For his service with the Household Cavalry during a deployment to Afghanistan in 2013, British Army Major Al Pickthall was ultimately awarded the Military Cross, a decoration presented by the United Kingdom and other Commonwealth countries for acts of "exemplary gallantry” in combat. In this episode, Al recounts the details of that deployment and the actions for which he was awarded the Military Cross, as well as his education at Sandhurst and Yale University and his thoughts about topics such as leadership, military writing, and his recent visit to the United States Military Academy at West Point.

While serving as a company executive officer with the 1st Battalion of the 75th Ranger Regiment in 2016, Ryan Crayne and his company were training at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center when they received emergency overseas deployment orders. Just days later, and after a herculean logistical effort, Ryan and his fellow Rangers were in Afghanistan and engaged in a major clearing operation against ISIS. He joins this episode to share the story of that operation, explaining how high-performing units leverage leadership principles such as mutual trust, disciplined initiative, and prudent risk to enable extraordinary accomplishments in training and on the battlefield.

In 2016, Brennan Deveraux was deployed to a small base in Baghdad called Union III. An artillery officer, Brennan worked in a small group known as a strike cell, where he was the theater-level rocket artillery liaison for Operation Inherent Resolve. Over the course of the deployment, he fired more than five hundred HIMARS rockets in support of Iraqi security forces as they fought to wrest back control of vast swathes of territory seized by ISIS two years earlier. In this episode, he shares the story of one of those rockets.

Brennan has also written about this story and others in a forthcoming book. The book is one example of the type of professional military writing that is undergoing a rejuvenation with the backing of the Harding Project, an initiative that was launched one year ago this week. For listeners who would like to contribute to the Army’s professional military discourse, a special edition of Military Review has just been published, dedicated to the Harding Project’s work, detailing the importance of professional writing, and offering encouragement and guidance on how to get started.