William Clark’s breath made clouds of fog in the December air as he and his teammates headed into an open field in Helmand province. Through his night vision goggles, Clark suddenly spotted something their eye in the sky had ...
Jan 14, 2022
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Dec 29, 2021
Tattoo Therapy: Kinetic Ink and Warfighter Overwatch Provide Support Systems for Veterans, First Responders
Directly in the center of Kinetic Ink Tattoo Co. is a wall decorated with small photographs of proud smiling faces. With a pang of sadness, I realized as I walked toward it that I recognized a few — Ranger buddies of a friend of ...
Dec 26, 2021
What Dad’s Snapshots From Vietnam Taught Me About the Power of Stories
When I was about 6 or 7, I discovered my dad’s pictures from Vietnam. In them, he and Marines from his infantry company — posed around the An Hoa Basin — were in the prime of their youth. Men I knew from fishing trips were 20 years younger, filthy, ...
Dec 25, 2021
Mountain Lion Sausage, 17 Vets, $2,500 Knives: Meet Master Bladesmith Josh Smith
Josh Smith held a long blade in his hand. Maybe 18 inches long, it was still black and ragged from the forge, but he had a point he wanted to make. He held it up, so that the group of close to 20 in his shop could get a good look. All were ...
Dec 19, 2021
What Did We Leave Behind When We Left Afghanistan?
Scott Elwell, an Army officer from the 10th Mountain Division, commanded a battery at a forward operating base in the far northwestern corner of Afghanistan — a place they called “the end of the world.” A November 2010 firefight ...
Nov 28, 2021
How Nirvana Rocker-Turned-Special Forces Veteran Jason Everman Rediscovered the Music
A man sits at the window-facing counter of a dive bar in Bremerton, Washington, plotting how to make the best use of his time. A handwritten list in front of him reveals he needs screws from the hardware store, oil, coolant, reef ...
Nov 02, 2021
Courage 53: The 10th Mountain Division’s Forgotten Rescue Mission in Mogadishu
Brett Archibald has spent the last 28 years haunted by the belief that he let his fellow soldiers down. He didn’t. Archibald was gravely wounded while laying down cover fire for his fellow soldiers from his HMMWV-mounted M60 ...
Oct 26, 2021
Exclusive Front-Line Report: Modern Trench Warfare in Eastern Ukraine
The Ukrainian soldier warns me to speak no louder than a whisper. The enemy lines are less than 50 meters away, he tells me, and my voice — if too loud — can easily carry across no man’s land and invite gunfire from the other ...
Sep 29, 2021
With New Recon Sniper Course, Marines Seek To Make More Elite Snipers
Under an overcast sky on an urban warfare range aboard Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton, a shooter waits for an instructor’s signal. “Let’s go!” the instructor shouts, sprinting toward a nearby building and quickly up a flight ...
Sep 18, 2021
Combat Anthropology: How the DPAA Gives Names Back to the Dead
OFFUTT AIR FORCE BASE, Neb. — In a World War II bomber hangar that once housed the Enola Gay and Bockscar B-29 bombers, which dropped the two atomic bombs on Japan, forensic anthropologist Traci Van Deest, Ph.D., and her team of ...
Sep 11, 2021
‘God Left Me Alive To Do This’: FDNY Veteran Tim Brown Recalls the Heroism and Horror of 9/11
Sept. 11, 2001, was a beautiful Tuesday morning. Blue skies, no humidity. The kind of morning pilots call “severe clear.” Tim Brown was a 17-year veteran of the New York City Fire Department on that fateful day when he and hundreds ...
Sep 05, 2021
Academy Cadets Who Have Kids Must Legally Give Them Up — The CADET Act Would Change That
Melissa Hemphill took the pregnancy test that changed her life in a Walmart bathroom. She was a junior at the US Air Force Academy, a potential Olympian pole vaulter, and the oldest of eight kids in a large Catholic family; a child ...
Aug 24, 2021
Hitting Her Mark: Army Veteran Lia Coryell’s Path to the Paralympics
Lia Coryell’s eyes fluttered open on a spring morning in 2014. As she stirred and moved to get out of bed, she was struck by panic at the realization her legs would not work. She’d felt lethargic for a while, but this was new. ...
Aug 08, 2021
Meeting God: Powerful Psychedelic Therapy Is Helping Some Wounded Vets Heal
A bed in white linens sits in the center of a wood floor, lit by soft daylight streaming through large windows. Outside is a still desert landscape pockmarked with scrub brush and cactus. A veteran is on the bed, tattooed, laying still as a ...
Jun 20, 2021
Peace in the Clouds: How One of the World’s Deadliest Warriors Found His Zen
The sun has barely crested the snowcapped peaks of “his canyon” when Dan Schilling pulls into the back lot of Snowbird ski resort. He grabs his ruck — packed with snowshoes and hiking poles — from the back seat and shuts the truck ...
Jun 18, 2021
Exclusive Dispatch: US Guardsmen Train Ukrainian Troops for a New Kind of War
YAVORIV, Ukraine — At this former Soviet military base located some 750 miles to the west of Ukraine’s eastern war zone, the sounds of tank shots, machine guns, and small arms fire snarl throughout the course of this sweltering ...
Jun 13, 2021
The Triumph and Tragedy of Coast Guard Search and Rescue
You can’t save them all. Coast Guard rescue swimmer Ryan Pierce learned that lesson the day the call came to evacuate a man who’d suffered a heart attack aboard a cruise ship off Florida’s Atlantic coast. Pierce and the other ...
May 30, 2021
Section 60: Finding Peace in the Park
Glancing down at the park map wadded in my fist, I studied the road names. My vision blurring, I struggled to read the words as they danced rhythmically with my heartbeat. I trombone-tested my near and far sight, feeling the ...
May 23, 2021
A Texan’s Long Road to War — Fighting ISIS With the YPG in Syria
Watching from the roof of a makeshift command post in the Syrian town of Hajin, the Texan surveyed the no man’s land of hollowed-out, bullet-riddled buildings and earth scorched by the fight against ISIS. The ground looked like a ...
Apr 30, 2021
Fighting Escalates on Ukraine’s Eastern Front: An Exclusive Report From the War Zone
Standing in the garden of her home on the outskirts of this front-line Ukrainian town, Nastya Troitskaya points over the wall in the direction of the trenches and says: “When the shelling gets really loud, the children always cry. ...
Feb 21, 2021
The Legend of Jim Capers: The Hero Who Never Was
It was around dawn on Feb. 19, 2012, when the phone rang in an apartment in Oceanside, California, rousting retired Marine Maj. James Capers Jr. from a deep sleep. Capers looked for the sound, his 73-year-old brain still soaked ...
Dec 06, 2020
‘You’re Saving Lives With This’ — How a Hunting Trip for Veterans Could Be a National Model for Better Health
Steve Houghton’s rugged face shone orange in the firelight as he pulled in a deep breath of the frigid Montana backcountry air and shifted in his chair before taking his turn at a personal story. The stress lines of an ...
Nov 19, 2020
Gunfights & Coffee: Why Black Rifle Coffee Tastes So Good
Gunfighting made Evan Hafer a coffeehead. The future Black Rifle Coffee Company founder and CEO had separated from the US Army Special Forces as a noncommissioned officer with multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He had ...
Nov 15, 2020
‘From Cradle to Career’: Special Operations Warrior Foundation Leaves No Child of America’s Fallen Special Operators Behind
Alicia Sims was at her neighbor’s house to get some Tylenol when she heard a knock at the front door. At first she thought it was one of her five children. “Come in,” she hollered. There was no reply. “It’s unlocked, come ...
Nov 11, 2020
From South Dakota to War, Van Life, and Journalism: The Many Adventures of Marty Skovlund Jr.
As a member of the Army’s elite 75th Ranger Regiment, Marty Skovlund Jr. completed five combat deployments. But the only time he ever got shot was in basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia. It was a hot July afternoon on the ...
Oct 18, 2020
Delivering Pizza and Coffee to the Front Lines, One Ukrainian War Veteran Uses Business Success To Fight for Freedom
Those who have been to war never truly leave it. Even in peace, the war is always there, like a chasing moon you can’t outrun. For some, the inescapability of war’s aftereffects leads to their destruction. For others, like ...
Oct 11, 2020
The Shooter: How One of America’s Top Combat Photographers Lost Her Way and Found It Serving Veterans
On a recent warm fall afternoon in Charleston, South Carolina, Stacy Pearsall struggled to wind herself down from the daily bustle of ranch life. Flustered from her regular stream of chores and nursing a broken hand for which she recently underwent ...
Sep 07, 2020
The Demise of a US Air Force C-121G ‘Super Constellation’ — and the Arizona Trail That Honors It
Just before 2 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 28, 1959, in the clear sky 5 miles north of Prescott, Arizona, something went wrong aboard an Air Force C-121G Super Constellation aircraft. The pilots, Navy Lt. j.g. Theodore Rivenburg and ...
Aug 30, 2020
The Untouchables: After a Roadside Bomb Tore Them Apart, Brotherhood Brought Them Back Together
The last time Tim Jeffers was on Okinawa, he had legs. That was in February 2006 when Jeffers, then a corporal assigned to 3rd Transportation Support Battalion, 3rd Marine Logistics Group, as a motor transport operator, left the island for Iraq’s ...
Aug 29, 2020
Scars Are Not Forever: How Operation Mend Helped Make a Marine Whole Again
“Scars are not forever” was conceived for one Marine in the months of rehabilitation that followed an IED blast in Iraq, which left him badly burned and disfigured. Since then, the spirit of that ideal has evolved into an innovative partnership ...
