Seth Harp on Military Secrecy and Reform

Your Fellows project is the forthcoming book, The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, which investigates a string of unsolved murders at America’s premier special operations base. How did you first come across this story, and what compelled you to pursue it?

In December 2020, I learned that two special operations soldiers had been found murdered at a remote training range on Fort Bragg, and that police did not have a suspect. That in itself was worth investigating. But then I learned that one of the victims was an active-duty operator on Delta Force, the most elite unit in the U.S. military, and was suspected of dealing drugs on base. At that point I knew there had to be more to the story—a lot more.

You served in the U.S. Army Reserve and did one tour of duty in Iraq. How did your military experience shape your approach to investigating this story? Were there times when it helped—or perhaps even hindered—your work?

I actually served in Iraq at the same time that my main character, Billy Lavigne, did his first tour there. Although it took longer for him to lose faith in the post-9/11 wars, we both became disillusioned with the military and U.S. foreign policy as a result of events in Iraq. That sympathetic connection enabled me to much better understand his state of mind around the time that he went to work trafficking drugs in conjunction with an international drug cartel.

Your previous reporting on this subject in Rolling Stone spurred policy changes, including the Department of Defense Overdose Data Act of 2023. What further reforms do you hope the book will encourage?

I hope that my book will encourage broad reforms to the military that go beyond merely cracking down on drug dealing in the ranks. I believe that a quarter century of overreliance on special operators and secret military units to accomplish the national security objectives of foreign policy elites has led to the creation of a sharply divided two-tier military whose pathologies mirror those of our divided and profoundly unequal society. We need a more egalitarian armed forces that doesn’t hide behind military secrecy and that works for the good of the taxpayers who fund it, rather than the power games of unelected national security officials whose foreign policy adventures have proved so ruinous for our country.

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