The disorder exposed in Seth Harp’s The Fort Bragg Cartel will come for us all.

BY SARAH O’CONNELL

In March of 2018, Special Forces soldiers Mark Leshikar and William “Billy” Lavigne drove up the Dixie Highway. With their two daughters, they were returning home from Walt Disney World, a voyage made by countless American families every year. But unlike other fathers transporting tired toddlers home after a week of sun-soaked family fun, the two were still drunk from the night before. Their brains were “fried” from a days-long binge on various drugs, including cocaine, MDMA, and bath salts.

Somewhere on the way back to Fayetteville, North Carolina, a disoriented and paranoid Leshikar became convinced that the car behind them was following them. During a brief confrontation upon arriving home, Lavigne, a battle-hardened Delta Force Operator who was addicted to drugs and prone to fits of explosive rage, shot him dead. In 2020, Lavigne would meet his untimely end, his body discovered in a field at Fort Bragg alongside that of Army Veteran Timothy Dumas. Both men were shot dead, their bodies discovered in a field at Fort Bragg, the headquarters of Delta Force located right outside Fayetteville.

In The Fort Bragg Cartel, published in August of 2025, Investigative reporter and Iraq War veteran Seth Harp attempts to make sense of the string of violent crime surrounding the base. Harp originally began investigating the deaths of Lavigne and Dumas, but quickly realized there was more to the story. What follows is a thrilling, shocking account of a domestic cartel facilitated by Special Forces troops, in which “everyone knows it, everybody is complicit in it, and nobody does anything about it.” Harp shines a light on a sickness that penetrates not just Fort Bragg, but the armed forces and the country as a whole. The book debuted on the New York Times bestseller list and has been described as one of the “best nonfiction books of 2025” by The New Yorker.

After decades of U.S. intervention abroad, the concept of blowback is well-documented, but domestically, the consequences of endless wars cannot be clearly seen in many places as they can be in Fayetteville. The city, nicknamed “Fayettenam,” has been described as “a dumping ground for the problems of the American century of war and empire, where the wounds of war have pierced most deeply and are most visible.” The seemingly unstoppable path of destruction originating from the rot at the center of Fort Bragg takes countless victims, and many who seek accountability or answers are met with nothing but lies and documents full of redacted information.

Though Lavigne does not face charges for the shooting of Leshikar, his life quickly unravels in a dizzying downward spiral that at times reads more like fiction than fact. Joined by a colorful cast of people, such as Freddie Wayne Huff, a former DEA task force officer and North Carolina highway patrol agent who was fired after ticketing a motorist who was a major donor to North Carolina’s governor. Huff, enraged by his firing and disillusioned by his knowledge that the United States could stop the flow of drugs into the country at anytime but chooses not to, goes rogue. He pledges to “use every fucking thing I had known, learned, and taught against them,” and ends up at the head of a drug empire sprawling from Mexico to North Carolina. The shocking twists and turns read like an action novel, so much so that HBO announced it won the rights to adapt the book as a series in a “competitive bidding war” shortly after its release.

Though most other cities don’t have to face the repercussions of war as head-on as Fayetteville, it can be seen as emblematic of America as a whole. As more and more Americans struggle to make ends meet, with their tax dollars again going to fund unpopular wars in an ill-fated effort to retain American hegemony, The Fort Bragg Cartel presents an urgent and essential understanding of the military’s double-faced rhetoric. While we won’t be its first victims, it’s another reminder that the disorder snaking through the heart of the American empire will come for all of us eventually.