FORT BRAGG, N.C. — US Army Command Sgt. Maj. Joe Powers is on a mission. And so is Sgt. 1st Class Adam Klakowicz, two of the nine members of Raid Team 1. It’s April 23 in the warming hours of a hot Saturday morning on ...
May 08, 2022
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May 04, 2022
Saved by His Dog in Life After Service, a Vet Says Goodbye
Hank wore a pink bandana, matching Sarah Cole’s dress. As a camera snapped, William Cole leaned over to pet Hank. All three of them smiled. It was a big day for the young couple, William and Sarah, a gender reveal party with ...
Apr 24, 2022
‘We Slaughtered Them All’: Inside the Bloody Battle for Shewan
On July 21, 2008, Lance Cpl. Brady Gustafson was manning an M240 machine gun in the turret of a Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicle in the Afghan village of Shewan when a rocket-propelled grenade pierced the MRAP’s hull and ...
Apr 17, 2022
Hunter, Frogman, Sniper, Spy: Retired SEAL Terry Houin Is Just Getting Started
Standing on the ramp of a C-130 in the dead of night, at 5,000 feet, in thick clouds over the Indian Ocean 12 miles east of the Horn of Africa, Terry Houin and his five teammates, all part of a secretive intelligence unit within ...
Apr 15, 2022
Operation Just Cause: Untold Stories From the Army Rangers Who Invaded Panama
Flying nonstop from the United States, a swarm of C-130 Hercules and C-141 Starlifter transport planes rumbled through the night. They dipped low over the Caribbean Sea, and the Ranger jumpmasters standing in the doorways felt ...
Apr 08, 2022
Holding the Line: America’s Best Technical Rescue Team Is in Small-Town Idaho
A base jumper climbs onto a handrail and looks around. Almost 500 feet below is the Snake River, met on both sides by massive sheer cliffs that are stained dark brown by volcanic basalt rock. Behind the man, four lanes of highway ...
Apr 03, 2022
How a Family of 10, With Help From US Veterans, Escaped Afghanistan
Shahab donned a shirt he hadn’t worn in weeks, said goodbye to his family, and left the cramped apartment in Mazar-i-Sharif on Sept. 2, 2021. The father of eight had started walking to the money exchange when Taliban foot soldiers ...
Mar 13, 2022
FOB Brewing Brings Front-Line Camaraderie to Front Gates of Military Bases
In a building just a couple hundred feet from the fence line of Joint Base Lewis-McChord in DuPont, Washington, Army veteran Jared Wharton tugs the control grip of an MH-6M Little Bird, and a steady stream of the India pale ale ...
Mar 09, 2022
A Green Beret’s ‘No-Fail Event’ — Summiting Everest Without Oxygen
Music drowned out the sound of Jason Howell’s fingertip exploding. It was the Saturday after he’d started the Special Forces Qualification Course — informally known as the Q Course — and he was alternating between dumbbell chest ...
Feb 20, 2022
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Therapy: How the Veterans Charity Ride Is Helping Vets Heal
There is pain when it comes to riding a motorcycle. On a bike, exposed to the elements, the little things are painful. At 75 miles per hour, raindrops batter exposed skin. A piece of road gravel kicked up by a passing car feels ...
Jan 14, 2022
The Special Ops Dog Handler Who Ran Through Hell to Save Dog
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 ...
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. ...
