Monday Brunch: Fear and Loathing in Fort Bragg

Plus other ecstatic and psychedelic links

Check out this opening paragraph from Rolling Stone journalist Seth Harp’s new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel:

Two veteran Special Forces soldiers, still drunk from the night before, their brains fried from a days-long binge on cocaine, MDMA, prescription pills, and a grab bag of mind-altering chemicals commonly sold in smoke shops as “bath salts,” were driving home from Walt Disney World the morning of March 21, 2018, when Sergeant First Class Mark Leshikar, riding in the passenger seat, developed an unshakable conviction that their car was being followed. Leshikar’s hard blue eyes, cracked with bloodshot veins from lack of sleep, studied the side-view mirror. He could have sworn that he saw shadowy pursuers on their tail, flitting in and out of the hazy lanes of traffic behind them on the Dixie Highway.

It echoes the famous opening of another Rolling Stone journalist’s book, Hunter S Thompson’s 1971 classic, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But where Thompson’s book was a hallucinatory exploration of drug freaks at the fringe of Nixon’s conservative America, Harp’s book takes us into the heart of US Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), to suggest something is deeply rotten in the US military elite.

Harp’s book, currently number two on the New York Times best-seller list (behind the unmoveable Bessel Van Der Kolk), tells the story of how the JSOC special forces centered at Fort Bragg in North Carolina - Navy Seal Team Six, the secretive Delta Force, and an even more secretive unit known simply as ‘The Activity’, became the US government’s go-to resource for its overseas wars from the 1980s onwards, especially in the last two decades of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Navy Seals and Delta have been lionized in movies like Zero Dark Thirty, Black Hawk Down or American Sniper, but Harp suggests there’s a much darker side. Professional killing machines, pumped up with drugs like amphetamine on tour, are operating with impunity, then coming home and still operating with impunity in North Carolina. Many of these elite soldiers come home struggling with PTSD, and they’re taking all the drugs - cocaine, crack, heroin, MDMA, magic mushrooms, LSD, ketamine, Tramadol, marijuana, and a lot of alcohol. They’re getting mixed up with crime around Fort Bragg - sexual violence, gun-running, even drug-running and work with Mexican and Colombian cartels, hence the provocative title, ‘The Fort Bragg Cartel’.

Harp investigates multiple murders that have occurred at or around Fort Bragg, focusing on two involving Delta Master Sergeant Billy Lavigne, a real-life Jason Bourne (on crack), who killed his best friend in 2018 after a drug-fuelled trip to Disney World, and then himself turned up murdered on the grounds of Fort Bragg military base two years later, apparently after getting involved with drug-dealing. Harp suggests there are one or more drug-running rings around Fort Bragg, run by Special Ops soldiers, lethal killers outside the law operating with the best tech the US government has, and that the military leadership is unable to keep them under control.

That’s a scary thought - it reminds one of what happened in Mexico in the 2010s, when a group of Mexican special forces soldiers trained at Fort Bragg by Delta Force turned into one of the most violent cartels, the Zetas. God forbid we’re seeing the Zetafication of some elements of US Special Forces

Harp’s book is relevant to the latest chapter in the War on Drugs - President Trump is poised to send JSOC into action in Mexico and Venezuela to fight cartels (a military invasion which apparently requires no Congressional approval), yet it appears some of these Special Forces may be mixed up with drug-running themselves. And it’s relevant to the Psychedelic Renaissance, which as I’ve recounted has been legitimated by testimonies from Special Forces veterans on how their PTSD was cured by psychedelic drugs like MDMA, psilocybin and ibogaine. On the one hand, the book underlines how important this effort is - you don’t want a bunch of traumatized Special Forces running around the world causing mayhem. On the other hand, it sounds like they were already doing a bunch of psychedelics before they ever heard of Rick Doblin or ibogaine!

How the US military got addicted to Special Ops (and how some Special Forces got addicted to drugs)

US Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC, was set up in 1980 as a counter-terrorism unit modelled on the British SAS. It is ‘a secret military within the military’, centred at Fort Bragg, containing various units - Delta Force, Seal Team Six, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and a unit known simply as The Activity, plus some of the best surveillance tech and military hardware the Pentagon has. JSOC gradually replaced the CIA as the US national security apparatus’ go-to resource for dirty opps like assassinations, partly because it could operate with more secrecy and less Congressional oversight - the media only became aware of JSOC’s existence four years after it launched, and there’s still very little media coverage of Delta Force. ‘Navy Seals write books, Delta Force write headlines’, goes one adage.

Delta Force exists to carry out covert actions, defined under federal law as overseas operations “in which it is intended that the role of the United States government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” They don’t wear uniforms, don’t have regulation hair-cuts, sport tattoos, and look and act more like a Hell’s Angels gang than a traditional military unit. Delta Force are incredibly tough and fit, having to pass an extremely gruelling physical trial and then get selected by some of the 300 or so serving Delta soldiers. They’re almost all white, and apparently tend to fall into two groups - the Christian teetotallers and the free-wheeling, drug-taking ‘pipe-hitters’.

JSOC became heavily used in the Global War on Terror. When there was local resistance to the US occupation in Iraq, from 2002 onwards, the US military command painted it as a terrorist insurgency by ‘Al Qaeda in Iraq’, and relied on JSOC units to do night-time raids to quell the insurgency. It was Special Ops who bore the brunt of General McChrystal’s ‘surge’ in Iraq and carried out his F3EAD strategy - Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze and Disseminate. Harp writes:

From now on, Iraq would be a war of targeted killings carried out clandestinely, almost always at night. Swollen with new infusions of money, personnel, equipment, and aircraft, JSOC became “JSOC on steroids,” a “counterterrorism killing machine” capable of slaying recalcitrant Iraqis on a scale that both Vickers and McChrystal describe as “industrial.”...From about ten a month at the start of the war, the number of night raids that JSOC carried out increased to ten per day at the height of the surge…The F3EAD cycle was not a complicated concept. It typically meant tracking down a target, killing him and every adult man and teenage boy in the vicinity, seizing every piece of paper and electronic device found on their persons, and using these materials to come up with more names to add to the hit list, and then killing them too, sometimes just a few hours later. From 2006 on, 90 percent or higher of insurgent deaths were from targeted, offensive Special Forces operations,” said a former Delta Force sergeant major who served in Iraq during the surge.

Two undercover Delta soldiers in Iraq

In the Afghan war, the US military under President Obama followed the same JSOC playbook, using Special Forces to prop up and train the Afghan military, even as the Afghan state under Hamid Karzai became the biggest narco-state in the world, and Afghan white heroin flooded into the US and helped precipitate the opioid crisis in which nearly a million Americans died.

You could say the US got addicted to special ops. And as the Global War on Terrorism dragged on, the psychological and moral cost to special forces units grew, as they served longer and longer missions, killed more and more people (often on weak intelligence) and operated without much scrutiny or accountability:

Over time [writes Harp] a sea change took place in the composition of the Special Forces. A good number of those who stayed in the Army for the second decade of the War on Terror were animated by baser character traits, including a sheer love of fighting, addiction to the gunslinging lifestyle, and a mercenary attitude toward killing. Theft of government funds, seen as a victimless crime, became commonplace…Lauren Grey, a longtime Army wife who resided at Fort Bragg for more than a decade, said that Afghanistan during President Obama’s second term was like “the wild, wild West.” There seemed to be no limit to the bad behavior that Special Forces soldiers like her husband, who did a total of eight deployments, could get away with. “Stealing cars,” she said. “Running guns. Selling drugs. Fucking Afghan women. Where do you want me to start?”

Supersoldiers on drugs

There’s long been a fascination with the use of mind-altering or performance-enhancing drugs on the battlefield - Norman Ohler’s Blitzed is largely an account of how the Nazi Blitzkrieg-invasion of Europe was powered by amphetamine. And it seems like the JSOC units, operating under intense pressure, also relied on amphetamines:

“During the dark days of Iraq,” recalled the retired sergeant major, “the op tempo got real bad.” He and his team sometimes had to stay awake for days on end. “Because of the continuous operations,” he said, “our own medical personnel became drug dealers.” JSOC doctors did what American medics have been doing since the Vietnam War and distributed amphetamines, specifically dextroamphetamine, known by the brand names Dexedrine or Adderall. “Then guys couldn’t sleep,” said the retired sergeant major, “so they were getting Ambien. Some were mixing it with booze.”

There’s been some reporting of this, but not much. Jack Murphy wrote in SOFREP in 2017:

Sources within the Special Operations community have described a situation to SOFREP in which SEAL Team Six operators are routinely high on drugs while conducting highly dangerous direct action missions while deployed abroad. Operators are known to abuse methamphetamine and other uppers on a regular basis during combat operations.

Murphy notes:

Is it possible that SEAL Team Six operators got addicted to these issued drugs which led them to later abusing methamphetamine as has been reported to SOFREP and CBS News? If so, the Naval Special Warfare Command bears responsibility for this and for the operators’ rehabilitation.

The use of amphetamine during military operations isn’t confined to US Special Forces, by the way - the US AirForce also reportedly use it, and it’s led to some accidents, like the 2002 Tarnak Farm friendly fire incident in Afghanistan, when an American F16 pilot killed four Canadian soldiers by mistake. He blamed the incident on prescribed amphetamines.

Blowback in North Carolina

As with the CIA’s involvement in shady operations in Latin America and Afghanistan in the 60s-80s, there seems to have been a fair amount of blowback from JSOC’s involvement in the War on Terror, in the form of Special Forces soldiers’ involvement in drugs, drugs-and-arms-smuggling and murders back home in North Carolina, leading NC Senator Tedd Budd to ask JSOC General Bryan Fenton about the ‘series of concerning incidents’ in 2023.

The Fort Bragg Cartel starts with the sad story of Delta Forces sergeant Billy Lavigne and his best friend, Green Beret Mark Leshikar. In 2018, the pair went to Disneyworld in Florida with their young daughters, and did a whole bunch of drugs - MDMA, cocaine, pain-killers, ketamine, bath salts. On the way home, Leshikar became paranoid that they were under surveillance, there was a disagreement, and Lavigne ended up shooting him six times, killing him when Leshikar was unarmed. Lavigne didn’t face any legal consequences for this, which Harp takes as indicative of the fact Delta Force soldiers are apparently above the law.

“They are a very hush-hush community,” said Diane Ballard, the lone police detective in nearby Vass, the tiny town where many Delta Force operators, active and retired, own homes. “They do what they want.”

Lavigne and Leshikar were part of a circle of hard-partying Special Forces soldiers around Fort Bragg and Fayettville (a town nicknamed Fatalville on account of the amount of fatal incidents and murders that occur there), who liked their booze and drugs. There was Special Forces veteran Jordan Terrell, for example, ‘who himself sold marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms on Fort Bragg’ - he ‘attested to the flagrant and continuous use of cocaine as well as MDMA and other drugs by a regular procession of active-duty Delta Force operators at Billy Lavigne’s residence…At Lavigne’s house [he says] there was always “a bunch of coke on the table,” as well as MDMA, ketamine, LSD, methamphetamine, and both types of heroin.

LSD seems to be particularly popular.

“Pretty much everybody was doing acid,” agreed Jordan Terrell, the Special Forces dropout in the 82nd Airborne Division who sold LSD and shrooms to Billy Lavigne and his Delta Force teammates, and bought coke and heroin from them. “Psychedelics and cocaine were the two biggest.”

One of the stories Harp tells is of 82nd Airborne paratrooper Enrique Roman-Martinez, who liked LSD so much he had it tattooed on his arm. He went camping with some other military buddies in Fort Bragg, in 2021, they dropped acid, he had a bad trip, then disappeared. His head turned up floating in a lake the next day, apparently chopped off with an axe. His body was never found and his death remains unsolved.

After the paywall, how some Special Forces soldiers got mixed up in drug-running. But is there really a Fort Bragg ‘cartel’? Plus, a new CPEP study on resurfaced trauma on psychedelics, Bessel Van Der Kolk gets in hot water, and the pick of the talks from Breaking Convention.