It started as a small-time street gang in 1950’s Los Angeles, and took its name from where it was based: 18th Street, in the city’s Rampart District. It evolved over the years, until the 18th Street Gang – also known as “Barrio 18” – became one of the largest youth gangs …

by Bruce Pannier “Well guys, are we going, or are we going to sit here taking a piss?” It has been many years since the culmination of the so-called Russian constitutional crisis, when the country’s president, Boris Yeltsin, sought to dissolve the parliament and then ordered the military to crush …

by Martin Kufus The Pentagon is adamant that no flying saucer crashed in July 1947 near Roswell, N.M., and that no aliens nor advanced technology were recovered and secreted away. It’s an odd coincidence, nonetheless, that the world’s most famous UFO-related incident occurred near the world’s only nuclear weapons.   By …

by Gatimu Juma It should have been a routine flight. The Bush War was well underway in Rhodesia, but on that day in 1978, civilian air travel was safe. Or so it seemed. On the afternoon of September 3, 1978, the passengers and crew aboard Air Rhodesia Flight 825 learned …

by Greg Chabot The beginning of February 2005 was a busy time in Baqubah. Insurgent activity had picked up considerably, keeping all of us at the Police HQ on our toes. With the end of the deployment coming, I had tried multiple times to extend my tour but was denied. …

by Boris Egorov At the end of 1980, on the outskirts of Moscow, Soviet policemen beat to death a KGB major, and staged it as a robbery. They had no idea what dire consequences the encounter would have for them and the entire Soviet police force.  On the morning of …

Perfume, purloined jewelry and a millionaire’s son form the complex story of Herbert Repsold, a Navy deserter who also was known as the Perfumed Burglar. In the early 1900s, Repsold was a troublesome youth. Growing tired of his son’s antics, the elder Repsold cut off his son’s cash and forced …

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 …

by Cliff Wade Iraq, 2007 Every now and again we’d get an outsider attached to our unit on missions. Sometimes they were enablers who proved to be assets, other times they were regarded as interlopers who got in the way. One such instance sticks out in my mind over others: …

by A.R. Fomenko VIENNA BUREAU – On the battlefields of Ukraine, steel beasts now crawl under strange new hides – bristling, porcupine-like shells known as “hedgehog armor.” It’s the latest mutation born from drone-saturated warfare, where a cheap quadcopter can gut a million-dollar tank before the crew even knows it’s coming. …