Benjamin Stuart Reed

05/31/2026

It is a tragedy that these videos exist.
And this is not the first time I've posted something about how Russians enact their form of justice on soldiers. Some Russian simp is going to state that the justifications for this and well...

How do I put this? It does not show discipline. It does not show justice. It does not show a bunch of XYZ comparisons in contrast I could make but it does show that this country has no value to the discussion of human rights.

05/31/2026

A video circulating online appears to show a Russian soldier executing a Ukrainian prisoner of war. If authentic, it is a war crime. At the same time, we live in an era where synthetic media is becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish from reality. Videos deserve scrutiny, especially when they confirm what we already want to believe.

In my forthcoming memoir, War Tourist: A Reckoning, with Dog, I spend a great deal of time thinking about the kinds of men who commit atrocities. The uncomfortable question was never whether I could recognize a war criminal. The uncomfortable question was whether, under the right conditions, I could become one.

My conclusion is not flattering.

I do not emerge from those pages convinced of my own virtue. War strips away many of the stories people tell about themselves. It narrows the world. It rewards aggression, punishes hesitation, and turns other human beings into obstacles, threats, coordinates, uniforms. The men who commit atrocities are often monsters. The more disturbing truth is that many begin as ordinary men.

That understanding has made me more cautious whenever I discuss war crimes. Condemnation is easy. Understanding the machinery that produces them is harder.

Many people know me through the controversy surrounding Chosen Company. I made mistakes during that period. Some of them significant. My handling of several situations was poor, and I have no interest in pretending otherwise. The book is not an attempt to settle scores or rehabilitate my image. If anything, it is an effort to examine my own conduct with the same scrutiny I have applied to others.

Chosen Company occupies only a small part of the story. The larger subject is the system that creates men willing to cross oceans and enter other people's wars. Masculinity. Violence. Belonging. Status. Trauma. The strange allure of conflict itself. The old idée fixe that somewhere beyond the horizon there exists a test capable of revealing who a man really is.

Or, as the French might put it: plus je me jugeais exceptionnel, plus je découvrais que j'étais ordinaire. The more exceptional I believed myself to be, the more ordinary I became.

05/30/2026

Sometimes the stories just write themselves.
Candice Owens shilling for Russia.
Nick Fuentes calling her out.
Laura loomer finally getting with the program.

What are you guys think?

05/28/2026

05/27/2026

Pete Hegseth's pastor believes Catholic servicemembers practice idolatry that a properly ordered Protestant republic would suppress. Roughly a quarter of the U.S. military is Catholic. Hegseth has not been asked, in public, whether he agrees.

JFK gave the Houston speech in 1960 to answer questions like these before he had the office. Hegseth already has the office. The questions have not been asked.

New piece on the Substack. Link in bio.

05/27/2026

Regret the tattoo, but it was a valid choice.

At 4:31 he calls me a VA scammer. At 5:36 he calls the fraud line on camera.
The rating is for PTSD, among other things. The paperwork substantiates military sexual trauma. Members of my platoon held me down. I begged the NCO to stop. He did not.
I have not said this in public before. He gave me the reason.
At 1:11 he says I have tattoos of units I was not in. I was in the Norman Brigade, which fell under the UDA. Check my letter of recommendation.
At 4:00 he says I posted stolen footage with operational value. I posted a video with no operational value to a private Instagram of around a hundred people, almost all family. He was the exception. I was drunk. I wanted a backup. Google Drive would have made more sense. I apologized to O'Leary the next morning.
At 4:18 he says I doxed fellow soldiers. He means Samberg. The information was already public. Samberg pleaded guilty to x counts of domestic violence in Australia. One concerned a child under six months.
He also says I gave Russian assets locations of Ukrainian bases. I did not. He says I threatened to. I did. I sent that message to Ryan O'Leary at three in the morning after months of his men harassing my family and sending death threats. I blocked him and went to sleep. FBI flew from Warsaw to Kraków and asked me about it. They left. No charges. Eighteen months later, no charges.
At 2:59 he says there is audio of me admitting to stealing an optic. He has not produced the audio. I lent the optic to Joel. We kept no tabs. He knew I was a mensch. I donated it when I left Chosen.

There's a few more other things but context is needed. Or it will be omitted entirely to strengthen a narrative

Make me a real apologizing and I stop.

Behind him, the locks entered the world gradually, with the quiet authority of natural law. The signal decayed into a kind of electronic weather; familiar rooms collapsing inward, their old désinvolture replaced by corridor, by narrowing, by the slow emergence of another shape in the dark where the exits used.

05/25/2026

War Tourist: A Reckoning, with Dog.

A man goes to a foreign war. The book is about everything else.

Male sexuality, Hierarchy and Class. The structures we inherit and the ones we build to hide inside. Dating, status, the small economies of who gets seen and who doesn't. What a man is actually chasing when he says he's chasing a cause.

The war is the narrative engine and is not the subject.

Chosen Company sits at the center of the fourth act as a crucible. I render them honestly. I give the counter-argument to my own thesis as fairly as I can. The reader makes the call.

After that, the book turns inward. A man unravels. He interrogates his own masculinity and what it has cost him. He names what he has spent and what he cannot get back.

The dog is the throughline. The dog is the moral architecture.

Agents of the most respected literary agencies in New York have read the manuscript or substantial portions of it. (Redacted) nearly acquired the previous draft. I would not be in those rooms if I were verbose.

Azreal: for the people in the chat with you who said no one will read it. I rendered them in the book honestly. The reader will decide.

05/20/2026

This photograph appeared in Fox News in the summer of 2022, written by Michael Lee. I was trying to target a conservative, MAGA leaning audience with an info operation. That's the bit of my braggadocio here. A subsequent one was set up by a fixer under another pseudonym for La Repubblica.

My face was blurred and my name withheld. I could have claimed the article as my own small morceau of wartime prestige, but vanity was already consuming enough of my attention, and anonymity seemed, for once, the more honest arrangement.

The book begins with a battle I was too afraid to join.

From there it moves backward and forward through the places where I kept trying to discover what sort of man I was: triad gambling rooms in Hong Kong, the Belarus uprising, Brazil, Thailand, where I fought a kickboxing match against an opponent who appeared to possess an unexpectedly generous sense of sportsmanship, and finally Ukraine, where the questions became less theoretical.

There are dogs, women, money, and a great many decisions that do not improve under retrospective inspection. There are men in the Norman Brigade, Legion and Chosen Company whose conduct I examine with the same froideur I apply to my own. In several cases, placed under similar pressure, I suspect I would have done exactly as they did.

This is not a memoir in which the author emerges burnished by war. It is an accounting.

Whether the balance falls in my favor is left to the reader.

The only assertion I will fight is that I did not abandon my dog & the VA paperwork proved you wrong. The one thing you really lack is sangfroid. I left your name out. It was keeping with your stature.

War Tourist: A Reckoning, with Dog.
The third version of the manuscript will be available by the end of August.

This is not a score settling memoir but I encourage everybody that wants to settle their score to comment.

A professional editing team will be done with it by then.

I still have a door open with a Big 5 publisher and if any agents are interested contact me. .

05/19/2026

I would take his stated concerns more seriously as ethical objections if he had ever shown comparable outrage over Russian war crimes in Ukraine or over Hamas's massacre in Israel on October 7.

He has not.

The organizing principle of his platform is opposition to the Atlantic order and to the political and security architecture of the West. That is the consistent through line.

In this video, he is doing what experienced polemicists often do when the implications of their position become uncomfortable: hedging, qualifying, and clearing his throat. Nothing more.

On a separate note, my forthcoming memoir, a brutally self-indicting account of war, addiction, and the structures of masculinity, is nearing its final round of editing and is now open for literary representation.

War Tourist: A Reckoning, with Dog

That comma does all the work it needs.

05/15/2026

Trump is going to meet Xi. I won't pretend to know what gets traded, but Taiwan and Iran will be on the table.

The West plates a deconstructed bouillabaisse and asks the room what they think. China sets down a bowl of century egg and waits for the room to acquire the taste.

You could write a long history of what Taiwan has been to China, and what it might become. Set the history aside for a moment and look at proximity and scale. Beijing does not treat the island's status as an open question. It treats reunification as a settled aim, and the asymmetry of stakes between a regional power at its own shoreline and a global power eight thousand miles away is the fact every projection has to start from.

For the Western order, Taiwan reads as non-negotiable too. I'd argue we quietly understand there is an expiration date on that. If an invasion comes soon, we have already overplayed the hand. We are still fighting in the desert three decades on. For electoral reasons, and because of the constraints a democracy places on sustained war, a great-power conflict is something to be deferred at nearly any cost.

There is a harder debate underneath this, and it belongs on Substack. Self-determination and territorial integrity are both foundational principles of the international system, and they contradict each other. That is why Kosovo, Catalonia, Kurdistan, and even the American founding get settled by power. Idealism can only go so far.

So the honest framing is simply a matter of pragmatism. Defend the sphere of influence while it still holds, because it remains aligned with the order we live inside. But concessions will be made, or war will come from refusing them. Those are the options. Pretending there is a third is how you sleepwalk into the second.

Everyone at that table is going to eat. The only question is who still has an appetite when the plates come.

So I'll ask you. When the saffron, the century egg, and the cheeseburger are all on one table, whose plate are you actually reaching for?

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