Pipe Hitters
August 19, 2025 at 01:40AMIn the most righteously angry book review you’ll read this week—year?—Grayson Scott considers two new releases about the legacy of America’s 21st-century wars, with a focus on the role of special operators. First up, To Lose a War: The Fall and Rise of the Taliban by Jon Lee Anderson:
When Anderson parachutes in for a story, he tends to land in a rich guy’s backyard. At the opening of his book The Fall of Baghdad, another series of essays written in-country before and during an occupation, he makes sure to tell us exactly how the exiled Sunni sheikh he is talking to is related to the prophet Muhammad. He loves hanging out with Saddam’s plastic surgeon, even after he acknowledged that the man has started avoiding him for his own safety in the last days of Baathism. (It had become inadvisable for Saddam’s associates to advertise their whereabouts, even to American reporters.) In Afghanistan, he interviews President Hamid Karzai, and even minor warlords like Daoud Khan and Mullah Naquib qualify as celebrities. If success in journalism is a question of access, then Anderson deserves this third payday (most of these essays were originally written for The New Yorker; many of those gathered here are also collected in a 2002 book called The Lion’s Grave).
Despite all his important friends, Anderson still missed the biggest story of the war, though this isn’t to say he didn’t have the material for forming the right answers in front of him from the occupation’s earliest days. In an essay from January of 2002, Anderson turns to his translator and asks, “What it would take for me to set myself up as a warlord in Afghanistan.” The Afghan replies, “It would be easy. You hire a hundred gunmen for a month, get a few Toyota pickups, and you’re in business.” He estimated that it would cost about $10,000. Anderson then comments, “Most of the mujahideen commanders in the Northern Alliance, for instance, were also involved in the opium and heroin trade.” This discussion and its commentary were occasioned by an offer made by an Afghan, mistaking Anderson for a special operator, to sell him an al-Qaeda prisoner. The observations Anderson makes in these handful of paragraphs—that the American-backed leadership was corrupt and unpopular, and that anyone with money could join them—were made three months after the invasion began.
Scott then turns to The Fort Bragg Cartel: Drug Trafficking and Murder in the Special Forces by Seth Harp:
The most affecting parts of The Fort Bragg Cartel are the vignettes Harp collects showing the devastation soldiers inflict on their families: an operator named Keith Lewis beat his wife, then pointed a gun at the cops who showed up when she called. No charges were filed, and soon thereafter he was promoted. A couple of years later, Lewis murdered his wife, who was pregnant, with a gun in one hand and their daughter in the other. Another operator stomped to death his tiny dog, named Greta Bean, then shot his wife in the head before killing himself. This didn’t start recently. In July 2002, the Times was reporting a “growing problem” at Bragg: soldiers murdering their wives. The report notes that of the four women killed in the six weeks before the article was published, three of the victims were married to men in the special forces. One, another who killed his wife and then shot himself, was a member of Delta.
The cutting edge of grisly violence against innocent people might belong to operators, but their innovations filter down. A study from a few years ago found that over the previous thirty years, 25 percent of the people who attempted or carried out mass casualty attacks in the United States were veterans. More surprisingly, it concluded that veterans who had seen combat or had deployment-related trauma were no more likely to try and kill lots of people than those who didn’t have those experiences. It was enough just being in the military.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/08/18/pipe-hitters/
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