War veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) should have validated MedicAlert bracelets stating that they have a combat-related illness, said the decorated survivor of an RPG attack and subsequent firefight. Sean Teal, a wounded veteran who served four eventful tours in Afghanistan and earned the military’s second-highest award for valour, struggled with physical pain and mental health issues until he was ushered out of the army in 2014. Then his problems got worse. “It’s hard to get sympathy or empathy from people who can’t relate.” He said civilian doctors unfamiliar with his experience overseas and the stresses of combat all but ignored his military medical files and perpetuated a cycle of treatment that eventually rendered him a “slug,” unable to eat, sleep or...

The last thing Corporal Sean Teal said to Warrant Officer Rick Nolan was: “Do you want a Life Saver?” Before Nolan could reply, a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) fired by a Taliban fighter struck the windshield of their G-Wagon and killed him. Teal, driving in the seat right next to him, was concussed but functional. “All of a sudden, wham, there was this huge flash and I was smashed back in my seat,” Teal recalled in an interview with Legion Magazine. “Everything just went black. All you could smell was burning plastic and burning hair and it was like there was no air. “I went to hit the pedals and there was nothing. It was like the vehicle just shut off. Then there was this barrage of machine-gun fire coming in.” They call it “the mad minute,” those first moments of an ambush ...

The sinking of U-94 by an American aircraft and HMCS Oakville off Cuba on the night of Aug. 27-28, 1942, brought to a dramatic end the submarine’s relatively long and eventful service in the Kriegsmarine. Commissioned in August 1940, U-94 had sunk 26 Allied ships in two years, totalling 141,852 gross register tons, under the successive command of two Knight’s Cross recipients, Kapitänleutnant Herbert Kuppisch and Oberleutnant zur See Otto Ites. But a year before the tide of battle shifted in the U-boat war, the interrogations of U-94’s 26 survivors told other stories—of joyful encounters with porpoises the crew at first mistook for torpedoes; gifts of music and money from German corporations; and near-fatal sabotage engineered by Polish slaves during a refit.   The 29-sh...

New evidence uncovered long after a prehistoric cemetery was discovered in Sudan suggest that its inhabitants weren’t killed in what was believed to be one of humankind’s earliest known battles but may instead have died over the course of protracted warfare. Furthermore, the study by paleoanthropologist Isabelle Crevecoeur of the University of Bordeaux, France, and her team of anthropologists, geochemists and prehistorians suggests the ongoing series of raids, ambushes and other violence was likely attributable to an issue all too familiar to 21st-century society: climate change. The cemetery at Jebel Sahaba was first excavated in the 1960s, but the new study, published May 27 in the journal Scientific Reports, says scientists at the time missed evidence that some of the 61 skeletons...

War, violence and so-called natural disasters, many related to climate change, forced 40.5 million people to relocate within their own countries in 2020—the most in more than a decade, the world authority on such movements reported on May 20. By year’s end, 55 million people were living in internal displacement. At 30.7 million, disasters accounted for the most displacements, the bulk of them (30 million) weather-related, said the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre, which has tracked and analyzed the forced relocations of populations since 1998. In assembling its annual report, the Geneva-based centre found that almost 10 million people had been internally displaced by armed conflict (7.5 million), violence (1 million) and other threats (1.2 million) in 2020. By year’s end, 55...