Has the last American soldier who will die in Afghanistan been born, yet? I don’t think so…
How ought we, as a nation of laws, respond to allegations of war crimes committed by our military?
I knew my next sentence would define me forever in their minds. Was their leader a racist? I had not in my twenty-three years on the planet ever been confronted with the reality of that flag...
Alone in the dark bunker, I shook. I had never been a target. I had never lived in a war zone behind the wire...
How the people we came to help (the Afghans) could benefit from our being in Zombalay proved utterly elusive…
How many N95 masks would $4.5 billion buy? Roughly 2.5 billion. The aircraft carrier sits in Guam, dead in the water.
There is a direct correlation between the darkness of one’s skin and the likelihood of dying in police custody, going to jail and prison, and being executed by the state.
Hopelessness has triumphed in Afghanistan.
Originally from Macon, Georgia, Tony Schwalm spent much of his adult life as an Army officer, serving as a tank company commander in the First Gulf War in 1991 and leading Green Berets during the Haiti invasion in 1994. Retiring from the Army in 2004, he works as a consultant to the Department of Defense and lectures to business students at the University of South Florida on the merits of improvisation as learned in the world of guerrilla warfare. In 2009, his essay, Trek, won first prize at the Mayborn Literary Non-fiction Conference at the University of North Texas and was the basis for the book The Guerrilla Factory: the Making of Special Force Officers, the Green Berets published by Simon and Schuster in 2012. He makes his home in Tampa, Florida.