Preston just completed his 2 weeks of Army Reserve Annual Training at Ft. McCoy, WI where he helped facilitate a reserve brigade's readiness training at the operational level.  He and Sayre discuss some of their key takeaways and thoughts.

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We are joined by Nick Laidlaw. Nick is a former Marine Infantryman, who from that experience, now has a passion to share the extremes of the human experience in warfare. His website, Battles and Beers shares stories of the men, women, and civilians who have gone willingly or unwillingly into harm’s way.

Nick is also the author of What War Did to Us, Combat Through Their Eyes a collection of short vignettes spanning from 1914 to present. He has interviewed men from both sides of almost every major war since 1939. He has had nearly 200 conversations with men from 20+ different armies, including the Taliban. We enjoyed this conversation with a fellow GWOT veteran telling such human stories.

Battles and Beers:

https://battlesandbeers.org/

What War Did to Us, Combat Through Their Eyes:

https://www.amazon.com/WHAT-WAR-DID-US-Through/dp/B09MC8NQ9D

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Website: https://www.warstories.co

Mike Dowling is an Emmy nominated producer, author, and veteran advocate based in Los Angeles.

Mike enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2001 and was in boot camp when 9/11 happened. Enlisting on an open contract, he was assigned to be a military policeman, became the distinguished honor graduate of his class, and would serve as a military working dog handler deploying with his Military Working Dog Rex to Iraq in 2004. They were attached to 2nd Battalion, 2nd Marines surviving the Triangle of Death and the First Battle of Fallujah. His book “Sergeant Rex: The Unbreakable Bond Between A Marine and His Military Working Dog” (Atria Books/2011) is a memoir of his service as a K9 handler.

Since leaving the miliary, Mike shifted his career to film and media. He has been a military consultant on a wide range of productions for CBS, ABC, Animal Planet, and for Netflix working with Academy Award winning producers James Moll and Robert Zemeckis on the Medal of Honor docuseries (2018).

Instagram:

@miked0wling

Mike Dowling’s website:

https://www.officialmikedowling.com/

Sergeant Rex is available for purchase at:

Amazon

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Website: https://www.warstories.co

We are joined in this episode by Austin Knight. Austin serves in the active-duty Army as a Religious Affairs NCO where he’s currently assigned to the U.S. Army Airborne School. We spoke to Austin about a variety of topics ranging from what Airborne School is like today, the experience of jumping out of airplanes for a living, to his ultimate role which is to care for not just the spiritual welfare of Soldiers (from Private to General), but their moral and emotional well-being as well.

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Website: https://www.warstories.co

In this episode, we are joined by Steve Coll. Coll is a New Yorker staff writer and reports on issues of politics, intelligence, and national security in the United States and abroad. He has written about the education of Osama bin Laden, secret negotiations between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, and the hunt for the fugitive Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. He was the managing editor of the Washington Post from 1998 to 2005, having earlier been a feature writer, a foreign correspondent, and an editor there; in 1990, he shared a Pulitzer Prize with David Vise for a series of articles about the Securities and Exchange Commission. From 2007 to 2013, he was the president of the New America Foundation.

Coll is the author of several books, including “Directorate S: The C.I.A. and America’s Secret Wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan”; “Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power”; “The Bin Ladens: An Arabian Family in the American Century,” which won the pen/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction; “On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia”; “Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the C.I.A., Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001,” for which he received an Overseas Press Club Award and a Pulitzer Prize; “Eagle on the Street,” which was based on his reporting on the S.E.C.; “The Taking of Getty Oil”; and “The Deal of the Century: The Breakup of AT&T.” Coll has served as dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, where he continues to teach.

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Website: https://www.warstories.co

In this episode, we are joined by Phil Klay. Phil Clay is a GWOT veteran of the Iraq war, having served as a Marine Corps officer from 2005-2009. Phil’s works, both as a veteran and writer, have been published throughout The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and the Brookings Institution's Brookings Essay series.

His short story collection Redeployment won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction and the National Book Critics' Circle John Leonard Prize for best debut work in any genre, and was selected as one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times. His nonfiction work won the George W. Hunt, S.J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters in the category of Cultural & Historical Criticism in 2018. He currently teaches fiction at Fairfield University and his debut novel, Missionaries, was released in October 2020 with Penguin Press.

https://www.philklay.com/

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Website: https://www.warstories.co

Little shorter bit here where Preston and Sayre get into an article discussing media coverage of the war in Ukraine.

FAIR.org article: https://fair.org/home/invasion-news-fits-on-front-page-more-when-an-enemy-does-the-invading/

Preston's video on the subject: https://youtu.be/YIBYYdQY3-4

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Website: https://www.warstories.co

In this episode we are joined by Justin Roberts. Justin is a documentarian and former Army chaplain who served in Afghanistan with the 101st Airborne Division. Justin's documentary "No Greater Love" details the reality of war with firsthand footage and accounts of a harrowing 12-month deployment to Kunar Province, Afghanistan.

While we discuss Justin's experiences in Afghanistan, he spoke to us while on the ground in Ukraine. We discuss what the current battle tempo is like, and how the war has evolved into an artillery-heavy war with little maneuver. Justin has an incredible perspective of war and the people affected.

No Greater Love

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In this episode we are joined by Bob Walker. Bob was an infantry officer during the Vietnam War with an incredible story and experience.

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Website: https://www.warstories.co