war

George Washington was a flawed man, as are we all, but he had an undeniably charmed life. He was the right man at the right time to birth the greatest nation the world has ever seen.

Certain dark days are burned into our national consciousness. For us, that day was obviously 9/11. On the morning of 7 October 2023, the nation of Israel had their own 9/11.

There is something visceral about the last stand. A small forlorn band bereft of support arrayed against insurmountable odds fighting to the last simply strikes a primal chord. Examples are well-documented. The Hot Gates at Thermopylae, Custer’s slaughter, and the Alamo stand out. These many tales of selfless bravery are profound and powerful. One lesser-known example is the siege of Bukit Kepong.

A friend of mine was one of a group of five military officers who first developed the concept of arming an unmanned surveillance drone. Then these guys decided to hang a couple of missiles under the wings, and the whole earth moved just a little bit.

Viktor Belenko was born in Nalchik, Russia, on February 15, 1947. By his 29th birthday, LT Belenko was at the top of his game. LT Belenko was the poster child for 1970’s-era communism. Under the surface, however, all was not well with the Soviet Air Defense Force’s fair-haired boy.

Whether it is spontaneous road rage or a husband spurned, it is the heat of the moment that drives so many people to do so many things they might later regret. Little is more emotionally heated than modern combat.

Operation Desert Shield ran from August 2, 1990, until January 17, 1991. This was the massive buildup of Allied forces in Saudi Arabia in response to Saddam Hussein’s unprovoked invasion of Iraq.

Heinrich “Hein” Severloh should have been a farmer. Born on June 23, 1923, in the town of Metzingen in Northern Germany, Heinrich was a man of the earth. However, in the Summer of 1941 his country called. Conscripted into the Wehrmacht, Severloh was trained as a dispatch rider and assigned to the 3d Battery

The winners write the history, and war is bad. Normal men forced into such abnormal circumstances are frequently driven to do things that seem unnatural from the comfort of our living rooms. The very act of combat is the most repugnant of human pursuits.