“The Fort Bragg Cartel” is journalist Seth Harp’s explosive investigation into drug dealing, murder and suicide within America’s special operations forces groups, notably the superelite Delta Force, based in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
This gnarly, in-depth account addresses the domestic consequences of the Global War on Terror, or GWOT, which Harp, an Iraq War veteran, describes as “an era of cataclysmal abasement” that “succeeded only in killing millions of people, displacing tens of millions, squandering trillions of dollars and making America the great villain of the 21st century, in the eyes of most of the world.”
The War on Terror took an immense psychic toll on even the most highly trained warriors, like those in Delta, who perpetrated and witnessed extreme violence during the Iraqi occupation and the 20-year war against the Taliban.
Harp writes that, during the classified night raids of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s “hidden surges,” campaign circa 2010, “teams of Delta Force soldiers, Navy SEALs and Army Rangers … (killed) up to a hundred Afghans at a time… leaving whole villages in smoking ruins.”
Credit: Viking
Credit: Viking
The extent of these atrocities was concealed from the American public whenever possible.
Special operations forces fighters were, Harp contends, “routinely prescribed amphetamines to keep them awake, hypnotics to sleep, opiates for pain and anxiolytics for panic attacks associated with PTSD.”
Moreover, they were tasked with defending Hamid Karzai’s corrupt government, which Harp calls “a military-industrial money-laundering machine” and a “massive drug cartel that produced nearly all of the world’s illicit opiates.”
In this “ambiguous environment,” as one soldier unambiguously put it, there was an inevitable “moral drift” (a term used by Special Warfare magazine, cited by Harp), and fighters turned to easily accessible opiates for self-medication and kicks.
While Harp is careful to note that many “operators” remained teetotaling, God-fearing Christians, others took advantage of their rarefied status, enriching themselves by diverting shrink-wrapped billions earmarked for “narco-warlords.” Freebooting further, they used military planes to ferry staggering quantities of heroin back to the States, flooding homeland bases like Fort Bragg and the surrounding Fayetteville community.
Harp: “No person in any position of influence dared to suggest that the scourge of opiate addiction then afflicting the poor and working class across the United States might have resulted from the wartime narcotics bonanza.”
Back in the Tar Heel State, distribution became increasingly sophisticated, diversifying into a brisk cocaine and amphetamine trade. A significant number of Fort Bragg’s 50,000 soldiers became addicted to speed, coke and/or heroin. Some imbibed in exotic — and deadly — concoctions like fentanyl and cough syrup. Improbably, there was also an LSD cult.
Credit: Seth Harp
Credit: Seth Harp
Fort Bragg’s murder rates escalated — 24 between 2020 and 2024 — as suicides and overdoses soared. “The grim litany of soldiers killing themselves was unbelievably relentless and demoralizing,” Harp writes.
Harp focuses “The Fort Bragg Cartel” on the tragic lives of GWOT veterans William Lavigne of Delta Force and Mark Leshikar, a Green Beret friend.
The two returned to Fayetteville from a 2018 Disney World vacation when Leshikar, high on “cocaine, MDMA, tramadol and Xanax,” slipped into a paranoid fit and frantically started taking apart their car engine, looking for surveillance bugs. An altercation ensued, and Lavigne, in a rage, shot his friend dead.
Lavigne was eventually “absolved of criminal responsibility.” (Throughout, Harp isolates disturbing patterns of cover-up and collusion by military investigators and local law enforcement.)
Nevertheless, Lavigne’s mental state deteriorated, and he was booted from Delta for cooking crack. He continued dealing coke and meth, forming a bond with the most fascinating characters in “The Fort Bragg Cartel,” Freddie Wayne Huff and Timothy Dumas.
A disgruntled North Carolina state trooper, Huff developed a business relationship with Los Zetas, a violent Mexican drug cartel. He soon became the Southeast’s cocaine kingpin, whose fiefdom included Atlanta.
Dumas, a Special Forces quartermaster, worked for Huff, distributing coke to around Fayetteville, including Lavigne.
Everything was going great until, of course, it all went sideways. Dumas and Lavigne were found murdered by a lake on Fort Bragg, and the hunt was on for a mysterious “Third Man” killer. Huff would be imprisoned for trafficking and firearms offenses in 2023.
For the various failures of GWOT, Harp assigns blame to Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden, but he reserves his harshest criticism for the Trump administrations. By “pardoning war criminals” as a political stunt during his first term, Harp believes President Donald Trump contributed to “a breakdown of good order and discipline in the Special Forces that Lavigne’s case came to symbolize.”
Harp is often frustrated by a stonewalling military command more concerned with public relations than addressing the substance abuse problem; he was hurled out of a news conference for simply asking a question about the Dumas/Lavigne murders.
Reluctant to extrapolate from the events at Fayetteville, Harp stops short of assessing the overall mental health of the country’s armed forces. But, when it comes to the sedation of clear and quick thinking in the blur of modern battle, “The Fort Bragg Cartel” is a book to be taken seriously by the country’s political class and military establishment.
NONFICTION
“The Fort Bragg Cartel”
by Seth Harp
Viking
352 pages, $30
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