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Spec Ops Magazine, 8 The Green, Suite B, Dover, DE (2026)

09/09/2026

In 2004, during the Iraq War, 50 Cent flew into Camp Anaconda, one of the most dangerous bases in the country, nicknamed "Mortaritaville" because it was getting hit by mortar fire nearly every day. Located near Balad and officially known as Logistics Support Area Anaconda, it was one of the most frequently attacked American installations in the entire country, and reports say the camp had already taken a missile hit on the very day he arrived.

Just hours before he landed, an officer looked at him and told him straight, no BS, that he could die that day. He'd already survived being shot nine times in New York a few years earlier, so he decided to do the show anyway. Wearing a bulletproof vest, surrounded by military personnel, he walked out and opened the set with "What Up Gangsta."

The trip was part of a USO tour meant to boost morale during one of the more brutal stretches of the war, and by every account it did exactly that, a rapper at the absolute peak of his fame choosing to fly into a base most people were desperate to leave, because the guys stationed there deserved a night that felt like something other than incoming fire. A strange, memorable footnote in the long list of ways people found to support the troops during two decades of war.

09/09/2026

Soldiers of the U.S. 10th Special Forces Group in Beirut, Lebanon, 1983, during one of the most volatile and dangerous deployments of the entire decade. Officially, these Mobile Training Teams were there on a Foreign Internal Defense mission, helping stand up and modernize the Lebanese Army amid the country's brutal civil war, but the reality on the ground rarely stayed that clean. Green Berets found themselves pulled into ad hoc security roles around diplomatic facilities as fighting between Druze militias, the Lebanese Armed Forces, and other factions repeatedly spilled into the areas they were operating in, at one point providing security for two straight days while Druze fighters loyal to Walid Jumblatt exchanged fire nearby and eventually sought sanctuary inside the embassy itself.

The stakes of that entire deployment were laid bare on April 18, 1983, when a su***de bomber detonated a truck packed with 2,000 pounds of explosives at the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including 17 Americans, among them much of the CIA's Beirut station. It remains one of the deadliest attacks on any American diplomatic mission in history, and it was only the beginning. That October, a separate truck bombing struck the Marine barracks at Beirut International Airport, killing 241 American service members in a single morning, the deadliest single day for the Marine Corps since Iwo Jima.

Beirut in 1983 became the grim proving ground for a threat the United States hadn't fully reckoned with yet, the su***de truck bomb, and it reshaped how American forces and diplomatic missions secure themselves overseas to this day. The Green Berets who spent that year training a fractured army and improvising security under fire were living through the opening chapter of a threat the country would spend the next four decades fighting.

09/09/2026

Captured MP7s and Glocks photographed by Al-Shabaab after a failed French DGSE hostage rescue attempt. In 2009, two officers from France's external intelligence service, the DGSE, were seized in Somalia while working with forces of the Transitional Federal Government, posing as journalists and military trainers. One later escaped under mysterious circumstances. The other, Denis Allex, remained in captivity for more than three years.

On the night of January 11, 2013, France sent roughly 50 operators from the DGSE's highly secretive direct-action unit, Division Action, into Bulo Marer, a Shabaab-held town in Lower Shabelle, in an effort to finally free him. Six helicopters supported the assault, including Tiger attack helicopters launched from the Mistral. The raid went wrong almost immediately, a 45-minute firefight erupted, reinforcements poured in, and the operation collapsed. Two French operators were killed, one of them left behind on the ground and later shown in Shabaab propaganda photos. Allex himself was executed by his captors in the chaos. Roughly 17 Shabaab fighters and as many as eight civilians also died in the crossfire.

Al-Shabaab wasted no time turning the failure into propaganda, posting photos of the recovered weapons, including these MP7s and Glocks left behind in the fighting, on their official Twitter account within days. President Hollande himself acknowledged publicly that the operation did not succeed.

It's an episode that's seldom discussed outside France, which is unfortunate, because it's one of the starkest reminders in recent memory of exactly how badly a hostage rescue can go, even for one of the most secretive and capable units in the world.

09/09/2026

An American Air Force officer was shot down over Iran. Wounded and alone, with the enemy closing in, he spent 50 hours trying to survive as he waited for a rescue. For the first time, he tells his story. This Sunday on CBS 60 Minutes.

09/08/2026

Former DEVGRU operators DJ Shipley and Cole Fackler during an Iraq deployment with SEAL Team 10 in 2009. The two met in BUD/S in 2003, graduated together, and were both assigned to SEAL Team 10 in Virginia Beach, deploying to Iraq together three separate times before both earning their place at the Command. Neither man went it alone getting there, and neither man went it alone leaving either, both were eventually medically retired due to injuries sustained across their combined 17-plus years of deployments and training.

That bond didn't end with the uniform. In 2019 they co-founded GBRS Group together, DJ as Chief Training Officer and Cole as CEO, building it into one of the most respected names in tier one adjacent tactical training and gear, backed by a combined 34-plus years of special operations experience between the founders. As Shipley has put it, working in high-performance teams to achieve a common goal is a universal formula for success, whether that team is clearing a compound in Iraq or building a company from nothing.

Twenty-plus years of friendship, from BUD/S class to Team 10 to the Command to business partners, the kind of bond this community produces that outlasts the uniform entirely. Respect to both.

09/08/2026

Among the most unforgettable images of the Iraq War, the photo of 1st Sgt. Brad Kasal being helped from Fallujah's "Hell House" by LCpl Chris Marquez and LCpl Dane Shaffer on November 13, 2004, during the Second Battle of Fallujah. Despite being critically wounded, still gripping his 9mm Beretta in one hand and his K-Bar in the other, he maintains flawless trigger discipline, finger straight along the frame, exactly as trained, even after everything his body had just been through.

Kasal was providing overwatch nearby when he heard heavy gunfire erupt and Marines came pouring out of a house, pinned down inside by an unknown number of insurgents. He didn't hesitate. He joined the squad making entry, killed an insurgent at point-blank range in the first room, and pushed forward, finding a wounded Marine, Private First Class Alex Nicoll, in the next. As the insurgents opened up with AK-47 fire, both Marines were hit repeatedly. When the enemy dropped grenades to finish them, Kasal used his own body to shield Nicoll from the blast, absorbing more than 40 pieces of hot shrapnel on top of seven 7.62mm gunshot wounds to his legs. He kept fighting anyway, killing multiple insurgents with his pistol, and refused medical attention or extraction until every other wounded Marine had been treated first, shouting encouragement to the men still clearing the house around him. By the time he reached a trauma surgeon, he'd lost roughly 60 percent of his blood.

Doctors operated on him more than 20 times over the following year, repairing the gunshot wounds and 44 pieces of embedded shrapnel. He stayed in the Marine Corps for nearly 34 years total, retiring with a reputation for genuine modesty about a moment that's since been immortalized in a bronze sculpture outside Camp Lejeune's Warrior Hope and Care Center. Marines still call this photo No Man Left Behind, and the trigger discipline in it, more than the blood, is the detail they point to first. Semper Fi.

09/08/2026

Mario Romero, former Navy SEAL, our Navy SMU veteran, NASA diver, and aspiring astronaut. Romero's story starts about as far from a typical astronaut's résumé as it gets, by his own account he barely graduated high school, and everything that followed was built on refusing to let that beginning define where he ended up.

He spent over eight years as a Navy SEAL, augmented into the Command's Red Squadron, deploying to Ramadi during some of the hardest fighting of the Iraq War, the same city and era that shaped Jonny Kim, whose own SEAL-to-astronaut story we've covered on this page. Romero has spoken openly about praising Kim's humility, a kind of quiet respect between two men who've walked strikingly similar paths years apart.

After leaving the Teams, he enrolled at Columbia University and earned a Bachelor's degree in Pure Mathematics, then worked his way into NASA as a diver, part of the crew supporting astronaut training and spacewalk simulation in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab, all while pursuing his own application to the astronaut corps. As he's put it himself, working at NASA is the thing every kid keeps in the back of their mind, but what he actually wanted, first, was to be a SEAL. He got both.

A story built entirely on refusing self-imposed limits, from barely finishing high school to a Red Squadron deployment in Ramadi to a mathematics degree to training divers for astronauts, with his own trip to space still the goal ahead of him.

09/08/2026

Marcus Luttrell on the set of Lone Survivor alongside actors Mark Wahlberg and Taylor Kitsch during production in 2012. Wahlberg played Luttrell in the film, while Kitsch played Lieutenant Michael Murphy, the officer who moved into open ground under enemy fire to make the call that saved Luttrell's life and cost Murphy his own, earning him the Medal of Honor posthumously.

Luttrell wasn't a distant consultant on this one, he was embedded in nearly every stage of the production. Before filming began, he put Wahlberg, Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, and Ben Foster through roughly a month of genuine training, and by his own account he and the other SEALs on set didn't cut them any slack, putting them through it fast with a brutal learning curve. Each actor had his own assigned SEAL working alongside him throughout the 43-day shoot, and Luttrell was present for most of the filming itself, stepping away only occasionally.

Director Peter Berg built the screenplay directly from Luttrell's own eyewitness account in his memoir, cross-referenced against autopsy and incident reports from Operation Red Wings, the mission we've covered in depth on this page, the ambush that killed Murphy, Danny Dietz, and Matthew Axelson, and the sixteen more Americans lost in the failed rescue attempt aboard Turbine 33. At the New York premiere, Mohammad Gulab, the Afghan villager who sheltered Luttrell after the ambush, made his first-ever appearance in an American movie theater, standing alongside the families of the men who never came home. A film built from the inside out, by the one man who lived it. Never forgotten.

09/07/2026

Navy SEAL divers spent four months conducting a covert operation to clear Iranian mines from the Strait of Hormuz, according to a Financial Times report published this weekend. The mission ran mostly at night, amid ongoing exchanges of strikes between the United States and Iran in and around one of the most strategically vital waterways on earth.

The scale of the problem was genuine. The International Maritime Organization estimated roughly 80 mines had been laid along major shipping lanes since the war began in February, deterring commercial vessels from transiting the strait for months. Rather than relying primarily on traditional Navy minesweepers, which were reportedly stationed elsewhere in the Indian and Pacific oceans, the operation leaned on small teams of divers working from inflatable-hulled boats, paired with unmanned surface vessels and underwater robots towing high-resolution sonar arrays to scan the seabed and pinpoint threats without putting crews at unnecessary risk.

The truly dangerous part came after a mine was found. A diver, or in some cases a robotic system, had to physically approach the device and attach an explosive charge to destroy it, precise, deliberate, and unforgiving work with essentially no margin for error, conducted underwater and in darkness against ordnance specifically designed to sink ships. As one mine-warfare expert put it, these forces are inherently vulnerable, slow-moving and lightly defended by nature of the job itself. Remarkably, no U.S. casualties have been reported from the operation.

President Trump announced last week that all mines in the strait's international waters had been cleared, a claim the U.S. military has since confirmed, though maritime security advisers remain more confident about the waters near Oman than the strait as a whole. Iran's Foreign Ministry has dismissed the American announcement as propaganda. Whatever the political dispute, the divers who spent four months doing this work in the dark, one mine at a time, did it quietly and came home.

09/07/2026

Most people who know the Battle of Mogadishu remember two names, Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart, the operators from America’s Army SMU who made their last stand at the crash site. The movie Black Hawk Down made them household names, and for good reason, they were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor for it. Almost no one talks about the third sniper who was on that same helicopter. His name is Brad Halling.

On October 3, 1993, Halling was aboard Super Six-Two alongside Gordon and Shughart, providing sniper overwatch as the mission unraveled below them. When the crew chief was shot through the arm, Halling took over the helicopter’s minigun to keep the aircraft’s fire support running. Twice Gordon requested permission to insert on the ground at the Super Six-Four crash site to protect the wounded crew trapped there. Twice command said no. On the third request, they got the green light, jumping out while Halling stayed behind on the gun.

It wasn’t long before Super Six-Two took its own RPG hit, severing Halling’s left leg. With his own limb gone, he improvised a tourniquet out of another soldier’s belt and a screwdriver to keep himself from bleeding out, and kept the aircraft functioning until it made it back to base. Gordon and Shughart never made it back. Halling did, and he’s spent the decades since as one of the earliest amputee soldiers to fight to stay in the fight, paving the way for other wounded warriors to keep serving after losing a limb. Two names became legend. The third one kept flying with a screwdriver and a belt holding his leg together.

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