When former President Donald Trump chose JD Vance as his running mate in July, the moment marked a milestone for veterans who joined the military following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks: One of their own would be listed on a major-party ticket for the very first time.

Some veterans believe Vance’s ascension is worth celebrating. If he makes it to the White House, post-9/11 veterans will be represented at the highest levels of government, and someone with first-hand experience in America’s Global War on Terror will have the ear of the commander-in-chief.

That possibility is “invaluable” to a generation of veterans who often felt disconnected from the elected officials whose decisions affected ground troops during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, said Allison Jaslow, an Iraq War veteran and the CEO of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

Other prominent veterans who served in those wars are speaking out against Vance, as well as the notion that he represents them.

Those veterans — including retired Marine Corps officers Joe Plenzler and Scott Cooper, as well as Amy McGrath, a former Democratic political candidate from Kentucky and the first woman to fly a combat mission for the Marine Corps — accused Vance of political flip-flopping and criticized his isolationist stance toward foreign policy.

Vance’s promotion of unfounded claims about the 2020 presidential election doesn’t align with the oath of enlistment and the promise to defend democracy, McGrath argued.

A ‘good thing for our country’

JD Vance, a Republican senator from Ohio, enlisted in the Marine Corps in 2003 under the name James D. Hamel, the Marine Corps confirmed. He served a four-year enlistment as a combat correspondent and deployed to Iraq with the 2nd Marine Aircraft Wing from August 2005 to February 2006.

Vance left the service in 2007 as a corporal. He later went on to attend Ohio State University and Yale Law School, change his surname to Vance in honor of his maternal grandparents, work as a venture capitalist, write the best-selling memoir Hillbilly Elegy and eventually become a leading voice in conservatism.

When he was nominated in July, some veterans celebrated Vance as the first veteran of any generation to be part of a major-party ticket since John McCain in 2008, as well as the first veteran of the military’s enlisted ranks to be on the ballot since Al Gore in 2000.

That representation of veterans on the ballot — and the perspective an enlisted Marine could bring to the White House — supersedes politics, Jaslow believes.

“The idea of war or what it takes to defend ourselves from terrorism is all too often an abstract concept that people want to intellectualize, when in reality, it’s something that impacts real human lives ... in ways that are lost on many of the American people in real time today,” Jaslow said. “Having a veteran serve in elected office would mean that the men and women whose lives are on the line to defend what we have here at home would be more top of mind than they otherwise would be.”

Likewise, Elliot Ackerman, a former Marine Corps special operations team leader who has authored bestselling memoirs about his service, views Vance’s political ascension as positive, despite Ackerman not agreeing with all of the VP nominee’s political beliefs.

“It should be applauded that we have a veteran running at that level, regardless of what you think about their positions,” Ackerman said. “I think it’s a good and healthy thing for our democracy that at senior decision-making levels you have individuals who served this country and whose experience is informed by that service.”

Vance is likely paving the way for other post-9/11 veterans to be nominated by a major party, Ackerman added.

“On the national stage, he’s the first at the top of the ticket, and I suspect he probably won’t be the last,” Ackerman said. “I think that’s a good thing for our country.”

Hugh Hewitt, a conservative political commentator, wrote in The Washington Post that Trump likely viewed Vance as key to reclaiming the support from veterans that the former president lost between his 2016 and 2020 campaigns. During the 2020 presidential race, polling showed that older veterans overwhelmingly backed Trump, while younger veterans and women veterans significantly preferred President Joe Biden.

Three weeks after Trump announced his VP choice during the Republican National Convention, it remained uncertain how the pick would affect polling.

In an Ipsos poll released July 30, 47% of Americans believe veterans make the best elected officials when compared to people with prior public service or those currently working in law enforcement, business, academia or news and entertainment. When it comes to confidence in elected officials, 76% believe that veterans elected to office would make good decisions.

The poll was based on a sample of 1,238 U.S. residents and conducted on behalf of With Honor Action, a veteran-led group that aims to increase the number of veterans in elected office and foster bipartisanship in Congress.

‘Doesn’t represent’ all veterans

While some veterans view Vance’s nomination as a symbolic win for U.S. veterans and service members, others see his rise as a threat to democracy and foreign policy. They also frown upon his alignment with Trump after Vance initially criticized the former president.

Upon Trump’s election in 2016, Vance called Trump “dangerous” and “unfit” for office and said he could be “America’s Hitler.” By 2021, Vance had reversed his opinion, citing Trump’s accomplishments as president.

“While we share being Marines and from the Great State of Ohio, I’m not voting for him,” said Plenzler, a former infantry officer and combat veteran of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “His flip flop on the presidential candidate gives me whiplash, and I’m looking for someone with a steadier moral compass.”

Michael Smith, a former Navy officer and the executive director of Veterans for Responsible Leadership — a Super PAC comprised of “Never Trump” veterans — said that Vance’s military service was honorable, but his support of Trump’s antidemocratic views is not.

Similarly, Cooper, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran who commanded an EA-6B Prowler squadron, criticized Vance for not speaking out against rioters who carried out the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Vance has said that unlike former Vice President Mike Pence, he would have used the VP’s role to contest the outcome of the 2020 election, which he said was “stolen” from Trump.

“We would hope that those who have served in the military would represent moral courage, a willingness to stand apart from the group, at personal risk, for what is right,” Cooper said. “He doesn’t represent what I feel deeply about.”

Naveed Shah, an Iraq War veteran and the political director of Common Defense, a progressive veterans organization, argued that people shouldn’t vote for candidates merely because of their status as veterans. Like Cooper, Shah doesn’t believe Vance represents the values held by some veterans of his generation.

McGrath, a veteran political candidate who lost her bid in 2020 to unseat Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., likewise said she would support a post-9/11 veteran making it onto a major-party ticket if the person stood for the values that American veterans fought for throughout history. Vance is not that person, McGrath argued.

“We have veterans who are Republicans, we have veterans who are Democrats, we have veterans who are conservative and we have veterans who are liberal. The red line is democracy itself,” McGrath said. “If you’re somebody who perpetuates a lie, particularly continuing to say that the last election was unfair, you’re basically doing the work of our adversaries. ... That’s so disturbing to me.”

In particular, McGrath and Plenzler criticized Vance’s “America First” approach to foreign policy. He would dismantle “a system of allies and partners” built by the Greatest Generation and abdicate the country’s responsibility to lead on the world stage, they argued.

Vance has accused America’s NATO allies of not paying for their fair share to support Kyiv, and earlier this year, he joined 14 other Republican senators to oppose an aid package to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Vance has said his military service helped to shape his beliefs on foreign policy. When he enlisted in the Marine Corps after graduating high school, Vance believed in the mission of the Iraq War — a belief he now describes as a mistake. Vance reflected on that time of his life in a speech on the Senate floor in April while arguing against sending aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

“I believed the propaganda of the George W. Bush administration that we needed to invade Iraq, that it was a war for freedom and democracy,” Vance said. “I served my country honorably, and I saw when I went to Iraq that I had been lied to, that the promises of the foreign policy establishment of this country were a complete joke.”

Vice President Kamala Harris, who won the Democratic presidential nomination Monday, chose Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, a longtime member of the Army National Guard, as her running mate, multiple news outlets reported Tuesday morning.

In addition to Walz, Harris’ pool of potential VP picks included Department of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, an Afghanistan War veteran, and Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., a former astronaut and Navy aviator.

Walz enlisted in the National Guard in 1981 at the age of 17, and he ascended to the rank of command sergeant major, said Lt. Col. Kristen Augé, the Minnesota National Guard’s state public affairs officer. He retired in 2005 as a master sergeant because “he did not complete additional coursework at the U.S. Army Sergeants Major Academy,” Augé said. He later became the highest ranking enlisted soldier to serve in Congress.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

The roughly $9.8 million in overpayments and about $84.7 million in underpayments to impacted veterans occurred as a result of claims processors not consistently following policies and procedures, the report said.

A rating of 100% for compensation may be assigned even when the overall disability rating is less than 100%, but the veteran is considered to be unable to get and maintain a job due to service-connected disabilities, the report noted.

The watchdog team reviewed statistical samples and estimated that 74% of claims granted for those with that disability compensation rating, and 76% of those denied, between May 2022 and April 2023 had at least one claims processing error.

Whether the Veterans Benefits Administration, the department’s agency which handles the complex financial disbursements, is processing veterans’ claims effectively enough served as the subject of a House panel meeting last week.

“We have taken corrective action on 95% of all of the cases identified in that report. We should have the remainder done here shortly,” Ronald Burke Jr., the deputy undersecretary for policy and oversight at VBA, said during the hearing.

The VA watchdog report made several recommendations to improve accuracy in individual unemployability claims decisions, including updating guidance, enhancing information systems, improving training and evaluating workload distribution.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person training has been replaced with virtual training that does not provide the tools needed for processors to succeed, according to Linda Parker-Cooks, from the union American Federation of Government Employees.

VA workers face more mandatory overtime amid record claims processing

Rep. Chris Pappas, D-N.H., said during the hearing that many VA processors were hired to assist in response to high demand with processing claims as a result of the Promise to Address Comprehensive Toxics Act — better known as the PACT Act — that was signed into law in 2022 and expanded veterans’ eligibility for disability benefits related to injuries from toxic exposure.

A July report from the Government Accountability Office found that training for claims processors at the VA needs to be enhanced. It noted that in fiscal year 2023, VBA processed over 2.2 million claims for disability compensation and provided about $136 billion in benefits to veterans with service-connected disabilities. However, it had not fully implemented some of the recommendations the government watchdog had made a few years prior.

Elizabeth Curda, from the GAO, said during the hearing that “an effective training program is needed to one: help new claims processors become fully proficient, and two: for seasoned staff to maintain their knowledge and skills in an ever-changing complex environment.”

Burke acknowledged that there is room for improvement.

“We’ve asked ourselves, ‘What can we do better? How can we better prepare our claims processors?’”

The trade followed years of secretive back-channel negotiations despite relations between Washington and Moscow being at their lowest point since the Cold War after Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.

Marine veteran Paul Whelan sentenced to 16 years in Russia on spying charges

The sprawling deal, the latest in a series of prisoner swaps negotiated between Russia and the U.S. in the last two years but the first to require significant concessions from other countries, was heralded by President Joe Biden as a diplomatic achievement in the final months of his administration. But the release of Americans has come at a price: Russia has secured the freedom of its own nationals convicted of serious crimes in the West by trading them for journalists, dissidents and other Westerners convicted and sentenced in a highly politicized legal system on charges the U.S. considers bogus.

Under the deal, Russia released Gershkovich, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was jailed in 2023 and convicted in July of espionage charges that he and the U.S. vehemently denied and called baseless; Whelan, a Michigan corporate security executive and Marine veteran jailed since 2018 also on espionage charges he and Washington have denied; and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty journalist Alsu Kurmasheva, a dual U.S.-Russian citizen convicted in July of spreading false information about the Russian military, accusations her family and employer have rejected.

The dissidents released included Kara-Murza, a Kremlin critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning writer serving 25 years on charges of treason widely seen as politically motivated; 11 political prisoners being held in Russia, including associates of the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny; and a German national arrested in Belarus.

The Russian side got Vadim Krasikov, who was convicted in Germany in 2021 of killing a former Chechen rebel in a Berlin park two years earlier, apparently on the orders of Moscow’s security services.

Russia also received two alleged sleeper agents who were jailed in Slovenia, as well as three men charged by federal authorities in the U.S., including Roman Seleznev, a convicted computer hacker and the son of a Russian lawmaker, and Vadim Konoshchenok, a suspected Russian intelligence operative accused of providing American-made electronics and ammunition to the Russian military. Norway returned an academic arrested on suspicions of being a Russian spy, and Poland also sent back a man it detained.

US soldier convicted of theft in Russia sentenced to nearly 4 years

Thursday’s swap of 24 prisoners surpassed a deal involving 14 people that was struck in 2010. In that exchange, Washington freed 10 Russians living in the U.S. as sleepers, while Moscow deported four Russians living in their homeland, including Sergei Skripal, a double agent working with British intelligence. He and his daughter in 2018 were nearly killed by nerve agent poisoning blamed on Russian agents.

Speculation had mounted for weeks that a swap was near because of a confluence of unusual developments, including a startingly quick trial and conviction for Gershkovich that Washington regarded as a sham. He was sentenced to 16 years in a maximum-security prison.

In a trial that concluded in two days in secrecy in the same week as Gershkovich’s, Kurmasheva was convicted on charges of spreading false information about the Russian military that her family, employer and U.S. officials rejected.

Also in recent days, several other figures imprisoned in Russia for speaking out against the war in Ukraine or over their work with Navalny were moved from prison to unknown locations.

Russia releases US Marine vet as part of prisoner exchange

Gershkovich was arrested March 29, 2023, while on a reporting trip to the Ural Mountains city of Yekaterinburg. Authorities claimed, without offering any evidence, that he was gathering secret information for the U.S. The son of Soviet emigres who settled in New Jersey, he moved to the country in 2017 to work for The Moscow Times newspaper before being hired by the Journal in 2022.

He had more than a dozen closed hearings over the extension of his pretrial detention or appeals for his release. He was taken to the courthouse in handcuffs and appeared in the defendants’ cage, often smiling for the many cameras.

U.S. officials last year made an offer to swap Gershkovich that was rejected by Russia, and Biden’s Democratic administration had not made public any possible deals since then.

Gershkovich was designated as wrongfully detained, as was Whelan, who was detained in December 2018 after traveling to Russia for a wedding. Whelan was convicted of espionage charges, which he and the U.S. have also said were false and trumped up, and he was serving a 16-year prison sentence.

Whelan had been excluded from prior high-profile deals involving Russia, including the April 2022 swap by Moscow of imprisoned Marine veteran Trevor Reed for Konstantin Yaroshenko, a Russian pilot convicted in a drug trafficking conspiracy. That December, the U.S. released notorious arms trafficker Viktor Bout in exchange for getting back WNBA star Brittney Griner, who’d been jailed on drug charges.

Litvinova reported from Tallinn, Estonia.

NEW YORK — It was a landmark moment for the psychedelic movement: The Department of Veteran Affairs’ top doctor stood on stage, praising advocates who have spent decades promoting the healing potential of mind-altering drugs.

In an unannounced appearance at a New York psychedelic conference, the VA’s Dr. Shereef Elnahal said his agency was ready to start rolling out MDMA-assisted therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder as soon as regulators approved it.

FDA advisory panel votes against psychedelic therapy to treat PTSD

“The VA has to be first, as we have been, with the mental health needs of our veterans,” Elnahal told attendees at the May meeting. He also highlighted the “awesome, groundbreaking” research on the drug by MAPS, or the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, the leading nonprofit advocating for the medical and legal use of hallucinogenic drugs.

But expectations for MDMA’s first-of-a-kind approval unraveled a few weeks later when Food and Drug Administration advisers voted overwhelmingly against the drug, citing flawed data, questionable research conduct, and potential safety and addiction risks. The panel’s recommendation isn’t binding, but the FDA is widely expected to delay or decline approval when it makes its decision by mid-August.

The potential rejection has sent shockwaves through the psychedelic community, including combat veterans who have spent years lobbying for the drug, which is also known as ecstasy or molly. The advocacy effort has long been intertwined with MAPS, which has funded or supported some of the most vocal veterans supporting psychedelic therapy.

Dr. Harold Kudler of Duke University met with veterans and MAPS leaders while serving as the VA’s top consultant on mental health services. He believes FDA's experts are justifiably skeptical of the science behind the drug, which he says has been drowned out by messaging from MAPS and its leader, Rick Doblin, who began pursuing MDMA's approval in the mid-1980s.

“Rick is the most persuasive advocate within the scientific community that I’ve ever seen. You want to believe him because he's offering you something you sorely need — an effective treatment for PTSD,” Kudler said. “But I think the FDA committee caught a glimpse of how much of this is Rick’s zeal and how much is real.”

MAPS declined to make Doblin available for an interview. Instead the group pointed to a recent statement by two dozen scientists and pharmaceutical executives — many with backgrounds in psychedelic research — supporting MDMA’s approval.

Earlier this year, MAPS changed the name of its drug development arm to Lykos Therapeutics, allowing the new company to raise funds from outside investors.

In addition to shortcomings in Lykos' studies, FDA panelists voiced concern about separate allegations that some MAPS-affiliated researchers suppressed negative study results or coached patients to inflate positive results. The FDA says it's investigating those claims.

Casey Tylek, an Army veteran, says he didn’t experience any of that while participating in the study. When he asked researchers for guidance in evaluating the effect of the drug, Tylek says he was repeatedly rebuffed and told he had to rate the treatment without any outside influence.

Tylek says he was “pessimistic” going into the trial, but credits MDMA-assisted therapy with resolving anger, anxiety and trauma stemming from a rocket attack in Iraq.

“It basically rewrote that memory in my mind and how it functioned,” Tylek said. “I was able to just kind of let go of it and not be hung up on it.”

Kudler and other researchers say they want to see the MDMA results confirmed in larger studies that have no links to the psychedelic community.

That work would take years. Veterans who support the treatment say it would jeopardize patients suffering from PTSD who haven’t been helped by antidepressants and other existing therapies. The suicide rate among veterans is 70% higher than the general population, according to government figures, with 18 veteran suicides per day in 2021.

Jon Lubecky, who served in both the Marines and the Army, says he tried to kill himself five times after returning from deployment to Iraq in 2006. After years of struggling with PTSD he enrolled in a MAPS trial in 2014. He credits MDMA-assisted therapy with curing his condition.

Since then, Lubecky has told his story hundreds of times in media interviews, congressional hearings and private meetings with military officials and federal lawmakers, including conservatives like Sen. Rand Paul and Rep. Dan Crenshaw.

Lubecky worked as a consultant for MAPS for more than five years. But he rejects the idea that he was merely advancing the agenda of psychedelic boosters who want to see the drugs outright legalized.

“I’m not in this for ending the drug war or any of those other things," he said. "I’m in it for my friends.”

Lubecky’s work helped secure $20 million in funding for the VA to conduct its own studies of psychedelics, including MDMA and ketamine.

Part of the rationale for that research: Many veterans now leave the U.S. to undergo psychedelic therapy at clinics in Mexico, Peru and other countries where it is more accessible.

A nonprofit group, Heroic Hearts Project, currently has a waiting list of over 1,000 veterans seeking financial and logistical support to travel abroad. A former Army Ranger, Jesse Gould, founded the group after returning from a weeklong retreat in Peru using ayahuasca, the psychedelic brew associated with indigenous cultures of the Amazon. After the experience, he said he was able to overcome anxiety, anger and depression that had burdened him after three deployments to Afghanistan.

Gould says MAPS deserves credit for kickstarting research that could eventually help thousands of veterans.

“I think MAPS has done more for the veteran community in this area than most politicians have done in the last 20 years,” said Gould, whose group has no financial ties to MAPS. “Time and time again our needs either go unheard or go to the back of the line.”

Heroic Hearts hosted an event on Capitol Hill earlier this month where several House lawmakers and veterans called for MDMA's approval.

Gould doesn’t expect the FDA to flatly reject MDMA. Instead he and others say the agency may ask Lykos to perform additional studies.

Even if the company is unable to quickly conduct that research, experts say others could benefit by avoiding the pitfalls in Lykos' MDMA application, including a small patient population with little diversity and a high potential for bias.

Dozens of other drugmakers are studying psilocybin, LSD and other psychedelics for depression, anxiety and addiction.

Dr. John Krystal, a Yale University psychiatry professor, said Lykos' setback "will hopefully ensure that future studies are conducted in ways that give reviewers greater confidence about the effectiveness and the safety of these drugs.”

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

My husband served in the Navy for 20 years, where he specialized in disarming explosive devices, and his best friend was among those 31.

Most of my husband’s career was spent attached to Navy SEAL Team 2 and Navy SEAL Team 6, where he bravely carried out more than 12 combat deployments.

We were a tight community, and on that day in August, 31 of our friends and teammates lost their lives in an instant.

My husband had the harrowing task of notifying his best friend’s wife and children of his death and bringing his remains back to West Virginia.

We were never the same.

Psychedelic therapy data ‘speaks for itself,’ VA official says

After this mass casualty, we lost many others, either in combat, in training, or to suicide. I became depressed and constantly anxious that the ball was going to drop, and that my family would be the next to receive that dreaded knock on the door. I began having panic attacks and suicidal thoughts.

I was convinced no one gets out unscathed, and if you want the truth, no one really does.

A few years later, my husband retired with a 100% disability rating at just 39 years old, primarily due to invisible wounds—those deep-seated mental scars that no medal could ever begin to mend.

In the quiet desperation that often accompanies military service, both veterans and their families bear a weight that is rarely understood by those outside the fold. As a military spouse, I’ve witnessed firsthand the toll that years of service can take on the mind and spirit of those who have served our country. For years, our family navigated the turbulent waters of post-service life, where the aftershocks of trauma reverberated through our daily existence.

Both my husband and I have tried a range of therapies to heal. A decade after the accident, in July 2021, I was introduced to midomafetamine assisted therapy on a life-changing retreat to Mexico.

This treatment involves a drug known as MDMA, or on the street as ecstasy or Molly. I was invited along with six other special operation spouses to explore this treatment solution, since it has yet to be approved by the Food and Drug Administration for use in the U.S. It turned out to be a beacon of hope for healing deep-seated emotional wounds.

In a therapeutic setting, MDMA allows those suffering to access buried demons and trauma in a way that is gentle and compassionate—something traditional therapies often struggle to achieve. It’s not about escaping reality but confronting it head-on, under the guidance of trained therapists in a safe and supportive environment.

In 2017, the FDA designated MDMA-assisted therapy, as a “breakthrough therapy” because of clinically demonstrated evidence in treating the root causes of PTSD. In one example, a study found that following just three sessions of MDMA therapy, 71% of participants no longer met the diagnostic criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD.

Our veterans need access to this treatment, but without FDA approval, it often remains out of reach. Veterans like my husband, for example, who work in government jobs after military retirement, are given strict polygraphs that specifically ask if the employee has ever taken a schedule I drug like MDMA. Without FDA approval of MDMA therapy, they cannot seek out this route without risking their security clearance.

One of the most profound challenges my husband has faced, which is common among veterans, is that his nervous system has become locked in a perpetual state of shutdown and detachment. This manifests as extreme fatigue, emotional numbness, and disconnection from both himself and loved ones.

I vividly recall a moment at my son’s hockey game. He scored a goal, the crowd cheered, and my husband dutifully clapped and smiled. Later that night, he said to me: “I go through the motions of happiness and excitement, but I feel nothing.” It was a stark reminder of the invisible battle raging within him, one that no amount of conventional therapy seemed able to reach.

Psychedelics may soon be available — sort of — to treat vets with PTSD

The FDA has not approved a new treatment for PTSD in nearly 25 years, leaving those suffering with antidepressant drugs a as approved treatments, medications that only seem to numb the pain. This keeps some people at a baseline of numbness—while they may not feel all the bad, they often struggle to feel joy.

Our veterans are experiencing a suicide epidemic, in part because they cannot access the care they need. Every day, an estimated 17 or more veterans die by suicide, totaling up to 16,000 veterans each year.

For veterans in particular, MDMA therapy provides clarity and allows them to uncover profound empathy and forgiveness for themselves—directly addressing guilt for leaving their families or painful experiences during war. It saves their lives.

Yet, despite its promising results, an FDA Advisory Committee recently declined to recommend MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, cherry picking small procedural concerns. The FDA will make its final decision on whether to approve MDMA for such therapy on August 11.

I strongly urge them to help veterans who are suffering and approve this lifesaving therapy.

The same veterans who risked everything for our country are being denied access to treatments that could offer them a chance at peace. Our veterans should not need to go abroad, or worse, seek this therapy in an unregulated environment within the U.S. It’s a cruel irony that those who sacrificed so much are often left to navigate their post-service lives with inadequate support for their mental health.

Veterans deserve every opportunity to heal, to reconnect with themselves and their families, and to reclaim the lives they put on hold in service to our nation. Denying them access to breakthrough therapies is not just a disservice; it’s a betrayal of the promises we made as a grateful nation. We deserve the right to try any and all options, treatments, and healing modalities available to recover, repair, and improve our lives after years of sacrifice.

We must give our veterans the chance to rewrite their stories, not as victims of war but as resilient survivors who deserve every chance to live full lives.

Elaine Brewer is a proud military wife. She is the founder of Humble Warrior, a 501c3 nonprofit, which aids in military and first responder mental health and wellness. Elaine lives with her husband and their two sons in St. Louis, Missouri.

Austin ordered the creation of a special panel to determine whether to retain or rescind the medals, the Department of Defense announced Wednesday. In a July 19 memorandum ordering the review, Austin said the panel would investigate “each awardee’s individual actions” and also “consider the context of the overall engagement.”

“It’s never too late to do what’s right,” an unnamed senior defense official said in a statement Wednesday. “And that’s what is intended by the review that the secretary directed, which is to ensure that we go back and review each of these medals in a rigorous and individualized manner.”

The killings, referred to as the Wounded Knee Massacre, occurred Dec. 29, 1890, near Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota. It was part of a larger effort by the U.S. government to repress Native American tribes of the Great Plains and eradicate a religious movement known as Ghost Dance.

Reports about the Ghost Dance movement prompted the U.S. Army to guard reservations. On Dec. 29, 1890, troops from the 7th Cavalry were confiscating weapons from Lakota people when a struggle with a reportedly deaf man sparked a chaotic one-sided firefight. When the smoke cleared, dozens of cavalry troopers were wounded or killed by friendly fire — likely from their artillery — and hundreds of Lakota were dead.

For their actions that day, 20 cavalrymen were awarded the Medal of Honor, the nation’s highest military honor. Austin’s memorandum lists the recipients, along with short descriptions of why each man received a medal.

One citation says a recipient showed distinguished conduct “in a battle with hostile Indians.” Another says one man “voluntarily led a party into a ravine to dislodge Sioux Indians concealed therein.”

A few citations said troops had rescued their fellow soldiers, and some said only that the men exhibited “extraordinary gallantry.”

Congress officially apologized for the massacre around its 100th anniversary in 1990, but it did not rescind the medals then. In 2022, Congress approved a measure encouraging the Pentagon to review the awards.

Medals of Honor for soldiers who perpetrated Wounded Knee massacre may be rescinded

The panel reviewing the Medals of Honor will comprise five experts, including two from the Department of the Interior, Austin’s memo states. The panel is expected to submit a report to Austin by Oct. 15 with recommendations for each recipient, and then Austin will take those recommendations to President Joe Biden.

When reviewing the awards, panelists will consider the context at the time and use the military’s 1890 standards for awarding the Medal of Honor, rather than today’s standards.

Panelists will determine whether any of the soldiers did anything disqualifying them from the award, which includes intentionally directing an attack against someone who surrendered in good faith, murdering or raping a prisoner or engaging in any other act “demonstrating immorality,” Austin’s memo reads.

The U.S. Army was ordered to hand over all historical documentation about the massacre, including personnel files for the awardees, by Friday.

The Pentagon noted that this isn’t the first time Medals of Honor have come under scrutiny. In 1916, Congress ordered the Army to review all Medals of Honor awarded since the Civil War. At that time, a panel of five retired generals decided to rescind 911 of the awards. Six of those medals were later reinstated.

This story was produced in partnership with Military Veterans in Journalism. Please send tips to MVJ-Tips@militarytimes.com.

Body camera footage released this week shows Grayson fatally shooting Massey in her Illinois home, the latest example of law enforcement officers shooting Black people in their homes across the country.

Here’s what The Associated Press knows about the shooting and the former deputy now facing years in prison if convicted.

What happened that day?

At 12:50 a.m. on July 6, Massey called 911 with her fears about a prowler around her home in an unincorporated neighborhood of Springfield, 200 miles southeast of Chicago.

Video from body cameras worn by Grayson and another deputy show a search around Massey's house and in surrounding yards. They found a black SUV with broken windows in an adjacent driveway before Massey came to the front door. When Massey opened the door, she said, “Don't hurt me,” seemed confused and repeated, “Please God" and said, "I don't know what to do."

It isn't clear why Massey and Grayson went inside the house, followed by the other deputy.

Grayson asked for her name to include on a report as the deputies prepared to leave. Massey was searching her purse for ID when Grayson pointed out a pot over a flame on the stove.

Massey quickly went to the stove, moved the pan toward a sink and asked Grayson, “Where are you going?” He had stepped back and remained in the living room of the small home, separated from her by a cluttered counter.

Grayson and Massey chuckled as he replied, “Away from your hot, steaming water.” Massey then unexpectedly said, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” prompting Grayson to pull his 9 mm pistol and tell her, “You better (expletive) not or I swear to God I’ll (expletive) shoot you in your (expletive) face.”

He repeatedly yelled at Massey to put down the pot. She apologized and ducked before Grayson fired three times, striking Massey once in the head.

Who was Sonya Massey?

The mother of two — 17-year-old Malachi Hill Massey and 15-year-old Jeannette “Summer” Massey — was from a large family with many cousins who thought of her as a sister.

“She was loving, caring. Her cousins — she loved her cousins,” Malachi said. “She was just a ball of energy. We’d go anywhere; if she wanted to talk to someone, she’d go talk to them. She was just a loving person. She always helped people, too.”

Massey, who was unemployed, had struggled with mental illness and undergone treatment. That might explain her puzzling statement to Grayson, “I rebuke you in the name of Jesus,” according to the family’s lawyer, Ben Crump. But it also speaks to her strong religious faith, he said.

What is Sean Grayson’s background?

Grayson, 30, graduated from North Mac High School in Virden, 27 miles south of Springfield, in 2013, according to defense attorney Daniel Fultz at last week’s hearing. He enlisted in the U.S. Army in 2014 until a general discharge in 2016.

According to the Illinois Law Enforcement Training and Standards Board, Grayson joined the police ranks in August 2020 with the first of six jobs in four years, three part-time and three full-time. The Associated Press has requested his employment records from the central Illinois agencies in public records requests.

In a July 2020 employment application to the Pawnee Police Department, he said he was a mechanic and performed vehicle maintenance and recovery in the Army.

“I am a very hard worker and fast learner,” Grayson wrote in the employment application. “I am looking for a department to give me a chance to show what I can do. I am a team player and great communicator.”

He also wrote that he also worked as a security guard at a hospital, as a landscaper and spent three years working at a fitness center.

He joined the sheriff’s department in Sangamon County, population 196,300, in May 2023. He was fired last Wednesday, the day he was indicted.

What charges were filed?

A grand jury indicted Grayson on charges of first-degree murder, aggravated battery with a firearm and official misconduct. If convicted, he faces prison sentences of 45 years to life for murder, six to 30 years for battery and two to five years for misconduct.

He is being held in the Menard County Jail without bond. He pleaded not guilty and his defense attorney has declined to comment on the case.

What have prosecutors said?

In last week's court hearing, First Assistant State's Attorney Mary Beth Rodgers said the distance between Grayson and Massey negated any perceived threat and he had “a lot of options” aside from firing his weapon if he believed he was in danger.

“At no point did this defendant show anything but callousness toward human life,” said Rodgers, adding that Grayson “clearly dismissed his training as a law enforcement officer.”

Massey’s home in the Cabbage Patch neighborhood, named for a huge cabbage farm there more than a century ago, has an open floor plan with the living room divided from the kitchen by a counter. The video shows Grayson in the living room with Massey on the other side of the counter, several feet away.

On the video, Grayson is heard justifying his actions by saying, “What else do we do? I’m not taking hot (expletive) boiling water to the (expletive) face.” He's also heard telling arriving officers that Massey “came at me" and called her “crazy.”

Associated Press writer Corey Williams contributed from Detroit.

Louis Gigliotti’s caretaker says the former U.S. Army medical technician has a card from the Veteran Administration, but he never realized he could use his status to access “free perks” such as health care.

Lawmakers push for cost-of-living boost in veterans benefits next year

Gigliotti, who goes by the nickname Jiggs, could use the help to pay for dental, hearing and vision problems as he embarks on his second century. He was honored last week by family, friends and patrons at the Alaska Veterans Museum in Anchorage, where he lives with his nephew’s family.

Melanie Carey, his nephew’s wife, has been Gigliotti’s caretaker for about a decade but only recently started helping him pay his medical bills. That’s when she realized he was paying out of his own pocket instead of going to the VA for care. She investigated with the local facility, where staff told her he’d never been there.

“OK, well, let’s fix that,” she recalls telling them.

“I don’t think he realized that when you’re a veteran, that there’s benefits to that,” Carey said. “I’m trying to catch him up with anything that you need to get fixed.”

Gigliotti was raised in an orphanage and worked on a farm in Norwalk, Connecticut. He tried to join the military with two friends at the outset of World War II, but he wasn’t medically eligible because of his vision. His friends were both killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Alaska National Guard said.

His second attempt to join the military was approved after the attack on the Hawaii naval base, and he served as a surgical technician during the war without going to a combat zone.

After the war, he moved to Alaska in 1955. He owned two bars in Fairbanks before relocating to Anchorage 10 years later. There, he worked for two decades as a bartender at Club Paris, Anchorage’s oldest steakhouse.

His retirement passions were caring for Millie, his wife of 38 years who died of cancer in 2003, and training boxers for free in a makeshift ring in his garage.

The state Office of Veterans Affairs awarded Gigliotti the Alaska Veterans Honor Medal for securing his benefits. The medal is awarded to Alaska veterans who served honorably in the U.S. armed forces during times of peace or war.

“This event is a reminder that regardless of how much time has passed since their service, it is never too late for veterans to apply for their benefits,” said Verdie Bowen, the agency’s director.

Carey said Gigliotti is a humble man and had to be coaxed to attend the ceremony.

“I’m like, ‘Geez, it’s really important that you get this done because there’s not a lot of 103-year-old veterans just hanging out,’” she said.

And the reason for his longevity depends on which day you ask him, Carey said.

For the longest time, he’s always said he just never feels like he’s getting old.

“I just want to go more,” he said Tuesday.

On other days, the retired bartender quips the secret is “you got to have a drink a day.”

Known as Project 2025, the plan organized by the conservative think thank The Heritage Foundation would make sizable changes to the lives of service members and veterans if implemented.

The lengthy guidebook that seeks to reform several facets of the federal government has taken the spotlight in the 2024 presidential race.

While Republican nominee and former President Donald Trump has distanced himself from Project 2025, Democrats have called the agenda a “dangerous blueprint” for what his second term could look like.

Project 2025 was authored by many officials who served in the first Trump administration.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump said in July on Truth Social. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

He doubled down on that message just days later, and did so again in a campaign speech delivered following an attempted assassination against him.

But Democrats are not ready to let him off the hook yet. Vice President Kamala Harris, who received an endorsement from President Joe Biden to serve as the next commander-in-chief after he dropped out from the presidential election this past weekend, warned in a social media video that Trump and his team intend to implement Project 2025.

What exactly is Project 2025?

The Project 2025 initiative includes a roughly 900-page policy agenda, a personnel database for those who could serve in the next Republican administration, a training for those individuals called the “Presidential Administration Academy” and also plans for a playbook of actions to be taken in the first 180 days of office.

The effort includes recommendations by former Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller, and has been led by other former Trump administration officials including Paul Dans, former chief of staff at the Office of Personnel Management, and Spencer Chretien, former special assistant to the president and associate director of presidential personnel.

Policy recommendations stretch across the executive branch, from the White House to the Department of Justice to independent regulatory agencies, each broadly seeking to reduce the size and scope of the federal government.

“Our goal is to assemble an army of aligned, vetted, trained, and prepared conservatives to go to work on Day One to deconstruct the Administrative State,” a prelude to the handbook states.

The “administrative state” refers to executive branch agencies exercising the power to create, enforce and adjudicate their own rules. Those who oppose such a setup, primarily Republicans, argue that unelected officials should not have such powers.

How would Project 2025 impact troops?

The policy chapter on remaking the Department of Defense includes reducing the number of generals and reinstituting policies barring transgender individuals from serving in the military.

That portion of the guidebook was written by Miller, who served as acting defense secretary in the final months of the Trump administration.

“Our disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, our impossibly muddled China strategy, the growing involvement of senior military officers in the political arena, and deep confusion about the purpose of our military are clear signals of a disturbing decay and markers of a dangerous decline in our nation’s capabilities and will,” Miller wrote.

Some of the suggested personnel changes Miller put forth fall in line with conservative culture war arguments, including:

• Reinstating service members to active duty who were separated for not receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, restoring their rank and providing them back pay.
• Abolishing diversity, equity and inclusion offices and staffs.
• Reversing a policy that lets DOD cover travel costs for troops seeking reproductive care, including abortion services.
• Eliminating “Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs,” which the text does not provide examples of.

Other prescriptions include:

• Suspending the use of the recently introduced Military Health System Genesis, where military applicants are medically examined before they can sign up.
• Requiring completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery, the military entrance examination, by all students in schools that receive federal funding.
• Increasing the Army force structure by 50,000.
• Aligning the Marine Corps’ combat arms rank structure with the Army’s.
• Maintaining between 28 and 31 larger amphibious warships as opposed to the what is specified in current Navy shipbuilding plans.
• Increasing F-35A procurement to 60–80 per year.
• Providing necessary support to Department of Homeland Security border protection operations.
• Improving base housing and considering the military family “holistically” when considering change-of-station moves.

Separately, in a chapter dedicated to revisions to the Department of Homeland Security, it was suggested that the Coast Guard, which currently operates under DHS during peacetime, be transferred out to another department.

Ken Cuccinelli, a former DHS official from the Trump administration, who wrote that section of the guidebook, said the maritime service should instead be moved to the Department of Justice when not at war, or alternatively to DOD for all purposes.

John Oliver rips Trump’s Schedule F: ‘Not a recipe for good government’

How would Project 2025 impact veterans?

The policy chapter on reforming the Department of Veterans Affairs involves rescinding VA’s ability to provide abortion services and revising hybrid and remote work options for the department’s employees.

That section of the handbook was written by Brooks Tucker, who served as the VA’s acting chief of staff in the last year of the Trump administration.

“The VA must continually strive to be recognized as a ‘best in class,’ ‘Veteran-centric’ system with an organizational ethos inspired by and accountable to the needs and problems of veterans, not subservient to the parochial preferences of a bureaucracy,” Tucker said.

Changes that Tucker advocated for include:

• Rescinding all departmental clinical policy directives related to abortion services and gender reassignment surgeries.
• Reviewing in-person work options. Tucker cited that, specifically for VA staff in the nation’s capital, the remote work policy is “undermining the cohesiveness and competencies of some staff functions and diluting general organizational accountability and responsiveness.”
• Requiring Veterans Health Administration facilities to increase the number of patients seen each day to equal the number seen by DOD medical facilities: approximately 19 patients per provider per day. Currently, Tucker said, VA facilities may be seeing as few as six patients per provider per day.

Not everyone however agreed with taking that approach.

“VHA healthcare providers need to spend more time with veterans during their appointments to effectively address their complex health needs,” Russell Lemle and Jasper Craven, from the Veterans Healthcare Policy Institute, wrote in a Task & Purpose op-ed. “By demanding that VHA facilities match the patient volume at DOD facilities, Project 2025 risks shortchanging veterans and compromising the quality of care they receive by treating them as if they are in the prime of their youth,” they added.

Other recommendations from Tucker included:

• Embracing the expansion of Community Based Outpatient Clinics without “investing further in obsolete and unaffordable VA health care campuses.”
• Revising disability rating awards for future claimants while “preserving them fully or partially for existing claimants.”
• Establishing a veterans “bill of rights” so vets and VA staff know exactly what benefits veterans are entitled to receive.
• Transferring all career Senior Executive Service individuals out of specific positions on the first day to “ensure political control of the VA.”

Michael Embrich, a former member of the Advisory Committee on the Readjustment of Veterans, shared in an op-ed for GovExec that following Project 2025′s plans to reshape the government workforce “would disproportionately affect veterans, many of whom rely on these positions not only for employment but also for a sense of purpose and community.”

The Trump campaign did not respond to an email request for comment.

Special operations forces deployed to Karshi-Khanabad, or “K2,” in Uzbekistan about three weeks after the 2001 attacks. K2 was a former Soviet air base that U.S. forces used to strike Taliban targets inside Afghanistan in the earliest days of the war. The base was a former chemical weapons processing site and littered with Soviet-era debris, including demolished bunkers, missile parts and highly radioactive uranium powder, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Congress wants answers on contamination at former US air base in Uzbekistan

It's not clear why uranium powder was on the ground or how it got there. But it’s worrying those who served at K2. Thousands of K2 veterans in the years since have reported complex medical conditions, some of which are known to be connected to radiation exposure.

“Imagine you’re stationed inside the meth lab on ‘Breaking Bad,’” Stewart said in an interview with the AP. “These guys were exposed to a toxic soup of basically an exploded chemicals and nuclear weapon facility.”

A massive veterans aid bill called the PACT Act that was signed into law by President Joe Biden in 2022 addressed many of the health issues facing K2 veterans. But it didn’t include coverage for radiation exposure at K2.

K2 veterans have pressed the Department of Veterans Affairs for help for years, but so far the VA has not acted. The agency has said it is still studying the issue and looking to the Pentagon for additional information before it determines whether to add radiation exposure as a condition K2 service members can get coverage for.

“All presumptive conditions established by the VA, rather than by legislation, require a factual rationale,” said VA spokesman Terrence Hayes.

It's been more than 20 years since troops first deployed to K2 and almost two years since Biden celebrated the PACT Act's passage. But K2 veterans are still facing the claim denials the PACT Act was supposed to fix.

Data obtained by the AP shows the soil at K2 recorded uranium radiation levels up to 40,000 times higher than what would have been expected if it were natural uranium, according to Arjun Makhijani, a nuclear fusion specialist and president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research, who reviewed the data.

Even if it were in its least radioactive form, depleted uranium, the soil was up to 24,000 times above what would have been found in nature. Air samples were more than 30 to 100 times the levels that would have been found in normal air samples, Makhijani said.

The radiation levels the health team recorded were significant enough that anyone not wearing protective gear would have breathed in high levels of contamination when the dust was kicked up, especially during activities such as earth moving, Makhijani said.

The radiation data was captured in November 2001 by former Army Sgt. Matthew Nicholls, who was part of an Army environmental health team quickly deployed to collect air, water and soil samples from K2 after local Uzbek workers who were preparing the site for arriving U.S. forces fell ill with headaches, nausea and vomiting.

As the health team walked the base by the demolished bunkers and remnants of missiles, the team found the soil dotted with yellow pebble-sized clumps and powder, and tuna can-shaped containers spilling yellow powder, Nicholls said.

A tool used to detect radiation “went from one click, click, click, to sounding like a fishing reel going off,” Nicholls said.

“That material was scattered all over the place,” he said. Photographs obtained by the AP show Nicholls and his team collecting the yellow clumps and scattered powder.

After the health team reported its findings, the military created a classified base map obtained by the AP where the area was marked “enriched uranium contamination site” to keep tents from being constructed there. But the soil had already been moved by bulldozers and trucks as they pushed up a protective berm, and tents on the other side of the berm were constructed on the soil, directly adjacent to the off-limits fields.

Radiation exposure from uranium can damage kidneys, create bone cancer risk and also impact pregnancies because it crosses the placenta, among other harmful effects, said Makhijani, who previously worked with “atomic veterans” who were sickened by radiation after working at the Bikini Atoll during nuclear weapons tests in the 1940s.

We were guinea pigs: Documentary puts atomic veterans in limelight

“Uranium goes to the bone,” Makhijani said.

Despite detecting the uranium, the military went forward with using the base for the next four years and built a sprawling tent city there. Heavy wind and rain hit the base frequently, stirring the contaminants there. More than 15,000 troops rotated through from 2001 until 2005, when U.S. forces left.

Since the PACT Act was passed K2 veteran and former Army Staff Sgt. Mark Jackson has sought medical help for severe osteoporosis, had to have a testicle removed and had his entire thyroid removed.

None of the new medical issues he's experienced since passage of the PACT Act have been covered by the VA. This Friday, Jackson will join Stewart in Washington to press the Department of Veterans Affairs to act faster.

Hayes, the VA spokesman, said the agency is “currently doing extensive research to identify evidence that may demonstrate radiation exposure — including analyzing all claims submitted by Veterans who served at K2. We are working this with the utmost urgency.”

In a statement to the AP the Pentagon said late Monday that its own monitoring of the site “does not indicate the presence of enriched uranium,” and that it is reviewing materials from K2 veterans on the site.

The VA doesn't have complete numbers of how many K2 veterans are sick so the veterans have had to take it upon themselves to organize and collect data. They have been in touch with about 5,000 K2 veterans. Of those, more than 1,500 have self-reported conditions including cancers, neurological conditions, reproductive system problems, a large number of birth defects and bone conditions, among other issues, said Natalie White, a volunteer for the group. White's husband, Tech. Sgt. Clayton White, died at age 41 after a long list of ailments including osteoarthritis, grand mal seizures and kidney failure. White was deployed to K2 shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

Stewart has long advocated for the firefighters and emergency personnel who responded to the World Trade Center attacks, and in recent years, for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans who came home with cancers or other serious illnesses after exposures to toxins on the battlefield.

The PACT Act was “an immense improvement” Stewart said. A small adjustment by VA Secretary Denis McDonough to address the radiation exposure at K2 could fulfill the PACT Act's intent.

He worries some of K2 veterans are running out of time.

“The worst part about it is, those years when they’re sickest, being spent in anxiety and struggle against a system that’s somehow set up to be antagonistic,” Stewart said. “I don’t know why it’s an adversarial system in any way, shape or form. But that seems to be the uphill climb that everybody has to go through to try and get either the benefits or the health care that they’ve earned.”

Andrew Espinosa was in his office in Boulder, Colorado, when the first message popped up on the Air Force veteran’s phone: Andy, is this finally the resolution you’ve been working for?

President Biden had just announced he was “righting a historic wrong” by issuing pardons for gay veterans convicted of consensual sex, and Espinosa says the text messages didn’t stop for hours.

“I’ve got shivers,” Mona McGuire, an Army veteran, told The War Horse on that June 26 morning, celebrating the news from her home in suburban Milwaukee in between interviews with CNN and the BBC. “I feel relief.”

More than 25 years ago, both McGuire and Espinosa were kicked out of the military for being gay. Finally, it appeared, they would get a long-overdue reprieve and apology — and possibly qualify for health care and other veterans benefits they have been denied because of their “bad paper” discharges.

Then reality struck. In the weeks since the president’s historic gesture, McGuire and Espinosa have dug into the details and learned they and thousands of other veterans are unlikely to qualify under the narrow confines of Biden’s pardons. The whipsaw of emotions has renewed the sting of exclusion that has followed them for decades after their military service was cut short.

It’s “another kick in the gut,” says Espinosa.

The two are among about 100,000 veterans pushed out of the military for reasons related to their sexual orientation from World War II through the repeal of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy in 2011. Thirteen years after that repeal, Biden’s pardons invigorated advocates and LGBTQ veterans who continue to try to undo the harms inflicted on gay veterans, including, for some, imprisonment and convictions that still mar their records today.

But it turns out there is a catch: Only those convicted in a military court of nonforcible sodomy qualify for a pardon, and neither the White House nor the Defense Department could tell The War Horse exactly how many veterans that includes — or why it excludes so many others.

It doesn’t include McGuire, who became a symbol of the injustice stemming from the military’s discriminatory past after sharing her story with The War Horse days before Biden’s announcement. The Milwaukee mom was never convicted in a military court because she opted to avoid court-martial by admitting to a lesbian relationship and accepting a bad discharge. The pardons will do nothing to fix her record.

What’s also worrying advocates is that the presidential election is only four months away, and a return to the White House for Donald Trump could halt the processing of pardon applications altogether, experts say.

Amid the euphoria of Biden’s announcement, the White House estimated thousands of veterans would benefit from his pardons, allowing them to upgrade their discharges and receive veterans benefits they’d been locked out of. But Michael Wishnie, a professor at Yale Law School and veteran law expert, is wary.

“There’s a real danger that no one benefits,” he says.

‘Mass’ pardons are rare

By the time the text messages stopped, and Espinosa returned his focus to his real estate job, he had already concluded that the pardon didn’t apply to him.

He joined the Air Force in the late 1980s with the hopes of eventually becoming an astronaut. In 1993, the Air Force captain was court-martialed for an “indecent assault.”

The incident occurred, he said, in the blurry early morning hours after a party while he was stationed in Turkey. Espinosa was accused of touching a fellow airman’s leg and kissing him on the cheek as they watched the playoffs. Espinosa maintains his innocence and believes he was targeted because of homophobia in the military and his superior officers’ desire to get rid of him.

Espinosa, who first told his story to CBS News last year, had a letter written to his mother from a military official that explains “homosexuality is a factor in this case” but that the key factor is his harassment of another airman. Espinosa says he’s largely moved on from his dismissal from the military, but the conviction prevented him from getting a job with the government as a census taker, and he tried and failed to receive a discharge upgrade in the wake of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” repeal. Until 1993, the military prohibited gay and lesbian people from serving, but under President Clinton, “don’t ask, don’t tell” allowed gay people to serve as long as their sexuality remained hidden.

After reading the fine print of the pardon, Espinosa responded to all those congratulatory text messages from childhood and military friends, thanking them for their support but telling them he would not receive any of Biden’s goodwill.

“If it helps one person, it’s good,” says Espinosa. “I wish it would’ve been explained more.”

What adds to the confusion is that rather than granting an individual pardon that names people specifically, Biden’s clemency action was bestowed upon a group of unnamed people. Such “mass” pardons are rare, but not unheard of. In 1977, for instance, President Jimmy Carter pardoned hundreds of thousands of Vietnam War draft dodgers.

Wishnie says advocates and veterans should be proud that their persistence likely encouraged Biden’s pardon. Still, Wishnie is “very disappointed that it is such a narrow program.”

Biden could have expanded his pardon to more veterans, he said, including those who were convicted for charges like “indecent acts” due to their sexual orientation. The pardon also could have helped veterans like McGuire.

In 1988, while stationed in West Germany, McGuire was outed, arrested, and forced to choose between a court-martial and possible prison time or a less than honorable discharge “in lieu of court-martial” if she admitted her lesbian relationship. She chose the latter.

The discharge has prevented her from accessing veterans benefits, and, though she tried to upgrade her discharge last year, the Army’s review board denied her request because as a 20-year-old under interrogation, she admitted guilt to charges of sodomy and an indecent act.

McGuire thought Biden’s pardon might render her admission obsolete, particularly since the president acknowledged the unjust criminalization of gay service members. But, she says, “I’m just kind of in the same place, in the same position I was for the last 37 years.”

‘These things aren’t slam dunks’

When Steve Marose learned of the president’s announcement, it sounded “glorious.” Justice, at last. He jumped into action, and the Air Force veteran, who lives in Seattle, sent in his pardon application last week.

In 1990, Marose was a second lieutenant who followed his father’s footsteps into the Air Force. He was a proud officer and says he was good at his job. But for a few months he lived with another airman, and was eventually convicted of three counts of consensual sodomy. He spent two years in federal prison at Fort Leavenworth. But Marose was also convicted of conduct unbecoming, a charge not included in the pardon.

“I’ve always tried to be optimistic,” he says. But “these things aren’t slam dunks.”

A White House spokesperson did not respond to requests from The War Horse to explain why the pardons excluded many LGBTQ veterans.

There is another route for those who don’t qualify, a Department of Defense spokesperson said. LGBTQ veterans can submit a standard Department of Justice pardon application to the secretary of the military branch in which they were convicted. But a decision can take years.

Wishnie and other veterans advocates say the Defense Department could have spared LGBTQ veterans the confusion over how far the pardons extend.

“For years, people have been asking DOD to do the work themself, to identify veterans discharged for being gay, whether they were court-martialed or not,” Wishnie says. “And for years, DOD has absolutely resisted.”

As the pardon stands, veterans like Marose who think they are eligible must apply, wait for an answer — which could take months — and then go through a separate process to upgrade their less than honorable or dishonorable discharges.

“They are leaving the onus on veterans,” Wishnie says, adding that such a multistep process will likely deter many veterans who could take advantage of the pardon.

What happens now?

If Marose’s application is approved before November’s election, it will remain intact no matter who wins the White House. If Donald Trump prevails, however, it’s possible that the new administration could slow or stop the process of receiving a pardon certificate that would allow veterans to access benefits, Wishnie says. No one from the Trump campaign responded to questions from The War Horse about whether a Trump White House would follow through on Biden’s pledge.

Presidents often issue pardons at the end of their terms, says Graham Dodds, an expert on U.S. politics at Concordia University in Montreal. It’s unclear why Biden decided to act on this particular issue now.

It could be an act of reconciliation, Dodds says, much like Canada, in 2017, apologized for past discrimination against LGBTQ people. But politics, he says, can’t be discounted.

“While the LGBTQ community is not monolithic, it does account for some 7% of the electorate,” Dodds says. “In a close election every vote might well matter.”

Still, the military didn’t treat each gay veteran in a uniform way. Policies shifted over the years, and a commander had the power to choose among quietly dismissing an LGBTQ service member with an honorable discharge, prosecuting them, or scaring them into accepting a bad discharge to avoid a court-martial. Because of that, Dodds says, this pardon is somewhat “messy.”

In McGuire’s case, she was not convicted or imprisoned. But she said it felt like she was.

After her arrest in May 1988, she waited three months for her discharge paperwork. She was stripped of her security clearance and forced to clean the men’s latrines. Soldiers whispered about her and three other women who were being kicked out for homosexuality. They were treated, she says, “not even like second-class humans.”

McGuire didn’t walk around alone out of fear of getting beat up.

In August of 1988, she was finally handed her orders to leave. Her dream of a career in the Army crumpled, and her heart broke on the spot. “I was crying and breathing so hard I couldn’t talk,” she says. “I was devastated.”

All those years ago, as a 20-year-old soldier, McGuire said she believed that taking responsibility and walking away from the Army would pay off in the long run.

“It’s just kind of ironic that those who were actually convicted and possibly spent time in prison are the ones eligible,” she says. “But not me.”

This War Horse investigation was reported by Anne Marshall-Chalmers, edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Abbie Bennett wrote the headlines. Coverage of veterans’ health is made possible in part by a grant from the A-Mark Foundation.

Descendants of the second-generation Nisei soldiers traveled to Italy from around the United States — California, Hawaii and Colorado — to tour the sites where their relatives fought and attend a commemoration at the U.S. military base in Camp Darby ahead of the 80th anniversary Friday of the liberation of nearby Livorno in Tuscany.

Japanese faces, American hearts

Among those taking part were cousins Yoko and Leslie Sakato, whose fathers each served in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which went on to become the most decorated unit in the history of the U.S. military for its size and length of service.

“We wanted to kind of follow his footsteps, find out where he fought, where he was, maybe see the territories that he never ever talked about,” said Yoko Sakato, whose father Staff Sgt. Henry Sakato was in the 100th Infantry Battalion, Company B, that helped liberate Tuscany from Nazi-Fascist rule.

The 442nd, including the 100th Infantry Battalion, was composed almost entirely of second-generation American soldiers of Japanese ancestry, who fought in Italy and southern France. Known for its motto “Go for Broke,” 21 of its members were awarded the Medal of Honor.

This Japanese American Army unit is the reason we celebrate National ‘Go for Broke’ Day

The regiment was organized in 1943, in response to the War Department’s call for volunteers to form a segregated Japanese American army combat unit. Thousands of Nisei — second-generation Japanese Americans — answered the call.

Some of them fought as their relatives were interned at home in camps that were established in 1942, after Pearl Harbor, to house Japanese Americans who were considered to pose a “public danger” to the United States. In all, some 112,000 people, 70,000 of them American citizens, were held in these “relocation centers” through the end of the war.

The Nisei commemoration at Camp Darby was held one week before the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Livorno, or Leghorn, on July 19, 1944. Local residents were also commemorating the anniversary this week.

In front of family members, military officials and civilians, Yoko Sakato placed flowers at the monument in memory of Pvt. Masato Nakae, one of the 21 Nisei members awarded the Medal of Honor.

“I was feeling close to my father, I was feeling close to the other men that I knew growing up, the other veterans, because they had served, and I felt really like a kinship with the military who are here," she said.

Sakato recalled her father naming some of the areas and towns in Tuscany where he had fought as a soldier, but always in a very “naive” way, as he was talking to kids.

“They were young, it must have been scary, but they never talked about it, neither him nor his friends,” Sakato said of her father, who died in 1999.

Her cousin Leslie Sakato’s father fought in France and won a Medal of Honor for his service.

“It was like coming home,” she said of the commemoration.

Margaret “Meg” Kabat was tapped for the job guiding leadership of the cabinet department with a multi-billion dollar budget and hundreds of thousands of employees, after having served in multiple VA advisory positions, an announcement from the department said.

“Meg is a tireless advocate for Veterans, their families, caregivers, and survivors — and we’re thrilled that she’s going to be helping lead VA in this critical role,” VA Secretary Denis McDonough said in the statement. “As our next chief of staff, she will undoubtedly continue to positively impact our organization and ensure we deliver on the most sacred mission there is: serving America’s Veterans,” he added.

Kabat succeeds Kimberly Jackson as chief of staff, who announced last month she would step down from the role that she filled after her predecessor, Tanya Bradsher, left to become the VA’s deputy secretary.

Originally from Massachusetts, Kabat had worked as VA’s principal senior advisor since January 2022, and before that as senior advisor for families, caregivers and survivors, according to her department bio.

Previously, Kabat was also a senior director at the consulting firm Atlas Research and a social worker and case manager at National Naval Medical Center, her bio noted. Beginning in 2011, she served in leadership roles in the VA Caregiver Support Program, it added.

VA’s caregiver program losing top official at a critical moment

“Serving Veterans, their caregivers, and their loved ones has been the greatest privilege in my career, and I am honored to continue driving our mission forward as VA’s next chief of staff,” Kabat said in the release.

“As the daughter of a Vietnam Veteran and the granddaughter of a World War I and a World War II Veteran, I carry our mission close to my heart,” she added.

On July 17, 1944, munitions being loaded onto a cargo ship detonated, causing secondary blasts that ignited 5,000 tons of explosives at Port Chicago naval weapons station near San Francisco.

Major racial disparities exist in military justice system, report says

The explosion killed 320 sailors and civilians, nearly 75% of whom were Black, and injured another 400 personnel. Surviving Black sailors had to pick up the human remains and clear the blast site while white officers were granted leave to recuperate.

The pier was a critical ammunition supply site for forces in the Pacific during World War II, and the job of loading those ships was left primarily to Black enlisted sailors overseen by white officers.

Before the explosion, the Black sailors working the dock had expressed concerns about the loading operations. Shortly after the blast, they were ordered to return to loading ships even though no changes had been made to improve their safety.

The sailors refused, saying they needed training on how to more safely handle the bombs before they returned.

What followed affected the rest of their lives, including punishments that kept them from receiving honorable discharges even as the vast majority returned to work at the pier under immense pressure and served throughout the war. Fifty sailors who held fast to their demands for safety and training were tried as a group on charges of conspiracy to commit mutiny and were convicted and sent to prison.

The whole episode was unjust, and none of the sailors received the legal due process they were owed, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro said in an interview with The Associated Press.

It was “a horrific situation for those Black sailors that remained,” Del Toro said. The Navy’s office of general counsel reviewed the military judicial proceedings used to punish the sailors and found “there were so many inconsistencies and so many legal violations that came to the forefront,” he said.

Thurgood Marshall, who was then a defense attorney for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, defended the 50 sailors who were convicted of mutiny. Marshall went on to become the first Black justice on the Supreme Court.

On Wednesday, the 80th anniversary of the Port Chicago disaster, Del Toro signed paperwork officially clearing the sailors, who are now deceased. Del Toro handed the first pen to Thurgood Marshall Jr., the late justice's son.

The exonerations “are deeply moving,” Marshall Jr. said. “They, of course, are all gone, and that's a painful aspect of it. But so many fought for so long for that kind of fairness and recognition.”

The events have stung surviving family members for decades, but an earlier effort in the 1990s to pardon the sailors fell short. Two additional sailors were previously cleared — one was found mentally incompetent to stand trial, and one was cleared on insufficient evidence. Wednesday’s action goes beyond a pardon and vacates the military judicial proceedings carried out in 1944 against all of the men.

“This decision clears their names and restores their honor and acknowledges the courage that they displayed in the face of immense danger,” Del Toro said.

The racism that the Black sailors faced reflected the military’s views at the time — ranks were segregated, and the Navy had only reluctantly opened some positions it considered less desirable to Black service members.

The official court of inquiry looking into why the explosion occurred cleared all the white officers and praised them for the “great effort” they had to exert to run the dock. It left open the suggestion that the Black sailors were to blame for the accident.

Del Toro’s action converts the discharges to honorable unless there were other circumstances surrounding them. After the Navy upgrades the discharges, surviving family members can work with the Department of Veterans Affairs on past benefits that may be owed, the Navy said.

The latest evidence of that firefight is five musket balls dug up last year near the North Bridge site in the Minute Man National Historical Park in Concord. Early analysis of the balls — gray with sizes ranging from a pea to a marble — indicates colonial militia members fired them at British forces on April 19, 1775.

Archaeologists believe they’ve uncovered Revolutionary War barracks

“As soon as they pulled one of them out of the ground, there was kind of a ‘look what I have,’” said Minute Man park ranger and historic weapons specialist Jarrad Fuoss, who was there the day the musket balls were discovered.

“And of course, everybody goes flocking to them like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ We’re looking at them, and then the excitement continued to grow because it wasn’t just one,” he continued. “And the fact that we found five of them, which is incredible all these years later.”

Musket balls were previously found in the historic park of about a thousand acres outside Boston, which marks a series of opening battles of the American Revolution. About a decade ago, about 30 musket balls were found at the site known as Parker’s Revenge, where the Lexington militia company led by Capt. John Parker ambushed British troops. In the early 19th century, Henry David Thoreau was walking in the area and found a few musket balls from what is believed to be the North Bridge fight.

The latest discoveries are the most ever found from that fight when militia leaders ordered their men to fire on government troops. The event led to the conflict escalating and was later dubbed the “shot heard round the world” by Ralph Waldo Emerson in his 1837 “Concord Hymn.”

About 800 British soldiers had started the day marching from Boston to Concord to destroy military supplies they believed that colony rebels had gathered. It ended with an eight-hour battle that stretched to the Charlestown neighborhood of Boston — covering 16 miles and leaving 273 British troops and 96 militiamen dead and wounded.

It prompted the militia to create an 11-month siege of Boston, leading to the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, one of the bloodiest battles of the American Revolution.

“This is where everything kind of changes in an instant because that moment is treason. There is no turning back,” Fuoss said. “To be able to pull that out of the ground and know that we’re the first ones to touch that since somebody else was ramming it down the muzzle of their gun 250 years ago is one of those things that sends shivers all over your body.”

Joel Bohy, who was also on the dig site and is researching bullet strikes and bullet-struck objects from that day for a book, said the discovery helps “validate the historical record, as well as the types of arms that the provincial minute and militia companies carried that day.”

“Based upon the caliber of the balls and studying them, the general location, as well as the context of the site, it made the hair stand up on the back of my neck,” Bohy said, adding that he had “been fascinated with April 19 and the material culture since I was a 7-year-old — 51 years ago. So for me, it was a great day.”

The war continued for seven years after those first shots were fired, even past the July 4, 1776, adoption of the Declaration of Independence.

Nikki Walsh, the museum curator at the park, also said there was plenty to learn from the lead-cast musket balls. Given their various sizes, Walsh said, archeologists concluded they were from the militia. Those men brought their own weapons and ammunition to the fight, with some being imported, and others captured or purchased by the town or province from British or Dutch merchants, according to the National Park Service. On the other hand, the British had standardized all their ammunition.

And the fact that the musket balls were intact indicates fighters likely missed their mark.

“Since that lead is so malleable, you can see marks on them that indicate whether they’ve been fired, whether they were unfired and dropped,” she said. “If they had been fired and hit something, they would have likely smushed like a pancake.”

The musket balls have attracted intense interest from history buffs and tourists, with about 800 journeying to the park's visitor center over the weekend to get a first glimpse. The interest has also prompted the National Park Service to keep the exact location of the find under wraps, hoping to dissuade treasure hunters with metal detectors from showing up in search of more artifacts.

They are willing to disclose the general area of the find, a field just over a wooden bridge of the Concord River and just beyond two monuments — a 25-foot stone obelisk marking the 50th anniversary of the North Bridge fight and the Minute Man statue built to commemorate its 100th anniversary. Nearby, a smaller marker with British flags indicates where the first two British soldiers died in that battle.

Among those recently checking out the site was Jennifer Ayvaz, who came to the park with her husband, Tim, and their two children after her father heard about the musket ball discovery. As they passed Walsh, she offered to show the family the musket balls. Opening a tiny box, the family snapped photos and moved closer for a better look at the balls lined up in a row.

“It’s incredible,” said Jennifer Ayvaz, who came from Castle Rock, Colorado, adding that her father would love to see the musket balls. “I wish he could be here with us. It’s very neat. He is a huge history buff, and he is kind of living vicariously through us.”

The remains of U.S. Army Air Forces Pvt. 1st Class Charles R. Powers, 18, of Riverside, were flown to Ontario International Airport east of Los Angeles for burial at Riverside National Cemetery on Thursday, 82 years to the day of his death.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency announced in June that Powers was accounted for on May 26, 2023, after analysis of his remains, including use of DNA.

Powers was a member of 28th Materiel Squadron, 20th Air Base Group, when Japanese forces invaded the Philippines in late 1941, leading to surrender of U.S. and Filipino forces on the Bataan peninsula in April 1942 and Corregidor Island the following month.

Powers was reported captured in the Bataan surrender and was among those subjected to the 65-mile Bataan Death March and then held at the Cabanatuan prison camp where more than 2,500 POWs died, the agency said.

Powers died on July 18, 1942, and was buried with others in a common grave. After the war, three sets of unidentifiable remains from the grave were reburied at Manila American Cemetery and Memorial. They were disinterred in 2018 for laboratory analysis.

The 16-member commission, which has spent the last year hiring staff and getting organized, has an historically unique tasking: it aims to produce an accessible and cohesive “after-action review” of the 20-year war that includes perspectives ranging from the U.S. State Department to international governmental partners and possibly even the Taliban.

And as they begin their information-gathering in earnest, the commission’s leaders want to show that the perspectives of the U.S. service members who fought in the war are not merely an aspect of that story, but at the heart of the entire project.

The “Veterans” tab on the commission’s website leads to a form that invites Afghanistan veterans to share their experiences and questions with the commission. “What did you view as your mission during the war?” the form asks, and “To what extent do you believe that mission was accomplished?”

“The veterans community is kind of the wind in our sails, if you will,” commission co-chair Shamila Chaudhary told Military Times during an interview at the commission’s headquarters in Arlington, Virginia.

Afghanistan withdrawal errors came despite military concerns

Chaudhary, a former State Department and National Security Council official with expertise in U.S.-Pakistan relations, said it quickly became evident to her as she began her new role that veterans were continuing to discuss and evaluate the outcome and meaning of Afghanistan in a way unparalleled by other stakeholder groups.

“The most vibrant conversations were actually happening in the veteran community, and they were very open,” she said.

Colin Jackson, the commission’s other co-chair, is himself a veteran of the war who served multiple deployments as an Army officer and later served as the senior Defense Department representative to the U.S.-Taliban peace talks. He also chairs Strategic and Operational Research at the U.S. Naval War College. Jackson, who has a son and a daughter serving in and entering the military, hopes the commission’s report will in part formalize the kind of conversations and insights shared while “standing in the driveway at Fort [Liberty]” following a deployment.

“I feel viscerally that we owe it to this future generation to be smarter, better,” Jackson said. “If we don’t do that, then we’re not doing our job properly.”

Veteran responses so far have been few but high in quality, said Matthew Gobush, the commission’s strategic communications advisor. Some responses, he said, will prompt follow-on engagement or interviews. Others may help guide the commission in the inquiries it pursues.

The commission’s mandate is broad. The congressional language that created it in 2021 tasked it with studying aspects of the conflict ranging from U.S. decisions immediately prior to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks and the initial invasion to peace negotiations and the ultimate military withdrawal from Afghanistan in August 2021 that was quickly followed by Taliban takeover. The commission chairs don’t describe their objective as creating an aura of defeat. But in the absence of similar projects compiling broad-ranging multi-agency analysis of past U.S. wars, they are informed by another analysis of catastrophe: the 9/11 Commission Report, published in 2004.

That 585-page volume garnered literary praise, climbed some bestseller lists and even received a National Book Awards nomination. Trying to create an accessible, narrative-driven equivalent that covers a sprawling two-decade war rather than a single-day attack is a mammoth task, and the commissioners know it.

Helicopter pilot details final days of HH-60 rescue ops in Afghanistan

“I mean, we get a lot of unbelievable stares when we talk about the work, because it’s very ambitious. And we could have easily interpreted it in a less ambitious way,” Chaudhary said. “And we decided not to do that, because doing the hard thing at this moment is the right thing to do.”

As the committee has begun to engage with veterans from various eras of the war, using the networks of congressionally chartered veteran service organizations like The American Legion and the VFW, the passion they hear encourages them in their approach.

“The fact that we have the veteran community so interested in our work directly challenges the notion that nobody cares about Afghanistan,” Chaudhary said.

The commission will deliver its final report in 2026, with an interim report charting the way ahead and work already completed set to come out in August. Leaders hope that veterans who read the report will be able to find themselves in the narrative in the context of the whole war, Jackson said.

“This report ideally allows an individual who, say, served once, twice, three, four times in Afghanistan to say, ‘Ah, now I understand how my piece of the action at various points in time related to the larger whole,’” he said. “So while we cannot conceivably cover the entire waterfront, on the technical aspects of the war, hopefully we give an architecture that allows individuals to say, ‘Okay, now I understand how I fit in, in 2005 in Farah province, to a larger project that spanned two decades.’”

Active-duty military leaders, they said, may find a new depth of analysis and application for future conflicts as well.

“They’re going to process current and future events through this Afghanistan lens, whether we like it or not,” Chaudhary said. “And so we will be doing them a service by providing them some depth that doesn’t exist right now. And the report will be just as much about Afghanistan as it will be about future scenarios, future intervention. It has to be; otherwise, it’s just history.”

The guard and the police sergeant testified during a preliminary hearing for Karl P. Loucks, who was arrested May 31 on a first-degree murder charge in the killing of Shaun Rhea, a homeless man who lived in downtown Memphis. After hearing their testimony, Shelby County Judge Bill Anderson said there was enough evidence to present the case to a grand jury for indictment.

Loucks, 41, is being held without bond on the murder charge. Loucks’ lawyer has suggested that he acted in self-defense. Loucks also is charged with aggravated assault after police said he cut another homeless man twice with a knife in the days before Rhea was shot. Loucks has not entered a plea in either case.

Loucks attacked Rhea in the early morning hours of May 31 in downtown Memphis, police said in an affidavit. Tony Perry, a security guard at a downtown Memphis hotel, testified that he saw Loucks use pepper spray on Rhea while he was sleeping. Loucks also pepper-sprayed other homeless people that same night, Perry said.

After he was pepper-sprayed, Rhea confronted Loucks, asking why Loucks did it and “calling him the b-word,” Perry said. Loucks took out a knife, and Rhea picked up an electric scooter that was nearby and threw it at Loucks. He missed.

“He was angry,” Perry said of Rhea, adding that Rhea did not attempt to get physical with Loucks.

Loucks then entered his apartment building, but he returned shortly afterward carrying an AR-style rifle under an orange jacket, Perry testified.

“Next thing you know, I heard gunshots,” said Perry, who testified that he turned and ran as several shots were fired.

Rhea, who did not have a gun, was struck in the back, Memphis police Sgt. Jeremy Cline testified. Rhea died at a hospital. Six bullet casings were found at the scene of the shooting, Cline said.

Police were called, and they found the rifle and the jacket in Loucks' apartment, Cline said. During a police interview after his arrest, Loucks said he acted in self-defense after Rhea confronted him, Cline said.

Cline said he asked Loucks why he did not call police.

“He said he didn’t do it because he felt he was being threatened,” the police sergeant said.

During the hearing, Cline showed a video of the shooting to the judge, the defense lawyer, the prosecutor and Loucks. Relatives and supporters of both Loucks and Rhea were in the courtroom, but they were not able to see the video.

Loucks was a health care specialist in the Army from September 2007 to August 2013, said Bryce S. Dubee, an Army public affairs spokesman. Loucks served in Afghanistan from March 2009 to March 2010 and left the Army with the rank of private first class.

Loucks was honorably discharged from the Army because he was disabled due to post-traumatic stress disorder, said his lawyer, Blake Ballin. Outside court, Ballin said he was working on arranging a psychological evaluation to determine if and how Loucks’ mental health played into the shooting.

“If somebody in Mr. Loucks' situation, with his experience in the past, his experience in these events, felt reasonably that he was in fear for his life or his physical safety, then he may have been justified in acting the way he did,” Ballin said.

The hearing took place in a courtroom used for cases involving military veterans. Banners from branches of the military hang along the back wall of the courtroom.

Judge Anderson said he could not help but think that Loucks' experience in the Army during wartime could be a factor in the case.

“Some cases don't make any sense, any logical sense,” Anderson said. “This is one of them.”

Memphis police spokesperson officer Theresa Carlson said Tuesday that investigators are working to determine if Loucks has had other confrontations with homeless people, in addition to the stabbing that police said took place May 25.

Inhofe, a powerful fixture in Oklahoma politics for over six decades, died Tuesday morning after he had a stroke over the July Fourth holiday, his family said in a statement.

Inhofe, who was elected to a fifth Senate term in 2020, stepped down in early 2023.

Inhofe frequently criticized the mainstream science that human activity contributed to changes in the Earth’s climate, once calling it “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.”

In February 2015, with temperatures in the nation’s capital below freezing, Inhofe brought a snowball on to the Senate floor. He tossed it before claiming that environmentalists focus attention on global warming as it kept getting cold. “It’s very, very cold out. Very unseasonable,” Inhofe said.

As Oklahoma’s senior U.S. senator, Inhofe was a staunch supporter of the state’s five military installations and a vocal fan of congressional earmarks. The Army veteran and licensed pilot, who would fly himself to and from Washington, secured the federal money to fund local road and bridge projects, and criticized House Republicans who wanted a one-year moratorium on such pet projects in 2010.

“Defeating an earmark doesn’t save a nickel,” Inhofe told the Oklahoma City Chamber of Commerce that August. “It merely means that within the budget process, it goes right back to the bureaucracy.”

He was a strong backer of President Donald Trump, who praised him for his “incredible support of our #MAGA agenda” while endorsing the senator’s 2020 reelection bid. During the Trump administration, Inhofe served as chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee following the death of Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona.

Inhofe caught national attention in March 2009 by introducing legislation that would have prevented detainees from the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo Bay from being relocated “anywhere on American soil.”

Closer to home, Inhofe helped secure millions of dollars to clean up a former mining hub in northeast Oklahoma that spent decades on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund list. In a massive buyout program, the federal government purchased homes and businesses within the 40-square-mile region of Tar Creek, where children consistently tested for dangerous levels of lead in their blood.

“This is an example of a government program created for a specific purpose and then dissolves after the job is completed. This is how government should work,” Inhofe said in December 2010, when the project was nearly complete.

In 2021, Inhofe defied some in his party by voting to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election, saying that to do otherwise would be a violation of his oath of office to support and defend the Constitution. He voted against convicting Trump at both of his impeachment trials.

Born James Mountain Inhofe on Nov. 17, 1934, in Des Moines, Iowa, Inhofe grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Tulsa in 1959. He served in the Army between 1956 and 1958, and was a businessman for three decades, serving as president of Quaker Life Insurance Co.

His political career began in 1966, when he was elected to the state House. Two years later he won an Oklahoma Senate seat that he held during unsuccessful runs for governor in 1974 and for the U.S. House in 1976. He then won three terms at Tulsa mayor starting in 1978.

Inhofe went on to win two terms in the U.S. House in the 1980s, before throwing his hat into a bitter U.S. Senate race when longtime Sen. David Boren resigned in 1994 to become president of the University of Oklahoma. Inhofe beat then-U.S. Rep. Dave McCurdy in a special election that year to serve the final two years of Boren’s term and was reelected five times.

Inhofe lived up to his reputation as a tough campaigner in his 2008 reelection bid against Democrat Andrew Rice, a 35-year-old state senator and former missionary. Inhofe claimed Rice was “too liberal” for Oklahoma and ran television ads that critics said contained anti-gay overtones, including one that showed a wedding cake topped by two plastic grooms and a photo of Rice as a young man wearing a leather jacket.

Rice, who has two children with his wife and earned his master’s degree from Harvard University Divinity School, accused Inhofe of distorting his record and attacking his character.

Inhofe’s bullish personality also was apparent outside politics. He was a commercial-rated pilot and flight instructor with more than 50 years of flying experience.

He made an emergency landing in Claremore in 1999, after his plane lost a propeller, an incident later blamed on an installation error. In 2006, his plane spun out of control upon landing in Tulsa; he and an aide escaped injury, though the plane was severely damaged.

In 2010, Inhofe landed his small plane on a closed runway at a rural South Texas airport while flying himself and others to a home he owned in South Padre Island. Runway workers scrambled, and Inhofe agreed to complete a remedial training program rather than face possible legal action.

“I’m 75 years old, but I still fly airplanes upside down,” Inhofe said in August 2010. “I don’t know why it is, but I don’t hurt anywhere, and I don’t feel any differently than I felt five years ago.”

Inhofe is survived by his wife, Kay, three children and several grandchildren. A son, Dr. Perry Dyson Inhofe II, died in November 2013, at the age of 51, when the twin-engine aircraft he was flying crashed a few miles north of Tulsa International Airport.

The Russian state-sponsored hacker infiltrated a Microsoft platform called Microsoft Azure Government, which provides storage, databases and other services to the VA and other government agencies.

VA press secretary Terrence Hayes told Military Times in an email that the server was breached “for just one second, presumably to see if the credentials worked” by a group called Midnight Blizzard, or Nobelium, which has ties to the Russian government, according to Microsoft.

“After investigating the matter, we determined that no patient data was compromised,” Hayes told Military Times. “VA found that Midnight Blizzard used a single set of stolen credentials to access a Microsoft Cloud test environment around January. ... We are continuing to look into this matter with Microsoft to ensure that all veteran patient data remains protected and that we are not compromised in the future.”

Stars and Stripes previously reported the hack.

Microsoft said the attack originally targeted corporate email accounts within the company, including the company’s senior leadership, in an effort to find information related to the group Midnight Blizzard itself. The hacker used a spray attack, which involves using a variety of predictable, simple passwords to try and gain access to an account, according to Microsoft.

“The attack was not the result of a vulnerability in Microsoft products or services,” Microsoft officials said in a January statement. “To date, there is no evidence that the threat actor had any access to customer environments, production systems, source code or AI systems.”

Hayes told Stars and Stripes that the attack was unrelated to a Feb. 21 hack, which involved a private vendor, Change Healthcare, responsible for processing health care payments.

That attack included an expansive breach of the U.S. health care system, possibly including the VA. Fifteen million veterans were notified that their private health care information could have been compromised, Veterans Affairs Sec. Denis McDonough said in April.

The cybersecurity attack also included the Peace Corps and the U.S. Agency for Global Media, an independent news group of the federal government that produces Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and Free Asia, according to Stars and Stripes.

As ranking member, Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., led 19 other senators who asked McDonough to ensure veterans’ right to community care — a program the VA utilizes to connect veterans to health care through local providers. The senators claim that a panel, dubbed the Red Team, meant to assess the reasoning behind community care’s increased spending, made recommendations that are negatively impacting veterans in need of care.

“VA leaders — including yourself — addressed the Red Team and provided it with select data and briefings that contributed to the conclusion that frames community care as a potential existential threat to VA’s direct care system, rather than the vital lifeline it is for veterans and for VA,” the senators wrote.

The letter states that the Red Team suggests the VA reduce community care referrals for veterans needing emergency, oncology or mental health care.

“It is unconscionable that VA would consider leaving them with fewer options to seek needed care,” the senators said in the letter.

Even as the Red Team’s recommendations have not formally been implemented yet, the senators write they noticed a steep uptick in reports from veterans and their families, saying the suggestions are being adhered to already. The VA already canceled, revoked or denied community care for a number of veterans, according to the letter.

VA issued a hiring pause in February and is striving to reduce staffing by 10,000 employees, which the letter argues will affect veterans’ welfare, especially for those in need of care.

The letter cites the VA’s 2018 MISSION Act, with the goal of giving veterans more options for health care access, that included the community care program, launched in 2019.

“VA must embrace both the spirit and letter of that transformational piece of legislation to ensure this does not continue,” the senators said. “Doing anything less is detrimental to the progress VA has made through the MISSION Act and a personal affront to veterans across the country.”

Editor’s note: This story was updated 5 a.m. ET on July 8.

But Ollis’ desire deepened with the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York City, a surrogate hometown for the Staten Island native. That calling to serve would lead Ollis into some of the most intense combat of the recent wars and an episode that would result in a Distinguished Service Cross and Poland’s highest honor for an allied soldier.

Author Tom Sileo has chronicled the exploits of various heroes of the Global War on Terrorism in five nonfiction books in a little more than a decade.

Those stories include the heroism of Medal of Honor recipient Florent Groberg, three brothers who served as a Navy SEAL, Green Beret and Marine, two U.S. Naval Academy classmates and friends killed in battle and Marine Maj. Megan McClung, the first female academy graduate to die in combat since the school’s founding.

Paratrooper's Afghan War book helps platoonmates tell their story

In his recently published sixth book, “I Have Your Back,” Sileo tells Ollis’ life story, what led him to join in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, and what kept him serving as headed out for a third combat deployment — one that ultimately took his life. On that tour in Afghanistan, Ollis saved the life of a Polish soldier he barely knew and became a kind of national hero in that country.

On Aug. 28, 2013, while serving with 2nd Battalion, 22nd Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division, Ollis was at Forward Operating Base Ghazni, Afghanistan when attackers detonated a 3,000-pound car bomb before an enemy force assaulted the base.

Ollis sent his team to get their gear while he ran toward the blast site with one magazine in his rifle and no body armor. Once there he found Karol Cierpica, a lieutenant with the Polish Army. Cierpica had been wounded by shrapnel to his leg, and Ollis quickly moved him to an area with other soldiers who were returning fire. As Ollis and Cierpica reached the position, an enemy grenade landed and exploded, further wounding Cierpica. As Ollis rendered first aid, the last surviving enemy fighter rushed their position. The attacker was wearing a suicide vest.

Ollis stood up and shielded Cierpica from the blast, saving the lieutenant’s life at the cost of his own.

Polish officer names son after staff sergeant who saved him

Sileo spoke with Army Times recently about his work writing military stories, the importance of documenting the narratives of Global War on Terror veterans and his most recent book.

*Editor’s Note: This Q&A has been edited for length and clarity.

Q: You’ve written a lot about Global War on Terror veterans. Why has this been important to you?

A: I just try to tell as many stories as I can about our troops, veterans and their families to help Americans remember the great men and women who stepped forward to serve and certainly those who made the ultimate sacrifice to make sure we never forget what they did for our country and our families.

Q: How did you learn about Staff Sgt. Ollis’ story and decide to write a book about him?

A: About 10 years ago I got in touch with Staff Sgt. Ollis’ sister, Kimberly. She had read a previous book of mine and reached out to tell me that she thought it was a good book and that her brother had just been killed in Afghanistan. At the time I was writing a syndicated weekly column about the sacrifices of our troops. I said I’d love to interview her and find out more about her brother’s life. She told me how her brother had died to save the life of a Polish soldier, which really struck me. Having been exposed to a lot of stories about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, this was the first time I had heard of an American sacrificing his own life to save a foreign soldier. I wrote a piece about him but over the years I always thought there was more of a story to tell. And his story said a lot, not only about a generation of heroes and about alliances that are so crucial, are even more critical now than they’ve been probably since the Cold War. The fact that Michael could forge a bond in just a few minutes with a soldier from a different country that he’d only just met and then be willing to stand between him and a suicide bomber, it just said a lot to me.

Q: Across the six books you’ve written about individuals in these conflicts, have some themes emerged?

A: If there’s one common thread, I think it’s selflessness, the fact that every subject of every book that I’ve ever written wanted to serve, to save lives. They wanted to serve for the brave man or woman next to them, or for their families. Certainly, in Michael’s case. There’s a line in the book near the funeral and some family and friends have gathered at the Ollis home on Staten Island and an ex-girlfriend of Michael’s was there and she said, “you know, it just hit me that this is what Michael lived for, all of his friends and family being together.” I think that really sums up this generation of volunteer warriors who raised their hands and swore to defend our country and went to these faraway places so that the rest of us didn’t have to.

Q: What value have you found for the individuals you’ve interviewed and shared their stories?

A: Michael’s father was a Vietnam veteran, he never really talked about it with his son until Michael joined the Army. I think one of the touching things about the story is the way they bonded and Michael really helped him with some of his demons from Vietnam by sharing some of the stories from Afghanistan and asking his dad’s advice. I think veterans should keep telling their stories. It’s so critical that we pass on stories like Staff Sgt. Michael Ollis’ and other stories I’ve had the privilege to help tell the next generation because at some point in time, when they’re called upon to preserve our freedom, I think it’s important that they know about those who came before them.

Senate Finance Chair Louise Lucas and House Appropriations Chairman Luke Torian announced late Tuesday that they plan to introduce identical legislation to repeal changes to the Virginia Military Survivors and Dependents Education Program in the two-year budget that took effect on Monday. Members of the Senate and the House of Delegates will return to Richmond on July 18 to vote on the agreement.

Virginia Senate fails to pass bill on military tuition program

The new legislation will propose an additional $90 million in taxpayer funds to pay for the program, in addition to the $40 million already included in the budget. The program’s costs have risen from $12 million to $65 million in five years. Previously, state colleges and universities have covered the costs with state funds and tuition from other students.

Lucas said the new proposal would set aside $65 million each year for the program, while the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission studies it, along with a task force appointed by Gov. Glenn Youngkin and a Senate work group.

“This study and the allocation of what now will be $65 million per year for the program provides me with the comfort that we will not place the burden of the escalating cost of the program on other students through their tuition charges,” Lucas said in a statement.

To rein in the program’s rising costs, the budget deal passed by the General Assembly in May restricted eligibility to associate and undergraduate degrees, required participants to apply for other forms of financial aid and tightened residency requirements.

After vehement protests from military families, the House of Delegates voted last week to repeal the new restrictions, but the Senate took no action after meeting twice in two weeks to work on the issue.

Youngkin praised the agreement.

“A full, clean repeal with additional financial support for the VMSDEP program, unencumbered by any other provisions, is great news for our military heroes, first responders, and their families,” Youngkin posted on the social platform X.

That award — which recognizes service members who show heroism in the field — has been called into question after a CBS investigation reported Nehls had been touting military decorations that did not match his service record provided by the Pentagon. In campaign ads and in his House biography, Nehls, R-Richmond, has posted pictures of him in an Army uniform wearing two Bronze Star medals. He has also worn the Combat Infantryman Badge lapel pin, awarded to soldiers for service in combat.

Texas Congressman defends military record amid combat badge scandal

The investigation found that the Pentagon reported Nehls only received one Bronze Star and that the Combat Infantryman Badge was awarded in error and rescinded in 2023. Nehls, who has been publicly criticized by members of his own party amid the claims of stolen valor, said on social media that he did have two Bronze Stars. But he has since stopped wearing the CIB.

But Jason Burke, the Navy captain who led the 130-person joint task force Nehls served on during his tour, recalled awarding the medal to Nehls. Nehls received the medal at a ceremony with several other officers in the fall of 2008, shortly before Nehls finished his tour and returned to Texas, Burke told the Tribune.

“You’re getting that award if you’ve done a good job and met the criteria,” said the now-retired Burke, who is listed on the award certificate as Nehls’ commanding officer. “He earned it, and received it.”

Nehls, who represents a swath of Houston suburbs, served as Burke’s second-in-command under a joint effort called Task Force Currahee. Their unit, which included both Army and Navy officers, worked on provincial reconstruction, building roads, clinics and schools in eastern Afghanistan’s Ghazni Province. Burke said the team’s convoys regularly came under Taliban ambushes and guerilla attacks.

The Bronze Star award must be recommended by a commander, and any service member in any branch of the military working an operation involving a conflict with an opposing force of the U.S. is eligible. The CIB, by contrast, is only given to those in combat roles.

It was relatively standard during the U.S.’ war on terrorism, after the Sept. 11 attacks, for officers of certain ranks to receive some kind of award upon completing a tour, often a Bronze Star. Nehls’ first star was awarded for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2004, where he trained 13 staff members of an Iraqi government office to perform financial assessments, according to the certificate.

A spokesperson for Nehls declined to comment on this story, pointing to a post on X Nehls made last month defending his record and posting photos of the certificates of his two Bronze stars, and his copy of the underlying nomination forms. Burke’s sign-off can be seen on the 2008 documentation, known as Form 638, along with signatures from two higher-level officials.

Congressman accuses Army of political attacks over combat badge

CBS reported the Pentagon would conduct another review of Nehls’ record. The most recent summary of his service and awards, provided to the Tribune by a Pentagon spokesperson on Friday, lists only one Bronze Star and no CIB.

The systems for records keeping for military awards can be difficult to navigate. Soldiers often become responsible for making sure awards paperwork is turned over to a personnel officer.

That means documentation for awards sometimes slips through the cracks, according to retired Army sergeant Anthony Anderson, who has investigated numerous instances of stolen valor.

“I wouldn’t say it’s common, but it does happen,” Anderson said.

Anderson said he had previously spoken with Nehls’ chief of staff, encouraging them to submit documentation of the second Bronze Star to the Pentagon to be added to Nehls record.

He said he would be surprised if an officer in Nehls’ position hadn’t received a Bronze Star.

Nehls’ military record has become a thorn for him in recent months. He announced that he would stop wearing the Combat Infantryman Badge last week in response to reports that the badge had been revoked in 2023.

Nehls was found to be ineligible for that badge because he had served in Afghanistan in a civil role, not as a combatant infantryman. Nehls did serve as an infantryman during his time with the Wisconsin National Guard in the 1990s, completing a tour in Bosnia.

“Amid stolen valor accusations, ex-commanding officer confirms he issued Rep. Troy Nehls’ second Bronze Star” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Military Times has edited the original headline.

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Nehls, R-Richmond, has been under intense scrutiny over his display of a combat service badge that the Army revoked and removed from his service record last year.

Congressman accuses Army of political attacks over combat badge

Nehls, who represents a large swath of suburbs southwest of Houston, released what he called a “final written comment” on the controversy Tuesday afternoon. Nehls did not dispute that his Combat Infantryman Badge (CIB) had been revoked by the Army, but offered no explanation for why he continued to wear it until as recently as this month.

The congressman instead accused his critics of using the military to undermine him for his hardline conservative views. Nehls is a member of the far-right Freedom Caucus.

“Unfortunately for me, as an America First Patriot and an outspoken member of Congress, there are no lengths to which the establishment won’t go to discredit me, including my CIB, which I was awarded over 14 years ago,” Nehls said in his Tuesday statement. “Nothing more needs to be said.”

On Wednesday, Nehls had apparently stopped wearing the badge.

“Because you guys are vultures,” he told reporters, according to NOTUS, a nonprofit newsroom. “I know what I’ve done, and I certainly don’t have to justify myself to you guys. You were probably in middle school when I was over there. So I don’t have to justify myself to you in any form or fashion. But I know the truth. And now that I don’t wear that, what are you going to talk to me about?”

Nehls served in the Army from 1988 to 2008, first with the Wisconsin National Guard and then in the Army Reserve. During his two deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan, Nehls served in the civil affairs branch, the Army confirmed to the Washington outlet NOTUS. The Combat Infantryman Badge was apparently incorrectly awarded for his tour in Afghanistan in 2008.

Only infantrymen or Special Forces soldiers who engaged in active combat are eligible for the Combat Infantryman Badge.

In his Tuesday statement, Nehls appeared incredulous over the Army’s move to rescind his badge, even as he acknowledged that it occurred. Nehls previously argued in a letter to the Army’s human resources command that the division he had been a part of was indeed a combat unit.

“In 2023, 14 years after my retirement, suddenly, the Department of the Army rescinded my CIB. According to my correspondence I received from the Department of the Army, 142,596 CIBs have been awarded over the past 20 years. Of these, only 47 CIBs have been rescinded. So, let me get this straight, the Department of the Army says that the 101st Airborne Division has been 99.968% correct in awarding the CIB over the past two decades?” he said.

The issue was brought to light in May after a CBS News investigation showed discrepancies between the congressman’s own representations of his military career and his records held by the Pentagon. Reviews of Nehls’ career conducted by the Army found two separate discrepancies.

In addition to the revoked Combat Infantryman Badge the Army also told CBS that Nehls’ records indicate he received only one Bronze Star medal, despite his claiming to have been awarded two. Nehls posted two certificates and two forms on social media earlier this month.

Bronze Stars are awarded to any individual based on any heroic achievement in a combat setting, whether they were serving in a combat or civilian role.

Some of Nehl’s House Republican colleagues have since criticized him for his continued display of the badge, with fellow Texas Rep. Wesley Hunt of Houston, a former Army officer, telling a NOTUS reporter: “That’s ridiculous. That’s stolen valor.”

Before being elected in 2020, Nehls was the sheriff of Fort Bend County. He is separately facing a probe by a House ethics panel into potential campaign finance violations.

“U.S. Rep. Troy Nehls defends military record amid badge scandal” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues. Learn more at texastribune.org.

Military Times has edited the original headline.

Sign up for The Brief, The Texas Tribune’s daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news.