THE FORT BRAGG CARTEL

The dark side of one of the nation’s top military bases.

Harp, an investigative reporter, focuses on Fort Bragg, the North Carolina installation that is home to the Joint Special Operations Command, which the author calls a “secret killing machine” at the center of U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Troops stationed at Fort Bragg, he says, have shown a disproportionate rate of deaths by drug overdose, suicide, and homicide. The book examines several cases involving Special Forces soldiers based at Fort Bragg, veterans living in the nearby community, and civilians in the drug trade. One case involved the off-base shooting of one soldier by another following a drug-fueled weekend. Both the local police and military authorities accepted the shooter’s claim of self-defense and, the author says, kept the victim’s family and outside investigators in the dark—a pattern he says is typical of cases involving Fort Bragg troops. The high rate of drug use, Harp notes, is in part caused by the reliance of combat troops on painkillers and stimulants to get them through the stress of life in a war zone. When the war zone was Afghanistan—a center of opium production—heroin became more prevalent. Drug dependency continued when troops were rotated home, and a supply network (predictably) arose. The book unflinchingly faults presidential administrations that have ignored the PTSD and devaluing of human life that the “targeted assassination” operations create among troops caught up in a “forever-war paradigm.” An unsettling read, the book will nevertheless enlighten anyone concerned about U.S. foreign policy and the role of the military in it.

A scathing exposé of drug trafficking, homicide, and suicide in the U.S. military.