This was an incredible read. I think it did real damage to my sleep because I couldn’t put it down.
The core thread is an investigation of crimes by members of the Delta Force, a shadowy special-ops unit out of Fort Bragg (aka Fort Liberty). This is extremely well-written, with the pacing of a crime thriller and a lot of incredible details. Harp definitely put in the work talking to the wives and friends of the people involved, and his first-hand experience being in the military himself helps getting an accurate read of the culture.
But this isn’t just about personal stories and individual murders or instances of drug trafficking: this also contains details about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that were totally new to me.
The Taliban forbade poppy cultivation; bacha bazi, or boy play; suppressed kidnapping; and in the summer of 2001 completed a countrywide eradication campaign that radically reduced the world supply of heroin.
Learning more about the Taliban and the drug trade was eye-opening as someone who was too young at the time to really understand what was going on.
On March 4, North Carolina reported its first case of COVID-19, a highly contagious respiratory disease that escaped from a U.S.-funded biolab in Wuhan, China.
The one thing that did stick out to me as weird, at least, is that Harp writes about the COVID-19 lab leak theory as if it was confirmed fact. I don’t have a strong opinion or any special knowledge about that, but it doesn’t seem like a settled fact either way and to state it as such chipped away at my confidence in the book’s accuracy a bit.
And I think that goes with the strong storytelling about international events and wars: Harp definitely has an opinion and a political stance and tends to give a straightforward explanation of things that would merit a multi-paragraph explanation if you had asked a political scientist.
This book makes you feel bad about wars and skeptical that they can ever be fought correctly or fairly. And for what these troops did to innocent people, and the psychological damage that they took home, and then how they killed people in the US as a result. It’s all pretty sickening.