At 17, Rudi Richardson took a friend’s car for a joyride, crashed it into the side of a parked car, and landed himself in court. It was Southern California in the 1970s. Richardson’s probation officer told him he had a choice: The court could pursue the joyriding charge. Or Richardson could go into the Army. Richardson’s parents, who had adopted him from Germany when he was a small child, thought the Army sounded like a good idea. His father was a career Army man. Richardson’s biological father had been in the Army too, serving in Europe after World War II—although Richardson didn’t know it at ..read more

I sit staring at the empty chair next to me. We know whose chair it is. He isn’t coming. His name was Sam. He’d grown up in the country, the child of a military family, and he was obsessed with computers. We affectionately called him “our admin kid,” but he was more than that, smarter than all of us, and wise beyond his years. He was the energy in our ops section. We instantly liked him. One day, looking for a bit more excitement, he asked if he could go out to a forward operating base. Sam flew off in a helicopter in combat gear and returned in a black rubber bag. Afterwards, I flew out to th ..read more

The U.S. Department of Veteran Affairs has signed up more than 280,000 new veterans and completed roughly 900,000 new toxic exposure claims under the expansion of the PACT Act, a Biden administration move that sped up the implementation of a 2023 law aimed at securing benefits for veterans exposed to burn pits overseas. Veterans who had exposure to some toxic substances during their military service, whether they deployed or not, became eligible for VA health coverage under the legislation as of March 5. Former service members who served as far back as the Vietnam War can have their health ca ..read more

This time, I don’t wrap the picture frames, vases, and other delicate souvenirs in bubble wrap, or place them in Tetris-like defensive positions inside a large brown box. I don’t need to; the boxes aren’t going far. After years of going where the Air Force tells us, we’re moving into our forever home just down the street. Such permanence feels like a foreign concept, and I marvel at how different this change is from the rest—the half-dozen locations these treasures have traveled, sometimes across the ocean. They’ve lost friends along the way. Shattered glass and broken frames, dents and scratc ..read more

My wife and I sit in a large auditorium in El Paso, Texas, waiting in anticipation, along with other families, for our daughter’s return from deployment. Upbeat music fills the air and the feeling in the assembled crowd is of a group of fans awaiting a rock band to take the stage. This isn’t far off. The main characters are our own family members—the balloons, signs, and flowers overt displays of affection marking the safe return of mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, daughters and sons. I watch young children playing and dancing to the music. Each is more interested in the other kids tha ..read more

Late in the afternoon of Sept. 11, 2001, Brockton Hunter, a defense attorney in Minnesota, was having drinks with a friend from law school. Hunter had served in the Army before becoming a lawyer; his friend had been in the CIA. The conversation turned from that day’s devastating attacks to what they felt would inevitably follow. “Both of us understood that we were going to be going to war like we hadn’t since Vietnam,” Hunter said. In the two years since he’d hung out his shingle as a public defender, Hunter had watched veteran after veteran cycle through his law practice. Most were Vietnam ve ..read more

There is no doubt in my mind that military pilots have egos stretching to the stratosphere. I found out early in my military career that fighter pilots, as a group, are a bunch of assholes. I learned to tolerate most of them, but none considered me a buddy, and I didn’t consider any of them one either. Nonaviators knew flyboys depended on nonflyers to support them, not associate with them. Then, on a hot, humid day at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base in 1966, I learned that loss could bridge the divide that separates us. Fifty-seven years later, I’m still haunted by what happened that day. Ter ..read more

I shared my big news with friends while visiting them out of town over Mother’s Day weekend. I planned to begin in vitro fertilization with a donor to freeze embryos later that year. The couple, a fellow Navy veteran and their spouse, had experience in finding a sperm donor. “Be prepared for the weirdest online shopping of your life,” my friend said with a laugh. At 36, after the end of my third long-term relationship in six years, I admitted to myself that the chance of finding a life partner during my reproductive years was waning. I’d done the math. Even if I met someone the day after I mad ..read more

In interviews, nearly three-quarters of veterans who said they supported an extremist group or ideology reported experiencing a traumatic or otherwise negative event during their military service, according to a study released today by the RAND Corporation. And more than half of the veterans interviewed said they struggled with the transition to civilian life, with difficulties including homelessness and incarceration. The study is the first qualitative analysis seeking to understand how veterans’ experiences may play a role in support for radical ideologies. While the sample size is small, re ..read more

“I remember the trees,” retired Lt. Col. Philip Treglia said about the day in April 2004 when he returned to his command post in Fallujah, Iraq, to find it had been attacked by insurgents armed with RPGs. “The trees all around were cut in half, kind of like those old black and whites of the beaches at Tarawa in the Pacific,” he said. “Just blown to hell.” U.S. Marine Corps, courtesy of retired Lt. Col. Philip Treglia. For days, Treglia’s company of Marines had been engaged in intense fighting deep in the Iraqi city, caught up in a grinding, messy showdown with upward of 1,600 enemy fighters ..read more