In August 2007, a US Army Special Forces team came under fire while passing through a valley in Afghanistan. The call for support went to a nearby base, where an AC-130H Spectre gunship crew was standing by. The crew quickly launched, and shortly later, the aircraft was overhead. This is the type of job the AC-130H was designed for. In the hours that followed, they engaged enemy targets a number of times with both a 40-millimeter cannon and a 105-millimeter howitzer. Michael Murphy was a copilot on that aircraft in Afghanistan, and he joins this episode to share the story.
Arriving in Vietnam in April 1968, John “Tilt” Meyer volunteered for a highly classified unit without knowing so much as its name. Tilt, it...
In 2010 Kevin Mott's unit arrived in Afghanistan's Kunar province for a deployment that would see months of hard fighting. At one point, he...
This episode of The Spear features our first ever conversation with a US Army medic. On Oct. 3, 2009, Combat Outpost Keating was attacked...