Seth Harp Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Seth Harp is a published author and an investigative journalist and a foreign correspondent known for writing about the military, armed conflict, and organized crime.

He is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and has reported back from various countries that include Mexico, Syria, Ukraine and Iraq for various publications that include Harper’s Magazine, the Columbia Journalism Review, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Daily Beast, The Intercept, and The Texas Observer. He has had his work supported by different fellowships and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and New America.

Prior to being a journalist, Harp practiced law for roughly five years. He was also an Assistant Attorney General for the state of Texas. While in college and law school, Seth served in the United States Army Reserve and also completed a tour of duty in Iraq.

The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces is a 2025 book by Seth Harp. This book was nominated for a Goodreads Choice Award for the category of Readers’ Favorite Nonfiction.

This book is an investigation into a string of murders that took place at America’s largest military base that have gone unsolved. It also addresses what these crimes are able to show about drug trafficking as well as the impunity that was experienced among elite special operations soldiers.

Two dead bodies were found in a forested area in 2020 of Fort Bragg, North Carolina. One of them was William Lavigne. Also going by Billy, he belonged to the Delta Force, the most secretive black ops unit in the military. He was a long time veteran of the classified assassination program in America and had completed over a dozen deployments. He was also addicted to crack cocaine, dealt drugs while on base, and had carried out a series of violent crimes, all before his mysterious death occurred.

The second body was that of Timothy Dumas. He was a supply officer who was attached to the Special Forces. He used his closeness to clandestine missions to try and steal guns and traffic drugs into the Untied States from abroad. He had also penned a letter of blackmail that threatened to expose criminality in a special operations task force located in Afghanistan.

Seth Harp starts looking into the double murder. As an Iraq war veteran and an actual investigative reporter, he is well qualified to do so. But in the process, Seth ends up finding out that there have been a lot of unexplained deaths at Fort Bragg recently. All of them appear to have something in common, a vague connection to drug trafficking and then dozens of fatal overdoses.

Pulling from trial transcripts, police records, and hundreds of different interviews, the author tells the story of narco-trafficking in the Special Forces, as well as military cover-ups, drug conspiracies helped along by corrupt police, American complicity in the heroin trade of Afghanistan, and the consequences that come along with continuous war. Read this book to absorb all of the details and to check out this nonfiction, happened in real life story for yourself.