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.
In 2011, Todd Angstman and his Special Forces team deployed to Gao, Mali, to provide training and assistance to the Malian Armed Forces. Gao...
In 2006, Jeremy Fox was a platoon leader deployed in Iraq, his platoon tasked for part of that deployment with providing security for an...
During the Vietnam War, the 1972 Easter Offensive was a major operation launched by North Vietnam to destabilize South Vietnam and strengthen its own...