Military History

April 21, 1989 the US Army Special Forces lost a legend in its ranks. Communist guerrillas assassinated COL. Nick Rowe while on his way to work as a military advisor to the Philippine Army. Rowe had escaped a Viet Cong prisoner of war camp on New Year’s Eve 1968 while being taken to his execution. […]

At treetop height over the Coral Sea, with fuel gauges bleeding toward empty and silence enforced by secrets that could not survive daylight, a handful of P-38 pilots flew straight into history to cut down the architect of Pearl Harbor.

American power succeeds only when it enters a conflict with limits, legitimacy, and a political end state already within reach, and it fails when it tries to invent those conditions at gunpoint.

He proved the warrior-poet is real when he turned a punji-stick tourniquet and a Green Beret tab into a chart-topping hymn, then proved the other half of the equation when the discipline slipped, the hearth went cold, and the same fire that made art started taking bodies.

At eleven, Willie Johnston carried his drum through the Seven Days retreat when others tossed their gear to survive.

Major John L. Plaster’s SOG is a blunt, first-hand account of MACV-SOG’s small-team missions behind enemy lines that makes Hollywood action look fake by comparison because it’s built on real consequences, brutal odds, and men who did not get to choose how it ended.

When the grenade hit the dirt and the clock ran out, Leroy Petry did not look for cover or permission, he reached down, made the only decision that mattered, and paid for it so his Rangers would live.

The faceted black jet was dragged across a Saudi ramp like contraband in broad daylight, and if you listen closely you can hear the old rules of air war cracking in half.

All hell broke loose over Bavaria as Eduard Schallmoser, a 21-year-old Me 262 hotshot handpicked to fly wingman for Adolf “Dolfo” Galland, came screaming up from six o’clock on a B-26 formation, guns blazing and metal shredding, until he clipped a Marauder’s prop and somehow lived long enough to earn the only nickname that fit: “The Rammer.”

Tibor Rubin endured the Holocaust, chose to fight for the country that freed him, and risked death repeatedly in Korea, proving that moral courage can survive even when everything else is stripped away.

He was a sharecropper’s son from Lepanto who spent the day after Christmas turning a Belgian roadside into a firing range for German 88s, dragging wounded men out of the kill zone like he was collecting debts in the snow, and walking away with a kind of courage you cannot wrap, tag, or put under a tree.

You do not get to interview your defenders for ideological purity when the rockets are already inbound, you take the ones who hold the line and you judge them by what they do under fire, not by what comfortable people say about them afterward.