Military Families

At a point in time some five or so years ago, I found myself at a party early in my first semester of college. It was supposed to be some introductory thing for the people in our dorm to get to know one another, and to this day I still…

One minute.I can breathe. Inhale for four beats, hold for four, exhale for four, hold for four, then repeat. In. Hold. Out. Hold. Our front yard is filled with mourners, all in black. A bead of sweat rolls down the nape of my neck, melting…

He stood in front of me in a pile of his own vomit. The remnants of his bottle and bile were spattered down his shirt, and he screamed that he wanted spaghetti for dinner. At the same time, no more than three feet away, sat a plate of…

For decades, dawn brought the clarion bugle call of reveille across the lush campus of the Veterans Home of California in Yountville, 60 miles north of San Francisco. The residents, the earliest among them veterans of the Mexican-American…

It’s Saturday morning in Lynchburg, Virginia, shortly before sunrise. I lace my Nikes and head out the door for a weekly run with my dad. I’m 12 years old.I tiptoe down the steps and gently open and close the front door so I don’t disturb…

When the casualty notification team arrived at the door down the street, you dropped everything, and in a blinding rush toward her, saw that she was in the car in her driveway, the ignition on and her eyes fixed forward on infinity. Her son…

On Aug. 2, after six days of sleeping on the steps of the Capitol Building in Washington, Rosie Lopez-Torres breathed a sigh of relief. The Senate, after considerable back and forth, finally passed the Sergeant First Class Heath Robinson…

In an interview last week at The War Horse Symposium, comedian Jon Stewart asked Deputy Defense Secretary Kathleen Hicks about a broad range of topics ranging from toxic exposure to veteran unemployment to declining national service. But…

I turned off the patient’s ventilator and stood over him as his heart slowed and his breathing grew shallow. It was his own body killing him now—and he would die with none of his family there to witness his final breaths.He was a stranger,…

Just before Christmas in 2021, employees at Lincoln College, a predominantly Black institution in central Illinois, came into work to find their printers had started printing on their own. All across campus, they spit out the same message:…