had seen the Fox News report June 10: “Seattle helpless as armed guards patrol anarchists’ ‘autonomous zone,’ shake down businesses.” Above the headline, superimposed on a banner image of a protester running past burning cars and buildings, was the ...
hat’s he doing?” asked Staff Sergeant Alfonso Paniaugua. “He’s just standing there talking on the phone,” Lance Corporal Trung Cao replied. The young U.S. Marine was looking at an Iraqi wearing camo fatigue pants on a hill in the ...
t first light on a quiet morning in March, Howard Leedham found himself crouching near an austere compound in a hilly area near the unremarkable village of Ziarat, typical of this part of Pakistan’s impoverished and lawless Balochistan province. With ...
ome families are born in the loving care of two parents, and some are built through friendships in college or work. Still others are born out of shared hardship — the military, for example, often uses the word “brotherhood” to describe the bond ...
t was a drizzly night at the end of March when members of the U.S. Army’s 1st Battalion, 24th Infantry Regiment (1-24) arrived in Erbil, the capital of Iraq’s Semi-Autonomous Kurdish region. They had driven from Mosul, where they’d maintained a small ...
rin Scanlon never expected to become the face behind a proposed Congressional bill. All she did was attend a party in Fayetteville, North Carolina, on Sept. 9, 2016. “There was this nonprofit that had this event,” said Scanlon. “That’s when I met ...
hese are the nights that they hit us,” said Specialist Nathaniel Zimmerman, a young and energetic cavalry scout known affectionately as “Zim” by his fellow soldiers. “When it’s overcast and there’s not a high breeze or anything like that, they love ...
eliz Navidad! Feliz Navidad!” Specialist Hester belted out the lyrics to the Christmas song as he and fellow soldiers sat waiting for their mission to start. It was a sunny November morning as soldiers with the 1-24 Infantry Battalion’s Alpha Company ...
ou know, we were supposed to numb you.” The thought had clearly just occurred to him. I started to panic. “Has that not happened?” He laughed. “That has not happened.” Shit, I thought. It’s officially too late. Andre Forrest, who works ...
handful of soldiers looked up at a screen showing a group of mysterious figures moving through a field. Their shapes and movement were unusual, and with the angle of the sun, they were casting very large shadows. The soldiers had already ruled out ...
tereotypes exist for a reason. When special operators leave the military, they often choose new career paths that stem from their service. This usually involves some form of government contracting, shooting or tactical instruction, public speaking on ...
feel disappointed because we fought side-by-side with the Americans against ISIS, but when Turkey decided to attack these areas, they just left,” said Ario Syriani, a fighter with the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) near the frontline around Tal Tamr, ...
his would be a really badass fighting position,” said an American soldier admiring the architecture of a heavily bombed palace in Mosul, Iraq, that once belonged to the late Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. “It was a fighting position,” someone ...
“hat do we do if we run into the PMF?” asked Sergeant Corbin Mason during a briefing for a mission outside of Q-West Airbase in Iraq. The soldiers being briefed are members of the U.S. Army’s 1-25 "Arctic Wolves" out of Fort Wainwright, Alaska. Their ...
van Hafer, the founder and CEO of Black Rifle Coffee Company, was suspicious. He was holding staff meetings every two days, being told that their in-house fulfillment center was only a few shipments behind, and yet customer service complaints were ...
gathering of soldiers waited for the bus on a cloudy and chilly late-August morning at Fort Wainwright, Alaska. As members of the U.S. Army’s 25th Infantry Division’s 1st Stryker Brigade Combat Team — the Arctic Wolves — they are trained to fight in ...
o you remember Rosie? She was a young woman in her mid-20s when the U.S. was pulled into World War II in 1941. The iconic poster of her flexing her bicep and clenching her fist has captured the imagination of millions of patriots for more than 75 ...
wenty-five years ago in Rwanda, one of the worst genocides in modern history ended after four months of government-organized slaughter. At least half a million people were killed, often by their own neighbors and friends, simply for being part of the ...
he van let the group of veterans from Heroic Hearts Project out at the bottom of a two-lane country road. It was too steep for the vehicle to go any farther. As they hiked deeper into the Peruvian jungle, flocks of chickens ran around their feet. ...
he bamboo ladder shook as I climbed down to the second floor of the bombed-out complex we were occupying in Sangin, Afghanistan. My team leader met me as I reached the bottom. “Justin’s truck hit an IED,” he said. Before I could ask, he informed ...
anbij wasn’t necessarily safe so much as it was stable. Or maybe just quiet ... for the time being. Kurdish forces backed by the American military successfully drove out the Islamic State in 2016, with a relative calm following. The small northern ...
arry the battle to them. Don’t let them bring it to you. Put them on the defensive and don’t ever apologize for anything.” When most people think of Harry S. Truman, they think of the president who signed off on the first and only wartime use of ...
he Hoyt Sherman Place has been an icon in Des Moines, Iowa, for more than 140 years. Filled with eclectic paintings and sculptures, the structure once hosted some of America’s most powerful and influential people, including former presidents Ulysses ...
t the beginning of 2018, Facebook announced that it would be changing the News Feed aspect of the website to eliminate most posts from Facebook “pages” to allow for more content from friends and family. “We've gotten feedback from our community that ...
his is a place that we are welcomed on a daily basis,” said Chris “Slyde” Harrison, president of the Buffalo Soldiers Motorcycle Club’s Seattle-Tacoma chapter. It’s a smoky room in the Thunderbird Lounge on the Puyallup Indian Reservation where he ...
inter begins on the high plains of Montana every year as it has for millenia: Massive grizzly bears prepare for their seasonal hibernation, thousands of birds take off for the long migration south, and cattle — a more recent addition to this land — ...
ith only 200 pesos to her name, Lesly departed her small town in El Salvador and began the dangerous journey to the United States early one December morning in 2013. Lesly wasn’t joining a caravan of thousands of people, nor was she the typical ...
uck, a former US Army Ranger-turned-Special Forces communication sergeant, quietly watched as a C-130 cargo airplane lifted off from the runway at Jalalabad Airfield with a deafening roar, quickly ascending into the pitch-black sky. “I know ...
t’s not that the backyard pool was remarkable in and of itself. Rather, it was the people swimming in it. Most of them had visible scars, some of them had fresh wounds that would eventually turn into scars, and one was even wearing a neck brace. Most ...
ore than 20,” he said, delivering the statement as a matter of fact, devoid of emotion. That’s not to say Mohammad Wali Tasleem — a ruggedly handsome, middle-aged Afghan man with long black hair and a square jaw — didn’t mourn the death of his family ...
