by Brian Thompson, The War Horse January 12, 2022 Brian Thompson laughs near local children while on patrol in Afghanistan in 2007. Photo courtesy of the author. New Year’s Day 2008 marked the most memorable day of my deployment in Afghanistan. I replay the events over and over, like
If Admiral Chester Nimitz hadn’t spotted it on a map, Ulithi might have gone completely unnoticed by US forces as it island-hopped across the Pacific. Such an oversight would have cost the Americans the largest and best anchorage in the world and the perfect location for staging its final assault on the
By Todd DePastino In 1966, as war raged in Vietnam, Quaker Oats began putting little plastic Bo’sun’s Pipes inside boxes of Cap’n Crunch cereal. They called it the “Cap’n Crunch Bo’sun Whistle.” According to the legend--and even some actual fact--this was the toy that inspired Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak to
← BACK TO VBC BLOG That's a wrap on Season 1 of the Scuttlebutt! When we started The Scuttlebutt, I was both excited by the possibilities and terrified of unknowns. Would veterans have interest in our subject matter? Would non-veterans get lost in the translation? Could
You’ve heard of Japanese Kamikazes in World War II, but probably not Kaiten, the underseas version of the famous suicide attacks on Navy warships in 1944-1945. Kaiten was a top-secret manned torpedo program where the Japanese “pilots” would be sealed into explosive-packed steel cylinders and launched against enemy ships. The word Kamikaze
The slouch hat with the brim pinned on the side is an icon of the Australian military, and it used to be common in service branches around the world, including the United States Army. But today, female drill instructors (called Drill Sergeants in the Army and Military Training Instructors in the Air
