Mac Caltrider is a staff writer for Coffee or Die Magazine. He served in the US Marine Corps and is a former police officer. Caltrider earned his bachelor’s degree in history and now reads anything he can get his hands on. He is also the creator of Pipes & Pages, a site intended to increase readership among enlisted troops. Caltrider spends most of his time reading, writing, and waging a one-man war against premature hair loss.
When Jacklyn "Jack" Lucas heard about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he found the sense of purpose his life was lacking. He knew right away he was destined to serve overseas and do his part in the war. Nothing was going to get in his way. Not ...
In the shadowy world of special operations, America’s most elite military units each bring something unique to the battlefield. Whether that is Navy SEALs' expertise in counterterrorism and direct action raids, or the 160th Special Operations ...
Gary Paulsen, Army veteran, field engineer, trapper, dog musher, proud Luddite, and beloved author of children’s books and coming-of-age adventure stories, died in October at age 82. Born May 17, 1939, he left behind a body of work defined by its ...
Russia has the largest stockpile of tanks in the world, and 1,200 of them are staged near the Ukrainian border. The most formidable Russian tank may be the T-14 Armata, but how does it match up against American armor? For all its bells and ...
In 2012, knife manufacturer Condor named a new tactical switchblade after Cpl. Samuel Toloza, one of 380 El Salvadorans who fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Corporal Toloza was part of a small force of Central Americans in Najaf, Iraq in 2004. ...
Corruption and politics often go together like peas and carrots. That was especially true in the 19th century, when election results were regularly determined by which candidate was able to muster enough criminals to outmuscle his opponent. In the ...
In March 1945, a vast army of American tanks, trucks, and troop carriers staged on the edge of the Rhine. As the Americans conspicuously arranged their vehicles and equipment along the last major geographical obstacle between the Allied advance and ...
Navy SEAL Jeff Reid joined the military with one goal: to fight. After two kinetic deployments to Afghanistan, Reid found an unlikely calling — dog mushing in a remote corner of the Alaskan wilderness. In 2017, Reid launched Frozen Trident, his ...
Calls to defund police, increasing rates of violent crime, and the complicated history of policing have sparked heated debates about what the future of law enforcement should look like. While arguments rage in the offices of politicians and on the ...
Eleven photographs. That’s all that exists of the Allies' first-wave assault of Normandy's beaches on D-Day: the free world’s monumental effort to liberate Western Europe from its Nazi plague. It was the largest amphibious invasion ever conducted, ...
In 1948, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9981, ending the policy of segregation in the United States military. The move set the stage for the Civil Rights movement to desegregate every American institution. But before desegregation ...
From Charlie’s plot to win the attention of strippers by dressing as a war hero to Mac developing PTSD from playing too many video games, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia has a history of hilarious military-themed moments. On the most recent episode ...
As critics of Joe Rogan’s wildly popular podcast mount a campaign to have The Joe Rogan Experience removed from Spotify, the stand-up comedian and UFC announcer took to Instagram to address the controversy, promising to take steps to promote media ...
In David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic Fight Club, the Pixies’ “Where Is My Mind” adds a hallucinatory magic to the climactic final scene as Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter stand hand in hand in a high-rise building, watching an entire cityscape ...
Only two episodes remain in The Book of Boba Fett, and after the Disney+ series took an odd detour in episode four, director Bryce Dallas Howard put the series back on track with "Chapter 5: The Return of the Mandalorian." The episode brought back ...
Fans of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy have just eight more months to wait until they can embark on another adventure. Amazon Studios just released a first look at the title sequence for its upcoming Lord of the Rings series, The Rings of ...
With the threat of a Russian invasion of Ukraine looming like a storm cloud over Eastern Europe, international relations are a bit tense. Now, in addition to fielding the most tanks of any nation in the world, Russia apparently has lightsabers, ...
Jessica Buchanan wasn’t sure what she heard. It sounded like some small animal scurrying through the Somali brush. It was the middle of the night in the desert, and she was battling a urinary tract infection that was creeping into her kidneys, ...
When Pfc. Charles Waterhouse landed with the first wave on the black volcanic sand of Iwo Jima, painting was the furthest thing from his mind. Waterhouse — along with approximately 70,000 other Marines and sailors — was simply trying to survive. At ...
Ever since Michael Mann blew moviegoers away with his hyperrealistic Los Angeles gunfight, many fans of the 1995 film Heat have wondered what happened to the surviving characters. Did Lt. Vincent Hanna pursue the other bank robbers? Did Chris and ...
The undoing of Thomas Shelby is rapidly approaching, as is the wrath of the Nazi war machine in an epic new trailer for the final season of Peaky Blinders. Season six will be the last installment of the hit series that follows the Shelby family in ...
Marvel finally released a full trailer for the upcoming Disney+ series Moon Knight, and it looks dark as hell. Backed by Kid Cudi’s “Day ’n’ Nite,” the two-minute trailer reveals a hulking superhero who’s entangled with Egyptian gods and tormented by ...
The nameless Marine stares blankly into the distance, his vacant eyes peeled inhumanly wide. According to the artist, he’s a combat veteran of both the enemy and tropical disease. Most of his unit has been destroyed in a battle history will deem ...
It’s rare for a Green Beret to pursue a career in football after serving in the Army. It’s even rarer for one to then pursue a career in Hollywood. But that’s exactly what Special Forces veteran and former Seahawks long snapper Nate Boyer is doing. ...
A collection of “adventurers, musicians, drunkards, journalists, delivery boys, wealthy ne’er-do-wells, old Army hands, investment brokers, small-town Midwesterners, farm boys from the South, offspring of Eastern slums, Rothchilds and Indians ...
Jen Burch served a seven-month tour in Afghanistan a decade ago. It has haunted her ever since. Burch, who was 23 when her tour ended, worked as an operations manager for an Air Force combat engineer unit. She aspired to be a physician. She ...
In the second episode of The Book of Boba Fett, showrunner Jon Favreau re-created The Great Train Robbery in a galaxy far, far away. Like a smuggler’s cup overflowing with Corellian wine, "Chapter 2: The Tribes of Tatooine" was brimming with ...
Over the years, Shia LaBeouf has developed a reputation for being a bit ... odd. Some might say crazy even. His on-screen shenanigans have garnered criticism from fellow actors and his off-screen antics have gotten him arrested eight times. He’s ...
In 2019, the U.S. Navy’s Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) filed a number of seemingly out-of-this-world patents that could, in theory, revolutionize not only military aviation, but just about everything. Chief among these strange ...
An all-new Punisher series is coming to the Marvel Universe in March of 2022, and with it comes a major change to the vigilante superhero’s iconic logo. In a strange step back from the well-established symbol, Marvel has decided to distance the ...
