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...

The Stellate Ganglion Block: An Alternate Look at PTSD

Because it seems to change our personality, most folks assume that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is solely a mental health problem. PTSD sits on the same list with schizophrenia and bipolar disord...

Hazardous Divergence: Sociopolitical Sectarianism in America

There’s no doubt that identity politics, social media and COVID-19 are all factors that increased political tensions exponentially around the world. But more specifically, in the U.S., where we’ve ...

A Bridge Too Far: A Counterpoint to the Antifa Boogeyman

As we are a platform of varying and informed opinions, it’s only healthy that we also challenge each other as writers for the sake of civil discourse. So in that spirit I offer a counterpoint ...

The Antifa Boogeyman

So about two months ago, I got an email notification from Nextdoor, which is a national platform for neighbors to locally communicate on all things relative to good ole American suburbia. Norm...

Stress Inoculation in Practice: Cold Water Exposure

One of the main things setting special operators apart from those with less rigorous training is that they don’t break down as much when things go sideways. It’s not so much that they possess amazi...

War Vets, Fantasy, and a Misunderstanding

* Egregious Nerd Alert * Know Ye that by getting this far you’ve already tread perilously close to where Dungeons & Dragons remains eternally relevant. This week we take a break from curre...

VETS IN THE ERA OF VICTIMHOOD

As the world changes, one thing remains the same: why most young people enlist. Despite bells and whistles about patriotic duty, what prompts so many youngsters to join the military is hopes of ach...

The Death of the Veteran Monoculture

  We, the GWOT veterans, went to war with the ubiquitous thank-you-for-your-service refrain, the hero-worship and do-no-wrong treatment that emerged after September 11th, 2001. Our country started ...

The Battle of Davenport

  Note: this article was originally released August 24, 2020. This piece is raw from the fireline, unfiltered insights from the souls standing between a 74,000-acre lightning complex fire and ...

The Three Rs

Scientific studies of memory are a little scary, because the evidence is in, and your memory sucks. Memories are not objective recordings of our experiences. They are colored by any number of disto...

A Cloud Too Far

 We set out mid-morning underneath an azure sky, accompanied by a solitary puff of a cloud perhaps providing relief to some distant beast in the valley down below. That day I was leading a group of...

Events, Beliefs, and Consequences

  One of the universally desirable traits across selection courses is what psychologists call low neuroticism. This doesn’t mean being dead inside or emotionless. The best translation would be “hig...