The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces

by Seth Harp

avoided the question.” Lavigne was allowed to walk out of the jailhouse a free man that same night. Waiting for him outside, in a menacing convoy of lifted pickups, was a group of his Delta Force teammates. “There were three trucks that pulled up to the street,” said Laura.

this was maybe the first reference of pickups - i always clock now if someone talks about 'their truck' vs. their vehicle. I dislike pickup truck energy. i'm most partial to minivans, myself, and obviously my scooter. (https://josh.works/scootering) and any sort of 'lifted' vehicle is a huge alarm bell for me, even simply seeing one when out and about. American vehicle norms are so riddled with this consensual kink dynamic. Stop making me unwantingly participate in your self-validation of your identity by being public in how you take up space, how you express your willingness to take up space, via the whole narrative compression of a 'truck'

special operations personnel whose total number started out around thirty-five thousand and has since grown to approximately seventy thousand—the

75,000 people paid full-time to make war upon... anyone? horrifying.

That summer, in a stretch of just six weeks, four Army wives at Fort Bragg were murdered by their husbands, three of whom were Special Forces soldiers just back from Afghanistan.

deployed to a foreign war zone. The purpose of the Times piece was to tout American efforts to train up Afghan commandos. A photo that accompanied the article shows eighteen of these locally recruited mercenaries assembled on a line, wearing black ski masks to hide their identities. NATO officials who spoke to the Times commended their “lethal professionalism,” but acknowledged the need to “sharpen” their skills.

black ski masks, masking, was interesting to me. does ICE ppl using masks have wanna-be domestic mercenary energy?

Afghanistan. In the English-language press, the world of nonprofits connected to the State Department, network and cable news, and the Democratic and Republican Parties, total silence descended over the topic of heroin production in the Helmand, Kandahar, Nangarhar, and other Afghan provinces where U.S. soldiers were not infrequently photographed patrolling vast fields of poppy. No person in any position of influence dared to suggest that the scourge of opiate addiction then afflicting the poor and working classes across the United States might have resulted from the wartime narcotics bonanza. A willful ignorance toward the subject prevailed in polite society in Washington and New York. “It was rarely mentioned in policy circles either in Afghanistan or in Western capitals,” said the SIGAR report.

Made me think of the documentary 'dopesick', about some domestic opiod production. it's not good to be a domesticated population inside of a slave state operating two militaries - a local military and far-away military

Grey said that she personally untaped $10,000 from her husband’s voluminous torso after he came home from his first tour in Iraq. The next time, after a rotation to Afghanistan, it was seven or eight grand. The amounts varied, but he always came home with cash. “I was so freaked out that this had become our life,” she said. “And I couldn’t say anything to anyone. Not our children. Not even the other wives. “This is when I started to look at my husband as not who I married,” she continued. “He was not the same man. He had become a full-on conscienceless killer. Greed was his number one thing. And every time he came home, going back to war was the only thing on his mind.”

sometimes I wonder how much people IRL are playing out video game tropes. So many video game mechanics focus on maximizing some resource. Maybe as these people get broken by violence and concussions and needful emotional numbing that it's sorta a script under the hood. money ++, money ++

known as the Activity. Though he liked to pass himself off as a commando, Dumas was really a logistics guy, a property accounting technician whose job was to oversee an extensive military supply chain, ensure that needed equipment was on hand, and prevent theft, fraud, and waste. It was his responsibility to manage the OPFUND, also known as the small purchase program, and to supervise the performance of military contracts in the field. Given the large quantities of cash involved, the paucity of oversight, and the limited paper trail, all of these roles require a high degree of honesty and integrity in a soldier. Unfortunately, Timothy Dumas had neither.

photographed by his side in Afghanistan. Lavigne’s next rotation, beginning November 2, 2015, was not to Iraq, where thirty-nine-year-old Master Sergeant Joshua Wheeler, his Delta Force teammate, had just been killed in an attempt to rescue hostages in Mosul; or to Syria, where fifty special operators, the first of a growing contingent, had touched down a mere three days earlier, but to neighboring Israel.

ah, israel. I wasn't expecting a connection, and then obviously am not surprised. the USA *is* settler colonialism, and set up israel (settlements, little suburbs/enclaves) inside of palestine, and then armed the that immigrant population to take territory from the original inhabitants, to 'fill out' the notion of a boardered ethnicity-backed state. israel is doing to palestine today what european americans did to the native people in today's 'greater united states', as they claimed territory and murdered their way across the continent across the last few hundred years.

Gethsemane. For most of the GWOT, the deep and abiding relationship between the American and the Israeli militaries was soft-pedaled for fear of inflaming Arab and Muslim public opinion. For instance, the United States declined to include Israel in its “coalition of the willing” that invaded Iraq while proudly touting the inclusion of much smaller countries like Palau, Macedonia, and Micronesia. But Israeli politicians and Israeli foreign influence organizations lobbied hard for nearly every war in which the United States became embroiled after 2001, and following President Bush’s rescinding of the ban on assassinations, JSOC established a cell in Tel Aviv to share intelligence and jointly train with Israeli commandos and spies, who are prolific extrajudicial executioners, notorious for murdering their enemies in hit jobs the world over, often using poisons, car bombs, and strange devices. Time in Tel Aviv became de rigueur for rising Delta Force personnel, who sometimes wore the uniform of the Israel Defense Forces while in-country. The relationship between American and Israeli special operators deepened significantly as a result of the complex, multiphase war in Syria, as the deployment of a relatively low-level enlisted man like Lavigne to Israel shows.

I remember in the video games I played as a kid (in the house of an american military family) the constant glorification of 'israeli commando' type shit. icky. killing kids. male people. i'm a 37 year old male person. If I lived in palestine, I'd obviously not be alive right now, and no one before me for generations would have experienced meaningful peace. The state fabricates, fantasizes, fabricates from existance, the concept of ethnicity, in order to tie certain benefits or penalties to the results. Israeli people, the american government, isn't murdering 'palestinians', 'afghanis', 'iraqi's, they're murdering 'people living in palestine', 'people living in afghanistan', 'people living in iraq'. Wait till someone tells them that the concept of a state, the state, any particular state (or country) is made up...

A small but steady stream of reporters did trickle in, though. On November 24, 2016, with help from a Kurdish commander who was willing to subvert the blockade imposed on Syria, I managed to slip across the border at Mount Sinjar disguised as a Kurdish militiaman. The

snaps, kudos, respect to the author for this move. cool. some people wouldn't do something like this, to their discredit.

For the past fifteen years, JSOC and all of SOCOM had been continuously growing in power, autonomy, and impunity. The GWOT stood thoroughly discredited in public opinion, but America’s cultural and political infatuation with special operations, and its veneration of the iconic figure of a bearded commando, were at an apex. In a slew of late GWOT cultural products, including big-budget films like Zero Dark Thirty, followed by American Sniper and 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, the image of a tall, bearded, and roughly handsome white man with a checkered keffiyeh wrapped around his neck and a black rifle in his hands came to embody a venerable old archetype of American masculinity and male identity in all white settler societies descended from European colonies. If the special ops aesthetic looks vaguely familiar, it’s because the operator is the twenty-first-century reincarnation of the rugged frontiersman. The quintessential role of this mythic figure, represented first by the pioneer, then by the cowboy, is to bring law and order to the gritty fringes of empire and to protect the white family from the depredations of brown-skinned natives congenitally incapable of appreciating the virtues of civilization and democracy, whether they be Cherokee, Comanche, Pashtun, Arab, or Somali.

reminds me of this excellent piece: https://popula.com/2019/02/24/about-face/

Trump, whose only qualification to be president was his unerring ability to channel the darkest currents of the American id, had surrounded himself on the campaign trail with some of the craziest people in the special operations community, including Stanley McChrystal’s deputy Michael Flynn, who would later pledge allegiance to the QAnon conspiracy theory, and Jerry Boykin, a holy-rolling former commander of Delta Force who had been reprimanded by the Pentagon for describing the GWOT as a Christian war against the armies of Satan. Believing, absurdly, that the military had been made to fight with one hand tied behind its back, Trump loosened the already flexible rules of engagement applicable to special operators and firmly closed the spigot on the meager drip of information dribbled out to the media. The White House announced that the Pentagon would no longer disclose any information at all on the “capabilities, force numbers, locations, or movement of forces in or out of Syria.” The picture, already blurry, went completely black. Under Obama, assassinations had been authorized only where the target was found to pose a specific threat to Americans. Fuzzy as it was, Trump dropped even that requirement, dramatically increased drone strikes, and delegated authority over strategic decisions to officers in the field, some of whom had no business making such momentous calls. The pace of bombing increased by 50 percent in Iraq, where a strike on a building in Mosul killed hundre...

*hundreds of people*. everywhere, over and over.

distort judgment. In the field, special operators became more reckless and aggressive. On March 26, 2017, one month into Lavigne’s second rotation in the war against ISIS, a small element of Delta Force operators stationed at the Lafarge concrete plant called down a bunker-buster bomb on the Tabqa Dam, a hydroelectric power facility on the Euphrates River upstream of Raqqa. The Delta element, code-named Talon Anvil, requested the strike without seeking permission from their chain of command by falsely claiming an urgent necessity to prevent imminent harm to the SDF, ignoring warnings that bombing the giant structure could cause it to fail. Only a merciful stroke of luck prevented what could have been one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time, as the two-thousand-pound BLU-109, one of the biggest munitions in the U.S. arsenal, miraculously failed to detonate.

I looked up raqqa - the dam holds a huge amount of water, feels like 'hundreds of thousands of lives could have been at risk' is reasonable. How are these people not in jail? (I dislike jail, but at least fired? publicly named as 'people no respectable person anyone would ever want to be like') horrifying that destroying this piece of equipment was ever considered okay. It's identical to firebombing a city, murdering everyone inside. What hubris, that a few small people give themselves permission to murder hundreds of thousands of others.

program for years to come. In 2019, Army operators killed the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and took out his lesser-known successor, Abu Ibrahim al-Hashimi al-Qurayshi, in 2022. Delta Force’s sizable presence in Syria surfaced again in 2023, when ten operators were seriously injured in a hard landing after a helicopter failed to take off due to a malfunction of its rotor. That same year, fifteen hundred Fort Bragg soldiers deployed to support Iraq War III, which did not end when the caliphate fell, nor when Trump left office, but morphed into an undeclared and open-ended Israeli-American shadow war against Assad and his Iranian allies. They say you’re not a real Special Forces soldier, not a true Pipe Hitter, unless you have three things: a Harley-Davidson, a Rolex, and two divorces. Lavigne was a Yamaha guy and favored a digital watch, but true to the stereotype of a hard-living Green Beret had attained his second divorce by the end of 2017.

i knew there was something icky in harley davidson riders, or those who associate with them. similarly icky energy as the pickup trucks. I didn't highlight all the instances of mention, but all the key figures drove 'four door' (i think) big ugly pickup trucks. Some of them with like... 'racing tires'? seems like overall bigness of the truck was persued. How much of Ford's GDP is just direct transfers from military members in the american south? icky. this makes me dislike pickup trucks AND military type people all the more.

The pandemic years coincided with an outbreak of violent crime, a spike in political strife, and widening social isolation. Paranoia ran wild, faith in institutions crumbled, and all across America drug use surged, with accidental overdoses rising to an all-time high that approached 100,000 deaths in a single year.

dopesick, the documentary, comes to mind. 100,000. feed the machine.

Drawing nearer, the deer hunter saw that the vehicle was a quad-cab Chevrolet Colorado with racing wheels and street tires unsuitable for off-road use.

see, this 'quad-cap {manufacturer} {stylized vehicle name}'. I had to look up a photo of this. it's the modern ugly pickup. I dislike the vehicle class (pickup) as well as the company that originated it (ford) because of the person that originated the company (henry ford). He actively contributed to the acts of murderousness happening in europe, between the supremacists and all those they deemed as 'the other'. Google 'henry ford the international jew pdf' to read any of the hundreds of pages henry ford sponsored, supporting the extermination of any person associatable with an identity. He was a top-notch abhorrent person, everything he touched ought to be ritualistically excised from society. He was a eugenicist, supremacist, nazi, believed in whiteness and racial purity, and wanted so hard to induce the other races into becoming more like the best race, white people/european americans, and was correct that using his vehicles and vision for social control, he could get the people to live how he wanted them to. He succeeded!