Graeme Wood

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12 August 2011 • 6:16 pm 0

Wojtek, Soldier Bear

Originally appeared in The Daily.

In November 1947, after five years of service, the Polish army discharged a soldier by the name of Wojtek at the rank of corporal. Wojtek’s record had its moments of distinction, including heroism under fire in the brutal battle against the Nazis at Monte Cassino, Italy. But overall, it was blemished with insubordination, including drunkenness, theft of women’s clothing, and attempted murder. For another soldier, these crimes would have meant a court-martial, but the army let them slide, because Corporal Wojtek was a 500-pound brown bear.
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Filed under: Daily, , , ,

10 May 2010 • 4:12 am 0

Back to the Afghan Future

Anup Kaphle and I reported last year from Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan.  We’ve published a piece on the British Army Gurkhas here, in The Weekly Standard.

Filed under: Weekly Standard, , ,

8 April 2010 • 2:35 pm 1

Joseph Kony’s Hike to, and from, Hell

The Lord’s Resistance Army has been kidnapping, brainwashing, and murdering unlucky adolescents in a remote corner of the Central African Republic.  The Ugandan military is trailing the LRA, sometimes killing them and sometimes not.

Click through to read my report for The National on the world’s most technologically outmatched insurgency.

Filed under: National, , , ,

1 September 2009 • 6:44 pm 0

Bovine Intervention

An article on dairy training in Iraq.  September 2009 Atlantic.

SINCE MID-2009, Lockie Gary has lived part-time on a Marine base in Fallujah and led a series of seminars that aim to train insurgents’ widows to become milkmaids. On this hot June day, he is in a makeshift classroom in a rural technical school, addressing five quiet but curious students. Cows and humans have many of the same needs, Gary tells his students, and when cows are stressed, they give less milk. “The same things that cause you stress will stress your cows,” he says, and waits for an interpreter to translate. “What stresses you?” Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: Atlantic Monthly, , ,

11 August 2009 • 6:49 pm 0

The Lost World

I spent much of this summer with Canadian, Afghan, British, and US forces in southern Afghanistan. Here are some of the resulting dispatches.

Filed under: Atlantic Monthly, , ,

10 July 2009 • 11:40 am 0

In the Graveyard of Empires

A review of Seth G. Jones’s In the Graveyard of Empires, in the Barnes & Noble Review.

Filed under: Barnes & Noble Review, , , ,

30 June 2009 • 2:15 am 0

Leaving Iraq

Over at The Atlantic, I wrote a cycle about returning to Iraq in the run-up to the US withdrawal from Iraqi cities.

Filed under: Atlantic Monthly, , ,

22 January 2009 • 5:18 pm 0

Law and Disorder

Originally published in Abu Dhabi’s The National.

At the entrance to the Afghan police and military base in Zhari district, half a dozen wrecked police trucks sit in a small dirt lot. As a first sight greeting visitors to the base, they are a poor recruitment tool for new policemen. The most intact truck is missing its windscreen and a door, and has caked blood on one seat; it will never drive again. The worst off is a twisted clump of metal, scorched so badly that any blood would probably have cooked away in the fire that followed the initial blast of the roadside bomb that did it in. Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under: National, , ,

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