What Kind of Political Thriller Are We Living In?

Political thrillers tend to reflect the turbulence of their times. Cold War era spy novels often pitted individualistic capitalism (the good guys) against authoritarian communism (the bad guys). Post-Vietnam political thrillers like Three Days of the Condor or The Parallax View questioned government and corporate actions. Starting in the 80s political thriller heroes might be Jack Ryan patriots who battle evil aggressors from the USSR or a Jason Bourne special operator pursued by his own government’s CIA.

After 9/11 Islamic terrorism became a preferred villain. However, a need to appeal to global audiences sometimes mutes the political insinuations of contemporary thrillers. Think Prime’s Citadel where the enemy is a malevolent surveillance group not associated with a particular political persuasion. Still the genre depends on realistic depictions; this is not sci-fi or fantasy.

So what background informs our contemporary political thriller? Terrorist events in the US have gone from 9 to 21 per year from 2004 to 2014 climbing to 103 in 2020. In 2023 the US Government Accountability Office said domestic terrorism is on the rise.

Let’s write today’s political thriller using the two terrorist attacks of New Year’s Eve. Is this a story of extremists attacking crowded tourist sites? Shamsud-Din Jabbar was a 42-year-old veteran who killed 14 people and ran down many more on Bourbon Street in New Orleans on New Year’s Eve. He announced in a Facebook post that he had joined ISIS last summer and had a black ISIS flag on the trailer hitch of the rented pickup truck he drove. But he was also an army veteran and US born citizen. Confusing, right?

What about Mathew Livelsberger, a 37-year-old Army master sergeant who apparently blew up a Cybertruck in front of the Trump Hotel in Las Vegas? (More on ‘apparently’ in a minute.) Another soldier but no convert to ISIS. Livelsberger was a 19-year Green Beret with five deployments in Afghanistan and numerous medals. According to a Marine who knew him there, Livelsberger struck awe with his near-native knowledge of the region and his blond beard flowing to his waist. His job was to finalize targeting and go on night raids with special ops to kill or capture ‘targets’. A member of the elite of the US military turned terrorist?

According to the official account he shot himself in the head and then detonated the propane and fireworks in his rented Cybertruck. His dad says he was a ‘super-soldier’ who would never have used such a simplistic concoction since he knew how to make sophisticated bombs. Plus how did he detonate this mess after shooting himself in the head? So let’s say possible terrorist.

Maybe what we’re really talking about are domestic abusers who escalated to mass violence. An NIH study published in 2021 found that 59.1 percent of mass shooters had a history of domestic violence. Jabbar had been married three times and his second wife obtained a restraining order against him. He considered killing his family before deciding on the Bourbon Street attack. Livelsberger and his wife argued over his alleged cheating and he left the home the day after Christmas. Authorities have searched a townhouse in Colorado Springs where a woman (not the wife) and baby were sighted. But no DV history revealed as of yet.

Here’s one thing the two perpetrators have in common: both spent time at Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, in North Carolina. Fort Liberty has lots of problems. It’s being sued for water contamination due to years-long use of fire retardants containing PFAS forever chemicals and had to demolish many barracks due to mold. But more to the point, the death rate at this base of 54,000 people is too high. Rolling Stone journalist Seth Harp has been reporting on deaths at the base due to drug overdoses, suicide, homicide (some of it related to drug trafficking) and domestic violence murder. There has also been a string of convictions of soldiers for sex trafficking and rapes of minors.

Fort Liberty is the headquarters of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) which oversees Delta Force, SEAL Team Six and other elite special operations units that carry out classified missions. Seth Harp analyzes the situation on the base as expressing a combination of pathologies: first, a sense of entitlement among special ops forces who feel superior to other soldiers. As concrete proof of their elite status, a special ops soldier accused of murder was reportedly wafted out of his jail cell with police records of the crime conveniently blanked out. In other words, special ops are akin to the pilots Tom Wolfe once portrayed in The Right Stuff: a heroic warrior class entitled to adoration and honor in compensation for risking their lives.

Another factor Harp cites at the base is rampant PTSD due to repeated deployments to Middle East war zones (along with unacknowledged theaters like the Congo and Georgia) carrying out deadly missions that likely take the lives of innocents. Finally, there’s a raging domestic violence problem among soldiers which, according to one employee of the base’s DV rehabilitation program, is not improving because this sense of entitlement includes controlling women through force if necessary.

A few days after the attack podcaster Shawn Ryan, a former Navy Seal, revealed he’d received a manifesto from Livelsberger by email mentioning two topics: Chinese drones using anti-gravity propulsion and alleged war crimes in Afghanistan in 2019 that Livelsberger says he helped cover up. Anguish over the concealment of war crimes substantiates the relevance of PTSD for Livelsberger.

But PTSD is a downstream effect of military service. Military service is now the single strongest predictor of becoming a mass casualty offender according to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism, or START, at the University of Maryland.

So to write the political thriller of our times requires depicting the blowback from foreign wars and the devastating effects on soldiers of participating in violence … violence they may carry home with them. That’s one way to see the political thriller we’re living in. What do you think?