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The War Horse
I See My Life in Music, So I Used It to Find My Freedom and Peace After Years of War
I sat alone and confined in a stress position for hours and was running out of Schlitz for the exercise. The only thing that kept me from jacking it in was the intolerable shame of quitting. I figured this would be hard, which implies that…
War Horse Earns 3rd Edward R. Murrow Award
The War Horse team is proud to announce that our newsroom has received the prestigious Edward R. Murrow Award for reporting on the 20th anniversary of the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.The multimedia reporting project profiled…
Explosives, a Couple of Flamethrowers, and No Ordinary Men Against a Forbidding Jungle
Tall, muscular, broad-shouldered, with a full head of white hair, Brig. Gen. John M. Wright Jr. scrambled up a termite mound, some 30 feet wide at the base and seven or eight feet high, and gestured for us to draw into a…
I Lost One of My Marines to Suicide. Maybe Being Honest About My Blind Spots Will Help.
I couldn’t bring myself to go into his barracks room and view the body. I stood just outside the door, one in an endless row of identical entrances on the second deck, as the NCIS agent described the scene inside.“Go straight back into the…
More Than 40% of Troops Face Limited or No Access to Abortion Care, Study Shows
When J, a Marine Corps reservist, served on active duty during the troop surge in Iraq, she found herself unexpectedly pregnant just a couple of months before her unit was set to deploy. At first, she wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. But…
All Warfare Is Based on Deception—Troops, Vets Targeted by Disinformation Can Fight Back
Type “#MilTok” into the search bar on TikTok and you’ll be greeted with page after page after page of military videos. Soldiers trash-talking sailors. Sailors trash-talking soldiers. Military memes, uniform hacks, service members waxing…
We Saluted Under the Night Sky. Each New Loss Felt Harder Than the One Before.
On the night of April 3, 2012, we stood in near-complete darkness as a stretcher rolled by. I was among dozens of soldiers who gathered to salute the remains of the first soldier killed in action since our unit arrived in east Afghanistan…
Troops, Veterans Are Targets in the Disinformation War, Even if They Don’t Know It Yet
In the summer of 2015, active-duty troops began to arrive in Bastrop, Texas, for a military training exercise. The exercise wasn’t much different from previous joint training exercises, except perhaps for its size. Over the course of two…
Can I Be Like the Hummingbirds, With the Strength to Fight Another Day?
I watch a hummingbird chase a grackle into the treetops. At first glance, I think it’s being chased by a large, fast-flying insect. The mangy grackle looks like it’s been through hell and shouts a warning that sounds like it’s choking on a…
Wounded Knee Massacre ‘Tarnishes’ Integrity of Medal of Honor
When Rep. Kaiali’i Kahele, a lieutenant colonel in the Hawaii Air National Guard, thinks about the men, women, and children massacred by the U.S. Army more than a century ago at Wounded Knee, it brings home memories of other wrongs.In 1893,…
Play Hard. Get Dirty. Use Good Saop.