Category: Military History

During the Vietnam War it became very clear that the U.S. military needed to revise their hand-to-hand training.

For most people, surviving the Holocaust in Nazi-occupied Europe would be the defining moment of their lives. Men like Major General Sidney Shachnow aren’t most people. The Lithuanian-born Shachnow survived a forced labor camp and went on to join the U.S. Army, serve in Vietnam, and lead the Army Special Forces’ ultra-secret World War III […]

World War II saw the advent of modern special operations, and thus the need for special hand-to-hand fighting skills for special operators.

You can read part I here. Ancient China and much of Asia saw widespread use of spies and espionage during its turbulent history. In fact, the use of these agents was so common that the final chapter of Sun Tzu’s “The Art of War” (Sunzi Bingfa) is dedicated to spies, spying, and their importance in […]

De Oppresso Liber – To Free the Oppressed Known as the quiet professionals, the Green Berets have been “freeing the oppressed” all over the world, for decades. Their extraordinary contributions in Vietnam alone, serve to remind us of their uniqueness as the ONLY presidentially appointed unit. Now, the Special Forces’ legacy is desperately calling upon […]

Ah, the ubiquitous donut. The guilty pleasure is, at the same time, the most reviled snack by doctors and professional trainers because of its extreme fat content and beloved by people everywhere because, let’s face it, it tastes so damned good. Donuts in some form or another have been around forever. Archaeologists have dug up […]

From the outset, the only hand-to-hand training given to most soldiers on both sides of the trenches involved the bayonet and the trench knife.

The U.S. Air Force became the first U.S. military branch to select a woman to serve as the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer. Chief Master Sgt. JoAnne Bass will become the 19th Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force. She will succeed Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force Kaleth Wright, who is expected to retire on […]

CIA. KGB. MSS. All acronyms that anyone familiar with the intelligence world would know. (For those who may not be familiar, they stand for: Central Intelligence Agency — United States, Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti — Soviet Union/Russia, and the Ministry for State Security — China). They are all well-represented in the modern media. But what about […]

Swords and rifles get dropped and lost. Then, the warrior has only his wits and hand-to-hand fighting skills to rely on.

She fought through every challenge the Q Course threw at her, proving that grit, skill, and determination—not gender—are what earn the coveted Green Beret.

“How the hell am I going to fill 1,000 sandbags, and how did I get myself into this mess?” I thought. Sometimes life throws curveballs at you and you have to do your best to sit back in the box and hit them the opposite way. In doing so, you can make the most out […]