Depressed over the April 30, 1975 fall of Saigon, this Army veteran went to see a new movie. by Jack Hawkins Released in Los Angeles in 1978, The Deer Hunter was already becoming a legendary film by the time it hit “flyover country” a few months later. I was between …
Read More »WATCH: Army PsyOps Ghost Characters Go Dancing
A previous Army PsyOps ghost-clown recruiting vid, Ghosts in the Machine, was so offbeat and effective, it tore up the ‘net. The 4th Psychological Operations Group (Airborne) got high props for creeping people out at a whole new level. Now, some of the video’s same characters are back, dancing through …
Read More »An Infantryman Comes Home From War
by Heath Hansen March 2006. My tour was over. I had survived. No more fire-fights. No more IED’s. No more raids. No more rocket-attacks. I was going home. Many servicemen spend time in-country without ever leaving “the wire.” As an infantryman, I basically lived outside the wire. Being shot at, …
Read More »The Sands of Agadez: Where a Woman Knows More Than She Should About Gun Lords and Mercenaries
by Carl Hancocks For the past four years, the city of Agadez has been what could barely pass as home for a woman without a name. Nigerian, she fends for herself as a sex-worker, but that was not how she arrived in this place. Her story is that of a …
Read More »A Swedish Mercenary in Iraq: A Ghostwriter’s Ode to Axel Stal
by Jonas Vesterberg It was back in 2016. I was at home in Los Angeles when I got a call from my agent in Stockholm. “I have a project but nobody here in Sweden wants to touch it. Maybe you could take a look?” I suppose I was known as …
Read More »‘With My Shield’: The Story of an Army Ranger in Somalia
BOOK REVIEW by Susan Katz Keating It all comes down to the fact that you have to trust the men to your left and right, knowing they are standing fast and will not break on you, just as you are doing for them. – Jim Lechner in ‘With My Shield‘ …
Read More »Creating The Vietnam Wall Was ‘a Minor Miracle’: Jan Scruggs Credits Veterans for Building Their Own Memorial
by Jan Scruggs As you readers may know, I started what is now known as The Wall. The wall gets 5 million visitors a year, according to the National Park Service. The idea was not complex. We would get a site and build a memorial engraved with the names of “..the men …
Read More »My Father, an Old Photograph, and a Legendary Marine: Gen. Alfred M. Gray
by Heath Hansen As a child, I enjoyed looking through the photo albums of my father’s old military pictures. There was one, in particular, that stood out because it was of a serviceman other than my father. The black and white picture displayed a Marine Brigadier General clad in woodland …
Read More »Juba the Baghdad Sniper: Was He Real, Or a Clever Psyop?
By Greg Chabot In mid-2005 the name Juba struck fear into coalition troops in Baghdad. He had become a folk hero to the insurgency with his attacks on check points that were filmed and uploaded to the internet along with a graphic novel written about him. He would leave an …
Read More »We Worked Through the Night to Fix a Helicopter Engine Sensor – and Then Came the Crash
by Brian Dykeman, The War Horse The funny thing about memories is that your brain will let most of them drift off into a place where they only make an appearance if you see a picture, smell a smell, or if a certain song comes on the radio. Then there …
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