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

In February 2001, American warplanes bombed radar sites in Iraq while William Joseph Lavigne II enlisted. Joining the Army carried little prestige, and few recruits expected to participate in a war. Lavigne grew up in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, a remote region whose residents are called “Yoopers” (52). A 1999 family photo suggests that he was tall but still boyish. His mother claims that “he was a great son” (52), while his father describes his son as “busy” (53). As a teenager, Lavigne struggled in school and felt self-conscious about an eye condition known as strabismus. The Army’s new refractive surgery program corrected his eyes, thus removing his major insecurity. After boot camp, Lavigne enlisted in advanced individual training as a cavalry scout. The 9/11 attacks occurred during Lavigne’s advanced individual training. Soon, he would be on the front lines of the resulting war.

On leave a year later, he surprised his friend Ben Boden with his dramatic physical transformation. Stationed at Fort Lewis, he met Jamie Carter, a Tacoma bartender. He was shy, she remembers, and she initiated their relationship. Through late 2002 and 2003, the Bush administration built toward invading Iraq, and Congress authorized military force against Iraq in October 2002. Lavigne received deployment orders in early November 2003. A week before he was to ship out, he proposed. Jamie remembers how she dressed herself in “a nice skirt and shirt” (56) for their wedding in the Pierce County auditor’s office. On November 11, Lavigne shipped out to Iraq.

In Iraq, his Stryker brigade operated in Samarra, Mosul, Tal Afar, and across Salah al-Din province. Roadside bombs killed three Americans near Samarra on December 24, 2003. More attacks followed in April, May, and early July, and additional IEDs killed eight more soldiers that summer. On September 4, 2004, his squadron helped rescue downed helicopter pilots after an Army Kiowa helicopter was hit in Tal Afar. On September 9, a patrol took fire in Mosul and detained the shooters. On October 11, a suicide truck bomb destroyed a Stryker in Mosul and killed a staff sergeant. Around Thanksgiving 2004, Lavigne returned to Washington. He refused to let Jamie attend his homecoming and bluntly announced that he wanted a divorce. He had resolved to join Special Forces and told her that he could not have a woman “holding him back as baggage” (58). After a brief separation, Jamie signed the papers. Lavigne transferred to Fort Bragg for Special Forces training.

After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, JSOC expanded as Delta Force shifted from searching for weapons to capturing senior regime figures, killing Saddam Hussein’s sons in Mosul, and pulling Saddam from a hideout near Tikrit. With scrutiny on interrogation sites in Baghdad, the task force moved its field headquarters to Camp Anaconda at Balad, building a concealed, screen-filled operations floor that integrated CIA and FBI personnel. Author Seth Harp served at the same base in a conventional unit, though he claims to have had no idea that the unit existed; General Stanley McChrystal later wrote that they “walled off [the] plot with concrete blocks” (61).

In 2006, as sectarian killings surged, McChrystal became the key architect of a new approach that reframed the Iraq conflict as a node of global jihad. His staff popularized the notion of “al-Qaeda in Iraq” (62), elevated the Jordanian militant Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as its shadowy figurehead, and promoted a kill-centric strategy to justify the invasion. Michael Vickers, as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict (ASD SO/LIC), helped install a two-track plan that paired the public troop surge with a covert expansion of JSOC’s night raids, the “hidden surge” (64). JSOC scaled from about ten raids a month to about ten per day, operationalizing the F3EAD cycle—an operational strategy first developed in the intelligence community, the acronym stands for “Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, and Disseminate” (64), indicating that operators first identify a target (find), then prepare an attack (fix), then gain any available intelligence from a successful raid (exploit, analyze), and finally share that intelligence with relevant parties (disseminate). Targets were identified despite “an almost complete lack of Arabic skills” (64-65) in the unit. Operators struck at night, seized documents and devices, and added any names they found to the list. Their tactics included disguises, false identities, and plainclothes teams.

Former Delta troop sergeant major Jesse Boettcher later posted images from these rotations and praised his small team as “Pipe-Hitters” (66), writing that some “have killed more people than cancer” (67). He described the pace as nightly and sustained even without strong intelligence, with stimulants and sedatives used to manage sleep and stress; commanders kept Ambien “close at hand” (67) to help them sleep. Attacks by militants fell in 2008 amid a militia truce and the Sunni Awakening, though officials credited the surge. Barack Obama drew down troop numbers in Iraq but faced a deteriorating war in Afghanistan fueled by a narcotics economy and a resurgent Taliban. He elevated David Petraeus and gave McChrystal command in Afghanistan, signaling an all-covert approach. On November 11, 2009, Billy Lavigne became a “TEAM MEMBER/OPERATOR” in “SFOD-D (DELTA FORCE)” (69). Not long after, a military doctor began to prescribe him with dextroamphetamine.

Billy Lavigne completed Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, including training in Arabic language and culture. He’d served as an intelligence sergeant with 1st Special Forces Group at Torii Station, Okinawa, from 2007 to 2009. His record includes multiple deployments before 2010 and time in Thailand, where he earned Royal Thai Army wings. His selection for Delta Force is discretely indicated in military records as “advanced land navigation” (70). The tough training culminates in a 40-mile night hike in full combat gear and a psychological review board. According to James Reese, the best recruits “are generally introverts who are able, when necessary, to be extroverted” (71). He adds that Lavigne was “a guy who slipped through [their] cracks” (71). Jordan Terrell calls the unit a “good old boys’ club” (71) and says candidates must fit an unspoken mold. Mark Leshikar failed selection due to his volatility and rumors that had followed him from Afghanistan. Terrell describes Lavigne as calm and smiling, saying, “Billy was a cool guy” (71) who always had a smile on his face.

Lavigne’s first full year in Delta Force aligned with General Stanley McChrystal’s expansion of F3EAD in Afghanistan and a higher tempo of night raids. Harp outlines a Kabul government run through warlord patronage and narcotics networks, including Ahmed Wali Karzai and the Akhundzada clan, which McChrystal calls a “durable drug cartel” (72). McChrystal authorized JSOC to target native Taliban, which he later characterizes as “a diverse taxonomy of groups [that the military] lumped together” (72), lowered targeting thresholds, and increased raids alongside drone strikes. According to Harp, the military had an error rate around fifty per cent in people killed or captured, rising violent deaths, and was eventually ordered to halt public body-count reporting, even as McChrystal publicly stressed stricter rules for conventional troops. Michael Hastings’ Rolling Stone profile led to McChrystal’s firing, as he described the “crazy life [at the] top of the American war machine” (74). Later, Hastings was killed in a car crash that many viewed as suspicious, especially after reports emerged of the CIA’s research into remotely taking control of cars as part of an undetectable assassination program.

Vice Admiral William McRaven succeeded McChrystal, and SEAL Team Six carried out the Abbottabad raid that killed Osama bin Laden, a famous operation that led to a film portrayal and public disputes among participants about who executed Bin Laden. Subsequent reporting describes the culture of SEAL Team Six in a controversial fashion, including reports of “killing fests,” “canoeing,” “bleed-out videos” (71), and theft. The members, Harp notes, seem to dress themselves as pirates or bikers. Throughout, Delta Force remained the lead actor in the F3EAD killing program yet drew little press attention.

Billy Lavigne’s first Afghanistan tour began on October 28, 2011, when night raids averaged about ten per night and combat risk had risen. Months earlier, his teammate Master Sergeant Benjamin Allen Stevenson had been killed in Paktika, and in 2010, Master Sergeant Jared Van Aalst and Sergeant First Class Ronald Aaron Grider had died in Kunduz. Nineteen USASOC soldiers died in Afghanistan in 2011, including a Special Forces engineer who overdosed at Camp Montrond and another Green Beret who overdosed at Fire Base Ripley. A contemporaneous photo showed Lavigne’s eight-man team in civilian clothes and armor, with Lavigne carrying a machine gun and the work described as “mowing the lawn” (78). The Delta squadron operated from Mazar-i-Sharif and Kunduz, with another element at Kandahar focused on vehicle interdiction. Lavigne’s rotation ended on February 16, 2012. In 2013, a New York Times reporter visited a classified commando base about fifty miles from Kabul and reported sixty special operations teams, fifty strike forces, and nine commando battalions and police units spread across the country, under a two-star commander reporting to Bill McRaven. It was the first division-sized deployment of special operations forces.

Under US occupation, Afghanistan became the primary global source of heroin. Poppy acreage more than tripled from 2003 to 2004, heroin output rose 7,514 per cent by 2005, and, by 2007, production neared 1,000 metric tons. For comparison, the next two largest producers, Mexico and Myanmar, produced about 50 and 24 metric tons respectively. US agencies noted rising purity and declining street prices; one sheriff’s office described heroin from Afghanistan as their “biggest rising threat” (79). The DEA later asserted that less than 1 per cent of US heroin came from Afghanistan, relying on sampling programs that excluded larger seizures and airports and labeled 60 per cent of highly pure white powder as “Alleged Mexican White” (81). A 2012 ONDCP paper identified large measurement errors and suggested underestimation of non-Latin sources, after which DEA threat assessments dropped Afghanistan statistics. Reporting tied drug production to senior figures in President Hamid Karzai’s government. SIGAR stated that “the extent to which the Taliban participates in the trade of narcotics is debated” (82), while documenting widespread involvement of the US-backed Afghan state and CIA relationships with traffickers. In Obama’s second term, counternarcotics efforts were abandoned, cultivation expanded, and discussion of Afghan heroin in US policy circles “was rarely mentioned” (84).

Billy Lavigne returned to Afghanistan on February 25, 2013, for another Delta Force rotation during a period of high risk that followed the death of his friend Ryan James Savard in Kunduz. Bordering Tajikistan, Kunduz had become the unit’s deadliest area after a US-funded bridge at Sher Khan Bandar opened the Panj River crossing and expanded the Northern Distribution Network that supported logistics and state institutions, while also allowing for the overland movement of Afghan opiates through Tajikistan to Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Baltic ports. During Lavigne’s 120 days in Afghanistan, three Green Berets were killed in action, with additional USASOC deaths later that year. JSOC continued F3EAD at a slower tempo due to distance, terrain, limited cellular infrastructure, and resistance practices that kept fighters off phones and shut towers at night. Operators reported frustration with “posting numbers” and nightly strikes on low-level “suspected Taliban” (86).

On the home front in 2013, USASOC recorded fourteen suicides, another fatal overdose, and the unsolved murder of Sergeant First Class Sean Wayne Wells in Fayetteville. In 2014 psychological operations specialist Valeria Zavala deployed with JSOC; like Lavigne, she was connected to the Coast x Coast motorcycle club that had been founded to honor Sergeant First Class Ryan Savard, who died in combat in Khan Abad, Afghanistan in 2012. She described operators as eager for action, though she noted that they were men who “murder people with zero remorse” (88). That December, President Barack Obama declared the war in Afghanistan over and said that Americans were now “safer” (89), but special operations forces remained to support Afghan forces amid continued violence; embedding with US units became more restricted than with the Taliban, according to a reporter.

Sergeant First Class Mark Leshikar deployed in late 2015. Army wife Lauren Grey described the era as “the wild, wild West” (90), citing theft of counterterrorism cash and other misconduct; documented cases included Green Berets convicted of stealing operational funds, while rumors of hidden cash circulated for many years. On May 27, 2014, warrant officer Timothy James Dumas Sr. tested positive for cocaine and was questioned about theft schemes tied to Kandahar contracting; according to multiple accounts, he drafted a letter detailing an international drug-smuggling ring moving product from overseas onto Fort Bragg, summarized by his son as an accusation that the military was “bringing the drugs from overseas onto Fort Bragg” (97).

Billy Lavigne married Michelle Yuki in July 2013. Their daughter Ava was born in May 2014. In June 2014, he deployed to Niger for sixty days as a trainer, part of a pivot of JSOC activities to Africa enabled by secret authorities that let units pursue al-Qaeda “affiliates,” “financiers,” and “facilitators” worldwide (99). Harp traces how US support for Arab Spring movements and CIA programs helped destabilize Libya and Syria, including Muammar Qaddafi’s killing and the spread of weapons across the Sahel. President Obama told West Point graduates that decentralized affiliates would be “the most direct threat to America” (100). In Syria, the CIA’s Timber Sycamore program supplied arms to rebel groups while JSOC conducted cross-border operations.

Lavigne deployed to Iraq on March 18, 2015. On May 16, a JSOC team including Delta Force and British SAS raided a site near al-Amr in eastern Syria and killed Abu Sayyaf, described as ISIS’s “emir of oil and gas” (103). They detained his wife and seized electronics and documents for targeting. Lavigne rotated home on May 18. At home, his marriage came under strain. He drank heavily, used prescribed Adderall, and began using cocaine and MDMA, according to friends. He was promoted to team sergeant on July 1, 2015 and deployed to Israel on November 2, 2015, for training and liaison work that reflected deepening special operations ties between Israel and the United States.

JSOC formalized the Expeditionary Targeting Force. According to Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, this new force meant that ISIS “has to fear that anywhere, anytime, it may be struck” (105). Harp himself entered Syria in November 2016 with Kurdish assistance and observed American bases, British SAS elements, and US commandos supporting the SDF while official troop numbers remained opaque. In October 2017, a task force commander stated that 4,000 Americans were in Syria before a press officer corrected him with the much lower, publicly stated number of several hundred. Lavigne’s final deployment began on February 26, 2017, after the Trump administration had loosened targeting rules and increased secrecy. On March 26, 2017, a Delta element called Talon Anvil requested a strike that accidentally hit the Tabqa Dam with a heavy bomb. By sheer luck, the bomb did not detonate, avoiding “what could have been one of the greatest humanitarian disasters of our time” (110). Lavigne returned to the United States on July 1, 2017. By late 2017 he divorced Yuki, showed signs of PTSD, struggled with money, and began dealing drugs within his circle, where videos of raids circulated and his rivalry with Mark Leshikar persisted. Though the two men were friends, they often bickered and teased one another. Lavigne “would pick on” (117) Leshikar for failing to make Delta Force, Leshikar’s sister claimed, fueling their chauvinistic male rivalry. Leshikar was compared to a “powder keg waiting to blow up” (118).