Reps. Eugene Vindman, D-Va., and Pat Ryan, D-N.Y., both retired U.S. Army veterans and members of the House Armed Services Committee, are advancing a bill they dubbed the MISSION RX Act.

Their proposal is designed to allow Tricare beneficiaries and Department of Veterans Affairs patients to pay for prescription drugs at whichever is the lower of two prices: the rate negotiated by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, or the cost offered through their existing coverage.

The bottom line, the congressmen say, is that anyone covered by Tricare or the VA would pay the lowest government-negotiated price.

Right now, only people enrolled in Medicare get to pay the rate for certain drugs set by the CMS.

This option does not automatically extend to those who are part of other federal health programs. The basic framework to lower drug costs for Medicare recipients was part of the Inflation Reduction Act, passed in 2022 under then-President Joe Biden.

“After serving 25 years in uniform, I know firsthand the sacrifices our service members, veterans and military families make every single day,” Vindman said in an exclusive statement to Military Times. “The last thing any of them should have to worry about is whether they can afford the prescription drugs they need.”

“The veterans and service members I represent in Virginia’s Seventh District have earned every benefit this nation can give them. That’s why I’m leading this commonsense effort to reduce the crushing cost of prescription drugs for those who have served and sacrificed,” he added.

Vindman and Ryan’s push faces an uncertain future in the House, where Republicans hold a slim majority. The bill has four co-sponsors so far, all of whom are Democrats: Reps. Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania and Bill Keating of Massachusetts.

It also has the support of a number of key organizations, including the Veterans of Foreign Wars, the Marine Corps League, the Fleet Reserve Association, Air Force Sergeants Association and Commissioned Officers Association Public Health Service.

Before they entered Congress, Vindman and Ryan built their careers in the Army during the post-9/11 wars, each deploying to Iraq. Vindman began as a paratrooper and infantry officer, before going on to serve as a Judge Advocate General’s Corps attorney. Ryan, for his part, worked as an intelligence officer, earning two Bronze Star Medals.

“Military families have sacrificed so much for our country — it’s absolutely unacceptable that they’re being forced to pay more than other Americans for the same medication,” Ryan said in a statement.

“Our bill corrects this egregious oversight by ensuring that military families have access to the same lower drug prices that others do. Especially amid rising healthcare costs nationwide, leaving military families to bear the burden is simply un-American,” he continued. “They’ve stepped up and sacrificed for us — now we need to do right by them.”

The legislation, if enacted, would boost the savings for American taxpayers from lower drug costs. CMS already estimates that the original Biden-era measures could save $6 billion annually.

Born on Aug. 5, 1895, William Sawelson was a Jewish resident of Newark, New Jersey, when the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. He enlisted in Harrison, New Jersey, and after training he was assigned to Company M, 312th Infantry Regiment, 78th Division, serving as the company’s supply sergeant.

A Reserve unit made up of Jerseyans filled out with New Yorkers and Pennsylvanians, the 78th was initially dubbed the “President’s Own” because President Woodrow Wilson had been New Jersey’s governor, but the unit was later renamed the “Lightning Division” and adopted a red shoulder patch with a white lightning bolt as its insignia.

Landing in France in June 1918, the 78th Division initially lent its engineer units to support operations, in particular the 303rd Engineer Regiment. While it prepared for its turn at the front, the American Expeditionary Forces crushed the German Armee-Abteilung C around St. Mihiel between Sept. 12 and 18 with relative ease.

On Sept. 26, a reinforced AEF set off confidently to deal with Gen. Georg von der Marwitz’s V. Armee in the Meuse-Argonne sector — and ran into one brick wall after another.

In contrast to their defenses at St. Mihiel — caught in the midst of their retreat — the Germans in the Argonne had dug in behind three lines of fortifications. What followed was the largest and bloodiest campaign fought by the U.S. Armed Forces, as one division after another suffered high casualties until a newly arrived replacement took its place along the Western Front. It was in this crucible that Supply Sgt. Sawelson had his moment of truth.

In late October, the 78th phased its infantry units into the front lines to relieve the battered 77th Division. In so doing, it took up where its predecessor left off, advancing on the rail head and logistical hub at Grandpré. Thus far the AEF had conducted its agonizing advance in phases: from Sept. 26 to Oct. 4 and Oct. 4 to the 28th.

On Oct. 26, however, Sawelson and fellow 78th Division troops came into premature contact with the enemy, who were hardly about to follow the Americans’ agenda. Driven to ground under a hail of machine gun fire, they could do little until extra support came up. Sawelson’s actions were cited afterward:

“Hearing a wounded man in a shell hole, some distance away calling for water, Sgt. Sawelson, upon his own initiative, left shelter and crawled through heavy machine gun fire to where the man lay, giving him what water he had in his canteen. He then went back to his own shell hole, obtained more water and was returning to the wounded man when he was killed by a machine gun bullet.”

Sawelson’s sacrifice made an impression on the 78th. At a time when the AEF was reluctant to recognize the deeds of Jewish soldiers, Sawelson’s officers and comrades-in-arms were startlingly swift in recommending him for the highest American honor and on Jan. 22, 1919, his father, Jacob L. Sawelson, was awarded his posthumous Medal of Honor.

Buried at Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery and Memorial east of the village of Romagne-sous-Montfaucon, Sawelson was one of nine Americans slain in the battle for Grandpré.

Instead of Viet Cong guerrillas, however, the Marines would be meeting soldiers of the People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN), more trained, disciplined and aggressive than the VC had been. Although the Americans had the benefit of complete air superiority and air support, the PAVN usually did the choosing between flight or fight. This often led to a series of battles within battles — small in the overall scheme of things, but anything but minor to the combatants.

One of these encounters, fought on March 30, 1967, 5.9 miles northwest of Cam Lo in Quang Tri Province, was named for Capt. Michael Getlin, commander of I Company, 3rd Battalion, 9th Regiment, 3rd Marine Division (Reinforced), famously known as “The Walking Dead.”

Known as the Battle of Getlin’s Corner to the participants, that patch of contested real estate is also remembered for an officer who stood out in a field full of valor: 2nd Lt. John P. Bobo.

After graduating from Niagara University in 1965, the New York native enlisted in the U.S. Marine Reserve in Buffalo, New York, on May 28, 1965. On Dec. 17, he completed an officer candidate course before completing further training in Quantico, Virginia in May 1966. Bobo shipped out to Vietnam the following month, where he was assigned a platoon in I Company, 3rd Battalion, 9th Marines.

On March 30, 1967, Bobo’s platoon was among some 200 advancing and his men were establishing night ambush sites on Hill 70., west of Con Thien. At 3:00 p.m. that afternoon, Marines shot two North Vietnamese, but soon afterward the company came under attack by some 700 to 800 troops of the PAVN 324B Division, reinforced with heavy automatics weapons and mortars.

Reacting as did all the officers down the line, Bobo organized a hasty defense and fought to prevent his platoon’s being overrun by an enemy determined to bring its greater numbers to bear before American air support arrived in force. Moving along from position to position, Bobo seemed to be everywhere as described in his citation for the day’s operation:

“Recovering a rocket launcher from among the friendly casualties, he organized a new launcher team and directed its fire into the enemy machine gun positions. When an exploding mortar round severed 2d Lt. Bobo’s right below the knee, he refused to be evacuated and insisted upon being placed in a firing position to cover the movement of the command group to a better position, with a web belt around his leg serving as a tourniquet and with his leg jammed into the dirt to contain the bleeding.”

Besides the first sergeant, Bobo was entreated by the platoon corpsman, Petty Officer Kenneth Braun, to withdraw for medical attention. When Bobo refused, Braun did what he could to improvise the makeshift tourniquet.

When they came under attack, Braun picked up an M14 rifle that proved to be defective, but he managed to shoot two enemy soldiers with it. More memorable to “Doc” Braun’s men, perhaps, was his pulling 30 Marines to safety while himself being wounded three times.

Once he’d moved to what he thought a better position, Bobo reportedly “delivered devastating fire into the ranks of the enemy trying to overrun the Marines,” according to his citation.

Bobo was “mortally wounded while firing his weapon into the main point of the enemy attack but his valiant spirit inspired his men to heroic efforts, and his tenacious stand enabled the command group to gain a protective position where it repulsed the enemy onslaught,” it concluded.

On the morning of March 31, the PAVN troops conceded that they could do no more against the Marines and their supporting helicopter gunships and withdrew into the forest, leaving 67 bodies and two prisoners in the area of Hill 70.

Marine casualties included 16 dead in the one position the enemy had managed to overrun. Of the seven Marine officers involved, three survived.

It could have been worse.

Of a total of 47 wounded recovered there, every one later recovered in hospital. Bobo, Braun — who was subsequently awarded the Navy Cross — and numerous others each played a part in I Company’s holding the line during the Battle of Getlin’s Corner.

When Operation Prairie III concluded on April 19, 1967, it had cost 56 Marine dead, an estimated 252 PAVN killed and four prisoners of war.

Lt. Bobo’s remains were returned to his home and interred at the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Lewiston, New York. On Aug. 27, 1968, his family assembled at the Marine Barracks in Washington, D.C. to receive his posthumous Medal of Honor from Secretary of the Navy Paul R. Ignatius.

Of several monuments and dedications afforded him since, the largest, entering service in 1985, is the Marine prepositioning ship USNS 2nd Lt. John P. Bobo.

In a release last week, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said, “Due to significant impacts resulting from fuel shortages in Laos, DPAA was forced to cancel four recovery teams that were planned for April 27 through June 10.”

The cancellation followed actions taken by DPAA earlier this year on operations in Laos, when “four recovery teams had to curtail operations by 10 days for the Feb. 28-April 6 mission due to insufficient fuel supplies,” DPAA said in the release.

In addition, DPAA plans for other recovery operations last year, both in Laos and Vietnam, were canceled for lack of funding after Congress failed to appropriate the money because of the partial government shutdown over operations of the Department of Homeland Security and the funding of health insurance subsidies.

“Due to the lapse of appropriations, DPAA has been forced to cancel its Joint Field Activities (JFA) in Vietnam and Laos that were planned for late October through early December,” DPAA said in a release last November.

In one of his quarterly updates in January to families and veterans groups, DPAA Director Kelly McKeague, a retired Air Force major general, warned that DPAA this year was being asked to do more with less as a result of budget cuts.

For Fiscal Year 2026, which began last Oct. 1, “you will recall that DPAA’s appropriation will be $171.3 million, which is an 11% reduction as a result of [Department of Defense] budget adjustments,” McKeague said.

When asked at the same meeting what the impact of the budget cuts would be on operations in Laos and Vietnam, Navy Capt. Meghan Bodnar, the DPAA deputy director, said, “The Vietnam War continues to be our number one operational priority, so the budget cuts will be spread proportionally across all missions and will reduce more Vietnam War field missions from being deployed.”

“We entered FY 2026 with the intent to field 66 field missions, compared to 105 deployed in FY2025, due to the reduced budget,” Bodnar added, noting that DPAA had already decided to reduce operations in Laos even before the fuel crisis began.

Some of the investigative work would continue in Laos, Bodnar said, but the main operations of the “RTs,” or Recovery Teams, “must be deferred” to the next fiscal year.

All of the nations of Southeast Asia have been hit hard by the blockades of the Straits of Hormuz, resulting in a cutoff of 20% of the world’s oil supply, but Laos is a particular case.

Laos has no oil of its own and depends on supply from Thailand, which has its own fuel crisis. The U.S. has yet to offer any help in easing that crisis, Thailand’s Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow told the Washington Post in an April 27 interview.

“I think they’re aware that there are consequences from the war,” Sihasak said in the interview, referring to the Trump administration, “but they haven’t come out to talk to us about how they can help.”

The legacy of U.S. involvement in Laos, in what was called the “secret war,” stemmed from the massive bombing campaigns and paramilitary operations carried out by the CIA from 1964-1973, operations that violated Laos’ neutrality while missions were hidden from the public and Congress.

According to DPAA, about 288 U.S. troops are still unaccounted for in Laos and more than 1,500 in Vietnam.

“The constitution supposes, what the History of all Governments demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it,” Madison continued. “It has accordingly, with studied care, vested the question of war in the Legislature.”

The Constitution delineates that the legislative branch — and only the legislative branch — has the power to declare war.

However, the term “declare” has been open to interpretation since the Constitution’s signing, with American presidents going to war without congressional approval for centuries, according to History.com.

In 1846, James Polk’s occupation of Texas and the subsequent Mexican-American War was without congressional consent, while at the outbreak of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln likewise authorized early military action without Congress.

The U.S. has technically not been in a state of war since 1945, and yet more than 100,000 service members have died in conflicts spanning the globe since May 8 and Sep. 2, 1945, respectively.

Since the 1950s and the term “police action” entered the government’s lexicon, the right of Congress to declare war has been dealt a series of escalating blows.

By 1963, President John F. Kennedy was sending military equipment and advisors in South Vietnam. One year later, America was secretly bombing Laos, eventually leaving it the most heavily bombed country per capita in the world, according to History.com. Marines were on the ground in 1965.

As part of “Operation Menu” in 1969, President Richard Nixon was bombing Cambodia — a fact that was withheld from the American public until The New York Times revealed the operation to the public. By the following year, with American ground troops deploying to Northern Cambodia, waves of criticism met the president and triggered a check on presidential power.

This case of executive overreach by Nixon in Cambodia led to the passage of the War Powers Resolution on Nov. 7, 1973, with Congress overriding Nixon’s veto by a two-thirds majority.

The Vietnam-era law was designed to ensure that the “collective judgment” of Congress and the president were in lockstep if and when U.S. armed forces entered into hostilities.

According to Friends Committee on National Legislation, the War Powers Resolution has three main components:

1. The president must get a declaration of war or specific authorization from Congress before sending troops overseas unless the United States or its armed forces are attacked.
2. If the president initiates hostilities, these can last only 60 days and must then be terminated unless Congress authorizes their continuation.
3. If there is no declaration of war or specific statutory authorization passed within 60 days, Congress can require the president to end U.S. participation in hostilities at any time.

The act has created significant tension between Congress and the executive branch, with presidents like Ronald Reagan sidestepping Congress in Grenada; George H.W. Bush in Panama and during the first Gulf War; and Bill Clinton in Kosovo.

Just one week after the 9/11 attacks, Congress passed the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, authorizing the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.”

The AUMF has subsequently paved the way for presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Joe Biden to wage war not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but also in Pakistan, Somalia, Syria, Yemen and other nations for more than two decades as part of the War on Terror.

Now, as the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran reaches the critical 60th day of operations, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth controversially claimed on Thursday that the fragile ceasefire with Iran means that Trump does not yet have to seek congressional consent to extend the war.

Ceasefire ‘stops’ War Powers clock on Iran, Hegseth claims

Hegseth argued that the pause in hostilities freezes the ticking clock that would otherwise require the president either to get agreement from lawmakers or to end military operations after 60 days.

“We are in a ceasefire right now, which [in] our understanding means the 60-day clock pauses, or stops,” Hegseth told Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing.

Friday marks 60 days since the Trump administration notified Congress that it had launched strikes on Iran. The law gives the president the option to ask for a 30-day extension, though it is unclear whether Trump intends to do so.

“I do not believe the statute would support that,” Kaine said, adding that he has “serious constitutional concerns and we don’t want to layer those with additional statutory concerns.”

Any member of the House or Senate, regardless of committee assignment, can invoke section 5(c) of the War Powers Resolution and get a full floor vote on whether to require the president to remove U.S. armed forces from hostilities.

Under the procedural rules of the War Powers Act, these bills are granted expedited status — requiring a full floor vote in the House within 15 calendar days, and in the Senate within 10 calendar days of introduction.

During a hearing Thursday on the Defense Department’s $1.5 trillion fiscal 2027 budget request, Hegseth said he supports the Maj. Richard Star Act — a bill that would give roughly 54,000 veterans their retirement pay and VA disability concurrently.

“As I have said in the past to other organizations, we support the Richard Star Act,” Hegseth said during questioning by Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn.

Blumenthal is a lead sponsor of the bill who repeatedly has tried to pass the legislation, most recently, calling in March for a Senate vote. The legislation has the support of 79 Senators and 323 House members.

But it has been blocked by some Republicans over concerns of funding. In March, Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wisc., objected to Blumenthal’s call for a floor vote, saying the legislation would cost more than $70 billion over the first 10 years of enactment.

Lingering cost worries cloud plans for veterans disability reform bill

The $70 billion Johnson cited is the total estimated cost of eliminating the offset for all 250,000 military medical retirees, and according to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, the Richard Star Act only applies to medical retirees eligible for Combat Related Special Compensation.

Under those requirements, the committee estimates it would cost $11 billion over 10 years.

The legislation is a top priority for major veterans groups including the Veterans of Foreign Wars and Disabled American Veterans.

Because of its cost, under current congressional rules, lawmakers must find a way to pay for it. One proposal set forth by the VFW is to use the federal Military Retirement Fund, which finances military retired pay and has more than $1.7 trillion in assets.

The legislation was named for Army Reserve Maj. Richard Star, who died in 2021 from lung cancer after being exposed to burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 2004, veterans who earned military retirement for serving at least 20 years and who quality for VA disability benefits receive full pay for both if they have a disability rating of at least 50%.

But veterans who retired early from service as a result of military injury or illness are subject to dollar-for-dollar offsets in their military disability and VA disability benefits, sometimes amounting to thousands of dollars in lost income.

Blumenthal implored his fellow legislators to support the bill.

“It will eliminate this wounded warrior tax,” Blumenthal said.

VA Secretary Doug Collins said Thursday during a Senate hearing on the VA’s $488 billion budget proposal for fiscal 2027 that the VA has decided to close facilities that don’t properly care for veterans and has made changes to address longstanding issues at Augusta VA Medical Center in Georgia.

According to Collins, community-based VA outpatient clinics in McMinnville, Tennessee, and Schenectady, New York, will close this year. McMinnville will close May 31, and the Schenectady clinic will close in August, according to reports.

The closures have alarmed veterans who use the clinics and will be forced to go elsewhere for care; in some cases, they will travel more than 35 miles from the existing clinics for health services.

In the hearing before the Senate Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, Collins said the clinics, which were privately run, did not meet VA standards of care and will be shuttered.

According to Collins, the contractors managing the facilities were not meeting requirements and veterans were failing to get quality care.

“For years, our veterans were going and being handed off, handed off, handed off, new doctors coming in all the time … a lot of time they were not showing up, we were having to then schedule them in other places,” Collins said. “This is a problem.”

Tennessee and New York lawmakers have raised concerns about the impact of the closures on the 4,000 veteran patients in their districts and states.

In March, Rep. Scott DesJarlais, R-Tenn., wrote Collins about the McMinnville closure, saying in his district, with 46,000 veterans, patients will have to drive more than an hour to receive medical care.

“I applaud the work your administration has done to improve patient outcomes. However, I am extremely disappointed and concerned about how the VA has handled the closing of this rural healthcare clinic,” DesJarlais wrote.

During Thursday’s hearing, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., urged Collins to consider establishing a VA-operated clinic in Schenectady or, at the very least, ensure that veteran patients at the existing facility don’t fall through cracks.

“In rural America, drive times are highly relevant. With gas prices as high as they are, this could mean much more expense for them, much more stress for them,” Gillibrand said. “Please, if you are willing to do a different type of facility at the VA site, that would be the best of both worlds.”

At the same time, the VA is working to improve the troubled VA Medical Center in Augusta, Georgia, replacing its management team in the last month, the second leadership change in 14 months.

Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., ranking member of the Senate Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee, pressed Collins for answers on the Augusta VA, which was the subject of a VA Office of Inspector General investigation.

The VA OIG found last year that the facility had a hostile work environment, including retaliation against staff, and supply shortages that hampered veteran care.

“I sent a letter earlier this year requesting some specific information about the management of that facility, and have not yet received the detailed responses to that letter,” Ossoff said.

Collins assured Ossoff that the VA had completed the recommendations made by the OIG in its report and was working to resolve the management issues.

“Nobody’s more upset about Augusta than me. It’s my hometown, it’s my home area,” Collins said.

In response to Ossoff’s questions as to how the VA announced the closures of clinics, Collins said the Veterans Health Administration believes it has followed the law in cancelling contracts. He also noted that the VA has opened 34 clinics in the past year.

The VA has requested $488 billion for fiscal 2027, including $123 billion for medical care and services, nearly $4 billion to construct new facilities and $4.2 billion to continue rolling out the department’s new electronic health records system.

Collins told members of the committee that the restart of the medical records program in Michigan this month after a three-year hiatus has been “phenomenal.”

“A tornado hit one of our facilities — lose power — and we never lost a bit in a very new system. That is how well this is working right now,” Collins said.

Subcommittee Chairman Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., said looked forward to receiving an update on the medical records system modernization program, which began eight years ago and is now in use at 10 VA facilities and associated clinics.

“We hope we are on track to make health records boring again,” Boozman quipped.

Within a few hours, that cannonade would come steadily closer until the British 3rd Brigade marched into Washington, D.C., virtually uncontested and proceeded to burn the city’s public buildings, including the Capitol, the chambers of the Senate and House of Representatives, the Treasury Department and the War Office.

Adm. George Cockburn himself helped his men loot the White House — who purportedly sat down and helped themselves to President James Madison’s still-warm dinner — before setting the seat of democracy ablaze.

The following day, the arson continued until a serendipitous squall of rain extinguished the flames. The massive storm then spawned a rare tornado that, according to the National Weather Service, killed more British soldiers than American guns did during their brief occupation of D.C.

In just 10 days, the British had penetrated enemy territory, won a battle against a larger army and captured and burned the enemy’s capital — all at the loss of fewer than 300 men, according to historian Rick Britton.

Two years into the War of 1812, the ransacking of the capital was a national embarrassment, with an incensed Madison demanding the resignation of Secretary of War John Armstrong Jr. as the city lay smoldering.

It was an unmitigated military disaster, save for a small band of U.S. Marines whose desperate defense of the nation’s capital allowed for the Declaration of Independence — and the president — to be whisked away to safety.

A final stand

It was close to noon on Aug. 24 when a 4,500-man British army finally marched within sight of Bladensburg, Maryland. At just nine miles northeast of Washington, D.C., the seemingly vacant river town gave Maj. Gen. Robert Ross a commanding view of the American forces just across the Anacostia River.

The Americans — mostly untested and under-equipped — were strung out along three stacked lines. Hastily dispatched from all across the eastern seaboard to intercept the British, the men chaotically attempted to fall in line, standing facing the river’s only bridge.

There they stood in the open field and waited.

Earlier that morning, according to Britton, Madison had received a message from the sleep-deprived William H. Winder, one of the two brigadier generals tasked with defending Washington.

As Madison later put it, that morning Winder required the “the speediest counsel” from Madison.

At a subsequent meeting at Winder’s camp — attended by most of the cabinet secretaries — it was reported that the British were marching on Washington via Bladensburg.

Secretary of War Armstrong Jr., silent for most of the meeting, finally spoke up, saying, according to a later memorandum from Madison, that the American militiamen — roughly 7,000 strong but varying wildly in quality, training and enthusiasm — “would be beaten” by “Wellington’s Invincibles,” seasoned soldiers so named for their string of successes against Napoleon.

According to Britton, Madison, upset at Armstrong’s remark, instructed him to join Winder at Bladensburg, while also promising to be on the battlefield himself, should there be any “difficulty on the score of authority.”

Winder, according to the U.S. Naval Institute, “made and unmade plans, shuffled units around, and wore himself as thin as his straggling army.” Things were not improved by the presence of Madison and his Cabinet, “to whose ‘officious but well-intentioned information and advice’ the general was compelled to listen,” wrote historian Benton J. Lossing.

As Washington’s most senior leaders dashed off to Bladensburg, so too did Cmdr. Joshua Barney, mustering a group of 103 Marines and flotillamen from the Washington Navy Yard.

Even as the Marines took their positions at the center of the third line, the British attacked.

The first wave of British troops, repelled by cannon and rifle fire fell back, before a second wave managed to cross the bridge. Panicked, the first line of American troops turned and fled.

Charles Ball, an escaped enslaved worker that Barney took into his flotilla, noted that the militia “ran like sheep chased by dogs.”

The second line of defense, primarily Maryland militiamen, were outnumbered and outgunned as British forces poured over the now unguarded bridge. They too soon melted away in the face of the more experienced British units.

“In less than an hour,” according to the USNI, “nearly two-thirds of the American army had evaporated. Only the third line remained, anchored on Barney’s guns.”

Now, only the Marines stood in the way of the British and the U.S. capital.

As the British surged toward them Barney’s men repelled them once, twice, three times.

After the final failed attempt to overrun the battery stalled 50 yards in front of the Marine line, Barney counterattacked with his flotillamen, driving the British back into the ravine with cries of “Board ‘em, board ‘em!” according to the USNI.

The Marines and flotillamen fought alone for nearly two hours more hours — even as Barney’s ammunition wagons drove off with his resupply.

Dozens of Barney’s men were killed or wounded as they became enveloped by the British. Barney himself was wounded when a bullet became lodged deep in his thigh.

As the escape route began to close, Barney finally ordered a retreat as a few American gunners and Marines held the line while the rest ran a gauntlet of fire to make their way back to the capital, writes the USNI.

Six hours after British forces first engaged the Americans near Bladensburg, the red coats strolled into downtown D.C.

But the Marine’s defense was not entirely in vain — their desperate fight allowed precious minutes for Madison, government officials and civilians to flee.

It also allowed for State Department clerks to run to the Library of Congress and evacuate the Declaration of Independence, first to an unused gristmill near Chain Bridge over the Potomac River and later to a private home near Leesburg, Virginia, according to the National Archives.

The actions of the Marines that day were so decisive that even the British were impressed. According to USNI, Barney, unable to leave the field due to his wound, was captured and exchanged words with Adm. Cockburn and Gen. Ross.

“I am really very glad to see you, Commodore,” said Gen. Ross.

“I am sorry I cannot return the compliment, General,” Barney retorted.

Ross smiled and turned to Cockburn. “I told you it was the Flotilla men.”

“Yes,” Cockburn said, “you were right, though I could not believe you — they have given us the only fighting we have had.”

In a further act of chivalry, as the nation’s capital lay in smoldering ruins, only two buildings remained unscathed as the entire neighboring Washington Navy Yard was burned to the ground — the Marine Corps Commandants’ home and the Marine barracks lay untouched.

Former Army telecommunications technician Ronald Christoforo, along with Michele Christoforo, filed suit Monday in the U.S. District Court of Connecticut, alleging that the VA discriminates against thousands of disabled children of Vietnam veterans by providing compensation to those whose mothers served but not their fathers, with one exception: children born with spina bifida.

In the suit, the Christoforos note that Michele’s birth defect, which causes dwarfism, is specifically covered by the VA for the children of female veterans who served in Vietnam.

Ronald Christoforo applied for VA Agent Orange-related disability benefits for Michele in 2022 but was denied. According to the suit, the VA told Christoforo that Michele’s mother would have had to serve in Vietnam or Korea to qualify.

The Christoforos argue that the decision was unconstitutional because it is based on sex discrimination.

“When the VA rejected my claim, they didn’t say my condition wasn’t real or that it wasn’t caused by Agent Orange. They said my father’s service didn’t count the same as a mother’s would. How can that be legal?” Michele Christoforo said in a statement Monday.

According to the suit, roughly 200 children were born with birth defects to female Vietnam veterans, while an estimated 350,000 children of fathers who served have birth defects.

The VA began awarding disability benefits to the children of Vietnam veterans born with spina bifida in 1996, and four years later, expanded the list of eligible conditions for the children of women Vietnam veterans to 18. The expanded list includes achondroplasia, the defect that caused Michele Christoforo’s dwarfism.

The Christoforos, represented by Yale Law School’s Veterans Legal Services Clinic, want the courts to declare the VA’s sex-based disability awards as unconstitutional and provide disability benefits to all children who qualify, regardless of whether their mother or father served in Vietnam.

“All other circumstances equal, if Mr. Christoforo were female, he could rely on the benefits provided under [the law] to ensure his child would receive the medical care, educational benefits and income support she needs. The only difference in his ability to have this assurance is his sex,” the lawsuit noted.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., has sponsored legislation that would increase research on birth defects in veterans exposed to environmental pollutants, such as Agent Orange and the burn pits used in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere to dispose of waste.

On Monday, Blumenthal said children with a disability related to their parent’s service-connected exposure “deserve equal benefits without exception.”

“Michele’s condition is real, her father’s service is unquestionable, and the damage caused by Agent Orange is well-documented. Denying her VA benefits solely because her father served rather than her mother is both unjust and cruel,” Blumenthal said.

Linda Schwartz, a Vietnam veteran and adviser to Vietnam Veterans of America, added that research does not “justify this distinction” between maternal or paternal exposure and birth defects and she supports the suit.

“Our members came home from Vietnam carrying wounds that didn’t always show up right away, and some of those wounds were passed on to their children. … It is long past time it does the same for the children of the men who served alongside them,” Schwartz said in a statement.

Agent Orange is the name given to defoliants used in Vietnam and elsewhere to strip combat zones of vegetation that could be used by enemy forces for camouflage. The herbicides contain a type of dioxin that is a known carcinogen linked to cancers, chronic conditions and birth defects.

The Justice Department, which represents the VA, did not respond to a request for comment by publication.

“American Revolution: The Augmented Exhibition,” which opens Saturday at the museum, uses the camera scanning feature of a museum-provided tablet to bring dramatically backlit displays to life. Scenes like the site of the Boston Massacre and Washington’s famous Delaware River crossing are mixed with video game-style period characters and allow visitors to pan the screen for 360-degree navigation of the space.

Selecting hot spots on the screen will bring you to the center of a crowd listening to a preacher fomenting revolution or transport you to Thomas Jefferson’s talking head, animated through generative AI.

Those seeking a “gamified” experience can select a treasure hunt activity through the various scenes, while those less keen on the immersive elements can take their tablets over to a comfortable corner in the exhibit space and manually swipe through all the scenes at their own pace, said Susan Smullen, a public affairs officer for the museum.

A particularly interesting feature for the larger interactive scenes lets viewers scroll forward in time to the same location in the present day.

In scenes like the Delaware crossing, mythologized in an iconic 1851 painting by Emanuel Leutze, the recreated scene and the present-day site comparison also serve to dispel misconceptions about what they moment was actually like.

“You’ll see… they’re actually sailing these, kind of, barges across,” said Matthew Eng, a communications and social media specialist at the museum. “And there is ice in the Delaware River as they’re crossing from Pennsylvania into New Jersey, but it’s not as dramatic as [the painting].”

The exhibit, created by French company Histovery as a touring exhibition, will be a centerpiece of the Army museum’s America 250 celebration. Last year, a new permanent exhibition, “Call to Arms” opened on the museum’s second floor, showcasing nearly 300 artifacts of the Revolution donated and on loan from other collections.

Highlights include the sword believed to be surrendered by Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown to end the war in 1781; and a pair of pistols and a pocket watch exchanged as gifts between George Washington and the Marquis de Lafayette.

Later this month, a replica of Washington’s field tent — sometimes called the first Oval Office — will open on the green outside the museum as another historical touchpoint.

Paul Morando, the first chief curator of the museum and newly installed director, told Military Times during a preview visit that the Revolutionary War was a particularly good fit for an exhibit that reimagined historical scenes, since it took place before photography and many stories about the soldiers who fought have been lost to history.

“Folks are learning not just about a particular battle; they’re learning about the people,” he said. “But it’s done from a heavily researched perspective, and not just as a fun experience.”

For the museum, which opened in 2020, it also represents a chance to generate fresh interest among both visitors and donors. Located 40 minutes away from Washington, D.C.’s world-class Smithsonian collections, the museum has sometimes struggled to attract its full capacity of visitors.

While the U.S. Army funds museum infrastructure and operations, the foundation contributes fundraising for programming and construction and manages revenue-generating functions like the gift shop. For donors, being able to sponsor individual “time portal” Revolutionary War scenes is exciting, said Jamie Hubans, vice president of Marketing and Communications at the Army Historical Foundation.

“A lot of those are individuals who have family connections to these stories,” such as an ancestor who served at Yorktown, she said.

The free exhibit replaces a paid simulator gallery that was seeing waning foot traffic, Hubans said. This augmented reality experience, which follows a smaller, but markedly successful, AR exhibit about D-Day, will also allow the museum to market itself anew to tour groups and other visitors.

Between the immersive exhibit and the artifacts collection, Morando stressed that soldier stories remain at the forefront.

“A lot of people forget we only declared our independence in 1776; it was up to our soldiers to fight and die for that independence. And I think sometimes that gets lost,” he said. “And these are just, most of them, common folks who decided to take up arms and do something extraordinary. They risked not only their lives, but their families, their way of life. … So that’s the message we’re trying to get across with an experience like this.”

“American Revolution: The Augmented Exhibition” will remain open until at least July 2027.

In a late Thursday release, DPAA announced that the Operation 85 advocacy group led by family member Kevin Kline had met the 60% threshold of DNA Family Reference Samples for the number of crew members thought to be buried in the commingled graves at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the “Punchbowl.”

Although DPAA initially opposed the USS Arizona (BB-39) Unknown Identification Project, DPAA extended “its sincere appreciation” to Kline, grandnephew of Arizona crew member Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Robert Edwin Kline, “and the ‘Operation 85’ team for their devoted efforts over the past three years to locate and connect enough USS Arizona families to help reach this important milestone.”

Last November, Operation 85 announced that they had reached the required 60% threshold for the Arizona, meaning 643 families. However, it has awaited DPAA confirmation since then.

In a phone interview with Military Times Thursday, Kline, who runs a real estate company in Fairfax County, Virginia, with his wife, Elizabeth, said the threshold agreement was a long time coming. He became obsessed with the possibility of identifying the unknowns after attending a DPAA update to the families in Norfolk, Virginia, three years ago.

But he had to go up against a March 2022 report to Congress regarding the cost to identify those buried as unknowns.

“Identifying the Sailors and Marines buried in the [Punchbowl] will cost the Navy and the Marine Corps casualty program offices approximately $2,700,000 for just their portion of the larger effort,” the Navy report said.

While the Navy Department, DPAA and other agencies “agree that the identification of the 85 Unknowns associated with USS ARIZONA and buried at [the Punchbowl] is feasible, it will require significant resources and an inordinate amount of time,” the Navy report said.

In addition, “Pursuing this effort will give false hope to the vast majority of USS Arizona families that their loved one may be identified,” the Navy report said.

However, in the effort to track down families and get their permission for DNA samples, “we turned a hard ‘No’ to a ‘Yes,’ Kline said.”

“It’s wonderful and we’re very excited to have hit this milestone” that will allow exhumations to begin,” Kline said. “But I feel like the work is not done yet, we still have new families to find,” he said. “But it’s much easier now knowing that the DPAA and everybody else is on board and I’m not just a rogue family member doing this alone anymore.”

Kline said that he and other family members were surprised to learn that there were crew members — including his great uncle, Gunners Mate 2nd Class Robert Edwin Kline, who died aboard the Arizona at age 22 — who were not entombed in the Arizona when it was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941.

His great uncle and others may have been blown clear of the ship by the force of the eight bombs that hit the Arizona from Japanese attack planes, Kline said, or by the huge explosion of the Arizona’s ammunition compartment.

The battleship suffered more loss of life than any American ship during the attack, its 1,177 dead comprising nearly half the 2,403 killed at Pearl Harbor.

Of the ship’s dead, 277 of its sailors and Marines are buried in Honolulu’s National Memorial of the Pacific. The identity of at least 85 of those men remain unknown to this day.

Kline’s great uncle and others could be among the remains of those recovered by Navy divers after the war before the mission was deemed too dangerous.

“Growing up in our family — we knew our uncle was never found [because] he was in the ship. That’s where everybody always thought where he was,” Kline said.

The hull of the 608-foot Pennsylvania class battleship Arizona now rests at the bottom of Pearl Harbor as the final resting place for more than 900 of the ship’s 1,177 crewmen who were killed on Dec. 7, 1941.

Above the hull, without ever touching it, is the gracefully stunning Arizona Memorial, officially known as the Pearl Harbor National Memorial, managed by the National Park Service.

The sloping roof of the memorial’s design, crafted by Austrian-American architect Alfred Preis, was intended to convey the profound symbolism of war and remembrance. The roof “sags in the center but stands strong and vigorous at the ends, expressing initial defeat and ultimate victory” in World War II, Preis said after the 1962 dedication of the memorial.

While certain enhancements have been made throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the core of the gun has remained relatively unchanged. So much so that a doughboy could likely pick up the modern-day M2 and operate it.

The highly versatile weapon has seen action affixed to the wings of P-47 Thunderbolts and P-51D Mustangs. It has floated down the Mekong Delta on the decks of America’s “Brown Water Navy” aboard patrol boats and river vessels. And it has surveyed terrain mounted atop Humvees during the Gulf, Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

That the M2 has managed to outlast all other small arms weapon is a testament to its maker: John Moses Browning.

The ‘Thomas Edison’ of guns

Born in Ogden, Utah Territory, in 1855, Browning was the son of Mormon gunsmith Jonathan Browning who fathered 22 children with three wives.

John was lucky number 13 and spent much of his youth tinkering in his father’s workshop. By his mid-teens, Browning was a skilled metalworker in his own right and could repair or copy any gun dropped off at his father’s shop.

“As soon as I started to make the gun,” he recalled, “I found my head so full of parts that my greatest difficulty was sorting them out.”

Browning eschewed blueprints in favor of trial-and-error cutting, chiseling, drilling and filing. By 1879 the 24-year-old had filed his first of 128 firearm patents for what would become the Model 1885 single-shot rifle.

The prodigious inventor went on to design seminal military guns such as the Colt M1911 semiautomatic pistol, history’s most enduring semiautomatic pistol design; the Winchester Model 1897 pump-action shotgun, the devastating American “trench gun” of World War I that was so effective that it drew diplomatic protests from Germany; the M1895 gas-operated machine gun; the .50-caliber M2 machine gun; and the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle — the BAR of World War II fame.

Author Nathan Gorenstein estimates that roughly 35–40 million firearms have subsequently been patterned after the inventor’s designs, and he even conceded that number is likely low.

“As Henry Ford was to automobiles, and Thomas Edison was to electricity,” the author writes, “Browning was to firearms.”

A war’s on

By 1917, the horrendous “butcher’s bill” of the Great War was already in the millions as a result of numerous technological weapons advancements introduced on the Western Front — from the machine gun, tanks to airplanes.

As American doughboys poured into France, Gen. John J. “Blackjack” Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Forces, requested the development of a multipurpose heavy machine gun in response to both German 13mm antitank rifles and the emergence of thicker enemy armor, according to the Army.

Browning got to work that summer, teaming up with Colt engineer Fred Moore to create a gun that, per Pershing’s specifications, could shoot armor-piercing ammo capable of traveling 2,700 feet per second.

While Winchester Repeating Arms Company set off to develop the .50-caliber cartridges, Browning worked to exact a prototype to match.

Working off the M1917A1’s base design — Browning’s machine gun that received prodigious use during WWI — the subsequent M1921 would have water-cooled barrels, was recoil operated and fired from a closed bolt. The unique design made the receiver transformable into seven different configurations for all types of roles, from infantry to aircraft.

The first test of what was to become the M2 wasn’t exactly promising, however.

On Oct. 15, 1918, Browning fired 870 rounds in bursts of 100 to 250 rounds. The basic mechanism of the gun was sound, but a host of challenges remained.

The recoil, according to Gorenstein, made it practically impossible” to hold the barrel level.

Postwar development of the gun continued, albeit at a slower pace.

“Work on the 50 caliber going along rather slow,” Browning wrote on April 23, 1920. “I am not satisfied with the new cartridge and afraid it will kick the gun around so it will have no accuracy. … The cartridge we have jumps too much and new one will be 50% worse.”

Browning continued to tweak the gun throughout the 1920s until his death in 1926. Ultimately, the .50-caliber gun that is still in widespread use today was modified by Samuel E. Green, an engineer at the government’s Springfield Armory in Massachusetts, who took over its development in 1927, according to Gorenstein.

“He and his team developed a feed mechanism so that ammunition belts could be loaded from either the left or right side, important if multiple guns were mounted in the confined space of an aircraft wing or fit into a tank turret,” writes Gorenstein.

“He also figured out how to produce a version of the gun for use on land, air, or sea that could be made on a single assembly line. It was officially adopted as the ‘Browning, Caliber .50, M2’ to differentiate it from Browning’s first version. By the end of World War II, more than 2 million M2s had come off American assembly lines, and the gun acquired its still-used nickname, Ma Deuce.”

WWII and beyond

The advent of World War II firmly cemented the M2 as America’s heavy machine gun.

Equipped on both American bombers and fighters, the M2 provided a lethal wall of lead for its plane crews.

In 1941, as Japanese planes strafed American battleships at Pearl Harbor, it was an M2 Browning machine gun that Messman 2nd Class Dorie Miller wielded to defend the USS West Virginia, earning him a Navy Cross — the first Black American service member to receive the award.

As Audie Murphy mounted his tank on Jan. 26, 1945, near Holtzwihr, France, he used a .50-caliber machine gun to hold off advancing German troops in one of the war’s most famous stands.

In the Vietnam War, legendary Marine Corps sniper Carlos Hathcock killed an enemy soldier at a distance of 2,460 yards, writes Matt Fratus. It was not a rifle that notched the nearly mile-and-a-half-long kill, but an M2.

From the battlefields of Mogadishu, Iraq and Afghanistan to present-day Ukraine, the M2 has remained a staple in the U.S. — and the world’s — arsenal.

The machine gun, meanwhile, has come up for reevaluation, and at least four major attempts have been made to develop a lighter gun with less recoil, with only one making it past field tests.

Even in that instance, the weapon was only in the field for a brief time before it was replaced by the old M2, according to Gorenstein.

Roughly 50,000 Browning M2 machine guns remain in use by the American military today.

After suffering a humiliating defeat at Rommel’s hands at Kasserine Pass in Feb. 19-23, 1943, however, from March 23 to April 3 the Americans demonstrated their ability to learn under the tutelage of Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr. at El Guettar. Among those quick learners were Pvt. Robert Booker.

Born in Callaway, Nebraska, on July 11, 1920, Booker joined the Army in June 1942 and after training he was assigned to B Company, 133rd Regiment, 34th Infantry Division. Arriving in Belfast on Jan. 26, 1942, the 34th was the first American division to reach UK soil and on Nov. 8, it landed at Algiers alongside elements of the British 78th Infantry Division and two British Commando units. From there, the division took part in a succession of battles: Kasserine Pass, Sened Station, Sidi Bou Zid, El Guettar, Faid Pass, Sbeitla and Fondouk.

It was at Fondouk that Booker had his moment of challenge. On April 9, 1943, he was carrying the machine gun and ammunition for his company across an open field when they came under heavy enemy mortar and machine gun fire. As Booker’s citation noted, “He continued to advance despite the fact that two enemy machine guns and several mortars were using him as an individual target.”

Although enemy artillery also began to register on him, the wounded gunner reached his intended location 600 feet ahead, immediately set up his weapon, commenced firing and eliminated one enemy machine gun position.

Booker then turned his weapon on a second enemy machine gun, but the enemy was focusing its attention on him and struck him a second time. Although mortally wounded, Booker “remained retrained and unfazed as he continued to encourage his squad and helped direct their fire.”

Slain at age 22, on April 25, 1944, Robert Booker was awarded the Medal of Honor on April 25, 1944, but followed it with an unusual epilogue.

Decades after his sacrifice, the Army commemorated him as the namesake of a new “armored infantry support vehicle,” the M10 Booker. Developed by General Dynamics Land Systems and unveiled in June 2023, the “assault gun” was a relatively lightly armored vehicle with a 105mm M35 cannon, a 12.7mm M2HB machine gun and a 7.62mm M240 weapon for use against light armor and defensive positions.

The M10, however, suffered from weight problems and shifting priorities in the Army budget, leading to its cancellation in 2025. By then, 80 had been produced and plans for their disposal, such as sale to another country, currently remains undetermined.

In an extraordinary and ongoing effort, specialists from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, using new techniques including “next generation” DNA sequencing, have resumed the effort to recover and identify remains from the prison camps and ships used to transport POWs that the U.S. gave up on in 1951.

One of the most recent identifications was that of Army Air Forces Pvt. Bennett H. Waters, who was serving on the Bataan peninsula with the 17th Bombardment Squadron, 27th Bombardment Group, when the forces of Imperial Japan invaded the Philippines on Dec. 8, 1941, the day after the Pearl Harbor attacks.

He was among a group of at least 20 American POWs from the Pacific whose remains have been identified and returned to their families from the first of the year through April 21.

Waters had survived the Bataan Death March; he survived more than three years of prison camp cruelty; and he would survive the sinking by U.S. aircraft on Dec. 14, 1944, of the unmarked Japanese transport Oryoku Maru, which had been taking him and more than 1,600 other POWs to Japan’s home islands to work as slave labor.

Waters, then 26 years old, would not survive a second attack by U.S. aircraft on a second Japanese “hell ship,” the Enoura Maru, on Jan. 9, 1945, in the port of Takao, Formosa (now Taiwan). Waters and more than 300 other U.S. POWs killed in the attack on the Enoura Maru were later buried in a mass grave in Takao, according to DPAA.

In both sinkings, the aircraft came from the same U.S. carrier, the Hornet (CV12), the namesake of the carrier Hornet (CV8) which launched the April 8, 1942, raid on Tokyo led by then-Lt. Col. James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle and was later sunk on Oct. 27, 1942, in the battle of the Santa Cruz Islands.

Following the identification, the remains of Waters were brought back to his southeast Georgia hometown of Blackshear with a military escort from his great-great nephew, Army Sgt. Andrew Walsh of the 10th Mountain Division, for interment on April 4 with full military honors.

Walsh told First Coast News that bringing home “Uncle Hubert,” as he was known, was “an important moment for me but not only me, but for my whole family.”

“We come from a long line of service in the Waters bloodline dating back to the Civil War,” Walsh said. “As a family member of Pvt. Waters, it means a lot that he was able to be found and finally be placed next to his mother” who had a plot at the Blackshear City Cemetery waiting for him

Years ago, Waters’ mother, Minnie Bennett Waters Kelly, bought a tombstone to mark the grave of the son that she believed would eventually return to his southeast Georgia hometown, the Blackshear Times reported.

The April 4 services for Waters at the First Baptist Church of Blackshear marked one extended family’s tribute to the service of a relative who went off to war in another century and whose memory could not be erased by the passage of time and generations.

As the Blackshear Times put it, “Over eight decades of pain, heartache and unanswered questions finally came to an end” when Waters was laid to rest.

Attending the services were several of Waters’ nieces and “numerous” great-nieces and great-nephews; great-great nieces and nephews; and great-great-great nieces and nephews, the Blackshear Times reported.

On his return to Fort Drum in upstate New York, Sgt. Walsh went to the Fallen Warrior Monument on the base to reflect on his unexpected mission to escort the remains of a great-great uncle he had only learned of through family lore.

“My reaction was happy, for one, because he is coming home after so many years of being a POW/MIA,” Walsh said in an article by the Fort Drum Garrison public affairs office. “And then I was excited that I could honor my family in such an important way. As a soldier, it makes me happy to have a fellow soldier coming home, and honoring his memory, and being able to pay respect to him for the sacrifices that he made for this great nation.”

Identifications continue

Another POW whose remains were recently identified was Army Air Forces Pfc. Weber S. Underwood, 25, a member of 28th Materiel Squadron, 20th Air Base Group.

He survived the Bataan Death March but was believed to have died while assigned to the infamous Tayabas Road work detail, according to prison camp and other historical records, DPAA said in a release.

The work at Tayabas Road was such that the POWs built a small cemetery where the remains of 35 POWs were recovered after the war, according to DPAA.

The work detail was a brutal forced labor project in which the Japanese Imperial Army used roughly 300 POWs to construct and repair a strategic jungle road in Tayabas Province, DPAA said.

Underwood died on June 3, 1942, according to the DPAA, and by then Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo was getting ready to order the transfer of thousands of POWs aboard unmarked transports from the Philippines and other sites in the Pacific to Japan’s home islands to be used as slave labor.

Tojo, who was hanged after the war, ordered prisoners to be shipped to Japan on all available vessels, and “The Japanese military subsequently transferred large numbers of POWs to industrial sites throughout their empire— Formosa (Taiwan), Korea, Manchuria, China, Burma (Myanmar), and Siam (Thailand),” DPAA said in a release.

Thousands of prisoners had already died in captivity that began in 1942 when roughly 12,000 U.S. troops and more than 60,000 Filipinos surrendered on the Bataan peninsula in what was arguably the worst defeat ever suffered by the U.S. military.

Then began what has come to be known as the “Bataan Death March,” a 65-mile trek to a railhead in tropical heat with little food or water amid the unremitting cruelty of the Japanese guards who stood ready to kill anyone who fell out of line.

“We had no idea what was ahead” as the march began, Army Air Forces Cpl. James Bollich, who survived the war, said in a 2012 article published by Air Force Global Strike Command Public Affairs.

As the march continued, “All we were doing was burying the dead,” Bollich recalled. “I remember looking around and deciding that the way people were dying that within a few weeks we would all be dead. The big killer was dysentery. Once you caught dysentery you were gone.”

Bollich was later transferred in what the prisoners came to call “hell ships” to labor camps in Mukden, in what is now China, where he was eventually liberated by Russian troops.

Hell on land and sea

In all, the floating dungeons that were the hell ships made a total 156 voyages to transfer POWs, and an estimated 25 of them were sunk by U.S. aircraft or submarines, according to a report by the U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command.

The lingering question about the hell ships has been whether U.S. intelligence or theater commanders knew that American prisoners were aboard and still allowed the attacks to proceed.

In the case of the Oryoku Maru, the sinking “was the result of intercepted Japanese radio transmissions that would have revealed some information about POWs on board,” according to a November 2019 article by the NHHC.

“Whether that information made its way down to the theater commanders is unclear. At any rate, there is no evidence to suggest that commanders at sea had any knowledge of the presence of POWs on Japanese ships,” NHHC said.

According to figures compiled for the Department of Veterans Affairs Advisory Committee on Former Prisoners of War in 1981, the Japanese held a total of 27,465 American POWs during the war and of that total, 11,107 died in captivity.

The oral histories of survivors at the Veterans History Project of the Library of Congress attest to how they died: some were worked to death; some fell to disease and starvation; some died from the bayonet or the bullet of a prison camp guard.

Following the war, the American Graves Registration Service sought to recover and identify remains, including at the main Cabanatuan prison camp in the Philippines, but discontinued the effort in 1951, citing the poor condition of and the commingling of the remains that prevented identification.

More than 3,000 sets of remains were reburied as unknowns at the Manila American Cemetery where they have been cared for by the American Battle Monuments Commission. Others have been reburied as unknowns at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, known as the “Punchbowl.”

In 2014, the Defense Department gave DPAA the mission of renewing the effort to identify, recover and repatriate the remains of POWs who died in the prison camps or aboard the hell ships.

In an e-mail to Military Times, Heath Kennedy, the DPAA Indo-Pacific Disinterment Manager, said that 761 unknowns have thus far been disinterred from the Manila American Cemetery, with most of those occurring since 2017 when DPAA sped up operations.

The 761 unknowns include 464 unknowns associated with common graves from the Cabanatuan POW camp, Kennedy said. “Of the 464 Cabanatuan POW Camp unknowns already disinterred, at least 142 have been identified,” he said.

As for the hell ships, DPAA has disinterred 430 unknowns associated with the hell ships in Fiscal 2023 “and both the Manila and Punchbowl cemeteries and the DPAA Lab are still working to identify as many as possible,” Kennedy said.

DPAA forensics specialists use dental and anthropological analysis, as well as circumstantial evidence, to make identifications. They are assisted by scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System who use mitochondrial DNA analysis to confirm identities, DPAA said in a release.

The most recent identifications were also aided by next generation DNA sequencing, which can identify remains using DNA samples from relatives who are several generations removed from the deceased individual.

At an April 1 briefing in Thailand, DPAA Director Kelly McKeague also announced that DPAA had begun its “largest, most complex underwater mission ever in the history” to recover and possibly identify the remains of POWs who were killed when U.S. Navy aircraft mistakenly bombed and sank the Oryoku Maru in December 1944.

“When the ship was sunk, it limped back into Subic Bay and it sank there. And we began this effort three years ago to underwater investigate the site and the wreckage from the standpoint of trying to understand what it was, what the ship looked like,” McKeague said.

“We estimate there might be over 250 missing Americans in the hold of the ship. We think they might be limited to one of two holds, and that’s where the divers are currently operating,” McKeague said.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices overturned a circuit court ruling that said veteran Army Spec. Winston Hencely could not cite state law to hold Fluor Corp. liable for an employee’s actions.

Hencely had sued the company for negligence in state court in South Carolina, where two Fluor subsidiaries were headquartered. The bombing killed five service members and civilians and injured 17, including Hencely, who suffered a traumatic brain injury and lost the use of his left hand, arm and side of his face.

Writing the opinion for the majority, Justice Clarence Thomas said Fluor’s argument — that it had immunity in wartime under federal law that shields the military from being sued for combat-related decisions — and the circuit court’s support of that defense swept “too broadly.”

“Fourth Circuit … nonetheless found preemption simply because the suit arose in a wartime combat setting. [Another case decision’s] rationale, [Boyle v. United Technologies Corporation] justifies no such blanket preemption,” Thomas wrote.

Thomas added that neither the Constitution or any federal statute explicitly preempted the suit.

“The Court has already held that the Federal Tort Claims Act’s combatant-activities exception does not itself apply to suits against federal contractors,” Thomas wrote.

In late 2016, Ahmad Nayeb, an Afghan national who worked for Fluor and had known ties to the Taliban, built a bomb in his on-base space using work materials and tools.

Nayeb failed to board an escort bus the morning of Nov. 12, 2016, after work but no one reported him missing. He then walked across the base toward a staging area for a 5K Veterans Day race and detonated the bomb in a crowd of more than 200.

The Army investigation found that Fluor violated its contractual duties by providing Nayeb with the tools used to carry out the attack and failing to monitor his movements during escort duties.

Troops are barred from suing the U.S. military for injuries sustained in service under the Feres doctrine, a legal restriction stemming from several 1950s era Supreme Court cases.

They are allowed to sue defense contractors for negligence in their duties working for the U.S. government in combat zones but have seen mixed success, either losing their cases outright or winning but seeing them later overturned by higher courts.

Hencely’s suit differed from most previous cases in that he filed in state court in South Carolina, where two Fluor subsidiaries are based, and made claims against the company under the state’s negligence laws.

In their opinion, Thomas, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch, Amy Coney Barrett and Ketanji Brown Jackson, upheld the state court’s jurisdiction over companies, adding that contractors do not automatically share the government’s immunity.

“Although the Constitution gives Congress and the President broad war powers, that assignment has never been understood to bar all war related tort suits,” they said. “Absent a statue to the contrary, states can regulate or tax federal contractors on the same terms as any private company.”

Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh disagreed and Alito filed a dissenting opinion.

“May a state regulate security arrangements on a military base in an active war zone? May state judges and juries pass judgment on questions that are inextricably tied to military decisions that balance war-related risks against long-term strategic objectives? In my judgment, the answer to these questions must be ‘no,’ and for that reason, this state-law tort case is preempted by the Constitution’s grant of war powers exclusively to the Federal Government,” Alito wrote.

The families of those who were killed and at least eight other injured service members also have filed a lawsuit against Fluor, but that case was on hold pending the Supreme Court’s decision in the Hencely suit.

Killed in the attack were U.S. soldiers Pfc. Tyler Iubelt, 20, Staff Sgt. John Perry, 30, and Sgt. 1st Class Allan Brown, 46, as well as Fluor contractors Peter Provost, 62, and retired Army Col. Jarrold Reeves, 57.

As a justice, Thomas has sided with U.S. troops harmed by negligence by the federal government in non-combat situations, including medical care and off-duty events.

He has argued that the Feres decision should be overruled. Last year, after the court rejected a case that would challenge the Feres decision, Thomas penned a strongly worded 14-page dissent, calling the law “indefensible” and a “senseless as matter of policy.”

The virus, resulting in deadly pneumonia, struck down previously healthy young men within days, some within hours. Postmortem exams revealed soggy lungs with evidence of hemorrhaging, according to the National WWI Museum. Unbeknownst to them, influenza was about to ravage the U.S. military — and the world — in a way unseen since the likes of the bubonic plague in the 1350s.

The origin of the virus is believed to have begun from Haskell County, Kansas. Young men from Haskell County were training at nearby Camp Funston, in what is now Fort Riley, Kansas, according to the Army.

On March 4, 1918, the first influenza cases were identified at the Army base. Within three weeks, 1,100 of the 56,222 troops at the camp were sick.

Then, as men boarded crowded transport ships and lived in close quarters —both behind the lines and at the front — influenza struck, killing more lives in just 18 months than the First World War claimed by bullets in four.

The resulting numbers are staggering. The influenza epidemic claimed the lives of an estimated 50 million people worldwide, afflicting 25% of the U.S. population, and in just one year dropping the average overall life expectancy for the nation by 12 years.

“In retrospect a more efficient incubator and disseminator of an infectious disease to pandemic proportions could not be imagined,” according to the Kansas University Medical Center. “Young non-immune persons concentrated in close quarters for weeks and then dispersed throughout the world. … Military transport ships were the likely vector of influenza which was well-established around the world by August of 1918.”

Within the U.S. military, an estimated 116,516 to 117,000 were killed during the war, including 53,402 battle deaths. Of that, approximately 43,000 service members were killed by the influenza virus.

During the postwar period, the devastation wrought by the flu inspired the U.S. Army Surgeon General to commission research to develop a vaccine to ward off influenza. By the 1940s, the first clinical trial among troops demonstrated excellent efficacy, leading to the first influenza vaccine mandate for military personnel in 1945. Seven million men and women were rapidly vaccinated, according to the National Library of Medicine.

However, the effectiveness of the vaccine began to shift, leading to the withdrawal of the military’s influenza vaccine mandate in 1949.

According to the NLM, increasing understanding of antigenic shifting of the influenza virus became clearer and combatable, and the influenza vaccine once again became mandated again in the early 1950s to preserve the health of the force.

That mandate remained active for over 70 years until Tuesday, with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s announcement that the flu vaccine requirement was no longer mandatory “effective immediately.”

https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2026/04/21/flu-vaccine-requirement-discarded-effective-immediately-hegseth-says/

Typically, the Defense Department aims to inoculate more than 90% of active-duty personnel, and, according to an October 2025 Armed Forces Health Surveillance Division report, the program has been a major factor in lower rates of hospitalizations among service members than national U.S. rates.

According to previous Military Times reporting, the incidence rate of hospitalizations for flu among recruits from 2010 to 2014 was 70 per 100,000, compared with the overall military rate of 7.4 per 100,000.

There were, nevertheless, a handful of American divisions that were “loaned” among the French, the British and the Australians, leaving their partners a general impression of naïve green soldiers capable of learning fast. Among those fast learners was Sgt. Reidar Waaler of Company A, 105th Machine-Gun Battalion, 27th Division, who entered the fray at Le Hamel on July 4, 1918.

Waaler’s peripatetic life story began on Feb. 12, 1894, with his birth in the Norwegian suburb of Oslo. A few years later, his family moved to resettle in New York City. Waaler had enlisted in the 27th Division, a New York National Guard unit, and had risen in rank to sergeant by the time his activated division was shipped overseas.

At Le Hamel the 27th and 30th divisions fought alongside the Fourth Australian Division under one of the most effective tacticians in the British Army: Lt. Gen. John Monash. By September, Monash had been knighted and was commanding the Australian Corps, taking the two American divisions with him.

As the British prepared to advance on the German Hindenburg Line, the infantry of the Australian 3rd and 5th Australian divisions and the U.S. 27th and 30th divisions were lent backup by British Tank Mark V battalions.

Since their debut on Sept. 15, 1916, the lumbering lozenge-shaped leviathans had proven unreliable — unreliable to control and vulnerable to enemy artillery. By 1918, however, they had been much improved and Monash found more things to do with their armored sides than provide gunfire support, such as bringing up fresh ammunition or bringing back the wounded.

On Sept. 27, the Allies moved up toward the Saint Quentin Canal and Péronne, with the 30th Division already having taken its objective. In spite of their demoralizing fallbacks, however, the Germans remained full of fight, inflicting casualties 3,076 out of the 18,055 American divisions in the sector in a matter of two days.

During fighting near Ronssoy, Waaler got a personal demonstration of even the newest tanks’ limitations as one of those supporting A Company was penetrated and began to burn — with a least two of its crew trapped inside. Waaler’s response was described in the citation:

“In the face of heavy artillery and machine-gun fire, he crawled forward to a burning British tank, in which some of the crew were imprisoned and succeeded in rescuing two men. Although the tank was then burning fiercely and contained ammunition which was likely to explode at any time, this soldier return to the tank and, entering it, made a search for the occupants, remaining until he satisfied himself that there were no more living men in the tank.”

The British push, with its two American assistant divisions, broke through the Hindenburg Line on Oct. 5, at which point the war was all but over, although fighting continued until Nov. 11.

On Feb. 4, 1919, Sgt. Waaler stood before Gen. Pershing at Chaumont to receive the Medal of Honor. In 1920 he married Gladys Evelyn Schutrum, but little further is known of his postwar activities, save that he died on Feb. 5 in Palm City, Florida, at age 84, and rests nearby at Forest Hill Memorial Park.

“Since 9/11, we’ve lost over 21 times more veteran lives to suicide than on the battlefield,” he said. “Today, we’re bringing them new hope.”

Trump, in a declaration suffused with urgency, signed an executive order directing the Food and Drug Administration to accelerate the review of certain psychedelic therapies to treat mental illnesses.

Specifically, the order commits at least $50 million in federal funds to boost research on ibogaine, a powerful hallucinogen derived from the African shrub iboga.

Ibogaine is classified as a Schedule 1 substance in the United States — the same category as heroin — which means the Drug Enforcement Administration considers it to have a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Yet it has drawn mounting scientific attention in recent years for its potential to ameliorate conditions ranging from post-traumatic stress disorder to depression.

Much about the treatment remains opaque, but researchers argue the magnitude of the benefits observed in small, controlled trials merits further investigation. A 2024 Stanford University study of 30 special operations veterans with traumatic brain injury and repeated blast exposure found significant improvement in functioning, as well as an easing of PTSD, depression and anxiety symptoms after a single ibogaine session. No serious adverse side effects were reported, and no cardiac complications of the kind occasionally associated with the drug were observed. The authors cautioned, however, that larger studies were needed to better understand its safety and efficiency.

“If these turn out to be as good as people are saying, it’s going to have a tremendous impact on this country, and other countries, too,” Trump emphasized. “It’s for a lot of people, but it’s for our military in particular. The suicide epidemic among veterans is a national tragedy.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., appearing alongside Trump on Saturday, said, “We owe it to our war fighters and veterans to turn over every stone” to alleviate the mental health challenges stemming from their deployments. He acknowledged that the Schedule 1 restriction has caused veterans to seek treatment abroad, where ibogaine is legal.

“It’s disturbing to me and to the president that hundreds, in fact thousands, of veterans are having to travel to Mexico, or other countries, to experiment with interventions that hold great promise,” Kennedy added.

Trump’s directive would not immediately change the categorization of any substance. Instead, it aims to ease the regulatory constraints that have long stymied research, including for therapies already well advanced along the FDA’s approval process.

The Trump administration will also create a pathway for ibogaine to be “administered to desperately ill patients under the ‘Right to Try’ law.” This would permit patients with life-threatening conditions — who have exhausted all approved care — to access experimental medicine not yet fully supported by the FDA.

“I’ve always believed in ensuring that the American patients have access to breakthrough treatments and therapies with love for our veterans, and I have a real love for our veterans,” the president concluded.

A veteran’s search for healing led to an ibogaine trip and an epiphany

Marcus Capone, a Navy SEAL veteran with multiple combat deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq, told Military Times that he found relief in the unconventional treatment. He credits the intervention, without hesitation, for saving his life.

“Every time you come home from a war zone, you feel like you lose a little bit of yourself,” he said, recalling cycles of emotional volatility which encompassed anger and sadness. Over the years, he tried both pharmaceutical and non-pharmaceutical treatments, none of which proved to have long-lasting benefits.

As a last resort, his wife Amber Capone arranged for him to attend a medically supervised retreat in Mexico involving ibogaine. The treatment itself extends between six to 24 hours. Such sessions, he said, are psychologically demanding and physically taxing. At times, they can involve dark imagery and periods of intense emotional processing. But he insists that, for him at least, the gains were worth it.

“The psychedelic shows you not what you want to see, but what you need to see,” he explained. “So when you’re dealing with a traumatic experience, and you go revisit that, you deal with it. You get past the grief, the shame, and move on with your life. They actually get to the root cause of issues.”

The Capones have since established a foundation, Veterans Exploring Treatment Solutions, or VETS, focused on expanding safe access to psychedelic-assisted therapy for those who have exited the military.

“There is hope,” Amber Capone told Military Times. “It’s not a one-size fits all, it’s not for everyone even. But there is hope, and you can actually live rather than simply survive.”

Representatives from specialty courts and veterans’ legal organizations pressed Congress Wednesday for expansion of the Veterans Treatment Courts system and reinstatement of some Veterans Affairs benefits for imprisoned former service members.

They argued that while not all veterans convicted of serious crimes would benefit, those with other-than-honorable discharges or service-connected mental health or substance use disorders should have opportunities to change their lives.

Corey Schramm, an Army veteran who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after three deployments to Iraq and later was arrested following a blackout that involved a weapon, said a Kansas Veterans Treatment Court, where he underwent two years of treatment and mentorship, saved his family.

“I was on and off probation before I went to Veterans Treatment Court, and when I showed up, I thought I was going to play the system, go through the motions. Boy was I ever wrong. … VTC is not a shortcut,” Schramm said during a hearing Wednesday before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.

The first Veteran Treatment Court was established in 2008 in Buffalo, New York, to provide medical treatment, supervision and mentorship to former service members with non-violent criminal convictions related to service-connected addiction or mental health conditions.

Today there are more than 600, and the Department of Veterans Affairs employs hundreds of Veterans Justice Officers to support veterans in jails or who are on parole, probation or in the court system.

But many veterans remain unaware of programs tailored to them or lack access to available services because they were discharged from the military with general or other than honorable discharges, rendering them ineligible for many Veterans Affairs programs and benefits.

Others may have lost access to their VA benefits when they were sentenced, since disability compensation is reduced when a veteran is convicted of a felony and incarcerated for more than 60 days and VA health care benefits stop when they enter a prison health system.

Rose Carmen Goldberg, director of the Veterans Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law, argued that incarcerated veterans should have access to VA behavioral health care, which provides expertise in combat-related mental health issues, sexual trauma or other service-specific concerns.

“Access to VA mental healthcare can literally be lifesaving. Veterans with a less-than-honorable discharge who are unable to access VA mental healthcare have a significantly elevated risk of suicide, a difference that disappears if they gain access,” she said.

Goldberg proposed that imprisoned veterans have access to VA services through telehealth and she supports a bill, the “Get Justice-Involved Veterans Behavioral Assistance and Care for Key Health Outcomes to Maintain Empowerment Act,” sponsored by Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, and Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., that would do that.

“VA-furnished mental healthcare is critical because it is more effective than private sector care,” Goldberg said.

Another key to improving outcomes for veterans who leave the service is reforming the Defense Department’s Transition Assistance Program, which several panelists argued was ineffective for preparing service members for non-military life, the panelists said.

According to retired Army Brig. Gen. David “Mac” MacEwen, director of the Veterans Justice Commission at the Council on Criminal Justice, the Defense Department spends billions on recruiting and training but just millions per year on TAP.

A commission found that TAP did not prepare 44% of its attendees for transition and 22% of transitioning service members never attended.

“The result is a fragmented and under-resourced system that leaves too many service members ill-prepared for civilian life. This lack of preparation increases their vulnerability to involvement in the criminal justice system,” MacEwen said.

Committee Chairman Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., conducted the hearing to better understand how to help veterans in judicial system and prevent them from entering it in the first place.

Moran sponsored a bill that was approved in January to fully fund Veterans Treatment Courts and provided $4 million to establish a National Center for Veterans Justice.

“We need to make sure that veterans who carry scars, with wounds — visible and invisible — are not forgotten,” Moran said.

Yet many jurisdictions do not have a veterans treatment court or those in law enforcement or the court system aren’t aware of these programs. Former Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton Nuss, a former Marine, said more courts are needed, noting that in Kansas, of the 89 veterans who have graduated in the past decade from the VTC program, just five have later been arrested, a 95% success rate.

According to Nuss, one of the first graduates from the Johnson County VTC was a combat veteran who told him he would “have been better off being killed in Afghanistan instead of coming home and being arrested for committing a violent crime.”

“He described his shame to me [as], ‘I went from hero to villain,’” Nuss said. “This justice-involved veteran suffered from unhealed PTSD. As has been said about such veterans, the painful paradox is that fighting for one’s country can render one unfit to be its citizen.”

The panelists also pressed for changes to the GI Bill that allow more veterans to access education benefits. According to MacEwen, the original GI Bill called for all veterans except those who received dishonorable discharges to receive education benefits.

MacEwen said that since the original language for the GI Bill was written in 1944, the VA has changed eligibility requirements.

“Congress explicitly wrote that individuals who were not discharged under dishonorable conditions should be eligible for VA care and benefits. However, the VA’s implementation has not aligned with this plain text, resulting in the unlawful denial of services to hundreds of thousands of veterans with other than honorable discharges,” MacEwen said.

Moran said he believes the VA and Defense Department must improve services for transitioning veterans but community organizations are vital to supporting veterans as well.

“All of our witnesses provide examples of why we work to support veterans when they transition out of the military, and the value they add to our communities and our country after their service when that transition goes well,” Moran said.

Ferencz, who died in 2023 at the age of 103, was just 27 with no previous trial experience when he became chief prosecutor in one of the most significant murder trials in history.

While Congress voted to bestow the medal to Ferencz in 2022, his family members were on hand to posthumously receive the honor this week during the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual Days of Remembrance commemoration at the U.S. Capitol.

“Mr. Ferencz was a tremendous force for good, a fierce New Yorker with a heart of gold and a backbone of steel, a man who saw the worst of humanity and spent the better part of a century fighting for the best of it,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., during the ceremony.

“He came face-to-face with evil, recalling the fact that he had quote, peered ‘into hell,’” Gillibrand continued. “A lesser person might have looked away. But Ben Ferencz looked harder.”

Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz, who was the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, emigrated with his family to the United States when he was an infant to escape anti-Jewish pogroms.

After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943, Ferencz enlisted in the U.S. Army and was given the job of anti-aircraft artillery gunner.

“In their typical [Army] brilliance, being a Harvard Law School graduate and an expert on war crimes, they assigned me to clean the latrines in the artillery and do every other filthy thing they could give me,” Ferencz reminisced about the Army’s odd job placement in a 2016 interview with The Washington Post.

The outspoken Ferencz, who barely registered over five feet tall, eventually rose to the rank of sergeant as a member of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army. Action during the Normandy invasion followed, as did breaking through the Maginot and Siegfried lines, crossing the Rhine and bitter fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.

After Ferencz’s honorable discharge in 1945, Gen. Telford Taylor, then the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, recruited Ferencz to return to Germany and work with a team of investigators tasked with uncovering the horrors of the Nazi regime.

Tasked with gathering credible evidence of Nazi war crimes for the Army’s War Crimes Branch, Ferencz encountered the depths of human depravity. The Germans maintained meticulous death registries at the camps of Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg and Ebensee. These registries, which Ferencz was ordered to collect, contained the names of millions of victims.

“When I passed the figure of one million, I stopped adding,” he recalled in an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “That was quite enough for me.”

It was there that Ferencz and his colleagues discovered the dossiers of the Nazi mobile death squads, the Einsatzgruppen — roving extermination squads that targeted Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissidents in Eastern Europe. In the subsequent trial, the International Military Tribunal determined that nearly two million Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.

“Death was their tool and life their toy,” Ferencz told the judge during the opening statement of United States of America v. Otto Ohlendorf et. al. “If these men be immune, then law has lost its meaning, and man must live in fear.”

All 22 men prosecuted by Ferencz were convicted. Most were sentenced to death.

The 100-year-old South Carolina native received the National Order of the Legion of Honour on April 9 from Anne-Laure Desjonquères, the French consul general, who noted “Mr. Cook, you are a true hero — your example gives us inspiration for the future and your legacy provides a moral compass for generations to come.”

First established by Napoleon Bonaparte in May 1802, The Order is the highest decoration in France and is divided into five degrees: Chevalier (Knight), Officier (Officer), Commandeur (Commander), Grand Officier (Grand Officer) and Grand Croix (Grand Cross).

Roughly 10,000 Americans have been awarded France’s highest distinction, with most recipients being World War II veterans who played a role in liberating France.

“There is no way that I can even attempt to explain the feeling,” Cook said at the ceremony. “As far as I’m concerned, I am so unworthy. I want to be a representative of the people who didn’t come back. They are the ones who paid the real sacrifice.”

For three years, from 1942 to 1945, daylight bombing runs by the 8th’s Flying Fortresses over Nazi Germany unleashed 697,000 tons of bombs.

Of that total, more than 47,000 were from the 8th.

Of that 47,000, the 379th Bomb Group — of which Cook was a part of — dropped 26,459 tons.

The effort to pry the claws of the Third Reich from Europe was met with deadly resistance, prompting torturous contemplation of one’s own mortality while being confronted with casualty totals that, by war’s end, would exceed 115,000 personnel from the U.S. Army Air Force.

Despite such odds, Cook told the WWII Veterans History Project, “Anytime I got in that plane and we took off, I told myself that I’m coming home. That was my attitude.”

Enlisting in the U.S. Army Air Forces in 1943, Cook had dreams of becoming a P-38 fighter pilot. However, according to Cook’s account in the WWII Veterans History Project, he washed out of cadet training for what the Army called a “negative attitude regarding military aviation.”

Undeterred, the slender, 138-pound Cook found his way back to aviation, this time as an aerial gunner in the belly of the four-engine bomber.

“To me that was the most comfortable place in the plane. I was accustomed to that. I fit in it pretty good,” Cook told ABC 25 Columbia.

Flying with the of 524th Bomb Squadron, 379th Bomb Group, 8th Air Force out of Kimbolton, England, Cook participated in the bombings of enemy rail yards, airfields, factories, communication centers, synthetic fuel factories, rocket sites and enemy troop concentrations within France, Germany, Czechoslovakia and Holland.

According to the South Carolina legislature, the 379th’s combat record “was the most successful of all the 8th Air Force heavy bomber groups. The unit held records as far as bomb tonnage dropped … and exceeded all other United Kingdom-based Bomb Groups in the total number of missions flown, carrying out 330 missions between May 1943 and May 1945.”

Cook participated in the air cover during the Battle of France, bombing enemy positions from Normandy through the breakout at St. Lo, as well as during the Battle of the Bulge and the Allied assault across the Rhine River into Germany.

“We would bomb just about anything that would disrupt the [German] war effort,” he explained to the Veterans Project.

Cook flew his last mission — his 35th — on Feb. 16, 1945, and was discharged in October of that year. The veteran returned home to Lexington, South Carolina, where he ran a jewelry store for more than 20 years before his retirement in 1983.

“The Lord’s just been good to me,” said Cook at the ceremony last Thursday. “I have really enjoyed life, and I just thank the Lord for what he’s done for me.”

In the link between distance and ease of aggression, there’s a direct relationship between empathy, physical proximity of the victim and the resultant difficulty and trauma of the kill, according to Lt. Col. Dave Grossman in his 1995 study “On Killing.”

For Vietnam veteran Eugene “Gene” Marion Simmers, a close proximity to death and the actions he wrought haunted him for more than fifty years.

Simmers was drafted soon after he graduated from Granville High School in Ohio in 1966. Serving as a combat medic with Company A, 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry, Simmers received a Silver Star for heroism after his unit found itself trapped as it approached a booby-trapped bridge over a rice paddy near Mo Duc, Vietnam.

“Upon hearing the explosion,” according to his Army citation, “Specialist Simmers rushed to the front of the company and came under intense sniper fire from scattered positions in the area. After taking momentary cover, he maneuvered through the hostile fire and administered first aid to those wounded in the explosion.

“Despite enemy fire impacting all around him, he moved throughout the area to aid his fellow soldiers. His courageous actions were directly responsible for saving the lives of his comrades.”

When asked about his memory of the incident in 2014 by a local news outlet, the Newark Advocate, Simmers recalled, “I just knew I had seven guys hit, and I had to do whatever I could to keep them alive.”

“War’s a bitch,” Simmers went on. “I was just doing my job, and they gave me a medal for it.”

However, up until his death on Nov. 28, 2022, it was not the lives of those men he saved that stayed with him, but that of an elderly Vietnamese woman he had killed during the war.

While the circumstances surrounding the woman’s death remain unclear, what is evident is the weight of her death on Simmers’ psyche.

The simple etching on his gravestone is short — but poignant. The burden of decades-long grief and trauma:

In memory of the elderly woman I killed in Vietnam.

Forgive me. I’m so sorry.

Gene Simmers

Marvin Glen Shields was born in Port Townsend, Washington, on Dec. 30, 1939. After high school his family moved in 1958 to Hyder, Alaska, where he worked in a gold mining project for the Mineral Basin Mining Company.

On Jan. 8, 1962, he enlisted in the Navy, choosing the multi-training of a construction battalion member, or Seabee. After training at Naval Air Station Glynco, Georgia, and Port Hueneme, California, he graduated as a naval construction mechanic in May 1963, and served his first assignment at Okinawa from Nov. 18 to Sept. 1964.

On Nov. 1, 1964, Construction Mechanic 3rd Class Shields swerved into harm’s way when he was assigned to Seabee Team 1104 of Naval Construction Battalion 11.

After final training, on Jan. 22, 1965, he and his nine-man unit transferred to Saigon, Vietnam, just 10 days later. From there, Team 1104 was transported 55 miles north to Dong Xoai, where it joined the 11 members of Army Special Forces Team, A-342, 5th Special Forces Group (Airborne), 1st Special Forces, in constructing a fortified Special Forces camp.

Further reinforcing the area were 200 local anti-communist Montagnards and 200 soldiers of the Army of the Republic of Vietnam (ARVN).

The area was also crawling with enemy troops, ranging from local guerrillas to full-fledged infantry units trained and organized in North Vietnam before returning south. The latter included the reinforced 272nd Regiment, about 2,000 strong, which on the night of June 9, 1965, set out to eliminate the compound at Dong Xoai.

Soon, every defender at Dong Xoai was fighting for his life.

As described in his citation, that included Shields, who was wounded early in the fighting as was the commander of Team 1104. In spite of that: “Shields continued to resupply his fellow Americans who needed ammunition and to return the enemy fire for a period of approximately three hours, at which time the Viet Cong launched a massive attack at close-range with flame throwers, hand grenades and small-arms fire.”

Though wounded a second time during this attack, Shields assisted in carrying a more critically wounded man to safety, then rejoined the fighting for another four hours.

Then a call came up from 2nd Lt. Charles Quincy Williams who, with the wounding of his commander, had taken charge of the Special Forces troops. He needed a volunteer to join him in a sally to eliminate a well-placed Viet Cong machine gunner whose accuracy was endangering the lives of all personnel in the compound.

Without hesitation, Shields volunteered for this hazardous mission. Proceeding toward their objective with a 3.5-inch rocket launcher, Williams and Shields closed to approximately 500 feet and Williams succeeded in destroying the machine gun emplacement.

As the Green Beret and the Seabee made their way back to their defensive positions, however, Shields was hit a third time and Williams twice more.

After a grueling 14-hour siege, Dong Xoai’s defenders were finally evacuated. In the process, Williams eventually recovered from his injuries. Shields was not so fortunate, dying before he reached Saigon. On June 19, he was buried in the presence of a Marine honor guard in Gardiner Cemetery, Washington.

Although the 272nd Regiment finally overran Dong Xoai, the VC knew enough not to hold it long against an enemy with complete air superiority. As far as casualties went, postwar statistics testify to the overnight siege’s butcher bill.

The Americans claimed to have killed 300 VC and captured 104 weapons, while Vietnamese records claimed the loss of 134 men killed and 290 wounded. On the South Vietnamese side, 416 of the ARVN and Montagnards stationed in and around the compound were killed and 176 wounded and 233 missing.

Of the Americans, nine Special Forces troops were killed and of the Seabees, besides Shields, Petty Officer 2nd Class William C. Hoover was killed in the VC’s opening mortar attack. All seven surviving Seabees were wounded.

On Sept. 13, 1966, Shields’ family traveled to the White House, where President Lyndon B. Johnson awarded him a posthumous Medal of Honor. Later, on June 5, 1966, Charles Q. Williams was alive to receive his Medal of Honor. Shields’ name was later christened to the guided missile frigate USS Marvin Shields (FF-1066), as was Camp Marvin Shields Construction Battalion Support Base in Okinawa.

Just a little over a decade after World War I ended, Erich Maria Remarque’s readers found themselves behind the German front lines, empathizing with German soldiers who had once been mortal enemies to the Americans, British and the French.

Like the outcropping of surrealism after WWI, “All Quiet on the Western Front” opened up a new genre of books for veterans to process what they had gone through.

“The novel attracted global audiences in its own time — and continues to do so nearly a century later — because it lays bare features identifiable in virtually any war: deprivation, terror, trauma, kinship, black humor, alienation from society, and (usually) some questioning of the cause,” Samantha Power, Pulitzer Prize-winning author and former U.S. ambassador to the U.N., writes in the forward of the book’s most recent translation.

However, while it is one of the most famous books to come out of WWI — or any war for that matter — “All Quiet on the Western Front” — until recently — had only been translated twice from German to English. Once in 1929 by an Australian; the second translation, from 1993, is available only in the United Kingdom.

Arthur Wesley Wheen’s 1929 edition, despite its numerous mistranslations and stylistic flaws, is the dominant one today, having been the only one available in the U.S. for almost one hundred years.

Maria Tatar, the John L. Loeb professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures & Folklore and Mythology Emerita, saw a gap in the literature and painstakingly restored the novel with contemporary prose while remaining faithful to Remarque’s voice.

With “All Quiet on the Western Front” now in the public domain, she writes in her foreword, “we have the opportunity to try to convey its power in a new translation, and to introduce it to a new generation.”

“I think my real mission was to bring back the voice of [protagonist] Paul Bäumer. To let him speak,” Tatar told Military Times. “In a way, this is a talking book. I’d like to think of it as a book that speaks to us, that gives somebody who is muted by the war, really, a voice.”

“We get to process the violence of war through Paul,” Tatar continued. “And the interesting thing is that, of course, war is this world-shattering experience. Not just world shattering, but also word shattering. So there’s a strange paradox embedded in the book — we’re getting these sorts of unmediated thoughts of the soldier as he’s experiencing combat. I really did see my mission as trying to capture the register of Bäumer’s voice in English, which is, I have to say, not as easy as I thought it would be.”

Calling the translation a “labor of love” and a “struggle,” Tatar strove to bring back, or rather preserve, the Germanness of “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

“Translation means carrying over, carrying across,” said Tatar. “And I felt as I was translating that I was rowing across the River Styx, bringing back a dead man, giving him a voice and channeling Remarque as well.”

Wheen’s 1929 translation has become the definitive translation of Remarque’s work, but according to Tatar, Wheen himself “admitted that his German was not very good.”

“The manuscript was sent to me,” Wheen later reported, “as being one able to understand it, and on reading I found that I understood it less by reason of my knowledge of German, which I have but imperfectly, than by virtue of having made the experience recorded in it.”

In some instances, Wheen includes the word “mate” in his translation — something no German on the Western Front would conceivably call his fellow soldiers. In another, Remarque writes about a guy “getting lucky,” which translates into English literally as “he had a pig.” According to Tatar, Wheen subsequently took that to mean the soldier had pork for dinner.

While Brian Murdoch’s 1993 version comes closer to a true rendering of “All Quiet,” Tatar notes that there were “places where I felt uncomfortable, where the dialog is so difficult to capture in the right way, to get the right tone. And although Murdoch is successful in many ways that’s where I think he fell short, in not working hard enough to get the dialog close to something like a Hemingway style.”

Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front” serves as a semiautobiographical account of the author’s war. Conscripted in the German Army in 1917 at the age of 18, Remarque was hit by shrapnel in the leg, arm and neck and sent to a hospital to convalesce before returning once again to the front. Remarque’s unvarnished account of the war is evident in “All Quiet.”

“It is written from the heart, not from the head,” Tatar noted.

“Tim O’Brien describes in ‘The Things They Carried’ the majesty of combat,” said Tatar. “I think he calls it the ‘aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference.’ But what I find in Remarque’s work is more of a grotesque aesthetic. It’s not the majesty of combat. You get this fragmentation, destructive violence, disintegration, dissolution. And yet, in the face of all of that, there’s a subtext that endorses affective engagement, emotional engagement, sympathetic identification, almost as if to compensate for the unspeakable, physical injuries of war. So in the midst of all of this violence, we’re seeing what Paul sees. We’re feeling what he feels. You feel his pain in an extraordinary way.

“As I was translating the novel, I was so often on the edge of tears,” Tatar continued. “And part of it is that Remarque is so skillful as a narrator, in drawing you into combat. First you get all these acoustical effects — the roar of cannon, the explosions. And then he gives you all these sensory, visual details. You’re really drawn into this explosive, terrifying scene of time.”

The novel has endured for almost a century because while the tools for killing have evolved, much of warfare remains the same. There are and will always be soldiers seeking solace in the camaraderie of their peers and “wondering what the hell it achieves to kill and be killed for causes defined by others,” Powers writes.

It also details the painful, deep disconnect of soldiers returning home from war.

“They’re people I don’t understand,” Paul reflects. “And I both envy and loathe them.”

Human nature almost ensures that there will be more generations who empathize with Paul, but Tatar hopes that her translation has “found the words for a story that we must keep reading to keep from repeating it.”

In the early aughts of the 1990s, the Pentagon was working on developing a whole host of non-lethal chemical weapons that would render an enemy force incapable of being anything other than ... amorous or annoyed.

Within a three-page declassified document came a blink-and-you-miss-it line positing using “Chemicals that effect human behavior so that morale and discipline in enemy units is adversely affected.”

“One distasteful but completely non-lethal example,” it continued, “would be strong aphrodisiacs, especially if the chemical also caused homosexual behavior.”

In a word, a chemical weapon that would make enemy soldiers sexually irresistible to one another — striking a blow to morale.

The randy chemical, later dubbed “gay bomb,” was just one of the many that the Wright Laboratory explored in its proposal dubbed “Project Sunshine.”

Among others, Project Sunshine contained a litany of ideas ranging from the absurd to impractical, including: making a “chemical that made personnel very sensitive to sunlight”; making a weapon that would attract swarms of enraged wasps or rats to an enemy position; and the development of a chemical that caused “severe and lasting halitosis.”

The lab requested $7.5 millions dollars over a five-year period to make their hair-brained ideas reality. The funding was not forthcoming. It did, however, eventually make its way to the mind of Tina Fey and 30 Rock.

As the saying goes, there are no bad ideas — only great ideas that go horribly wrong — but perhaps the Wright Laboratory is an exception that that rule.