The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp. Viking, 357 pages.

Something is rotten at Fort Bragg. 

Soldiers have been dropping like flies at the North Carolina military installation, home to Special Operations Command and its elite, top-secret Delta Force. The deaths have taken many forms: overdoses, murders, suicides, and at least one decapitation that the Army tried to pass off as a boating accident. 

Seth Harp, an Iraq War veteran and investigative journalist, reports on many of these cases in The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces. He writes about them with style and drama and deep knowledge—and sometimes in disturbing detail—though the exact source of the rottenness remains a mystery at book’s end.

One particular murder case threads the book: the killing of William Lavigne, an active-duty Delta Force operator, and Timothy Dumas, a former chief warrant officer in the Army, their bullet-riddled bodies discovered in the remote pine woods of Fort Bragg in December 2020. The two men had been involved in a drug ring—not selling a few grams of bud to friends, but moving whole kilograms of hard stuff—a disconcertingly common practice on post, which Dumas had threatened to expose in a blackmail letter. 

We the readers don’t get to the double homicide until past the book’s midway point, but when we do, the animating question of The Fort Bragg Cartel is revealed: Who killed Billy Lavigne?

We never really find out, though the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division (CID) eventually names a suspect whom Harp considers, with some justification, rather unlikely. The absence of closure isn’t merely unsatisfying; it feels strangely personal. Lavigne—who joined the Army as a naïve teenager in February 2001, had his life turned upside down on 9/11, deployed a dozen times to several countries that Washington had seen fit to pulverize, and wound up a profoundly broken person—serves as a metaphor for the American military, and perhaps for America.

An earlier homicide involving Lavigne focuses the first couple chapters: the killing in March 2018 of Lavigne’s best friend Mark Leshikar, another Special Forces soldier. In that case, we know who pulled the trigger.

Lavigne and Leshikar each had enough drugs in their system to make Hunter S. Thompson blush as they drove home to North Carolina from Disney World, their two young daughters in the back of the car. Under the effects of psychotropic drugs, Leshikar grew paranoid, convinced that they were being tailed, that the car was bugged, that Lavigne was complicit in some dark conspiracy against him. 

After they arrived at Lavigne’s home in the early evening, Leshikar popped the hood and began to disassemble the still-hot motor, searching for hidden microphones. When Lavigne tried to take the screwdriver from his mad friend’s hands, a fight ensued. Harp writes:

Leshikar had two inches and twenty pounds on Lavigne, but Lavigne had been trained in a syncretic brand of marital arts unique to the Army, drawn from Muay Thai, Brazilian jiujitsu, Krav Maga, and plain old American-style boxing. Despite being the smaller man, he managed to subdue Leshikar. He grabbed hold of both girls, bundled them into the house, and locked the front door, leaving Leshikar panting, red-faced, and enraged.

Inside the home, Lavigne phoned a mutual friend, Jens Merritt, and asked him to come over and help defuse the situation. But by the time Merritt arrived, it was too late. Leshikar had gained entry into the home, let in by his 6-year-old daughter Melanie, who watched as her father was gunned down by “Uncle Billy” in the foyer. Minor police questioning revealed inconsistencies—and even outright lies—in Lavigne’s story. Yet Lavigne, though brought to the county jail, was never even officially arrested, much less tried and convicted.

Thus commences a major theme of the book: the near impunity enjoyed by Delta Force operators, and in particular Lavigne, who would go on to commit several more felonious acts before winding up dead in a forested corner of Fort Bragg. After spending millions turning men like Lavigne into lethal machines, the U.S. military is reluctant to let its highest-value soldiers languish in a prison cell. Another factor, perhaps more decisive: The Pentagon wants to keep Delta Force a secret, and that’s hard to do when operators make the news for committing grisly murders and drug crimes.

But did Lavigne deserve prison time for killing Leshikar, a behemoth of a man who was “enraged” and mentally unmoored when he unexpectedly and without permission entered Lavigne’s home? True, as a Green Beret, Leshikar lacked Lavigne’s combat training. But he was still a Green Beret, and Lavigne could not take for granted that the larger, well-trained, and highly agitated Leshikar could be easily subdued a second time. That Lavigne felt himself to be acting in self-defense, and that the authorities acted more or less reasonably by not locking him up, are plausible-enough conclusions based on the evidence, in the opinion of this reviewer, though he undoubtedly received special treatment.

Similarly, the cloud of doubt and suspicion that Harp whips up over the killings of Lavigne and Dumas is a little darker than seems deserved. I will not spoil the book by revealing the “third man” alleged to have murdered one or both of the others, but I cannot quite see what makes it so unbelievable that the government nabbed the right guy. The most sensational alternative theory—that Delta Force command had Lavigne and Dumas killed—seems comparatively less likely. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

That’s not a knock on the book. Many of the people close to the events it describes take a conspiratorial view of the strange and lethal happenings at Fort Bragg. Harp stands on firm journalistic ground when he reports their suspicions. Moreover, much of the fun of the book—which reads like a nonfiction thriller—is developing one’s own theories and interpretations of the inconclusive evidence. Personally, I think one Freddie Huff deserves more attention from CID detectives. Huff—a disgruntled ex-cop who linked up with Mexican cartels and degenerated into a kind of suburban Scarface—seems to have had both the motive and the means to order the double homicide, if not carry it out himself.

Less pleasant than playing reader-detective is digesting gruesome accounts of Delta Force’s “night raids” in the Middle East. Evidently, the Global War on Terrorism had devolved by the time of the Obama administration into a covert killfest carried out by men with long hair, bushy beards, and ragtag non-uniforms who were hopped up on methamphetamine as they blasted away at suspected “terrorists”—with an error rate around 50 percent. 

Also unpleasant is reading about the various ways in which the GWOT followed America’s warfighters back home. Meet Billy’s dog:

a tautly poised, hyper-alert Belgian Malinois named Rocky that had been one of the unit’s working animals. Nicole wanted to know why it had no teeth. Lavigne told her that its titanium dentures had been surgically removed upon retirement because the dog had been trained to attack and had grown accustomed to feeding on the flesh of people killed in special operations raids, including being allowed, ‘as a treat,’ to eat human brains.

The Fort Bragg Cartel is a book about Billy Lavigne, but it’s also a book about the post-9/11 wars, the context within which Lavigne turned into a dead-eyed criminal and Rocky turned into a gummy former brain eater. And it’s about types of blowback that the officials who launched those wars never anticipated. 

Toppling the Taliban in Afghanistan, for example, engendered the rise to power of drug lords (and child-sex-traffickers) and a return of the opium poppy fields that had been outlawed. Incredibly, Afghanistan became the largest narco-state in the world by far under America’s post-Taliban client government, producing a mind-boggling quantity of heroin that exceeded global demand. Much of that smack made its way to the U.S., worsening Americans’ opiates addiction and laying the groundwork for the fentanyl crisis. And some of it was brought back by U.S. soldiers looking to turn a profit.

How could America’s most prestigious warriors—men who risked their lives to serve their country—get caught up in such a disgraceful web of criminal treachery? During a guest appearance on the Tucker Carlson Show this summer, Harp offered a psychological insight that may shed light on that question:

My inclination is to think that it is a result of waging wars that nobody really believes in, for years and years, because think about what that does to your psychology. When you’re engaged in a righteous cause that has widespread societal buy-in, you’re going to be constrained by your own sense of yourself as a virtuous actor. And you’re going to know, when you’re tempted to do things for money or for other motives, that that’s not consistent with your self-image, and so you don’t do it.

By contrast, when you’re waging wars for Israel, or for weapons contractors, or for no discernible reason at all, there’s not much stopping you from becoming the kind of monster you at first had thought that you’d be fighting.

Subscribe Today

Get daily emails in your inbox

Email Address:

George Orwell, in his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” states a fact that pacifists, he says, cannot accept: “Those who ‘abjure’ violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf.” Somewhere along the winding roads of intellectual engagement with Orwell, this quote morphed into a different one often misattributed to him, including on a U.S. Army poster that I saw frequently while growing up on military bases: “People sleep peaceably in their beds at night because rough men stand ready to do violence on their behalf.” 

The apocryphal quote captures conservative insights about human nature, the reality of evil, and the necessity of violence in protecting home and community from dangerous outsiders—insights that were revived in public consciousness on 9/11. After the attacks, the American people trusted President George W. Bush to protect the homeland, and rough young men signed up to do violence on the nation’s behalf. 

The Bush administration failed us all, exploiting the surge of nationalism to launch—and lose—a global war that had little to do with 9/11. In the process, those enlistees inflicted senseless violence that prevented many innocent people in the Middle East from sleeping peaceably in their own beds. One such enlistee, Bill Lavigne, had a bad conscience as a result, and seems to have had trouble living with a murderer—that is, with himself.The Fort Bragg Cartel uncovers much of the worst of what many elite U.S. soldiers have been up to, both abroad and here at home. Perhaps the book’s most constructive, if discombobulating, contribution is to make real and pressing and alive again a question that had become cliched these last couple decades: Are we the bad guys?