This article was originally published Aug. 16, 2016, on The War Horse. As a Marine infantryman I wanted to kill like I’d been trained to do. The fact that I haven’t weighs on me. It’s a different burden than that of soldiers who have been trained ...
Desiree had been seeing Aaron “Jay” Danielson for about a month when he sent her a text on the afternoon of Aug. 29. “On my way to film the rally,” Danielson wrote. Danielson and Desiree had known each other for about a year but only recently ...
The night before 9/11, it rained. It rained for hours, from late afternoon until well after darkness had fallen. I remember this because I was at Yankee Stadium, hoping to see Roger Clemens notch his 20th win of the season against the Red Sox. The ...
This article was originally published Aug. 26, 2020, in The War Horse. He wanted to be a man with a story. He wanted to do things, see things, to have a history. He wanted to be like his grandfather, a hero of the Second World War who flew dozens ...
rain travel is an ordinary experience. In Ukraine I went to war that way. It was the end of August 2014 and the Russian military had invaded eastern Ukraine. Following the battle for Ilovaisk, in which hundreds of Ukrainian soldiers had been ...
Explosives, like communication, are a mix of art and science. As a US Army Ranger, one of my special duties was master breacher. This means that I was an expert in the use of explosives with the purpose of breaching walls, doors, and other barriers ...
This article was originally published July 29, 2020, in The War Horse. We’re piled on top of each other 15, sometimes 20, at a time, in a vehicle that feels like it’s built for 12. Our weapons and gear double our volume. Once in, we can’t ...
In his opinion for the Jacobellis v. Ohio Supreme Court ruling in 1964, Justice Potter Stewart offered his famous definition of hardcore pornography. “I know it when I see it,” Potter wrote. Used to be you could say the same thing about war and ...
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 buildings, was the ...
t’s May 30, 2020, and my gun is by my side, loaded, ready. I hope I don’t have to use it, but more than a few scenarios have crossed my mind where I might have to squeeze the trigger. This is not what I would call a typical Saturday night in my ...
ear sunset one evening in the summer of 2016, I was on the rooftop of a Kurdish Peshmerga fort in the front-line town of Gwer, just south of Mosul, Iraq. I stood behind a sandbag berm beside Kurdish General Omar Hama Ali Farag, and we watched through ...
Editor's Note: Adam Bercovici is a 30 year veteran of the Los Angeles Police Department. The opinions expressed in this article are his own, and do not necessarily reflect the views of Coffee or Die Magazine or Black Rifle Coffee Company. To submit ...
They call it the “Island of Death.” At this spot on the western side of the Dnieper River in central Ukraine, some 30,000 Soviet soldiers died under Nazi artillery during World War II. Yet, on this hot June day, there’s nothing to suggest that ...
Two years ago this month, we launched Coffee or Die Magazine. In June 2018, I wouldn’t have imagined that today we would be in the midst of both a pandemic and a civil rights crisis. But I don’t think I’m the only one 2020 took by ...
eep sending him up,” Viper said. As a child of the ’80s, I tend to use the classics of that period as analogies to help me through life — and “Top Gun” is no exception. These movies have been my unofficial therapists in times before I had one, ...
COVID-19 has taken the world by storm. To date, 3,758,421 cases have been confirmed worldwide. The death toll is at 259,513, though these numbers are changing by the hour. Nurses are on the front lines, fighting for every one of those lives at great ...
“Baghdad airport just got hit by a missile attack.” I was casually swiping through my phone in a makeshift greenroom outside of Amman, Jordan, when Dan Cord, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of Operation Phantom Fury and the frontman of Salt Lake ...
Slosh, plop, slosh, plop. The noise my boots made with every step seemed deafening. 20 or so Iraqi Special Forces soldiers and I were doing our best to be sneaky on our way to the target building, but it was the wet season, so Iraq’s infamous moon ...
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 ...
The smell was insistent and abhorrent, the sting of burning metal filling my nostrils. Walking up from the subway at an unfamiliar station, I emerged into a cloud of dust so thick that I could barely see the man standing next to me. I was completely ...
Sweat was pouring from LD Ryan’s head as he checked and rechecked the gauges. It was 1952 and the Korean War was in full swing, but that was happening outside the metal skin of this U.S. Navy boat. Inside, Ryan's head was spinning as he made his way ...
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 ...
Dan “Yardbird” McCants and John “Irish” Quinlan were pilots in the U.S. Army’s elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment — known as the Night Stalkers — one of the units made famous in the movie “Black Hawk Down” and in the book “Not a Good ...
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 ...
I have an emotional attachment to coffee. Not an addiction (although that may be accurate as well) or some overdramatic “I must have coffee in the morning …” sort of thing. It’s a feeling born of nostalgia and precious memories that feature coffee. ...
Cable television was an intermittent luxury during my childhood. Options for visual entertainment were normally limited to the five stations you could pick up via antenna, watching ants on the sidewalk, and the three Playboys I found in my dad’s old ...
It’s that time of year again: copious amounts of eggnog, fourth cousins rooting through your fridge, and last-minute shopping. Regardless of which holiday you celebrate, December seems to bring out the best and the worst, whether it’s people, food, ...
Approximately six months into my relationship with my college boyfriend, we were sitting at a Pizza Hut when he nervously told me, “When I have kids, I want to raise them Jewish.” I shrugged. “That’s fine with me.” And that’s how a lapsed ...
If you’ve been following Coffee or Die Magazine, you may have been wondering where we’ve been lately and why there weren’t any stories published in October. I apologize for the absence, but we’ve been hard at work preparing for the launch of our new ...
To our readers and fellow Americans, On this day, 17 years ago, terrorists attacked our country. They killed thousands of our fellow countrymen and permanently changed the lives of millions more. Like many of you, where I was and what I was ...
