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

The term blowback was originally used by the CIA to describe the unforeseen repercussions of secret operations abroad. In the context of The Fort Bragg Cartel, blowback refers to the unintended, destructive consequences of America’s decades-long covert wars returning home to the very soldiers and institutions that waged them. 

One of the most pronounced illustrations of blowback in the book involves the Mexican drug cartel Los Zetas. Unlike earlier cartels, Harp notes, Los Zetas are “real soldiers, elite ones, trained in the United States” (167). Originally intended as a project to combat drug trafficking in Mexico, the commandos trained by the American military to fight the cartels instead took their military training and used it to displace the cartels and to take over the drug trade. The emergence of these narco-terrorists, Harp suggests, “inaugurated the darkest era in all of Mexican history” (168). The violence on the boarder intensified, fueled by the training and equipment that were intended to put a stop to the cartels. Rather than ending the drug trade, this US intervention escalates the violence and destruction, creating a new form of blowback as Mexican drug traffickers with US military training begin to infiltrate the drug trade in the US. Ironically, what began as a joint training exercise between Mexican and American law enforcement becomes a joint training exercise between the cartels and the men who Harp portrays in his book. Figures like Dumas and Huff, for example, not only do business with the cartels, but exchange information and training to make the trade more profitable. The equipment and the violence is not the only thing which bounces back to the American society; the very notion of a mutually intelligible institutional knowledge exchange is weaponized in the name of the drug trade.

After years of clandestine missions, assassinations, and counterinsurgency campaigns carried out in places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the tactics and moral corrosion of those conflicts reappear within Fort Bragg itself, a form of psychological blowback. The same soldiers trained to operate without oversight abroad later turn their “advanced infantry skills” and trauma inward on their own communities (70).  In certain instances, this is direct and specific. The aftermath of the killing of Leshikar, for example, involves discussion of Lavigne’s particular skillset. A domestic dispute between two friends is intensified in part because Leshikar’s tactical training fuels his paranoia. Both men have advanced combat skills that make the fight much more serious. Lavigne kills Leshikar using the same techniques he learned fighting enemy combatants; he is, in a very literal sense, bringing his violent methods into his home. Harp broadens the scope of this analysis of blowback, showing how the techniques and skills learned by Delta Force operators become even more of an issue when—amid untreated trauma and drug addictions—domestic disputes occur. Domestic violence and murder are so prevalent among the men of Fort Bragg in part due to blowback, as every fight or dispute is made suddenly more intense due to the training and trauma of frontline combat.

Harp also describes the Global War on Terror’s unintended effects on the  opioid crisis in America. In the chapters devoted to the history of the War in Afghanistan, Harp describes how the cultivation and trafficking of heroin was almost ended under the first Taliban regime in the 1990s. Then, after the American invasion of Afghanistan, heroin production exploded. This heroin was trafficked into the United States, becoming a low cost alternative to Fentanyl and other painkillers. Many people in America, Harp writes, had become addicted to prescription narcotics and, as a consequences of their addiction, turned to an illegal network suddenly flush with Afghan-grown heroin, made possible due to the American invasion. Harp suggests that “the Afghan client state had functioned as the world’s biggest drug cartel, responsible for producing at least four-fifths and more like nine-tenths of all the heroin consumed during the global opioid epidemic” (264). The heroin that floods into the United States is a clear example of blowback.