Reflections

The U.S. military always takes care of its own when Thanksgiving rolls around, no matter what part of the world you’re in. In November 1968, that place was the fishing village of Rach Gia, where I spent the final five months of my year-long…

We all have stories. After all, we didn’t just watch history, we made it.We lost friends. We saw heroes. Some of us were heroes. We knew sacrifice and pain and sometimes we saw God at the strangest times.Many of us carry a heavy burden and…

Even without my helmet and body armor, the district council chamber felt oppressive. The meager window units could not defeat the heat in southern Baghdad, at least not within the fading grandeur of this marble and columned space. I did my…

On Oct. 28, 1991, I settled into an hours-long commercial flight from Frankfurt, Germany, to Moscow. By year’s end, the iconic Soviet flag would fly over the Kremlin for the final time, silently signaling the collapse of the USSR after…

I look up from scrubbing dried yogurt and petrified cereal flakes off my kitchen table and notice it immediately. The persimmon tree that grew oddly off-center in our North Carolina backyard is bare. Yesterday there had been six orange…

Whenever I hear the thwack-thwack-thwack of a helicopter, I stop and look up. Nothing too unusual about that, except a shot of adrenaline unfailingly accompanies these sightings. The hair on my arms and neck stands up, and something I can’t…

A pop-up box appeared on the screen one night in 2006 as I idly surfed the internet. Thirty-nine dollars and 95 cents would send a care package to an American soldier in Iraq. I typed in my credit card number.Weeks later I received a…

I sat alone and confined in a stress position for hours and was running out of Schlitz for the exercise. The only thing that kept me from jacking it in was the intolerable shame of quitting. I figured this would be hard, which implies that…

Tall, muscular, broad-shouldered, with a full head of white hair, Brig. Gen. John M. Wright Jr. scrambled up a termite mound, some 30 feet wide at the base and seven or eight feet high, and gestured for us to draw into a…

I couldn’t bring myself to go into his barracks room and view the body. I stood just outside the door, one in an endless row of identical entrances on the second deck, as the NCIS agent described the scene inside.“Go straight back into the…