Specialoperations

In the early hours of December 20, 1989, 28 years ago, the United States began operations against Manuel Noriega and the Panamanian Defense Forces in Operation Just Cause. During the opening hours of the US operation, several US Special Operations units conducted operations to rescue American Kurt Muse from the notorious Modelo Prison, stop Noriega […]

Prior to the war in Afghanistan, the conflict in Vietnam was the longest in United States history. And on April 1, 1970, Green Beret medic Gary Beikirch showed incredible bravery during an attack on his Dak Seang A-Camp. He was exposing himself repeatedly to enemy fire to treat wounded comrades, despite his own serious wounds […]

Situated in the northwestern portion of South Vietnam, along the border with Laos, lies the A Shau Valley.  At 25 miles long and one mile wide, A Shau the valley consists of tall and thick elephant grass flanked on either side by steep mountain ranges, dense with jungle, that rise between 3,000 and 6,000 feet. […]

Charles Ernest Hosking Jr. was a career soldier who fought as a U.S. paratrooper in World War II and was one of the original Green Berets when the unit was created in 1952. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for his actions in Vietnam. A desire to serve Hosking was born in May […]

Hannah Duston, also alternatively referred to as Dustin, Dustan, and Durstan in early Colonial records, was a Puritan mother of nine children who was taken captive along with her infant daughter by Abenaki Indians from Canada during King William’s War. The Abenaki had taken her during a raid on Haverhill, Massachusetts on March 15, 1697, […]

The attacks of 9/11, which seem so long ago, caught the United States by surprise. There were some warning signs that were missed by our intelligence and law enforcement agencies but pointing the finger isn’t the purpose here. The last 16 years have seen our forces fighting a different kind of war, with a different […]

Today is the birthday of Sterling Hayden, he would have been 103 years old today. Most people when they hear his name think of the crooked cop, Captain McCloskey in “The Godfather”. Working with a rival faction of Mafiosi, Hayden met his end when Michael Corleone shot him in a restaurant. He was also outstanding […]

British Air Ministry engineer William Godfray De Lisle came up with the concept of an integrally suppressed rifle while working at home in 1942. He created a prototype chambered in  .22 caliber and based on a Browning semi-automatic rifle to hunt small animals for food. After much success, he realized the extreme quiet of the […]

Submachine guns had been Russia’s forte’ during the Second World War, when several million copies were produced of the PPSH-41 and PPS-43 variants. With millions available, tacticians found that the employment of such weapons spurred the creation of a new doctrine of warfare, where firepower was favored over accuracy. This innovation would peak with the development […]

After the forces of Hitler’s Nazi Germany overran most of Europe in the summer of 1940, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that the military create a force that could carry out raids against Nazi-occupied Europe. “Enterprises must be prepared, with specially-trained troops of the hunter class, who can develop a reign of terror down […]

Soldiers who came from a light infantry or a Ranger battalion will have already mastered the art of rucking for long distances. For soldiers coming from a different background, that is where they are sailing into uncharted waters.

Once Eugene Stoner, designer of the AR-15/M-16 series of combat rifles, left Armalite Corporation in the early 1960s, he decided to design a unique weapons platform that used a common receiver around which a family of small arms could interchange. Such a commonality would enable it to transform into a rifle, carbine or light machine gun […]