The Havok Journal | Military & Veteran News, Commentary, Culture

• Mondegreens, and Other Things You Didn’t Know March 18, 2026
  Language is a fragile thing. We like to pretend it’s precise, orderly, and governed by rules, but in reality it’s held together by context, habit, and a lot of wishful thinking. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the phenomenon known as the mondegreen. If you’ve ever confidently sung along to a song only to […]
  Charles Faint
• Where Duty Turns to Doubt March 18, 2026
  Dearest Mom, The hardest thing about writing these letters is the fact that I can’t really talk about anything I do. It makes for rather dry material, and often enough I try to write something and find it too poor a product to call my own. But one thing I can write about is my […]
  Special Guest
• Battling PTS: Choose Not to be a Statistic March 18, 2026
  A couple of years ago I was diagnosed with PTSD, I knew something in my head wasn’t right, but I refused to do anything about it. Big tough Army guy, suck it up buttercup. Well, I went to see a head doc and yep the shit I had been exposed to throughout my 25yr career […]
  Jay Lajoie
• Smoke Over MSR One March 17, 2026
  On May 31, 2008, my squad was assigned as the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) for eastern Afghanistan in Nangarhar Province. While turning in documents at Brigade Headquarters on Forward Operating Base (FOB) Fenty, a loud boom erupted from the nearby road. Second Squad and I rushed to our vehicles, located between the airfield and the […]
  Daniel Dodds
• The Great American Pill Parade Where Your TV Sells You Sickness and Immunity March 17, 2026
  Oh, darling readers, gather ’round the glowing idiot box that is your television, because Tammy Pondsmith is here to dissect the grotesque carnival of drug company commercials with the precision of a surgeon wielding a chainsaw. You know the ones: glossy little fever dreams where a silver-haired couple frolics through a meadow, somebody regains the […]
  Tammy Pondsmith