In 2007, Patrick Melton was a military police soldier on his first deployment in Baghdad, when his combat outpost was hit by a barrage of improvised, rocket-assisted munitions. He was sitting inside a vehicle as he and others in his unit prepared for a mission when the vehicle suffered a direct hit. Listen to him tell the story of how they reacted when the attack destroyed everything around them.
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...
In early 2003, Karl Blanke was a Marine platoon commander during the early stages of the US-led invasion of Iraq, when his battalion was...
Sergeant Major Chuck Ritter overcame a series of bad decisions in his youth—as well as a rough start to his Army career—to become a...