Delta Force’s Dirty Secret

quote:

---

For Erin Scanlon, a junior Army officer in the artillery branch, Fort Bragg was a prime posting. The blond 25-year-old from suburban Phoenix had secured a lieutenant’s slot in the storied 82nd Airborne Division thanks to the good offices of one of her ROTC instructors at the University of Arizona. “He was a really good mentor that I looked up to,” she tells me recently. “He had been in Delta Force.” Scanlon lived off-post in an apartment in Fayetteville, a moody military town in the North Carolina pines just outside of Fort Bragg, the biggest Army base in the U.S. On the evening of Sept. 9, 2016, a friend of hers from the gym, a military wife whom I’ll call “Tina” to protect her privacy, invited her to a charitable event at a barbecue restaurant and bar called Mac’s Speed Shop. It was a fundraiser to honor five slain Green Berets, hosted by “some SF guys,” Tina texted.

The Special Forces of the U.S. Army are based out of Fort Bragg, as is the powerful and secretive Joint Special Operations Command, making this spot, inland of the Eastern Seaboard, the central node in the United States’ global special-operations complex. But Scanlon’s unit, despite its distinguished pedigree going back to World War I, is a division of the conventional Army, which is kept separate from top-secret JSOC by high walls, both literal and figurative.

Scanlon and Tina arrived at Mac’s shortly before 10 p.m. A number of motorcycles were parked out front. They belonged to members of the Coast x Coast motorcycle club, made up of active-duty soldiers on Delta Force, a classified manhunting unit that is the Army component of JSOC. A nonprofit associated with the club, the Coast x Coast Foundation, raises money through annual cross-country motorcycle rides to honor fallen special operators. The founder and CEO of the nonprofit is a 39-year-old man, Cristobal Lopez Vallejo, who goes by the alias Cris Valley. He was host of the event at Mac’s that night. Right as Scanlon and Tina walked into the crowded barbecue joint and beer hall, Vallejo stopped them, “tried to flex, laughed, and walked away,” Tina would later recall to a Fayetteville detective.

Vallejo, dressed in camouflage cargo shorts and a T-shirt, was tall, lean, strong, and fiercely handsome, with a black beard and shaggy brown hair much longer than most soldiers get to wear. “Throughout the whole night he kind of acted like a celebrity,” Scanlon says. “Going around chatting with people like a politician.”

At the time he met Scanlon, who was nearly 10 years his junior, Vallejo was a sergeant first class. He had done three combat rotations with Delta Force — two in Afghanistan and one in Iraq — but she never guessed that he was a “trained killer,” in her words. She took him for a run-of-the-mill special-forces veteran, retired from the Army or otherwise discharged, because she’d been taught that it’s against regulations for active-duty personnel to solicit donations for a military cause, and that was the whole point of the Coast x Coast Foundation. “A guy who’s in Delta Force would not be flashing his name around and having a nonprofit and partying at a bar. He was not a ‘quiet professional,’ ” she says, using a term that special-operations generals came up with in the 1980s to describe themselves, and since repeated endlessly in the news media.

Shortly after she and Tina arrived at Mac’s the night of the fundraiser, Scanlon recognized the Coast x Coast club’s logo from a Facebook photo of her old ROTC mentor, the ex-Delta soldier, which made her implicitly trust Vallejo and his crew, she recalls. “I asked him if I could take a picture in front of their logo to send to my instructor,” she says. “He gave me his card and invited us to go to the next bar with everyone.”

They exchanged phone numbers, and a group of about nine, led by Vallejo, relocated from Mac’s to a bar called Paddy’s, an over-the-top Irish pub out on Raeford Road that has a metal detector at the front entrance, bartenders in Scottish kilts, brass bathroom door handles cast with anatomical exactitude in the form of male genitalia, and urinals shaped like a woman’s mouth. At one point, while posing for a group photo, Vallejo “grabbed my arse,” Scanlon claims. “I didn’t say anything when he did that. Sad as it is, that happens a lot. That’s being a girl at a bar.”

According to text messages she sent a girlfriend the next day, Scanlon “was drunk and flirted with him.” But she didn’t consent to what later ensued, she immediately added. “I said no over and over.”

Scanlon claims that Vallejo raped her that night, and says that the trauma still haunts her to this day. Reached through his lawyer, Vallejo declined to comment for this story. Vallejo says the sex was consensual and was acquitted of all charges arising from the incident in a June 2018 court-martial on Fort Bragg. He was originally set to be tried in civilian court, but Army prosecutors assigned to Special Forces swooped in at the last minute and caused the Cumberland County district attorney to drop the charges so that Vallejo could be tried by the military. No reporters attended the subsequent court-martial, and no transcript was made of the proceedings. As soon as it concluded with an acquittal, the Army deleted the audio recordings.

---