Afghanistan

From a quiet Mississippi upbringing to a rooftop in Marjah, Kyle Carpenter’s life is a study in what happens when ordinary resolve collides with an extraordinary moment.

Ryan Pitts didn’t survive COP Keating because he was invincible; he survived because, in the chaos of a fight designed to kill him, he refused to quit.

For two decades, the war in Afghanistan was fought as a coalition effort. NATO allies deployed to combat zones, took casualties, and shared the risks of a war that ultimately ended in failure.

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

American power succeeds only when it enters a conflict with limits, legitimacy, and a political end state already within reach, and it fails when it tries to invent those conditions at gunpoint.

Wake up in the dark, throw on cargo pants and boots, mainline coffee and Rip Its, live in cable traffic inside the TOC, and if you are lucky you end the night at the fire pit with a stiff drink and a short laugh before you do it all again.

Giunta’s story is what valor looks like when it is not polished for the cameras, because in the Korengal he moved into fire again and again for one reason only: to get his people home.

He stepped into the open, phone in hand and grit in his teeth, trading the last of his cover for a handful of breaths for his teammates — the kind of small, brutal choice that carves a quiet legend out of an ordinary life.

We armed a ghost army and when it vanished the keys and the guns stayed, so now our beige beasts roll under a foreign flag toward Pakistan as a seven billion dollar punchline to a war that ended with a mad scramble to the runway.

As the Durand Line crackles with Kabul claiming 58 Pakistani dead and Gaza braces for a 20 hostages handover by nightfall, Trump orders the Pentagon to tap R and D cash so U.S. troops still get paid while Washington’s shutdown grinds on. Welcome to Sunday, October 12th, 2025. This is your SOFREP Morning Brief.

War is not glorious; it is the white hot rattle of a MEDEVAC, two blood slick hands locked after an IED blast near Kandahar, and a young sergeant who learns the hard Latin that war is only sweet for those who have not been through it.

Where we lived with villagers and tied bottom up security to district and provincial governance, VSO and ALP held ground the centralized model could not, and when support was cut the Taliban wasted no time reclaiming the countryside.