Right now, future Medal of Honor recipient Kyle Carpenter is holding an AMA-style session over at the Marines Facebook page, inviting users to send in their questions over the next hour so he can answer them in real time. Carpenter will receive the military’s highest honor Thursday for shielding a friend from a live grenade in 2012. Why is this incredibly cool? First, Carpenter will be one of only two living Marine Corps Medal of Honor recipients from the post 9/11 era. This is a big piece of Marine Corps history. Second, hearing from a living hero of this caliber…

Conservative commentator and author Oliver North is making waves this morning with a provocative tweet. The decorated former Marine lieutenant colonel, perhaps best known for his role in the Iran-Contra scandal in the latter half of the 1980s, sent out to his 20,000 followers a picture of himself sending documents into a giant shredder. [HTML1] The image is an allusion to Iran-Contra. North publicly admitted to shredding documents related to his work in Iran, including the covert sale of weapons to that country. The incident would eventually lead to the end of his military career in 1988. But North has…

Above the debate churning around the Bowe Bergdahl saga seems to be the notion that the U.S. should always seek to bring every service member home. Not so fast, says one former commandant. In an appearance this weekend on Fox News, retired Gen. James T. Conway talked about the recently recovered soldier and all the context surrounding his return to the U.S. Bergdahl had been in the hands of the Haqqani network of the Taliban ever since he had wandered off base five years ago. Reports and evidence suggest he left of his own will, investigations have yet to determine…

In her new book “Hard Choices,” former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton reportedly claims there were Marines guarding the U.S. embassy in Tripoli at the time of the infamous Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya–a statement that appears to contradict the sworn testimony of senior officers. The book, due out tomorrow, dedicates a full chapter to Benghazi, which has become a symbolic event for many characterizing the perceived failures of the current administration. Four Americans were killed in those attacks as the Defense Department scrambled to deploy a Marine Fleet Antiterrorism Security Team from Rota,…

The word is out: Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has nominated Gen. Joseph Dunford to be the 36th Commandant of the Marine Corps. But before you try to follow him on Twitter, watch out: there are lots of accounts out there using his image to trap unsuspected users in “phishing” scams and “romance hoaxes.” On Twitter alone, I counted ten different accounts using images of the real Gen. Joseph Dunford. Some include snippets of his biography, and some tweet bizarre messages at other users asking them to email an account so they can begin a friendship. All of them have fewer…