In 2004, Matt Hardman was an infantry company commander in the 82nd Airborne Division. Just returned from Afghanistan, his paratroopers were deployed to Iraq’s Babil province on just a month’s notice. The situation in Babil was uncertain, with limited intelligence on enemy cells, tactics, or objectives. Hardman’s battalion had almost eight hundred square kilometers to patrol and scant resources with which to do it. Within their first week, the company began losing soldiers. He joins this episode to reflect on that challenging deployment, describing the foundations for his paratroopers' success and what he learned about the fundamentals of leadership.
In this episode of The Spear, retired Marine officer David Berke joins to share a story from 2006, when he was a forward air...
In 2014, when Russia invaded eastern Ukraine and Crimea, Father Andriy Zelinskyy, a Jesuit priest, was the first military chaplain to authorized to enter...
In 2010, Maj. Patrick Dubois was a lieutenant deployed as a Kiowa helicopter pilot to Afghanistan. One day, a mission to provide support to...