The War Horse

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…

One Saturday in March, with a few minutes to spare before choir rehearsal, Patti Pugh engaged in what had become a habit over the last two years: “One of my Alvin searches.” In February 2022, her 60-year-old brother, Alvin Jerome…

My dad knew two things. He wanted to serve this country, and he wouldn’t live until his 40th birthday. In 2006, his last prophecy came true. He was 36.“On behalf of the president …” were the last words I remember hearing two uniformed…

Three years have passed since President Joe Biden announced that the United States would pull all of its 2,500 troops out of Afghanistan, starting a chain reaction that ended in thousands of Afghans flooding Hamid Karzai International…

I looked out the door of the Huey helicopter into the orange, yellow, and purple fan rays of the sunset over Southeast Asia. The air was cool up here—about 70 degrees compared to the 112-degree heat just 2,000 feet below us.It was June…

At 17, Rudi Richardson took a friend’s car for a joyride, crashed it into the side of a parked car, and landed himself in court. It was Southern California in the 1970s. Richardson’s probation officer told him he had a choice: The court…