The Spear

In 2006, Jeremy Fox was a platoon leader deployed in Iraq, his platoon tasked for part of that deployment with providing security for an oil pipeline and associated infrastructure. Integrated with Iraqi Army soldiers, he spent many of his nights checking the lines and the security positions at his isolated position. During one such night, accompanied by his interpreter, a sudden incident forced hi...

In the early 1990s, Greg Banner was sent to El Salvador to assist ongoing counterinsurgency training and operations. As a Special Forces officer, Greg had previous experience in Latin America and with advising missions but had not previously deployed to an active war zone. Supporting US Military Group El Salvador, he, along with a non-commissioned officer, advised an experienced Salvadoran army un...

In 2010, Scott Haran was a company commander in Afghanistan. His company was responsible for establishing police checkpoints in and around the city of Kandahar. Partnered with the Afghan National Civil Order Police, Scott and his soldiers accompanied the Afghans on daily patrols to disrupt Taliban activity. One day, he traveled with a small team of his soldiers to the battalion headquarters. While...

In 1962, while on a year-long break from college, Barry Broman was first shot at in South Vietnam while working as a photographer for the Associated Press. Seven years later, he arrived in I Corps, the northernmost part of South Vietnam, as a Marine infantry officer in Company H, 2nd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (H/2/5), which was operating in an area known as the Arizona Territory. Not far from...

In this episode Maj. John A. Meyer shares a story from his first deployment, in 2007, to Afghanistan. On July 27, his platoon and a group of Afghan National Army soldiers were moving along the road next to the Kunar River during a squadron mission to secure the valley. The Afghan soldiers began to cross a bridge when they looked down and saw a group of enemy fighters. The massive fight that ensued...

In the second episode in a two-part series , Misty Cantwell recounts the ongoing combat operations she conducted in Sadr City, Iraq, in 2003. A military police platoon leader, her sense of the political fragility of the nation was brought home after two bombings targeting the Baghdad headquarters of the United Nations assistance mission occurred. Cantwell reflects on the vagueness of American coun...

In this episode, Chief Warrant Officer 5 Joe Roland joins to share a story from 2004. A UH-60 Black Hawk pilot, his aircraft and another were supporting an Army Special Forces team in search of a group of enemy combatants in Afghanistan's northern Kandahar province. As soon as his helicopter landed to drop off a US soldier and two Afghans to take up an overwatch position, they saw enemy fighters a...

In 2003, just months after graduating from West Point, Misty Cantwell was a military police platoon leader waiting to cross the border into Iraq. Arriving after the main invasion, Cantwell’s platoon was assigned to Sadr City, a restive neighborhood in Baghdad. Initially arriving in Iraq in soft-skinned vehicles without modern body armor, Cantwell was soon immersed in the rising anti-coalition viol...

We are now twenty-one years past the events of 9/11. America's war in Afghanistan has come to an end yet the repercussions of that day and that war continue to impact foreign policy, strategic positioning, and the lives of those who were there. That makes now an important time to reflect on our Afghanistan experience. Retired Special Forces soldier Scott Neil was one of the first Americans into Af...

In 2012, Sean Marquis was an infantry platoon leader—deployed to Dehqobad, Afghanistan—with a Stryker brigade. The boundary between the platoon's area of responsibility and that of an adjacent unit was a suspected transit route due—US force in the area called it the seam. As villages along the Arghandab River became increasingly restive, Sean set out to find a Taliban recoilless rifle known to be...

In the summer of 1993, Greg Banner was a newly appointed company commander in 10th Special Forces Group. Halfway around the world, ethnic tensions were flaring in the former Yugoslavia. The Cold War had ended but the need for special operations forces in Europe was made apparent as the nation disintegrated into warring states. With only a few weeks’ notice, Banner and his company deployed. Once on...

In the previous  episode  of The Spear , Karl Blanke shared a story that featured the actions of one of his former Marines, Lance Corporal Jackson (a pseudonym). “Jackson” was a machine gunner in the 1st Marine Division and took part in the march to Baghdad in 2003, where he was wounded in a firefight and awarded a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with Combat Distinguishing Device for his...

In 2003, after completing the march up to Baghdad in dramatic fashion, and after an all-night gunfight to seize one of Saddam’s palaces, the Marines of Company C, 1st Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment were immediately sent to capture Baath officials suspected to be in a neighborhood nearby. A platoon commanded by Karl Blanke established a cordon and began searching house by house for their targets wi...

Few books have had the impact on generations of young soldiers as Jim McDonough’s Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat . First published in the mid-1980s, Platoon Leader remains on military reading lists worldwide and is still included in curriculum for junior officers and NCOs across the joint and combined force. Detailing the events that shaped Jim’s life as a young lieutenant in the 17...

In August 2007, a US Army Special Forces team came under fire while passing through a valley in Afghanistan. The call for support went to a nearby base, where an AC-130H Spectre gunship crew was standing by. The crew quickly launched, and shortly later, the aircraft was overhead. This is the type of job the AC-130H was designed for. In the hours that followed, they engaged enemy targets a number o...

A newly minted Special Forces officer in the spring of 1966, Mike Eiland landed in Vietnam and joined 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne). A team leader, Mike and his team were tasked with reestablishing a Special Forces camp at Hiep Hoa, where a previous camp had been overrun in November 1963. On May 12, 1966, less than six weeks after Mike arrived in Vietnam, the camp was attacked. The ensuing f...

In the late summer of 2021, after years of service to his country—including four years at the United States Military Academy—Major Naqib Mirzada, an Afghan National Army Special Forces officer, and his family fled Afghanistan after the Taliban's seizure of Kabul. Arriving at Hamid Karzai International Airport on August 15, amid the US-led coalition's withdrawal from the country, Naqib and his fami...

In 2012, Rich Kent was a platoon leader deployed to Panjwai in Afghanistan's Kandahar province. Tasked with locating an IED cell in a small village just outside his normal area of operations, Kent was leading his platoon along a trail after receiving a tip about the location of Taliban fighters. After inadvertently drifting onto a different trail less traveled, Kent was reorienting his soldiers to...

In 1998, retired US Air Force Colonel Mike "Starbaby" Pietrucha was an electronic warfare officer flying in an F-15E Strike Eagle, enforcing the northern no-fly zone over Iraq in the 1990s. In this episode, he brings listeners into the cockpit as he describes one particular mission during that deployment, when his aircraft was targeted by a radar guidance system for an SA-3 antiair missile. Not lo...

Before his NFL career, Alejandro Villanueva was a rifle platoon leader in the 10th Mountain Division. During a deployment to an especially restive sector near Kandahar, Afghanistan, his unit faced heightened security challenges due to a prison break that freed a large number of Taliban fighters. But Villanueva also had to contend with a unique dilemma: after a member of the Afghan National Police...

As Ukrainian troops continue to fight against invading Russian forces , they are supported by a growing cadre of civilians . Many among this group , however, have no training or experience. Matt Gallagher , a former US Army officer and veteran of Iraq, recently returned from training some of those civilians in Lviv . In this episode, Gallagher talks about his decision to travel to Ukraine, the dif...

In the second episode in a two-part series, Dan Gade joins The Spear  to tell the story of his 2004 deployment to Ramadi, Iraq. After his unit suffered the deaths of two soldiers—the difficulty of which he discussed in the previous episode—his company continued to engage in frequent and heavy action with insurgents. But as coalition forces began to adopt a population-centric approach to providing...

In 2004, Dan Gade’s armor company took over a sector of Ramadi, Iraq, then the heart of the Sunni insurgency. Within days, his unit suffered its first fatality. As a company commander, Gade had the responsibility to lead his troops back outside the wire the next day regardless of the emotional toll Tyler’s death might have taken. In the first episode of a two-part series, Gade describes how his co...

As an executive officer of an infantry company at Forward Operating Base Fenty in Afghanistan, Michael Houghton was heavily involved in one of his company's primary missions: conduct counter–indirect fire patrols. Fenty was routinely targeted and these patrols were important for protecting the personnel and assets located there.  Houghton was responsible for orchestrating the fight as what his com...

In an  episode  of The Spear  released in June 2021, Karl Blanke shared a story that featured the actions of one of his former Marines, Lance Corporal Jackson (a pseudonym). “Jackson” was a machine gunner in the 1st Marine Division and took part in the march to Baghdad in 2003, where he was wounded in a firefight and awarded a Navy and Marine Corps Commendation Medal with Combat Distinguishing Dev...