Letter from the Editor
In 1932, in the grips of the Great Depression, 43,000 World War One veterans and their starving families descended on Washington DC demanding redemption of the service bonus certificates promised in the World War Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924. The problem was that the legislature had set 1945 as the year for payment. But when your family is starving, a bonus payment still thirteen years hence doesn’t mean much. It was a debatable benefit anyway, in a population that fought from April 1917 to November 1918 and typically only lived to be fifty or so. I am generally a “them’s the breaks” kind of guy; but I can understand the urgency they felt in demanding immediate cash payment of their certificates before heading off to eternity. It is a lesson in how reality can shape ideology.
However, the real lesson of the “Bonus Army” came on July 28, 1932, when the United States Attorney General, William D. Mitchell, sent Washington DC police to remove the encamped veterans from all government property. Veterans resisted, as we are sometimes wont to do when feeling aggrieved, and by the end of the day, two of them lay dead at the hands of police who opened fire on them and their families. Army Chief of Staff General Douglas MacArthur then led infantry and cavalry, supported by armor, in driving American veterans and their wives and children out of their campsites before burning their possessions.
A few years later, in McMinn County, Tennessee, GIs came home from World War Two to find a corrupt government waiting to abuse them. As one vet, Bill White, said at the time, “A lot of boys getting discharged [were] getting the mustering out pay. Well, [sheriff’s] deputies running around four or five at a time grapping [sic] up every GI they could find and trying to get that money off of them.” About 10% of the McMinn County population had returned from war, and they were understandably unwilling to endure assaults on the very freedoms for which they’d been told they were fighting.
The GIs began with a political solution, fielding their own non-partisan slate of candidates to unseat corrupt politicians. But they also knew how to fight. You can read about it in Chris Derose’s The Fighting Bunch, but the upshot was that election tampering led to a night of firefights now called “The Battle of Athens” and the unseating of a corrupt government by a veterans’ movement. Of course, in the tradition of our community, they couldn’t have nice things; and between some veterans acting in ways warned against by First Sergeants since time immemorial and others simply replicating the corrupt actions of the men who had stayed home to profit, things fell apart. But for a moment, there was an example of what happens when people bound together by their service decide they’re not accepting mistreatment.
So it was in February 2026.
On February 17, 2026, the Department of Veterans Affairs directed disability examiners to rate disabilities based on their severity once treated, a decision with the potential to lower ratings for conditions managed by medication. 20,000 commenters expressed their objection to the rule. Disabled American Veterans, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and the American Legion objected publicly. Twenty legislators wrote the Secretary of Veterans’ Affairs (and Air Force Reserve Colonel) Doug Collins, requesting revocation of the rule. Why it wasn’t 435 legislator signatures, I don’t know. But by February 27, 2026, following ten days of bureaucratic tap dancing, the rule was formally rescinded.
The proposed standard for disability determination was fundamentally unjust, of course. The very fact that a disabling condition exists as a result of service is the matter necessitating compensation, not the level to which it is ameliorated by treatment that would have been unnecessary absent the veteran’s service. But it took a lot of people making a lot of noise to make that simple fact understood. Making noise is something I do pretty regularly, by calling my Senators and my Congressman at 202-224-3121 and following the prompts. You can too. And you should. Politicians are our employees, not our gods or a sports team we’re somehow obligated to support. They work for us. We need to let them know what we think.
The price of freedom is eternal vigilance, a principle that also applies to protecting your rights and earned benefits from the people Rudyard Kipling wrote about in 1890, in a poem eventually titled Tommy:
“You talk o’ better food for us, an’ schools, an’ fires, an’ all:
We’ll wait for extry rations if you treat us rational.
Don’t mess about the cook-room slops, but prove it to our face
The Widow’s Uniform is not the soldier-man’s disgrace.
For it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ Chuck him out, the brute!”
But it’s “Saviour of ‘is country” when the guns begin to shoot[.]”
We are not disposable heroes; we are citizens who served. That’s a nothing less, nothing more proposition, and though you’re not a “citizen plus” as a result, you do deserve the rights and benefits that the citizenry, via our legislators, confer upon you. Some of that is a genuine understanding of the sacrifices we make when the guns begin to shoot. Some of it is the cost of the all-volunteer military that allows other citizens and legislators to stay home. Don’t let them treat you like Tommy, make them prove it to our face.
I encourage you to tell me how I am wrong, or to tell me how you’ve exercised your rights. Likewise, I invite you to publish something in opposition to or in support of anything I write here. Most importantly, we aim to be the voice of the barracks here, but this volume is damned near all officers and Marines. Speaking as a retired Marine officer, we want and need enlisted voices and folks from all service backgrounds (I’m looking at you Space Force). Speak up at submissions.lethalmindsjournal@gmail.com
Fire for Effect,
Russell Worth Parker
Editor in Chief - Lethal Minds Journal
Dedicated to those who serve, those who have served, and those who paid the final price for their country.
Lethal Minds is a military veteran and service member magazine, dedicated to publishing work from the military and veteran communities.
Two Grunts Inc. is proud to sponsor Lethal Minds Journal and all of their publications and endeavors. Like our name says we share a similar background to the people behind the Lethal Minds Journal, and to the many, many contributors. Just as possessing the requisite knowledge is crucial for success, equipping oneself with the appropriate tools is equally imperative. At Two Grunts Inc., we are committed to providing the necessary tools to excel in any situation that may arise. Our motto, “Purpose-Built Work Guns. Rifles made to last,” reflects our dedication to quality and longevity. With meticulous attention to manufacturing and stringent quality control measures, we ensure that each part upholds our standards from inception to the final rifle assembly. Whether you seek something for occasional training or professional deployment, our rifles cater to individuals serious about their equipment. We’re committed to supporting The Lethal Minds Journal and its readers, so if you’re interested in purchasing one of our products let us know you’re a LMJ reader and we’ll get you squared away. Stay informed. Stay deadly. -Matt Patruno USMC, 0311 (OIF) twogruntsinc.com support@twogruntsinc.com
In This Issue
Across the Force
The Swarm Fallacy- Rethinking Mass and Effects in Drone Warfare
Opinion
Veteran Suicide & Recruiting
Field Day
“Do you think the wars were useless?”
The Written Word
Sometimes They’re Better
The Spine on the Reference Shelf
The Young Man and Old Man: Reflections of a Peacetime Marine Corps Officer
Lucky Dog
Poetry and Art
Book Excerpt
The Adler Compound, Chapter Nine – Opening Pandora’s Box
Across the Force
Written work on the profession of arms. Lessons learned, conversations on doctrine, and mission analysis from all ranks.
The Swarm Fallacy: Rethinking Mass and Effects in Drone Warfare
Thomas Schueman
The American military is increasingly preoccupied with “drone swarms.” The term appears in concept papers, capability briefs, and acquisition discussions. Efforts are underway to evaluate competing systems in a gauntlet-type scenario, and one key performance characteristic is a system’s ability to swarm. For several reasons, the Marine Corps should not select a system based on its swarming ability.
1. Single-system swarming is not an effective TTP. On average, nearly 7,000 drones are flying over Ukrainian battlefields daily. This illustrates that while “swarms” of drones are employed on the modern battlefield, they are a mix of strike and reconnaissance systems. They are not launched in a single, synchronized wave by a single operator carrying a backpack full of identical aircraft. They are persistent, layered, and sequenced.
2. The physical burden of drone employment is often omitted from the discussion around swarms. A drone team must move to a covered and concealed position with everything required to fight: aircraft, batteries, munitions, antennas, radios, water, medical gear, personal weapons, ammunition, and sustainment for however long the mission demands. If that position is 15 kilometers over rough terrain, every drone represents a weight and space consideration that has to be carried.
3. Massing drones assumes the target remains fixed and vulnerable throughout the attack window. Because many targets are mobile, a vehicle can disappear in the time it takes a drone to reach the target, and a dismounted element can enter cover before a strike mission can be executed. Concentrating a finite resource into a single, massed event risks losing it all to a single countermeasure.
4. If a target can be destroyed by a single First Person View (FPV) or droppable munition, launching multiple aircraft simultaneously is inefficient. It is the equivalent of dropping two precision-guided munitions on a target that can be neutralized by one. Launching swarms of drones all at once is putting all your eggs into one basket. A more logical employment would be to launch one and assess the effects. If that drone is defeated by wind, netting, small arms, or electronic countermeasures, the next one can approach from a different angle or at a different altitude.
5. Drones are not the proper weapons-to-target match to achieve mass effects. Combined arms effects are achieved by creating dilemmas across domains. FPVs, droppable munitions, ISR, mortars, machine guns, and artillery each impose different problems. When layered and synchronized appropriately, they force the enemy into tradeoffs. If a unit needs to achieve mass effects on a target or an enemy’s frontage, the better weapons to use are machine guns, artillery, or mortars. An artillery round can strike a target 15 kilometers away in under a minute, whereas a drone requires several minutes to cover the same distance. Therefore, when massing fires rapidly on a target of opportunity, conventional munitions are the more effective weapon system.
6. Steady drone presence hinders an enemy’s ability to shoot, move, and communicate. It forces concealment. It disrupts logistics. It imposes psychological strain. Even when no munition is dropped, the knowledge that one could be alters behavior. Steady, persistent drone pressure forces the enemy to continually employ countermeasures. If the enemy is employing jammers, this necessitates a constant draw on their power system, risks overheating the ECMs, and burning out ECM components. Persistence creates a problem that the enemy must continuously manage and increases the potential for operator and system degradation, creating gaps and windows that can be exploited.
7. A dynamic battlefield requires skilled human pilots who can detect, identify, and maneuver through cluttered terrain. Flying through tree lines, windows, trench apertures, or netting demands judgment and practice. Sometimes a drone may be deliberately sacrificed into a physical barrier to create a breach for a follow-on aircraft. That kind of adaptation is incompatible with a pre-scripted mass launch. It requires real-time observation, decision-making, and adjustment. If we assume that drone employment will be automated into synchronized swarms, we understate the human element required to generate effects in complex terrain.
The Marine Corps should select systems that are cheap, resilient, and mass-producible. A force equipped with many affordable, durable aircraft can maintain pressure over time. Treating swarm performance as a decisive selection criterion risks privileging a narrow use case over the broader realities of combat.
Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Schueman is the Commanding Officer, Advanced Infantry Training Battalion-East
Opinion
Op-Eds and general thought pieces meant to spark conversation and introspection.
Veteran Suicide & Recruiting
Fred “Doom” Dummar
The Kid Who Lies Gets In. The Kid Who Tells the Truth Needs a Waiver.
We lose approximately seventeen veterans to suicide every day. That number hasn’t moved meaningfully in years despite billions spent on awareness campaigns, crisis lines, resiliency programs, and expanded mental health services. We keep asking why veterans don’t seek help earlier, why they wait until a crisis, and why they suffer in silence when resources exist.
We’re asking the wrong question.
The question isn’t why veterans don’t trust the system with their mental health. The question is: why did we build a system that teaches them not to—before they ever put on a uniform?
Most people don’t connect recruiting policy to veteran suicide. They see them as separate problems handled by separate offices with separate budgets. Recruiting is about getting people in. Suicide prevention is about keeping people alive after they’ve served. The two conversations rarely overlap.
They should. Because the recruiting system isn’t just filtering candidates. It’s delivering the first lesson about what this institution values about mental health. And that lesson echoes through entire careers, into transition, into the VA parking lot at 2 a.m.
We think tighter mental health screening produces a more mentally stable force. Does it? Or have we created a system where veterans warn future enlistees not to seek treatment, where parents scramble to get things off their kid’s record, where lying is the implicit price of admission—and we wink because we all know that’s how the game works?
What have we done? Is this really the best we can do?
From 2008 to 2010, I commanded the Special Operations Recruiting Battalion. My mission wasn’t street recruiting—the Army had 37 other battalions for that. We recruited soldiers already serving for attendance at selection and assessment for Special Forces, the 160th Aviation Regiment, Explosive Ordnance Disposal, Civil Affairs, and Psychological Operations. We were pulling from a pool that had already made it through the front door.
But I understood the accessions mission. I had to. And I became the guy friends called when their kid couldn’t enlist, when parents needed help understanding why their son or daughter suddenly required a waiver for something that wouldn’t have mattered five years earlier.
The conversations followed a pattern: a reasonable question on their end, and no good answer on mine. A father I’d served with, calling about his eighteen-year-old: “He saw a counselor after his mom and I divorced. Took some medication for a year. He’s fine now. Has been for three years. Why is this a problem?”
There was no good answer. The system had changed, but no one had recalibrated the standards to reflect what that change meant.
Secretary of the Army Driscoll’s decision to delegate mental health waiver authority back to two- and three-star commanders addresses a procedural bottleneck. When 95% of waivers were being approved based on lower-level recommendations anyway, the Secretary-level review added friction without adding value. But this fix treats a symptom. The underlying disease keeps spreading—and its effects extend far beyond the recruiting station.
The Surveillance Nobody Planned For
Thirty years ago, a young man walked into a recruiter’s office and started fresh. His past was largely what he said it was. The eighth-grade fight never happened unless he brought it up. The counselor’s visits after his parents split were his business. The system couldn’t verify these things because it didn’t have access to them.
Recruits lied. I’m not endorsing it, but I’m naming it. Many of those kids became solid soldiers. Some became exceptional. The system’s blindness forced recruiters to exercise judgment about the person in front of them rather than the database behind them.
That world is gone.
Today, the locker room scuffle exists as an assault charge in a juvenile database. Speeding tickets accumulate into a criminal record. The behavioral health appointment your parents scheduled because they wanted to support you through a rough semester is documented permanently. The ADHD medication you stopped taking three years ago remains on file.
We’ve built an infrastructure that captures every stumble of adolescence and treats it as predictive of adult military performance. The evidence doesn’t support this. I’ve served with soldiers who had rough teenage years and went on to become phenomenal warriors. I’ve watched “clean” recruits wash out of Special Forces selection because they’d never encountered real adversity.
Documentation tells you what happened. It doesn’t tell you what someone learned from it, or who they became afterward.
We Told Them to Get Help. Then We Punished Them for It.
This is what makes me angry.
For forty years, we have been telling parents that supporting their children meant getting them professional help early. We launched campaigns to reduce stigma around mental health. We normalized therapy, counseling, and medication for routine developmental challenges. Good. I believe in that mission. I’ve advocated for it in the veteran community.
Then we told those same kids: because you sought help, because your parents did the right thing, because you’re in the system, you now need special permission to serve your country.
The Walter Reed study from 2022 found that between 2016 and 2020, more than 31,000 potential recruits were disqualified for learning disabilities, psychiatric conditions, or mental health concerns. Over a third of Army applicants needed a waiver for something in this category.
These aren’t broken people. They’re documented people. There’s a difference, and our system refuses to see it.
Quality Over Quantity—Weaponized
Katherine Kuzminski from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) is still framing this as a balancing act between “quality and quantity.” I understand the framing, but it lets the system off the hook.
“Quality over quantity” is a SOF truth. I’ve lived it. I believe it.
But I’ve also watched it get used as a battering ram to shut down anyone advocating for actual humans, for soldiers, for a system that makes sense. Someone raises a concern about overly restrictive policies eliminating good candidates for bad reasons, and the response comes back: “We can’t sacrifice quality for quantity.”
As if that’s what’s happening. As if pointing out that documentation isn’t the same as disqualification means you want to lower standards.
Having stupid policies that are overly restrictive and eliminate people for the wrong reasons isn’t quality over quantity. It’s stupidity over humanity. It’s a system trying to be bureaucratically efficient while missing the point entirely.
Quality means getting the right people. It means identifying who can do the job, who can handle the stress, and who will show up for their teammates when everything falls apart. It doesn’t mean rejecting a capable candidate because a database flagged a counseling visit from six years ago. That’s not protecting quality. That’s worshipping an administrative process.
When we hide behind “quality over quantity” to avoid examining whether our filters measure quality, we’ve stopped thinking. We’ve drained a principle of its meaning, and turned it into a shield against thinking and accountability.
The Lesson They Learn Before They Ever Serve
What’s the downstream effect on the soldiers who do get in?
Think about what we’ve taught them. They were told once to seek help, and it nearly disqualified them from service. Maybe they got a waiver. Maybe they lied, hoping the system wouldn’t catch them. Either way, they learned something about how this institution operates before they ever raised their right hand. They either experienced it themselves or watched their buddies do it.
Now they’re in. They deploy. They see things that will stay with them forever. They come home carrying weight they don’t know how to put down. And we tell them to seek help. Go to behavioral health. Talk to someone. It’s okay. No stigma. We’ve changed.
Do you think they believe us?
Do you think they trust a system as procedurally bureaucratic and blind as the one they experienced at enlistment?
They were told to seek help once, and it came back to bite them. Why would they expect anything different now?
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.
We tell people to have integrity. We build entire programs around values, character, and doing the right thing. But at the front door, we wink and let them lie to enlist—because honesty gets you flagged and silence gets you in. The system taught them, before we ever taught them differently, that transparency is a liability, documentation is a weapon, and the safest move is to say nothing until and unless you can’t anymore.
And then we wonder why veteran suicide rates don’t move. We wonder why soldiers don’t seek help until they’re in crisis. We build resiliency programs and hire more counselors and launch awareness campaigns, but we never address the foundational lesson we delivered before they ever wore the uniform: this institution punishes honesty about mental health.
The Question Nobody Wants to Answer
A kid whose parents got him help and who did the work to come out stronger gets flagged. A kid who suffered in silence and never built coping skills slides through. Which one do you want in your formation when things get hard? And which one is more likely to seek help when they need it later?
Is a young person who sought help for anxiety at sixteen, and has been thriving for three years, less qualified than someone who white-knuckled through the same anxiety, undocumented?
Our current standards say yes. The first kid needs a waiver—the second ships without additional scrutiny.
I don’t believe that’s the correct outcome. I don’t think most commanders believe it either. But the system wasn’t designed for nuance. It was built for bright lines in an era when bright lines were the only tool available.
What We Actually Need
Driscoll’s move puts decisions closer to people who understand recruiting context. USAREC commanders know their mission and their applicant pool better than a staff officer at the Pentagon shuffling waiver packets. That’s an improvement.
But it doesn’t address the fundamental mismatch between our standards and our reality. And it does nothing to repair the trust we’ve already broken.
We need to determine what predicts success in military service—not what disqualified people in 1985, but what current data shows. I’ve worked with soldiers at every stage of their careers for four decades. The correlation between adolescent documentation and adult performance is weaker than the system assumes.
We need standards that distinguish developmental challenges from enduring conditions. A teenager who saw a therapist for six months after his grandmother died isn’t the same as an adult with an active, unmanaged psychiatric illness. The current framework can’t tell them apart.
We need to confront whether we’re filtering for the right things at all. When we struggle to meet recruiting goals (yes, we’ve hit them two years running, but the underlying demographics and propensity to serve haven’t fundamentally shifted), are we excluding capable people for documentation reasons while missing genuine risk factors that never appear in medical records?
Every waiver for adolescent mental health care, every flag on a kid who sought help and came out fine, every wink-and-nod encouragement to just not mention it—that lesson follows soldiers through their entire career. It’s still operating when they’re sitting in a parking lot at 2 a.m., deciding whether to walk into the VA or drive home and drink until they can sleep.
I spent my final years in uniform working with Afghan commandos and came home to work with veterans navigating transitions of their own. The pattern is consistent: we’ve created systems that reward opacity and punish transparency.
That’s not a waiver problem. It’s a values problem.
We say we want soldiers who seek help when they need it, who don’t suffer in silence, who address problems before they become crises. But we have built a recruiting system that selects against exactly those behaviors—using recruit transparency against them when they try to serve. We teach them from day one that honesty about mental health is a risk, not a strength. And we expect them to forget that experience once they’re in uniform.
They don’t forget.
Until we acknowledge that the recruiting system teaches lessons about trust that echo throughout entire careers, we’ll keep shuffling waiver authority between echelons while the real problem festers. We’ll keep invoking “quality over quantity” to avoid the harder conversation. And we’ll keep losing soldiers to the silence we trained them to keep.
First dominoes: If you’re a recruiter, ask yourself how many qualified candidates you’ve lost to documentation that told you nothing about their actual readiness.
If you’re a commander, ask yourself what your soldiers learned about trusting the system before they ever got to your formation.
If you’re a policymaker, stop moving the approval authority and start questioning what we’re approving for—and what lesson every waiver teaches about honesty.
And if you’re a veteran who learned to stay quiet because the system taught you that was safer... I see you. The system was wrong. Seeking help is still the harder right over the easier wrong, even when the institution teaches you the opposite lesson.
Lead with Love,
Doom
Fred “Doom” Dummar is a retired Special Forces Colonel with 29 years of service who now writes about leading with love, veteran wellness, and the systems we build that break the people they’re supposed to protect. Find him at Guide to Human on Substack.
Field Day
Ryan Miller
The tradition of Field Day in the Marines is something most of us will always remember. It’s where the standards of order and discipline were introduced, executed, and inspected with outcomes measured, reported, and, if needed, sternly remediated.
When my drill instructor briefed us on his Field Day expectations in the communal bathroom (also known as the head), he reminded us that he would never ask us to do something that he wouldn’t do himself. He then slowly ran the index and middle fingers of his bare, ungloved right hand under the inside rim of the urinal, all the way around the netherside of the porcelain. When he finally withdrew them, he showed us the urine-stained grime, including pubic hairs, that he extracted.
“This pisser is fricking nasty, do you understand that?” the drill instructor admonished.
“Yes, sir,” we all yelled, a few voices still cracking from puberty, excitement, or simple fear.
Field Day is another reminder of the importance of teamwork. There is too much to do, and the expectations are so high that only organized delegation and diligence can accomplish an elite level of cleanliness. Scrub brushes and brooms become as familiar as our rifles, and we learn that AJAX, Simple Green, and Bleach can clean just about anything. We’re too young and invincible to care much about PPE or ventilation for the caustic fumes. Simple Green can also be described as the toxic Marine Corps approach to diversity. Light-green, dark-green colorblindness rings hollow in the context of the Marine Corps being the worst branch for racial disparities in punishment and promotion. But I digress because that topic deserves an essay of its own.
The variety of solvents is matched only by the variety of music heard at a barracks during Field Day. One room bumping hip-hop, another blasting hardcore rock. Further down the hall, the twang of a country western tune can be awkwardly heard alongside the accordion of a Mexican Banda corrido.
Some of us come from diverse regions and can code-switch to assimilate between different cultures. For others, it’s their first exposure to folks from vastly different backgrounds, and they couldn’t fit in no matter how hard they tried. Some don’t try at all and retreat to the comfort and predictability of troops with similar backgrounds.
I love spending time with veterans from across the country in a variety of spaces. From the veteran art and activism movements to veteran mental health and plant-medicine communities, I encounter a wide range of perspectives and endeavor to gently offer some of my own. One community that I’ve grown to treasure is the veteran literary community of readers and writers. Two groups I attend are hosted by veteran writers in North Carolina, and I look fondly forward with anticipation to the fellowship that emerges from sharing our responses to writing prompts.
We come from different walks of life with varying value systems, but we all share a love for our country. Not necessarily love for the government nor the military, but love for the land known as the United States. For some, it’s the hunting and fishing, for others it’s the landscapes and wildlife - especially amphibians. From the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Sierra Nevadas, from Lake Mattamuskeet to Lake Tahoe, we all love the land that many of us believed we sweat and bled to defend.
“Leave no trace” is a common refrain among outdoor conservationists. Similarly, “if it doesn’t grow, it goes” is the Marine Corps version with the same intention. The cousin of the garrison Field Day is the police call in the outdoors. Whether it’s picking up spent brass on a shooting range or MRE litter in a bivouac site, Marines have stood shoulder to shoulder, walked on-line, and stooped down or bent over to clean up after themselves and each other.
I recently saw a film that featured both North Carolina and where I was born, San Francisco, California. Its title is “Earth’s Greatest Enemy,” and it was co-produced by US Army infantry veteran of the war in Iraq, Mike Prysner. In North Carolina, it featured Camp Lejeune and told the story about how the water supply on base was contaminated by fuel and volatile organic compounds in the 1950s, and over the next three decades, as many as a million military personnel, family members, and civilian employees drank, bathed in, and cooked from water that the government knew was contaminated, and the contamination was concealed from the troops and their families. Earth’s Greatest Enemy featured a small plot of land, just outside of Camp Lejeune, known as Baby Heaven, where hundreds of infants are laid to rest who succumbed to their birth defects from Camp Lejeune’s contaminated water.
On the opposite side of the country, Hunter’s Point, is a historically black working-class neighborhood on San Francisco’s waterfront. For thirty years, the Hunter’s Point Naval Shipyard was a major economic engine that employed much of the local community. After WW2 and until 1969, the Hunter’s Point naval shipyard was the site of the naval radiological defense laboratory, the US military’s largest facility for applied nuclear research. Just like Camp Lejeune, the radioactive contamination at Hunter’s Point was concealed from the public and even covered up, including falsified soil samples. For the residents of Hunter’s Point, miscarriages are considered normal, birth defects are considered normal, and respiratory illnesses are considered normal.
Do you know what else Camp Lejeune and Hunter's Point have in common? They’re both EPA superfund sites. A “superfund site” is a location with such horrific ecological pollution that it takes a superfund of resources to remediate. Did you know that the majority of global superfund sites are current or former US military bases? With nearly 1000 overseas bases and CIA black sites, we’ve exported our toxicity across the globe. Fallujah, Iraq, for example, is a global epicenter of birth defects thanks to Uncle Sam. Mission Accomplished?
“Pack it in, pack it out” is another common phrase of outdoor conservation culture, encouraging humans to keep the landscape pristine that we leave our tracks on. This may be where the Sierra Club and Uncle Sam’s Gun Club diverge. Earth’s Greatest Enemy documented the tradition of underway night ops, when sailors aboard US Navy vessels throw bags of trash overboard. Not to be out-polluted, the documentary also featured ground-pounders that, before ending an exercise or deployment, carefully collected and stacked pallets worth of ammunition, mortars, rockets, wired them with explosive charges, and blew them up in the desert. Beyond the heavy metals, depleted uranium, vaporized and spread to the wind and water in all four directions. One reason why infantry units destroy unused ammunition is so that next year’s operating budget isn’t reduced.
One of my favorite members of these veteran writing groups is a former US Naval aviator whose aircraft was also featured in Earth’s Greatest Enemy. The EA-18G Growler is an electronic warfare aircraft whose vibrational output was shown to disrupt sea life, including the ability for Orcas to hunt.
The Marine Corps may be lean, and it may be mean, but it’s definitely not green. It was recently said that in the books of America, veterans are in the black. If that’s true, then we’re also in the planet’s deepest red, and we have an unpaid morality debt. If once a Marine, always a Marine, then what is our Field Day and Police Call responsibility with the fact that the US Department of War is Earth’s Greatest Enemy? If we want our grandchildren’s grandchildren to hunt, fish, and surf where we have, then what must we change? How long will we allow other young people to sign up to serve a government where “Troop Welfare” is obviously a cruel myth?
Another pervasive myth is that Marines guard the streets of heaven. Earth’s Greatest Enemy teaches us that if cleanliness is next to Godliness, then we truly are devil dogs. There is no livable future in which the Empire of the US military-industrial complex exists, and it’s the moral obligation of the remainder of our lifetimes to police our own and Field Day after ourselves.
Ryan Miller is a Marine Corps veteran and a therapist.
“Do you think the wars were useless?”
Heather O’Brien
I shouldn’t have been surprised. I knew this day would come; someone would ask.
I swallowed the first swear word that threatened to pop out. The teenager standing in front of me was not snidely spitting words. He hadn’t even been born when I enlisted. His was an honest question.
Do I think that? I’ve often battled the thoughts that my service did no lasting good for any country I fought in.
“I do promise to defend…” words spoken with solemn pride while smoke still wafted from Ground Zero. He doesn’t know what it was like to watch 3,000 people die on TV, the bodies floating gently from rooftop to smashed pieces on the ground. War was here whether we wanted it or not; in an instant, curious suspicion about a religion blossomed into burning hatred.
Right or wrong weren’t options. The only choices were to join and serve revenge or sit on the sidelines.
Nobody knew in those early days that we would sit and stagnate in Afghanistan while being tossed into Iraq as well. My first deployment wasn’t even into the wilds or cities of Afghanistan; instead, I sat like a ghost airman in the very country that hid Bin Laden for 10 years.
Then Iraq, good reasons or made-up ones, it didn’t matter; they hated us, so another war was declared. Whether there were ever any WMDs was irrelevant; we still toppled their government and hung the psychotic ruler. Good was done…at first. But just like Afghanistan, we stayed and stayed.
Ineffective and badly executed at times, yes, but do I think they were useless?
In the end, I must answer no. The reason is quite simple. Regardless of why we went, who sent us, and whether it was truly for the greater good, the price we paid demands that it be worthwhile.
Over 7,000 of my brothers and sisters never returned home alive. And 30,000+ more died after they came home because the war overwhelmed their hearts and minds.
They are the price those “useless” wars claimed.
Were they good wars? Morally, right? Did a man-child president persuade us to invade a country to finish his dad’s war? Maybe.
But I really don’t care about any of those reasons. I went for better or for worse, not for glory, or a President, or to see some country whose people I hated try to build a democracy. I went because they went, my buddies, siblings given to me by Uncle Sam.
And so many of them paid the terrible, tremendous, awful price.
Tens of thousands of futures shifted, changed, and many were snuffed out.
Their blood screams that our wars weren’t useless.
Heather O’Brien is a writer and Air Force veteran with deployments to Pakistan and Iraq.
.The Written Word
Fiction and Nonfiction written by servicemen and veterans.
Sometimes They’re Better
J.B. Stevens
The room is cold and dark and smells of industrial cleaners, and I’m alone. The school-issue mid-80s polyester tracksuit scratches at my arms. I exist in the dark space. My brain screams for someone to take the fear—but no one can. It’s mine. I own it. The struggle is one-on-one, and the universe is watching.
Fear and stress tickle my lizard brain. I want the dread to leave. I turn Metallica’s “Master of Puppets” up to the max volume on my Discman. My parents bought it for me last Christmas, in 1998. I try to crank it loud enough to chase off the anxiety. But it doesn’t get that loud. Nothing does.
I notice a sliver of light at my side. Coach Grey glides into the locker room, thick and bearded. He steps in front of me. Coach was a Marine before coming to St. Pius X High School to teach weightlifting and coach wrestling.
I pull the headphones down, and the goosepimples kick up.
He puts two hands on my shoulders. “You ready?”
I look down. “Fuck, I don’t know.”
Coach frowns. “Don’t curse, you’re better than that.”
“Yes, Sir.”
“Time to man up.”
“Okay.” I nod and smile. I breathe deep through flared nostrils, arch my back. “He’s better than me.”
“That’s true.”
“Aren’t you supposed to say, ‘That’s crap’ or ‘Believe in yourself’?”
“I’m not a liar.”
“How do I win?”
“First match, you took him down, slammed him on his backside, got mean. Try to do that again. Get him off his game.”
“Yeah. But after that first take down, he whupped my ass.”
“Don’t curse. You’re better than that. Get mean, or give up.”
I nod. “Yes, Sir.”
I grit my teeth and stand.
Coach slaps me across the face. “Let’s go.”
I step to the gym’s prison-looking metal doors and kick them open.
I hear yelling. I think I can make out the sound of my mom, but I’m not sure.
Then the blood rushing in my ears, and the pounding in my chest, drown out everything else. I am alone.
I look up to the crowd. My mom is somewhere in there, with my dad, my brother, and my girlfriend, but I can’t see them.
Whoever’s running the place has turned down all the lights except for a lone spotlight on the mat. The only thing anyone can see is the mat. And now I must walk to the center and meet my opponent, Roper. He’s a better wrestler.
I’m alone. I’m alone.
I start my walk, and the spotlight is on me. The world is black, but for me.
I start to run. The mat’s blue vinyl is soft and familiar. I do two laps and squat in my corner. Coach Grey meets me there, and he talks, but I can’t hear him, just the thunder of my own blood.
I look down and close my eyes and try to push away the fear. I don’t want to think. The bleachers are full. A thousand people watching, and I’m alone.
There is a click, and I open my eyes. The spotlight shifts to the gym’s east side. It is Roper’s turn to enter. He was the state championship’s runner-up last year. He opens one door and steps out, slow, confident.
We lock eyes. He nods. He walks to the mat. He doesn’t run. Why did I run?
In the center, we shake hands. It’s just the two of us now, in spite of all the spectators.
The whistle blows, the struggle starts, and the universe slides away.
I shoot a double, but he sprawls his hips straight down and turns. His center of gravity is low. He twists, and my back is exposed, but I arch and bridge and roll.
Roper shifts left, then right. I try to get mean, but he is too good. I feel the tweak. He makes me turn one way, catches the crook of my knee and the base of my neck, and he has me. My back is flat on the blue vinyl, and I stare at the spotlight.
I’m exposed, the mask slips, and I’m alone.
Roper pins me.
The ref slaps the mat, and the whistle blows, and I stand. We shake hands, and it’s over.
I lift my chin and walk back to the locker room.
The spotlight cuts. The next match starts, and our struggle is forgotten.
Coach puts his arm around me. The room is colder now. I can’t smell the bleach, just my sweat, and the sounds come back—they are too loud. I feel hot tears.
Coach grabs my chin, looks me in the eyes. “You good?”
I wipe the tears. “Yup.”
“You give it your all?”
“I did.”
Coach nods. “Sometimes they’re better.”
He squeezes my shoulder and leaves.
And I’m alone.
J.B. Stevens is a former U.S. Army Infantry Officer who saw combat in Iraq and now writes fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and reviews.
The Spine on the Reference Shelf
Benjamin Van Horrick
The CIA World Factbook sat between the Rand McNally atlas and the Encyclopaedia Britannica on my library’s reference shelf, its spine creased and pages yellowed. It was the only book that mattered. CIA meant adventure. I cracked the spine, expecting spycraft, but found GDP figures instead. I read on anyway.
The experience was more like becoming a geography professor than a secret agent, but it gave depth to the world map my mother had gifted me. Moving between maps and the Factbook linked the visual representation of a country to the reality on the ground. Although the entries were brief—most were less than a page—the book made every line count. The maze of former Eastern Bloc countries particularly piqued my interest. Following the Soviet Union’s collapse, understanding how these nations formed their identities meant more than memorizing names.
Within an hour of flipping through its pages, I began forging connections among countries and regions. I learned that many African nations retained the same legal frameworks as their colonizers. Cape Verde’s main exports included fish, bananas, and salt; Midway Island remained a US territory.
In the mid-90s, the Soviet Union had collapsed, the Gulf War had been won in a matter of days, and the economy was booming. The “End of History” seemed not only appealing but real. However, conflicts in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, and Kosovo proved those rosy predictions false. The Factbook became my guide to an increasingly volatile world. In the post-9/11 world, I joined the Marine Corps.
Years later, before my second deployment, I received the Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB). The brief covered Helmand’s flat, unforgiving terrain, the Alizai and Barakzai tribes, and its rampant opium trade. The same information I had first seen in the Factbook. I’d come full circle from the library reference shelf.
The CIA halted publication of the World Factbook last month. For most, it was a book to look up the currency of Thailand (the Baht) or the chief export of Algeria (oil). I can still see the spine on that reference shelf, promising nothing more than facts. It propelled my career.
Major Benjamin Van Horrick is a Marine Corps logistics officer and Managing Editor of The Connecting File, the centerpoint for articles on leadership, training, and tactics for the Marine Corps infantry and reconnaissance communities.
The Young Man and Old Man: Reflections of a Peacetime Marine Corps Officer
Grant W. Boyes
It was one of those almost indescribable Michigan spring nights—warm enough to drink a few beers with your friends around a bonfire, cold enough to know you are in the Midwest; comfortable enough to want to be outside and smelling that fresh spring air, crisp enough to still want to wear a homey sweatshirt. I was a college senior in my second semester, newly voted and crowned as the senior class’s “Most Outstanding Man,” and eagerly awaiting my commission as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Although I was not a history major, that last semester I got the opportunity to take an upper-level history class with a new, young, and energetic professor who became my sole motivation to care about school when I had so much to look forward to in the next few months after graduation. I related to him instantly because I thought I could be just like him when I grew up: he was an Army officer with combat experience, the latter characteristic being the true mark of a military officer in my immature estimation.
Invited to his home for a late-night bonfire with my classmates, I knew we were in for a treat. In the course of the evening, we discussed who is the greatest basketball player ever (Michael Jordan was allegedly the Platonic form of basketball player), my latest run-in with school administrators, and James Mattis’ use of Sulla’s epitaph before the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Then, suddenly, in the darkness, the professor literally leaned into the brilliance of the fire to shed light on his most illuminating take of the evening. “You know, I know you want to see war. You want to see combat. You want to be the one who experiences it. You’re the young man. I’m the old man. The young man wants to go to war because that’s what young men want to do. The old man says that the young man shouldn’t want to go to war because he’s seen it. The young man doesn’t listen because he wants to be just like the old man.”
As my short, unimpressive, “boring,” active-duty military career concludes this spring, this conversation constantly churns in my heart and torments my soul. How ironic that I regret never having the chance to kill someone else’s son, husband, or father. The cynical side of me tries to convince myself that my time in the Marine Corps was only full of weekly operations sync, material readiness briefs (if only TBS prepared you to understand anything about GCSS-MC and what the heck a MEE is), and ensuring my platoon was “green” on all of our training requirements. What did success end up looking like as a peacetime officer? A satisfactory CGRI binder inspection? A 100 percent completion of annual and fiscal year training? Completion of Tables 3-6 and the BZO range without incident? Wow, all of this really makes me look like the modern version of Lieutenant John Bobo.
Serving in a peacetime military means constantly being told “sweat in peace so that you don’t bleed in war” or “Si vis pacem, para bellum.” If, as Aristotle surmises in the opening of the Ethics, the telos, or the end, of the art of war is victory, what is the purpose of practicing it or training it when there are no tactical or operational victories to be won? This question punctuates the philosophical underpinnings of everything you do as a military officer during peacetime. In wrestling with this question, I recount that moment with my teacher, and I feel a tremendous amount of personal shame, guilt, and embarrassment that my career ended without the opportunity to win valiant glory and lead Marines in the harshest, most dangerous conditions. Because I never “did the thing,” I reason, how can I call myself a veteran, or even a Marine, when those titles are worth something because of those that went before me, those “old men” from my teacher’s story?
Though there will always be a part of me that regrets my peacetime career, I offer consolation to anyone else who may be feeling or thinking similar sentiments. First, ask yourself these simple, plain questions: Did you do the best you could? Did you “take care of the Marines” or “do your job” when the opportunity arose? While only those that I served with can truly answer those questions for me (shout out to the Marines of Bravo Battery, 3rd platoon), I know I tried my hardest to give an affirmative answer to those questions. I know I failed as a leader to my Marines, as a lieutenant to my superiors, and as a peer to my fellow platoon commander plenty of times, but that never stopped me from getting up the next morning, putting on my cammies, and going to work ready to do better the next day.
To echo the importance of those “moto” quotes in the aforementioned paragraph, there is a reason we need to train for war. To understand this, just read or listen to T.R. Fehrenbach’s preeminent classic, This Kind of War: A Study of Unpreparedness, the story of the American military’s preparation for and participation in the Korean War. To the new lieutenant in front of his or her platoon for the first time or to the new NCO leading Marines for the first time, my challenge is to read that book, understand it as a warning to our military in 2026, and still suck at your job after that. Laziness in peacetime will cost our fellow Americans their lives. If you create a laid-back, undisciplined, dilettante unit like those Fehrenbach highlights, we will only see the same kind of failure wherever the enemy decides to fight the United States next.
One of the worst parts of military leadership is the limited time you get in one billet at one unit, unable to understand the long-term effects, positive or negative, of your investments in those you served with every day. Additionally, when the enemy never tests your unit in the fury of combat, you cannot know if your training succeeded or failed. Yet, to once again utilize clichés, if you leave your time in the service knowing you put out your best effort, that should bring you the purpose and meaning you sought when first joining the service. You see, the purpose of the training is the product you know you created, even if you do not see the practical result or consequences of that training. As a Christian, I believe Scripture’s recurring emphasis on God placing people in authority is not just about our civilian political leaders; He even places platoon commanders, squad leaders, and team leaders in authority, too. Your time spent leading in peacetime was the plan God had for you; cherish that.
To emphasize my teacher’s comments, I will close with another great warrior’s meditation on seeing combat yet yearning for peace. Episode two of the mini-series Band of Brothers depicts Dick Winters quietly saying a short prayer after surviving the jump into Normandy. “That night, I took time to thank God for seeing me through that day of days and prayed I would make it through D+1. And, if somehow I managed to get home again, I promised God and myself that I would find a quiet piece of land somewhere and spend the rest of my life in peace.”
For my teacher and Dick Winters, both extraordinary men who performed extraordinary deeds and actions for their country in faraway lands, they wished they never had to do it; they prayed for and craved a life of peace. Because of their actions to achieve victory for our country, to establish peace and security for their fellow citizens and future countrymen, I got to “enjoy” my existence as a peacetime military officer. Therefore, to quiet my worst instincts of “imposter syndrome” and guilt over my lack of combat experience, today and every day, I treasure the opportunity to serve my country during a time of peace because of the actions of those old men who saw war, so the young did not have to go. I thank God for the memory of a quaint, beautiful, yet normal spring night bonfire in Michigan because this memory reminds me of those old men and their deeds, and God’s grace that He created and made me for times such as these.
Lieutenant Grant Boyes is a Marine Corps Low Altitude Air Defense Officer.
Lucky Dog
Lance Kurnal
Nobody really knows how to retire from the service; you just do it, and then you realize years later that it all works out in the end. I was still on terminal leave when I moved my family to a small village in northern Okinawa. I got a job as a contractor on base, and I had my requisite beard, 5.11 pants, and a surly attitude toward Mother Corps. Somewhere in that first year of watching a lot of sunsets, smoking cigars, and eating way too many Doritos, a vague notion formed in my mind that I was going to get a German Shepherd and name it Lucky. I’d never had a dog before, and I had no idea what I was doing. My Lucky dog showed me the way.
She taught me that she couldn’t stand any other animals, especially cats, of which we had two at the time. She taught our family to never leave her alone in the house with anything in the trash. She loved riding in the car with me and going for walks, but it was more of a constant tug of war until we got to an open field where she could chase a tennis ball. She was unbelievably fast, and it would take around twenty minutes of constant sprinting back and forth to wear off some of her endless energy.
She had come from a breeder who supplied K-9 dogs for the local police, so we had to register her with city hall and sign her up for a series of obedience classes, which she had no interest in completing. Her purpose was clear to me from day one; we were her tribe, and she protected us. She was relentless to outsiders but an 85-pound snuggle bunny with our kids.
The only time she really listened to me was when we moved to the Pacific Northwest. When I picked her up at the airport, she was utterly dejected from the travel. We had a beautiful scenic drive from Northern California to the small college town we moved to in Oregon. Lucky was happily staring out the window in the back seat and occasionally licking my ear to remind me she was there. It was the first time she really listened to me, so when we got to our new place, I used the opportunity to teach her the only trick she ever learned: how to play dead.
Like all newly retired Marines, I struggled trying to find my new purpose. In Oregon, for the first time in my life, I couldn’t get a job, so I took the only one available, working at the front desk of a Vet Center while I went back to college. I had gotten my bachelor’s a few years after I retired, but I still had time on the GI Bill, so I enrolled at the local community college to get a general two-year IT degree. I learned that I still hate math and I can’t stand code.
A local businessman who had served in Vietnam tried to help me get a job. When I showed him my resume, which was basically my last FITREP, and dripping with obscure acronyms, he said, “We’re going to have to take out everything that talks about weapons and infantry because local businesses don’t understand anything about that stuff, and those terms just sound too aggressive to the average hiring manager.”
Working at the Vet Center was a trip. I learned that, apparently, there were very few admin, supply, and motor-T folks in the military. It seemed like everybody who came through the front door was in the stack that took out Bin Laden. My Lucky dog was there through it all. She didn’t care that I could not understand anything in my computer science classes; she was just happy I was home. I can still see her hips shaking and her tail wagging, with her tongue hanging out, while she pranced on her paws and waited for the magic words, “You wanna go for a walk?” After she spun in circles multiple times, she would slip and slide across the wood floor as she raced to go out the back door to do our nightly walks. I vividly remember her always sitting on a chair facing the front window of our house. Our kids were usually playing out front, and my Lucky dog was ever vigilant.
As I was finishing my IT degree, I got a job with a local Information Security company and found myself doing some of the most fascinating work I’ve ever done. After completing my training and vetting, I became part of a unique team of people whose job was to try and break into banks, power companies, local government, law enforcement organizations, and well-known defense contractor organizations. I found the people I worked with to be unique and brilliant characters. They were also incredibly dedicated to their craft and earnest in their approach. I was soon flying all over the country, and I learned the easiest way to break into a highly secured organization is to walk in the front door with a fake ID and a good story. My Lucky dog was always waiting for me when I got back. I felt safe knowing she was watching over my family while I was gone.
I was drawn back to Okinawa and working for the Marine Corps again. My Lucky dog couldn’t fly right away because it was too hot at the time, so she stayed with good friends in Idaho for a few months. She loved running around the woods with them. When she arrived back in Okinawa, it broke my heart at first to see her because she had made another long trip not knowing what was happening, and she was sad. I promised her I would never make her move again. She had slowed down by then, but she was still strong and always waiting for me at the end of the day. We had a nightly ritual; I had a cigar on the back porch and decompressed from the day while my Lucky dog stayed by my side. She couldn’t wait to go for walks at the Kurashiki Dam, and I had so many peaceful moments watching her sleep on the couch.
When she got sick, we thought it was just an infection. I got home from work one day, and she was hiding in the corner. She couldn’t stand up, and her ears were pinned back in pain, but she was more worried about me. Her purpose had never wavered. She knew exactly what she had to do every day of her life. The next few weeks were a whirlwind of ups and downs. There was emergency surgery, followed by a confirmation of cancer that was all over her liver. Some days, she was good, and other days, she could barely move.
The night before her final day, we just knew. We made her as comfortable as possible, and the family stayed up to watch old videos of our time with Lucky. The next day, my trembling hands held her neck tight, and my tears coated her face as she died. She didn’t want to leave us even as she faded. I didn’t realize how much she had healed me until she was gone. Her complete dedication to me and my family was something I had taken for granted for almost ten years. Her sense of purpose has stayed with me.
It’s been 14 years since I retired from the Marine Corps, and I still have no idea what I’m doing. I’m just trying to be the best father and husband I can be. My purpose is clear, and I owe my Lucky dog for setting the example.
Lance Kurnal is a retired United States Marine.
Book Excerpt
The Adler Compound
Andy Barker
CHAPTER NINE – OPENING PANDORA’S BOX
Berlin, Germany — December — Morning
Mostafa Farokhzad preferred the quiet hours—the ones before administrators arrived, before interns clogged hallways, before diplomats wandered the upper floors pretending to understand science.
Down here—three levels beneath the government research center’s public façade—the world made sense. The air-lock hum. The filtered light. The antiseptic smell baked into the concrete. The narrow corridors built not for comfort, but containment.
He stepped into the prep room and shut the outer door behind him.
Silence; controlled, familiar.
He stripped down to disposable scrubs, movements efficient; methodical, ingrained.
Inner gloves. Socks—hood liner. Each seam checked twice.
Some of the younger techs joked they could suit up in under three minutes—idiots.
Rushing was for people who believed the system would forgive them.
Mostafa eased his legs into the BSL-4 suit, pulled the torso up, rotated the locking ring until it clicked, then slid his arms into the stiff sleeves with their heavy gloves. He lowered the positive-pressure hood over his head and sealed it in place. A moment later the umbilical line snapped to his hip with a hollow clack, feeding him a stream of purified air.
The world softened—
sounds muffled, breathing amplified,
the hiss of airflow constant in his ears.
He pressed the intercom.
“Farokhzad. Entry to Lab Four.”
“Lab Four, entry granted. Cycling.”
The inner door unlocked, he stepped into the air lock.
Negative pressure engaged.
Lights rolled from red to amber to green.
Then the second door opened, revealing his sanctuary.
BSL-4.
Berlin’s most classified room disguised inside its most boring building.
No windows, no paper, no personal effects.
Only stainless steel, reinforced glass, sealed hoods, and surfaces designed to show every speck of contamination.
He walked to his station.
The mice rustled in their cages when he approached—tiny claws on plastic.
He spared them only a glance.
They were data points, nothing more.
The components waited inside the isolation hood—clear vials of clear liquid. No smell.
No color, no warning.
That was the point.
He slid his gloved hands into the fixed gauntlets and began.
Measured dispenses, recorded dilutions, temperature logs.
Time stamps.
“Sample A-twelve, baseline…
Sample B-nine, aerosol vector trial…
Time zero at nine thirty-eight.”
His voice sounded hollow inside the hood, half devoured by the suit.
He checked environmental readouts, perfect.
Stable.
He moved to the cages, verifying tags against the protocol sheet sealed beneath glass.
Control animals, component “A” animals, component “B” animals.
No symptoms, no distress.
Separate, the pieces were harmless. Together, they rewrote the rules.
He secured the nebulizer, checked the seals, slid the exposure chamber into place over the designated cages.
“Exposure chamber sealed. Initiating combined-agent aerosol.”
He pressed the control, for a moment—nothing.
Then the first mouse staggered.
Mostafa watched with clinical detachment as the onset began:
loss of coordination, muscle failure, seizing limbs, rapid, shallow gasps; another collapsed, then another.
He checked the timer: exactly as projected.
He cut the aerosol, let the purge cycle run.
Logged every observation with the detached clarity of someone who had long ago separated emotion from outcome.
He moved through decontamination of instruments, sample preservation, and final notations, step by step, letting the rhythm of discipline center him.
Then—
as he reached for the recording sheet—
a glint caught his eye, left sleeve, upper forearm, a hole.
Small—perfectly circular.
Barely the size of a pencil tip.
His breath froze; impossible.
He lifted his arm slowly, rotating the suit under the hood’s lights, eyes narrowing behind the visor.
The hole was real.
His chest tightened. Every hair on his body prickled.
A cold spike ran from his spine down through his gut.
He stared at it—
not breathing, not moving,
just calculating.
It could be nothing—
a superficial abrasion,
a manufacturing defect, a scrape from a rack or bench.
Or it could be—
He felt the memory hit him like a blunt weapon.
Not a thought or a fear, but a flash.
A trench outside of Majnoon Islands
Warm blood pooling near his knees.
The smell—burnt lungs, ammonia, something ferrous and rotting.
Men dropping around him, hands clawing at their throats.
Vision tunneling, light bending.
The medic’s voice fading as the mask tore from his face.
He blinked the memory away, once, hard, no panic.
No screaming, no collapse, just action.
He reached down, grabbed the atropine/2-PAM chloride auto-injector from the emergency kit mounted on the wall, flipped the safety cap free with his thumb, lined it up—
—and drove it into his right thigh, hard enough the suit dented inward around the needle.
Click—hiss.
He held it in place, five seconds, six, seven.
Then he yanked it free, dropped it into the biohazard bin, and moved.
Not walked or hurried but just moved.
Mostafa slammed the decon-panel with the heel of his hand.
The door sealed behind him, locking shut with that heavy, final sound he always trusted — except today.
The overhead jets roared to life.
He didn’t wait for the system cycle. His hands were already tearing at the suit, ripping open the heavy outer seals, twisting the blue shell off his shoulders and down his arms. It hit the floor in a wet slap.
Next came the inner gloves, then the disposable scrubs.
Then the last thin layers worn beneath.
Everything—all of it.
He stripped down to bare skin with the urgency of a man who understood exactly how contamination traveled — and how little margin existed between safe and dead.
The second he was clear of fabric; he stepped directly into the flood.
The water hammered down on him in a relentless, punishing column — hot, then cold, then hot again as the system cycled through its programmed pattern. He scrubbed hard, hands running over every inch of his body with the precision of someone performing triage on himself.
Chest, arms, neck.
Face, hair, legs.
Over and over, no shortcuts, no hesitation.
He braced his palm against the tiled wall, his breathing sharp and uneven despite every effort to force it steady.
Scrub, rinse, scrub again.
The water mixed with memory — the trenches at Majnoon Islands, the quiet that wasn’t natural, the stillness before the shells came, teenage boys in salt-and-oil caked boots pretending they weren’t afraid.
He wasn’t in Berlin anymore.
He was seventeen again, lungs burning, the world tearing itself apart cell by cell.
The water kept coming.
He didn’t break, didn’t sob, didn’t panic.
He just stared forward — a thousand-yard emptiness carved into his face, the kind earned only by men who had survived the worst and learned never to speak of it.
His back hit the wall, and he slid down slowly until he sat on the tile, knees bent, water cascading over him like a storm he refused to flinch from.
He stayed like that until the shaking stopped.
Until discipline returned to his hands.
Until the world came back into focus.
Only then did he rise.
It was several minutes before his breathing evened.
Before the world stopped narrowing.
Before he convinced himself—
logically, clinically—
that he wasn’t contaminated, the hole had been superficial.
Cosmetic—meaningless.
But the risk had been real enough.
His pulse slowed.
He eventually shut off the water and stepped out of the bay, the last of the emergency cycle still echoing off the tiled walls. He reached for a clean stack of sterile towels and dried himself fully — arms, legs, torso, hair — until no moisture remained.
He dressed in fresh facility scrubs, the fabric clinging slightly to skin still warm from the shower, and slipped into the decontamination-approved sandals waiting by the door. Only then did he leave the bay.
He walked the quiet corridor back to his office, each step controlled; measured, his breathing steady once more.
He sat, opened the secure terminal, and entered his observations.
Clinical. Precise. Stripped of anything resembling emotion.
When the log was complete, he opened the encrypted outbound channel.
A blank message waited — the kind with no visible metadata, no subject lines, no trackable fingerprints.
He typed only what was necessary.
No flourish, no explanation, just confirmation.
Progress confirmed, compound behavior matches projections. Awaiting next directive.
He encrypted the message, watched it dissolve into unreadable cipher, and sent it through the line that officially did not exist.
The confirmation ping appeared.
He powered down the terminal, the screen going black in front of him.
Andy Barker is a retired Naval officer with 32 years of service, including time as a Fleet Marine Force Corpsman, an Independent Duty Corpsman supporting Special Operations Forces and Surface Forces, in addition to his role as the sole medical provider aboard submarines; and ultimately ending his career as a Nurse Corps Officer specializing in Emergency and Trauma Care. Andy’s career spans combat medicine, austere operational environments, independent medical decision-making, and frontline emergency care, where precision and accountability carried immediate consequences.
Barker is the author of The Adler Compound, a military thriller shaped directly by lived experience rather than abstraction or mythology.
After an initial self-publication, he spent four years completely rewriting the book to better reflect the realities of service and its aftermath.
Following its relaunch in February 2026, The Adler Compound reached the top five in two Amazon thriller categories and the top ten in a third, surpassing the total sales of its original edition within days. His writing prioritizes authenticity, technical accuracy, and the human toll of conflict, aiming to portray the realities of service without spectacle or simplification.
Andy lives in Missouri with his wife, two children, and his Service Dog Alma; a six-year veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom, who saved countless lives as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Military Working Dog.
This ends Volume 44, Edition 1, of the Lethal Minds Journal (01MARCH2026)
The window is now open for Lethal Minds’ forty-fifth volume, releasing April 02, 2026.
All art and picture submissions are due as PDFs or JPEG files to our email by midnight on 20 MARCH 2026.
All written submissions are due as 12-point font, double-spaced, Word documents to our email by midnight on 20 MARCH 2026.
lethalmindsjournal.submissions@gmail.com
Special thanks to the volunteers and team that made this journal possible.
My writing partner is a 50+ year veteran of military and intelligence field operations. He was diagnosed with asthma and a heart murmur at the age of four. He lied and finagled his medical records through various means for forty years while doing the toughest stuff out there. He was finally caught up about twelve years ago and his activities restricted.
Absolutely the wrong message to ban the person who is honest. A medical record can't measure the power of will.
Stunning and raw, as always