The Fire Pit

by Kevin Cresswell Picture the scene: It was early hours on July 4, 2003, at Camp Slayer in Baghdad, Iraq. There were several hundred U.S. troops and a handful of odds and sods ‘Brits & Aussies.’ In the middle of the lake was a boathouse with a flagpole. During the …

by Mitch “Taco” Bell Sometimes you never know who your neighbors are and I don’t mean that in the ax murderer scenario way, but in the sense that you have true heros hiding out in plain sight. Take Tommy King, for instance. One weekend we had a giant wind storm and …

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 …

by Al Hagan In the early 1980s, I was in the Marine Corps, and a friend of mine who had gone into the Armywas getting married. We’d grown up together, and so I and others – lots of military – journeyedback home for the occasion. Naturally, this required a combination …

The Marine next to me started screaming, which I could clearly hear over the engine and wind noise  by Al Hagan As a Marine Corps lance corporal, I was going through helicopter training at Camp Lejeune. Our bird lands, we jump on, and I find that my seatbelt is adjusted …

BOOK REVIEW by Susan Katz Keating When Marty Skovlund Jr. told me a while back that he was working on a book about Navy cryptology tech Shannon Kent, I made a note to myself to look for the book when it was published. Within the special operations community, Shannon’s name …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …