My hands shook as I spot-checked my dress blues. I took the two brown paper bags and walked toward the memorial. The monument was wreathed in sentiment. Bouquets of flowers. Beer bottles. Little shots of whiskey. A man I"d never met saw me approach. His beard was prematurely graying. He stuck his hand out and threw his arm around me. Hey, brother... This was his ritual. To have a beer with his buddy. He gently told his young son to read all of the names. The boy complied. I placed three little bottles of whiskey on the stone. I took a fifth of Wild Turkey out of the second bag and we ...
Ten years ago today, U.S. air, sea and land forces attacked Iraq. And the great goals of Operation Iraqi Freedom? Destroy the chemical and biological weapons Saddam Hussein had amassed to use on us ...
“In Syria, I will work ... to identify and organize those members of the opposition who share our values and ensure they obtain the arms they need to defeat Assad’s tanks, helicopters and ...
In Basic Training, we were given a set of civilian clothes which had to be worn whenever we weren"t in uniform. It was another uniform to make us all the same, they said. The ...
One of my sergeant majors was an airborne soldier and what he said was gospel to us. We young soldiers saw the wings on his arm and asked him what parachuting was like. He said it ...
September 11 happened as soon as I"d gotten to my first regiment. It was just after lunch and our full bellies were satisfied as they worked away on fish and chips, pudding ...
The Army was obsessed with cleanliness. We"d crane our necks around the bottoms of toilets and plumbing pipes until we could see our tired faces in them. We"d show off our ...
Everything was bigger with the Yanks: their soldiers, their food, and their imaginations. I was in the cookhouse with them in Kuwait before we tore across the border. We Brits had ...
The Royal Engineers did anything the Army needed"from building bridges to crossing rivers, from building camps to clearing mines"so they needed to be tough soldiers. They ...
Tony Blair was interrupted at the Leveson Inquiry last week by a protestor calling him a war criminal. It seems the Iraq War won"t go away for Blair. Leadership involves ...
Sunil* was a well-fed Indian shipping millionaire. I"d heard about him through people who worked for him. I was helping the British Army build a prison in Iraq and would ...
War is supposed to be full of action. Men are supposed to dive over barbed wire and charge at the enemy while being shot. The enemy is supposed to be tough and unrelenting but ...
"I want you to shoot me," he said. He must have been joking. It was a struggle to drive, never mind listen to rubbish like this, but he was serious. I was following an ...
The Afghanistan war started over ten years ago. We"ve seen maps and graphics on the news, but without Googling it, can you name the capital? What languages do they speak? ...
If you were drawing up plans on how to run a private members" club, a larger society, or even a country, military life provides some good ground rules. SELECT YOUR MEMBERS ...
Some soldiers are meant to join the elite forces, become spies, and swing through windows shouting and shooting. Some aren"t. That we"re all equal is one of the greatest ...
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