by Charles C. Jett

In the Arena – Vincent van Gogh — He Kept Painting for a World That Had Not Yet Learned How to See Him

He failed at everything before he failed at painting. Art dealer, teacher, bookseller, preacher to the miners — every respectable path threw Vincent van Gogh out before he was thirty.
So he picked up a pencil. He gave ten years to it, kept alive by his brother Theo, and the world rewarded him with almost nothing. He died at thirty-seven believing he had failed. He never saw it turn.
Then a young widow read his letters and decided the verdict was wrong. She spent thirty years proving it. The vindication came. It just came too late for him to hear.
The work outlived the verdict.
The credit belongs to Vincent van Gogh.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – – The Only Woman Among the Buffalo Soldiers

Born a slave. Pressed into the Union Army as a cook. Barred from soldiering because she was a woman. On November 15, 1866, Cathay Williams enlisted as “William Cathay” and became the only documented woman Buffalo Soldier. She served two years with the 38th U.S. Infantry before a post surgeon discovered the truth. Then the Army denied her the pension she had earned and let her vanish from the record. She wanted to make her own living and depend on no one. She did it as a soldier when no law allowed it. Cathay Williams needs to be remembered.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Art of War: Rewritten – What Iran and Ukraine Reveal About Two Theories of Victory

Two wars ran at once this spring—the U.S. air campaign against Iran and Ukraine’s long-range strikes against Russia—and set side by side they reveal two fundamentally different theories of how a war is won. In “The Art of War: Traditional vs. New,” Charles C. Jett weighs decision-through-dominance against decision-through-system-attrition, follows the cost-exchange arithmetic that makes the new art possible, and refuses the easy thesis that the old art is obsolete—Fordow, after all, sits under a mountain no cheap drone can reach. The hard conclusion: the danger is not that America fought Iran the old way, but that the old way may be the only art it still knows how to practice, while the new one is being invented, industrialized, and proven elsewhere—on an industrial foundation America has let decay.

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by Charles C. Jett

The Iran War Ledger—What Operation Epic Fury Changed—and What It Did Not

On February 28, 2026, the largest American air campaign in the Middle East since 2003 began. A hundred and seven days later, a ceasefire was signed. But what did the war actually settle? In “The Iran War Ledger,” Charles C. Jett sets the region before the bombing against the region today—the nuclear file, the Strait of Hormuz, Iran’s decapitated leadership, the money spent, the gutted-but-ascendant Revolutionary Guard, America’s frayed alliances, and the strained partnership with Israel—and finds a hard truth beneath the signature ceremony: the war changed almost everything except the thing it was launched to fix. A clear-eyed, non-partisan accounting of a peace that rests on a fault line.

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by Charles C. Jett

Courage and Consequence – Am I a Man?

One seat, lawfully won. One vote, already written. A legislature that set aside the law to decide a single question: whether a Black man it had seated was a man at all. Henry McNeal Turner had every reason to plead. His colleagues did — appealing to the mercy of the men about to expel them. Turner called that what it was: slaves begging under the lash. He would not do it. He stood and demanded the rights he already held, and he made the chamber put its cruelty on the record. They expelled him anyway. The men who voted him out are remembered now as part of the Republic’s founding generation in Georgia. The man who refused to kneel had to be rediscovered. He claimed the rights of a man by refusing to ask for them. Henry McNeal Turner needs to be remembered.

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