Survival

Weak, burned, and alone, he drifted for months through shark-filled waters of the Atlantic. by Victor Hale The Atlantic Ocean was calm when Steven Callahan went to sleep. It was the kind of calm that convinces a solo sailor to trust his preparations. His 21-foot sloop, Napoleon Solo, rode low …

by Jose Campos The flight went bad in the high, thin air above North Carolina. Major William Rankin, who flew for the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II and Korea, was on a routine training hop in in his F-8U Crusader. He was an experienced pilot, and expected to …

by Gatimu Juma Publisher’s note: Gatimu Juma, who reports from the Horn of Africa, told me he was working on a story about the Al-Shabaab terror group. Nearly a year went by, and I couldn’t reach him. Finally he surfaced to tell me where he was all that time: convalescing. …

Ripped open by a grizzly and abandoned alongside a shallow grave, Glass dragged himself more than 200 miles unarmed through the 1820’s wilderness. by Jose Campos In the late summer of 1823, deep in the unmapped badlands of the Northern Plains, mountain man Hugh Glass was brutally mauled by a …

If there’s a lesson to be learned from merc work, it’s this: you are on your own. When you put your trust in others, or rely on outside forces for salvation, you’re buying yourself a one·way ticket to the oblivion of a mercs’ limbo: jail if you’re lucky, a bullet …

by Hooligan I wasn’t sure the man was real. Was he a hunter? The hunted? Out there in the woods, I was starving and on the brink of hallucination, so it could have been Bigfoot himself, for all I knew. When a man gets desperate, the thought of a good …

After the Soviets discovered huge reserves of natural gas in Uzbekistan, this part of the USSR became the main gas producing region in the country. But things went wrong, and one of its key gas fields turned into a man-made disaster of unimaginable magnitude. Hellish fire The unprecedented emergency at …

We were leaning over the throttles, breaking the seals on our masks, and yelling at each other. by Mitchell “Taco” Bell To all my passenger friends out there who always text me with the crazy pilot questions, I can assure you as pilots we train for this stuff all the …

 Their helicopter was never shut down, and had to be “hot-fueled” while the engine was running.  Shortly after midnight on Christmas Eve, 1955, a levee on California’s Feather River collapsed, sending a 21-foot wall of water into Yuba City. Terrified flood victims who huddled on rooftops or clinging to tree …

The mountains above Bridgeport, California, have been home to mountain warfare survival training for Special Forces, Marines, and others. In this frosty vid, Green Berets with the 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne) partner with United Arab Emirates Special Operations to conduct long range reconnaissance training at the U.S. Marine Corps …