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 accompanying his platoon opened fire on an approaching motorcycle, they lost sight of the driver. The potential that this was a civilian casualty led Villanueva's brigade headquarters to task his soldiers with determining what happened. The task was made much more challenging when Taliban radio communications indicating they were planning to attack the Americans along one of the most dangerous wadis in the area: Route Mariners. He joins this episode to share the story.
As a lieutenant on his first deployment, Capt. Steve Beckman was in charge of a platoon equipped with a unique vehicle—a Stryker variant called...
In March 2018, after a dangerous nerve agent was shockingly used in the British city of Salisbury, authorities looked to the armed forces to...
In this episode of The Spear, retired Marine officer David Berke joins to share a story from 2006, when he was a forward air...