What the public thinks of as special operators is largely shaped by TV shows and movies that portray these guys as action heroes. I just watched an episode of a show called The Terminal List, and it’s pretty typical in the way that it portrays these long-haired badasses who are rugged and tough antiheroes out there fighting terrorists. The reality around the Special Forces is a lot more complex.

The Special Forces has a specific role. Army Special Forces has a niche role that it grew out of in the Vietnam era, which was to train foreign armies to go into countries where the United States has perceived national security interests and create proxy forces to serve those interests. They’re trainers. They meet with local forces in a country like Afghanistan, for example, and their job is to create a force that’s capable of standing on its own. So a lot of the things that they do are hooking these guys up with weapons, getting them money supplies, training them how to fight, and then also leading them in battle.

Yeah, Sebastian Junger wrote a book some years ago, Tribe, in which he writes about hunter-gatherer groups that participate in tribal warfare, many of whom kill people and are exposed to gruesome violence in places like Papua New Guinea or the Amazon. His point was that in these environments, there is no such thing as Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). It’s not to be found.

He contrasts that with the experience of fighting in the modern military of a massive nation-state like the US, that’s capitalist and is alienated and atomized, where there’s a divergence between elite interests and the people. His basic hypothesis, which I find interesting, is that it’s because of the lack of integration of the reasons for fighting a war that causes people to suffer and grapple with their consciences afterward. It’s because they’re fighting for alienated interests, and they’re not fighting for their tribe.

Navy SEALs call each other brothers, but they’re not brothers in the sense that hunter-gatherers are literally brothers and cousins fighting. I think that has a lot to do with it, compounded by the fact that most veterans think that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were not worth fighting. The absence of a legitimate goal that the violence is in service of is what drives the epidemic of PTSD and moral injury that’s observable in the Special Forces.

I don’t think that you could say that they’re just bad apples or isolated cases, because there’s so many of them.

My book mainly focuses on a pair of special operators who were found murdered in Fort Bragg in 2020, Timothy Dumas and Billy LaVigne. They died in 2020, and the investigation into their deaths lasted three years. In the years since then, there have been many more cases coming out of Fort Bragg that I don’t have such close detail on but am still tracking.

Todd Michael Fulkerson, a Green Beret who was trained at Bragg, was convicted earlier this year of trafficking narcotics with the Sinaloa cartel up through the Arizona border and bringing drugs into Ohio. Another guy, Jorge Esteban Garcia, who was the top career counselor at Fort Bragg for twenty years — his job was to mentor and coach retiring soldiers on their career prospects — was literally recruiting for a cartel and was convicted of trafficking methamphetamine and supporting a violent extremist organization. And then a group of soldiers in the 44th Medical Brigade at Fort Bragg — all these soldiers are at Fort Bragg — were convicted of trafficking massive amounts of ketamine from Cameroon in West Africa to the US through the mail system.

Those three cases are just in the last eighteen months or so and just in one military base. When you look at these cases closely, you see how many times these things get covered up, and how rare it is to actually be fully adjudicated through the criminal justice system to the point where you have a conviction. I’m only talking about cases where these soldiers were convicted. Many more cases get quietly buried and never come to light.

As for what proportion of the drugs in the United States are being brought by members of the military, I think that’s impossible to quantify for a variety of reasons. But what you can say is that you can look at every single region of the world that’s a massive drug production center — which there really are not that many of them — and in every case, you can see that US military intervention preceded the country’s becoming a narco state, not the other way around.

You’re talking about Mexico, Colombia, also Peru and Bolivia to some extent, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Afghanistan as well as what’s now called Myanmar. Those countries account for the lion’s share of all drugs produced in the world, and all have a long history of US military and intelligence intervention that predates their becoming narco states.

Things are in flux now like never before. It’s hard to predict. In the first two years of Israel’s onslaught on Gaza, one thing that became clear is that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) actually makes the US military look pretty good by comparison. And it’s not a neat comparison because, for example, the US killed hundreds of thousands of people in Iraq, possibly as many as a million, certainly more than have been killed in Gaza.

Nevertheless — and this is not meant, and no one who read my book would confuse this for an apology — the US military, in waging war in Iraq, did conduct itself by a certain type of legality. They were, by and large, following legal processes where the war had been authorized by Congress, signed off by the president. And then from there on down, you had enemy fighters that were designated combatants that could be legally killed. There were concerted efforts to train troops to minimize civilian casualties.

In the unit I served in, in Iraq, when a soldier killed civilians unjustifiably — which happened right in front of me — other soldiers in the unit reported that they were not happy about it, and, in fact, tried to get the soldier in trouble. He never was [held accountable], but it still speaks to a certain intention to abide by the laws of war.

The IDF doesn’t care about any of that. They’re just total murderers and terrorists who will kill anybody that moves: kill children, kill women, sport killings. We’ve seen the worst horrors that anyone’s ever seen in living memory, committed by the IDF. The question that I am most preoccupied by in this regard is whether the US will follow the Israelis down that path and act in the same way.

Certainly, the strike on a Venezuelan boat the other day suggests that it’s possible we’ll move in that direction, because they haven’t made public their intelligence showing that these were cartel members. Even if they were cartel members, they’re not combatants in war, so striking them is totally outside the laws of war. And they’re just doing that openly. That’s similar to the Israelis in that respect. I’m really concerned that our country could follow that same model and become even more like the IDF.

Certainly. I think that’s a concern. One thing to keep in mind is that JSOC is a highly adaptable organization, and you see them become a very different iteration of themselves in successive armed conflicts. So they went into the Iraq War as a very niche organization that existed to hunt down former regime officials and look for those weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to exist. But over the course of the war, JSOC evolved into a much larger and bloodier organization with a much larger and broader target set; by 2007, 2008, they were just liquidating anyone who had any connections at all to the insurgency.

I use the phrase “death squad” to describe JSOC operations in Iraq. A similar model was then ported over to the war in Afghanistan when President [Barack] Obama came into office; again, Delta Force and JSOC functioned as a kind of death squad in Afghanistan, where they’re dedicated to daily assassination missions.

It slowed down, because Afghanistan was a very different type of war in terms of its terrain, the composition of the enemy, and the population size relative to Iraq. So it evolved there, and the tempo of operations is lower. And then in West Africa and all across North Africa, JSOC is a very different kind of organization. Less is known about what they’re doing there. Certainly there are kinetic, lethal missions that they’re engaged in there. But it’s not entirely clear to me what JSOC operations there consist of. I know that they’re doing a lot of patrols, a lot of surveillance, and occasional strikes, particularly in Somalia.

They also are very active in Libya, but it’s hard to know exactly what they’re up to there. Same story with Ukraine. We know that they’re there. We know that they’re doing operations. And we also see lots of sabotage and assassinations taking place inside Russian borders: generals getting killed by car bombs, factories blowing up, weapons depots catching fire. To what extent are active-duty US troops responsible for carrying out those operations versus working through Ukrainian proxies? Harder to say. There’s a lag time on this stuff because it takes years to come out.

When I was reporting in Iraq, I was not tracking entirely what Delta Force was doing, because they’re so secretive and it’s very hard to penetrate the organization to get operational details on what they’re doing. But we should keep a close eye on their actions. And in Gaza, we know that Delta Force has a permanent liaison cell in Tel Aviv and that there’s always Delta Force personnel in Israel collaborating with the IDF. They’re also doing stuff in Yemen. So it’s something to keep an eye on. But again, this is an adaptable organization that can morph and change right in front of your eyes and become something totally different from what it was a few years ago.

The first time I read it, I was keenly attuned to whether I’d gotten anything wrong. In reality, it was so much heavier than I knew. The stuff that LaVigne admits is really jaw-dropping. He talks not only about Delta Force operations and combat but also about his criminal activities in North Carolina. There’s a lot of information there that I think would be relevant to the investigation into his death as well, to assign responsibility for his murder and the murder of Timothy Dumas.

I quote sources in the book who say that LaVigne was working for a cartel and was trafficking drugs at a high level. That was something that was pretty hard to pin down. But he straight up admits it in the book, and he goes on at length detailing his work for this cartel, and he says that it started right after he got kicked off of Delta Force, after his sixth felony arrest. He didn’t get kicked off after he murdered his friend. He remained on active duty. But after a number of subsequent arrests, they had finally had enough.

That just destroyed him, because he lived for his career, and he was totally obsessed with being a Delta Force operator. It was his whole identity. When he lost that, he went completely off the deep end, and his drug problem became really extreme. He talks about meeting low-level dealers, then meeting the people above them. He’s just gradually ascending this world, because everyone knows who he is and what he’s done, and they all are keen to make use of his skills.

He talks about becoming linked up with some of the biggest drug traffickers in North Carolina, representatives of Mexican organizations that were there who wanted more of his knowledge and skills, not only in terms of beating up and threatening people who owed them money and accompanying them as bodyguards and teaching them how to do security, but also training them on how surveillance works. Because as a Delta Force operator, he really knew about operational security and what’s secure and what’s not, the capabilities and limitations of law enforcement.

He was training these guys. He even talks about doing international drug runs down to Central America and using high-altitude parachute jumping to smuggle drug packages into the United States, which is, I think, the modus operandi of high-level Special Forces guys who turn to drug trafficking. With large loads of cocaine, it’s a really effective way to get around customs inspections.

The most detailed accounts of Delta Force operations I’ve ever read come from this memoir. Years back, a guy, a reporter named Sean Naylor, wrote a great book about JSOC called Relentless Strike. And that was the most granular account of how JSOC operates I have ever read. Because you have to keep in mind: there’s a total information vacuum around this organization, despite its centrality to the US government and the war effort.

But Billy Lavigne’s is a much more inside look at exactly how, on a tactical step-by-step level, they carry out an assassination of, let’s say, a guy in a moving car or a guy in a fortified compound surrounded by thousands of fighters. One of the most incredible scenes in his memoir, which is surprisingly well written, is when he talks about a raid that took place in 2015, in Syria, which targeted an ISIS commander named Abu Sayyaf. This guy was surrounded by thousands of ISIS fighters in a village that was completely occupied by ISIS. To read his account of how they went in surgically — I mean, relatively surgically, they probably killed a hundred people that day. But the way that he describes exactly how they carried out this operation and didn’t lose any of their own forces, their precision and planning is really incredible.

They wait for weeks for the right opportunity to strike on a night when there’s clear weather. No moon is an important factor for them, because then they can operate in total darkness, without any clouds obscuring their own surveillance drones. What they’re constantly doing is minimizing risk, controlling contingencies, and then moving in and, in a very methodical way, wiping out everyone that’s on their target list while maintaining a secure perimeter that’s constantly under attack. It’s jaw-dropping, to see that from the inside.

His role was a dog handler, by the way. I never realized the extent to which the unit uses dogs. They use dogs on every single operation. It’s something that’s not really represented in film and TV depictions. One significant thing that he acknowledges: his dog dragged him this unarmed prisoner they had torn up, and he describes swiping the guys hair out of his face, because he had long hair. And when he saw that it was not Abu Sayyaf, the target person that they were trying to abduct, he just shot him at point blank. Just blew his brains out right there. So the way he casually described killing prisoners confirmed what I wrote in the book about how these raids tend to be total massacres. In all of the raids that Lavigne describes, there are no male survivors.

I would say that US complicity in the international drug trade was never as substantial as it was in the war in Afghanistan, or as out in the open. No bones about it, really. Gary Webb did great reporting on how the contra rebels of Nicaragua, which had covert US backing, were being tacitly allowed to traffic cocaine into the United States through Mexico. But as bad as the crack epidemic was in the US, which this fueled, it’s nothing compared to the heroin crisis that we saw in the United States in 2010.

The drug problem in the US has gotten way worse than it was in the 1980s, and most of that heroin came from Afghanistan, although the DEA has covered up that fact. But it’s true all over the world: Europe and Australia all had heroin crises around this time that were driven by an incredibly abundant supply and high potency of heroin, virtually all of which came from Afghanistan. Virtually all of it was being produced by warlords, police chiefs, top client state officials — all with the open backing of the US military, and many of whom were secretly on the CIA’s payroll.

So the US created Afghanistan as a narco state, and protected and armed it for twenty years as it pumped heroin into the veins of the entire world. And the lack of reckoning around that is truly awe-inspiring, as is the degree of elite omertà around this massive global crime that the whole of the US government committed, which had such disastrous consequences for us as a country and for the whole world.

It makes little sense. Venezuela is not even a major drug-producing country. They’re just counting on Americans’ ignorance to think, “Well, it’s in South America. It must be a narco state.” But that’s actually not the case. Venezuela doesn’t have terrain that’s well-suited for growing coca. It grows in Colombia, Bolivia, and Peru, which neighbor Venezuela.

This example of the strike on this boat really augurs poorly for the future. And the lies are not as good, not as sophisticated as they used to be. They are just filming their own war crimes and the secretary of state posts them on Twitter.

By the way, I read the Jacobin piece on [retired CENTCOM commander] General Michael Kurilla. I have his whole resume. I know everything that he’s done in his career. We were talking before about how people within these institutions see themselves as actors operating ethically within a legal framework. That is a limiting factor on the severity of the war crimes that they’ll commit.

But a really negative trend around Trump being president is that, the longer he is in office — we saw this during his first term, and I have no reason to believe that it’s not happening again — those types of people tend to get out of the military because they don’t like the lack of seriousness and professionalism from people like Trump and some of his top surrogates. The more centrist and sober-minded in the military, there’s less and less of them, and the people who are the most sycophantic, the most willing to flatter Trump’s prejudices and instincts toward violence as well as the people around him that are carrying water for Israel — they’re the ones who are rising through the military hierarchy.

Kurilla was one of them: someone who perceived in the ambient environment right now that it’s Israel that will get him the next accolade that he’s after in his military career. Totally absent is any capacity for reflection, humanity, sense of justice, or wisdom — anything you want to see in a high-ranking general or statesman. It’s really worrisome to see those people rising in the military hierarchy.