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The War Horse
A Vision of a Russian Cultural Transformation Comes Full Circle and Shatters
On Oct. 28, 1991, I settled into an hours-long commercial flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Moscow. By year’s end, the iconic Soviet flag would fly over the Kremlin for the final time, silently signaling the collapse of the USSR after…
Holding On When Leaving Feels Like Letting Go
I look up from scrubbing dried yogurt and petrified cereal flakes off my kitchen table and notice it immediately. The persimmon tree that grew oddly off-center in our North Carolina backyard is bare. Yesterday there had been six orange…
Veterans and Reservists Make up More Than 28% of Candidates Who Question 2020 Election Results
More than a quarter of the candidates on the ballot in November who have publicly denied or raised questions or doubts about the legitimacy of the 2020 election have served or are serving in the military, an analysis by The War Horse has…
Two Guys to a Bag, One Bag at a Time. We Each Became Experts in a Macabre Parade.
Whenever I hear the thwack-thwack-thwack of a helicopter, I stop and look up. Nothing too unusual about that, except a shot of adrenaline unfailingly accompanies these sightings. The hair on my arms and neck stands up, and something I can’t…
Feres Helps Military Avoid Accountability for Harm. New Ruling Could Be a Chance for Justice.
On the nine-hour drive from their home in California’s central valley to the Marine Corps’ Camp Pendleton, south of Los Angeles, Peter Vienna and his wife wondered what had happened to their son. They knew only that there had been a…
A Portrait of a Soldier—Inside Those Lines Was the Story of War
A pop-up box appeared on the screen one night in 2006 as I idly surfed the internet. Thirty-nine dollars and 95 cents would send a care package to an American soldier in Iraq. I typed in my credit card number.Weeks later I received a…
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…
Play Hard. Get Dirty. Use Good Saop.