In 2012, Mike Kelvington was a company commander in 1st Battalion, 508th Infantry Regiment, deployed in southern Afghanistan's Kandahar province. He joins The Spear to share a story of a two-day operations during which his company confronted a number of challenges. Some members of the Afghan National Army unit they were partnered with essentially quit during the mission. They took casualties from improvised explosive devices. And perhaps most challenging, the enemy was inflicting damage while avoiding an open fight. It was, in many ways, like chasing ghosts.
In 2008, Maj. Emily Spencer was an EOD platoon leader in Iraq. In April, she and one of her teams accompanied a route clearance...
Col. Bill Ostlund retired from the Army in 2019. In 1990, as a lieutenant, he arrived at his first unit as an officer and...
In the second of a two-part conversation with Ryan Hendrickson, our guest shares a story from 2016. Six years and a couple deployments after...