Chapter One I Kill People for a Living Two veteran Special Forces soldiers, still drunk from the night before, their brains fried from a days-long binge on cocaine, MDMA, prescription pills, and a grab bag of mind-altering chemicals commonly sold in smoke shops as "bath salts," were driving home from Walt Disney World the morning of March 21, 2018, when Sergeant First Class Mark Leshikar, riding in the passenger seat, devel­oped an unshakable conviction that their car was being followed. Le­shikar''s hard blue eyes, cracked with bloodshot veins from lack of sleep, studied the side-view mirror. He could have sworn that he saw shadowy pursuers on their tail, flitting in and out of the hazy lanes of traffic be­hind them on the Dixie Highway. The driver of the car, Master Sergeant William Lavigne II, a mem­ber of the U.S. Army''s top- secret Delta Force who had been trained in evasive driving and countersurveillance, told Leshikar that he was hal­lucinating. They were northbound on Interstate 95, headed for Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where both men were stationed. Lavigne, the older and more highly ranking of the two, had been keeping a close watch on the rearview mirror for miles.

There was no one on their six o''clock, he insisted. But Leshikar wouldn''t listen. Two little girls, Lavigne''s daughter and Leshikar''s, were in the back of the car, tired and sunburned after days of exploring the theme parks in and around Orlando, Florida. They were too young to understand what the tense bickering in the front seats was about. All they knew was that their daddies were starting to scare them. According to Leshikar''s mother, sister, and wife, he had been acting strangely for the last six months. The trouble began, they said, in late 2017, as a result of an ambiguous mishap that he sustained while on de­ployment to Tajikistan, a remote and mountainous narco-state that the United States used for many years as a staging ground for the war in Afghanistan. What exactly happened to Leshikar in Tajikistan, a global hub of international heroin trafficking, is a mystery.

An anodyne Penta­gon press release states that he and his Green Beret teammates were there to train the Tajik military on standard infantry tactics like target practice, rock drills, and first aid. Everyone in the accompanying photo­graph looks pretty bored. But upon Leshikar''s return to the United States, he didn''t seem like the same person. His appearance had changed, too. "When he came home," said his mother, Tammy Mabey, "notably, you could see a droopiness in his eye." Leshikar told her and his wife, Laura, that he and his team had come under attack in an ambush and that a roadside bomb had rocked the truck he was in, leaving him with a traumatic brain injury. But a spokes­man for the United States Army Special Operations Command, known as USASOC, said that no American soldier has ever been killed or wounded in Tajikistan. Nor do Leshikar''s personnel records reflect that he was awarded a Purple Heart, a decoration given to soldiers wounded as a result of enemy action.

Whatever the cause of Leshikar''s injury, a military doctor had pre­scribed him tramadol, an opioid painkiller that was freely distributed to elite troops during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and became a popular drug of abuse among special operations soldiers. Leshikar also came back from Tajikistan with a steady supply of the benzodiazepine Xanax, which he took along with tramadol to treat anxiety associated with his supposed PTSD, another claimed effect of the fictitious am­bush. On top of this volatile pharmaceutical cocktail, which, in addition to suppressing the central nervous system, can cause bizarre episodes of uninhibited behavior, Leshikar had taken up snorting cocaine. He tried to rationalize it, telling Tammy that he and his fellow Green Berets reg­ularly used the stuff to stay awake during night operations. "It''s just like taking an antidepressant," he''d said. Tammy, a single mother who had worked for a succession of small-town police departments in the Pacific Northwest, first as a jailer and dispatcher, later as a patrolwoman, wasn''t convinced. Cocaine is illegal, not something prescribed by a doctor, she reasoned. But it was her son''s alcohol consumption that concerned her the most.

"Marky always acted perfectly fine when doing cocaine," she said. "When Marky would spiral was if he drank too much." In the past, Leshikar had been a proud, stoic, taciturn man, not given to displays of incontinent emotion. Now, after no more than two or three alcoholic beverages, which combined poorly with the medica­tions he was on, a maudlin gloominess would overtake him, a sullen and wounded sort of machismo. He would turn to his wife and say things like "You know I''m a bad person, right? I kill people for a living." In a photo taken at an American base in Afghanistan, where he served six months in combat from 2015 to 2016, Leshikar wears wrap­around Oakley sunglasses, a thick beard, and a pleased grin while getting pinned with a Bronze Star medal and a Combat Infantry Badge. In other photos, he sports a custom skull patch on the front of his body armor, a Confederate battle flag on his left shoulder, and an oversize belt buckle shaped like a fanged demon with ram''s horns. "Such a pigheaded, egotistical man," was the first impression that he made on Laura, a paralegal originally from Hawaii whose dad was a marine.

She initially scoffed at his swaggering boastfulness and the ridiculous lies he told. He was rather tall and handsome, though: six feet four, with light blue eyes and a jawline as well defined as a carpen­ter''s square. "Over time," said Laura, "he grew on me." Leshikar was born in 1984 in rural Idaho and joined the active-duty Air Force at age eighteen. He served in the Air Force Honor Guard, a ceremonial unit in which he felt left out of the real action entailed in America''s escalating wars. In 2010, after an aimless period in civilian employ, he secured a Special Forces slot in Washington state''s Army National Guard and was sent to Fort Bragg for Green Beret training. Assigned to the 19th Special Forces Group, a National Guard for­mation that has teams of part-time Green Berets stationed all over the country, Leshikar went on to patch together a career as a socalled guard bum, a reservist with no other regular source of employment who jumps from orders to orders, picking up deployments, temporary duty assignments, and paid training gigs as often as possible. He de­ployed for a year to the Philippines, worked for a time as a SWAT trainer and private security guard, then did his tours in Afghanistan and Tajikistan.

"His deployments were pretty kinetic," said Jordan Terrell, a para­trooper in Fort Bragg''s 82nd Airborne Division, originally from Chi­cago, who was friends with Leshikar. "I know he threw a bunch of incendiary grenades on a villager''s hut and burned a couple of people alive," Terrell said. "He showed me videos. It was pretty fucked up." Shortly after returning from Tajikistan in 2017, Leshikar suffered a severe clonic-tonic seizure, resulting in his hospitalization. A computed tomography scan of his brain, as well as magnetic resonance imaging, failed to disclose any physical trauma. There was no clear etiology for the seizure, but the doctor who examined him surmised that it had something to do with his heavy use of prescription drugs, as well as chronic insomnia. In February 2018, about a month before the ill-fated trip to Disney World, Leshikar''s little sister Nicole Rick and her husband, a Navy sub­mariner, stayed with Mark and Laura for two weeks while closing on a house in Chesapeake, Virginia.

Whenever a babysitter could be found to look after their children, the group of four young parents, all in their mid-thirties, went out on the town together, invariably joined by Leshikar''s best friend, Billy Lavigne, the Delta Force soldier. "Full disclo­sure," Nicole said, "me and Billy and Mark all did coke together." Before hitting a bar or club, they would stop at Lavigne''s house, a cookie-cutter tract home at the end of a culdesac in a newly con­structed subdivision of Fayetteville, the moody military town, a low- slung sprawl of suburbs and strip malls, studded with billboards, that surrounds Fort Bragg on three sides. Lavigne had recently divorced, and now that his wife and daughter had moved out, the three-bedroom house was often full of his fellow operators from Delta Force, a highly classified unit a cut above the ordinary Special Forces. No less secretive than the Central Intelligence Agency, Delta Force exists to carry out covert actions, defined under federal law as overseas operations "in which it is intended that the role of the United States government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly." Wearing civilian clothes or operating in disguise under false identities, soldiers from Delta Force infiltrate foreign countries and commit clandestine acts of sabotage, espionage, and assassination, often on direct orders from the White House. Behind a heavy curtain of government secrecy, twenty-plus years at war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Syria, the Philippines, and elsewhere has given rise in this ultra- lite unit to a toxic culture of addiction, criminality, madness, violence, and impunity. "The unit guys kind of separate themselves into two groups," said Terrell, who, like Leshikar, aspired to join Delta Force but failed to meet the rigorous and often arbitrary selection criteria.

"You have the teetotalers, the guys who are super Christian, warriors for God. No drugs, no alcohol, super goody-goody, by the book. Then you have the guys who are just.