Author Joe Gould

Freelance journo Duncan Larkin kicks his old commander David Petraeus while he’s down in a colorful account in Vice magazine of their time together in the “Devil Brigade.” At the time, Larkin was a lowly junior officer and Petraeus, by Larkin’s telling, was gunning for his first star. It was the mid-nineties. Petraeus (AKA “Devil Six”) micromanages, kisses ass and stage manages a ridiculous training exercise for the benefit of Sen. Strom Thurmond, then the aging chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the gatekeeper to Petraeus’ promotion–as the yarn goes. “Appearances became even more important as the day…

New York might be one of the most culinarily diverse cities on the planet. But when it comes to heating FEMA meals, some folks need a lesson. For non-English speakers, it’s not so easy to follow the directions that come on the packages and show how to operate the heaters. So guardsmen have been holding demonstrations to show folks how the heaters work, according to New York National Guard spokesman Eric Durr. A guardsman in the photo above was demonstrating how to operate the heater for a group of volunteers in Chinatown, one of whom was filming an instructional video.…

 [HTML1] Video shows New Jersey National Guard troops in trucks and on foot amid knee-high flooding to pick up residents stranded by Superstorm Sandy flooding. One relieved mom, safe and dry with her infant daughter in a Guard vehicle, tells troops, “I’ll have a story to tell her when she’s older.” The mom, Natalie Vuckovic, and her daughter Rosalie, were rescued from a “cold, candlelit night” by members of the New Jersey National Guard’s 2nd 113 Infantry Battalion, according to the YouTube blurb. Across the state, New Jersey’s citizen soldiers are “napping where they can, eating when they can and…

Sherry Magallanes knows her husband Gil is a hero, whether he has a Silver Star or not. In the weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, Gil was on an 11-member Special Forces team that shepherded an obscure Afghan politician named Hamid Karzai from Pakistan into southern Afghanistan and fomented an uprising against the Taliban. The team, Operational Detatchment Alpha 574, was taken out of Afghanistan after a 2,000-pound bomb was dropped on their position in a friendly fire incident. Three of his teammates were killed, and the rest–including Gil–were badly injured. The definitive account of their mission is a book called,…

Sad news from Skateistan, a Kabul-based NGO that teaches Afghan children to skateboard. A suicide attack killed a number of young Afghans, four of them students of the school. (Our previous Skateistan post’s headline seems darkly ironic now.) “The bomb was detonated outside of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) HQ, where many of the street working children of Kabul sell trinkets, scarves and chewing gum to help support their families,” the site reports. Of course, any loss of life to a suicide bombing is tragic andsenseless, but it is all the more heartbreaking because of the hopefulness in their skating.…

If the Muslim holy month of Ramadan is a factor in attacks on U.S. troops by Afghan security forces–as Marine Gen. John R. Allen, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan said today–it would not be the first time. Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon from his headquarters in Kabul, Allen said he doesn’t know all the reasons behind the attacks, which likely include Taliban infiltration. However, he said they may be due in part to the stress on Afghan forces from fasting during daylight hours, in the just-concluded month of Ramadan. (In Afghanistan, it is called Ramazan.) According to a scathing 2011 report…

Police in Key Largo, Fla. said they arrested a Utah man who refused to leave a hotel pool while swimming fully clothed and claimed to be a special forces soldier, KeysNet.com reports. A Monroe County sheriff’s deputy responded Sunday, Aug. 19, to the Marriott Key Largo Bay Resort and found Jason Youngblood, 30, fully clothed in the pool with security staff attempting to get him to leave the water. The deputy said Youngblood responded to every question with a loud “yeah,” including an inquiry about where he is from, and eventually got out of the pool. Youngblood continued to act…