"Careful, Ma; don't spill your soup," I warned. "First time you spill, that's it — you're going to the home.” Mom's reply was immediate. "I know. I've picked out what I want to take with me."

We were buds, my mom and I -- until I hit puberty and became sullen and hostile -- a team, us against the world, a pretty blonde girl and a redheaded kid, walking among strangers. …

One night in the late 1970s, Miguel Ruiz, a young Mexican physician, fell asleep at the wheel of his car and crashed it into a concrete retaining wall. He lay near death for some days …

A couple of weeks ago Jay Leno did a gag about how the Japanese had offered to send troops to help out in Iraq. "Great timing," he said, the message being that the Japanese had …

One of the handier tools in the combat arms officer's bag of tricks is a thought process called the Estimate of the Situation. It's a comparison of potential courses of action in the light of …

It's been highly amusing to watch the flow of charges and countercharges over cooking the intelligence books on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. "The administration deliberately bent the data to make 'the Merkin people' …

He swears he was once within hours of encircling Bin Laden, when a CIA drone fired its Hellfire missile at Osama Bin Laden's meeting. That broke up the meeting and Osama got away.

The spirit of Special Forces remains the same and, for the most part, so does the organization. However, minor changes have had far-reaching effects and serve as brilliant examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences. …

Awhile back, a friend asked me what the differences are between the Special Forces of my day and this generation of Green Berets. After careful thought I have decided that the spirit is identical, the …

When cities and countries fall, looting is common. Students of history can cite the Rape of Nanking, the Sack of Rome, the burning of Atlanta. The difference between these conquests and the fall of Baghdad …

It's been a rough year for old heroes. So far, within the past 365 days, I've lost Ed Thomas, my old team sergeant, and Command Sergeant Major Bill Edge, who was probably the smartest man …

'If you think the M16 is bad in the jungle, you should see it with sand in it," said my friend Samir. The topic under discussion was why he carried an AK47. He was showing …

In Special Forces, the ideal is that every soldier is fluent in one foreign language and able to limp along in two others. But in a standard infantry company it wouldn't be unusual for no …

"They were careless people...they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the …

When I see an embedded reporter like, say, the late David Bloom of NBC (a great reporter and sorely missed), green in night-vision light, crouched behind a berm, whispering into his mike while guns and …

The first rule of counterguerrilla warfare is never set a pattern. This is so because the guerrillas are always watching for a weak point to hit. You can go anyplace and do anything two days …

Here's the bottom line on urban combat. You don't want it. When the Israelis went into Beirut in '82, I was one of an army of correspondents who went with them. At that time the …

Last week I wrote a piece called "Chimps with Nukes." When I had a draft I e-mailed it to a bunch of old soldiers to see if anybody thought I had left anything important out. …

In Jared Diamond's book The Third Chimpanzee, he points out that we share about 98 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees, which is not much greater than the difference between chimps and bonobo pygmy chimps. …