Category: War Stories

The cold sat with them like an old debt, unpaid and unspoken, while Christmas passed quietly somewhere far enough away to feel almost merciful.

In the frosty breath of a Christmas Eve that forgave no absences, our rifles spoke in double-taps, the rhythm of duty overriding the silent night.

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.

Dick Cheney didn’t just steer America into war, he helped turn war into a business, and soldiers like me and my friends paid the bill in blood while he and his circle counted the profits.

Yaël Sion does not survive the apocalypse by hoping harder; she survives it the way a cutting tool survives steel, by biting down and refusing to let go.

In Delta, there was a bifurcation of schools of thought among the men, whose physical training program was NOT dictated at any level of command, recognizing that the Unit was fueled by big boys who played by big boy rules.

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.