War Stories

Amidst the chaos and carnage, I couldn’t help but marvel at the sheer audacity of these men—pilots who crawled from the wreckage, dusted themselves off, and pressed forward as if crashing a helicopter was just another Tuesday.

We poured into the cabin like a living freight train—boots, pistol muzzles and halogen beams—smashing doors, vaulting seat-belt hurdles and dragging the terrified into the search corridor while Sam, lip busted and grinning, turned chaos into business and I kept replaying that stupid puddle of sweat on the wing that could’ve made the whole perfect plan look like a slapstick funeral.

We knelt like ghosts in the shadows, eyes locked on the Boeing’s silhouette, ladders poised in our hands, as the APU’s howl swallowed any doubt and the red light beckoned us forward into the night.

I went to Ukraine thinking I could choose how to help, only to find that on the morning the war began everything I knew—plans, love, even my sense of who I was—was smashed by artillery, paperwork, and the chaotic, makeshift mercy of volunteers who’d been thrown together to survive.

The lens hummed, the mud stilled, and for a heartbeat I couldn’t tell who was hunting who.

In a quiet bar where ghosts keep their own rhythm, Cordova’s three plays of “Wish You Were Here” turn grief into a kind of communion for the living.

Back home I kept checking my watch as if Iraq still owned my hours, wrestling to set down anger and pride so I could ask the only question that matters: what moral ground must we stand on before we spend blood again.

Russia’s war in Kherson has descended into a sport of civilian hunting; a moral collapse broadcast online for the world to ignore.

Writing is the long, bloody slog between inspiration and execution, but when it hits—when the scene fires clean—it’s like kicking in a door and finding the whole damn world on the other side.

Homecoming is the quiet recognition that we were never apart, that in the trials and the light alike we move within the same divine pulse binding my family, my service, and the turning of the galaxies.

When the guns pause and the ash settles, the men who learned to live at the zero line will drift outward like sparks on the wind, carrying paid skills, unpaid debts, and a quiet promise that the war is not finished with us yet.

In seventeen days of September 1918, Frank Luke burned a path across the Meuse, torching hydrogen dragons under flak and fighters, dropping three more in flames on his last mission, and dying with a .45 in his hand.