Army

The formation of and many of the defining events in the history of the 3rd Ranger Battalion happened on October 3rd.

When a televised roll call of admirals replaces a clear mission, you know the brass has swollen, the bureaucracy is smothering the fight, and our rivals are happy to watch us polish our parade skills while they sharpen their knives.

President George W. Bush visits the Delta Force compound shortly after 9/11.

A day after the Mogadishu firefight, Delta’s A Squadron lifted in to bolster a bloodied Task Force Ranger—17 Americans killed, 106 wounded, and Gary Gordon and Randall Shughart earning the Medal of Honor.

When the SECDEF orders 800 of the nation’s top brass to Quantico without a whisper of an agenda, that’s not a meeting—it’s a thunderclap that rattles coffee cups from Ramstein to Okinawa and has every colonel quietly checking his golden parachute.

When Chau Phu turned into a knife fight in a phone booth, Drew Dix grabbed whoever would move, keyed his radio, and bulldozed through Tet’s chaos—rescuing civilians, stacking prisoners, and proving leadership starts with stepping into the gunfire.

Night Stalkers don’t get the luxury of easy nights—their training flights cut low and fast through blacked-out timber, where one wrong move can turn a routine drill into a headline.

Flying with the Night Stalkers, whether fast-roping from a Black Hawk, thundering in a Chinook, or clinging to the skids of a Little Bird, showed me firsthand why these aviation professionals are the lifeline of America’s most elite warriors.

The war of terror is not fought with bombs or bullets, but in the human heart, where fear seeks to claim ground that only we can choose to surrender.

When the courtyard turned into a killing ground at Baghdad Airport, Paul R. Smith climbed into the turret, took the fight on his shoulders, and made damn sure his men walked away alive.

Vegas may be a city that never sleeps, but that day, standing in front of Chainsaw with his broken cane and unwavering grin, I knew that some connections run deeper than any lights, noise, or the ghosts we carry in our heads.

Years of envy and humiliation had hardened into a poverty of consciousness, where cruelty was mistaken for devotion and crime disguised itself as holy war.