THE FORT BRAGG CARTEL - SETH HARP

I have been waiting for this one for a while. I remember the article that Harp wrote a few years ago about the weird deaths at Fort Bragg and saw that he kept documenting them on Twitter over the span of a few years and then learned he was going to write a whole book about the situation and, given that it touches upon quite a few personal interests of mine, I was psyched. But even before that, I’m someone who grew up in North Carolina, I’ve long known and heard legends about the dark vortex that is Ft. Bragg and Fayettnam, as it was even called when I was a kid in the 90’s and early 2000’s. I’ve been there. It’s an insanely evil place, you can feel it in the air, the vibe is completely fucked. There is a constant parade of bizarre and sinister shit that bubbles up in the region. I’m glad someone finally put all of it in one place. In some sense the book bites off more than it can chew. Or, more charitably, it suggests a half dozen lines of inquiry to report out, and, if we lived in a real country with a real press, people would look into these things. But we don’t so I doubt we’ll ever get to the bottom of any of the more juicy stuff. And I do mean juicy. The most fascinating level that this book operates on is the GWOT hyper-cartel stuff. For twenty years Afghanistan was the largest narco-state in human history. They produced and moved more dope than any entity that has ever existed. We, the USA, were in power during this period, choosing to rule through a series of pedophile warlords (not even a little bit of an exaggeration) that were so hated by the population that they couldn’t last even a few months after we left. It seems beyond obvious to me that the US took an active role in this dope dealing. The official explanation, which is also the one they tried with the Contra affair, is that, yes, there was drug dealing by our allies or renegade Americans, and we either didn’t know or looked the other way and we all feel bad that it happened. Like in Central America, this seems like bullshit. I believe that we did actively facilitate this, I don’t think it was just a few rogue psychos in the special forces who tried to traffic drugs back. I think that the fact that Iran and Russia had enormous floods of cheap heroin was the result of policy and was made to happen. Russia has claimed that they have footage of dope being moved on American military planes, no one in our useless press will follow up on this (as an aside, you’ve got to wonder if the last couple of years worth of Russia “disinfo” hysteria is, at least partially, to inoculate ourselves against exactly this sort of stuff) and, sadly, this book does not fully pursue this angle, and instead looks at the layer below. Likewise, the book also suggests that Dubai might be where all of this money went (imagine how much money was made on all this dealing, now look at Afganistan, where did that money go?) but he never gets anything beyond speculation on this front. That’s the really big picture stuff that remains just out of view, what this book focuses more directly on is the layer below this, where our special forces guys operate. The special forces model is interesting and I’m glad it’s getting more attention. I’d frame it thus: starting after WWII, warfare changed in a profound way, no longer were most wars army vs. army, instead it was an asymmetrical fighting and counter-insurgency. And, as is brought up many time in this book, the model, for the US, was the Phoenix Program, the vietnam war era assassination program. The twist seems to be that after Vietnam and then the beginning of the Iraq war, the casualty numbers were too high. Americans could stomach dishing out death by the millions, but wouldn’t tolerate hundreds of our boys getting killed. So we settled on a strategy of just death squads. We could train these operators well enough that when they were travelling to some of the poorest places in the world, storming people's homes in the dead of night, with the full technical support of Earth’s largest war machine, and killing everyone there, they rarely were killed themselves. The number of American deaths was kept low enough that this program could run for decades. Just hundreds thousands of people killed, all over the world, by a legion of high-skilled hitmen. But, like the Nazis before us, we’ve come to learn that there are problems associated with keeping this many death squads around. Here the book reminded me of Masters of Death, a book about the Einsatzgruppen, the SS who carried out the death-by-shooting segment of the holocaust, which was much larger than the more famous shower-gassing technique. Turns out that this process makes the people carrying it out insane. This book follows a Delta Force guy who descends into drug-taking and crack-addiction and kills his best friend, in front of both of their children, at the tail-end of a monumental binge while on a trip to Disney World. He goes on to deal drugs and gets murdered on-base along with a friend of his. It’s an unbelievable story. I’m not as interested in this tale, as salacious and amazing as it is, as I am in the larger network thing I discussed earlier, and I’m always a bit wary/tired of stories that center our troops, but it was engaging and well written. Towards the end he just kinda throws in other bizarre crimes that occurred in the Ft. Bragg orbit. The acid dealer (can you imagine taking acid on Ft. Bragg?) who ended up decapitated on a camping trip was particularly gripping, I remember that story and this is the best write up I’ve seen. But all that stuff was not quite as intriguing as the larger-scale stuff. I really hope people continue to look into those broader angels: how the Afghan narcostate worked, where did the money go and what did it fund, and how did the US government manage it.