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 …

by James Donzella Somewhere between my 14th and 15th birthdays, my dad taught me to drive a stick shift. He thought it was important that I knew how. My first car was a stick-shift Ford—fast. It earned me several tickets. A few years later, drafted into the Army, I found …

by A.R. Fomenko VIENNA BUREAU — On the grim anniversary of the 1986 Chernobyl meltdown, a Belarusian nurse breaks her silence – not about the original disaster, but about its haunting encore. “Svetlana,” now retired, was a nurse at a radiation treatment ward in Gomel, Belarus. In 2022, as war …

by Igor Rozin The world’s most popular rifle, with 100 million units in circulation, is not without its drawbacks. The AK platform is popular worldwide for its reliability and ease of production. Today, there are roughly 100 million Kalashnikov rifles in 55 countries around the globe. And that’s only those …

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, …

by John Spencer Editor’s note: This is an excerpt of the book “Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connection in Modern War” published by Potomac Books and available for purchase at Amazon here. The excerpt describes 2LT John Spencer’s experience jumping into Iraq as a platoon leader with the 173rd …

“We are a tough people, we used to have war all the time. Fighting is in our DNA.” At a major international fighting event this year, all four athletes competing for world championship titles hailed from the Caucasus. The event, UFC 311, which was held in California on Jan. 18, …

by Susan Katz Keating A member of the Air National Guard was hit with criminal charges – but not for leaking classified documents. It has to do with murder-for-hire. A Tennessee man who serves in the Air National Guard agreed to kill someone for a client who actually was an …

by A.R. Fomenko “The ghost has been illuminated.” VIENNA BUREAU – It was the kind of pursuit that runs slow and cold. Spanish authorities hunted in vain for years to uncover a smuggling tunnel between Morocco and a tiny exclave of Spain within the North African country. The underground passageway was …

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 …