This is War

Training is a way of honing skills, of teaching your body to think without you, so you can concentrate on the crisis at hand, but you can’t train character, you only can amplify it. For Cody Jones th...

13 Juni 201848min

Fighting has to be somewhere in your nature if you want to be part of a warrior class. Notions about having the killer instinct probably are overstated because killing isn’t always what circumstances ...

30 Maj 201845min

Violence is a necessary part of combat, and that is something every Marine understands when they step on the yellow footprints that first day of bootcamp. Few people crave it outright, but they all ac...

16 Maj 201846min

Duty is above the letter of the law. It’s a way of calibrating what you want to do with what you’re responsible for and matching that up against how you see yourself as a person. Joe Alotto had wanted...

2 Maj 201858min

Being under constant assault in a war zone wears a person down in both expected and unexpected ways. Sure, it wears you down physically, psychologically and emotionally, but it also can wear down your...

18 Apr 201851min

What do you do with rage when you don’t have any place to point it but inward? When there is no satisfaction in revenge and no way to put things right? Marcus Freeman spent nearly a decade as a combat...

4 Apr 201852min

“My training just kicked in.” We hear that a lot. It calls to mind decisiveness and instinctual reactions to uncommonly dire circumstances. For an Army medic, it’s about worst case scenarios and hopin...

20 Mars 201848min

Many of the men and women who enlist in the armed forces do so knowing they might die, but somehow meeting death face to face still comes as an absolute surprise.

13 Mars 201847min