The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp
'The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces' by Seth Harp
The U.S. military is suffering from problems that increased defense spending can’t cure. Between January 2017 and September 2022, 15,293 active-duty service members overdosed. An inordinate number were linked to Fort Bragg, whose soldiers “were significantly more likely to overdose and die than the average American,” according to investigative reporter Seth Harp. He adds that at least 24 unsolved murders involving Fort Bragg occurred from 2020 through 2024. And for good measure, the pickup truck driver who plowed into the French Quarter crowd on New Year’s, and the guy who blew up his rented Tesla outside Las Vegas’ Trump Hotel, were Fort Bragg veterans.
In The Fort Bragg Cartel, Harp shines a spotlight into a dark hole in America’s military, the secretive Delta Force and a cadre of hangers-on and wannabes—“guard bums,” who patch together a career from reservist postings augmented by private security work. The Delta Force aren’t John Wayne’s Green Berets. Coalescing under the Reagan administration, they exist outside the regular command chain, flouting regulations and carrying out assassinations and sabotage across the world. They have conducted dangerous missions against ISIS and the Taliban and picked up bad habits and worse friends along the way. Some of the Special Ops have returned with multiple addictions triggering paranoia, agitation, palpitations and hallucinations. Others have been running drug rings concealed by the cloak of secrecy surrounding their operations. The domestic crimes they commit, even murder, are often covered and hushed up. The occasional Delta Force convict is treated to privileged conditions of confinement.
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Harp carries an unusual resume as a former Texas assistant attorney general, a Rolling Stone contributing editor and a reservist with a tour in Iraq. He knows the law and the military and brings a muckraker’s sensibility to his subject. His revelations keep coming, page after page. Some of the Mexican drug cartels’ most heinous death squads got their training at Fort Bragg. The burning of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco? Delta Force was there.
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