war stories

He was going to transform this daily parade into a gory resistance spectacle. To do so, he required a seriously crazy pilot. His first choice was Flight Lieutenant Alfred Kitchener Gatward.

We guys do take our sports seriously. The psychosocial impetus behind this curious phenomenon is indeed fascinating.

I was eighteen years old. It would be another three years before society would trust me to drink a beer or buy a handgun, but Uncle Sam had taught me how to kill a man efficiently and effectively with a bayonet.

Though the nuances are lost on a modern generation of lamentably binary Americans, imbedded within the school’s history we see the possibility that very good people might support some very bad causes.

His forte was the hulking villain, and he played that to perfection. Friends knew him as Big Bill.

In 1942, a Luftwaffe pilot named Armin Faber inadvertently and singlehandedly changed the calculus of the air war over Europe.

Weird things happen in war. Combat is chaotic, tragic, and horrible. It is arguably the most compelling of human experiences. As a result, it is a world where a man’s true character is revealed. 

Our finest strategists earn advanced degrees in the prosecution of modern war, and our military-industrial complex drives technical innovation on an unrivaled scale. And yet at its heart, the true mission of the military is to simply rip the very life out of other human beings who would, in general, really sooner not be there.

Van Dorn has been described by military historians as one of the greatest cavalry commanders who ever lived. Considering his competition includes such illustrious personalities as JEB Stuart, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and George Patton, that is high praise indeed.