The White House pressed U.S. Navy officials to launch 2,000-pound live bombs instead of dummy explosives during an elaborate military demonstration for the service’s 250th anniversary celebration that President Donald Trump attended, two people familiar with planning for the event told The Associated Press.

One person familiar with the planning said White House officials insisted to Navy planners that Trump “needed to see explosions” instead of just a “big splash” during the Oct. 5 demonstration.

Original planning for what the Navy dubbed the Titans of the Sea Presidential Review called for military personnel to use dummies and not live bombs, a third person familiar with the Navy’s planning said.

That person, who like the others was not authorized to speak publicly on the matter and spoke on the condition of anonymity, would not comment on why the Navy decided to switch to live bombs.

The White House said no switch was made. Deputy press secretary Anna Kelly in a statement said: “Organizers always planned to use live munitions, as is typical in training exercises.”

The episode is the latest example of the Trump administration turning the military toward the president’s wishes in ways large and small — from summoning generals from around the world to Washington for a day of speeches to his lethal strikes on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean.

The Navy and other military branches typically use dummy, or inert, bombs for training and demonstrations. Dummies are cheaper than live bombs because they do not contain expensive explosives, fuses and other components. They’re also safer.

However, military officials often argue that the use of live ammunition for events like the 250th birthday celebration also fulfills a training purpose and that the ordnance would have been expended anyway at a later date. The Navy declined to comment.

The switch required Navy officials to change up detailed plans for the Norfolk military demonstration to ensure safety protocols were met, according to the three people familiar with the planning.

The White House pushed forward with the event despite a U.S. government shutdown, which has led nonessential federal workers to be sent home without pay and reduced operation of many non-critical government services.

A celebration for the Marines also used live artillery

Confirmation that the Navy decided to use live bombs instead of dummies at the Naval Base Norfolk event comes as the administration faces scrutiny over an Oct. 18 live fire demonstration at Camp Pendleton, in which a misfire of a live artillery round led to shrapnel spraying onto Interstate 5 in Southern California.

No one was injured when shrapnel struck two California Highway Patrol vehicles. That Camp Pendleton event marking the Marines 250th anniversary was attended by Vice President JD Vance and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Last week, 27 members of the California congressional delegation and the state’s two senators sent a letter to Hegseth asking whose decision it was to shoot live artillery over the busy freeway and how authorities planned for the safety risks.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who says he’ll weigh a 2028 White House run after the midterm elections next year, criticized the decision and closed a section of the roadway connecting San Diego to Los Angeles for hours during the Oct. 18 Marine showcase. The White House criticized him for closing the highway and said the Marines said there were no safety concerns.

Trump is a fan of military pomp

Trump hasn’t been shy about his fondness for pomp and pageantry that celebrates military might.

In his second term, he has pushed the U.S. services to hold big parades and demonstrations, an idea inspired by a Bastille Day parade he attended in France early in his first term. He was a guest of honor at the 2017 event, which commemorated the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War I.

The Army included tanks in a June parade in the nation’s capital, requested by Trump, to mark its 250 years despite concerns from city officials that the heavy vehicles would damage the city’s streets. And he appeared to relish the massive military welcome he received last month during his second state visit to the United Kingdom.

At the Navy celebration this month in Norfolk, the president and first lady Melania Trump watched the military demonstration from the deck of an aircraft carrier before Trump delivered a speech in which he criticized his political opponents and attacked Democratic lawmakers.

At sea, the Navy had seven Arleigh Burke-class guided missile destroyers fire a variety of their guns, including a large 5-inch gun. Four destroyers also launched the Navy’s Standard Missile 2 (SM-2). Each missile costs approximately $2 million.

Meanwhile, aircraft from USS Truman’s air wing fired missiles and general-purpose bombs and performed a strafing run with their gatling guns. The Navy’s MH-60S Seahawk helicopters also fired hydra rockets and guns.

Trump then spoke on a pier between two towering Navy vessels, an aircraft carrier and an amphibious assault ship. The carrier displayed a Navy fighter jet that had the words “President Donald J. Trump ‘45-47’” printed on the fuselage, right under the cockpit window.

A Navy spokesperson told the AP shortly after the event that sailors put the president’s name on the aircraft for the visit and this was “customary for visits of this type.”

In addition to the live bomb demonstration, Navy destroyers launched missiles and fired shells into the Atlantic Ocean, and Navy SEALs descended from helicopters and fighter jets catapulted off vessels.

The shift to live bombs also required further spreading out of the guided missile destroyers in the waters off Norfolk for the military demonstration.

Vice President JD Vance said Tuesday he believes U.S. military members will be paid at the end of the week, though he did not specify how the Trump administration will reconfigure funding as pain from the second-longest shutdown spreads nationwide.

The funding fight in Washington gained new urgency this week as millions of Americans face the prospect of losing food assistance, more federal workers miss their first full paycheck and recurring delays at airports snarl travel plans.

“We do think that we can continue paying the troops, at least for now,” Vance told reporters after lunch with Senate Republicans at the Capitol. “We’ve got food stamp benefits that are set to run out in a week. We’re trying to keep as much open as possible. We just need the Democrats to actually help us out.”

Shutdown causes turmoil for some military families’ food assistance

The vice president reaffirmed Republicans’ strategy of trying to pick off a handful of Senate Democrats to vote for stopgap funding to reopen the government. But nearly a month into the shutdown, it hasn’t worked. Just before Vance’s visit, a Senate vote on legislation to reopen the government failed for the 13th time.

Federal employee union calls for end to shutdown

The strain is building on Democratic lawmakers to end the impasse. That was magnified by the nation’s largest federal employee union, which on Monday called on Congress to immediately pass a funding bill and ensure workers receive full pay. Everett Kelley, president of the American Federation of Government Employees, said the two political parties have made their point.

“It’s time to pass a clean continuing resolution and end this shutdown today. No half measures, and no gamesmanship,” said Kelley, whose union carries considerable political weight with Democratic lawmakers.

Still, Democratic senators, including those representing states with many federal workers, did not appear ready to back down. Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine said he was insisting on commitments from the White House to prevent the administration from mass firing more workers. Democrats also want Congress to extend subsidies for health plans under the Affordable Care Act.

“We’ve got to get a deal with Donald Trump,” Kaine said.

But shutdowns grow more painful the longer they go. Soon, with closures lasting a fourth full week as of Tuesday, millions of Americans are likely to experience the difficulties firsthand.

“This week, more than any other week, the consequences become impossible to ignore,” said Rep. Lisa McClain, chair of the House Republican Conference.

How will Trump administration reconfigure funds?

The nation’s 1.3 million active duty service members were at risk of missing a paycheck on Friday. Earlier this month, the Trump administration ensured they were paid by shifting $8 billion from military research and development funds to make payroll. Vance did not say Tuesday how the Department of Defense will cover troop pay this time.

Larger still, the Trump administration says funding will run out Friday for the food assistance program that is relied upon by 42 million Americans to supplement their grocery bills. The administration has rejected the use of more than $5 billion in contingency funds to keep benefits flowing into November. And it says states won’t be reimbursed if they temporarily cover the cost of benefits next month.

Vance said that reconfiguring funds for those programs was like “trying to fit a square peg into a round hole with the budget.”

The Agriculture Department says the contingency fund is intended to help respond to emergencies such as natural disasters. Democrats say the decision concerning the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, known as SNAP, goes against the department’s previous guidance concerning its operations during a shutdown.

Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer of New York said the administration made an intentional choice not to the fund SNAP in November, calling it an “act of cruelty.”

Another program endangered by the shutdown is Head Start, with more than 130 preschool programs not getting federal grants on Saturday if the shutdown continues, according to the National Head Start Association. All told, more than 65,000 seats at Head Start programs across the country could be affected.

Will lawmakers find a solution?

At the Capitol, congressional leaders mostly highlighted the challenges many Americans are facing as a result of the shutdown. But there was no movement toward negotiations as they attempted to lay blame on the other side of the political aisle.

“Now government workers and every other American affected by this shutdown have become nothing more than pawns in the Democrats’ political games,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D.

The House passed a short-term continuing resolution on Sept. 19 to keep federal agencies funded. Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., has kept the House out of legislative session ever since, saying the solution is for Democrats to simply accept that bill.

But the Senate has consistently fallen short of the 60 votes needed to advance that spending measure. Democrats insist that any bill to fund the government also address health care costs, namely the soaring health insurance premiums that millions of Americans will face next year under plans offered through the Affordable Care Act marketplace.

Window-shopping for health plans delayed

When asked about his strategy for ending the shutdown, Schumer said that millions of Americans will begin seeing on Saturday how much their health insurance is going up next year.

“People in more than 30 states are going to be aghast, aghast when they see their bills,” Schumer said. “And they are going to cry out, and I believe there will be increased pressure on Republicans to negotiate.”

The window for enrolling in ACA health plans begins Saturday. In past years, the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has allowed Americans to preview their health coverage options about a week before open enrollment. But, as of Tuesday, Healthcare.gov appeared to show 2025 health insurance plans and estimated prices, instead of next year’s options.

Republicans insist they will not entertain negotiations on health care until the government reopens.

“I’m particularly worried about premiums going up for working families,” said Sen. David McCormick, R-Pa. “So we’re going to have that conversation, but we’re not going to have it until the government opens.”

Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Lisa Mascaro in Washington and Marc Levy in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, contributed to this report.

Tricare health beneficiaries who fill prescriptions outside a military health facility will pay more for medications next year, but they will also have expanded access to new treatments for conditions like lung cancer and chronic back pain, under an announcement made by the federal government Tuesday.

According to a notice in the Federal Register, most Tricare prescription copayments for medications purchased at retail pharmacies and through the Tricare mail-order pharmacy will increase beginning Jan. 1.

In 2026, the rates for 30-day retail prescriptions will remain at $16 for generic drugs, but they will increase to $48 for brand-name medications. Ninety-day mail-order prescriptions will cost $14 for generic drugs and $44 for branded prescriptions. Non-formulary drugs will be $85 for the 30-day retail or 90-day mail-order prescriptions.

Prescriptions filled at military hospitals or clinics will continue to be available at no cost to patients, and active-duty personnel still won’t pay cost-shares or copays at retail pharmacies for covered medications.

The new rates reflect a 12% to 15.8% rise over the current copays, which were set at the start of 2024. The increase is part of a plan initiated in 2018 by Congress and the Defense Department to increase the share patients pay for their medical services through the military health program.

In addition to the increase in retail pharmacy costs, Tricare will introduce new coverage for some procedures, according to the announcement. Those include: radiofrequency ablation for uterine fibroids; cryosurgery for lung cancer or other cancers that have metastasized to the lungs; coronary calcium tests for patients suspected of having heart disease; and basivertebral nerve ablation for patients with chronic back pain.

Tricare also plans to cover the cost of electric devices, known as transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation, or TENS units, to address post-operative pain. Tricare will allow patients who meet the criteria for a likelihood of developing certain types of cancer to have prophylactic surgeries, including mastectomies and hysterectomies.

The military health program also will no longer require some dependents who have lost their hearing to use hearing aids for at least three to six months before being eligible for cochlear implants, according to the announcement.

Tricare will continue to cover monoclonal antibody drugs for early treatment of Alzheimer’s disease — a benefit it began last year. Patients must receive pre-authorization to receive the medication and must undergo testing to determine they have the condition.

Also beginning next year, active-duty family members and retirees and their eligible family members who live in Tampa, Florida, or Atlanta will be able to enroll in a new Tricare Prime option managed by CareSource Military and Veterans.

New Tricare Prime option coming to beneficiaries in 2 metro areas

The pilot, which will run through 2029, provides a new managed care program for military families beyond military treatment facilities or Tricare managed by Humana Government Business, the contractor for the East Region.

Beneficiaries interested in enrolling in the new program will be able to do so during Tricare Open Season, set for Nov. 10 through Dec. 9. During that time frame, patients also may switch between Tricare Prime and Tricare Select or enroll in the Federal Dental and Vision Insurance program. Open season for FEDVIP closes Dec. 8.

“Tricare Prime Atlanta and Tricare Prime Tampa represent an innovative approach to advance access to care, enhance the patient experience, and strive for better health outcomes,” Dr. David Krulak, director of the Tricare Health Plan at the Defense Health Agency, said in a statement when the pilot was announced May 7. “The data we get from this demonstration will inform future Tricare innovations nationwide.”

On May 8, 1945, “der dicke Hermann,” or “Fat Herman” to the German public, stepped out of his vehicle.

With the writing on the wall, Hermann Göring, the leader of the Luftwaffe, had surrendered to the Americans.

“Twelve years,” he purportedly muttered. “I’ve had a good run for my money.”

Now, based on Jack El-Hai’s book “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist,” director James Vanderbilt is bringing Göring’s 18-month incarceration and trial to the big screen in “Nuremberg.”

Starring Rami Malek as Lt. Col. Douglas Kelley, the U.S. Army psychiatrist assigned to interview the Nazi leader, the film follows Malek’s character as he interrogates Göring, played by Russell Crowe.

Held alongside 51 senior Nazi leaders, Göring was confined in Prisoner of War Camp No. 32, known to its inmates as the “Ashcan.” Kelley was the first Allied psychiatrist to evaluate him and other Nazi leaders such as Rudolf Hess, Julius Streicher and Karl Dönitz. His work, however, has been largely overshadowed by that of Gustave Gilbert, the psychologist brought in to reevaluate his findings.

According to historian James Holland, “Göring’s dandy image made him a persistent figure of ridicule. Germans mocked him and the foreign press painted him as an overweight buffoon. But Göring was a colossus in every way: a wily Machiavellian with an outsize IQ, skilled at combining charm, guile and ruthlessness to get what he wanted — skills he employed to the end.”

“I responded to the script straight away, but in a funny way I was also emotionally exhausted by it,” Crowe told the news site Deadline. “How would you even attempt to play that guy? When that kind of question comes up, that’s usually what I’m attracted to.”

During his incarceration Göring lost weight, detoxed from his steady war diet of morphine, and, writes Holland, “demonstrated acute intelligence, guile, wit and even charm.”

While imprisoned, the Nazi managed to befriend his guard, Lt. Jack G. Wheelis, and physician Ludwig Pflücker. During the trial, he ran rings around his prosecutor, even managing to draw laughter from onlookers.

It is, though, the psychological duel between Kelley and Göring that appears to be at the heart of “Nuremberg” — until a vial of cyanide spared Göring the noose.

“He couldn’t help but empathize with [Göring],” Malek told Deadline. “For Kelley to be so convinced that he was there to ‘dissect evil,’ as he explains in his book, and then to discover there’s nothing uniquely evil about Göring; in fact, there’s humanity in there. He realized that anyone at any moment in any political landscape could be capable of an atrocity like that. How jarring, and how absolutely terrifying that must have been.”

Joining Malek and Crowe is Michael Shannon, playing chief U.S. prosecutor, Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson; Leo Woodall as Sgt. Howie Triest; Colin Hanks as American psychologist Gustave Gilbert; and John Slattery as Burton C. Andrus, U.S. Army officer and commandant of the Nuremberg Prison.

“Nuremberg” is in theaters Nov. 7.

Not long after airplanes were first used in war, armies realized that close air support required specialists on the ground to coordinate with the pilots. Hence the advent of forward air controllers, and later the U.S. military’s Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, or JTACs.

But if you need JTACs to call in air strikes, and space-based weapons are becoming a reality, then don’t you also need specialists to call in space strikes? That’s why there should be Space Joint Terminal Attack Controllers, or SJTACs, argue two experts.

For example, “the space JTAC would connect tactical, on-the-ground SOF [special operations forces] units with space assets for targeting adversary military airbases, critical infrastructure, and more complex targets, such as Russian floating nuclear power plants,” wrote retired U.S. Army colonel Kevin Stringer and Marius Kristiansen, a Norwegian Army officer, in a July essay for the Irregular Warfare Initiative website.

Unlike space personnel already assigned theater special operations commands, SJTACs would embed with special operations tactical units, the essay suggests. They would “enable the assessment of vulnerabilities, ensuring precision in any potential attack, as well as monitoring target activities, tracking movements, and providing real-time situational awareness for preemptive strikes or future sabotage missions,” Stringer and Kristiansen wrote.

SJTACs are needed to coordinate the advent of space-based weapons that paint a future where orbital bombardment of ground targets is the norm, the pair argues.

“As space capabilities develop from science fiction to reality, the SJTAC could access future space weaponry ranging from lasers, electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapons, to the currently theoretical ‘Rods from God’ kinetic bombardment concept,” Stringer and Kristiansen wrote.

Just as JTACs are needed to target airstrikes and avoid hitting friendly forces, SJTACs would perform the same role for space.

“For normal airstrikes, an infantry scout or aviation aeroscout can call them in during an emergency,” Stringer told Defense News. “But the margin of error grows with a generalist doing infrequent specialist activities. A JTAC is a professional who focuses on this task. The SJTAC would be similar.”

There has long been an intimate link between space and special operations forces. The “Cyber-Space-SOF” triad is seen as a strategic capability, while U.S. Space Force is now standing up its own special operations component as part of U.S. Special Operations Command (SJTACs would belong to that Space Force component).

“Combined with space and cyber capabilities, SOF can access satellite communications, space-based reconnaissance, and cyber tools to disrupt enemy activities while maintaining a low signature,” the essay explained.

One question is redundancy. Rather than having separate SJTACs, would it be simpler to offer additional training in space capabilities to existing JTACs? Such training could be added to the Army-run Special Operations Terminal Attack Control Course, or SOTACC, which certifies JTACs. Or, the space role could be handed to Air Force combat controllers.

Stringer and Kristiansen disagree. In their view, SJTAC critics “overlook the fact that with space defined as a separate warfighting domain from the air, and with the creation of U.S. Space Force as a separate service, organizational logic and the development of deep space expertise necessitate a division of labor that would place the SJTAC function firmly within the Space Force sphere of responsibility.”

Separate STACs “would also avoid the inefficiency of having SOF from each service — Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines — develop their own SJTAC capabilities," the essay argues.

SJTACs would also be useful for coordinating U.S. space capabilities with NATO and other allies, Stringer and Kristiansen wrote.

“Given that not all NATO countries have space assets, and the planning assumption is that NATO SOF formations will operate in a combined fashion, a space JTAC becomes a critical linkage for allied interoperability,” the essay suggested.

Ultimately, if the special operations community wants to play a role in space-based capabilities, it will need to have its own space specialists, Stringer argues.

“Without this function, SOF will not be able to access the developing space capabilities nor be involved in their development and experimentation,” Stringer told Defense News.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that the U.S. military carried out three strikes Monday in the waters of the Eastern Pacific against boats suspected of carrying drugs, killing 14 and leaving one survivor.

The announcement, made on social media Tuesday, marks a continued escalation in the pace of the strikes, which began in early September spaced weeks apart. This was the first time multiple strikes were announced in a single day.

Hegseth said Mexican search and rescue authorities “assumed responsibility for coordinating the rescue” of the sole survivor but didn’t say if that person would stay in their custody or be handed over to the U.S.

In a strike earlier in October which had two survivors, the U.S. military rescued the pair and later repatriated them to Colombia and Ecuador.

Hegseth posted footage of the strikes to social media in which two boats can be seen moving at speed through the water. One is visibly laden with a large amount of parcels or bundles. Both then suddenly explode and are seen aflame.

The third strike appears to have been conducted on a pair of boats that were stationary in the water alongside each other. They appear to be largely empty with at least two people seen moving before an explosion engulfs both boats.

Hegseth said “the four vessels were known by our intelligence apparatus, transiting along known narco-trafficking routes, and carrying narcotics.”

The death toll from the 13 disclosed strikes since early September is now at least 57 people.

In his announcement of the latest strikes, Hegseth also continued to draw parallels between the military’s actions against drug trafficking and the war on terrorism following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

He claimed that cartels “have killed more Americans than Al-Qaeda, and they will be treated the same.”

President Donald Trump has also justified the strikes by asserting that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels and proclaiming the criminal organizations to be unlawful combatants, relying on the same legal authority used by President George W. Bush’s administration for the war on terrorism.

However, the Trump administration has shown no evidence to support its claims about the boats, their connection to drug cartels, or the even the identity of the people killed in these strikes.

The U.S. Navy relocated hundreds of nonessential personnel from Naval Station Guantanamo Bay to safety over the weekend as Hurricane Melissa approaches landfall in the Caribbean, according to Naval Air Station Pensacola.

Some 864 family members, civilian employees, contractors and pets were evacuated to Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, on Saturday and Sunday in preparation for what weather forecasters are labeling a Category 5 hurricane, the highest category on the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale, with winds greater than 157 miles per hour.

“The safety and well-being of our Navy family is always a primary concern,” said Capt. Chandra Newman, NAS Pensacola commanding officer. “The Sailors and civilian employees here are dedicated and adaptable, making sure they accomplish our Navy mission — and right now that’s taking care of our Navy family from Guantanamo Bay.”

The storm is expected to hit Jamaica first and then Cuba, potentially impacting Naval Station Guantanamo Bay.

USS Iwo Jima leaves Norfolk again after returning to avoid storm

The evacuation of nonessential personnel will allow the naval installation, which hosts approximately 5,500 personnel and families, to focus on expediting recovery operations after the hurricane passes, NAS Pensacola said in a release Sunday.

NAS Pensacola has established an Emergency Family Assistance Center to plan housing and dining accommodations. The centers typically provide counseling and lodging assistance to military personnel and their families during large-scale emergencies.

The Florida installation is offering housing to nonessential personnel through the Navy Lodge and other facilities.

Hurricane Melissa is on track to make landfall in Jamaica on Tuesday and potentially cause widespread devastation through flooding and landslides.

The storm, which carries with it the potential to be the strongest hurricane to ever touch down on the island, has already claimed the lives of six in the northern Caribbean, The Associated Press reported.

The U.S. Marines conducted a landmark training exercise which saw them fire the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System for the first time while near the base of Mount Fuji, Japan.

Marines of the 3rd Battalion, 12th Marine Regiment, 3rd Marine Division unleashed HIMARS missiles during live-fire training at Camp Fuji on Oct. 27.

Although the location has been used as a training ground for a wide variety of U.S. military exercises, this live-fire drill is the first instance in which Marines have practiced firing long-range missiles from the area.

“Training at CATC Fuji is critical for the Marine Corps‘ only forward-deployed artillery unit to rehearse and project long-range precision fires,” Maj. Gen. Kyle Ellison, commanding general, 3rd Marine Division, said in a release. “This training is foundational to enhancing 3/12’s agility and flexibility, ensuring they can safely and rapidly generate combat power in support of the Joint force.”

The HIMARS system is a mobile artillery platform that is highly versatile in terms of maneuverability and especially in its capability of delivering effective long-range strikes with an array of different munitions.

Some of the precision-guided missiles it can strike with include the Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System, which is equipped with a 200-pound warhead; the Army Tactical Missile System, which can strike deep behind enemy lines; and the entire range of rockets belonging to the Multiple Launch Rocket System family.

It can also be used to fire the Precision Strike Missile, which can destroy targets from over 248 miles away. The PRSM was recently tested at New Mexico’s White Sands Missile Range at the end of September, and demonstrated power and precision at striking long-range objectives.

The live-fire exercise near Mount Fuji comes amid unprecedented tensions in the Indo-Pacific region. In May, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth released a joint statement with the Defense Ministers of Japan, Australian and the Philippines, condemning “China’s destabilizing actions in the East China Sea (ECS) and the South China Sea (SCS) and any unilateral attempts to change the status quo by force or coercion.”

Repeated intrusions by Chinese aircraft into Japanese airspace and clashes between Chinese and Philippine vessels in the South China Sea in recent months are among many factors that have raised Japan’s national security concerns, according to the 2025 Defense of Japan report published by the Japan Ministry of Defense.

Facing its “most severe and complex security environment since the end of World War II,” according to the report, Japan is seeking to deepen ties with the United States, improve interoperability with international forces and revamp its defense capabilities.

The report notes that Japan plans to strengthen its entire defense architecture and to increase cooperation with the United States in air and missile defense capabilities.

“Japan will further deepen discussions with the U.S. on each country’s respective roles, missions, and capabilities to further reinforce Japan-U.S. joint deterrence capabilities,” the report stated.

In the spring of 1972, the communist People’s Army of Vietnam (PAVN) launched an offensive into South Vietnam that dropped all pretense regarding Hanoi’s involvement in the conflict, including the use of conventional weapons and tactics.

The largest, longest and most savage struggle in the campaign was the Second Battle of Quang Tri, which began on June 28, 1972. The United States played a reduced, peripheral role in the battle, but the advisors and air support it provided played a vital role in opposing the invasion.

Although the PAVN did not commit aircraft to its attack, it supplemented its anti-aircraft artillery with a formidable innovation: the SA-7 (dubbed the codename Grail by NATO), a shoulder-fired guided missile. Among the Grail’s earliest victims was a U.S. Air Force ground support aircraft, a North American Rockwell OA-10A Bronco — a small, nimble airplane designed to pick out targets in a guerrilla war — piloted by Steven Bennett.

The Louisiana native was on his second tour of duty with the 20th Tactical Air Support Squadron at Danang in 1972 when the North Vietnamese thrust into Quang Tri on June 28.

Just one day later Bennett was flying a Bronco with U.S. Marine Capt. Michael Brown in the observer’s seat, providing reconnaissance, artillery adjustment and liaison for South Vietnamese Marines and a contingent of U.S. Marine advisors.

While they were directing gunfire for two U.S. Navy destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, the duo received information that a large PAVN force was concentrating for a mass attack on a ”friendly unit.” Bennett relayed the request for tactical air support, but was informed that there was none available and moreover, artillery support was being denied because of the close proximity of the PAVN to the Marines.

For the time being, Bennett and Brown were the air support.

Besides four 7.62 mm machine guns in the fuselage, the Bronco could carry up to 3,600 pounds of bombs and rockets, and, as Bennett’s citation stated, “Capt. Bennett was determined to aid the endangered unit, and elected to strafe the hostile positions.”

In the course of four strafing runs, the men inflicted so much damage that the North Vietnamese began to retreat. It was in the course of making a fifth attack, however, that Bennett’s plane was hit by an SA-7 missile, which severely damaged the left engine and left main landing gear.

As the fire spread from the left engine, Bennett realized that it would be impossible for him to reach a South Vietnamese-held airfield. He therefore told his observer to prepare to eject, but while Bennett’s parachute was still intact, Brown replied that his had been shredded by the force of the exploding SA-7.

Putting his observer’s life before his own, Bennett made for the Tonkin Gulf. Despite the Bronco’s notoriety for the slim chance it afforded the pilot ditching, Bennett decided it was his observer’s only chance.

“There were five or 10 minutes before we would hit the water, and [Bennett] knew full well his chances were virtually nil,” Brown told The Daily Advertiser newspaper in 2010. “He could have gotten out himself, but he chose not to do that.”

Reaching the coast eight miles south of Quang Tri, Bennett ditched. Sure enough, however, the impact caused the plane to cartwheel, severely damaging the front cockpit and trapping the pilot therein, but Brown was able to swim clear. Bennett’s body was recovered the next day and eventually brought to its final resting place in Lafayette Memorial Park in Louisiana.

When the 81-day Second Battle of Quang Tri ended on Sept. 16, 1972, the PAVN’s offensive had been halted and the South Vietnamese forces had regained all their lost land.

On Aug. 8, 1974, Bennett’s widow and daughter went to the Blair House in Washington, D.C. to receive his posthumous Medal of Honor from President Gerald R. Ford.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story.

A U.S. Navy helicopter and a fighter jet assigned to the aircraft carrier USS Nimitz crashed in the South China Sea on Sunday in separate incidents less than an hour apart, the Navy said.

“All personnel involved are safe and in stable condition,” U.S. Pacific Fleet said in a brief statement.

At approximately 2:45 p.m. local time, an MH-60R Sea Hawk helicopter attached to the Nimitz “went down in the waters of the South China Sea while conducting routine operations,” U.S. Pacific Fleet said. Assets assigned to the carrier’s strike group rescued the helicopter’s three crew members. The helicopter was assigned to the “Battle Cats” of Helicopter Maritime Strike Squadron 73.

About 30 minutes later, at 3:15 p.m., an F/A-18F Super Hornet fighter jet from the Strike Fighter Squadron 22 “Fighting Redcocks” also crashed in the South China Sea while conducting routine operations, according to the statement. Both crew members successfully ejected from the jet and were rescued, U.S. Pacific Fleet said.

The cause of both incidents are under investigation.

A U.S. warship docked in Trinidad and Tobago‘s capital Sunday as the Trump administration boosts military pressure on neighboring Venezuela and its President Nicolás Maduro.

The arrival of the USS Gravely, a guided missile destroyer, in the capital of the Caribbean nation is in addition to the aircraft carrier USS Gerald R. Ford, which is moving closer to Venezuela. Maduro criticized the movement of the carrier as an attempt by the U.S government to fabricate “a new eternal war” against his country.

U.S. President Donald Trump has accused Maduro, without providing evidence, of being the leader of the organized crime gang Tren de Aragua.

Government officials from the twin-island nation and the U.S. said the massive warship will remain in Trinidad until Thursday so both countries can carry out training exercises.

A senior military official in Trinidad and Tobago told The Associated Press that the move was only recently scheduled. The official spoke under condition of anonymity due to lack of authorization to discuss the matter publicly.

Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, has been a vocal supporter of the U.S. military presence and the deadly strikes on suspected drug boats in waters off Venezuela.

U.S. Embassy Chargé d’Affaires Jenifer Neidhart de Ortiz said in a statement that the exercises seek to “address shared threats like transnational crime and build resilience through training, humanitarian missions, and security efforts.”

The visit comes one week after the U.S. Embassy in Trinidad and Tobago warned Americans to stay away from U.S. government facilities there. Local authorities said a reported threat against Americans prompted the warning.

Many people in Trinidad and Tobago criticize the warship’s docking in town.

At a recent demonstration outside the U.S. Embassy, David Abdulah, the leader of the Movement for Social Justice political party, said Trinidad and Tobago should not have allowed the warship into its waters.

“This is a warship in Trinidad, which will be anchored here for several days just miles off Venezuela when there’s a threat of war,” said Abdulah, who is also the leader of the Movement for Social Justice political party. “That’s an abomination.”

Caricom, a regional trade bloc made up of 15 Caribbean countries, has called for dialogue. Trinidad and Tobago is a member of the group, but Persad-Bissessar has said the region is not a zone of peace, citing the number of murders and other violent crimes.

LVIV, Ukraine — “I’m not disabled, I’m upgraded.” These were words I remember vividly from one Ukrainian army veteran, Serhiy.

Like other Ukrainian soldiers, he identified himself by first name only for security reasons.

Serhiy had been lucky as far as injuries went. A mine had blown off his leg below the knee but he could comfortably jog and skipped about 20 reps with a jump rope, using his good leg.

He’d been far luckier, say, than a former engineer named Artem I met in Kyiv.

During Ukraine’s failed 2023 counteroffensive, a drone-dropped explosive had sheared him almost entirely in half. When I met him more than a year later in a rehabilitation center, he was walking on his arms, doing an assisted bench press, climbing ropes and said he could even comfortably drive a car.

It is as if Serhiy, Artem and others like them take the Green Knight from Monty Python’s admonition that “it is just a flesh wound” literally. They have found ways to live their lives as productively as possible — and many still want to serve their country, even back at the front line.

“Ukraine is the best place in the world for prosthetics, they have the most advanced care and equipment,” said Eddy Scott, a British humanitarian volunteer who lost an arm and a leg evacuating civilians in eastern Ukraine.

In the eight months he has been recuperating at the Superhumans Center, a state-of-the-art facility in Lviv, Scott has seen how Ukrainian surgeons have stitched up the most seemingly hopeless cases.

“They have the most people to learn on,” he says with a shrug and a weary smile.

Ukraine has perhaps 25,000 amputees, most of them veterans, and many more who have suffered all kinds of combat wounds and must be reintegrated into society — at a time when the Russian invasion continues at full pace in Ukraine’s east, and major cities such as Kyiv are being regularly bombed.

On top of it all, there is the mental trauma inflicted upon so many soldiers, not just for those fighting, but for prisoners of war who endured horrific conditions in Russian captivity.

I spoke recently with Oleksii, a soldier who was taken prisoner after the siege of Mariupol in 2022 and endured just under two years in Russian captivity.

He, like many, speaks in euphemisms, noting, “the roof is leaking,” to describe how lives fall apart when they return to Ukrainian society.

Oleksii said that the worst part of his return was the survivor’s guilt.

Despite being back in Ukraine with his family — and a supportive community of veterans — he was tormented by the knowledge that many of his comrades in arms were suffering the same torture and deprivation he had been subjected to.

“I knew 18 people who died around me” of disease, torture and starvation, he said.

Many soldiers say the difficulties in civilian life stem from knowing few people who truly understand their struggles.

Seeing young men and women enjoying coffee at the country’s chic cafes or partying in bars and nightclubs can yield feelings that sacrifices have gone unappreciated.

“It is their turn,” is how one veteran summed up the attitude toward those who have not yet fought in the war.

Some veterans, meanwhile, like Serhiy, have begun looking around for units that admit amputees.

The idea is less crazy than it sounds — with the rise of drone warfare, an operator sitting motionless in a trench or a farmhouse basement can do more damage than the best special forces soldier.

Tom Mutch is a Ukraine-based journalist from New Zealand. He is the author of The Dogs of Mariupol, available now.

The deployment of National Guard troops in Washington, D.C., faced a challenge in a court in the nation’s capital Friday, while a judge in Portland, Oregon, said she expects to rule by Monday on whether to let President Donald Trump put troops on the street there.

The hearings are the latest in a head-spinning array of lawsuits and overlapping rulings prompted by Trump’s push to send the military into Democratic-run cities despite fierce resistance from mayors and governors. Troop deployment remains blocked in the Chicago area, where all sides are waiting to see if the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes to allow it.

Here’s what to know about the latest legal efforts to block or deploy the Guard in various cities.

A challenge to troops in Washington, DC

U.S. District Judge Jia Cobb, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, was hearing arguments Friday on District of Columbia Attorney General Brian Schwalb’s request for an order that would remove more than 2,000 Guard members from Washington streets.

In August, Trump issued an executive order declaring a crime emergency in the district — though the Department of Justice itself says violent crime there is at a 30-year low.

Within a month, more than 2,300 Guard troops from eight states and the district were patrolling under the Army secretary’s command. Trump also deployed hundreds of federal agents to assist them.

It is unclear how long the deployments will last, but attorneys from Schwalb’s office said troops are likely to remain in Washington through at least next summer.

“Our constitutional democracy will never be the same if these occupations are permitted to stand,” they wrote.

Government lawyers said Congress empowered the president to control the D.C. National Guard’s operation. They argued that Schwalb’s lawsuit is a frivolous “political stunt” threatening to undermine a successful campaign to reduce violent crime in Washington.

Although the emergency period ended in September, more than 2,200 troops remain. Several states told The Associated Press they would bring their units home by Nov. 30, unless extended.

Judge continues hearing on West Virginia’s deployment

Among the states that sent troops to the district was West Virginia. A civic organization called the West Virginia Citizen Action Group says Gov. Patrick Morrisey exceeded his authority by deploying 300 to 400 Guard members to support Trump’s efforts there.

Under state law, the group argues, the governor may deploy the National Guard out of state only for certain purposes, such as responding to a natural disaster or another state’s emergency request.

“The Governor cannot transform our citizen-soldiers into a roving police force available at the whim of federal officials who bypass proper legal channels,” the group’s attorneys, with the American Civil Liberties Union of West Virginia, wrote in a court document.

Morrisey has said West Virginia “is proud to stand with President Trump,” and his office has said the deployment was authorized under federal law. The state attorney general’s office has asked Kanawha County Circuit Court Judge Richard D. Lindsay to reject the case, saying the group has not been harmed and lacks standing to challenge Morrisey’s decision.

Lindsay heard some arguments Friday before continuing the hearing to Nov. 3 to give the state time to focus more on whether Morrisey had the authority to deploy the Guard members.

“I want that issue addressed,” Lindsay said.

Troops in Oregon remain in limbo

U.S. District Judge Karin Immergut, a Trump appointee in Portland, is in a tricky legal spot.

She issued two temporary restraining orders earlier this month — one prohibiting Trump from calling up Oregon troops to Portland, and another blocking him from sending any Guard members to Oregon at all after he tried to evade the first order by deploying California troops instead.

A 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals panel on Monday put the first ruling on hold, letting Trump take command of 200 Oregon National Guard troops. Now Immergut must decide whether to dissolve her second order.

DOJ has insisted Immergut is required to immediately dissolve the second order because its reasoning was the same as that rejected by the appeals panel. Attorneys for Oregon disagree, saying she must wait to see if the 9th Circuit will reconsider the panel’s ruling.

After hearing arguments Friday, Immergut said she would rule by Monday — if not sooner.

In Chicago, awaiting word from the Supreme Court

U.S. District Judge April Perry on Wednesday blocked Guard deployment to the Chicago area until the case is decided in her court or the U.S. Supreme Court intervenes. Perry previously blocked the deployment for two weeks through a temporary restraining order.

Attorneys representing the federal government said they would agree to extend the order, but would also continue pressing for an emergency order from the Supreme Court that would allow for the deployment.

Lawyers representing Chicago and Illinois have asked the Supreme Court to continue to block the deployment, calling it a “dramatic step.”

Associated Press writers Christine Fernando in Chicago, Adrian Sainz in Memphis and John Raby in Charleston, West Virginia, contributed.

The Pentagon confirmed Friday that it has accepted an anonymous $130 million gift to help pay members of the military during the government shutdown, raising ethical questions after President Donald Trump had announced that a friend had offered the gift to defray any shortfalls.

While large and unusual, the gift amounts to a small contribution toward the billions needed to cover service member paychecks. The Trump administration told Congress last week that it used $6.5 billion to make payroll. The next payday is coming within the week, and it is unclear if the administration will again move money around to ensure the military does not go without compensation.

“That’s what I call a patriot,” Trump said during a White House event Thursday when he disclosed the payment from the donor.

The president declined to name the person, whom he called “a friend of mine,” saying the man didn’t want the recognition.

The Pentagon confirmed it had accepted the donation on Thursday “under its general gift acceptance authority.”

“The donation was made on the condition that it be used to offset the cost of Service members’ salaries and benefits,” said Sean Parnell, chief spokesman for the Pentagon. “We are grateful for this donor’s assistance after Democrats opted to withhold pay from troops.”

Congress is at a stalemate over the government shutdown, now on track to become one of the longest federal closures ever, in its 24th day. Neither Republicans, who have control of the House and Senate, nor Democrats, in the minority, are willing to budge in their broader standoff over health care funding.

Payment for service members is a key concern among lawmakers of both parties as well as a point of political leverage. The Trump administration shifted $8 billion from military research and development funds to make payroll last week, ensuring that military compensation did not lapse.

But it is unclear if the Trump administration will be willing — or able — to shift money again next week as tensions rise over the protracted shutdown.

While the $130 million is a hefty sum, it would cover just a fraction of the billions needed for military paychecks. Trump said the donation was to cover any “shortfall.”

What’s unclear, however, is the regulations around such a donation.

Pentagon policy says authorities “must consult with their appropriate Ethics Official before accepting such a gift valued in excess of $10,000 to determine whether the donor is involved in any claims, procurement actions, litigation, or other particular matters involving the Department that must be considered prior to gift acceptance.”

It had been nearly five years since Winston Churchill had declared that “an iron curtain has descended across the continent,” and plunged the West in a Cold War and a hot race for armament with the East.

Yet worlds away from Washington and Moscow, in a remote outpost 40 miles west of Idaho Falls, Idaho, a town would soon become home to America’s first nuclear accident.

On Jan. 3, 1961, operators from the U.S. Army’s Stationary Lower Power Reactor One, or SL-1, were returning from a 10-day holiday break.

Among them was Army Spc. John Arthur Byrnes, Navy Seabee Richard Carlton Legg and SP4 Richard McKinley.

SL-1 was designed to provide heat and electricity for remote Defense Early Warning system radar sites, established to provide early warning of attack by Soviet aircraft or ICBMs, supplementing conventional plants requiring costly and hazardous diesel deliveries.

However, poor oversight, lack of rigorous training and detailed procedures and inadequately tested technology spelled disaster for SL-1 and its operators that night when, shortly after 9 p.m., a steam explosion blasted through the plant.

According to Argon Electronics, which provides nuclear and other hazardous material training simulators, the blast had enough force to lift the whole 26,000-pound apparatus over 9 feet into the air and create 500 pounds per square inch of pressure “which forced the plugs at the top of the reactor open and fire the control rods like missiles into the ceiling.”

“The entire reactor room was instantly filled with burning steam contaminated water and fragments of the radioactive cores,” Argon said.

It would take over an hour and a half for responders to arrive at the reactor, and when they did, they found dangerous levels of radiation.

Byrnes and Carlton were killed almost instantly in the blast. McKinley was still breathing, but the 27-year-old succumbed to his injuries shortly after being transported into an ambulance.

An Atomic Energy Commission investigation found the explosion had been caused by an operator pulling the reactor’s central rod too far out of its housing and, according to NASA, “This withdrawal caused the reactor to go ‘supercritical’ in just 4 milliseconds as the core power level surged to 20,000 megawatts or over 6,000 times the rated power output.”

It was speculated that the rod had become stuck, resulting in an operative accidentally pulling it too hard to free it. Others say it was the simply the result of human error.

Brynes and Legg were buried in their hometowns but McKinley, a Korean War veteran, was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery at the behest of his wife.

Twenty-two days after the explosion, McKinley’s family gathered in Arlington, Virginia, to watch the veteran’s eight-minute funeral — from 20 feet away.

Laid to rest in a double lead-lined casket, McKinley was lowered into a 10-foot-grave encased in concrete and surrounded by a metal vault. For good measure an additional foot of concrete was poured in atop his casket.

McKinley’s gravesite remains the only radioactive burial plot in Arlington National cemetery, and while it is safe to visit, his cemetery file warns, “Victim of nuclear accident. Body is contaminated with long-life radioactive isotopes. Under no circumstance will the body be removed from this location without prior approval of the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission] in consultation with this headquarters.”

The U.S. military is sending an aircraft carrier to the waters off South America, in the latest escalation and buildup of military forces in the region, the Pentagon announced Friday.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered the USS Gerald R. Ford and its strike group to deploy to U.S. Southern Command to “bolster U.S. capacity to detect, monitor, and disrupt illicit actors and activities that compromise the safety and prosperity of the United States,” Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell said in a social media post.

The USS Ford, which has five destroyers in its strike group, is currently deployed to the Mediterranean Sea. A person familiar with the operation told The Associated Press that one of those destroyers is in the Arabian Sea and another is in the Red Sea. At the time of the announcement, the USS Ford was in port in Croatia on the Adriatic Sea.

The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive military operations, would not say how long it would take for the strike group to arrive in the waters off South America or if all five destroyers would make the journey.

Latest US strike on alleged drug-running boat kills 6, Hegseth says

Deploying an aircraft carrier is a major escalation of military power in a region that has already seen an unusually large U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela.

Hours before Parnell announced the news, Hegseth said the military had conducted the 10th strike on a suspected drug-running boat, leaving six people dead and bringing the death count for the strikes that began in early September to at least 43 people.

The Pentagon told reporters it had nothing further to add beyond the statement.

Hegseth said the vessel struck overnight was operated by the Tren de Aragua gang. It was the second time the Trump administration has tied one of its operations to the gang that originated in a Venezuelan prison.

The pace of the strikes has quickened in recent days from one every few weeks when they first began to three this week, killing a total of at least 43 people since September. Two of the most recent strikes were carried out in the eastern Pacific Ocean, expanding the area where the military has launched attacks and shifting to where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producers is smuggled.

In a 20-second black and white video of the strike posted to social media, a small boat can be seen apparently sitting motionless on the water when a long thin projectile descends, triggering an explosion. The video ends before the blast dies down enough for the remains of the boat to be seen again.

Hegseth said the strike happened in international waters and boasted that it was the first one conducted at night.

“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth said in the post. “Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.”

US focus on Venezuela and Tren de Aragua

The strike drew parallels to the first announced by the U.S. last month by focusing on Tren de Aragua, which the Trump administration has designated a foreign terrorist organization and blamed for being at the root of the violence and drug dealing that plague some cities.

While not mentioning the origin of the latest boat, the Republican administration says at least four of the boats it has hit have come from Venezuela.

The attacks and an unusually large U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela have raised speculation that the administration could try to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, who faces charges of narcoterrorism in the U.S.

In the latest move, the U.S. military flew a pair of supersonic heavy bombers up to the coast of Venezuela on Thursday.

The Trump administration maintains that it’s combating drug trafficking into the United States, but Maduro argues that the operations are the latest effort to force him out of office.

Maduro on Thursday praised security forces and a civilian militia for defense exercises along some 2,000 kilometers (about 1,200 miles) of coastline to prepare for the possibility of a U.S. attack.

In the span of six hours, “100% of all the country’s coastline was covered in real time, with all the equipment and heavy weapons to defend all of Venezuela’s coasts if necessary,” Maduro said during a government event shown on state television.

The U.S. military’s presence is less about drugs than sending a message to countries in the region to align with U.S. interests, according to Elizabeth Dickinson, the International Crisis Group’s senior analyst for the Andes region.

“An expression that I’m hearing a lot is ‘Drugs are the excuse.’ And everyone knows that,” Dickinson said. “And I think that message is very clear in regional capitals. So the messaging here is that the U.S. is intent on pursuing specific objectives. And it will use military force against leaders and countries that don’t fall in line.”

Comparing the drug crackdown to the war on terror

Hegseth’s remarks around the strikes have recently begun to draw a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug traffickers.

President Donald Trump this month declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and said the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with them, relying on the same legal authority used by the Bush administration after 9/11.

When reporters asked Trump on Thursday whether he would request Congress issue a declaration of war against the cartels, he said that wasn’t the plan.

“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them, you know? They’re going to be like, dead,” Trump said during a roundtable at the White House with homeland security officials.

Lawmakers from both major political parties have expressed concerns about Trump ordering the military actions without receiving authorization from Congress or providing many details. Democrats have insisted the strikes violate international law.

“I’ve never seen anything quite like this before,” said Sen. Andy Kim, D-N.J., who previously worked in the Pentagon and the State Department, including as an adviser in Afghanistan.

“We have no idea how far this is going, how this could potentially bring in, you know, is it going to be boots on the ground? Is it going to be escalatory in a way where we could see us get bogged down for a long time?” he said.

But Republican Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart of Florida, who has long been involved in foreign affairs in the hemisphere, said of Trump’s approach: “It’s about time.”

While Trump is a president who “obviously hates war,” he also is not afraid to use the U.S. military in targeted operations, Diaz-Balart said.

“I would not want to be in the shoes of any of these narco-cartels,” he added.

Associated Press writers Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, and Ben Finley and Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.

A truck driver who backed into a U.S. Coast Guard base in the San Francisco Bay Area — the site of earlier protests against federal immigration agents — was shot at by law enforcement officers and wounded, authorities said Friday.

The driver was being held for a mental health evaluation after “attempting to weaponize the vehicle to ram into Coast Guard Base Alameda” on Thursday night, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security posted on X. A bystander was struck by a fragment, treated at a hospital and released, the statement said.

No Coast Guard personnel were hurt, it said. They issued “multiple verbal commands” to stop, but the driver failed to comply, “suddenly accelerating backwards at a high rate of speed directly toward them,” the statement said.

“When the vehicle’s actions posed a direct threat to the safety of Coast Guard and security personnel, law enforcement officers discharged several rounds of defensive live fire.”

The driver was wounded in the stomach and was expected to survive, the statement said. Homeland Security didn’t specify whether the driver was shot.

The FBI was investigating.

“At this time, the incident appears to be isolated, and there is no known current threat to the public,” FBI spokesperson Cameron Polan in San Francisco said in a statement. No other details were immediately released.

Video from the scene showed what appeared to be a U-Haul truck trying to back into the base.

“U-Haul is assisting law enforcement to meet any investigative needs they have,” company spokesperson Jeff Lockridge said in a statement.

#BREAKING: Video from KPIX photojournalist Rick Villaroman shows a U-Haul driver backing up toward a line of officers outside US Coast Guard base Alameda before officers opened fire. This was hours after almost all protesters dispersed. Awaiting an update from police @KPIXtv pic.twitter.com/UPrc3CDT3l

— Sara Donchey (@SaraDonchey) October 24, 2025

Earlier Thursday, protesters had assembled at the island, with many singing hymns and carrying signs saying, “Protect our neighbors” and “No ICE or troops in the Bay,” a reference to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the National Guard.

Hours earlier, President Donald Trump had called off a planned surge of federal agents into San Francisco to quell crime. Mayor Daniel Lurie and Gov. Gavin Newsom said it was unnecessary because crime is on the decline.

Separately, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents began arriving at the Coast Guard base in the region earlier Thursday for a possible ramp up of immigration enforcement, a move that drew several hundred protesters.

Trump said he backed off after speaking to the mayor and several prominent business leaders who said they’re working hard to clean up the city.

That decision was in contrast to others made by Trump to send the military into Democratic-run cities over fierce resistance from mayors and governors.

The deployment of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington faced challenges in two courts on Friday — one in the nation’s capital and another in West Virginia — while across the country a judge in Portland, Oregon, was considering whether to let Trump deploy troops there. Deployment remains blocked in the Chicago area.

Coast Guard Island is a 67-acre human-made island formed in 1913 in the Oakland Estuary between Oakland and Alameda. It is federally owned, does not allow visits from the general public without an escort or specific government identification, and it has been home to the current base, Base Alameda, since 2012, according to a Coast Guard document from 2016.

Base Alameda provides a variety of services for Coast Guard activities throughout the West Coast.

The U.S. military has conducted its 10th strike on a suspected drug-running boat, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said on Friday, blaming the Tren de Aragua gang for operating the vessel and leaving six people dead in the Caribbean.

In a social media post, Hegseth said the strike occurred overnight, and it marks the second time the Trump administration has tied one of its operations to the gang, which originated in a Venezuelan prison.

The pace of the strikes has quickened in recent days from one every few weeks in September when they first began to three this week. Two of the strikes this week were carried out in the eastern Pacific Ocean, expanding the area in which the military was launching attacks and where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producers is smuggled.

In a 20-second black and white video of the strike posted to social media, a small boat can be seen apparently sitting motionless on the water when a long thin projectile descends on it, triggering an explosion. The video ends before the blast dies down enough for the remains of the boat to be seen again.

Hegseth said the strike happened in international waters and boasted that it was the first one conducted at night.

“If you are a narco-terrorist smuggling drugs in our hemisphere, we will treat you like we treat Al-Qaeda,” Hegseth said in the post. “Day or NIGHT, we will map your networks, track your people, hunt you down, and kill you.”

The strike also came hours after the U.S. military flew a pair of supersonic heavy bombers up to the coast of Venezuela on Thursday. The flight was just the most recent move in what has been an unusually large military buildup in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off Venezuela that has raised speculation that President Donald Trump could try to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro faces charges of narcoterrorism in the U.S.

Venezuelan Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino has told his military leaders that the U.S. government knows the drug-trafficking accusations used to support the recent actions in the Caribbean are false, with its true intent being to “force a regime change” in the South American country.

Hegseth’s remarks around the strikes have recently begun to draw a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown on drug traffickers.

When reporters asked Trump on Thursday whether he would request Congress issue a declaration of war against the cartels, he said that wasn’t the plan.

“I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them, you know? They’re going to be like, dead,” Trump said during a roundtable at the White House with homeland security officials.

Lawmakers from both major political parties have expressed concerns about Trump ordering the military actions without receiving authorization from Congress or providing many details. Democrats have insisted the strikes violate international law.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said this week that “expanding the geography simply expands the lawlessness and the recklessness in the use of the American military without seeming legal or practical justification.”

Trump this month declared drug cartels to be unlawful combatants and said the U.S. was in an “armed conflict” with them.

Despite the concerns from some lawmakers, the Republican-controlled Senate has voted down a Democratic-sponsored war powers resolution that would have required the president to seek authorization from Congress before further military strikes.

Wounded soldiers glowing with a greenish-blue.

Those soldiers inexplicably recovering more quickly than others.

A Halloween tale for this time of year?

No, it was a true episode from the Civil War - the Battle of Shiloh - and one that was only explained many years later, in 2001, in part by two high school students in a Maryland suburb outside Washington.

The story begins on April 6, 1862.

Dawn was beginning to break near a small Methodist meeting house in Hardin County, in southwestern Tennessee, and the Union army was not expecting much trouble.

The Union Army of the Tennessee, had routed Confederate forces at Forts Donelson and Henry a few weeks before and had hunkered down in Hardin County.

The Union forces, so confident in their security, had constructed no defensive works around their camp. Maj. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant, the commander, was 20 miles away, meeting with Maj. Gen. Don Carlos Buell, head of the Army of the Ohio. Grant had not even bothered to leave an officer in temporary command during his absence, according to historian Christopher Allen.

Soon, however, the Union men were roused from their slumber by nearly 45,000 Confederate troops, organized into four corps of the Army of the Mississippi, under the command of Gen. Albert Sidney Johnston.

On what had been a peaceful Sunday morning soon turned into one of the bloodiest clashes of the of the Civil War.

There were an estimated 23,746 casualties over the two-day battle. On the Union side, 1,754 men were killed and 8,408 wounded. The Confederates suffered similar losses, with 1,728 killed and 8,012 wounded.

With field medicine still primitive during the early days of the war and germ theory still a relatively new concept, hundreds of wounded men were left to wait for aid in the rain on a muddy battlefield.

However, as day turned into night, shockingly, some of the surviving wounded began to glow a greenish-blue hue. Moreover, doctors and medical personnel later reported that those with glowing wounds had lower infection rates and healed much more quickly than those without them.

The other-worldly phenomenon was quickly dubbed the “Angel’s Glow” by soldiers for its seemingly healing properties.

It would take 139 years, however, to apparently unravel the mystery surrounding the glow.

In 2001, high school students Bill Martin and Jonathan Curtis, at Bowie High School in Bowie, Maryland, worked with Martin’s mother, Agricultural Research Service microbiologist Phyllis Martin, to root out its source. According to the Agriculture Department, she had “previously studied the bacterium, Photorhabdus luminescens, as a potential biocontrol agent and knew that this insect pathogen created a glowing effect.”

The students found that the Photorhabdus strains produced antibiotics that inhibited the growth of other bacteria that would have caused infections in open wounds, thus aiding in the soldiers’ healing.

It was known that the glowing bacteria live in the guts of nematodes, small parasitic worms, Curtis said in a 2001 interview with HealthDay, “and we found that these nematodes are attracted to small insects that would have been in the guts or clothing of the soldiers, and [the worms] would have excreted glowing bacteria.”

The excreted glowing bacteria from the parasitic nematode released chemicals that ate away at serious bacterial infections such as gangrene. The cold and wet conditions after the battle likely made it the perfect hosting conditions for the worm and bacteria — and likely helped the soldiers live through the night.

Melissa A. Winn, director of marketing and communications at the National Museum of Civil War Medicine in Frederick, Maryland, told Military Times, “Angel’s Glow was a true phenomenon and one of those stories about Civil War medicine and soldiers that they hear questions about often, especially around Halloween.”

“What’s exciting about the story for us,” Winn said, “is the modern interest in determining ‘why.’ It’s genuinely part of our mission to use artifacts, storytelling and the historic lessons derived from that era to educate the public and define the impact on today’s society. We continue to learn from and benefit from Civil War medicine and this story highlights how curiosity about this unique phenomenon has impacted medical study in the 21st Century.”

It was a scene that played out countless times in homes across America during World War II: A young soldier, home on leave, making his tearful goodbyes to his family before shipping out to fight in some faraway land.

On Feb. 28, 1943, a 20-year-old draftee, who was inducted into the U.S. Army at Fort Snelling in his hometown of St. Paul, Minnesota, said a particularly painful farewell. For the very last time, he addressed his mother, who was near death from cervical cancer.

“Goodbye, Sparky,” said his bedridden mother, Dena, who was 48. “We’ll probably never see each other again.”

She died the next day when “Sparky” — the childhood nickname of Charles M. Schulz — was back at Fort Snelling. A few weeks later, the cartoonist who drew the popular “Peanuts” comic strip, which marks its 75th anniversary this month, shipped off to basic training at Fort Campbell in Kentucky with a heavy heart.

Oh, the Places SNAFU Will Go: Dr. Seuss’ animated fight against Nazis

Years later, Schulz reflected on that experience as a defining moment in his life — one that enabled him to project his own fragile emotions through the downtrodden world view of good ol’ Charlie Brown, the comic strip’s main character. It would also lead to the development of one of the most beloved illustrated figures of all time.

“The Army taught me all I needed to know about loneliness,” Schulz later recalled of the tears he shed in his barracks following Dena’s death.

“Schulz was incredibly proud of his World War II service,” said Michael Keane, a veteran of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars and author of "Charlie Brown’s Christmas Miracle."

“However, his mother’s passing … really had an impact on him. He was horribly lonely.”

Born Nov. 26, 1922, in Minnesota, Schulz was nicknamed “Sparky” by his uncle for a character in the “Barney Google and Snuffy Smith” comic strip. That connection to the funny papers would remain a constant in the youngster’s life. He dreamed of becoming a cartoonist and having a daily strip in the newspaper.

Those plans were interrupted by World War II. Schulz dutifully served in the U.S. Army with the 20th Armored Division, part of the III Corps, in battles across France, Belgium and Germany. He rose to the rank of staff sergeant and became a light machine gun squad leader. His division participated in the liberation of Dachau, though the future cartoonist and his comrades never entered the concentration camp.

According to Keane, Schulz likely suffered from undiagnosed PTSD. After the war, he was plagued by severe depression and paralyzing anxiety. The wartime trauma experienced by the sensitive illustrator left an indelible mark on his psyche, impacting his drawing and family life for the rest of his years.

“His [first] wife wanted him to get therapy,” stated Keane, adjunct faculty for the School of Public Policy at Pepperdine University. “Schulz wouldn’t do it, though. He was afraid it would affect his creativity and he wouldn’t be able to draw ‘Peanuts’ anymore.”

Schulz later recalled three events during World War II that left a mark on him. One involved an encounter with German soldiers. The sergeant pointed his machine gun at them and pulled the trigger, though it didn’t fire because Schulz had failed to pull back the cocking handle. That’s when he realized the enemy troops were surrendering.

Another time was when he was handling a captured German luger. It went off in his hands and grazed the cheek of a combat medic standing in front of him. Both near-misses left him shaken and worrying about what might have been.

The third encounter involved a German village, where Schulz’s unit had been taking sniper fire. Army rules of engagement at the time dictated that the town be destroyed in retaliation for the attack. The cartoonist later admitted to being overwhelmed by memories of a “hysterical woman standing in the front yard while her house was on fire.”

With the end of the war, Schulz returned home, married and started a family. He worked as an art instructor while pursuing his dream of drawing a comic strip for newspapers. He initially started with a series of one-panel drawings called “Li’l Folks” for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, then was signed in 1950 by United Feature Syndicate to do a daily four-panel strip across the country.

However, Schulz had to make a few revisions before it could be syndicated. Because it was similar to another comic strip, the name was changed to “Peanuts” — based on the popularity of the phrase “peanut gallery” used in the children’s TV series “The Howdy Doody Show.” Schulz never really liked the title but did what he had to do to get published.

The artist also needed a new name for one of his characters. In “Peanuts,” he wanted to call the dog Sniffy, but that was already taken by a pooch in a comic book. Then he remembered the last few conversations he had with his mother.

Dena’s cancer caused her significant pain, so she was given morphine to ease her suffering. The resulting hallucinations crept into conversations with her son. Dena spoke about getting better and returning to a normal life. Schulz knew it would never happen, but he indulged his mother.

Dena also spoke about getting a new dog. She had already picked out its name: Snoopy. Dena’s parents were Norwegian, and in their language, “snupi” meant “darling.” Schulz knew it was the perfect name for the character in his comic strip.

Snoopy made his debut on Oct. 4, 1950 — two days after “Peanuts” first premiered in newspapers. Two years later, the dog was given the ability to “speak” through “thought balloons.” As Snoopy donned a variety of alter egos and pursued fantasy-laden adventures, he grew in popularity to the point where the character soon dominated the comic strip, as well as network TV specials.

In 2000, “Peanuts” was read by more than 355 million people each day in 2,600 newspapers. Snoopy, of course, was a huge part of the success. The character generated millions of dollars in sales from greeting cards, plush toys, mugs, key chains, bedsheets and many more collectible items. He even became a symbol of hope during the Vietnam War, when American troops brandished Snoopy on helmets, tanks, trucks and other military gear.

Reflecting on the success of his determined dog, Schulz once said, “There’s another quality about Snoopy that I think makes the whole thing work. This is a quality of innocence combined with a little bit of egotism. You put those qualities together, and I think you have trouble, especially with Snoopy.”

America’s Favorite Beagle was also Schulz’s way of remembering his mother. He was extremely close to Dena, who strongly encouraged him to pursue his love of drawing. Having Snoopy appear almost daily in “Peanuts” helped honor her, whose death was a “loss from which I sometimes believe I never recovered,” he later stated. Schulz died at 77 in 2000, the night before his final “Peanuts” strip ran in newspapers around the world.

Editor’s note: This report was updated to correct some inaccuracies identified by the Charles M. Schulz Museum.

California lawmakers are demanding answers after a live fire demonstration over Camp Pendleton Saturday led to a misfire that rained shrapnel on Interstate 5, striking two California Highway Patrol vehicles.

An artillery shell exploded over the freeway during a celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Marine Corps, attended by Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Pieces of shrapnel scattered on the closed roadway and struck a patrol vehicle and motorcycle.

“I was very disappointed, because I hoped we could celebrate the Marine Corps without undue risk,” Rep. Mike Levin, a Democrat from San Clemente and Carlsbad who represents the district including Camp Pendleton, told CalMatters. “I’m led to believe the decision-making did not put public safety first. That’s why we’re calling for a full investigation.”

Marine artillery shell explodes over highway during drill, police say

On Wednesday Levin sent a letter signed by 26 California Congress members and the state’s two senators to Hegseth, asking who decided to shoot live artillery over the freeway, and how authorities planned for the safety risks.

“While we are relieved no one was injured, we are deeply concerned by the decision-making that led to this incident,” Levin wrote.

The mishap deepened conflicts between President Donald Trump and California leaders including Gov. Gavin Newsom, with some Republicans chastising Newsom for closing the freeway during the live fire exercise. Other local leaders were exasperated by an unorthodox military display that they believe was orchestrated for the benefit of Trump administration officials.

“It’s almost absurd that this would be acceptable,” California Sen. Catherine Blakespear, an Encinitas Democrat whose district includes Camp Pendleton, told CalMatters. “And for what? There’s no military benefit. There’s no community benefit. It’s posturing with militaristic bluster at the expense of the safety and well-being of the community.”

The Marine Corp’s 250th birthday party

On Saturday Marine Corps Base Camp Pendleton held a demonstration featuring aircraft, ships, and amphibious assault vehicles to celebrate the milestone anniversary. It involved firing artillery across the coastal freeway in a planned demonstration of 60 rounds, according to the CHP incident report.

That location was unusual, military and public safety officials said. Although live fire training is routine, it usually takes place on designated ranges within the 195 square mile base in North County San Diego.

“It is highly uncommon for any live-fire or explosive training activity to occur over an active freeway,” CHP Border Division Chief Tony Coronado said in a statement Sunday. “As a Marine myself, I have tremendous respect for our military partners, but my foremost responsibility is ensuring the safety of the people of California and the officers who protect them.”

The first round launched at 1:46 p.m. Saturday from M777 Howitzers on a beach west of Interstate 5 toward the east, the incident report stated. That artillery round failed to clear the roadway and detonated midflight near Interstate 5 southbound, sending shrapnel flying toward protective service details assigned to the vice president. After that, the exercise was halted and no more munitions were fired.

An officer described hearing what sounded like “pebbles” falling on his CHP BMW motorcycle, and other shards struck an empty Ford patrol vehicle. The two officers who had driven the vehicle saw a two inch-by-half inch piece of shrapnel on the hood, which left a small dent or scratch. Photos in the incident reports show the patrol car struck by shrapnel, and an officer holding the metal shards.

The CHP called for additional review of the planning, communication and coordination between state and federal partners about the freeway closure and public safety. The Marine Corps is also investigating the incident, the Washington Post reported.

Levin said he hoped the Marine Corps anniversary would bring the country together to honor the force’s 250 year history: “Our Marines deserve to be celebrated without compromising these ideals.”

A risky exercise

The incident snarled traffic for hours on the freeway, which Newsom had ordered closed for the exercise. And it startled residents in San Diego and Orange Counties, who are accustomed to noise from military exercises, but didn’t expect one to take place over a civilian transportation corridor. Some shared photos of surreal highway signs warning of the live fire event.

“Artillery on base is normal,” Levin said. “I hear it all the time from my house. But everything we’ve seen is that firing over the freeway is not how this ordinarily works. Common sense tells us it’s much riskier to fire over the freeway.”

Ian Bennett, a retired Army artillery officer who served in Iraq in 2003, said military leaders plan for every facet of munitions exercises, from gun settings and direction to range conditions and weather.

“You want to make sure that everything is done safely because you don’t want to have a mishap offramp all the good that you’re doing,” Bennett said.

Live fire exercises involve multiple dry fire rehearsals and any that affect civilians or take place in sensitive areas require extra coordination to make sure there are no surprises, he said.

“I’ve never had cause to shoot over a major road during training,” Bennett said. “From my personal perspective, that’s not something I would consider.”

Miscommunications before the mishap

San Diego leaders described miscommunications about the live fire demonstration at Camp Pendleton in the days beforehand, with some elected officials saying they weren’t in the loop.

“If there was coordination, I would expect it would include my office,” Blakespear said. “We weren’t even informed or invited to the event.”

Last Wednesday the Marine Corps issued a statement assuring the public that live fire demonstrations would take place on approved training ranges and comply with established safety protocols.

But that evening, Levin voiced concern that parts of Interstate 5 could be closed in both directions “to accommodate events tied to anything partisan or political.”

Leaders in Oceanside, the city south of the base, said there was conflicting and changing information about the demonstration until the morning of the event.

“I was in planning for probably a month to a month and a half out, and there were a lot of unknowns,” Oceanside Police Department Assistant Chief John McKean said. “The government doesn’t tell you a whole lot of stuff out front, other than we’re coming out and we want a big party.”

The day before, the word was that the freeway would remain open, Bennett said. He awoke to a phone call at 6:30 a.m. Saturday to learn it would be shut.

Live fire exercise fuels political feuds

In a statement Saturday, Newsom announced the freeway closure, describing the live fire exercise as a show of force meant to intimidate Trump’s opponents, thousands of whom were demonstrating at “No Kings” protests throughout San Diego the same day.

“The President is putting his ego over responsibility with this disregard for public safety,” Newsom wrote. “Firing live rounds over a busy highway isn’t just wrong — it’s dangerous.”

All lanes in an area along the base were scheduled to close for about four hours, McKean said, but they were ultimately shut for just under an hour, between about 1 p.m. and 2 p.m.

McKean, who served in the Marines, said it’s not typical but not unprecedented to shoot across a roadway. Safety concerns include not only misplaced explosions but also noise distractions, he said.

“It’s more of scaring people with the large percussion that comes from the big boom right in front of you,” he said. “I don’t think they do it that often.”

Republican Rep. Darrell Issa, who represents East County San Diego, complained on X that Newsom overruled “the best-trained and most-experienced leaders of our Marine Corps” to shut down the freeway and denounced the closure as “a spiteful publicity stunt… to ruin the occasion.”

After the errant explosion, Issa’s office said the danger was blown out of proportion.

“The media don’t need to amplify these comic exaggerations,” Issa’s spokesperson Jonathan Wilcox wrote in an email to CalMatters. “(asterisk)This(asterisk) is what shut the freeway down for several hours? Congressman Issa knows that a real governor — whether Republican Pete Wilson or Democrat Jerry Brown — would never have mislead (sic) the public and exploited a minimal incident for some attempted partisan gain.”

Levin acknowledged that as the minority party Democrats have fewer levers to get answers to questions about the misfire at Camp Pendleton. But he said he’ll use his role on the House Committee on Appropriations to keep up pressure.

“The administration heard safety warnings from the Marine Corps, and completely ignored them,” he said. “That would mean JD Vance and Pete Hegseth cared more about their demonstration than the safety of Marines, the safety of communities. So we need to push for answers and accountability.”

This story was originally published by CalMatters and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service, under the headline “A Massive Fraud Probe, a Botched Investigation, and the Thousands of Soldiers Who Paid.” Subscribe to their newsletter.

He lost his job and was kicked out of the Army. The stress cost him his marriage and relationship with his kids.

Luis Visalden, a former Army intelligence officer, was one of thousands of service members between 2012 and 2017 caught up in a massive fraud investigation of soldiers who received bonus payments for referring recruits to enlist in the National Guard and Army Reserves.

The scandal and now-discredited Army investigation exposed the far-reaching consequences of what’s known in the military justice system as “titling.”

They’ve Never Been Arrested. Why Does the FBI List Thousands of Service Members as Potential Criminals?

It didn’t matter that Visalden was never convicted or even arrested. In the military, simply being under investigation leads to a black mark known as “titling” that shows up in civilian criminal background databases and can haunt veterans for years.

“I got treated like garbage after doing everything good for God and country,” the Iraq war veteran told The War Horse.

When he returned from Iraq, Visalden participated in one of two military recruiting programs known as G-RAP (Guard Recruiting Assistance Program) and AR-RAP (Army Reserve Recruiting Assistance Program) that paid soldiers to recruit new members. In 2012, after allegations of fraud within the program, the Army Criminal Investigation Division launched a probe.

The CID was “out to get scalps,” said Jeffrey Addicott, director of the Warrior Defense Project at St. Mary’s University School of Law, who wrote a journal article on the investigation, which he described as a “fiasco.” Ultimately, the Army spent approximately $28 million on the investigation, which uncovered roughly $2.5 million in fraud, according to the advocacy site Defend Our Protectors, returning less than $500,000 to the treasury.

In 2022, the Army reopened nearly a thousand cases and cleared many charges. During the records review, former director of the U.S. Army Criminal Division Gregory Ford acknowledged that CID “fell short in a large number of these investigations.”

After Army Lt. Lee Hughes was accused of fraud over his involvement with G-RAP, he was forced to take a new job with a $60,000 pay cut and spend thousands to hire a lawyer. The accusations left him with a “stigma” amongst his peers, said Hughes, who was cleared in 2022 and now works at the Department of Commerce in Washington, D.C.

“You’re kind of just outcast,” he said. “Nobody wants to be around the guy that’s got the pending charges.”

Visalden estimates he made about $14,000 in bonuses through AR-RAP. After the Army CID informed Visalden that he was under investigation for fraud, he was kicked out of the military with an other than honorable discharge in June 2015.

He quickly got a new job, but was fired after someone who knew about the recruiting fraud accusations reported him to his new employer.

This series of events took a toll on his marriage, he said, and the stress of supporting three kids overwhelmed them. Eventually, divorce papers were served. He relocated to Ohio to find work. Now, he rarely sees his boys.

In November 2022, he got a certified letter from the Army CID stating that the charges had been unfounded. He hired lawyer Doug O’Connell to represent him, and more than a year later, his discharge had been upgraded to honorable, and he was restored to his previous rank.

Vindication—but years too late.

“What’s that mean to me?” he asks.

He tries to stay positive—he has a great job, a girlfriend, and a house in Cookeville, Tennessee. But he gets headaches now, and he wears a mouth guard—too much grinding has cracked his teeth. He had PTSD from combat in Iraq from 2003-2004; the stress of being titled made it worse. The memory of it all keeps him awake at night.

Plus, his pension is gone—he was 22 months shy of the years of service required to collect.

“I walk around with a broken relationship with my children, partly because of this,” Visalden said. “I wish it was different for me.”

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Rachel Fobar is a freelance investigative reporter and fact checker. Previously, she was a wildlife trade investigative reporter for National Geographic, and before that, she covered criminal justice and potentially wrongful convictions for The Medill Justice Project. She has also written for the Guardian, Popular Science, and ABC News. She has won several awards for her work, including the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor Award. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

Editors Note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service, under the headline “They’ve Never Been Arrested. Why Does the FBI List Thousands of Service Members as Potential Criminals?” Subscribe to their newsletter.

Denise Rosales has never been arrested.

She’s never been handcuffed.

She’s never spent a night behind bars, never stood before a judge to profess her innocence.

And yet, if you perform a background check, a criminal database maintained by the FBI will say that she was “arrested or received” into custody and charged with three crimes in January 2021.

While deployed in Kuwait, Rosales, a member of the Texas Army National Guard, threw a birthday party for her husband. Some of the guests allegedly brought alcohol, according to the Army, “in a nation where such substances are illegal.” She was investigated and fingerprinted by an Army investigator, but received nothing more than an administrative reprimand.

Still, more than four years later, the Texas mother of two is fighting to clear her name. She’s been forced out of her full-time position with the National Guard on a multiagency counterdrug task force, lost job opportunities, and even denied the chance to chaperone her kids on school field trips.

Rosales’ saga is the result of a perplexing record-keeping process the military justice system calls “titling”—and it’s one that’s left potentially thousands of veterans saddled with false criminal histories, according to a lawsuit against the Army and Department of Defense.

The term sounds nonthreatening enough. But in the military, “titling” isn’t about taking ownership of a car or property. It’s what happens when a service member’s name is simply listed as the “subject” in a military criminal investigative report. “Titling does not mean an individual has been arrested, charged or convicted of a crime,” a legal assistance document on the Army’s website explains.

A Massive Fraud Probe, a Botched Investigation, and the Thousands of Soldiers Who Paid

But here’s the problem: Every branch of the military shares titling records in criminal databases with more than two dozen agencies, including the FBI, even if the case was dropped.

The fallout can be devastating because the records are retrievable for decades. Veterans can be passed over for promotions, rejected on apartment applications, and denied firearms clearance, advocates say. With the stain on their record, some struggle to get a job for years.

“Who will take my word over the plain text of the FBI’s criminal history?” Rosales, 39, asks in an affidavit in her lawsuit.

She feels betrayed, thinking back to the day when a military recruiter came to her school when she was 17. “I was told the military would guide me in the right direction and have my back,” Rosales told The War Horse.

With the Army refusing to budge, Rosales’ case has become a showdown over the military’s system of titling. Veterans and civil liberties advocates are calling for reforms while victims’ groups stress the need for the military to alert civilian law enforcement and employers of the danger among their ranks.

But during a hearing in the ongoing lawsuit, a judge posed a fundamental question about the service members and veterans like Rosales being wrongfully tagged by the military justice system that even the government’s attorney was unable to answer:

Why “is this that big a deal to the Army?”

How big a problem is titling?

It’s hard to know how many people have been caught up in the quagmire, because there is no requirement to notify service members they’ve been titled, and many don’t find out for years until it turns up, for example, when someone tries to buy a gun, travel abroad, or apply for a job.

The War Horse has filed Freedom of Information Act requests for records from the Department of Defense and National Archives, which houses military criminal files, to reveal how many people have been titled but not court-martialed, but the agencies are not responding to requests during the government shutdown.

Frank Rosenblatt, a former Army prosecutor and an associate professor at the Mississippi College School of Law, estimated the number is at least 10,000 service members and veterans.

The problem is, our military justice system doesn’t “always easily translate over into civilian terms,” said Rosenblatt, who has represented titled veterans.

In the military, titling only requires the existence of “credible information” that a crime was committed. “Legally, this is a very low standard, far below the standard required at trial by a court of law,” according to Fort Leonard Wood’s Army legal assistance office.

“In the vast majority of cases, these [investigators] are young soldiers who don’t have any significant level of criminal justice experience, but are somehow vested with tremendous authority to make determinations that follow people for the rest of their lives,” said Doug O’Connell, an Austin, Texas-based attorney who is representing Rosales.

And the Department of Defense spells out the other huge hurdle for wrongfully titled service members:

“Once the subject of a criminal investigation is indexed in” the database known as the Defense Central Index of Investigations, the information remains “even if they are found not guilty”—unless DOD law enforcement officials agree to expunge the record.

But that’s a whole separate headache. To appeal, victims of titling are forced—sometimes long after they leave the military—to prove the crime didn’t happen, said O’Connell, a former Special Forces colonel in the Army who now specializes in defending military service members.

“They’ve created a system where you’re guilty until proven innocent,” he said. “If the [Army Criminal Investigation Division] agent believes something, then you’re going to have this criminal history created, and it’s up to you to now prove that it didn’t happen.”

An overcorrection?

The Army’s Criminal Investigation Division did not respond to multiple interview requests from The War Horse over more than a month of reporting. The United States Attorney’s Office, which represents the Army and DOD in Rosales’ lawsuit, declined to comment on the case, citing active litigation. The FBI, whose lawyer argued is “simply a clearinghouse” of titling information, was dismissed from the lawsuit.

But even Rosales’s legal team acknowledges the logic behind the military sharing criminal records: If someone commits a crime during their military service, civilian law enforcement should be able to know.

“I want my government to keep me safe from people who they know have a propensity for illegality or criminality or violence,” said William Thomas, one of Rosales’ attorneys and a former Army field artillery officer.

To understand why titling creates chaos in the lives of so many veterans, go back to the pews of a white church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

Devin Kelley, an Air Force veteran with two domestic assault convictions, opened fire in November 2017 during morning services at the small community church, killing 26 people, several of them children. It was one of the deadliest mass shootings in the state’s history.

But why had Kelley been allowed to purchase his semiautomatic rifle, along with the two handguns found in his vehicle, from licensed vendors, given his criminal background?

His convictions during his military service hadn’t been entered into the national criminal background system.

The Department of Defense has long required that criminal history, including fingerprints, be shared with the FBI when a service member is investigated for an offense.

But, as it turns out, the military wasn’t very diligent about doing it. After the Texas church shootings, a Pentagon review found that one in four fingerprint cards were not submitted to the FBI, and a 1997 report by the DOD inspector general found that in the Army, fingerprint cards weren’t submitted to the FBI in more than 80% of cases.

The public demanded accountability. Victims’ families sued the federal government, arguing the Air Force had been negligent in its failure to share Kelley’s criminal background, and in 2023, the Department of Justice announced it had reached a tentative settlement of $144.5 million.

In response, the military overcorrected, O’Connell said. After the shootings, the titling problem bloomed into a widespread issue, likely affecting thousands more veterans.

The military doesn’t want anyone “to slip through the cracks,” Rosenblatt said. In the face of potential lawsuits, there’s a strong incentive to share information about veterans’ backgrounds, but “they don’t have strong incentives for people’s privacy and due process.”

Discovering his own violent arrest record

The crimes were shocking: Murder. Negligent homicide. Attempted aggravated sexual contact.

It took former Green Beret James Morris four years to get these false charges cleared from his record.

After a fellow soldier was killed during a 2017 hazing incident, one of the assailants claimed Morris had given permission for the attack. Even though Morris hadn’t been present for the assault and was never taken into custody or charged, he was fingerprinted and titled during the investigation.

Little did he know that left him with a violent arrest record. He only discovered it in 2021 when he tried to renew his concealed carry license.

While the offenses remained on his record, Morris lost his security clearance and was wary of applying for jobs. But one of the worst parts was losing pride in his service.

“They took away from me more than just my career—that’s 18 years, 10 months of memories that I can’t grapple with properly,” said Morris, who now works as a contract training analyst at Fort Gordon in Georgia.

For many veterans and service members like Rosales, the ordeal continues—undoing titling is extremely difficult, advocates say. In more than a hundred appeal cases he’s filed, O’Connell said he’s only been successful once.

Rosales first discovered she had an arrest record when she returned from Kuwait and tried to return to her National Guard-sponsored position as a drug analyst for a counterdrug task force. She sought to have her records corrected in November 2021, but the Army denied her request and appeal over the next two years.

If an “untitling” petition is denied, the next step is to appeal to the Army Board for Correction of Military Records. People have had more success in expunging their records there, O’Connell said, but the process is lengthy, due to a growing backlog of cases. It can take years to get cleared.

“It’s hard to prove your innocence,” said Liz Ullman, who launched the advocacy group Defend Our Protectors after nearly a thousand service members were caught up in a recruiting scandal. “Which is why you’re not supposed to have to.”

‘I want my children to be proud of their mother’

The fallout from Rosales’ titling record was swift and substantial.

She lost her National Guard job as a criminal analyst in a federal counterdrug task force, which she’d held for 12 years, and cut short her eligibility for retirement benefits, including a pension. In an affidavit, she said she was “reluctant to apply for other Guard employment to save myself from the embarrassment of bringing up my false criminal history.” When her security clearance comes up for renewal, she expects it will be revoked.

She sold her home and relocated her family closer to the Mexican border when a commander gave her a chance—despite her record—to work as a first sergeant for Operation Lone Star, a border security initiative launched in 2021 by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The false charges continued to come up, blocking her access to certain buildings, she said.

What’s even more humiliating is that she’s been unable to attend her kids’ school field trips, which require background checks.

“I want my children to be proud of their mother,” she said in the affidavit, “and not ask why I cannot attend a school event.”

Still, her case drags on. While a judge in September rejected her legal team’s petition to approve the suit as a class action case, the lawyers are still hopeful that a win in Rosales’ case could help other wrongfully titled veterans.

The Army’s refusal to correct her records hasn’t just befuddled her advocates—even the judge presiding in her lawsuit has expressed similar confusion.

‘I don’t understand why they just don’t remove it’

Back in May 2021, an Army JAG officer confirmed in an email to one of Rosales’ lawyers that she had not been arrested for the incident in Kuwait. Despite the acknowledgement, the Army Criminal Investigation Division denied her request and a subsequent appeal to have her records corrected.

Three years later, with her case in U.S. District court, lawyers for both Rosales and the Army were still quibbling before a judge over whether Rosales had been arrested. The Army’s lawyer, Matthew Mueller, acknowledged that although Rosales was read her rights, gave a statement, and was fingerprinted and photographed, she was never detained in jail or handcuffed.

By 37 pages into the hearing transcript, U.S. District Judge David A. Ezra seemed exasperated.

“What is a little aggravating is we don’t really have an explanation from the Army as to why they haven’t changed her record,” he said at the May 2024 court hearing. “Apparently, she wasn’t charged. I mean, I don’t understand why they don’t just remove it.”

In an order two weeks later, Ezra doubled down on his point: “Defendants provided no explanation as to why they would not change her record,” he wrote. “One could only speculate as to why the Army would defend a record that is not accurate of the events that took place.”

Now, with both sides awaiting the judge’s decision on whether the case should move to trial, frustration is mounting for Rosales and her legal team.

“Do I really have to stand in front of a federal judge, a lifetime appointee, a third co-equal branch of government, and say, ‘Judge, I just want the Army to stop lying about my client?’” asked Thomas, one of her attorneys. “Is that really how far I have to go?”

Reforming a ‘giant organizational defect’

The solution to this issue seems simple enough, advocates say: The titling process needs reform.

Derrick Miller, the director of the Congressional Justice for Warriors Caucus, which advocates for wrongly accused veterans, has lobbied for a legislative amendment that would require that titling records be deleted after 10 years if the service member will not be charged or court-martialed over the allegation. These reforms would ensure due process and prevent an accusation from having the same consequences as a conviction, Miller said.

U.S. Rep. Eli Crane, an Arizona Republican and former Navy SEAL, introduced the amendment in August.

“Far too often, the reputation of our brave service members is unfairly tarnished due to titling,” Crane told The War Horse, calling the amendment a “sensible approach to protecting the livelihoods of our courageous veterans.”

Reforming the titling system is common sense, experts say. The military’s system of titling is a “giant organizational defect,” said Robert Bracknell, a retired Marine armor officer and an adjunct professor at William & Mary Law School.

There’s little incentive for the military to change the titling process, Rosenblatt added. “This isn’t a politically powerful block of the military,” he said, referring to those who’ve been unfairly titled. “It’s often people who are on the outs with their command, and they end up being investigated.”

The issue needs a champion, Bracknell said.

Rosales could be that champion. But her team wonders why she needs to be.

“Why are they fighting so hard to preserve something so wrong?” O’Connell asks. “As a guy who spent 30 years in the Army, I’m completely disgusted.”

This War Horse story was edited by Mike Frankel, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar. Hrisanthi Pickett wrote the headlines.

Rachel Fobar is a freelance investigative reporter and fact checker. Previously, she was a wildlife trade investigative reporter for National Geographic, and before that, she covered criminal justice and potentially wrongful convictions for The Medill Justice Project. She has also written for the Guardian, Popular Science, and ABC News. She has won several awards for her work, including the Chicago Headline Club’s Peter Lisagor Award. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from Northwestern University.

The U.S. military on Wednesday launched its ninth strike against an alleged drug-carrying vessel, killing three people in the eastern Pacific Ocean, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said, expanding the Trump administration’s campaign against drug trafficking in South America.

It followed another strike Tuesday night, also in the eastern Pacific, that killed two people, Hegseth posted on social media hours earlier. The attacks were departures from the seven previous U.S. strikes that had targeted vessels in the Caribbean Sea. They bring the death toll to at least 37 from attacks that began last month.

The strikes represent an expansion of the military’s targeting area as well as a shift to the waters off South America where much of the cocaine from the world’s largest producers is smuggled. Hegseth’s social media posts also drew a direct comparison between the war on terrorism that the U.S. declared after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the Trump administration’s crackdown.

“Just as Al Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people,” Hegseth said, adding “there will be no refuge or forgiveness — only justice.”

Later Wednesday, he referred to the alleged drug-runners as “the ‘Al Qaeda’ of our hemisphere.”

Republican President Donald Trump has justified the strikes by asserting that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels and proclaiming the criminal organizations unlawful combatants, relying on the same legal authority used by President George W. Bush’s administration for the war on terrorism.

Trump says strikes on land could be next

Asked about the latest boat attack, Trump insisted that “we have legal authority. We’re allowed to do that.” He said similar strikes could eventually come on land.

“We will hit them very hard when they come in by land,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. “We’re totally prepared to do that. And we’ll probably go back to Congress and explain exactly what we’re doing when we come to the land.”

Lawmakers from both political parties have expressed concerns about Trump ordering the military actions without receiving authorization from Congress or providing many details.

Appearing alongside Trump, Secretary of State Marco Rubio defended such strikes, saying, “If people want to stop seeing drug boats blow up, stop sending drugs to the United States.”

Trump said the strikes he is ordering are meant to save Americans and “the only way you can’t feel bad about it ... is that you realize that every time you see that happen, you’re saving 25,000 lives.”

Targeting a boat in a thoroughfare for cocaine smuggling

In the first brief video Hegseth posted Wednesday, a small boat, half-filled with brown packages, is seen moving along the water. Several seconds into the video, the boat explodes and is seen floating motionless on the water in flames.

The second video shows another boat moving quickly before being struck by an explosion. Video apparently recorded after the explosion shows packages floating in the water.

The U.S. military has built up an unusually large force in the Caribbean Sea and the waters off the coast of Venezuela since this summer, raising speculation that Trump could try to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Maduro faces charges of narcoterrorism in the U.S.

In his posts on the strikes, Trump has repeatedly argued that illegal narcotics and the drug fentanyl carried by the vessels have been poisoning Americans.

While the bulk of American overdose deaths are from fentanyl, the drug is transported by land from Mexico. Venezuela is a major drug transit zone, but the eastern Pacific Ocean, not the Caribbean, is the primary area for smuggling cocaine.

Colombia and Peru, countries with coastlines on the eastern Pacific, are the world’s top cocaine producers. Wedged between them is Ecuador, whose world-class ports and myriad maritime shipping containers filled with bananas have become the perfect vehicle for drug traffickers to move their product.

The administration has sidestepped prosecuting any occupants of alleged drug-running vessels after returning two survivors of an earlier strike to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.

Ecuadorian officials later said they released the man who was returned because they had no evidence he committed a crime in their country.

Questions from Congress as strikes continue

Some Republican lawmakers have asked the White House for more clarification on its legal justification and specifics on how the strikes are conducted, while Democrats insist they are violations of U.S. and international law.

Sen. Richard Blumenthal, a Democratic member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he was alarmed and angry about a lack of information on the strikes.

“Expanding the geography simply expands the lawlessness and the recklessness in the use of the American military without seeming legal or practical justification,” Blumenthal said.

He said the way to target trafficking would be stopping the boats and interrogating those aboard to find the source of the drugs, “not just destroy the smugglers who are likely to be at the bottom of the smuggling chain.”

The Republican-controlled Senate recently voted down a Democratic-sponsored war powers resolution, mostly along party lines, that would have required the president to seek authorization from Congress before further military strikes.

Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana said he’s met with Rubio.

“He has researched the legal ramifications carefully and he believes we’re on solid ground in attacking these narcoterrorists,” Kennedy said. “I trust his judgment.”

Associated Press writers Will Weissert and Kevin Freking in Washington and Regina Garcia Cano in Caracas, Venezuela, contributed to this report.

The U.S. military conducted its eighth strike against an alleged drug vessel, killing two people, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said Wednesday.

The Tuesday night strike occurred in the eastern Pacific Ocean. The seven previous strikes all targeted vessels in the Caribbean. According to Hegseth in a social media post, the strike killed two people, bringing the death toll from all the strikes to at least 34 people.

In a brief video released by Hegseth, a small boat, half-filled with brown packages, is seen moving along the water. Several seconds into the video, the boat explodes and is seen floating motionless on the water in flames.

In his post, Hegseth took the unusual step of equating the alleged drug traffickers to the group behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attack.

“Just as Al Qaeda waged war on our homeland, these cartels are waging war on our border and our people,” Hegseth said, adding “there will be no refuge or forgiveness — only justice.”

President Donald Trump has justified the strikes by asserting that the United States is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels and is relying on the same legal authority used by President George W. Bush’s administration when it declared a war on terrorism after the Sept. 11 attack.

However, the Trump administration has also sidestepped prosecuting any of the occupants of the alleged drug-running vessels after it returned two survivors of an earlier strike to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia.

Ecuadorian officials later said that they released the man that was returned to their country, saying that they had no evidence he committed a crime in their country.