Yet they create the conditions that enable it and shield operators from consequences. 24 years of the GWOT, Global War on Terror, has created the situation we’re in. The way the United States wages war has changed. War is now carried out by Special Forces covertly under the cover of night. “Night Raids” was most Americans’ first introduction to this kind of war. The constant procurement of intelligence provides a never ending list for targeted killings. Never ending nights of assassinations. No one but a psychopath could come out of that meat grinder without serious damage, and JSOC attempts to screen out psychopaths for obvious reasons.

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone when these operators use the skills the military has taught them to commit crimes. Particularly the Tier 1 operators in Delta Force. PTSD does not begin to capture what their job does to them mentally. JSOC gives them amphetamines and dextroamphetamines to stay awake and focus, hypnotics to sleep, opiates to overcome pain, and steroids to increase endurance and heal faster. At home they escalate to cocaine, methamphetamines, and stronger opiates. Some begin dealing to support their expensive drug habit. None of it is surprising. All of it needs to change.

[Patxi Otxoa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A horrifying glimpse into well-documented events where the U.S. government’s desire for perpetual war takes precedence over the lives of its own people and soldiers.

While Harp highlights this, I can personally confirm that I have seen the trope of the bearded, plain-clothed special operator with night vision and an M4, once the new cowboy and symbol of Western aspiration and manifest destiny, fade away within my own lifetime. The name Fort Bragg now holds, in my mind, a special place that is synonymous with dishonor and dereliction of the most basic moral and military duties.

I feel that the massive shift from use of conventional forces to “special” forces during the GWOT is deeply troubling because it seems to have abstracted a large operational hand of our military even further from the American people’s oversight through the use of “top secret missions” and a limited chain of command. This harms the great people who serve in both special and conventional forces and leaves room for individuals like William Lavigne to fall through the cracks. Our own government leaves its elite soldiers so mentally fractured that one cannot help but wonder what the machine thinks or feels for the average person it has not spent hundreds of millions of dollars transforming into a precise tool to exact its will.

[cheer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Four years after the release of his first Rolling Stone article about a drug-related double murder at Fort Bragg, Seth Harp delivers a full-length account of corruption, drug-trafficking, and gruesome murder at the base that is both thrilling and harrowing.

Harp starts by detailing a murder case involving a few specific Special Forces soldiers at Fort Bragg, then zooms out to discuss the history of American special operations forces in order to contextualize the murders in the grand scheme of American foreign policy and military history, then zooms back in again. The result is a "true crime" narrative where the true perpetrator is the American Empire, whose tentacles grab hold of and destroy everything they can.

Curious why the CIA and FBI seem like they aren't what they used to be? That's because those guys got kinda owned by the Church Committee back in the '70s, which resulted in them being subject to the barest minimum of a horrible thing called "congressional oversight". A couple years later, Delta Force, then JSOC and a bunch of other special forces organizations are founded; these guys take orders directly from their commanding officers and the President, so the CIA and FBI just work through military special forces to conduct their illegal wars now.

Soldiers trained to conduct covert ops overseas, which consist largely of drug trafficking and indiscriminate slaughter, bring their skills home once the Empire has used them up overseas. You'll never guess what they do when they get back to the States!

The writing is engaging and it's hard to put down. Also, this book is a big one for acronymheads; if you want to know the difference between USSOCOM, JSOC, USASOC, and a lot of other evil military organizations, I can't recommend it enough.

[Aaron Witzl · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Just wow. Seth Harp knocked this out of the park. The US military and Fort Bragg specifically is a direct microcosm of the nation at large. Drug trafficking and addiction appears to be as rampant and crippling a problem for the military as it is for the rest of the country. It’s shocking that we aren’t cracking down on it.

He cites so many statistics and facts about the dismal state of Fort Bragg and the broader military that really call in to question as to how we’re able to fight wars overseas at all!

The Fort Bragg Cartel is an excellent page turner describing dozens of bizarre events occurring on base and Fayetteville. 10/10

[Peacegal · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars--I had encountered a couple different interviews with this author and knew I had to read this explosive book. Part investigative journalism, part true crime, and all disturbing. The information comes at you in such a barrage it can be overwhelming.