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.
Col. Phil Ryan is the commander of the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. In 2003, in the first days of the invasion of...
In February 2012, Capt. Jannelle Allong-Diakabana was a military police platoon leader deployed in Nangarhar province, Afghanistan. One day, as she and her platoon...
Sergeant Major Chuck Ritter overcame a series of bad decisions in his youth—as well as a rough start to his Army career—to become a...