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.
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.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.”
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.
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!”
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.”
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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