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 ...
almost ignored the explosion at first. Loud noises weren’t unusual here in Qamishli, and I’d already heard jackhammers that could have been mistaken for gunfire throughout the day. Maybe I shouldn’t ignore that one, I thought. I got up from the ...
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 ...
s the sun sank behind the hills just a few hours outside of Budapest, Hungary, a ragtag group of militiamen milled around a dilapidated building in a small clearing amid the Hungarian forest. With AK-47s slung on their shoulder, they played cards ...
here's a temporary city that emerges every year in a barren desert for an 80,000-person social experiment. No status, no government, no currency. No judgment, no rules, no inhibitions. A provisional society focused entirely on the individual, with ...
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 ...
perating undercover as an Allied spy was stressful work. They disguised themselves as ordinary citizens, developing false identities, documents, and cover stories while building trust amongst networks forged in secrecy through shared misery and ...
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 ...
he annual celebration of the Allied invasion of Normandy, France — D-Day, as it’s commonly referred to — is a spectacle to behold. Watching hundreds of U.S. and Allied paratroopers jump onto the farm fields just outside of Sainte-Mère-Eglise, the ...
he mission was to check out a vehicle that had been abandoned on a target range frequently used by Americans and ensure that it wasn’t left there for nefarious reasons. It was a cloudy day that wasn’t particularly ideal for flying, but nonetheless I ...
ix power snatches at 115 pounds, followed by four muscle-ups, and a 100-meter sprint. Do this for as many rounds as possible in 20 minutes. Do this immediately after a strength session that started at 70 percent of your one-rep max for a power clean ...
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 ...
