The cancellation, first reported by Task and Purpose, was announced Wednesday by leaders of the Bipartisan Women’s Caucus in a press conference outside the U.S. Capitol.

Multiple Democratic lawmakers decried the circumstances, saying it was more evidence of attempts by the administration and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to minimize the service of female veterans.

“In plain terms, the very women the ceremony was created to honor were pushed out of it,” Rep. Emilia Sykes, D-Ohio, the caucus co-chair and vice chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, said. “Honoring veterans should not be controversial. Recognizing the service and sacrifice of women who wore our nation’s uniform should be one of the easiest things for us to come together around. Yet, because of the decisions made by this administration, we are defending the basic act of honoring women veterans.”

A staffer for the Democratic Women’s Caucus told Military Times that the wreath-laying had been canceled June 10 after officials with the Department of the Air Force said they could not attend due to anti-DEI mandates published in January 2025, immediately after President Donald Trump took office.

An Air Force spokeswoman, Ann Stefanek, confirmed to Military Times via email that “The Department of the Air Force declined participation in compliance with Executive Orders … and DoW guidance.”

Officials with the Army and Navy declined to comment. But military sources with knowledge of planning indicated that the services were not coordinated in their response.

Sources claimed the Navy had been unaware of the event and their invitation to attend, while the Army faced scheduling conflicts related to Army birthday events following a rescheduling of the initial wreath-laying date. The Marine Corps did not respond to a query.

The caucus staff member confirmed the event had been rescheduled to June 10 from an earlier May date due to a conflict with votes. They also acknowledged that the Army had citing scheduling issues, but said Army birthday events had never been a problem in the past.

“The executive order and the DoD guidance, it’s for all the branches, so that’s ultimately why this event couldn’t happen,” the staffer said.

At Wednesday’s press conference, multiple speakers cited other recent moves they cast as diminishing the service of military women.

Sykes cited recent reports of Hegseth’s intervention to block the promotion of three female Navy officers to one-star admiral, leaving no women on the promotions list.

Kayla Williams, an Army veteran and former Department of Veterans Affairs official representing the Vet Voice Foundation, recalled Pentagon-driven directives that resulted in the services pulling down web pages honoring the achievements of women in uniform.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Penn., a former Air Force officer, noted that her grandparents were buried in Arlington National Cemetery, which made the cancellation of the wreath-laying “so painful.”

“I keep coming back to a simple question for President Trump and for Secretary Hegseth and my Republican colleagues,” she said. “Which is, when did saying thank you to women who served their country become a controversial statement?

“Women have answered ... every call this nation has asked of them,” Houlahan continued. “They have flown combat missions, they have commanded troops, they’ve cared for the wounded, they’ve gathered intelligence and they’ve deployed into harm’s way alongside their fellow service members. They didn’t ask for special treatment, they earned our respect. And honoring their service should never be viewed as a political statement.”

In a study examining the Department of Veterans Affairs’ handling of disability claims filed for military sexual assault, a panel of experts found that the agency’s dual standards for related disability claims — which allow evidence such as behavior changes and outside observation for post-traumatic stress disorder claims but require proof of the experience for other disabilities — “results in inconsistent decision-making” during adjudication.

According to the report, disability claims related to sexual assault or chronic harassment were approved at lower rates than combat claims, with an 18.2% approval compared to 27.6% across a five-year period. Approval rates were also significantly lower for men and Black veteran.

Under the VA system, veterans who file a claim for conditions stemming from sexual trauma have separate burdens of proof depending on their disability. Those who file for related post-traumatic stress disorder may provide observational evidence but those seeking compensation for other mental or physical conditions connected to the assault must provide proof of the event.

Given that “elements of the military context pressure service members not to disclose” such assaults, showing evidence remains a “major barrier” to substantiating such claims, the report noted.

In 2024, the VA received 39,711 claims related to military sexual trauma. Nearly two-thirds were approved with the average disability rating of 80%. According to the report, the average monthly compensation rate was roughly $2,500 a month.

Roughly 1 in 3 women and 1 in 50 men report having experienced sexual assault or harassment during their service in the military.

The panel, made up of academics, think tank analysts and VA researchers, recommended that the department consider allowing lay evidence and behavioral observation to support PTSD and non-PTSD related claims.

“Congress should enact legislation directing the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to accept evidence from lay persons or other sources as sufficient proof of service connection of any condition claimed to have incurred or aggravated by experiencing MST, regardless of whether there is an official service record of the MST experience or an associated condition,” said Dr. Harold Kudler, who is a retired VA psychiatrist and panel member now with Duke University, during a briefing Wednesday on the report.

The VA’s process itself for handling sexual assault related claims is problematic, the experts said, because claimants must fill out disability questionnaires and attend compensation and pension exams that often are conducted by people who lack trauma-informed training. The panel said the process — including the possibility of having a claim denied — can be traumatic.

They recommended reducing the number of compensation and pension exams veterans must attend, creating a more supportive exam environment and making sure the examiners were trained in handling trauma-related cases.

They also recommended that the VA develop a specific disability questionnaire for sex-related trauma claims.

“We hope that our recommendations will reduce harms to veterans and improve their experience when making [military sexual trauma]-related claims, modernize and strengthen training, and improve accuracy and fairness in the disability compensation process,” Committee Chairwoman Hortensia Amaro, a community health professor at Florida International University, said in a statement.

The National Academies of Sciences Engineering and Medicine was directed to conduct the study by Congress in 2023.

Crafted by architect Kengo Kuma in partnership with the Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation, the memorial’s design is the culmination of eight years of input from 20,000 Americans, including veterans from every branch of service and every conflict since World War II, according to a foundation release.

According to the memorial’s description, visitors will first encounter steel and stone relics recovered from the 9/11 attacks at each of the site’s three entrances, “marking where the journey began,” the release states.

In a primary section coined “the embrace,” a classically inspired amphitheater rises over the path below and features an arch made of reclaimed steel from the era’s combat operations.

The arch, which will also be adorned with native vegetation, is designed to filter light and will be oriented to align with Section 60 in Arlington National Cemetery, the resting place of roughly 1,000 service members killed in the post-9/11 wars.

Below the arch, a predominantly marble “path of honor” includes embedded boot prints “that represent the weight of war and the varied experiences of those who served and their families,” the release says. The path will also connect to adjacent memorials on the National Mall.

Extending from the footprint paths are shallow reflecting pools in which visitors can dip their feet before stepping back onto the stone to leave footprints of their own, an “interactive component [that] offers visitors the chance to walk alongside a loved one once more,” the foundation says.

“This design was shaped by history and held sacred from the beginning — forged by sacrifice and informed by the voices of warriors and their families,” Michael “Rod” Rodriguez, president and CEO of the Global War on Terrorism Memorial Foundation and a retired U.S. Army Green Beret, said in the release.

“Throughout history, societies have built sacred places to welcome their warriors home, places where a grateful people can say, ‘We see you. We honor you. You are not forgotten.’” Rodriguez added. “The GWOT generations deserve that same enduring tribute. Today, we take one step closer to welcoming them home.”

In addition to input gathered since 2018, a 23-member advisory council comprising Gold Star family members, veterans and their families worked alongside designers to craft what the foundation has called a “living place ... that will illuminate at night and invite reflection, healing and unity for generations to come.”

As the site’s architect, Kuma’s work on the memorial resonated on a deeply personal level, he said in a recent interview. The artist lost his close friend Yoichi Sugiyama, who worked for Fuji Bank, in the Sept. 11 attack at the World Trade Center.

“This memorial is not an abstract commission for our team, it is a sacred responsibility,” Kuma said in the release. “Our role was not to impose a design, but to listen. The voices of those who served and the families who stood beside them became our source of inspiration. We wanted to create a place of reflection and connection, a living memorial where nature, light and the materials of this war come together as an embrace for a grateful nation.”

Foundation officials are slated to meet over the coming months with various city planning commissions to finalize design approval, according to the foundation’s proposed timeline.

With approval, the foundation is aiming for a 2027 groundbreaking and a project completion date of late 2028.

Saturday’s rollout marks the second deployment this year to additional VA medical centers following a years-long pause prompted by implementation issues and safety concerns.

The FEHR, made by Cerner, was rolled out to four VA health care facilities and their associated clinics in Michigan in April, the first VA-specific facilities to receive it since 2022.

On Saturday, the VA activated the system at the Cincinnati VA Medical Center, Chillicothe VA Medical Center and Dayton VA Medical Center in Ohio, as well as the Cincinnati VA Medical Center-Fort Thomas in Kentucky.

According to the VA, more than 7,200 VA providers and staff members and 107,000 veterans will have access to the new system in southern Ohio.

VA Secretary Doug Collins told members of Congress in April that the resumption of the program, which was put on hold to address system issues, is going as planned.

“How I know this is working … is that I’m having center executive directors and employees at what is supposed to be next year’s facilities hearing [about it] from their colleagues, and they’re saying ‘We’re ready to go now. We’ve been training; we’ve been doing this — we’re ready to speed up our training,’” Collins told members of the Senate Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee.

The VA’s adoption of Oracle Health’s EHR was halted in 2023 following a year-long pause over safety and functionality concerns. The program was introduced to medical centers in Washington, Oregon and Ohio between 2020 and 2022 but experienced reliability and safety issues and cost increases.

VA officials said Monday the Michigan rollout — the first following the pause other than a 2024 “go-live” at the joint Department of Defense-Veterans Affairs James Lovell Federal Health Care Center in North Chicago — introduced more than 200,000 veterans and 10,000 staff members to the system.

It has received “exceptionally positive” feedback from users and hospital administrators, they said in a press release.

To achieve a smooth rollout, the VA hired additional staff, fixed “hundreds of problems” related to the initial rollout in the Pacific Northwest and streamlined the administration overseeing the implementation, according to Deputy Secretary Paul Lawrence.

The VA’s fiscal 2027 budget request calls for $4.2 billion to continue deploying the system across 170 VA medical centers.

The department plans to introduce the system to three medical centers in Indiana in August and facilities in Alaska and Cleveland, Ohio, in October.

The jobless rate for all veterans fell from 3.7% in April to 3.2% in May. The rate for the post-9/11 veterans ticked up from 4.0% in April to 4.1% in May but was still down from 4.5% in March, the bureau’s report said.

One trend in the report was the continuing improvement among the nation’s 2.1 million women veterans, as shown by a three-month surge – from an unemployment rate of 7.1% in March to 4.4% in April and 3.3% in May.

The last time the unemployment rate for women veterans was less than the rate for male veterans was in January 2019, when women veterans had a jobless rate of 2.7%, compared to 3.0% for male veterans.

However, the BLS has issued occasional cautionary notes on the data for women veterans, stating that the data comes from a much smaller sample than for male veterans and was thus susceptible to greater fluctuations.

One reason women veterans may be doing better on the jobs market is that more employers are realizing that “women make excellent employees,” said Heather Long, chief economist for the Navy Federal Credit Union.

In her estimation, the latest jobs report showed that the market’s recent “low hire, low fire” environment had come to an end. “The hiring recession is over,” Long said in a phone interview Friday.

She also noted that wages were not keeping up with inflation – the BLS said that wages were up 3.4% in May while the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland in a recent report projected that Consumer Price Index for May would come in a 4.2%.

“It’s a split-screen economy,” Long said, noting that job growth was continuing while the nation was at war in Iran, the Strait of Hormuz was closed, inflation was ticking up, the nationwide average for a gallon of regular gasoline Friday was $4.24, and the main concern of voters in numerous surveys was “affordability.”

The improving performance of women veterans was unsurprising to Kevin Rasch, the Warriors to Work regional director at the Wounded Warrior Project.

“Employers recognize the value of having veterans” on the payroll, Rasch said. “They bring a lot of value to the table,” he said in a phone interview Friday - and that recognition was now being given to women veterans.

Rasch recently returned from a trip to Germany where he visited U.S. bases to speak with active duty troops to learn of their concerns about transitioning back to civilian life in the states.

“AI is one of the hot topics” for those transitioning troops who feel that they could be at a disadvantage in the civilian jobs market, Rasch said. His team was prepared to coach those transitioning veterans on coping with AI, Rasch said, but he also said that “AI is not going away.”

Rasch said job seekers should not automaticall blame AI when they lose out on a position because “someone learned how to use AI better than you.”

The predictions ahead of the release of the BLS jobs report suggested that AI would be a factor in job losses. “AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs and the primary industry citing it is technology,” Andy Challenger, labor and workplace expert and chief revenue officer of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, said in a statement prior to the release of the BLS report.

The BLS report said that total nonfarm payroll employment increased by 172,000 jobs in May, which was similar to the gain of 179,000 jobs in April.

“Leisure and hospitality added 70,000 jobs in May, well above the average monthly gain of 14,000 over the prior 12 months,” the BLS report said. Food services and bars added 48,000 jobs, health care added 35,000 and manufacturing added 7,000.

“This is about the strongest market of my lifetime,” Kevin Hassett, the director of the White House National Economic Council, told CNBC of the job gains.

He attributed the gains to President Donald Trump’s policies, including the tax cuts he enacted last year.

Crandall, while recognized for his heroism, will be best remembered for the “warmth of his wit, the depth of his humility and the fierce loyalty he gave to the people and communities he loved,” according to a Congressional Medal of Honor Society release.

Born in February 1933, Olympia, Washington, the All-American athlete had dreams of being drafted by the New York Yankees and earned a scholarship to the University of Washington. That dream was deferred, however, when Crandall was drafted by the U.S. Army in 1953.

Crandall would subsequently receive the nation’s highest honor for valor during the Nov. 14, 1965, Battle of Ia Drang — the first major clash of the Vietnam War, made famous by the book We Were Soldiers Once … and Young: Ia Drang–The Battle That Changed the War in Vietnam and the subsequent movie of the same name.

On that day, Crandall led 16 helicopters carrying soldiers into Landing Zone X-Ray in the Ia Drang Valley, but as the fighting intensified, orders came down for follow-on aircraft to abort their mission, meaning all medevac assistance had been cut off to the men of the 1/7 Cav.

“The medevac pilots were all great pilots, but they weren’t allowed to land on a landing zone until it was ‘green’ for a period of five minutes,” meaning it wasn’t being relentlessly attacked, Crandall later recalled.

Crandall recognized that the men he had shuttled into Ia Drang were trapped, in desperate need of ammunition and, for some, medical evacuation.

Contacted on the radio by Col. Ramon Antonio “Tony” Nadal, Crandall recalled that Nadal was yelling, “I got to have — get my wounded out of here. I’ve got 12 guys that are — and they’re collected, and I have a hole where a helicopter can get in, but they won’t come.”

In response, Crandall refueled, kicked off his door gunner and weaponry to lighten his load.

“If you have infantry on the ground, you can’t shoot up their backside,” Crandall said, calling the M60 guns “worthless.”

Ignoring the heavy enemy fire, Crandall, alongside his friend Maj. Ed Freeman, voluntarily flew 22 missions into the valley to deliver ammunition and evacuate some 70 wounded soldiers.

“While medical evacuation was not his mission,” reads his Medal of Honor citation, “he immediately sought volunteers and with complete disregard for his own personal safety, led the two aircraft to Landing Zone X-Ray. Despite the fact that the landing zone was still under relentless enemy fire, Major Crandall landed and proceeded to supervise the loading of seriously wounded soldiers aboard the aircraft.

“Major Crandall’s voluntary decision to land under the most extreme fire instilled in the other pilots the will and spirit to continue to land their own aircraft, and in the ground forces the realization that they would be resupplied and that friendly wounded would be promptly evacuated,” the citation continues. “This greatly enhanced morale and the will to fight at a critical time.”

Crandall would ultimately fly nearly 1,000 combat missions and was further commended for rescuing 12 wounded soldiers during a dense jungle operation in January 1966, according to the Department of Defense.

In 1968, four months into his second tour in Vietnam flying Huey gunships in support of the 1st Cavalry Division, Crandall’s helicopter crashed, breaking the pilot’s back among other severe injuries that left him hospitalized for five months.

The broken back didn’t deter Crandall from flying, but a subsequent stroke in the early 1970s ended his flying career. He retired from the Army in 1977.

Crandall, who initially received the Distinguished Service Cross for his actions at Ia Drang, was awarded the Medal of Honor on Feb. 26, 2007, by President George W. Bush.

With Crandall’s passing there are now only 63 living Medal of Honor recipients.

I grew up in the house my great-grandparents built, a home where four generations shared laughter, loss, and celebrations. These same walls that once harbored the joy of my grandfather’s courtship were the ones that eventually held the pain of the day my grandmother learned he had been killed in action during World War II.

While growing up in this same house, I always knew of a box of letters my grandfather, Otis Bryant, had written from the war, most of them addressed to his wife and some to his mother. I read one or two during childhood, but in my mid-20s, I felt compelled to read them all in chronological order.

He was my grandpa, and I loved him, but I never met him. Still, I wanted to know him because losing him left a large gap in our family: my grandmother became a widow in her early 20s, and my mother was left fatherless. I witnessed my mother’s enduring grief of never knowing him.

I relished every sentence of his letters. I would lay them out and invite my mother to read them as well, but she would just walk by and say that it was too hard.

I read them with deep curiosity, always imagining what he looked like and where he was in the battlefields of Europe. Through his letters, I found he was a very caring, thoughtful, and religious person.

“Pray for this war to end very soon,” he wrote in one letter. “If you do any more praying than I do, you are doing plenty. I have almost worn out one prayer book.”

He also had a romantic side and showed his true love for my grandmother.

“I wish to tell you that I love you with all my heart and that there will never be anyone [to] make me feel different.”He included a flattened flower in the letter around their wedding anniversary and said he was thinking about their wedding day four years ago and that he imagined all the hugging and kissing when he got home.

I smiled when I read, “You can look in a mirror and kiss yourself and that will be for me.”

He talked about being homesick and how he missed his son, 3-year-old Tommy.

“I hope Tommy [doesn’t] forget what I look like before I get home. Talk about me a lot to him, I bet he wonders where I am. I can hear him say, ‘Where’s Daddy?’ ”

The letters made me feel close to him. He seemed lonely when he wrote them, thinking longingly of his babies and wife back home while he was in unspeakable environments and, on some days, had seen battle.

He wrote as if everything was OK and he wasn’t in the middle of a war in a strange land. I tried to weave those two concepts in my imagination, but it was almost impossible.

As I read his letters throughout the years, my deep connection to him grew. I always wanted to visit him at his burial place in the Lorraine American Cemetery in France. I consider burial sites sacred since they are the final, tangible resting place of our physical selves.

Grandpa never got to physically come home, so I wanted to go to him. That trip came in 2025.

The year prior, I immersed myself in researching the 80th Division and the 317th Infantry unit, where he was assigned. I used the 80th Division Veterans Association website to review unit histories, oral histories, and morning and after-action reports to trace his last days and weeks and possibly even the location where he was killed. It was a profound journey of discovery.

I also found the Thanks GIs Association, which organized a two-day pilgrimage to the actual villages where my grandfather last fought. While walking on those village streets, I held against my chest a book based on a diary of a soldier who fought in my grandpa’s infantry. It held details of the fighting and what had happened in those villages. I envisioned it everywhere I looked.

I was also honored to meet two village mayors. The gratitude from them and every French person I met was palpable, even 81 years after my grandfather’s service.

I was simply blown away by the gravity of their emotion, of their thankfulness to me. I felt as if I was accepting thanks for my grandpa. And I was.

I also felt like an imposter because I certainly didn’t do anything. He was the one who fought, suffered shrapnel wounds, and ultimately died for their freedom and the betterment of the world.

It was surreal, almost spiritual, to receive that thanks on his behalf. As I stood before these people, a beautiful sense of synchronicity occurred because I was reciprocating gratitude back to them for remembering him.

I did not expect to feel so indebted to them. My loved one was taken so their lives and culture could continue.

I certainly wish he had come home, raised his two kids, and, 30 years down the road, watched his grandchildren play. I wish he lived a happy, long life with his wife. But sometimes soldiers must fight to the death for freedom.

As I traveled through those French villages, I better understood that thousands had to leave this earth in order to take down evil, and in those thankful eyes, I saw the results of the fight for their freedom. This bond that I felt between our two worlds was an unexpected gift.

My family’s world — forever changed by the ultimate sacrifice and loss of our loved one — and their world, also shaped by our sacrifice and the sacrifice of thousands, came together in a soul-stirring way that I will forever hold dear.

Now, exactly 14 years to the day, the former paratrooper will step out of a WWII-era C-47 and jump into the same drop zone where paratroopers of the 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment and the 82nd Airborne fought on D‑Day.

“The fates always have an odd sense of irony in my life,” Harmon said in a press release. “Jumping on my 14th alive day, into the drop zone my 508 guys jumped, it’s surreal.”

“Eight months ago, if someone said that was possible, I would’ve laughed them out of the building,” Harmon continued. “But once it became a possibility, it was mission mode. How do we do this? What prosthetics? What padding? And then it was off to the races.”

For Harmon, the road — or sky — back to static-line parachuting has been a long time coming.

Enlisting in the Army just a couple months out of high school, the teen was soon patrolling in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, as a machine-gun ammo bearer with the 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division, as part of Task Force Fury.

According to Harmon, the day began “as a routine patrol and key leader engagement with village elders about a mile and a half from their strongpoint.”

Around mid-afternoon, as the maneuver element began moving into the village, Harmon and his gunner set up the support‑by‑fire position, according to the release.

As Harmon was checking his angles, he moved alongside a low wall and berm, where his machine gun was positioned.

“And that’s when I stepped on it,” says Harmon. “It was a total brownout. I kept trying to stand up. I didn’t understand why I couldn’t until I looked down and saw my [tibia and fibula] sticking out.”

A cloud of dust and debris enveloped the seriously wounded paratrooper. To his horror, just mere seconds later, fellow soldier Pfc. Brandon Goodine stepped on a second device close to Harmon.

As medics worked to save both soldiers, they triggered a third IED.

“They carried him right over me,” Harmon said. “And then the stretcher team stepped on another plate. It was … it was bad. It killed Brandon instantly.”

His unit suffered 10 to 12 casualties that day, with Harmon, despite his grievous wounds and severe blood loss, conscious throughout the whole evacuation.

“It was like something out of Apocalypse Now. Just a pile of guys in the Black Hawk,” he recalled.

“The last thing I remember was the American flag on the ceiling as they pushed me into the surgical unit,” he said in the release.

After undergoing an emergency surgery in Afghanistan and then Germany, Harmon was eventually flown to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where doctors amputated his left leg above the knee. His right leg, according to the release, was already gone.

From that day in June, Harmon was thrust into a new mission.

While recovering at Walter Reed, another double below‑knee amputee came round to his bedside.

“He lifted his pant leg and said, ‘It doesn’t end here.’ From that moment on, I wanted to be like him,” said Harmon.

Returning to active duty through the Army’s Continuation on Active-Duty program, Harmon — who became the first double above‑knee amputee to return to active orders in the 82nd Airborne Division — served as the XVIII Airborne Corps liaison to help wounded soldiers and their families navigate similar situations as his.

Harmon served as a liaison until 2020, after which he left the Army to pursue higher education.

His Army career was seemingly finished — that is, until Dominic Mancuso, a fellow combat infantryman, came calling.

“Would you want to jump into Normandy?” he asked.

In 2025, Ramon Alvarez, an active duty first sergeant stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia, had begun actively recruiting veteran paratroopers to take part in the ceremonies surrounding the 82nd anniversary of the Normandy invasion.

Alvarez, who had previously served with Mancuso in Afghanistan, is the co-founder of the WBS Charity Foundation, “a 501C3 nonprofit organization that channels collective generosity toward small, community-based nonprofits serving veterans,” according to the release.

From there, Harmon connected with the Liberty Jump Team, a commemorative parachute organization that “preserves airborne history by performing WWII‑style static‑line jumps at historic sites and memorial events,” per the release.

Nearly 14 years after jump school, Harmon began relearning the mechanics of parachuting — this time on specialized short prosthetic legs.

During his first jump this past March, something akin to catharsis occurred.

“I grabbed the door and thought, ‘This is so cool.’” he said in the release. “When I landed and stood up, I just broke down crying. I couldn’t believe I walked away unscathed.”

According to the release, Harmon is believed to be the first double above‑knee amputee to complete a static‑line parachute jump. He has already completed three jumps with his prosthetics, bringing his total to 10.

Harmon’s wife, an active-duty soldier herself, is encouraging him to keep going.

“As soon as my wife saw how insanely happy it made me, she said, ‘Yeah, you need to do this.’ And after I came back from BAR [basic airborne refresher], she told me, ‘You need to keep doing this. I haven’t seen you this happy in years.’”

On June 7, Harmon will jump into La Fière at Sainte‑Mère‑Église carrying Goodine’s necklace — lent to him by the soldier’s daughter — as well as some of his grandfather’s ashes and his original Army ID card. His grandfather, a Korean‑era infantryman, died recently, according to the release.

“I’ll be jumping with all my guys,” Harmon said. “Every paratrooper who came before me.”

For the former paratrooper, the jump into Normandy is more than sacred history, however.

“If I can use what I’m doing to help my guys so they’re not hurting themselves, I’ll do that for the rest of my life,” he said. “I want young paratroopers to know you can go into battle, get hurt, and life is not over. You can keep doing incredible things.”

“Stay airborne,” Harmon concluded. “It’s the greatest place on Earth.”

“Hey, get outta that chair,” barked the 101-year-old Don Graves. “Sitting in that chair with your arms folded.”

“I’m freezing!” rejoined William “Billy” Byrd, now 100.

“He looks like he’s been through battle right now,” Graves continued.

The two Marines, part of the 2nd Battalion, 28th Marine Regiment, 5th Marine Division that was famously tasked with capturing Mount Suribachi on Iwo Jima, had been flown into Washington, D.C., to serve as Honorary Grand Marshals for the National Memorial Day Parade on Monday.

Time was superfluous to the men who commenced their ribbing mere seconds upon spotting one another.

Iwo Jima veterans Billy Byrd (100) and Don Graves (101) flew to Washington, D.C., where they will serve as Honorary Grand Marshals for the National Memorial Day Parade. 🇺🇸

The first thing they did when they saw each other? Started talking trash.

Some things never change. 🤣 pic.twitter.com/K2tOFvxC6o

— 𝕃𝕚𝕖𝕦𝕥𝕖𝕟𝕒𝕟𝕥 ℂ𝕠𝕝𝕠𝕟𝕖𝕝 ℙ 🪖 (@TheLtColUSMC) May 24, 2026

Graves, a native of Detroit, Michigan, quit high school and joined the Marine Corps in 1942 at the age of 17.

“It was always the Marine Corps,” he told photographer D. Clarke Evans in 2018. “My dad was in the Corps.”

Graves noted that he was the only flame thrower in the 2nd Battalion to survive the battle.

“We had 335 Marines going in; 18 came off,” said Graves, adding the sobering statistic.

He was among the third wave of Marines that came ashore on Iwo Jima on Feb. 19, 1945, equipped with a 72-pound flamethrower strapped to his back and a .45-caliber pistol on his hip.

“On the beach, we knew this wasn’t going to be easy; we couldn’t move, we couldn’t get up. Guys were getting killed. Every time they’d go over the top, they’d drop,” Graves said. “I was on the beach at least two hours. It took us three days to go 540 feet to Suribachi — inch by inch, foot by foot, shell hole by shell hole.”

Graves, who after the war went into the ministry, told Evans that he found God in the volcanic sands out in the Pacific.

“I lay on the beach at Iwo. Nowhere to go, I saw what was happening. I was scared. I put my face in the sand and said, ‘God I don’t know much about you, but if you can do for me what people tell me you can, I will serve you the rest of my life.’”

101-year-old World War II veteran Don Graves — the last surviving flamethrower operator from his battalion, which fought on Iwo Jima — sings “God Bless America” at the National Memorial Day Parade. pic.twitter.com/8dpTMo7u9e

— Freedom 250 (@Freedom250) May 25, 2026

Byrd, a Mississippi native, enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1943 at the age of 18. One of seven children to parents of sharecroppers, Byrd hoped to expand his horizons by joining the Corps.

Byrd, like Graves, was just 19 years old when he found himself fighting on Iwo Jima.

“I was right on the lines,” Byrd told the Clarion Ledger in 2015. “I was so lucky.”

“The only thing we thought about was going home,” Byrd recalled to a local Mississippi outlet in 2019. “And after I got back home a couple of years, I regretted that I didn’t get their addresses and phone numbers.”

And while it took nearly a century to connect, the Marine was on hand Monday to watch as Graves belted out “God Bless America” at the National Memorial Day Parade.

One can only imagine the ribbing after that.

The silence then greeted the U.S. Army Transport ship Joseph V. Connolly as she sailed up the Narrows past the Statue of Liberty and eased into the berth at Pier 21 off W. 21st on Manhattan’s West Side on Oct. 26, 1947.

The converted Liberty ship carried a cargo of 6,248 caskets bearing the remains of troops from the European theater of World War II, including many who fell in the Battle of the Bulge.

The Connolly was the first ship to arrive in the states under the “Return of the Dead” program of the American Graves Registration Service, which conducted the largest search and recovery effort of war dead ever attempted between 1945 and 1951, resulting in the identification of more than 280,000 fallen Americans.

As a band played Chopin’s funeral march, a casket from the Connolly chosen at random was lowered onto a caisson which was escorted, to muffled drum beats, by 6,000 marchers from the military services up Fifth Avenue and then to the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, where dignitaries and military chaplains made remarks.

A crowd estimated at 400,000 turned out to mark the passage of the caisson. The mood stood in stark contrast to the boisterous, ticker tape parades that preceded the arrival of the Connolly for troops returning in victory from Europe and the Pacific.

The flag-draped casket on the caisson demanded respect and sorrow, but one of the only breaks in the crowd’s silence was completely understandable, the New York Times reported.

Along Fifth Ave., a distraught woman shouted, “Johnny, my Johnny, where is my boy?” The woman followed the parade to Central Park, the Times reported, and again shouted, “Johnny, where is my boy?”

The ceremonies in Central Park ended with a benediction from Navy Capt. Frank Hamilton, the Protestant chaplain for the Third Naval District.

“Almighty God, our Father, before Thee is a chosen child of the American people, chosen in death, to represent all our children,” Hamilton stated.

All 6,248 caskets aboard the Connolly arrived in New York with the approval of next of kin who signed “Quartermaster’s General Form 345” on the final disposition of the remains.

The form cautioned that “the next of kin should familiarize himself with the contents of the pamphlet ‘Disposition of World War II Armed Forces Dead’ before filling out this form.”

Then came the choice: the next of kin could choose for the remains “to be interred on a permanent American military cemetery overseas,” Form 345 said, or “be returned to the United States.”

If the U.S. was the choice, the government would deliver the remains to the nearest train station or to the home of the next of kin by military hearse. In addition, the government would pay up to $600 for a private funeral.

In all, a total of more than 171,000 remains were returned to the U.S., while the fallen’s next of kin chose to have more than 110,000 deceased remain overseas to eventually be interred at one of the 26 military cemeteries magnificently maintained worldwide by the American Battle Monuments Commission.

In statements after the war, President Harry S. Truman said he had been urged by unnamed allied countries to allow for the burial of American war dead in their cemeteries — if the families agreed — to honor permanently the troops who liberated their countries.

In a May 13, 1947, statement “Concerning Final Burial of the Dead of World War II,” Truman sought to ease the concerns of the families that their loved ones might not be treated with respect overseas.

“I feel sure, however, that if they could see for themselves the care which is devoted to the graves of those who died in the First World War, and to the temporary cemeteries in which their own dead lie buried today, many of the next of kin would prefer that their loved ones should rest forever in the countries where they fell,” Truman said.

“I believe, therefore, that our government should make possible a pilgrimage to the permanent cemeteries overseas” for the families “to give reassurance of the perpetual care which our country will devote to the resting places of our honored dead.”

The proposal, however, was deemed too expensive and was never implemented.

One of the overseas cemeteries is located near the Dutch town of Margraten, whose citizens have adopted the graves of each of the 8,200-plus American troops buried at the nearby Netherlands American Cemetery.

Operation Market Garden, which was fought across the Nazi-occupied Netherlands and marked the largest airborne operation of World War II, began on Sept. 17, 1944, about 60 miles northwest of Margraten.

Since 1945, ceremonies have been held at the cemetery on the Sunday before Memorial Day. The tradition began when Dutch teenager Frieda van Schaik wrote a letter to the U.S. military pleading for the remains of American soldiers to stay at the cemetery.

She and other citizens of Margraten made a promise to American military families.

“Leave your boys with us,” Schaik wrote. “We will watch over them like our own, forever.”

Now, the upcoming film “Pressure,” adapted from writer David Haig’s 2014 play of the same name, is set to relieve those angst-filled 72 hours leading up to D-Day.

The film stars Academy Award winner Brendan Fraser (“The Whale”) as Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces Dwight D. Eisenhower and Andrew Scott (“Fleabag”) as Group Captain James Stagg, the chief meteorologist who predicted the storms over Western Europe in the days leading up to the invasion.

Premiering in theaters on May 29, “Pressure” depicts this true yet stranger-than-fiction story of Stagg’s unenviable task of predicting the English Channel’s notoriously fickle weather.

The lanky Brit, later described by his son a “dour irascible Scot,” alongside a team of forecasters from the Royal Navy, British Meteorological Office and U.S. Strategic and Tactical Air Force, knew the Allies only had a small window — nine days in May and June — that were suitable for the invasion.

“The days needed to be long for maximum air power usage; a near-full moon was needed to help guide ships and airborne troops; and the tides had to be strong enough to expose beach obstacles at low tide and float supply-filled landing vehicles far onto the beach during high tide,” according to a DoD breakdown of D-Day. “H-Hour was also crucial in that it relied on those tides to be rising at that time. There also had to be an hour of daylight just beforehand for bombardment accuracy.”

Eisenhower set the date for the invasion to be June 5, but in the wee hours of June 4, 1944, Stagg recommended halting the 7,000 naval vessels — including battleships, destroyers, minesweepers, escorts and assault craft — carrying more than 160,000 troops.

Despite his recommendation, the weatherman was certain only in his uncertainty, writing in his diary on June 4, 1944, “I am now getting rather stunned — it is all a nightmare.”

“He was just greatly interested and brilliant at his job,” Scott told Military Times. “He wasn’t looking, number one, for people to like him in the war room. That wasn’t really his world. He was looking to do the right thing. He had to deliver this forecast that he knew he was capable of delivering.”

The aptly titled “Pressure” depicts an anguished Eisenhower on the eve of the invasion, with the weight of the free world and the largest, most dangerous seaborne invasion in history all hinging on a weather report.

“We tend to hear about or learn about the most dramatic or the most swashbuckling kind of adventure stories. … I think there’s something quietly heroic about a guy like Stagg, who’s got to leave his pregnant wife, he’s got to go to work, he’s got to save the world [and then go] home again as though nothing happened,” Anthony Maras, who directed and co-wrote the script with Haig, told Military Times.

“Stagg’s a bit like an intellectual superhero in a way in that he has the courage to stand by his convictions. He has the courage to tell people who are superior to him — who are in charge of the biggest military machine in the world — what they do not want to hear, but what they need to hear," Maras added. “I found [that] fascinating — that one decision can change history. You’ve got these really brilliant people — whether they be scientists, generals or officers — who are really capable, who have very different ideas about what to do. And as the clock ticks down for launching or not launching the biggest invasion in history, seeing these men and women go crazy in indecision, not knowing what to do, is inherently dramatic.”

Stagg’s intel proved correct and a storm broke over the English Channel on June 5. However, further postponement would have meant a two-week delay. Stagg believed there would be a small break in the storm and, just before dawn 24 hours prior, Eisenhower made the decision to go on June 6.

If the titanic invasion wasn’t enough to fray Eisenhower’s nerves, just six weeks prior, on April 27–28, Exercise Tiger, the dress rehearsal for Operation Overlord, had gone hideously awry.

Taking place in Slapton Sands, England, friendly fire and German E-boats claimed the lives of more than 1,000 men and resulted in the worst loss of life for American troops since the Dec. 7, 1941, Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

In fact, five times more men died at Slapton Sands than were killed storming Utah Beach on D-Day. As a result of the rehearsal, however, the Allies learned valuable, though grim, lessons that would be essential to the success of the invasion.

Just several weeks after the operation Stagg noted in a memo to Eisenhower that had the Allies postponed to later that June, they would have encountered the worst weather in the English Channel in two decades.

“I thank the Gods of War we went when we did,” Eisenhower wrote back.

Staff Sgt. Johnny “Joey” Jones, a Fox News contributor, reenlisted in the Corps on Wednesday in a ceremony held by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth at the Pentagon Hall of Heroes, according to the Department of Defense.

“A lot of work went into saying, ‘Hey, this is the kind of American we want back in uniform,’” Hegseth said in the ceremony. “Not just because of what he did and what he’s done in uniform but because of how he represents the fighting men and women of our country.”

Jones enlisted in 2005 as a radio technician before deploying to Iraq in 2007 as a machine gunner, per a Pentagon release. He then requested to change his MOS to Explosive Ordnance Disposal and later deployed to Afghanistan in 2010, according to the Sentinels of Freedom, a veterans scholarship and support program that Jones joined in 2012.

During his time in Afghanistan, Jones disabled over 85 improvised explosive devices. In August 2010, however, Jones stepped on an IED, resulting in the loss of both legs above the knee.

Starting in 2019, Jones became a Fox contributor “wingman” for Hegseth and spoke on military analysis and veterans’ services.

“How Joey talks about [service] on television [is] so that the American people understand it and connect to it in a visceral way,” Hegseth said at the ceremony. “You could talk about it academically, you could talk about it from a detached perspective or you can talk about having lived it the way he has.”

In his remarks at the ceremony, Hegseth highlighted last year’s Marine Corps record recruiting numbers, saying he hopes Jones’ reenlistment motivates younger Americans to join the military.

Jones said during the ceremony that he had more to give after medically retiring 14 years ago. He called it a “debt,” highlighting that he was able to be on TV while other service members continued to give to the country, “shy of their life and maybe a couple legs,” he said.

“The last job I had in uniform, my job was to get better. It was to heal. It’s a very selfish thing,” Jones said. “The Marine Corps paid me to get better, and then I retired, and there’s nothing wrong with that. But it was unfinished business.”

Jones said he strives to change the perspective that society has of the men and women who got injured in combat and saw the worst of war. He said there’s more to give — if not through reenlisting, then by serving the community.

He remembers former Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. James Amos telling him, “Once a Marine, always a Marine,” not knowing that he would “cash that check” almost 20 years later.

“If there’s an opportunity for me to serve, there’s no reason why a no-legged 40-year-old staff sergeant [should not] be able to put the uniform on, other than these men believed it,” Jones said. “The goal here is to open that door for anyone else that has something left to give.”

The bill, which also provides appropriations for veterans-related agencies such as the American Battle Monuments Commission and Arlington National Cemetery, includes nearly $450 billion for the VA in fiscal 2027, a 3% increase from fiscal 2026 but lower than President Donald Trump’s request of $488 billion.

The bill was the first appropriations legislation to clear the House this year, in a 400-15 vote May 15 that Rep. John Carter, R-Tex., called a “testament to America’s commitment to taking care of the men and women who have bravely worn the uniform.”

“I want every service member and veteran to know that this bill has their back,” said Carter, chairman of the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies Subcommittee.

The bill includes $324 billion in mandatory spending for the VA that covers health care and benefits and $137.8 billion for discretionary spending, roughly 2% higher than the fiscal 2026 amount but significantly lower than Trump’s request of $205.6 billion for discretionary funds.

The White House had asked to shift mandatory funds marked for injuries or illnesses related to toxic exposures — roughly $52 billion — to the discretionary budget, but the committee rejected the idea.

Lawmakers have expressed concerns that the use of those mandatory dollars, from the Cost of War Toxic Exposures Fund, would jeopardize the fund’s intended use for veterans sickened by environmental pollutants.

The bill provides $19.7 billion for military construction projects, including $2.1 billion for the Army; $5.5 billion for the Navy and Marine Corps; $3.7 billion for the Air Force; $3.8 billion Defense Department-wide and additional funding for the National Guard and Reserve components.

The bill also includes a provision that would cement the VA’s decision to halt notifications to the Justice Department of a veteran’s inability to manage his or her finances — a situation that precluded veterans with fiduciaries from owning guns.

VA restores gun rights to some disabled veterans

The Senate still must craft its own version of the bill, referred to as the MilConVA bill. The subcommittee responsible for the legislation jump-started that process in separate hearings April 30 and May 14 on the president’s budget proposals.

During those hearings, senators appeared supportive of the VA budget request and sought affirmation from VA officials that the department use the funds judiciously for health care, claims processing and other veterans services.

Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., ranking member of the Senate Appropriations MilConVA subcommittee, called the budget proposals “important investments” in the department.

But he expressed concerns about whether the VA had sufficient numbers of physicians and nurses and noted that the budget calls for significant increases for care at private facilities covered by the VA and less of an increase for health care at VA hospitals and clinics.

“The department’s own public facing data shows that outcome for veterans are either the same or better for direct VA care compared to privatized outside care,” Ossoff told VA Secretary Doug Collins in the April 30 hearing.

VA shuttering underperforming clinics, addressing leadership shortcomings at others

Collins testified Thursday before the House MilCon Appropriations Subcommittee, six days after the House passed its proposed bill.

Collins said that conflicts and the approval process prevented him from testifying until May 21, although earlier in the deliberation process, House Democrats had successfully amended the legislation to withhold 25% of the secretary’s office budget until he testified.

“Our veterans do not deserve that kind of uncertainty and lack of transparency,” said the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida.

Collins praised the committee for the legislation’s passage and called changes at the VA since he has taken office a “tale of two cities.” He said in the past year the VA has announced a restructuring, instituted a manning document, reduced its disability claims backlog, restarted its VA electronic health records system program and reduced appointment wait times.

VA hospitals earn top marks in federal review

“The VA will never be perfect and neither will its budget, but we are always going to work together to make sure one thing is true: Veterans are always going to come first at the VA,” Collins said.

The Senate is expected to roll out its MilConVA appropriations bill this summer.

“I think the sweep and scope of the documentary is itself illuminating,” Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jon Meacham told Military Times via email. “We are saying, ‘In a fragmented culture dominated by the device in your hand, you need to look up and engage in a story that is at once larger than any one of us but also intimate, personal and resonant.’”

Rob Citino, senior historian at the National WWII Museum and lead consultant for the series, told Military Times that “For someone in my generation ‘The World at War’ was equivalent to a kind of historical gospel. We watched every episode, we memorized it, the footage, the interviewees, which at the time were largely German and Allied officers — men who actually fought the war — they were still alive.

“It’s impossible to do that kind of series [now], but the museum and the History Channel alike thought this was an important project to bring to fruition.”

Citino added that nothing and no one in the latter part of the 20th century to the present day has remained untouched by the war.

“World War II is the largest event in human history, one that has shaped — and is shaping — everything since,” said Meacham, an executive producer on the documentary series. “Its lessons are essential — about confronting tyranny, checking appetite, battling discrimination. We ignore these things at our peril.”

It was a war that toppled empires and reshaped the modern world, but it didn’t just begin as German tanks rolled into Poland, nor did it just escalate with Operation Barbarossa or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

It was a war that was fomented in the 1920s and 1930s throughout beer halls in Germany and in Manchuria, China, Abyssinia (Ethiopia), Spain and beyond. With over 20 hours of footage, this is a fact that “World War II with Tom Hanks” — and its 20 episodes — does not appear to gloss over.

Nicholas Stargardt, a professor of modern German history at the University of Oxford and author of the acclaimed book “The German War,” appears in episode 15 of the series, examining how the German people came to understand the chasm that their violence opened up — and their own transition across it.

“You have this parallel thing of people being informed relatively reliably, but of course they don’t know it’s reliable because it comes through private conduits and information, and then being overwhelmed by it, doubting it, worrying whether this is like First World War atrocity propaganda,” Stargardt told Military Times. “So one of the things that really interested me was, first when did this become not just private information but publicly discussable in Germany, and in what context?

“You don’t have to do a very big thought experiment to think, well, for Jews facing impending destruction, it’s clear that what we talk of as the Holocaust would frame everything, and the war is secondary. They are all interpreting war news in terms of ‘Will we be liberated and Germany be defeated before we run out of time?’” he continued.

“And so the thought experiment was for ordinary Germans, the framing is the other way around. For them, the war is more important than the Holocaust. I realized that we could track this up to the end of March 1945 and it’s only in the last six weeks, five to six weeks of the war that you really get Germans not wanting to continue, and there’s a quite clear military reason for that.”

As the German military withdrew further and further across the Rhine, Stargardt continued, “it’s that use of terror, which actually tells you they’ve lost consent … it’s been turned into a kind of almost mythological set of events of seeing ‘we were their victims too’ kind of logic, rather than actually, if we look at this analytically, it shows that that kind of terror against the German population only occurs in these very specific circumstances and therefore we know we’re dealing with something else up to that point.”

While the series takes a relatively 30,000-foot view of the most destructive war in human history, the cadre of historians participating in “World War II with Tom Hanks” is akin to an all-star roster for history aficionados.

“I think we’re going to make sure that it’s going to be difficult to avoid World War II for the next 20 episodes, and frankly, that’s the way the museum likes it, the way the History Channel likes it and the way I like it as well,” Citino concluded.

“World War II with Tom Hanks” is set to premiere on the History Channel on May 25.

Buried beneath the curved, sweeping rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David at the Manila American Cemetery lies a special kind of American hero.

Their headstones carry no names. No ranks or branches of the military. No dates of death.

Each grave marker bears the same inscription: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.”

About 2,900 American service members are still buried as “unknowns” in the Manila cemetery—soldiers, sailors, Marines, and airmen whose remains were recovered after World War II but could not be identified with the science of their time.

Jim Knudsen believes his Uncle Julius is one of the unknowns.

For 17 years, the Minnesota resident has carried his family’s torch in the search for the remains of Army Technician 5th Class Julius St. John Knudsen, a 25-year-old tanker who vanished in the Philippines in 1942 during the infamous Bataan Death March.

Jim Knudsen, 75, has tracked down military records and contacted distant relatives to submit DNA samples. He’s studied dog-eared wartime maps and interviewed the last surviving soldier from his uncle’s tank battalion—fulfilling a promise made to his dad in 2009.

“Rest easy,” he told his father when he went into hospice care. “I’ll keep looking for Julius.”

Earlier this year, Knudsen believed the mystery of Julius’ final days might finally be solved—thanks to the marvels of forensic DNA science.

It took several years for Knudsen and a military researcher to convince the Pentagon’s MIA agency to exhume the remains of nine American soldiers recovered after World War II along the route of the death march. There is more than a glimmer of hope that Julius is one of the nine.

According to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, there are still more than 80,000 U.S. service members who remain unaccounted for since World War II. The DPAA estimates that 38,000 of them are recoverable. Most of the rest were lost at sea.

The agency identified the remains of 231 service members in fiscal year 2025—the highest number ever for the DPAA or its predecessor agencies.

By far, the easiest remains to recover are the 5,100 unidentified American service members buried in overseas military cemeteries, as well as the 900 at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu—better known as the Punchbowl—and 50 unknowns at other stateside cemeteries.

But while modern DNA science offers new hope to MIA families, the time for closure is running out for a generation of descendants of service members whose fates remain uncertain. At the current pace of the DPAA’s disinterments, identifying all of the unknowns in cemeteries would take more than three decades. And, as Knudsen has learned, even after remains are sent to laboratories for analysis, the wait can continue for years.

“My grandkids will be having kids before they identify my uncle,” Knudsen said. “And that’s not right.”

‘They Could Do This’

Some forensic DNA experts agree with Knudsen. They argue that in many ways the Pentagon is still approaching the identification of the unknowns with a system designed for an earlier scientific era.

They contend that bureaucratic inertia is the main obstacle to adding names to thousands of tombstones with a robust plan aimed at identifying all 6,050 service members in years, rather than decades.

“They could do this if they really wanted to,” said Edwin Huffine, a prominent forensic DNA scientist who served in leadership roles at the elite Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory from 1994 to 1999.

Huffine argues that the Pentagon still relies too heavily on slower forensic methods such as skeletal analysis and historical reconstruction, instead of allowing DNA to drive identifications. He believes state-of-the-art nuclear DNA testing and wider use of forensic genealogy—similar to how law enforcement uses DNA to crack cold cases—could dramatically accelerate the identification of thousands of unknowns.

That argument is at the heart of a poignant debate over how best to honor the unidentified World War II and Korean War service members in an era when DNA technology can unlock identities once thought to be lost forever.

In an interview with The War Horse, Kelly McKeague, a retired Air Force major general who has been the director of the DPAA since 2017, ruled out a dramatic surge in disinterments.

McKeague defended the current system for identifying the unknowns. He said the painstaking, respectful process effectively blends science, military history, and the solemn responsibility of disturbing military graves only when investigators believe there’s a strong chance of finding answers.

He said a massive disinterment campaign would destroy the sanctity of America’s military cemeteries. In addition, McKeague said, the DPAA lacks the laboratory capacity for such an effort.

McKeague pointed to one of the agency’s signature projects as evidence that DPAA’s approach is working: the disinterment of the remains of sailors and Marines killed on the battleship USS Oklahoma during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The 394 servicemen had been buried as unknowns in 61 caskets in the Punchbowl after the war.

Most of the caskets contained commingled remains. “One casket alone had 95 different individuals,” McKeague said.

The DPAA exhumed the remains of all the sailors and spent six years using forensic anthropology, dental analysis, and advanced DNA testing to separate and identify them. Of the 394 servicemen, 362 have been identified and their remains returned to their families for reburial with military honors in the cemeteries of their choice.

McKeague said the DPAA has adopted a similar strategy for the 862 Korean War unknowns who were buried at the Punchbowl.

The average length of time between the arrival of remains at the DPAA lab and formal identification is three to four years, McKeague said, “with some cases being closed in as little as a few weeks and others requiring many years to solve.”

Asked what he would say to MIA families hoping for quicker answers, McKeague said the “generational grieving” is often on full display when the DPAA updates families at regular meetings around the country.

“We understand, we empathize, and we’re doing everything possible” to alleviate that suffering, he said.

From Brainerd to Bataan

The decades-long quest to find Julius Knudsen illustrates the conviction required to navigate through the triumphs and pitfalls of the DPAA’s process.

For most of Jim Knudsen’s life, Uncle Julius existed only in family stories. He was the fun-loving prankster from Brainerd, Minnesota, who walked on stilts in parades, entered beard-growing contests, and rode an Indian motorcycle to California during the Great Depression before joining the California Army National Guard in 1941.

Like those of many World War II-era service members, however, his military record survived only in fragments: a few handwritten documents and a condolence proclamation bearing President Harry Truman’s signature.

“Dad never talked about it,” Knudsen said.

In the 1980s, Knudsen’s father, Wilbur, began searching for answers by writing letters to Congress and the Pentagon, only to encounter dead ends. Officials repeatedly told him that most of his older brother’s records had likely been destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. Burned out and frustrated, Wilbur Knudsen eventually stopped searching.

When his son resumed the hunt years later, he had internet tools his father never possessed. And after cycling through two Army casualty officers, he was assigned Charles Johnson, who became his steady guide through the bureaucracy.

Knudsen tracked down distant relatives and asked them to submit DNA samples to the Pentagon’s Delaware DNA lab as he pieced together Julius’ wartime path. He learned Julius had transferred from the California Army National Guard to join 63 other Brainerd men in Company A of the Army’s 194th Tank Battalion, one of the first mechanized units sent to defend the Philippines before Japan began attacking the island nation within hours of bombing Pearl Harbor.

After the fall of Bataan in April 1942, Julius joined 75,000 American and Filipino troops on the Bataan Death March. Army records initially suggested he died at the Cabanatuan POW camp, but secret camp records kept by American prisoners showed he never arrived there or at Camp O’Donnell, the end point of the 65-mile march.

In 2019, Knudsen sought the help of Colorado MIA researcher John Bear, who located the diaries of Julius’ commander, Lt. Col. Ernest Miller. He had written that Julius was last seen near the city of Lubao.

Knudsen then interviewed Walt Straka, the last surviving Brainerd tanker, a year before he died at 101 in 2021. Straka, who told Knudsen he believed Julius was among a group of POWs who ran into the woods somewhere south of Lubao, said some marchers reported hearing gunshots in the area where the men had fled.

Bear later found Army maps showing a cluster of wartime graves in a banana field near Lubao. Greg Kupsky, the DPAA’s lead World War II historian for the Philippines, then connected the site to the remains of nine unidentified soldiers recovered after the war and eventually buried at the Manila American Cemetery.

Kupsky ultimately assembled a list of candidates that included Julius and 151 other soldiers. Before approving a disinterment, the DPAA requires DNA reference samples from relatives tied to at least 60% of those possible matches—a threshold that took Bear and Army genealogists until 2023 to reach.

In April 2024, top Pentagon officials gave their approval for workers to exhume the remains of the nine soldiers and nine others from the Manila cemetery.

The DPAA and the American Battle Monuments Commission, which manages 26 military cemeteries overseas, then worked together to schedule the disinterments. The 18 caskets were exhumed in December 2025 and sent the next month to the DPAA’s Honolulu lab.

Knudsen was elated—until he learned the identification process could still take years because of laboratory backlogs.

“They have thousands of remains to process and have their own internal hierarchy when it comes to priority cases,” Johnson wrote to Knudsen in a Jan. 26 email. “So this is the part of the ID process where patience will be the most difficult.”

Identifying Victims of Genocide

Huffine says there’s no reason families like the Knudsens should be waiting so long to find the remains of the dead warriors.

During his time at the Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory, the friendly Oklahoman helped pioneer mitochondrial DNA testing, which became the backbone of early military identifications because it could recover genetic clues from badly degraded remains.

But it was his work in Bosnia and Herzegovina that helped push DNA science into a new era.

In 1999, Huffine quit his AFDIL job to join the International Commission on Missing Persons in the aftermath of the Bosnian war. He was asked to help solve one of the most daunting forensic challenges in modern history: identifying thousands of victims found in mass graves.

Bosnian Serb forces had massacred tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslim civilians and POWs and hastily buried them. To hide the evidence of their war crimes, the Serbs later dug up the mass graves and reburied the victims in other graves, using bulldozers to scatter and conceal the bodies.

“When I got there 27 years ago, they had 4,000 bodies and had identified only seven in three years,” Huffine told The War Horse.

The mitochondrial DNA tests the Bosnians were using were producing results, but because mitochondrial DNA passes only from mothers to their children, large numbers of related victims often share the same genetic signature, Huffine said. That was a huge problem in Bosnia, where entire extended families were slaughtered and buried together.

So Huffine and his team inverted the system.

Instead of treating DNA as the final step, they made it the first. They shifted to nuclear DNA—which comes from the nucleus at the center of human cells—and built a database of family reference samples. They then tested every viable bone to try to find a genetic match.

Within two years, the system was identifying about 500 individuals a month.

The implications were profound. Fragmented and commingled remains could be reassembled through genetic matches. Identification was no longer a slow, case-by-case exercise.

A quarter of a century later, however, the identifications of the commingled remains of the unknowns in America’s military cemeteries still emerge through a fusion of forensic anthropology, dental analysis, isotope testing, and military history—with DNA serving as one powerful line of evidence within a larger scientific reconstruction rather than the engine driving the case.

Huffine said it’s a system designed for a time when extracting DNA was expensive, limited, and uncertain.

“They need to do DNA testing first,” he said. “Then have everything else confirm it.”

Huffine said he believes the Bosnian model could identify the overwhelming majority of the 6,050 unknowns in U.S. military cemeteries in several years, particularly if Congress allocates more money for DNA testing and more of the testing is outsourced to private labs to eliminate the identification bottlenecks.

He argues that a large-scale identification campaign wouldn’t require turning America’s military cemeteries into excavation sites. Huffine envisions tightly controlled operations using temporary shielding, mobile DNA laboratories, and CT scanners positioned near cemetery grounds.

Remains could be exhumed, scanned, sampled for DNA, and reburied quickly. Forensic anthropologists and geneticists could analyze the data later.

“You could go through an entire cemetery relatively fast,” Huffine said. “It would actually shorten the length of time that you have to be there opening graves.”

Is a ‘Blended’ System Better?

McKeague, the DPAA’s director, said it is standard for the lab to start large projects—cases with commingled remains—with DNA analysis. The “blended” approach in those cases, he said, happens concurrently while samples are being processed.

“When we have sufficient information from our DNA-led approach to identify someone, we do so once the data are validated,” McKeague said. “Best practice for identifying large groups of poorly preserved skeletonized remains is to use a diverse toolkit, with DNA being a key component.”

He said forensic anthropologists routinely remove fingernail-sized slivers of bone from remains soon after they arrive at the DPAA lab. And the bone samples are sent to the Delaware lab for immediate analysis.

But Huffine said the issue is not whether the DPAA sometimes uses DNA at the beginning of the process, but how much weight the agency gives the science. The DPAA’s current blended approach still leans too heavily on anthropology, history, and other forensic disciplines rather than allowing DNA to drive identifications, he said.

“Always use your strongest science first,” he said.

Geneticist David Mittelman, CEO and co-founder of Texas-based Othram Inc., agreed. He said flatly that “DNA should lead the investigation.”

His lab specializes in extracting hard-to-get DNA from degraded and damaged bones, embalmed tissue, and even century-old remains. Othram’s customers include numerous law enforcement agencies across the country.

Mittelman told The War Horse that traditional forensic identification relies on testing for roughly 20 genetic markers, a method that is useful for confirming a suspected identity but often ineffective when no close family DNA sample exists or when remains are badly degraded.

Instead of 20 markers, Mittelman said, his scientists analyze hundreds of thousands of markers, allowing investigators to identify distant relatives and reconstruct identities through genealogical networks—a process he calls “identity inference.”

The Power of FIGG

The 2018 arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer, helped transform forensic genetics and brought national attention to an investigative technique known as forensic investigative genetic genealogy, or FIGG.

Instead of relying on traditional DNA methods that compare crime scene samples with known suspects or close relatives, California investigators used GEDmatch, a public DNA database, to search for distant genetic relatives of the killer—in some cases third or fourth cousins.

Genealogists then built sprawling family trees across generations until investigators narrowed the search to DeAngelo, a former California police officer who later pleaded guilty to 13 murders and dozens of rapes committed in the 1970s and 1980s.

Michelle Leonard, a genetic genealogy pioneer in the United Kingdom, said public DNA databases such as GEDmatch and FamilyTreeDNA are best viewed as investigative resources rather than standalone identification systems.

Coupled with DNA testing and traditional genealogy research, she said, the databases can generate leads, narrow family trees, and point investigators toward possible relatives in missing-person cases.

“FIGG isn’t magic,” Leonard said. “But it’s a very powerful tool.”

The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory still primarily relies on a closed DNA system built around samples voluntarily submitted by relatives of missing servicemembers—an approach that genetic genealogists say can limit potential matches in long-unsolved cases.

“It would certainly be possible to identify more soldiers if genetic genealogy could be used as an add-on to the regular methods,” Leonard said.

In written responses to questions from The War Horse, AFDIL defended its cautious approach.

“We currently do not use any publicly available databases for family references,” the laboratory statement said, arguing that the databases lack the quality controls required for forensic identifications. But the lab acknowledged it was now developing strategies to incorporate FIGG because its results have proved to be so promising.

Tom Osypian, associate director and product manager at GEDmatch, agreed that public DNA databases and FIGG are not substitutes for traditional forensic identification databases. They’re “meant to accelerate” IDs, he said.

“We don’t do the DNA testing at GEDmatch,” Osypian said. “But we have processes in place to make sure the data getting uploaded” to GEDmatch products is as robust as possible.

‘These Are Our Fallen’

For all of their disagreements, Huffine and McKeague describe their work in deeply personal terms—shaped as much by grief and duty as by technology.

McKeague said advocates of stepped-up disinterments sometimes underestimate the emotional and cultural weight of disturbing gravesites holding America’s war dead.

“These are not just cases,” he said. “These are our fallen.”

For his part, Huffine said his focus on identifying the missing was shaped in part by personal tragedy.

In 1995, his father disappeared during a drive and did not return home. Several days later, authorities found his body.

Even during that relatively short period of uncertainty, Huffine said, he came to understand “what just not knowing can do to someone.”

David Americo, the Paris-based chief of cemetery operations for the American Battle Monuments Commission, said that under an agreement with the DPAA, the current limit is 100 disinterments a year at the Manila American Cemetery and 75 annually across Europe. But, Americo said, the staff would work in good faith with DPAA officials if they eventually decide to accelerate the pace of disinterments.

Americo said the disinterments are carefully managed to minimize disruption to the cemeteries and the families who visit them. But headstones must be temporarily removed, and sod is cut away. Freshly disturbed earth can remain visible for weeks as the grounds slowly heal.

Still, Americo said, he understands the need to balance the beauty of the cemeteries and the MIA families’ pressing need for closure, and he hopes the issue can be resolved to the satisfaction of people on both sides of the debate.

Americo ended an interview with The War Horse by recounting the first disinterment he witnessed at the Florence American Cemetery in Italy after joining the commission in 2017.

He remembers watching in awe as a casket was opened and he saw the remains of a young American who had given his life for his country. “He was probably 18, 19, 20 years old,” Americo recalled.

U.S. soldiers then carried the casket away from the grave with military honors before it was transported to the DPAA’s forensic lab.

“That,” he said, “is a moment that will remain with me for the rest of my life.”

Reporting for this War Horse investigation was supported by the Pulitzer Center. The story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

“My father didn’t speak about his war experience very much,” his daughter, Kelly Stewart-Harcourt, told Military Times. “After he died, my sister found a journal, a handwritten journal that he had kept during the war” alongside his flight logbook filled with little scribbles, drawings and sketch marks from both Stewart and his men.

The journal, according to Stewart-Harcourt, “described dad’s fears and his uncertainties, uncertainties about the war and the struggles and wanting to please his father. Dad didn’t talk very much about himself, so this was a real look inside dad that we had never had before.”

“I don’t think [the movie] could have been done without that input,” she added. “It just made it so much deeper, richer and more profound.”

Poignantly, perhaps almost fittingly, the last line of the journal stops mid-sentence.

Wednesday, in honor of Stewart’s birthday, Burns & Co. production has dropped the official “Jimmy” trailer starring KJ Apa (“Riverdale”) as the World War II veteran and famed “It’s a Wonderful Life” star.

“I was just overwhelmed by this idea that someone would do that — someone who is in his position of power, wealth and influence would choose to serve in such a profound way,” Aaron Burns, director and producer of the film, told Military Times. “Then he came back as a hero, highly decorated, won all kinds of awards, and was a full colonel, but was racked with PTSD.”

“He gave everything he had, including his soul, to the cause and for his men, and he comes back and bottoms out … but he doesn’t stay there. And that’s what I think is so hopeful for any of us. Jimmy is an example of someone who went through the worst you could imagine and came out the other side with hope and healing and inspiration for all of us, so that was the story that I was drawn to telling,” Burns continued.

The film chronicles Stewart’s rise in Hollywood — including his Academy Award-winning performance in “The Philadelphia Story” — before his shock enlistment in the U.S. Army Air Corps in March 1941, shortly before the branch became the U.S. Army Air Forces.

It concludes in 1946, as Stewart struggles to find his footing back home and in Hollywood.

“Dad would tell us that his military service was the thing he was most proud of in his life. He was proud of what he had achieved in his craft as an actor, but in terms of meaning I think his military service was what he was most proud of,” said Stewart-Harcourt.

Stewart-Harcourt’s intimate knowledge of her father helps centers the film — giving insight into specifics like Stewart’s favorite music, the restaurant he went to every week and what he ordered — as well as lines that felt true to her father.

That experience would shape his life and his acting forevermore.

Less than a year after his return home, Stewart famously starred in Frank Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life,” delivering the now iconic, tear-soaked monologue: “God, God, dear Father in Heaven. I’m not a praying man, but if you’re up there and you can hear me, show me the way. I’m at the end of my rope. I … show me the way, oh God.”

“I think maybe it took ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ for him to get back into being an actor, maybe no other role would work,” Stewart-Harcourt mused.

“Jimmy” is set to debut in theaters Nov. 6, 2026.

For the second year , no VA hospitals received a one-star rating from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, or CMS, the agency within the Department of Health and Human Services that publishes quality assessments for U.S. hospitals based on mortality rates, patient safety, hospital readmissions and other measures.

CMS began rating VA hospitals in 2023. That year, of 114 facilities that were evaluated, nearly 30% received five stars; 37% received four stars; 15% were awarded three stars; 11%, two stars; and 8% -- or nine facilities -- one star.

In 2026, 45% of VA facilities received five stars, 33% earned four stars, 16% received three stars and 6% were given two stars.

Since the first assessment, the percentage of VA facilities that have earned four or five stars rose from 67% to 78%, despite dipping to 58% in 2024.

The assessments compare favorably against more than 4,600 hospitals reviewed by CMS nationwide. Roughly 12% of U.S. hospitals received five-star ratings, 30% were awarded four stars, 31% received three stars, 21% earned two stars and 6% were given one star this year.

Officials said the new ratings mean VA hospitals account for nearly 15% of the country’s five-star rated hospitals.

“The Trump Administration has a proven track record of improving Veterans’ care, and these ratings underscore that success,” VA Secretary Doug Collins said in a release. “We look forward to continuing to deliver the results veterans have earned at VA facilities across the nation.”

The list of high- and low- performing facilities at the VA has fluctuated over time, with some marked improvements in facilities that received one star in 2023.

For example, the VA Pittsburgh Health Care System, Providence VA Medical Center in Rhode Island and the Bronx VA Medical Center in New York City each received one star in 2023 but earned four stars in 2026.

Two facilities that earned one star each in 2023 continue to be among the VA’s list of facilities performing under national averages on several measures. The Overton Brooks VA Medical Center in Shreveport, Louisiana, and the San Juan Medical Center, Puerto Rico, are among the seven VA facilities that received two stars.

The VA maintained its own internal star ratings and began publishing them in 2017 following a series of news reports. In late 2019, the department dropped the effort because VA leaders said it provided little value to veterans.

Twenty Veterans Health Administration medical centers were not rated because they did not meet the criteria for inclusion. CMS does not rate facilities that have a low number of cases or incidents that are specific to its assessment criteria.

It also does not rate specialty hospitals, ambulatory surgical centers and some inpatient care facilities, such as psychiatric hospitals.

The CMS star ratings can be found on Medicare’s Care Compare website.

At a May 12 hearing of the House Appropriations Committee, Hegseth thanked Rep. Susie Lee (D-Nevada) for pushing legislation to override the Catch 22-type rules that have blocked veterans from getting the benefits received by Department of Energy civilians who also worked at the Nevada Test and Training Center (NTTR) north of Las Vegas.

“You have the authority to provide the [Veterans Affairs] with documents they need today to get those veterans the help they need,” Lee told Hegseth.

“Thank you for what you’re doing for those folks,” but “it’s not a situation I have all the facts on,” Hegseth told Lee, adding that he wanted an internal review before giving an endorsement. Hegseth also sought to assure Lee that he wasn’t stalling.

“I’m not talking about a full review, I’m just talking about a familiarization” on the issues that have blocked the NTTR veterans from receiving benefits and compensation under the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act, or PACT Act.

At the same hearing, Air Force Gen. Dan Caine, the Joint Chiefs chairman, said he would press to lift the bureaucratic restrictions blocking the VA from granting benefits to service members who were stationed at the NTTR.

“You bet, Ma’am,” Caine told Sen. Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada) when she asked whether he agreed that DOD personnel deserved “the same presumption of radiation exposure as DOE (Department of Energy) employees who worked alongside them.”

The issue for affected veterans, meanwhile, has remained that the VA requires documentation proving personnel actually served at the NTTR before they can be eligible for benefits.

That proof, however, cannot be released due to its classification under Cold War regulations, said former Air Force Sgt. Dave Crete, who previously served at the NTTR.

Crete said he founded The Invisible Enemy advocacy group with the sole purpose of getting previously denied health care benefits and compensation to “those who served on the range.”

The government acknowledges that the site is contaminated, but only for Energy Department workers who “get lifetime medical and compensation up to $400,000,” Crete said in a phone interview.

“That hasn’t happened for us,” he told Military Times. “The first thing that has to happen is to acknowledge that we were there.”

To attain that confirmation, Sens. Rosen and Catherine Cortez Masto have sponsored the bipartisan Forgotten Veterans Act — Fighting for the Overlooked Recognition of Groups Operating in Toxic Test Environments in Nevada.

“It is unconscionable that one U.S. government agency (DOE) deems portions of the range as contaminated and their personnel exposed, while another U.S. government agency (DOD) does not,” Rosen said in a statement.

Currently, the NTTR consists of nearly three million acres of restricted land that includes the highly secret Area 51 site. The area makes up “the largest contiguous air and ground space available for military (training) operations in the free world,” according to a Nellis Air Force Base release.

The first atmospheric atomic bomb test at what would become the NTTR occurred on Jan. 27, 1951, during the “duck-and-cover” era, when schools nationwide would conduct air raid drills to guard against a potential Soviet attack.

The first atom bomb test would be followed by 927 others — 100 of them above ground. The last test in Nevada was underground and occurred on Sept. 23, 1992.

But scarcely any could be called heroic.

In the case of the F4F Wildcat, usually outnumbered and almost always outclassed by its opponents, an exception can be made.

Distinctive in that it was first designed as a biplane in 1935, the U.S. Navy soon realized that the first iteration, the XF4F-1, could not compete with monoplane fighters.

Modifications continued throughout the next couple of years until the XF4F-3’s debut, which first flew on Feb. 12, 1939, about two months after the first flight of the Mitsubishi A6M1 Zero prototype in Japan.

First combat with the Wildcat was not with any U.S. service, however, but with Britain’s Royal Navy. Its first victim was German. (The Royal Navy called the aircraft the Martlet until March 1944, when it adopted the Wildcat moniker.)

According to historian Bruce Crawford, the British had shown great interest in the Wildcat as a replacement for the Gloster Sea Gladiator, and the first platforms were delivered in late 1940.

On Christmas Day that year, the stubby plane had its combat debut when it shot down a Junkers Ju-88 bomber over the Scapa Flow naval base in Scotland’s Orkney Islands archipelago.

By the close of 1940, the U.S. Navy, perhaps recognizing the effectiveness of the pugnacious plane, awarded Grumman a contract for 600 Wildcats.

Their American debut was less than auspicious, however.

As morning dawned at Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, 11 Wildcats were caught on the ground. Nearly all were destroyed.

It was the subsequent defense of Wake Island from Dec. 8 to Dec. 23 — by Marine squadron VMF-211 — where the Wildcat’s tenacity was first displayed.

A small, undermanned outpost 2,000 miles west of Oahu delivered what Maj. Gen. Thomas Holcomb described to Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox as “A cheery note” from Wake.

The initial Japanese attack left seven of 12 F4F3s wrecked on the field, with 23 of the squadron’s 55 men on the ground killed and 11 wounded. Not a single aircraft mechanic escaped injury. According to Ian Toll in his Pacific trilogy, VMF-211 suffered 50% casualties in the first minutes of combat alone.

Despite this, VMF-211 fought on for nearly two weeks, using its three airworthy planes — described by Toll as Frankenstein’s monster, “rattling, bullet-ridden, patched-over amalgamations of parts” — to bomb and sink the Japanese destroyer Kisaragi and eventually repel the Japanese invading force.

The plane was neither as fast as the Japanese Zero nor as aerobatic, but it was sturdy, stable and able to take severe punishment.

“I would still assess the Wildcat as the outstanding naval fighter of the early years of WWII,” British test pilot Eric M. Brown wrote in his evaluation of the Wildcat. “Its ruggedness meant that it had a much lower attrition rate on carrier operations than, say, the Sea Hurricane or the Seafire, and although it had neither the performance nor the aesthetic appeal of the latter, it was the perfect compromise solution designed specifically for the naval environment, to such a degree indeed that it was easier to take-off or land on an aircraft carrier than a runway.”

“I actually flew one sortie of four-and-a-half hours in this fighter — and fine ditching characteristics, for which I can vouch as a matter of personal experience, this Grumman fighter was, for my money, one of the finest shipboard aeroplanes ever created,” Brown continued.

Despite the carnage at Pearl, enough Wildcats had been received by the fleet that as carrier operations began in February 1941, the Wildcat was ready and the plane’s latest iteration, the F4F-4, carried with it a new innovation: folding wings.

The new mechanism allowed for carriers to accommodate 27 of the fighters — nine more than before, but at a cost. The addition of two more machine guns caused a falloff in climb and maneuverability, and the .50-caliber machine guns fired for only 22 seconds before ammunition was expended, down from 40 seconds in earlier versions.

“That, in combination with the placement of the cockpit high on the fuselage to give good vision,” writes Crawford, “helped give the Wildcat its distinctive, pugnacious appearance.”

Nearly 85 Wildcats flew from Yorktown, Enterprise and Hornet during Midway. And while it was the Douglas SBD Dauntless dive bomber that made a name for itself at the historic naval battle, the stubby Wildcat continued to make significant contributions to the American victories at the battles of Guadalcanal, the Solomons and in the Battle of the Atlantic.

A large part of the Wildcat’s success was tactics.

“The agile Zero, like most Japanese army and navy fighter craft, had been designed to excel in slow-speed maneuvers,” writes Crawford. “U.S. Navy aviators realized early on that the Zero’s controls became heavy at high speeds and were less effective in high-speed rolls and dives.

“Navy tacticians like James Flatley and James Thach preached that the important thing was to maintain speed – whenever possible – no matter what the Zero did. Although the Wildcat was not especially fast, its two-speed supercharger enabled it to perform well at high altitudes, something that the Bell P-39 and Curtiss P-40 could not do.”

So rugged was the F4F that terminal dive airspeed was not redlined, meaning that the Mitsubishi A6M Zero’s 7.7mm cowl guns and 20mm cannons were only effective at point-blank range.

Conversely, the Wildcat’s .50-caliber wing guns were enough to cause the complete disintegration of a Zero.

By 1942, the F4F kill-to-loss ratio for air combat was 5.9 to 1; for the entire war, the ratio was 6.9 to 1, according to the U.S. Naval Institute. The impressive ratio was earned despite the Wildcat being the only carrier-based fighter operated by the Navy during the first half of the war in the Pacific. Forty-eight Marine pilots would become WWII aces in Wildcats.

Two problems would continue to plague the F4F throughout its life, however. The manual landing gear retraction mechanism required 30 turns with a hand crank to retract — with one slip resulting in a serious wrist injury.

It also, in the ensuing years, was unable to be modified to keep pace with wartime fighter development.

While the Wildcat continued to fly for the duration of the war, by 1943 it had become largely supplanted aboard carriers by the F6F Hellcat.

Yet the burly fighter had one more fight left in it as it helped contribute to eliminating the U-boat menace in the Atlantic as its ruggedness and range — enhanced by two 58-gallon drop tanks — continued to make it ideal for use off small escort carrier decks, according to Crawford.

By the numbers, the F4F’s kill tally was less than the Corsair and significantly less than the Hellcat. But in the early days of the war, when the Japanese’s march through the Pacific seemed unstoppable, it was the bite of the Wildcat — the rugged, unflappable fighter — that delivered moments of heroic victory to a beleaguered nation.

Smither, who recently retired as a professor of history at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan, was also the creator and director of the university’s Veterans History Project.

“I got a call from a fellow named Jeff Wilcox,” Smither told Military Times. “And he said, I’ve got a Vietnam story you’ve never heard before. And he was right.”

That story, the Battle of Fire Support Base Ripcord — the last major American offensive effort in the Vietnam War — would lead Smithers on a nearly two-decade research quest to write “The End of the Rope: The Ripcord Campaign and American Disengagement in Vietnam”.

What first began as a series of interviews quickly expanded as veterans began tracking down Smither to learn more about the campaign.

“I found the veterans were coming to me, asking me to explain to them what had happened to them,” said Smither. “My first reaction was, ‘wait a minute. You were there. I wasn’t.’ The response was ‘Well, we have our individual pieces of the puzzle. You’re looking at all of them.’”

From March 12 to July 23, 1970, the 101st Airborne Division — the only remaining full-strength American division left in Vietnam at that time — was tasked with regaining initiative of the A Shau Valley, strategic ground for the North Vietnamese Army.

The A Shau Valley is the same area where the Hamburger Hill campaign had occurred a year prior. It was a main supply and staging area that the North Vietnamese used for launching invasions toward the coast and into populated areas to the south, according to Smither.

The objective was to destroy as much of the NVA’s infrastructure as U.S. troops could while America — which had quietly started withdrawing soldiers from Vietnam in 1969 — still had the forces available.

Roughly 25,000 NVA soldiers began silently streaming into the valley, digging in deep to await the Americans.

But that wasn’t the only issue plaguing the campaign.

According to Smither, officer promotions were on a “different clock,” geared to “a different world.” After six months of combat duty leadership would shift midstream, even in the heat of battle, meaning “most of the time, the new guys don’t get much of a chance to learn the craft before they’re responsible for guys’ lives.”

The brigade commander who planned and led the early stages of the operation was rotated out in June of that year. Lt. Col. Andre Lucas, the commander of the 2nd Battalion, 506th Infantry, had no practical combat experience prior to Ripcord and had not been to Vietnam since 1963. Capt. Isabelino Vasquez, an experienced “hard as nails” commander was sent to the rear to be battalion supply officer. Vasquez was replaced by Capt. Thomas Hewitt who, at the time, had no combat experience.

Hewitt was killed on July 2, 1970, during the opening rounds of an early morning NVA assault after he inexplicably strung up his hammock between two tree stumps on the crest of a hill. When the rocket propelled grenade barrage began, he was killed instantly.

“I call the book the ‘End of the Rope,’ in part, because there’s a limit to what they can actually accomplish,” Smither said. “But it’s actually kind of worse than that, because they’re really put in a position where there isn’t any way to accomplish the mission they’re given. And of course, the commanding officers realize they have their six months to make their mark. If they fail, they might not get the next promotion. Lt. Col Lucas is determined to succeed without understanding what the men on the ground could do.”

Despite the “terrible hand they’re dealt,” stressed Smither, most of the men perform exceptionally well.

“Most of the officers turned out to be really pretty good, including some new guys who didn’t have a lot of experience until they were tested. The enlisted men, they’re mostly either draftees or people who enlisted to take get a step ahead of the draft. They don’t really want to be there, but by and large when they’re out in the field, they do the best they can with the knowledge and experience they have.”

From July 1-23, 75 U.S. soldiers were killed in action, making the Battle of FSB Ripcord one of the deadliest battles in the Vietnam War for the United States, according to the Army.

On July 22 alone, 14 Americans were killed and 56 were wounded. When the Americans were ordered to withdraw the following day, the total number killed had risen to 139 men over the four-and-a-half-month battle. Lucas was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, and names like Bob Kalsu, the only recently active pro football player to die in Vietnam, and Weiland Norris, the brother of actor Chuck Norris, were also killed during Ripcord.

Despite this, very little was known about the battle for decades and no comprehensive research has ever been done on the siege — until now.

Calling the book a “labor of love” Smither noted that the extended time he spent writing the book allowed him to grasp a complicated set of events that “you wouldn’t normally do if you’re trying to crank out a book in a year or so.”

“I promised them I would give them a book,” he said. “And so I did.”

The grounds currently contain housing for 955 veterans in apartments, tiny homes and rooms, as well as a peer support facility that serves 36 veterans daily.

But it also is plagued by pests and crime, including illicit drug use and sales and prostitution, according to Rep. Mark Takano of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Committee on Veterans’ Affairs.

During a committee hearing, Takano shared stories of veterans whose belongings were stolen after they died and veterans’ dogs needing to be revived with Narcan after they were exposed to drugs.

“I fear that we will doom this property to becoming a vast west-side Skid Row,” Takano said. “This concentration of veterans without adequate supportive services has jeopardized tenant safety, sobriety and mental health. We have created a pressure-cooker.”

Efforts have been underway to build a development for homeless veterans that will provide housing and support, including counseling, medical treatment, recreation and employment services for veterans in California, the state with the largest percentage of homeless veterans.

Last May, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to create a Center for Warrior Independence that promises housing and services for up to 6,000 homeless veterans by 2028.

In December, a federal appeals court ordered the VA to use the property for veterans housing and services, saying the VA broke the law because it failed to provide housing for veterans with mental illnesses or traumatic brain injuries.

The VA unveiled a master plan for the community in 2022 calling for expanded housing, a wellness center, parking facilities and walking trails. The campus has grown from having 55 housing units in 2017 to being able to accommodate nearly 1,000, officials said Wednesday.

In creating the community, the VA is now contending with leases it signed under previous administrations that rented portions of the land to private and public entities, including the University of California-Los Angeles, which built its baseball stadium there. A private school’s sports facilities are also located on the site, as well as an oil company and a preservation organization that intended to restore a historic chapel on the property but has not started.

This year, the VA canceled leases with the private Brentwood School, a parking company and Wadsworth Chapel Heritage Partners. Litigation over UCLA’s baseball stadium is ongoing.

In a report delivered to Congress Tuesday, the VA said it received $324,052.83 in lease payments from UCLA from October 2024 to September 2025, and UCLA said it has provided additional services and support to veterans worth $2.7 million, although the VA could not “confirm or substantiate if the benefits claimed by UCLA were in fact provided to veterans.”

Committee Chairman Rep. Mike Bost, R-Ill., said it is critical to “correct course” at the West LA VA campus, to include the leases.

“The VA is being significantly underpaid for renting land intended to be used to the benefit of veterans,” Bost said. “Veterans are always at the top of my mind and all of my colleagues’ minds, and I want to ensure you that those using this land have the same mindset.”

Jim Zenner, director of the Los Angeles County Department of Military and Veterans Affairs, said during the hearing that campus security is a problem because of jurisdictional issues and understaffing of the VA Police Department.

The location, which is in LA County, not the City of Los Angeles, sits in a “jurisdictional dead zone” that contributes to “critical gaps in services and safety,” Zenner said.

Department officials said they are taking steps to improve security at the campus, recently awarding a “multimillion dollar” lighting contract and hiring up to 160 VA police officers, an increase from last year.

Zenner urged the administration to provide diverse housing options, such as homes for veterans who work on the campus, transitional housing for veterans who have recently left military service and their families, and student veterans, as well as the homeless.

And Zenner proposed creating a federal Veterans Treatment Court on campus that provides mentorship, management and treatment to veterans who commit non-violent crimes.

“Nationwide this model works. It produces reduces recidivism, improves housing outcomes and significantly enhances public safety,” Zenner said.

VA officials said the facilities show promise in that 98% of those served have remain housed and have not returned to the streets.

VA Under Secretary for Health John Bartrum said the department i committed to building a “community, not just a housing complex.”

“This campus … has not been living up to the needs, and so we are taking this opportunity to address those needs and to make sure that it lives up to the fulfillment of the promise,” Bartrum said.

The budget proposal, which includes $21.5 billion for barracks across the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force and Space Force, represents a “generational investment” that addresses a backlog of construction and repair priorities, according to Dale Marks, assistant secretary of defense for energy, installations and the environment.

Marks said that the department in the past has prioritized operations over facilities and “the bill for that trade is now overdue.”

“The degraded state of our installations is no longer a future problem. It is a direct and present threat to our ability to project power, defend the homeland and properly care for our service members,” Marks said before the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Military Construction, Veterans Affairs and Related Agencies.

The top priority for the services is barracks improvements and construction, according to military leaders. The request follows the formation last year of a Barracks Task Force that set requirements and standards for unaccompanied housing across the services.

A new barracks task force aims to improve military living conditions

The Army’s budget request includes $7 billion to “bring all rooms to new.” The service also is requesting additional funds to build new barracks at Fort Wainright, Alaska, and Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.

The Navy plans to use $2.5 billion to upgrade infrastructure to include kitchens, Wi-Fi and maintenance request systems, as well as modernize and address health and safety concerns, according to Rear Adm. Timothy Brown, deputy chief of naval operations for installations and logistics.

A $7 billion infusion in the Marine Corps budget would “jumpstart” the service’s barracks sustainment modernization, giving Marines “the housing that they deserve while they prepare and rehearse for potential combat operations every day,” Deputy Commandant for Installations and Logistics Lt. Gen. Stephen Sklenka said.

And the Air Force would use $330 million on top of previous funding to build unaccompanied housing — the service calls their barracks “dormitories” — at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston, Texas, Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico, and Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas.

The Barracks Task Force was created following a series of media and officials reports, including a 2023 Government Accountability Office assessment, of unsafe conditions in military barracks that included mold, inoperable fire suppression and heating and air conditioning systems and sewage overflows.

The One Big Beautiful Bill Act provided funding — nearly $1.7 billion — to restore or build new barracks, but department leaders said the funding in the military construction proposal would help continue momentum.

“We’re trying to make sure that we are getting after the problem sets using every every dollar to its max extent possible,” Marks said.

Lawmakers expressed concern for President Donald Trump’s fiscal 2027 defense budget, which requests roughly $1.1 billion through the regular congressional appropriations process and $350 billion in mandatory spending via a reconciliation effort that sidesteps routine congressional funding.

With no guarantees of success for the reconciliation strategy, priorities could go unfunded, they said.

“Reconciliation legislation is by definition uncertain, and it’s often partisan. Congress isn’t under no obligation to pass a reconciliation,” said the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat, Sen. Jon Ossoff of Georgia.

Subcommittee Chairman Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark., noted also that funding for defense projects, such as the Golden Dome missile defense program, were funded under the reconciliation dollars while construction money for some new barracks has been placed in the Facilities Sustainment, Restoration and Modernization allocation — which falls under defense appropriations, not military construction.

“Given the uncertainty surrounding reconciliation and the unpredictable nature of FSRM, I worry about whether these projects will ultimately move forward as planned,” Boozman said.

The House version of the funding bill provides $19.2 billion for military construction, $7.6 billion below the president’s budget request. The Senate has not released its initial iteration of the fiscal 2027 military construction appropriations bill.

Sklenka urged lawmakers to consider the budget carefully, especially the portions that support garrison security. With increased risks to bases at home and abroad — threats from drones, unauthorized entries by foreign nationals and cyber attacks against infrastructure — bases are under threat daily, he said.

“We all know in this room that our bases and stations are no longer the administrative garrison sanctuaries they once were. These are war fighting platforms today,” Sklenka said.

Boozman agreed.

“We have to rethink our installations … how we’re going to protect them … dealing with these incursions that … we’ve seen constantly,” he said.

Joel Rufus French, a marketing company owner and beneficial owner of eight durable medical equipment companies, sold patient information and fake doctors’ orders for medically unnecessary orthotic braces, according to a May 8 Department of Justice release.

“Fueled by lies, bribes, and overseas telemarketers, this corrupt scheme preyed on senior citizens and disabled veterans to flood the country with unnecessary medical devices — and then billed the taxpayer for it,” Justice Department’s National Fraud Enforcement Division Assistant Attorney General Colin M. McDonald said in the release.

French collaborated with overseas telemarketing call centers that pressured elderly Americans into sharing their personal and health insurance information and to accepting orthotic braces they did not need or want, the release states.

He then paid sham telemedicine companies illegally to acquire signed doctors’ orders from doctors and nurse practitioners who never examined — or sometimes never spoke to — the patients, according to the statement.

Following that, French sold the doctors’ orders to marketers and medical supply companies, who then submitted Medicare claims.

The former football player also defrauded Medicare and the VA’s Civilian Health and Medical Program, a health care program offered by the department for spouses or children of veterans who meet certain service-related disability requirements, the release states.

French defrauded the programs by billing them for orthotic braces through the DME supply companies that he owned and managed, the statement says.

He hid his association with the companies from Medicare through false documents and straw owners, meaning someone who appears to be the legitimate owner when the true owner can’t legally or wishes to remain anonymous.

“The defendant orchestrated a brazen, yearslong scheme that preyed on elderly patients and the families of disabled and deceased veterans to steal millions from Medicare and CHAMPVA,” Acting Deputy Inspector General for Investigations Scott J. Lampert of the Department of Health and Human Services Office of Inspector General said in the release.

“By hiding behind overseas call centers, sham telemedicine companies, and straw‑owned DME suppliers, he exploited some of the most vulnerable people these programs were created to protect,” he continued.

French, a resident of Armory, Mississippi, also laundered around $225,000 in cash from a Mississippi bank. The statement says he drove to Orlando, Florida, with over $10,000 of that cash to pay accomplices who sold him beneficiaries’ personal and insurance information.

On top of the 196 months in prison, he is also required to pay over $110 million in restitution and to forfeit roughly $17 million that the government seized from bank accounts and other assets, per the release.

The release says that French is convicted of conspiracy to commit health care fraud and wire fraud; conspiracy to commit money laundering; and conspiracy to offer, pay, solicit and receive kickbacks.

French was a unamimous All-American in 1998 while playing for the Ole Miss Rebels. He went undrafted in the 1999 NFL Draft but signed with the Seattle Seahawks until he was released from the team in 2001 after sitting the previous season out due to an injury.

He later signed with the Green Bay Packers but was waived before the 2002 season.

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.