The Guinness Book lists the carnage in Ramree Island’s mangrove swamps as the worst example of crocodile predation on humans in history. There were 500 or so troops who remained unaccounted for that night. Theirs was an undeniably ghastly end.

The Smadge kept me in shape, taught me discipline, showed me how to run a rifle, and started me down the path toward becoming a real soldier myself. A deeply flawed man, he was nonetheless undeniably hardcore.

One small tragic drama played out on the front porch of a plantation house during a hot summer afternoon outside Vicksburg, Mississippi.

No amount of training or indoctrination can excise the innately fallen nature of man. In no place is that axiom made more clearly manifest than in the dark inky heart of Chris Dorner.

It’s a timeless question. Nature versus nurture. Does greatness stem from some simple combination of nucleotides embedded within your DNA, or is it something that can be coaxed, taught, or trained?

The scale of destruction wrought during the Second World War was unprecedented. Such carnage is literally unimaginable today.

The war in Vietnam was winding down, and Michael Thornton was one of only a dozen Navy SEALs remaining in the country. On October 31, 1972, Thornton formed a team along with a SEAL officer named Thomas Norris and three South Vietnamese Special Forces operators.

Ernest Hemingway was an extraordinarily gifted writer. Sadly, his personal demons eventually got the better of him. Regardless, whether it was fighting alongside the French Resistance, hunting dangerous game in Africa, or battling hungry sharks with a Tommy gun, Papa Hemingway lived life to the full. He was indeed the archetypal Renaissance Man.

On Friday, January 24, 1975, far above the earth’s surface, the Soviet Union conducted humanity’s first and last test of an orbital space cannon. The tale of how the species got to that point is simply fascinating.