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U.S. Army
Humvees with Humps
A search begun in a Washington, D.C. boardinghouse 140 years ago continues today as a $100-million-a-year effort to reunite the U.S. military and American families with their missing soldiers.
Atop a half-mile-high mountain deep in the heart of the A Shau Valley in central Vietnam, a poisonous worm snake winds itself onto the edge of a spade. After a fleeting glance, the U.S.
The soldier-historian-novelist Ralph Peters looks at how the world has changed in the past decade, and finds that America is both a hostage to history and likely to be saved by it.
Military historians sometimes write biographies of people they call military intellectuals.
The least-understood branch of our military was born 60 years ago but today is coming into prominence as never before.
The United States Military Academy turns 200 this year. West Point has grown with the nation—and, more than once, saved it.
A historian argues that, in Vietnam, America’s cause was just, its arms effective, and its efforts undermined by critics back home, and that this is how things must work in a free society.
How the discovery of a long-forgotten trunk inspired an artist to spend years recording the quiet remnants of a wrenching military career
My grandfather spoke to me about his experiences in the first World War only once, and that was abruptly and in anger. As young boys, my brothers and I would spend part of our summer vacations with my grandparents.
Fifty years ago in the frozen mountains of Korea, the Marines endured a campaign as grueling and heroic as any in history.
The newspaper baron Robert McCormick was a passionate isolationist, though his brief service in France in 1918 shone for him all his life and gave birth to an extraordinary museum.
A soldier’s timeless meditation on the frustrations of military life
Reminiscences of World War II’s European Theater add up to considerably more than a bunch of good war stories.
Most of them were American soldiers who fought with skill, discipline, and high courage against a U.S. Army that numbered Ulysses Grant in its ranks. The year was 1847.
The court-martial of Captain John O’Reilly was one of 29 convened by the United States Army at the San Angel prison camp in Mexico on August 28, 1847: 36 other men of O’Reilly’s San Patricio Battalion faced courts-martial on that same day at nearby Tacubaya.
I am told that many people have difficulty in deciding the most exciting moment in their lives. Not I. For me, it was August 25, 1944—the day of the liberation of Paris half a century ago.
A scholar searches across two centuries to discover the main engine of our government’s growth, and reaches a controversial conclusion.
Alexis de Tocqueville observed in 1835 that America had no neighbors and hence no enemies.
A soldier who landed in the second wave on Omaha Beach assesses the broadest implications of what he and his comrades achieved there.
A D-DAY VETERAN’S GRANDSON ATTEMPTS TO FIND THE ANSWER TO THAT MOST IMPENETRABLE QUESTION: WHAT WAS IT LIKE?
The Reverend Maurice Kidder used to wake at 5:00 to write sermons in his dark study where the beagle slept; that early hour seemed to give him the clarity to compose his lectures, which he delivered in an unaffected but commanding baritone voice each Sunday a
After every war in the nation’s history, the military has faced not only calls for demobilization, but new challenges and new opportunities. It is happening again.
Not many people appreciate a military base closing. Like the shutting of a factory, it can devastate nearby towns, throwing thousands of people out of work. Merchants face losses and even bankruptcy as sales fall off.
The general responsible for remaking the American Army in the aftermath of the Cold War knows a great deal of history, and it sustains him in a very tough job.
It is dawn in Washington as General Gordon R. Sullivan, the Chief of Staff of the United States Army, walks quickly from his helicopter at Andrews Air Force Base to board the jet bound for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. Waiting for him there is a classroom full of the Army’s most successful and promising officers, colonels, and lieutenant colonels newly chosen to command brigades and battalions. Some of these officers will have fought in Grenada, in Panama, in the Gulf War, or all three. It is possible they will have to lead their soldiers in some other conflict before they leave command. Sullivan wants them to know who leads them.
The old Regular Army, part fairy tale and part dirty joke, was generally either ignored or disdained. But its people went about their work with a dogged humdrum gallantry, and when the storm broke, they helped save the world.
The United States Army has always been secretive about its defense installations. In the summer of 1864, a breach of security took place on the tiny island fortress of Alcatraz that reverberated all the way back to the War Department in Washington.
A civilian adventurer gave us the best artist’s record of America in Vietnam.
He didn’t want the job, but felt he should do it. For the first time, the soldier who tracked down the My Lai story for the office of the inspector general in 1969 tells what it was like to do some of this era’s grimmest detective work.
In the early spring of 1969, I was an Army colonel recently assigned to the office of the inspector general in Washington, and I was not particularly happy about it; I have always disliked living in Washington, and I think that most infantry officers would ra
An American soldier would never forget encountering the German with an icy smile. He would later discover that the blood of innocent millions dripped from Eichmann's manicured hands.
It was the second of May, 1945, six days before the end of the war in Europe.
The old school is alive with the memory of men like Lee, Grant, Pershing, and Eisenhower.
Each year, most of West Point’s three million visitors enter the U.S. Military Academy through the Thayer Gate.
The United States had promised black soldiers that they would be paid as much as whites. Sergeant Walker believed that promise.
This is in honor of Sergeant William Walker, of the 3d South Carolina Infantry Regiment, a young black soldier who believed in the United States government’s promises of equal rights.
A veteran reporter looks back to a time when the stakes were really high, and, yet, military men actually trusted newsmen.
One week in August 1942 ,several stories on the British war effort appeared on the wires of the Associated Press, written by an AP reporter based in London named Drew Middleton.
On the eve of the Normandy invasion, a training mission in the English Channel came apart in fire and horror. For years, the grim story was suppressed.
Ralph Greene was in the lab of the 228th Station Hospital processing some routine tests when he got the order to report immediately to the hospital’s recreation room. It was early in the afternoon of April 28, 1944, and for Greene, a captain in the U.S.
The first major engagement of the U. S. Army in Vietnam was a decisive American victory. Perhaps it would have been better for all of us if it had been a defeat.
“I don’t want this thing often,” one soldier said of his .45 automatic pistol, “but when I do, I want it damned bad.”
IN COMMON with all good jungle fighters, the Moros liked to work close up.
A FEW YEARS AGO, writing in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, the distinguished historian Henry Steele Commager charged that while civil-military relations had been healthy during most of the nation’s history, the relationship had suddenly taken a turn for t
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