I heard the 12.7mm gunshots reverberate across the abandoned buildings throughout the morning and into the afternoon. Shot after shot rang out from the lot outside the abandoned warehouse next to the apartment building I stayed in with the YPG. Eventually, curiosity got the best of me. It did not appear to be one of […]

As the SUV bounced down the rocky slope towards the Tigris river, the truck’s headlights illuminated a small inflatable boat churning through the current towards us.  I dumped my bags on the ground and waited for my turn to make the clandestine river crossing from Iraqi Kurdistan into the newly liberated region of Kurdish Syria […]

This guest post comes to SOFREP from a YPG cadre involved in the front-line fighting against ISIS. -Jack Merely fighting and winning battles is not all there is to winning a war like the one in Syria and Iraq. As militias grow and merge into something more akin to a regular Western army, supplies, ammunition, intelligence, […]

While college kids can be self-righteous as hell, I guess it is better for them to believe in something rather than to believe in nothing.  Yeah, they are a bunch of lefty kids, but so were our parents before they grew up, became good Republicans, and started cheating on their tax returns, so what can […]

Part four of this series is about my classmates. Actually, it is about one specific, and particularly annoying, subset of classmates. I made a reference to gay black guys in the first article in this series. I don’t have any problem with gay black guys, or gay guys in general. If you’re gay, be gay. […]

The thing you have to understand about Ivy-League institutions is that they masquerade as an intellectual discourse. The school will put itself up on a pedestal and act as if it is a forum of enlightened thought where people of diverse backgrounds come together and discuss the quandaries that plague our times before coming up with […]

As we head toward November mid-term elections, the writing is on the wall that the United States government is simply waiting out the domestic political situation until they can use military force, including troops on the ground, to battle ISIS in Iraq and Syria. Allied special operations forces are also preparing for this military action […]

Believe it or not, the point of these “angry veteran goes to college” posts is not to tell war stories about nubile co-eds. Mostly anyway. Actually, I hope other veterans will read this and will be able to take some of these things into consideration when they get out of the military. I graduated from Columbia […]

From time immemorial we have blamed outbreaks of diseases on foreigners.  From “yellow” fever amongst Chinese immigrants to dangerous diseases carried by Mexican illegal immigrants crossing the border, this subject never seems to be far from the conversation about immigration.  But does containment even work?

Ebolamania is sweeping the United States but the real fight against this the ebola virus is being fought, and will have to be won, in West Africa.

The killing of Osama Bin Laden in May of 2011 by SEAL Team Six in Abbotabad, Pakistan immediately became the crowning achievement of the US Special Operations community. However, almost every single detail fed to the public about the raid was completely false aside from the time and place of the operation and that fact […]

One fall morning, I skipped up the steps and down the gilded halls of academia to my first class of the day for the semester. As I rounded my way into the class room, I was almost knocked down on my ass by an invisible uppercut to the chin called yoga pants. Yes, you know what […]