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 suffered its first fatality. As a company commander, Gade had the responsibility to lead his troops back outside the wire the next day regardless of the emotional toll Tyler’s death might have taken. In the first episode of a two-part series, Gade describes how his company continued to patrol, taking contact from enemy forces nearly daily.
On July 13, 2008, around two hundred Taliban fighters ambushed American and Afghan soldiers in a remote area of eastern Afghanistan. The ensuing fight...
Col. Phil Ryan is the commander of the elite 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. In 2003, in the first days of the invasion of...
Maj. Brian Kitching joins this episode of The Spear to share a story from a 2012 deployment in southern Afghanistan's Kandahar Province. Two months...