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

by Seth Harp

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/