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. ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
“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 ...
Too many drinks and a Wyoming snowstorm will make anyone reconsider driving home from the strip club. It was just after midnight when John Knospler Jr. was jolted awake in the driver's seat by what sounded like someone trying to ...
The sun was fading behind Afghanistan’s Hindu Kush mountains the evening of June 27, 2005, as a team of four U.S. Navy SEALs walked up the ramp and into the back of U.S. Army Captain Matt Brady’s MH-47 Chinook helicopter on Bagram ...
Alex West threw his wetsuit and surfboard in the bed of his truck. He had spent the morning surfing off Del Mar on a picturesque Southern California day. After 15 combat deployments, injuries, and relentless stress, the only place ...
I 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 ...
What’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 ...
At 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 ...
Some 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 ...
It 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 ...
Erin 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. ...
These 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 ...
Feliz 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 ...
You 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 ...
A 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 ...
Stereotypes 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 ...
I 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 ...
This 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 ...
“What 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 ...
Evan 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 ...
A 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 ...
