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Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist Chinese government outlived the Japanese effort to conquer China, but at a terrible cost. After defeating Japan in concert with the Allies, Chiang’s government faced the formidable leadership of Mao Ze Dong and his Communist guerilla army. Mao husbanded his resources during the Japanese war to outlive the Nationalist government and the two sides renewed a brutal civil war.
My name's Mike and I'm a former Special Forces Engineer Sergeant. I medically retired from the Army in 2014, at 80% disabled. I’m the father of 3 kids ranging in age from 10 to 15 years old, and I'm usually just an all-around happy guy that cracks corny jokes, leaving my kids shaking their heads. Oh...and I look at child pornography. Wait...what?! I'll explain.
What followed next was being taken away from my team, and being told that I couldn't do what I loved to do anymore. I was forced to medically retire. What would I do for a career? I was approached with a few opportunities making big money doing various things.
One opportunity stuck out, though. And how much money was involved, you ask? It was an unpaid internship, so...no money. It was an opportunity to help sexually exploited children and put away the monsters that exploit them. To me, that is more valuable than money.
Two men walked inside our white picket fence, up on to our porch, and sent my dogs in a frenzy. I came out of the kitchen to see two berets in the top window of our front door. One was the deep red of an airborne soldier with a cross indicating a chaplain. The other was green like the one my husband Matthew wore, the one I have in the dash of our car, the one my son Declan wears around our house.
They rang the doorbell, they knocked on the wide old door, and they knew I saw them but somehow I couldn’t move. The 100 year old hardwoods beneath my feet had been refinished by hand in the dream house Matt and I had just bought to raise our son in. Our son, who was sleeping on the couch peacefully in his car-seat, after just being brought inside only feet from the front door, our son who I would do anything to protect from the shot heard round our world. Those beautiful hardwood floors we had loved so much were no longer enough to hold me up while everything came crashing down around us and they swallowed me whole.
The Taliban had fled the center of town as we inserted, however as time passed on target they began to regroup in several compounds on the outskirts of town and started to engage us with harassing fire. As extraction approached the fire intensified and by the time the last helicopter of our extraction package landed we were engaged in a decent gunfight. Unfortunately, the final extraction bird overflew the designated, and relatively protected, landing zone and landed in an exposed area approximately 200m from a cemetery in which several Talibs had taken up fire positions. The following video is of our chalk running to meet the extraction helicopter as it sits exposed in open ground. The operator who sustains the gunshot wound is the one who I kneel immediately next to. As luck would have it he chose the split second before he was shot to stand and turn to board the helicopter, causing the bullet to rip through his buttock and exit the front of his thigh, whereas it would have likely struck his head if he had remained kneeling.
"The name of the first U.S. service member killed in combat under the Trump administration was announced by the Pentagon on Monday.
The U.S. military said Sunday that one service member was killed and three others wounded in a raid in Yemen targeting its local al Qaeda branch, marking the first-known combat death of a U.S. soldier under President Donald Trump’s new administration.
On Wednesday, President Obama commuted the sentence of Chelsea Manning for her role in the WikiLeaks scandal of 2010. Manning a soldier who was convicted by court martial in 2013 under the Espionage act and under another 22 separate charges to include aiding the enemy.
Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov was shot multiple times in the back Dec. 19 in Ankara, Turkey, by Mert Atlintas, a member of Turkey’s Riot Police Squad. The carefully constructed assassination of the head of the Russian diplomatic enclave to Turkey ended, as planned, with the loss of the assassin's own life.
At age 18 I volunteered for the Infantry and was soon after sent to Ramadi, Iraq in 2006. This was the most volatile time of the Iraq war, and I found myself, arguably, in the most contested city of that campaign. This tour showed me that there was a deeper purpose to me fighting under the American flag.
His career lasted twelve years, he was an 11B (infantry), being too high speed he moved on to SFAS, he proved himself worthy and was selected. Passing Q-Course, 18-E School House, Robin Sage, BLMC, and SERE. Jared proved that he earned a spot on the teams. He was assigned to 7th group out of Eglin AFB in Florida.
14 times Sergeant First Class Kris Domeij deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan with the 75th Ranger Regiment. 14 times he went into harm’s way, fully knowing the hazards of his chosen profession, for his country, his family, and the men on his left and right.
What happened, why did it take so long, why?!? The report from the US Spokesman for Troops said that two CH-47 Chinooks inserted approximately eighty Special Forces troops and Afghan Special Forces. They immediately came under heavy fire.
This isn’t the first time Special Forces have gone into Marjeh. Back in May of 2009, a joint force of Afghan Commando’s, US Special Forces, DEA Fast and other SOF elements executed “Operation Siege Engine” an attack on a large Taliban command center in central Helmand province that doubled as a heroin-producing complex.
How can it be that after nearly a decade-and-a-half of waging war on terror—the greatest global onslaught in fact ever directed against a terrorist group—that al Qaeda believes that they’re on the path to victory?