Radio War Nerd EP #541 — American Death Squads, feat. Seth Harp
Guest: Seth Harp, journalist
Recorded: August 10, 2025
Seth Harp returns to RWN to discuss his new book, The Fort Bragg Cartel, on the gory underbelly of America Empire, death squads, drug-running, addiction & bringing it all back to the Motherland.
Buy Seth's book Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces
Follow Seth on Twitter
Further listening with Seth:
-EP #328: Ukraine War Reporting & the Ghost "International Legion"
-EP #370: Iraq War 20th Anniversary, pt. 1: Abandoned Soldiers
Total time: 1:43:51
Direct link to this episode's mp3 here
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Order your print or ebook of John Dolan's new book Erdogan Pizza: Dispatches from a Violent & Grotesque World
Comments (59)
can someone reupload his audiobook, won't play on itunes
Rambo: Last Blood. A down on his luck veteran uses his skills and training to take out a small town's police force.
Rambo predicted Chris Dorner
Not to tell you your business guys but IMHO this needs to be unlocked. As many people as possible need to have the scales pulled off their eyes abt how US power projection actually works.
Went on a search around town for this book yesterday. Ended up ordering it from my local indie bookstore. In 5-7 days I’ll be devouring this thing.
This is embarrassing to confess but as a starry eyed Democrat teenager I thought Jack Nicholson in “A Few Good Men” was supposed to be super evil and unlikeable. I totally was the target audience for that liberal wish fulfillment movie. People really think his character is cool?
People are stupid, so, yes. There are a lot of people who think he was right. They think Private Santiago was a pussy who just needed to be whipped into shape. These are the same morons who think Gunnery Sergeant Hartman rules and he was right to treat Private Pyle like he did without a hint of awareness as to why Pyle ended up killing Hartman and himself.
As far as domestic military, legally, just repeal the posse comitatus act. Practically, it’s security theater. The only difference between D.C. now and the months after 9/11 is the guardsmen are on their phones all the time like cops. In 2001, all those black guys, since this is D.C. and most of the national guard is black, we’re just standing around or sitting in humvees bored as fuck.
Fun fact: the Green Berets were originally trained by Nazi commandos smuggled out of post-war Europe to avoid war crimes tribunals, including Otto Skorzeny. Also they have a TERRIBLE song. I totally understand seeing the apparent successes of the Israelis and the SAS and wanting to have something like that for yourself. I cannot understand why the U.S. military has always been so enamored of the Wehrmacht. They lost! They're losers! They were not good at anything except lying about their performance! "We might need to fight the Soviet Union one day... we'd better learn the tactics and strategies of the guys who were famously and utterly defeated by both ourselves and the Soviet Union."
Got the book and am already halfway through, outstanding so far. Waiting to listen until after I've finished the book.
Buying the fuck out of this book. Thank you, Seth!
Hey, do you guys happen to know if the book is going to be available in ebook form on Google Play any time soon, or as an epub without needing to own some other walled garden? There's a link which claims to be to Google, but it does not work. Searching it doesn't bring anything either. I try the other sites, and I can't actually buy the thing. I don't want to get this book from a pirate site, Seth Harp needs our support!
I got it on Amazon Kindle.
What is this false belief on american elections?
If elections didn't matter, they wouldn't bother to rig them. That's my optimistic take on the incredibly grim gerrymandering news.
Looks to be a wild episode. I know what I'm listening to tomorrow
I haven't listened to the whole show yet, but I'm surprised that they haven't mentioned how the drug trade is simply one of the US secret agencies chief management jobs. The United States runs the world drug market. Just like the crown dip 100 years ago.
Jesus Christ in heaven! the parallels with imperial Japan / United States just don’t stop
This is really killing my love for the classic GWOT film Delta Farce starring Larry the Cable Guy
God damnit i bet these fucking weeaboos are naming their SMUs after memes n shit Fucking freaks
G squad? G unit. Grey fox? There's at least 2 metal gear refs you can make with that
From personal knowledge RE spec-ops in Taiwan: idk if it’s green berets also. But seals are there
An island 5 miles off the coast of China? Everybody's there.
Lmao don't remind me how fuckin stupid I was in 2003 Thank God I took too long to decide or I woulda done army
I had to talk a friend down from enlisting on 9/11. It was a wild time.
Idk if people here have read anything by Stan Goff but he’s written about his own experiences as a special forces staff Sargent and delta force medic and he was very vocal about the confluence between drug smuggling and US special forces in south and Central America where he was involved with training police and military that were obviously deeply involved in drug trafficking
why are his cheeks discolored?
what happened to bro's cheeks?
They have been clapped
My PhD was on the overdose crisis. It was repeated over and over again by every drug task force that Afghanistan heroin only went to Europe, not North America. Seems untrue based on stats and supply chains stretching between here and there. So many young people and families decimated. Connections between war and expansion of drug trafficking would be such a stretch for many to consider. As Mark would say… it’s grim
As if that is somehow fine that we were flooding Europe with cheap dope! Such a god awful country here in the US
Seth, the opening passage broke my heart. I'm sorry you had to witness that, and I'm so grateful it radicalized you. This is a brave book.
Also Mark's question at the end is especially relevant, now that Hegseth apparently wants to post military in US cities
I can corroborate Seth’s point at the end about heavy U.S. military presence being associated with increased drug production. I was in Honduras in 2021 and in the eastern Atlantic coast of the country it was an open secret among locals that the region of Ahuas was simultaneously the most DEA surveilled but also most heavily cocaine trafficked area of Honduras. Just look up the Hernández brothers if you want to learn more.
¡Fuera JOH!
Anyone else remember the journalist who wrote the rolling stone piece died under mysterious circumstances?
I'm referring to the Mcchystral story
Speaking of SIGINT freaks, Xfinity has been touting * as a feature * that it can use your - excuse me, their - router’s WiFi signals for “home security” as a motion detector. And there have been articles recently about being able to ID the signatures of people based on their reflection pattern. And so as much as we already know and suspect, it’s probably not that long before it’s a given until proven otherwise that any space reachable by WiFi can be mapped and eventually micced the same way laser microphones work. Good times!
DARPA
Just started this, but I have to ask; didn't they get A Frw Good Men backwards? Didn't seem like an endorsement of "you need me on that wall etc.", even if reactionaries take it that way.
Sorkin is a uniform-humper to his bones. Everything else about that movie is a paean to the military. They just went a little too far, but it’s just some bad apples. The rest are going to legally defend you out of honor and all that horseshit.
this stuff makes me appreciate the show REACHER even more (as impossible as that may seem).
Amazing interview - thank you all. Going to buy the book - and also revisit the Vegas Tesla/ DJT bombing - believe he was somehow related - but all makes sense.
Buying this book today! Incredible interview!
JSOC has been operating domestically in the name of counter terrorism and also counter intelligence since the Iraq war protests. Against them and others. Also a good reason to use female intelligence and full-blown operators when your enemy is Code Pink, etc. Just like all their domestic enemies have been for decades. The lack of female assets is no longer an acceptable excuse tolerated by the security state.
Officially, women have been attached to SOCOM and JSOC in noncombat roles for years. At least for uniformed personnel. During GWOT they started using women on Cultural Support Teams because of the sexual politics of the war zones. Since the Intelligence Support Activity is an ISR unit, women have been attached to it all along. And then we get back to our old Bush-era supervillain war criminals like John Negroponte. One of the programs that was conceived but “not activated” like Total Information Awareness was its successor program after TIA became too hot, called Proactive Preventive Operations Group, a super-Activity that would also be used domestically in the name of counter terrorism and counter intelligence. And you know exactly what “proactive” prevention means. The worst part is just how many fucking people work for all of these units. SOCOM had, last I checked, 75,000 uniformed personnel and a massive number of civilian personnel from DOD and their liaisons with every other security agency. This is also why there are so many goddamn ex-SEALs filling up the media sphere because this militaristic shithole loves tough guys. I’m old enough to remember when the government refused to admit Delta existed. And like any rapidly expanding enterprise, standards went down for units that already were notorious for being havens for antisocial pieces of shit.
God damn what an episode
Quick reminder that the TV listening to you is no joke. Every smart tv has a microphone and is constantly collecting data on you and your habits. You’re never going to stop it. You can just turn off the WiFi or direct internet connection. But there’s always a bypass. You can use only a device like a Roku or just a damn antenna and you’re still stuck. Luckily, outside of one in a million it’s just to sell advertising data.
Samsung TVs (and others) take multiple snapshots per minute as well. Best to just unplug. Online devices can also ping each other for open ports so there's so many ways to monitor you... They can profile your voice as well... Check out Michael Bazzell and Rob Braxmann
My Copy of the book is supposed to arrive to tonight, very excited
DIA did 911
Fayetteville native here, was excited for the book, doubly excited to see the author on!
Surprising Ahnuld impression from John.
Now I have to watch predator. Long tall sally by Lionel Richie.
Just finished the book so fucking excellent!!! We need a thousand more Seth Harps in this sick old world of ours!
He’s one of the best journalists in America. No exaggeration.
Yes I thought it would happen
I wonder what US troops get up in bases abroad. We have some in the UK where I live
mostly sexual assaults