On March 6, 1945, the Navy found its solution in Jane Kendeigh and her 11 fellow flight nurses. For the first time in the war, the U.S. Navy began deploying combat nurses to an active battlefield. With only six weeks of training, these nurses began to instantly triage and evacuate wounded Marines, working in frigid, unpressurized aircraft amid constant enemy assaults.

Oftentimes called “mom” by their wounded comrades, these 12 women evacuated 2,393 men on 125 flights — more than 13% of everyone evacuated from Iwo Jima — and continued their bloody, lifesaving work in what was to become the largest Allied amphibious landing in the Pacific theater and the final island battle of the Pacific, Okinawa.

Author and professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, Leah Garrett, sat down with Military Times to discuss her latest work, The Flight Nurses’ War: The American Women Who Saved Thousands of Lives at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, as well as the conditions these women worked under and how researching her latest book left her with one of “the most moving moments of my life.”

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

Military Times: When one thinks of Iwo Jima, images come to mind of the blackened sand, brutal conditions and Mount Suribachi, but never women. How did the story of these 12 women come to your attention?

Leah Garrett: When I was writing my last book, I kept hearing these rumors that there had been women at Iwo Jima, and I thought there was no way that there were women at Iwo Jima. I reached out to the Navy, and I got military clearance and worked with an archivist there. He had written a bit about it, but there had never been a book about it — the full story of who these women were and what they were doing there.

Once I started to search about it, I found out that there had indeed been these 12 Navy flight nurses who had landed at Iwo Jima under fire, and in the worst kind of nightmare anyone can imagine, and flew out these men. Part of the reason that no one had done their stories is that these women themselves … I don’t think they realized how extraordinary it was what they had done.

I started to reach out to the families of those 12 flight nurses, and discovered that every historian wants to discover — there was a massive amount of material. Most of the story was actually in these well-cared-for boxes in basements and garages, and so the way I wrote the story was I worked with the military archivists, but then I flew around the country and met with the families themselves, interviewed the children, and went through the boxes and found just all this extraordinary first-person material: photographs, letters, memoirs.

Before we get into the nurses themselves, can you talk about the creation of flight nurses?

All of the flight nurses signed up to join the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor. For each of them, that was the watershed moment when they said, “I need to serve.”

There’s this one woman named Mary O’Connor who goes to Washington and says, “Look, we want you to set up a flight nurses program.” The reason that they wanted to set it up is that the Army had women in combat positions who were nurses, but the Navy didn’t.

As we get into 1945, the final two battles in the Pacific were really far more horrific than anyone expected them to be in the Navy, particularly at Iwo Jima. The Japanese were targeting the medical corps as well, so there was a massive attrition rate, and they did not have enough people there to take care of the men. And also, Iwo Jima is really complicated because you can’t set up field hospitals in Iwo Jima because of the landscape; it’s just too exposed. So then the question becomes: “Well, how do we get these men out?”

What happens is all these different nurses are serving in the Navy at different military hospitals, Navy hospitals around the country, and their supervisors reach out to the best one or two of each group and say, “Look, would you be interested in overseas service?” Nobody knows what it will be, but these women say yes. O’Connor gets hundreds of applications. She picks the top 24 that seem the best to her — basically smart, very capable, very brave women. So these 24 women are then sent out to Alameda, California, to do … this very intense six-week training.

The cream de la creme of the 24 were then flown to Guam, and once they’re in Guam, they’re going to be given their assignment. This had never been done before. The Navy had never put women in combat positions under direct fire, and it was a very incredibly dangerous thing to do. I mean, what if they’re killed? What if they’re captured? What if they’re used for propaganda? Like, there’s so much that could have gone wrong, and I think, much to everyone’s surprise, probably including some of the women, they were so effective in getting those men out.

On March 6, 1945, Jane Kendeigh became the first Navy flight nurse to appear on an active Pacific battlefield. Ultimately, she and 11 other nurses evacuated 2,393 men from Iwo Jima. That’s an incredible statistic, but does any story in particular stand out to you?

One of the crazy aspects of this story is that when you’re in an aircraft flying from Iwo Jima to Guam, there are no doctors on these flights. They fly over there with their corpsman and then a pilot, maybe a navigator. And when they get to Iwo Jima, it’s active fire.

Every time they’re supposed to be landing, there’s supposed to be a lull. There’s no lull because it’s such a horrific battle. They can’t turn around. They have to land. And when they land, they all talked about this visceral aspect of it. The smell of death. The sulfur smell. That the airstrip is shaking. And again, because there are no field hospitals there, they walk over to scores of extremely wounded Marines who are just lying there on stretchers on the ground in terrible, terrible shape.

It’s absolute chaos that they have to face, and then they’re on the aircraft, and they’re by themselves. One of them said, “I can’t even phone anyone to ask what I should do. I’m in the middle of the Pacific. There are these men who are dying or near death all around me, and I have to figure out what to do.” All of it was this learning curve on the plane. It’s freezing cold. There’s no air pressure.

One of the stories that moved me so much — it’s actually one of the more famous stories — but I think one of the most moving ones is about Kendeigh’s first flight. She’s actually not supposed to go on the first flight. There’s this photo a Navy photographer takes of Jane, where she gets off the plane, and she walks over to a Marine, Sgt. Bill Wyckoff, lying there. He’s got bandages all over his face. Wyckoff later said it was like an angel took my hand. He’s lying there near death, and he hears this woman whispering in his ear, “It’s going to be okay.”

Albeit brief, what kind of relationship did these Marines and nurses forge?

The men called them mom. They would say, “Mom, can you come here?”

“Mom, can you put on your lipstick?”

“Can I watch you put on your lipstick like my mom used to do?”

When the book was published, I insisted the font color on the cover be that lipstick red.

The women always said, “We were treated with the greatest respect by these men.” They never dealt with any hassling, no sexualization, none of that. It was just pure respect and love that they received and gave back.

One of my colleagues likes to talk about “research rapture.” What was the process like researching for The Flight Nurses’ War?

The families were incredible because I think that they were so glad somebody was finally telling these amazing stories of their role. And I had so many extraordinary moments. Part of the way that the unpacking of the boxes would work was that I would be with the children as we unpacked the boxes, so it was this extremely moving and rich moment that the kids would remember: “Oh wait, like there’s a shell necklace from Guam,” and then they would tell the story of how the mom got it when she was there.

I talk about this moment a lot in the book, and I always get very seriously teary when I talk about it. Another one of the flight nurses, Mary Leahy Hudnall, came from Massachusetts. She didn’t particularly want to go on planes. She joined the Navy because she thought that she would be on a ship. There you go.

She ends up on these flights, and in one instance they’re putting these men on the aircraft who are mortally wounded, right? There’s no doctor; it’s just them and the corpsman. One of the Marines on her flight out of Iwo Jima, who she knows is very, very, very wounded. He’s probably not going to make it, and he insists that she take a vial of sand from Iwo Jima that he took. She says, “No, you’re going to be fine, you’re going to be fine,” but he keeps saying, “No, can you please take this. I need you to take it because you need to tell the story of what we went through.”

So she takes the vial of sand, and then he unfortunately passes away. She gives that vial of sand to her daughter, and then when I’m in Canada visiting with her daughter, we find that vial of sand in one of the boxes. I got to hold it, and it was honestly one of the most moving moments of my life.

I took a picture of it and put it in the book because, as a historian, it’s my imperative to tell his story. I’m not only telling the story of the nurses, but I’m equally telling the story of the wounded men under their care whose stories need to be told.

At roughly 10:13 p.m., officers with the Prince William County Police Department responded to calls about property destruction near Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.

Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano, 27, was arrested at the scene and has been charged with felony destruction of property, trespass with intent to damage property, and felony injury to a monument, per the police department.

The alleged destruction via a sledgehammer has caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the historic military monument, police said.

Per the Washington Post, a second Marine from the statue is missing the bayonet from the rifle slung over his back, while a third figure’s helmet and face had been “chipped and gouged.”

The memorial was created in honor of Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of U.S. Marines raising the flag over Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945.

Austrian-born American sculptor Felix de Weldon, serving with the U.S. Navy at the time, was so moved by the image that he immediately constructed a scale model of the flag raising.

It would take him another nine and a half years to complete the full-sized model now standing in Arlington, Virginia. The smaller monument, allegedly defaced by Maldonado Soriano, stands near the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Maldonado Soriano is being held without bond pending a court appearance.

During a review period from June 1, 2024, through May 31, 2025, the VA made at least one error in 17,900 cases, roughly 38%, regarding disability decisions for painful scars, according to a recent VA Office of Inspector General report.

920 of those decisions, per the report, led to millions in overpayment and will continue to accrue without “corrective action.”

For service-connected painful scars, as a result of burns, surgeries, shrapnel and gunshot wounds, among other sources, the VA requires a physical examination to support a veteran’s claim.

However, the OIG found that the Disability Benefits Questionnaire “does not clearly define objective versus subjective evidence.

Therefore, claims processors sometimes provided evaluations for painful scars without objective evidence to support the evaluations, which led to overpayments in disability compensation.”

In addition, the report found that physical manifestations of the disability were often evaluated under two separate diagnostic codes, often resulting in “pyramiding” and overpayment.

The report notes that more than a half-million veterans currently receive VA disability benefits for painful scarring caused or worsened by military service, but it took a random sample of 70 decisions from a review population of 47,300.

It further notes that the OIG took the findings to the VBA in February 2026 and following the briefing, “30 additional decisions completed from January 1 through January 31, 2026… identified a 43 percent error rate.”

The VBA, while agreeing with many of the OIG’s recommendations, including revising the “Scars/Disfigurement” section of the DBQ; ensuring employees understand how to accurately evaluate painful scars; and reviewing and correcting the processing errors on decisions the Office of Inspector General team identified, took issue with the statistical sample and the contextualization of those estimates.

“The OIG examined 130 decisions, representing approximately 0.27 percent of the total review population of about 47,300 decisions, and identified 60 errors, which form the basis for the projected 17,900 errors referenced throughout the report,” per VA comments in the report.

“Importantly, only seven of the 60 errors OIG found resulted in improper payments, which represents about 5.4 percent of the sample, and when viewed across the full review population, only about 0.015 percent of all decisions reviewed. The remaining 53 errors, more than 88 percent of the sample, were technical or procedural issues that did not result in improper payments.”

The VA is working to complete the OIG’s suggestions by February 2027 at the latest.

Inked at $20 billion for the full-scale development phase, the contract, according to a Pentagon release, “procures multiple test aircraft for ground, airworthiness, systems, and weapons integration testing.”

“The F/A-XX is a critical pillar in our commitment to maintaining peace through strength,” Michael P. Duffey, under secretary of defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, said in the release. “F/A-XX will dominate contested airspace, extend operational reach, and deliver a decisive combat advantage for the warfighter.”

Equipped with an extended range to provide power projection from U.S. carriers, Boeing has promised that the F/A-XX will, crucially, be interoperable with both manned and unmanned platforms such as Collaborative Combat Aircraft.

“This achievement marks a new era for the U.S. Navy,” said acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao. “The Sixth-Generation fighter is a generational leap in air superiority and will provide the world’s best aviators with unparalleled capabilities to fight, win, and come home safe. We are excited to partner with Boeing, and for our warfighters to continue to dominate the skies and defeat our nation’s enemies.”

Boeing’s contract award marks another milestone victory for the company, which has now all but guaranteed its monopoly on sixth-generation fighters across the services.

In 2025, Boeing beat out Lockheed Martin for the contract to build the U.S. Air Force’s sixth-generation fighter under the Next Generation Air Dominance program, or NGAD.

That aircraft, since dubbed the F-47, has entered its engineering and manufacturing development phase, one service official announced in July, with first flights expected as early as 2028.

The Air Force at the time announced plans to purchase at least 185 of the next-gen fighters, a number designed to replace the F-22 Raptor fleet.

The F/A-XX program, meanwhile, which has yet to receive its official designation, has been the subject of funding disputes for years, with engineering and supply chain concerns prompting some Pentagon officials to push for delaying the program.

The carrier-based fighter jet is slated to anchor the Navy’s next-generation fighter fleet — operating alongside the F-35 — and is expected to replace the aging inventory of F/A-18E/F Super Hornets and EA-18G Growlers beginning in the 2030s.

“It’s an honor to be selected to produce the Navy’s first sixth^–generation platform,” Steve Parker, president and chief executive officer of Boeing Defense, Space & Security, said in a release announcing the deal. “Backed by decades of work, bolstered by game-changing innovations and solidified by the investments we’ve made in new facilities uniquely suited to build multiple products with next-generation capabilities, our dedicated and talented team is ready to execute this critical program.”

During the panel, “Rethinking the Stockpile: Building the Right Mix for Future Conflict” at the Air and Space Cyber Conference on Monday, Lyons noted that the service is working to balance “capability, capacity cost and the adaptability to produce at the speed and scale for future conflicts.”

Citing the conflict in Ukraine, where battlefield adaptations can come within hours and minutes, not months and years, panelist Bryon Kroger, founder and CEO of Rise8, noted that “when it comes to software, we’ve just historically been really bad. Like, in some cases, we’re building software slower than hardware. It’s wild.”

“You wouldn’t think about not establishing a refueling apparatus for aircraft that need to get across long distances,” said Kroger. “But we haven’t really thought about, from an enterprise IT perspective, how to create a similar refueling apparatus or the ability to continuously deliver software to the field in the way that you should. It’s not getting nearly enough attention and we need to start.

“We really have to decouple the software cycles from the hardware cycles. … We [need to be] deploying multiple times a day, where we can get an update to the field on demand. As soon as we need it.”

Ryan Hartman, chief executive officer of Ondas Sentinel, agreed.

“Inventory on the first day of the conflict is one important equation. But it is the ability for that inventory to evolve with the conflict. In my 27 years in the industry, I haven’t seen an adversary comply with our acquisition system yet. And therefore, we have to make sure that our acquisition system enables us to keep up with the pace of the conflict and the adaptability necessary to stay relevant in the conflict.”

When addressing how the government and industry can work together to address stockpile bottlenecks, both Hartman and Kroger offered simple, if possibly difficult to enact, solutions.

For Kroger, the biggest bottleneck Rise8 faces is something simple: a calendar.

According to him, “80-85%” of his company’s time is spent waiting on government authorization to operate — time spent “waiting in the queue” to get on the ”authorizing official’s calendar… if it takes six months to get on the ATO’s calendar, right there you’re at a minimum of six months to fill the system, but they’re going to find something because we always find things during test and evaluation. And now we go back, redevelop, and wait another six months to get on that calendar. This is how you get 12–18-month ATO cycles,” he noted.

For Hartman, the bottleneck within U.S. industry is clear: “The first is the supply chain, the second is the supply chain, the third is the supply chain and the fourth is testing.”

With technological advancements unfolding at breakneck speed amid conflicts in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, time is not a luxury the U.S. Air Force and its industry partners have much of.

That has been a boon to people like Kroger, who notes that a government that unleashes performance-based outcomes means that the defense industry is not an insider game anymore. Rather, contracts go to companies that offer solutions-based, scalable products.

As for the most important action the government and industries must take to be better positioned in the next few years, Hartman was blunt:

“Make sure we have capacity prior to a conflict.”

Buzz Bissinger, author of The New York Times bestselling book Friday Night Lights, and its subsequent film’s director, Peter Berg, are teaming up to deliver the true story of The Mosquito Bowl, which saw 65 Marines of the 4th and 29th regiments, 6th Marine Division, facing off on the “gridiron” of Guadalcanal before being shipped off to Okinawa.

Based on Bissinger’s 2022 book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, the film follows four of America’s top college football stars, who traded a pigskin for an M1 Garand.

Netflix dropped the official teaser trailer Wednesday, featuring Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You) as John McLaughry, Bill Skarsgård (It) as Bob Bauman, Ray Nicholson (Smile 2) as Tony Butkovich and Tom Francis (Broadway’s Sunset Boulevard) as Dave Schreiner.

Berg, who penned the adaptation alongside Mark L. Smith, produced the film with Alex Gayner and Brian Grazer for Imagine Entertainment. Grazer and Imagine Entertainment previously collaborated with Berg on Friday Night Lights. Ezra Emanuel is the executive producer.

As the days of December 1944 passed on Guadalcanal, the island was beset with rumors of where and when the Marines would ship out. It also became the home to some lively trash talk.

Relief from the daily drudgery came over sips of beer and the promise that the “29th would kick the 4th’s ass if there was ever a football game between the two,” writes Bissinger.

That promise swiftly took shape into an all-American sporting event — some thousands of miles from home.

These men were not, according to Bissinger, run-of-the-mill former collegiate football players. Within the 29th alone came an “All-American running back from Purdue who had set a scoring record in the Big Ten; an All-Missouri Valley Conference end; starters from Cornell, Notre Dame, Illinois and Duquesne; and five former captains, including from Notre Dame, Illinois and Purdue.”

The 4th was no slouch when it came to its “roster” either. The unit touted a two-time All-American wide receiver from Wisconsin and another at center from the University of California; an Ivy Leaguer who had started with the New York Giants; and starters from Wisconsin, Michigan State, Fordham, Montana and Ohio Northern, according to Bissinger.

On Dec. 24, 1944, the 65 Marines strode out onto a “field” made up of dirt, pebbles and shards of sharp coral, wearing cut-off dungarees and T-shirts with numbers stenciled on the front. Roughly 1,500 Marines ringed the field with a broadcast on Guadalcanal-based Mosquito Network going out to various Navy and Marine units fighting across the Pacific. The score, according to Bissinger, was occasionally flashed to destroyers at sea.

Tragically, it would be the last game many of the footballers-turned-Marines would play. Fifteen of the 65 players who suited up for The Mosquito Bowl were killed during the Typhoon of Steel.

The film is set to hit theaters on Oct. 30 and premiere on Netflix on Nov. 25.

Her grandfather, Lt. Murray Simon, seldom spoke of wartime experiences, let alone the details regarding being shot down in a B-24 on a secret mission one month prior to D-Day.

All that was left was a piece of that downed plane — an antenna cover loop — painted black to blend into the cover of darkness.

Still, that and a shoebox full of military medals was all “just a little bit of mythology to me,” Sanders told Military Times.

But in 2016, the thread of Simon’s war years started to come undone thanks to Sanders’ persistence and a 1949 recording of the TV hit “This Is Your Life.”

The series, which ran from 1950 to 1990, ran on the premise of luring unsuspecting guests onto the show and then surprising them with loved ones or those whose lives they had touched.

In 1949, the guest of honor for one episode featured, according to its host Ralph Edwards, “a Marine whose life has been packed with enough adventure, thrills, hair-raising escapes, raw courage, and excitement to make half a dozen movies.”

The guest, Peter Ortiz, a lanky man with thick brunette hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, strolled onto stage — only to be surprised by Sanders’ grandfather a short while later.

With that recording and the blackened antenna cover loop, Sanders began to unravel the ties that bound these two men inexplicably together.

“Who was this multilingual, Hollywood-handsome figure who had parachuted behind enemy lines with bags of cash and ammunition for the Maquis, who he was at work training, between blowing up Wehrmacht railcars and eavesdropping on off-duty Nazis at pubs?” Sanders pondered, adding, “How was this not already a Netflix series?”

The full picture of Ortiz, a Marine Corps officer and Office of Strategic Services legend, quickly took shape, resulting in “Ortiz’s War,” written by Sanders and her co-author, retired Marine and CIA officer Nicholas Reynolds.

The book, published Tuesday, weaves the tale of the most battle-decorated member of the OSS who lived a multitude of lives before his death in 1988: as a French Legionnaire, a POW, a U.S. Marine, a spy and, to cap off his career, an actor.

While the OSS, created in 1942 as the first independent U.S. intelligence agency, was short-lived, the exploits of some of its legendary “glorious amateurs” such as William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Julia Child and Mo Berg live on within the American lexicon.

Ortiz, however, despite his many hair-raising adventures and numerous accolades, has lurked in the classified shadows for decades.

Something Sanders and Reynolds hope to rectify in “Ortiz’s War.”

“Even within this sort of very fascinating subset of American operatives, he really stood out,” Sanders said.

One of only 80 Marine Corps officers to serve in the OSS during the war, Ortiz was originally tasked with evaluating the strength and capabilities of the local resistance movement in the Vercors area in southeastern France. He then organized and armed the Maquis in preparation for the long-awaited D-Day assault, according to the CIA.

While operating in France, Ortiz often donned his U.S. Marine uniform — a unique sight, even after June 6, 1944.

“Ortiz felt that entering occupied France at a time when doing so was incredibly dangerous — and there weren’t many allies around — that the actual impact of that gesture on the resistance” was meant to boost morale when the promises of the liberation of France seemed more like a whisper of hope rather than reality, Sanders said.

“He was very symbolic, very literary in a lot of ways,” she continued. “He was there to arm, assess, and mobilize the resistance. So here he was coming in the middle of occupied France and he looks the part.”

That, Sanders said, was very much deliberate.

It was there, while operating in France, that Sanders’ personal family story intertwines with Ortiz’s.

Shot down in May 1944, her grandfather, Simon, had hurled himself out of his burning plane before being rescued by members of the French Underground. Initially hidden by a French Army doctor, Sanders recounts that after the war the doctor, tongue in cheek, demanded “two eggs” from the U.S. government because he had given Simon his last two.

Details like that, Sanders noted, while researching the book, “were very humanizing.”

From there, Simon was disguised as a deaf-mute Frenchman and transported to Valence, France, where he was introduced to the American commando.

Ortiz, codenamed “Chambellan” or ”Jean-Pierre” was the “person who, in my grandfather’s case, you would pray to be intercepted by when you’re a Jewish kid from Queens, New York, shot down over Nazi-occupied France,” Sanders said.

Simon’s encounter with Ortiz, who eventually led him to safety over the Pyrenees, was just one small deed in a series of larger sacrifices, however.

Following the success of Operation Overlord, Ortiz was directed to engage in acts of violent sabotage to prevent the retreating Germans from destroying key installations throughout the region.

During fighting near Albertville, France, in early August 1944, Ortiz, commanding five Marines, a Free French officer and an Army Air Forces captain, was soon overrun by several hundred troops of the German 157th Alpine Reserve Division.

Ortiz surrendered rather than risk German reprisals on the French village.

The commando made numerous escape attempts before being liberated by the British 7th Guards Armored Division on April 29, 1945. By October of that year, with the OSS disbanded Ortiz set his cap on Hollywood.

As for Simon, he “lived and died very grateful,” Sanders said.

“Ortiz’s War” by Nicholas Reynolds and Katie S. Sanders is out now.

Pvt. Aiden Craig, 18, died on Aug. 5 after initially suffering from an undisclosed ailment during a routine physical fitness test. Craig was taken to Tri-City Medical Center in Oceanside, California, and pronounced dead four days later.

The Texas native enlisted in the Marines on June 1, 2026, and was assigned to Alpha Company, 1st Recruit Training Battalion at Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego. Craig was on day 47 of recruit training at the time of his medical crisis — roughly halfway through the 13-week boot camp — according to USMC officials.

Craig posthumously earned the title of Marine, MCRD San Diego confirmed to Military Times.

The investigation into Craig’s death is ongoing, “and no further information will be released at this time,” according to the Marine Corps.

Two former U.S. warships, the amphibious assault ship USS Peleliu and the cruiser USS Mobile Bay, were sent below the seas off the coast of Hawaii during a live sinking exercise, or SINKEX, event on July 17.

On July 24, the Navy released footage of the sinking, including video of the Global Autonomous Reconnaissance Craft uncrewed surface vessel targeting the USS Peleliu. On July 29, however, it released b-roll from inside the ship as it was pummeled by two UGM-84 Harpoon anti-ship cruise missiles, fired from Los Angeles-class fast-attack submarine USS Columbia.

Cameras placed inside and around the vessel show the warship shudder as the powerful blasts rip at its innards.

The sinking of the Peleliu and Mobile Bay was the third SINKEX event in recent weeks. The former USS Juneau was sent to the ocean floor during the June 22-July 1 Valiant Shield exercise off the coast of the Mariana Islands Range Complex.

Commissioned in May 1980, the USS Peleliu was the first ship to deploy Marines to Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks, with the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit commanded by then-Marine Brig. Gen. James Mattis under Task Force 58.

That same task force went on to capture John Walker Lindh in November 2001. Lindh, an American citizen-turned-enemy-combatant, later confessed to being a member of Al-Qaeda while aboard Peleliu.

During 35 years of service, the ship, dubbed the “Iron Nickel,” steamed more than a million miles before its decommissioning in March 2015.