US SOCOM

A U.S. Army veteran reflects on hero worship, disappointment, and integrity inside modern warrior culture.

Five Years to Freedom is a compact, must-read POW memoir that shows how Nick Rowe endured five years of Viet Cong captivity through discipline and mental control, influenced the modern SERE program, and belongs alongside Frankl and Solzhenitsyn as a study of inner freedom under coercion.

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. […]

A junior soldier’s first Al Mar purchase becomes the entry point into how Al Mar’s Special Forces ties, friendship with Nick Rowe, and SERE-driven design priorities shaped some of the most respected knives in the tactical world.

Atlas Lion showed that AI can replace a crowd of observer controllers and still give commanders a sharper, doctrine-based read on how ready their Civil Affairs teams are for large-scale combat.

Special Operations favors the one who thinks under fire, starts before he is told, and pulls others with him.

I didn’t teach Kamal to swim; I taught him to harness fear until it pulled him across ten feet of water like a tide he commanded.

On October 3, 2025 at MacDill Air Force Base, Adm. Frank M. Bradley took command of U.S. Special Operations Command from Gen. Bryan P. Fenton, a quiet handoff that suggests tighter targeting, tougher training, and a boss fluent in JSOC tradecraft.

Marcus Luttrell was the lone survivor of Operation Red Wings, an operation that went sideways, resulting in the loss of 19 servicemembers.

And now here I was, just days away from graduating boot camp, trying to figure out how the hell to get myself on the track to BUD/S.

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.

Congress can treat this report like a weather brief before a combat jump—ignore the winds at your peril, because landing in the wrong county means the mission’s blown before the first shot’s fired.