The War Horse

Andrew waited long enough to be born a North Carolinian. After weeks in an Extended Stay America in Jacksonville, North Carolina, our family finally got a move-in date for our tiny base house—and the belongings we’d long been parted from…

The C-130 bounced like a rollercoaster at a cheap traveling circus. I sat on the cargo netting bench seats surrounded by first-time jumpers and pretended to sleep.All I could think about—other than that one of these bastards was going to…

Jan. 23, 1968, was an exciting day for me. I had no idea just how exciting it would turn out to be.I’d recently returned from three weeks of leave in the US and was finishing up an 18-month tour in the Philippines that included several…

In a historic move to address a legacy of discrimination in the U.S. military, President Joe Biden on Wednesday will announce a plan to pardon thousands of LGBTQ veterans who were criminally charged and forced from the service because of…

In the darkness of early morning, Mona McGuire startled awake. A fist beat on the barracks door. Her heart accelerated into a full gallop, and then the yelling began.Detectives from the Army’s criminal investigation division had burst into…

Enoch H. Kanaya was my sun-seeking neighbor who plucked red, ripe tomatoes off the vine in his sunny garden on our tree-lined streets in Chicago. He and his family—his wife, Carolyn, and their four daughters—moved into their modest brick…

My dad’s Navy service was nothing special. His single enlistment spanned from the end of the Eisenhower administration through that of John F. Kennedy. But in that time the Navy changed his life.In 1958, Merlin Chetlain left East Dubuque,…

As an Army infantryman, Ernest Barrington was very familiar with the thick smoke and fumes that came off the burn pit at Joint Base Balad in Iraq. The toxic dust that wafted from the huge, open-air ditches where the military burned…

I rode the third chopper in a daisy chain of five, each bird maybe 30 seconds behind the next. Clutching my M16 rifle in the left-side door gunner’s seat and surrounded by men cocooned in combat gear, I sat on a flak jacket in the vague…

Veterans who die alone, without connections to friends and family, have piled up on the shelves of county morgues and funeral homes for decades.The Department of Veterans Affairs estimates about 21,000 veterans are awaiting burials, some…