In 2003, just months after graduating from West Point, Misty Cantwell was a military police platoon leader waiting to cross the border into Iraq. Arriving after the main invasion, Cantwell’s platoon was assigned to Sadr City, a restive neighborhood in Baghdad. Initially arriving in Iraq in soft-skinned vehicles without modern body armor, Cantwell was soon immersed in the rising anti-coalition violence that summer. In this episode, she shares the story of her role in the response to an attack that killed US soldiers, reflecting on the change that happened to her that night, what she would tell her younger self, and how the effects of combat linger.
This episode features a conversation with Captain Lindsay Heisler. An aviation officer and Apache pilot, in December 2015 she was part of a mission...
In 2003, Maj. John Spencer was a platoon leader in the 173rd Airborne. In this episode, he talks about the very first mission after...
In the late summer of 2021, after years of service to his country—including four years at the United States Military Academy—Major Naqib Mirzada, an...