Sixteen years before he fatally shot himself and detonated low-grade explosives in the back of a Tesla Cybertruck outside the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, Master Sgt. Matthew Livelsberger of the Army’s 10th Special Forces Group arranged for a shipment of 200 stuffed animals, 100 notebooks, and 50 sets of crayons and pencils to be delivered from his native Ohio to Afghanistan.
The items that arrived at Forward Operating Base Airborne in Wardak Province were the result of a charity drive for children the 22-year-old soldier had started during his second deployment in 2009, his mother paying the cost of the shipping. The donors were given an opportunity to take some small part in a war that had begun on 9/11, just as he was entering Bucyrus High School, in his native Ohio.
Livelsberger had graduated in 2005 and enlisted in the Army as a special forces candidate as soon as he had recovered from a senior year football injury. He now pledged in an email to his hometown newspaper, The Bucyrus Telegraph-Forum, that he would personally distribute the donated materials.
“I promise you it will be in the hands of a child in need that would not receive it otherwise,” Livelsberger wrote. “The Afghan children are adventurous and playful, just as our children are.”
He allowed in a subsequent interview with the newspaper that making such deliveries in a war zone could be a challenge.
“You get shot at in some places, so they must come to you,” he said.
He added, “We cannot reach the hundreds of thousands of children in Afghanistan, but that is not a reason to not make an effort.”
Livelsberger purchased sweets from the Post Exchange at FOB Airborne and distributed them, along with the items from Ohio.
“He give it for the kids to be happy,” the unit’s interpreter, Fardin Fetwat, then 24, told The Daily Beast.
A snapshot taken at the time shows Livelsberger surrounded by smiling youngsters.
“He love the kids and the kids love him,” Fetwat said. “They call him Candy Man. They say, ‘Candy Man is here!’”
At night, Fetwat would accompany Livelsberger and the unit on combat missions. They had entered a compound during a major operation when a noise in the darkness signaled that a “bad guy” stood just a few feet away, his weapon pointed at Fetwat. Livelsberger fired first.
“The bad guys tried to hurt me that time,” Fetwat remembered. “[Livelsberger] shoot the bad guy.”
Fetwat recalls that Livelsberger remained remarkably calm.
“After that, he told me, ‘Hey, always stay behind me,’” Fetwat remembered. “He save my life. And that was not the only time.”
At the start of a mortar attack on the base, Livelsberger could have just sought the nearest shelter. He instead headed for a tent where Fetwat was somehow sleeping through the detonations.
“When mortars come, I not wake up, and [Livelsberger] come, and he knocked my door and say, ‘Hey, wake up! You didn’t see the mortar is coming?’” Fetwat recalled.
Livelsberger hustled Fetwat to a bunker just as a round landed in front of the tent, the shrapnel shredding the canvas just as it also would have anyone inside.
They both might have been killed in another attack as well, this one outside the base. It all began when an IED destroyed one of the unit’s armored Humvees.
“Bad guy ambush,” Fetwat said.
On another day, Livelsberger came upon a wounded dog. He nursed it back to health and built it a dog house.
“He was a good guy,” Livelsberger recalled.
By then, Livelsberger had learned that however proficient Fetwat was as a translator, he was illiterate in English. Livelsberger presented Fetwat with a computer in which the soldier had installed translating software.
“He bought it for me with his own money,” Fetwat noted. “He told me he will teach me one hour a day how to read, how to write.”
Livelsberger did exactly that, every day, between night missions and mortar attacks for months, until Fetwat was functionally literate. Livelsberger also made twice-a-week daytime outings from the base to bring cheer to Afghan adults as well as kids.
“He was the guy who talked with people, you know, try to help them,” Fetwat said. “Super friendly.”
Livelsberger’s second deployment came to an end in December 2009.
He sought to bring the dog home with him, but was told that was not possible.
“He passed it to Afghan National Army, and he told them, ‘Hey, take care of this dog,’” Fetwat remembered.
Livelsberger departed, only to return for a third deployment from June until September of 2010, the ninth anniversary of 9/11. Fetwat was transferred to a different base, but they were able to briefly see each other..
The translator then secured a well-deserved visa to settle with his family in America. Livelsberger was between deployments and met the former interpreter and his wife and two children, aged 5 and 7, at the Denver Airport.
“He brought food for us, he booked a hotel for us,” Fetwat recalled. “This guy, he help us a lot; [if] he wasn’t there, we had nobody, no connection with anybody.”
Livelsberger launched a 10th SFG fundraiser for the new arrivals.
“He send email to all the team,” Fetwat recalled. “He said to the team, ‘He needs some help.’ And everybody help.”
Livelsberger also took Fetwat’s kids to Cheyenne Mountain Zoo in Colorado Springs. And when U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services was unable to straighten out some confusion over Fetwat’s first name, Livelsberger took him to the agency’s office in Denver.
“Like two times,” Fetwat said.
In 2011, the U.S. located and killed Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan. The war in Afghanistan continued, as Livelsberger was deployed to the Republic of Congo from March to September of 2014 and Ukraine from January to March 2016, followed by Tajikistan from June to December of that same year.
In the meantime, Livelsberger seemed to be having troubles in his personal life, culminating in a divorce. Fetwat last saw him in 2017, when Livelsberg was heading from Colorado Springs for a skiing trip to Canada. Fetwat drove him to the airport and then continued happily living the life that Livelsberger had repeatedly saved.
Fetwat became a tractor-truck driver. His daughter is on her way to the ninth grade. His son is college-bound, at an age that Livelsberger was heading for the special forces.
On New Year’s Day, Fetwat received a call from the former commander of the 10th SFG at FOB Airborne in 2019.
He said, ‘Do you know what happened with Matthew?’” Fetwat recalled.
Fetwat learned that after Livelsberger finished that third deployment to Afghanistan and then one to the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2019, he was posted in Germany. The end of our longest war saw a five-time recipient of the Bronze Star—one with a V for valor—in Stuttgart, specializing in the type of drones that mark the future of combat. But the psychological aftershocks of the past repeatedly prompted him to seek help for depression.
He had bought a home for the mother who had paid to ship donations for kids to Afghanistan nearly two decades before. His first marriage had likely ended, but he was now married again with an 8-month-old daughter. He was home on leave with his family in Colorado Springs over the holidays.
He then set out in a rented Cybertruck and along the way called a former army nurse he had dated in 2018. She would later say that she recognized classic symptoms of PTSD and traumatic brain injury, an invisible wound resulting from repeated blows to the head and exposure to blasts. He once told her he had suffered “a few concussions.”
Livelsberger purchased two handguns in Colorado, and headed for Nevada loaded up on fireworks and camping fuel. He made entries with a notes app that police would recover from his charred cellphone after he managed to place a pistol in his mouth, pull the trigger and almost simultaneously set off a less than lethal explosion in an Elon Musk truck at the entrance to the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas.
Had he been bent on homicide, a highly skilled special forces operator such as himself could have outdone 42-year-old fellow Afghan War vet Shamsud-Din Jabbar, who had an ISIS flag in a pickup truck he chanced to rent from the same online agency and used to kill 15 in New Orleans on the same day.
“I don’t believe in coincidences because I have never seen one until now,” a senior law enforcement official said.
The FBI, which once honored the 10th SFG in for hunting down bombers and preventing IED explosions in Afghanistan between 2006 and 2009, determined that Jabbar and Liveslberger had each acted alone. Livelsberger’s blast injured seven, but killed nobody.
“This was not a terrorist attack,” one note recovered from Livelsberger’s charred cellphone in the Cybertruck said. “It was a wake-up call. Americans only pay attention to spectacles and violence. What better way to get my point across than a stunt with fireworks and explosives?”
Had he just shot himself in Colorado Springs, he would have been just another forgotten soldier with an invisible wound from a forgotten war whose suicide passed without notice. An average of 20 vets take their own lives every day.
But the image of a burning Elon Musk truck outside a Trump building got the attention of the whole country.
“Why did I personally do it now?” another note on his phone asks. “I needed to cleanse my mind of the brothers I’ve lost and relieve myself of the burden of the lives I took.”
In other notes, Livelsberger wrote of the need to rid the government of Democrats by “peaceful means first but be prepared to fight.” He also cited the importance of masculinity as embodied by Trump and Musk.
Fifteen years after he emailed his hometown paper to pledge that every donated item would reach the hands of a deserving child, Livelsberger appears to have written a pre-suicide email that some describe as a manifesto.
Now 37 after half a lifetime at war, Livelsberger seems to turn delusional as he warns of Chinese drones with “gravatic propulsion” and speaks of being followed by people who would not let him cross into Mexico because he was armed and had a “massive VBIED,” meaning a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device.
But he also addressed something all too real that could have pushed him toward madness. He said that during his last deployment to Afghanistan he had participated in targeting for a May 5, 2019, airstrike on more than 60 suspected methamphetamine labs in Nimruz Province. The United Nations subsequently declared the attacks illegal, reporting that 14 children had been among the 39 confirmed civilian fatalities, with possibly many more. The dead included 18 members of a single family. The survivors took the bodies to the province capital, demanding justice.
If Livelsberger did indeed participate in those airstrikes and in a subsequent cover-up, as the email says, that means the patriotic young idealist who set out to win the hearts and minds of Afghan children in 2009 ended up participating in the unintentional killing of a bunch of kids a decade later.
“He was famous as the Candy Man,” remembers Fetwat, who mourns Livelsberger as he would the loss of a brother.
