A Double Murder at Fort Bragg

Tucker Carlson interviews author Seth about the murder & drug trafficking taking place Inside America’s largest military base.

Years ago, while researching my book The Meaning of Malice, I interviewed a Sheriff’s Deputy in North Carolina who told me the story of a young serviceman who had recently returned from Afghanistan and murdered his wife and was himself killed in a shootout with law enforcement. Searching his vehicle, she found compact discs on which someone had inscribed Satanic sounding phrases with a magic marker. She took them back to the Sheriff’s office and watched them, and was horrified to see video recordings of the young serviceman and a few of his fellows raping and murdering Afghan girls. In some of the rapes, the victims appeared to be already dead and used as props in some sort of Satanic ritual.

When the then Sheriff (later imprisoned for drug smuggling and killed in prison) saw the CDs, he made an executive decision to take them out into the parking lot, put them in a metal trashcan, and burn them. As he saw it, the videos would be the end of the particular military branch’s reputation. At any rate, he reckoned the DoD would almost certainly cover up the crimes documented in the videos.

When the Sheriff’s Deputy protested, the Sheriff replied that if she pursued the matter, she would likely end up shot in the back of the head and found in the woods.

This morning I was reminded of this anecdote when I listened to Tucker Carlson’s interview with former soldier and author Seth Harp about a double murder at Fort Bragg. The story relates the life and death of an active duty Delta force operator who had a cocaine habit and was apparently involved in cocaine trafficking from Mexico.

Several months earlier he had shot one of his friends in the man’s home. The Army had apparently pressured local law enforcement to turn a blind eye to the incident with the claim that the shooting had been in self defense.

It’s one of the wildest stories I’ve ever heard. The portrait of the Delta Force operator that emerges reminds me of the character Colonel Walter E. Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, whom the CIA and Army intelligence decide to assassinate because he has gone rogue.

Especially noteworthy is the fact that the Delta Force operator in this story had become disillusioned with the U.S. military’s mission abroad. His perception that he was participating in a corrupt enterprise seems to have sent him into a tailspin of drug abuse and nihilism.

The Delta Force operator of this story was not the first great warrior to have come to this conclusion. As the most decorated Marine is U.S. history, Smedley Darlington Butler, memorably stated it in his 1935 book, War is a Racket:

I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.

Recently my younger brother went on a fly fishing trip with a former Navy Seal. Though not the most loquacious man, he occasionally made references to some of the missions he’d been on, without revealing any of the operations’ specific details. Listening to these anecdotes, my brother got the overwhelming impression that America’s greatest warriors are being used as muscle for commercial and political interests that have nothing to do with defending the American homeland.