AVDIIVKA, Ukraine — When you hear the sound you remember it and there’s no mistaking it for anything else. The thunder rolls in from the trenches — from where you are, about a mile away across a field and behind a tree line. The intrusive sound ...
May 4 is International Firefighters' Day. After his first day on the job as a new firefighter in Asheville, North Carolina, Mike Schoeffel, wrote this essay about what he saw and felt. The thing they don’t tell you about a dead body is the way ...
Power belts, eye protection, and hand grenades — oh my! And all the sergeants major said, “Hell yeah!” While the staff sergeants rolled their eyes. Let me explain. In the Army, the senior enlisted service member of any (battalion-level or ...
Even as a small girl growing up in Australia’s countryside, I knew April 25 was a day not to cry or complain or run amok through the dusty tracks. My father would pull my sister and me from our slumber at dawn, when the rouge light was still ...
In 2003, as the 75th Ranger Regiment shifted its attention to the war in Iraq, C Company of the 2nd Battalion, 75th, was doing time as “the forgotten company” in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province. Deep inside the Hindu Kush Mountain Range, narrow roads ...
Trench warfare is a true test of a soldier’s grit. The thing is, there’s no escaping the danger. You could die just as easily while walking to the toilet as you could while holding the line under artillery fire. You never know when the shelling will ...
CORSICANA, Texas — We are flying on “jump run,” cruising at about 100 mph in a World War II vintage aircraft dubbed “Southern Cross,” a C-47 troop transport like one of the 2,000 planes that dropped thousands of American paratroopers over Normandy on ...
The screen showed a noose left hanging inside a bathroom near the mirror. I asked a classroom full of soldiers what it meant to them. One soldier, white, said that it was probably a dark joke, maybe about suicide, or maybe even a coded message to ...
Nearly two decades into a war on terror, American service members and veterans enjoy strong public support. And while a certain amount of “thank you for your service” is always warranted, even in peacetime, some veterans seem to suffer with what I ...
The recent bill passed by the House of Representatives, known as the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2021, is brimming with reforms and federal mandates for law enforcement. There is too much to unpack in a single article, but it is safe to ...
Two days before we were blown up by an insurgent IED in Ramadi, my teammate got a letter from his dad — with a Purple Heart postage stamp on it. We looked at that stamp, sitting on Camp Hurricane Point in 2004, with incredulity. It was bad ...
Eugene Goodman never expected to find himself fighting for his life again, but as he ascended the stairs inside the US Capitol building and shouted into his police radio, that’s exactly what he was doing. It was Jan. 6, and Goodman, a Capitol Police ...
WOMP WOMP WOMP WOMP. We usually hear them before we see them: a flight of two CH-47 Chinook helicopters, our ride for the night. Soon the gigantic monstrosities of theoretical flight touch down on the helicopter landing zone, blasting the assault ...
The F-35 has been a favorite whipping boy of defense critics for many years now. Recently, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Charles Brown has floated the idea that the service would look at getting what could be called a Generation “5 minus” ...
Out of the blue, a Marine calls me. The last time I saw him he was being evacuated by helicopter, days before we were scheduled to redeploy. His platoon commander and I sat poking at a hot-ish meal in what we called our eating area. We heard a ...
The alarms had gone off—again—at Cement City near Dammam, Saudi Arabia, in late January. The air war had just begun, and we’d spent the day filling sandbags and digging a hole, the wet sand leaching all moisture from our frozen fingers. The Scud ...
Last week, I traveled to Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego to document the arrival and start of recruit training for the first platoon of female recruits ever to train at the West Coast installation. In a way, the assignment was a homecoming. I ...
This article was originally published Feb. 10, 2021, on Sandboxx News. Follow Sandboxx News on Instagram. We had a one-eyed tank gunner supporting our unit. She lost an eye at Tikrit, Iraq skirmishing there with the Mujahidin. She was on the ...
Super Bowl Sunday is a day of parties, drinking, and chicken wings for most Americans. For me, it’s a day I gamble on a sport I don’t follow (nor care about) and craft an extremely creative wager with whoever is dumb enough to agree. Some of you ...
The other day I received one of those compliments that makes a reporter uneasy. An Iraq war battle buddy called me "the only newsman he ever trusted." Happens the Army brother was a National Guard soldier, and a good one. His day job outside the ...
Editor’s note: T.L.K. is a pseudonym for a national guardsman whose identity is being withheld to protect the soldier from retaliation. T.L.K.’s service and presence at the Capitol has been verified through photographs and military records. Ask a ...
KYIV, Ukraine — I walk alone on a gray winter day. The bare branches bend in the cold wind. Beside the path through Kyiv's Babyn Yar memorial park, melted snow has turned the earth to black mud. I pass an old woman sitting on a bench. She has two ...
“Patriot” is a word that gets thrown around a lot. Probably too much, actually. If you check various major dictionaries, they all basically say some version of the same thing: “one who loves and supports his or her country.” But if you look at the ...
When the George Floyd homicide and subsequent civil unrest began earlier this year, police violence and its social implications were already on my mind. The 11th anniversary of my own experience using deadly force as a police officer was quickly ...
Too many dead friends. Some died in combat. Others died from suicide after they came back home. Not long after I was discharged I attempted suicide and was hospitalized. There were no easy answers. In the hospital, we had group therapy. Some ...
Days before President Donald Trump signed into law a $900 billion bill that provides financial aid to millions of struggling Americans, he decried the legislation on Twitter, citing several line items he objected to in the omnibus Consolidated ...
The Navy recently issued its 30-year shipbuilding plan. It’s extremely ambitious. From a current force of 296 ships, in 2045 the Navy will field 403. Unmanned ships will make that 546. That’s nothing short of a transformation for the Navy. It has, ...
Having been in the Army for almost 25 years and separated from my wife and/or children for much of that time, one of my greatest pleasures these days is telling stories to them during our family dinnertime. And when I say “stories,” I mean outrageous ...
In about a month’s time, President Donald Trump will transfer power to Joe Biden, launching a new administration with new policies. How will that impact the lives of veterans and the active-duty military? Undoubtedly, after four years of bombastic ...
This article was originally published Nov. 4, 2020, on Sandboxx News. Follow Sandboxx News on Instagram. The Delta Force, like so many other organizations, is the answer to a problem. If you can consider that our country’s civic police force is ...
