As a young second lieutenant in 1943, James Swett embarked on his first combat mission at the age of 22. Within 15 minutes, he was a fighter ace with seven enemy kills to his credit. Swett arrived for duty in February 1943 at Henderson Field on Guadalcanal Island in the …

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 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 …

by Mike Eckel, Daniil Belovodyev, and Anton Bayev In the first half of October 2022, employees of an obscure Russian government department working out of a small business center in northeast Moscow were worried about the weather. Not Moscow’s weather, but rather weather in four regions of Ukraine that President …

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 …

In Dublin, Ireland, on Easter Monday, 1916, nationalists proclaimed the founding of the Irish Republic. Bolstered by some 1,600 followers, they staged a rebellion against the British government in Ireland. They didn’t have planes nor tanks, and only limited use of artillery. Instead, the rebels made a stand using personal …

Pilots call it the Dragon Lady because the U-2 is tough to handle when taking off and landing – and isn’t easy to fly at altitude, where thin air at 70,000 feet is a tricky environment. The U-2 airframe that played a significant role during the Cold War appeared in …

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 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 …

  Sometime in 1965, Navy SEAL James Hawes landed in the Congo with cash stuffed in his socks, morphine in his bag, and a basic understanding of his mission. He would recruit a mercenary navy and suppress the Soviet and Chinese-backed rebels engaged in guerrilla movements against a pro-Western government. …