There are important books, and there are popular books. Sadly the two don’t often overlap. Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces, an exposé of the criminality and violence carried out by returning Special Forces personnel in American communities, is a rare exception. The book rocketed onto the New York Times bestseller list and is now set to be turned into an HBO series.

Its splash seems almost tailor-made for this moment. Harp’s book is making waves just as Donald Trump uses a supposed crackdown on violent crime and drug trafficking as a pretext to illegally deploy the military on American streets and expand US warmaking in radical new ways. Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic spoke to Harp, an investigative journalist and military veteran, about the evolution of US military interventions, the lesser-known ways they blow back on American soil, and new details about his reporting that didn’t make it into the book. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.