The War Horse
Nonprofit journalism about military service, war, and its impact.
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Latest posts
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Death Terrifies Me. So I Asked My Grandfather, a War Veteran, How He Faced It
Watching my mother’s glossy wooden casket covered with yellow roses being lowered into the ground when I was only 10 taught me death’s brutal weight. Ever since, I’ve struggled to understand how people can move willingly toward it. A few years ago, my neighbor invited me to her…
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Their Fathers Served in Vietnam. Why Won’t VA Cover Their Birth Defects?
Scott Davidson has always liked a challenge. This year, the 46-year-old ultramarathoner ran 100 continuous miles through his home state of Nevada, racing over roads and trails through the wind and darkness. He did it on two prosthetic devices. Davidson was born with severe birth…
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Salaries, Food, and Sumo Wrestling Suits. What I Learned Paying the Bills for War
The midsummer heat reflected off the flightline at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina. It was the summer of 1990 and the beginning of Operation Desert Shield. The entire base was in full deployment mode, with planes forming a long line for departure, sequenced by…
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Children Are Falling From Military Housing Windows. Why Did the Pentagon Change How It Protects Them?
It was Jason English’s job as a Naval intelligence officer to mitigate risk. The work suited him. He felt like he was wired to protect the people and country he loved. So when he became a father, English cruised the aisles of Home Depot and Babies “R” Us looking for ways to make…
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The Forgotten Marine Corps Disaster That Turned Camp Fuji Into a Firestorm
On Oct. 19, 1979, more than 1,200 Marines and sailors were sheltering from a powerful typhoon at Camp Fuji, Japan, when fuel spilled from storage bladders positioned uphill from their living quarters. The fuel ignited, and walls of flame tore through the camp. Seventy service…
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In Afghanistan, I Put the Mission Ahead of Everything — Even a Lump in My Breast
I was lying on my rack in a crowded tent in Afghanistan, watching an old episode of Project Runway on my computer. I rested my hands on my chest and felt something unfamiliar through my shirt: a lump in my left breast that had seemingly appeared overnight. It was hard, immobile,…
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The Pentagon Wants to ‘Optimize’ Service Members. Will Testosterone Make Them Better Warfighters?
Pete Hegseth leaned in toward the camera. Since the early days of his tenure as secretary of defense, the former Fox News host had been posting clips on social media for the public. But this time, with an amber glow illuminating the American flag in the background, he spoke…
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I Was a Homeless Woman Veteran. The Programs Meant to Help Weren’t Built for Survivors Like Me
I spent too many restless nights in a hot, wood-paneled room in my parents’ double-wide, taking self-soothing shots of five-buck Paul Masson brandy, and wondering how in the hell I ended up there. My financial stability took a hit when I walked away from six years of workplace…
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They Served in Asia and Came Home. Decades Later, the Kids They Left Behind Are Searching for Them
Bernardino Mijares has spent most of his life searching for his father. For many years, all the 33-year-old tricycle taxi driver knew was the name his mother had told him—which later was found to be incorrect—and that his father had served in the Philippines with the U.S. Navy.…
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A Military Man Straight Out of Central Casting. I Got to Know ‘Dadmiral’ in His Final Days
As my father, a Navy pilot, neared the end of his life, we watched “Top Gun: Maverick” together. “It was good,” he commented. “I’m better.” That was my father, Richard Chester Macke, a Naval Academy graduate whose career progressed from test pilot to being nominated by President…
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Fortress Guam: The Environmental Cost of Preparing For War With China
Editor’s Note: This is the second part of a two-part investigation. Read the first story, “The Pesticide Papers,” here. CHamoru is the officially adopted spelling in Guam. This project was produced in collaboration with The Margin and The War Horse. Life felt peaceful when…
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War Taught Me to Read a Room. My PTSD Service Dog Does It Better
Being a Marine and later an international aid and human rights worker taught me how to read a room. Vietnam. Beirut. Somalia. Bosnia. Rwanda. Iraq. Afghanistan. Survival depended on noticing what other people missed. The shift in a crowd’s weight, the change in a voice, the…
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The Pesticide Papers: Guam Residents Feared the Military Was Poisoning Them. New Records Reveal Decades of Toxic Contamination
Editor’s Note: This story was produced in partnership with The Margin, an independent, nonprofit newsroom dedicated to investigative and data-driven reporting on environmental and climate justice. Subscribe for free here. On a typically humid day on Guam in September 2025,…
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I Still Have Hundreds of Texts From the Fall of Kabul. They Remind Me of the Promises We Broke
The message came from an Afghan man who had worked closely with the U.S. State Department: “I have also moved to another place today because of fear. I’m very tired of my life because cannot handle anymore running and keeping safe, my kids and wife.” The Taliban had captured his…
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Hegseth Made the Fitness Test Harder for Women in Combat Roles. Most Female Marines Are Passing
When Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world to Quantico, Virginia, last September, he delivered a blunt message: Things were changing fast in the newly renamed Department of War. “No more division, distraction, or gender…
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The Global War on Terrorism Is Over—Except for the Veterans Who Fought It
This month marks 25 years since the attack on Sept. 11, which started the Global War on Terrorism. A quarter century. I have three kids who weren’t even alive for any of it. To them, it’s just a chapter in a history book. For many, a war that shaped my life has faded into the…
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They Served Through America’s Post-9/11 Wars. 25 Years Later, What Did That Service Mean?
If not for what happened on Sept. 11, 2001, Valeria Casillas probably would not have joined the military. But in the surge of patriotism following deadly terrorist attacks on New York City and outside Washington, D.C., she saw service as a chance to give back to the country…
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Jungles, Woods, and Deserts: The Army Was a Passport to the Wilderness I Loved
The life-affirming embrace of the wilderness has always filled me with wonder, its green arms making me feel more vital and connected with every plant, bug, and scurrying creature. My father was a pilot, and I spent my formative years on Air Force bases overseas. In Japan, I was…
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VA Probe Opened in Response to The War Horse Coverage
The Department of Veterans Affairs opened an Inspector General probe in February in response to a War Horse investigation alleging that veterans were being cut off from one-on-one therapy at VA medical centers. In an August 2025 investigation and December follow-up, War Horse…
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Where the Pentagon Can’t Go, a Small Nonprofit Searches for America’s War Dead
The four Filipino archaeologists knelt shoulder to shoulder in a trench only slightly larger than a toddler’s sandbox, shaving away paper-thin layers of earth and filling buckets with soil beneath a blazing early afternoon sun on the Philippine island of Mindanao. A few feet…