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100-Year-Old World War II Veteran Finally Receives Purple Heart From Battle of Okinawa

Harvey Drahos was wounded in action when he was 22 years old, in the World War II Battle of Okinawa. He received his Purple Heart this year, at age 100. The ceremony was held Sept. 30 at the Olympic Flight Museum in Olympia, Washington. Drahos’s service in the Army as an expert …

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‘People Are Getting Killed Out There!’ I Watched Yeltsin’s Tanks Open Fire on Russian Parliament

by Bruce Pannier “Well guys, are we going, or are we going to sit here taking a piss?” It has been 25 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 …

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Eerie Silences and Strange Time Warps: The Weirdness of Life Aboard a Submarine

by David Chetlain, The War HorseI spent 18 months in training before reporting to my first submarine. I learned a lot about damage control, sonar, electronics, and how to distinguish a sperm whale from a humpback whale. But nothing prepared me for the disconnection from Earth that distorted my perception …

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‘The Phantom’ Fouled the Latrine; We Had to Find Him Before Sarge Flushed Us All Down the Toilet

by Heath Hansen It was 0530 hours the morning our first sergeant kicked open the door to our tent, and told us to “get the fuck outside and form it up!” Late the previous night, we returned to base from a 10-day mission in Afghanistan. I could see through a …

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Zenith Arms ZF-5 Pistol an Excellent Clone of H&K Legendary Submachine Gun

by Friedrich Seiltgen The Heckler & Koch MP-5 Sub-Machinegun is a legend. Its development began in 1964. It began service with the West German Bundespolizei in 1966, and H&K never looked back. Throughout the years it gained a reputation as a quality built, reliable weapon and was selected for service by …

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Mold, Sewage, and Rot in the Barracks: How Did the US Military Sink So Low?

ANALYSIS by John “Wolf” Wagner Mold, raw sewage, broken windows, and fire systems that don’t work. The Government Accountability Office recently highlighted these and other severe problems plaguing military barracks across the services. The problems also include non-existent maintenance and repairs, poor cleaning services, a lack of accountability, and more. …

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In Cold War Moscow, a Moment of Hope at a Freezing Airfield

by Rick Kiernan, The War Horse On Oct. 28, 1991, I settled into an hours-long commercial flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Moscow. By year’s end, the iconic Soviet flag would fly over the Kremlin for the final time, silently signaling the collapse of the USSR after nearly seven decades. I …

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Eyewitnesses to War: Villagers Kept Record of Who Died Inside Airless ‘Dungeon of Death’ in Ukraine

by Mark Krutov, RFE/RL The elderly and sick died quietly. Crowded with hundreds of others held captive by Russian soldiers for four weeks in an airless, unsanitary school basement in Yahidne, a village in the Chernihiv region of northern Ukraine, the ill and the frail were particularly vulnerable. Several could …

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How The KGB Caught America’s ‘Volkswagen Spy’: A Story of Cold War Espionage

by Amos Chapple A photo album sitting on the shelves of Ukraine’s KGB archives reveals how an amateur U.S. spy was captured more than 60 years ago.  In the summer of 1961, a quiet, serious American student named Marvin Makinen pulled up to the Soviet border in a Volkswagen car. The …

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The Flying Legend, ‘Black Sheep’ Col. Pappy Boyington

by Katie Lange  Editor’s note: SOF publisher Susan Katz Keating knew Col. Pappy Boyington in the 1980’s when he frequented the Nut Tree airport in Vacaville, California. Here is a story of his life in uniform. Colonel Gregory “Pappy” Boyington was one of the service’s greatest and most legendary pilots. …

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