Col. Bill Ostlund is the director of the Department of Military Instruction at West Point. In 1990, as a lieutenant, he arrived at his first unit as an officer and almost immediately got the order to deploy to Saudi Arabia. Shortly after, he and his battalion air assaulted into Iraq as part of Operation Desert Storm. Listen to him recall his experiences and the lessons he learned from them.
This episode of The Spear features Brian Humphreys, a former US Marine Corps officer who shares stories from two deployments. In the first, to...
In 2003, Maj. John Spencer was a platoon leader in Iraq. One night, while waiting in an ambush position, he gave the order for...
In 2012, Sean Marquis was an infantry platoon leader—deployed to Dehqobad, Afghanistan—with a Stryker brigade. The boundary between the platoon's area of responsibility and...