Frontier Notes: The Mountains and My Azimuth

There’s a heartbeat out here. The organ is no different. The body it resides in is no different. But the ferocity she beats with here is tangible. It’s not shrouded by structures or tempered by pav...

Social Instability Among the Nacirema

Political anthropologists have been fascinated with various tribes and societies around the globe in recent decades.  The Middle East and Africa are home to civilizations ripe for study.  Insurgenc...

Writing with TBI

I speak much slower than I used to. In fact, I think much slower, too. Detached synapses are like abandoned off-ramps on the interstate of my thoughts. New roads have been built, and we all know ho...

Brave Men and Lost Boys

Peter Banning (played by Robin Williams): To die would be a great adventure!  Captain James Hook (played by Dustin Hoffman): Death is the only adventure you have left.  - Hook (1991)   So the story...

Frankie’s in Lacey

We sang “Take Me Home, Country Roads”  Because I killed it, drunk and buried in smoke A woman approached and told me we had to do “Rocky Mountain High” The woman took a drag and told me it would ma...

China Already Had Its War

“Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting,” (The Art of War, III:2, Sun Tzu).   The ...

The Warrior's Path: Part 1

“Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totall...

The Marine Corps’ Identity Crisis

Without an active conflict, The Marine Corps is facing an identity crisis; and its solution is to reinvent the wheel.  While the argument stands that our future war will be with a peer threat in th...

Perpetuating Success Stories - The One More Wave Floperator

I love veteran success stories. Growing up, my grandfather, a World War II infantryman, taught me to excel in life regardless of circumstances. Seen in his youth as the part-Indian bastard child of...

Poetry is Metal: What veterans can learn from Metallica’s “One”

When I think of Metallica’s song “One”, I remember the epic Guitar Hero jam-sessions held in a small shack we nicknamed the M-Dub, short for MWR, at OP Restrepo. We spent countless hours passing th...

The Great American Vet Fet, Part 3: The Naming of Things

After those morons stormed of the Capitol, we vets are Bret Hart during the Montreal Screwjob and no Vince McMahon is coming to make it right.   What do I mean? Well, first look at what appears to ...

Podcast Review: Q Clearance

By Saul O’Donovan   I will begin this short article by assuming there is at least one QAnon believer or someone who is Q-curious reading this. Perhaps you just know someone caught up in this moveme...

The Great American Vet Fet, Part 2: Magical Thinking

By Matt Cricchio   If we want to do our part to break The Great American Veteran Fetish the first thing we must do is to stop all of our magical thinking. Magical Thinking? Is that what your boy di...

Old but Gold: A Review of The It Could Happen Here Podcast Series

By Saul O’Donovan   It Could Happen Here is a podcast series hosted by conflict journalist Robert Evans which discusses the plausibility of a second civil war in the US. Released in the spring of 2...

The Great American Vet Fet, Part 1: Establishing the Fetish

You’re not going to like this and I am opening myself up to everyone’s favorite dick measuring contest (what branch was he? What unit? My boy was with him in RC-South and said he’s a turd) but it m...