In late 2001, Scott Neil was a US Army Special Forces soldier whose team was among the first US forces in Afghanistan—the legendary Horse Soldiers who led some of the opening operations in the war there, just weeks after the 9/11 attacks. While theirs is a well-known story, Scott’s military service extends well beyond that experience. In this episode, he reflects on a twenty-five-year career that included time in a foxhole in Panama as a young private, the remarkable work of the Horse Soldiers, and a number of deployments in the years that followed, during all of which he grew as a soldier and a leader.
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...
In 2007, Patrick Melton was a military police soldier on his first deployment in Baghdad when his combat outpost was hit by a barrage...
This episode of The Spear features a conversation with Josh Webster. A US Army officer, he previously served as a US Air Force pararescueman—a...