As a comedian, you never forget the first time you bomb. For me, it wasn’t on stage.

I was in southern Afghanistan in May 2014 when a vehicle-borne improvised explosive device detonated near me while covering a routine patrol as a public affairs specialist.

It was something I had a dozen times before, but in a flash I was on my back, ears ringing, lungs full of dust.

I don’t remember the sound — just the silence that came after. That was the first time I learned what silence was — that unique brand that only occurs when your brain is trying to reboot and you’re unsure what may or may not be broken.

The blast knocked me out cold. When I came to, nothing was where it had been. The explosion left me with a traumatic brain injury and partial deafness in my right ear, with tinnitus that still rings to this day. I deal with memory loss, light sensitivity and sudden moments of confusion or panic that attack without warning.

I am fortunate to be alive. Not everyone who has gone through the same experience can say the same. That fact followed me home and into civilian life. It followed me into comedy.

After I was medically retired from the Army, I felt unmoored. I didn’t want to be thanked for my service. I wanted to feel something again — other than adrenaline and dread. I wanted to laugh. I wanted to make other people laugh.

So, I started writing, chasing the rhythm of a good joke like I used to chase good light for a photo while convincing people I was more than just a POG. (Writing that last sentence and saying it out loud, I realize that’s probably the best joke I will ever tell.)

My civilian work eventually took me to Chicago, where I enrolled at The Second City, a comedy institution where the entire curriculum is built around turning pain into timing, a place where you’re not only encouraged but expected to fail. But even with all that structure and guidance, and despite learning from the best and being repeatedly told I was capable and that my story mattered, it still wasn’t enough.

I was scared — terrified, actually. Not of the stage, but of being exposed, of being seen, of letting people in on what the war had done to me.

So, I took a break — a long one at that. I told myself I needed time to write, reset and work on new material. But the truth was more simple: I didn’t know who I was without the uniform, and I wasn’t sure if people would laugh at what was left.

For a long time, I convinced myself I hadn’t earned the right to be on stage. Like telling jokes meant I wasn’t honoring the people who didn’t come home. Or that getting a laugh somehow cheapened what had happened.

But here’s what I’ve learned as months went by: if I survived, I’m still allowed to speak. I’m allowed to create. I’m allowed to be more than what happened to me.

Two years ago, I got back on stage. There wasn’t some profound moment that caused me to do so. I just went out and did it, embracing the fear that had gripped me for so long. With the encouragement from friends and a refresher with the Armed Services Arts Partnership, I slowly started to find my comedic voice again.

Strangely enough, performing again reminded me of being on a mission. You rehearse. You plan. You step into a high-stakes environment where nothing is guaranteed. And then you execute.

The audience, like a patrol route, is unpredictable. You adjust. You move. You adapt. You get through it or you don’t — but you’re changed by it either way.

When I bomb now, I don’t panic, because — without sounding too cliche — I know what actual bombing is. I’ve felt the pressure change before an explosion. I’ve seen the color drain from the world. So, when a joke doesn’t land, I breathe. I wait. I reset. I’ll write something better next time.

What that VBIED taught me — besides basic blast physics — is that timing matters and silence isn’t always failure. Sometimes it’s the space before the punchline.

It also taught me people are always watching how you carry yourself when everything goes wrong. In combat, it’s about bearing. In comedy, it’s about confidence. My pace on stage is a reflection of that. It’s slower, calculated and rehearsed. You don’t have to pretend you’re invincible, but you do have to show the crowd you’re still in control — even when the wheels are coming off.

I used to think comedy and combat were opposites. The two could never co-exist. One is chaos, the other is craft. One is pain, the other is relief. But now I see them as siblings. Both rely on rhythm. Both require you to say the unspeakable out loud. And each demands you be fully present in moments where the stakes are high and the outcome is unknown.

This May will mark 11 years since I was blown up. And while the scars remain, so does the voice. The one that says, “You’re still here. Say something useful.”

Some nights that voice tells a joke about memory loss or PTSD. Other times it gets on stage and tries not to flinch at the light. And then during others it wonders how many people in the audience have their own hidden war stories.

But every night, that voice remembers that laughter is proof of life. And that after everything, I’m still standing.

Still up. Still writing. Still here.

By the time the First Army of the American Expeditionary Forces launched its first major offensive at St. Mihiel on Sept. 12, 1918, the world had been at war for nearly four years. With the success of St. Mihiel, Gen. John J. Pershing, commander of the AEF, set his sights on an even more ambitious advance: The Argonne Forest.

It was here, however, that the American “Doughboys” encountered their first serious opposition — the German Fifth Army.

During the grueling six-week campaign that ensued, the AEF was provided a degree of innovative air support that included the Army’s first home-manufactured airplane — albeit a license-built British design, the De Havilland DH-4. Reaching the front were only 198 of the aircraft, which had to be supplemented in American squadrons by French-built Salmson 2A2s.

Only four airmen were awarded the Medal of Honor during the First World War, with two aviators, 1st Lt. Harold E. Goettler and 2nd Lt. Erwin R. Bleckley, earning the honor during one of the most dramatic battles fought within the Argonne Campaign: that involving the “Lost Battalion.”

Harold Ernest Goettler was born in Chicago, Illinois on July 21, 1890. After the U.S. declared war in April 1917, he joined the Signal Enlisted Reserve Corps in July, but transferred in October to the USAS for flight training at the School of Military Aeronautics at the University of Illinois.

He graduated in January 1918 and in February he received his second lieutenant’s commission. After further training in the 28th Aero Squadron, he transferred in August to the 50th Aero Squadron, based at Amanty aerodrome, France.

Erwin Russell Bleckley was born in Wichita, Kansas on Dec. 30, 1894, and was working as a teller in the Fourth National Bank of Wichita when war broke out. On June 6, 1917 he enlisted in Battery F, 1st Field Artillery, Kansas National Guard and obtained his second lieutenant’s commission on July 5. This unit was activated and redesignated the 130th Field Artillery at Fort Sill, Oklahoma and attached to the 35th Division.

Having transferred to the 50th Aero Squadron on Aug. 14, 1918, Bleckley began flying missions as an observer pilot with Lt. Goettler at the outset of the St. Mihiel Offensive. It did not take long for the pair to be listed among the squadron’s most dedicated and reliable duos.

The Argonne offensive encountered difficulties from the start, but an exceptional crisis began on Oct. 3, when 554 soldiers, all from the 77th Infantry Division, found themselves cut off by a ravine alongside the Charlevaux road.

That mixed component of troops, under the overall command of Maj. Charles W. Whittlesey, became known as the “Lost Battalion,” despite the 77th not exactly being a battalion nor particularly lost.

Its plight, however, was quite real.

Surrounded by elements of the German 76th Reserve Division, the Doughboys were pinned down by adversaries they actually outnumbered, but who were intimately familiar with the terrain. The Germans controlled the high ground, with machine guns that turned every inch of the ravine into a killing zone.

On Oct. 4, two attempts by the 77th Division to break through to the trapped men were repulsed, resulting in more than 200 casualties. Meanwhile, the cut-off units, commanded by Whittlesey, lay isolated, out of communication with the AEF and were soon suffering from dwindling ammunition, food and water.

The following day, Capt. Daniel P. Morse, commander of the 50th Aero Squadron, got a telephone request from the 77th Division to airdrop supplies to Whittlesey’s command. Boxes of ammunition, food and medical supplies were rushed to the aerodrome wrapped in blankets, straw, rags and cardboard in an attempt to prevent items from breaking when they hit the ground.

Meanwhile, a DH-4 tried unsuccessfully to pinpoint the Americans’ location. When Lieutenants Floyd M. Pickrell and Alfred C. George tried again the next morning, they came under intense ground fire, but as they flew over the ravine they spotted khaki-dressed soldiers waving from their dugouts. George hastily threw out the supply bundles, while Pickrell marked the location on his map.

Later that morning, as a French division tried to link up with the “Lost Battalion,” only to be pushed back by German counterattacks, Morse ran an aerial shuttle service in an attempt to supply the besieged troops.

It was no easy task. Whittlesey’s men had laid out white panels for the aircraft, but he ordered them taken in because they drew enemy fire. The Germans also laid out marking panels, trying to trick the Americans into dropping the supplies to them — which happened all too often, as packages fell outside of the 1,800-square-yard area in which the “Lost Battalion” was pinned down.

Meanwhile, enemy ground fire intensified with each sortie. Two DH-4s were downed behind German lines on Oct. 6, but their crewmen, Lieutenants George R. Phillips, Mitchell H. Brown, Allen Tracy Bird and William A. Bolt, managed to make their way back to the Allied side.

First Lt. Maurice E. Graham landed with his observer, 2nd Lt. James E. McCurdy, seriously wounded in the neck. After several flights, DH-4 No. 2, flown by 1st Lt. Goettler and 2nd Lt. Bleckley, had to be retired for repairs.

With time for one more sortie before darkness fell, Goettler and Bleckley took to the skies, dropping several bundles into the Americans’ approximate area.

As Goettler came back around at almost treetop height to drop his last few parcels, he and Bleckley were both struck by ground fire, but he managed to reach Allied lines before crashing. There, French soldiers found Goettler dead in the cockpit. Bleckley died moments later, but not before he passed on information to give the Allied artillery more accurate coordinates on the American and German locations.

At dawn on Oct. 7, a reinforced 77th Division finally drove the Germans back and re-established contact with the “Lost Battalion” that evening. By then, only 194 of Maj. Whittlesey’s command were still standing.

In the first such operation to be performed by the AEF, the 50th Aero Squadron had airdropped more than 1,200 pounds of supplies in 18 hours. However, only a fraction of that reached its intended recipients, and the effort cost the squadron two men killed and one wounded.

The two airmen who sacrificed their lives in support of their comrades on the ground, Goettler and Bleckley, were both posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, with the both aviators’ citations reading that the men “showed the highest possible contempt of personal danger, devotion to duty, courage and valor.”

The U.S. Army on Tuesday identified three of the four U.S. soldiers who died during a training exercise in Lithuania last week.

Sgt. Jose Duenez, Jr., 25, of Joliet, Illinois; Sgt. Edvin F. Franco, 25, of Glendale, California; and Pfc. Dante D. Taitano, 21, of Dededo, Guam, all from 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, were recovered Monday from a peat bog at a training site near Pabrade, Lithuania, the Army said.

“This loss is simply devastating,” said Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, 3rd Infantry Division commanding general, in a statement posted on the 3rd Infantry Division’s Facebook page. “These men were honored soldiers of the Marne Division. We are wrapping our arms around the families and loved ones of our soldiers during [this] incredibly difficult time.”

A fourth soldier was recovered earlier Tuesday. The Army has not released their name, pending confirmation of notification of next of kin.

At the time the soldiers were reported missing March 25, they had been conducting a maintenance mission with an M88A2 Hercules armored vehicle to recover another Army vehicle at a training area near Pabadre, Army officials previously said. The soldiers were deployed to Lithuania as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, which has been sending rotations into Europe since Russia invaded the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014.

The soldiers were permanently stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

According to the 3rd Infantry Division, Duenez was an M1 Abrams tank system maintainer and had served more than seven years in the Army. He deployed to Poland in 2021 and Germany in 2022, and he was currently serving in the 5th Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment.

“Sgt. Jose Duenez will always hold a special place in our hearts. As both a leader and a soldier, he set an example every day — always the first to arrive and the last to leave, greeting every challenge with a smile and a readiness to support anyone who required assistance,” said Capt. Madyson K. Wellens, a commander in his squadron.

Franco was also an M1 Abrams tank system maintainer who had been in the Army for more than six years. He deployed to Korea in 2020 and Germany in 2022.

Wellens said Franco’s “infectious smile and genuine joy in being with his team were matched only by the tenacity and drive. He never asked more of his soldiers than he was willing to give himself — a true testament to his character.”

Taitano was also an M1 Abrams tank system maintainer. He had been in the Army for nearly two years, and this was his first deployment.

Cpt. Matthew Lund, another 5th Squadron commander, said, “Taitano will always be remembered as the spark of the team. He wore a smile on his face no matter the environment or task and constantly brought the team together with his charisma and laughter.”

The initial search for the soldiers included military helicopters, Lithuanian diving teams and hundreds of U.S. and Lithuanian soldiers and law enforcement officers looking through thick forests and swampy terrain. On March 26, search teams found the soldiers’ vehicle 15 feet underwater.

What followed was an arduous, multiday effort to get to the vehicle, which continued to sink and be encased in mud as time went on. Officials brought in engineers, tons of gravel, excavators and slurry pumps. The Polish Armed Forces volunteered a unit of 150 military engineers to help in the recovery. And over the weekend, a U.S. Navy dive crew from Commander, Task Force 68, headquartered in Rota, Spain, arrived on site.

There was a breakthrough in the recovery effort Sunday when the Navy dive crew — after multiple failed attempts — attached steel cables to two of the hoist points on the M88A2 Hercules, the Army said. To get to the hoist points, divers maneuvered through layers of mud, clay and sediment, using a ground-penetrating radar provided by Lithuanian experts to find their way.

Two hours after the cables were attached, the vehicle was unearthed from the bog. By that time, the recovery team grew to include hundreds of personnel from multiple services and countries, the Army said.

Recovery operations continued Monday after the crews recovered the bodies of three of the soldiers. Recovery dogs and their handlers flew in from Estonia on Monday to assist in the search for the fourth soldier. Crews also employed two specialized drone systems, including one equipped with ground-penetrating radar.

“We are incredibly relieved that we were able to bring this recovery to an end and bring closure to all the families, friends and teammates of our soldiers,” said Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, commanding general of 1st Armored Division. “We cannot thank our Allies and fellow service members enough, especially the Lithuanians, who spared no resource in support of this mission. Together, we delivered on our promise to never leave a fallen comrade.”

An investigation into the incident is ongoing, the Army said.

Military Times Senior Editor Nikki Wentling and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The American landing on Guadalcanal on Aug. 7, 1942 and subsequent seizure of the airbase they would name Henderson Field marked the first American offensive in the wake of the Dec. 7, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. What followed was six months of savage fighting on land and a succession of naval engagements that cost 48 total warships between U.S. and Japanese forces.

Among numerous naval heroes who emerged from both sides, Rear Adm. Norman Scott stood out for his role in two of the campaign’s most critical naval duels.

Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on Aug. 10, 1889, Scott chose to leave his landlocked home for the sea and graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1911. That same year saw the graduation of Daniel Judson Callaghan, born in San Francisco on July 26, 1890, whose destiny would converge with Scott’s some 31 years later.

Scott first found action during World War I as the executive officer of USS Jacob Jones, which, on the night of Dec. 6, 1916, was torpedoed by the German submarine U-53. The Jacob Jones holds the distinction of becoming the first American destroyer loss in history. Of 110 crewmen, 64 lost their lives. Scott was among just five officers who survived.

After a succession of sea and land assignments during the 1920s-30s, Scott took command of the heavy cruiser Pensacola until just after the attack on Pearl Harbor, when he served at the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations. He was promoted to rear admiral in May 1942, and ordered to the Pacific in June.

By that August he commanded San Juan, a specialized anti-aircraft light cruiser with 16 five-inch guns in twin turrets and the latest SG (screen grid) radar, designed to accompany and defend aircraft carriers such as Hornet and Enterprise.

On the night of Aug. 9, a Japanese force of cruisers and destroyers under Vice Adm. Gunichi Mikawa surprised an Allied cruiser squadron off Savo Island, sinking USS Astoria, Quincy and Vincennes and His Majesty’s Australian Ship Canberra.

It left the Allies demoralized. Fortunately for them, Mikawa departed rather than take full advantage of his success.

In September, Scott was placed in command of Task Force 64, or “Task Force Sugar,” charged with patrolling the southern approaches between Rennell Island and Lunga Point. On Oct. 7, he took position and, keen to get revenge for Savo, trained his men hard for the next several days. Finally, on Oct. 11, aircraft reported Japanese reinforcements coming down the island chain the Allies called “The Slot,” as well as an escort of cruisers and destroyers.

Flying his pennant from heavy cruiser San Francisco, Scott led heavy cruiser Salt Lake City, light cruisers Boise and Helena and five destroyers around the western end of Cape Esperance to cover entry into Savo Sound.

At 2325 hours Helena made contact with the enemy, but that was 15 minutes later than it should have — although (or perhaps because) it had the latest SG radar, it was stationed at the rear of Scott’s column. One of San Francisco’s floatplanes confirmed that enemy warships were coming directly toward the Americans, putting Scott in the enviable position of “crossing the T,” bringing more guns to bear.

Approaching was one of the victors at Savo Island, Rear Adm. Aritomo Goto’s Sentai (cruiser division) 6, comprising heavy cruisers Aoba, Furutaka and Kinugasa, plus two destroyers. As he closed in, Scott ordered “Left to course, 230 degrees,” but while most of his ships performed the right turn perfectly, three of his destroyers made wider turns that placed them behind Scott’s column and within range of the Japanese.

Amid the uncertainty, at 2346 Helena reported its radar contact and asked to open fire. Scott replied “Roger,” meaning he’d received the message, but Helena’s skipper interpreted it as “open fire.” And fire he did — joined by guns on both sides.

Four American destroyers were caught between the opposing columns and one, Duncan, was demolished by heavy cruiser Kinugasa and destroyer Hatsuyuki as well as some American shells.

It sank the next day with 50 of its 195 crewmen, though destroyer McCalla rescued the rest. Damaged were Salt Lake City, Boise and destroyer Farenholt. The Japanese suffered worse, with heavy cruiser Furutaka and destroyer Fubuki sunk, flagship Aoba badly damaged and Adm. Goto mortally wounded.

Goto’s sacrifice accomplished his primary mission, however. Unnoticed by the Allies, the troop transport ships he was protecting reached Guadalcanal unmolested, but Scott’s tactical success over Goto directly avenged Savo and, as the first major American cruiser victory in the Pacific, did much to restore Allied confidence.

There were, however, more sea battles to come.

On the night of Oct. 13, the Japanese battleships Kongo and Haruna pummeled Henderson Field, followed by a night bombardment by Chokai and Kinugasa on the 14th and another by heavy cruisers Myoko and Maya the following day. This was followed by a carrier confrontation off the Santa Cruz Islands on Oct. 26, in which the Americans lost the USS Hornet, but the Japanese again failed to follow through.

While Japan repaired or re-equipped their four carriers and the Americans hastily fixed up Enterprise, the Japanese gathered what they had left for the next bombardment: battleships Hiei and Kirishima, light cruiser Nagara and 14 destroyers, commanded by Rear Admiral Hiroaki Abe.

As this formidable fleet approached on the night of Nov. 12, three American cargo ships were en route to Guadalcanal, escorted by Scott aboard the anti-aircraft cruiser Atlanta alongside five destroyers.

Upon reaching their objective, Scott and his warships were ordered to join Task Group 67, led by Rear Adm. Daniel J. Callaghan from aboard his “hometown” flagship, San Francisco, with heavy cruiser Portland, light cruiser Helena and anti-aircraft cruiser Juneau, along with another three destroyers.

As they entered the combat zone the Americans took up a column like the one used so successfully at Cape Esperance, but also — once again — holding their three cruisers and two destroyers with SG radar at the rear. The Japanese battleships, on the other hand, had no radar at all. Add a rain squall to obscure both sides’ vision and their vanguards passed one another just after midnight on the ominous date of Friday the 13.

At 0124 Helena made first contact, but defective radar resulted in excessive reliance on talk between ships (TBS) until 0141, when destroyer Cushing made out enemy destroyers Yudachi and Harusame silhouetted in the starlight 3,000 yards away and turned left to bring its torpedoes into play.

Atlanta, next in line, also turned hard left. As his formation began falling apart, Adm. Callaghan signaled on the TBS, “What are you doing?”

“Avoiding our own destroyers,” Atlanta’s Capt. Samuel P. Jenkins reportedly responded.

With mounting confusion on both sides, at 0145 Callaghan signaled “Stand by to open fire!”

At 0150, however, a searchlight from Hiei pierced the darkness and fell on Atlanta, 5,000 meters away. Scott, true to form, ordered a full broadside, but all 12 of his shells fell 2,000 meters short. Thirty seconds later Hiei’s eight 14-inch guns, devastated Atlanta in one of the war’s most accurate salvos, killing Scott and all senior officers on the bridge save for a wounded Capt. Jenkins.

Although Atlanta was out of the fight, Hiei paid for its searchlight as destroyers Cushing, Laffey, Sterett and O’Bannon, finding themselves anywhere from 2,000 to a few hundred meters away, engaged the battleship in a desperate point blank duel to the death.

The Japanese destroyers were also embroiled in the fight, including Amatsukaze, which scored two torpedo hits on destroyer Barton that sank it with 90 percent of its crew.

Noticing Yudachi under fire from Juneau, Amatsukaze fired more torpedoes that drove the cruiser off with a broken back. Cushing attacked Hiei but was sunk by a broadside from destroyer Terutsuki.

Destroyer Laffey almost collided with Hiei, then raked its mast and bridge, killing Abe’s chief of staff, Capt. Masakane Suzuki, and wounding several officers, including Hiei’s Capt. Masao Nishida and Abe himself. Laffey was in turn hit by Hiei’s guns and sunk by a torpedo from Terutsuki. Sterett was badly damaged but managed to fight its way clear, while the “Lucky O” O’Bannon escaped serious destruction from the battleship.

At 0200 hours Abe called for a retirement, but Hiei was dead in the water after some 50 hits on its superstructure and having its internal communications knocked out. In contrast, Kirishima was grazed by a single eight-inch shell.

“We want the big ones,” Callaghan ordered, but some of San Francisco’s shells fell on Atlanta and Callaghan. Adding to the confusion was the general order: “Cease firing own ships.”

Destroyer Akatsuki also scored torpedo hits on Atlanta, but was then caught between San Francisco, Portland and a destroyer whose combined fire sank it; the Americans later rescued 18 of its survivors.

Portland also fired at Inazuma and Ikazachi, but a torpedo from Yudachi jammed its rudder. Yudachi was in turn hit in the stern, probably by Aaron Ward, and ground to a halt.

Amatsukaze’s luck ran out when it was hit by Helena, retiring with 43 of its crew dead. Destroyer Monssen was sunk by Asagumo. San Francisco was also struck by Hiei and Kirishima, including a bridge hit that killed Callaghan, Capt. Cassin Young and other officers.

The next day revealed a grim tableau, but the carnage wasn’t over. San Francisco was still afloat and retiring with Juneau when a spread of torpedoes from Japanese submarine I-26 came at them, missing San Francisco but blowing up Juneau, leaving only 10 survivors of its 700-man crew, which included the five Sullivan brothers. Portland, still circling, came within range of the abandoned Yudachi and finished it off with a broadside.

To demonstrate the strategic outcome of the battle, however, Marine aircraft from a still-operational Henderson Field swarmed over Hiei, compelling Abe and surviving crewmen to relocate to the destroyer Yukikaze, leaving behind the first Japanese battleship loss since 1904. Ahead lay a second naval battle of Guadalcanal, which would seal the island’s ultimate fate and place the initiative in the Pacific in American hands for the duration.

Vice Adm. Abe and Captain Nishida were both subsequently “retired” from the navy for their lack of aggressiveness. Norman Scott and Daniel Callaghan were both posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor.

The final U.S. soldier reported missing at a Lithuanian training site last week has been found deceased, the Army announced Tuesday.

The soldier was the last of four U.S. soldiers of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, to be recovered after they went missing in the early morning hours of March 25 while operating an M88A2 Hercules armored vehicle near Pabadre, Lithuania.

The bodies of the three other soldiers were recovered Monday after recovery crews pulled the vehicle from a peat bog near the training site.

Recovery of missing soldiers underway at training site in Lithuania

“This past week has been devastating. Today our hearts bear the weight of an unbearable pain with the loss of our final Dogface Soldier,” said Maj. Gen. Christopher Norrie, 3rd Infantry Division commanding general, in a statement Tuesday. “Though we have received some closure, the world is darker without them.”

The Army has not released the soldiers’ names, pending confirmation of notification of next of kin.

At the time the soldiers were reported missing, they had been conducting a maintenance mission to recover another Army vehicle at a training area near Pabadre, U.S. Army Europe and Africa said in a release. The soldiers were deployed to Lithuania as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, which has been sending rotations into Europe since Russia invaded the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014.

The soldiers were permanently stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

The initial search for the soldiers included military helicopters, Lithuanian diving teams and hundreds of U.S. and Lithuanian soldiers and law enforcement officers looking through thick forests and swampy terrain. On March 26, search teams found the soldiers’ vehicle 15 feet underwater.

What followed was an arduous, multiday effort to get to the vehicle, which continued to sink and be encased in mud as time went on. Officials brought in engineers, tons of gravel, excavators and slurry pumps. The Polish Armed Forces volunteered a unit of 150 military engineers to help in the recovery. And over the weekend, a U.S. Navy dive crew from Commander, Task Force 68, headquartered in Rota, Spain, arrived on site.

There was a breakthrough in the recovery effort Sunday when the Navy dive crew — after multiple failed attempts — attached steel cables to two of the hoist points on the M88A2 Hercules, the Army said. To get to the hoist points, divers maneuvered through layers of mud, clay and sediment, using a ground-penetrating radar provided by Lithuanian experts to find their way.

Two hours after the cables were attached, the vehicle was unearthed from the bog. By that time, the recovery team grew to include hundreds of personnel from multiple services and countries, the Army said.

Recovery operations continued Monday after the crews recovered the bodies of three of the soldiers. Recovery dogs and their handlers flew in from Estonia on Monday to assist in the search for the fourth soldier. Crews also employed two specialized drone systems, including one equipped with ground-penetrating radar.

“We are incredibly relieved that we were able to bring this recovery to an end and bring closure to all the families, friends and teammates of our soldiers,” said Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, commanding general of 1st Armored Division. “We cannot thank our Allies and fellow service members enough, especially the Lithuanians, who spared no resource in support of this mission. Together, we delivered on our promise to never leave a fallen comrade.”

An investigation into the incident is ongoing, the Army said.

Military Times Senior Editor Nikki Wentling contributed to this report.

You may have seen the ads on Instagram or watched the video spots on YouTube. Noom, a paid weight-loss app that has earned plaudits for getting results in its users, is hot. And it’s now available for free to sailors who failed the service’s Body Composition Assessment standards last year.

As of Feb. 1, the Navy is offering the commercial version of Noom free for a year to these sailors in what the service calls its Fitness Enhancement Program. The Navy’s contract with Noom, which is considered a one-year pilot program, is worth $466,560, paid for by excess funds released by Congress last fiscal year for quality of service initiatives.

“The Navy is paying a discounted rate from commercial individual usage costs; and the service is available at no cost to eligible sailors,” Lt. Kathryn Cole, a Navy spokeswoman, told Military Times.

To register and receive the services, which include a personalized diet plan, weekly challenges, a virtual coaching team through the app, an AI-based food tracker that can calculate calories based on a photo of a meal, and even a 360-degree body scan completed with the user’s phone camera, sailors just need to send their first and last names and government ID number to a Noom-hosted registration link.

A subscription to these features on the app retails for $70 per month or $209 per year. Of note, the Navy’s Noom deal does not cover its newest and most heavily promoted offering, a subscription-based GLP-1 medication to be taken while using the app’s other tools.

“The pilot does not endorse — or cover the costs — of GLP-1 or other anti-obesity medications,” officials said in an info paper about the Noom partnership.

Neither the Navy nor Noom officials had releasable enrollment figures as of March, citing the newness of the program.

“We’re starting to see enrollments come in more and more each day,” Cody Fair, Noom’s chief commercial officer, said in an interview. The message notifying those eligible for the program, he said, had gone out to about 8,000 sailors — a figure the service also confirmed.

According to Navy data, nearly 25,000 sailors, most of them from the junior enlisted ranks, were in a weight management program as of the end of 2024.

The Navy’s Cultural and Force Resilience Office was tasked in March 2024 “to identify, pilot, and assess scaling opportunities to test additional resources to support sailor readiness,” Cole said in responses provided to Military Times.

Noom, she added, met a “strenuous list of capability requirements” that included psychologically based behavior change components, effectiveness shown through peer review, scalability and user data privacy.

Historically, the Navy has at times held the dubious distinction as the most overweight military service. A scientific study published last year found nearly 46% of sailors were overweight and 29% were obese following the COVID-19 pandemic. For comparison, in the same time period 55.8% of Marines were classified as overweight and 12.6% as obese.

While the Navy hasn’t administratively separated any sailors for failing body composition standards since 2017, pending the results of a new study on best assessment methods due later this year, leaders have recently made investments to boost sailor fitness, particularly at the entry level.

In 2023, the service kicked off the Future Sailor Preparatory Course, aimed at improving the fitness and body composition of prospective recruits to bring them within standards for enlistment.

Fair, the Noom executive, said the app and associated programming work because they target unhealthy brain pathways and seek to rewire them, rather than just focusing on promoting healthy actions.

“We start with the mind, and we use cognitive behavioral therapy and other evidence-based protocols to really uncover the root cause of the behavior, and that ultimately creates ‘aha’ moments for the sailors that reshape their habits for good,” he said.

Noom, Fair said, sees particularly strong user engagement, with 50% of all monthly active users logging in on a daily basis. That consistency, which he associated with the “aha moment” of cracking the code on unhelpful behaviors and how to change them, is important to the effectiveness of the program.

The Navy, Cole said, will be tracking the effectiveness of the pilot, which runs through Jan. 31, 2026, based on sailor participation, participant feedback and cost effectiveness.

“Objective data will also be used to determine if the pilot program was successful in increasing the amount of sailors who are within [body composition assessment] standards compared to previous years,” she said.

Fair said Noom will also be tracking how many sailors opt in to the program and how they use it. While the Navy is the company’s first military partnership, he said another service branch reached out to the company in March to discuss a similar deal.

“We’re just starting a conversation there, but certainly … we hope to show success with the Navy and have the ability to branch out to other services within the military,” he said.

World War II was marked by numerous technical advances and battles in which they played a pivotal role. Relatively overlooked but having an importance of its own was the destroyer as used in the Solomons campaigns of 1942 to 1943.

The naval struggle was generally fought at night, pitting Japanese destroyers ferrying reinforcements to contested islands or evacuating forces from untenable posts, versus American counterparts trying to intercept them.

Nicknamed the “Tokyo Express” by their opponents, the Japanese “tin cans” acquired the grudging respect of the Americans for their daring and ingenuity, their deadly 24-inch Type 93 “Long Lance” torpedoes and what seemed to be an uncanny Japanese talent for operating by night.

In 1943, however, American destroyers began receiving a new, more effective centimetric screen grid radio detection and ranging, or SG radar, along with a new generation of captains adjusting their tactics to take advantage of the new developments.

In the vanguard of those adopting the new weapons systems to challenge the Tokyo Express anew was Cmdr. Frederick Moosbrugger.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Oct. 9, 1900, Moosbrugger entered the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland, on June 25, 1919, graduating on June 8, 1923. His subsequent assignments included two three-year stints as an instructor at the academy and service aboard the heavy cruiser Houston starting June 1, 1934, with then-President Franklin D. Roosevelt as a passenger and attending the opening of the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco on May 28, 1937. On April 28, 1941, he got command of his first ship, the destroyer McCall.

McCall was escorting the aircraft carrier Enterprise toward Wake Island on Dec. 7, 1941, when word came in of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The small carrier task force did not return to Pearl until Dec. 10, but it was time enough for Enterprise’s aircraft to catch the Japanese submarine I-70 still snooping in the area and summarily sink it.

Between May 1942 and September 1943, Moosbrugger led destroyers in the Solomon Islands. In early August 1943 he led Destroyer Division 12 (DesDiv 12) aboard Dunlap, whose captain was Lt. Cmdr. Clifton Iverson, along with destroyers Craven and Maury.

Munda had been the latest objective, and the last previous attempt to derail the Express using patrol torpedo (PT) boats on the night of August 1-2 had failed — the only result being PT-109 rammed and sunk by destroyer Amagiri, although its skipper, Lt. John Fitzgerald Kennedy, survived to later become president.

Munda fell into Allied hands on Aug. 5, but word came in about another Express departing Port Vila for Kolombangara Island, and this time the job of interception was handed to Moosbrugger. He was reinforced with three more ships of Destroyer Division 15 (DesDiv 15), led by Cmdr. Rodger Whitten Simpson aboard the destroyer Lang (Cmdr. John Lester Wilfong as captain), with destroyers Sterett and Stack.

For the first time in the war, U.S. Navy destroyers were not escorting cruisers, giving them independence to work out their own tactics. Moosbrugger’s were to enter Vella Gulf with DesDiv 12 in column to the left of the formation and DesDiv 15 two miles to the right and a little farther behind. If they spotted enemy destroyers, DesDiv 12, which had long been zealously training at night fighting, would fire torpedoes while DesDiv 15, whose ships had new 40 mm anti-aircraft gun batteries, would follow up with gunfire.

At 1130 hours the force departed Tulagi and when it reached Kula Gulf, Moosbrugger ordered all ships into battle formation. Reaching and probing Blackett Strait, it headed due north following Kolombangara’s coast, on a rainy night that would have handicapped both sides if not for the Americans’ radar advantage.

Shortly before midnight, Dunlap’s radar made first contact with the enemy 10 miles away, which soon materialized into four “pips” on the screen. As Moosbrugger’s torpedo crews readied their weapons, he deactivated his unreliable magnetic exploder devices, while relying on the flash hiders of his improved “fish.” Moosbrugger got on the talk-between-ships system and ordered his division to “Stand by to fire torpedoes!”

Approaching from the north was Japanese Destroyer Division 4 (DesDiv 4) comprised of Hagikaze — flying the pennant of Capt. Kaju Sugiru — Kawakaze and Arashi, trailed by Shigure. The latter, under Cmdr. Tameichi Hara, was a relatively old ship and had been falling behind the formation. Its navigation officer, Lt. Yoshio Tsukihara, asked Hara, as the commander later recalled in his book “Japanese Destroyer Captain”: “Sir, we are lagging 1,000 meters behind Kawakaze. Shall we use the overboost to gain back our lost 500 meters?”

“No,” the veteran Hara replied. “This is good enough. To hell with the described 500-meter distance. Don’t overboost the engine!” Suspecting trouble, Hara ordered Shigure ready for action with guns and torpedoes trained left, where visibility was worst. Just then a lookout cried out: “White waves! Black objects! … Several ships heading toward us!”

At 4,000 yards distance, Moosbrugger ordered his DesDiv 12 ships to fire and 24 torpedoes — eight per ship — were loosed in 63 seconds. Two hit Hagikaze, knocking out its radio and throwing the column into confusion. Three torpedoes struck Arashi and two more hit Kawakaze, after which Moosbrugger pulled back to let Simpson’s destroyers finish the targets with gunfire.

Firing ceased as all three Japanese destroyers went down, along with 356 seamen and 685 troops. Behind them, Shigure dodged to the right, letting lose eight torpedoes, but hitting nothing.

In contrast, three or four American torpedoes bore on Shigure and put a two-by-two-foot hole in its rudder. It failed to explode, but it and the soldiers on board handicapped its further usefulness, so Hara made smoke and withdrew, requesting further instructions from headquarters at Rabaul.

“Return to base,” came the reply. “Ask Kolombangara to rescue survivors.”

Remarkably, 310 Japanese troops, including Capt. Sugiura, drifted to shore on Vella Lavella, from which they were transferred to Kolombangara. Henceforth, however, there would be no more Tokyo Express troop runs to that island.

Of the 24 torpedoes Moosbrugger’s destroyers launched, one-third had struck their targets.

“The hits on Arashi and Kawakaze were phenomenal,” Hara wrote after the war in what he called “a perfect American victory.”

“Never before had I seen such marksmanship by the enemy,” he continued.

The U.S. Navy agreed. On Sept. 10, 1943, Adm. William Frederick Halsey awarded Moosbrugger the Navy Cross, which was also presented to Dunlap’s Lt. Cmdr. Iverson and Sterett’s Lt. Cmdr. Frank Gardner Gould. Adm. Chester William Nimitz, commander in chief of U.S. Pacific Fleet, dubbed the Vella Gulf battle “a little classic of naval warfare.”

Moosbrugger also got congratulations from an Annapolis classmate, Lt. Cmdr. Arleigh Albert Burke: “Dear Moose, your battle the other night will go down in history as one of the most successful actions ever fought. It was splendidly conceived and marvelously executed.” Burke was more than just inspired by the precedent it set. On the night of Nov. 25, 1943, he led his own squadron in an equally successful ambush off Cape St. George that sank another three out of five Japanese destroyers engaged.

Moosbrugger fought no comparable action again, but rose steadily in his career, reaching the rank of captain at the U.S. Naval School, General Line, Naval Base at Newport, Rhode Island, on April 5, 1946. He made rear admiral on June 1, 1951, and in 1952 he served as commander of the Military Sea Transportation Service, Pacific Area, based at San Francisco, California. He retired as a vice admiral on Oct. 1, 1956. Besides the Navy Cross, he received the Distinguished Service Medal and the Legion of Merit with “Valor” device.

Moosbrugger died at the San Diego Naval Hospital on Oct. 1, 1974. He was buried alongside his wife, Dorothy (Britt), at Fort Rosecrans National Cemetery, San Diego, leaving behind three sons, Frederick Britt, Edward Arthur and David Britt. His name was given to destroyer DD-980.

President Donald Trump has pardoned a Virginia man whose sentence already was commuted for his convictions stemming from the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol.

Thomas Caldwell, a retired Navy intelligence officer, was tried alongside Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes but acquitted of seditious conspiracy — the most serious charge brought in the Jan. 6 attack.

Caldwell’s pardon is dated March 20. Defense attorney David Fischer said he informed Caldwell of the pardon on Monday after learning about it from news reports.

“And he’s elated,” Fischer added.

Convicted veterans among Jan. 6 rioters granted pardons, commutations

A jury convicted Caldwell of obstructing Congress and of obstructing justice for tampering with documents after the riot. One of those convictions was dismissed in light of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last year.

On Jan. 10, U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta sentenced Caldwell to time served with no supervised release. Prosecutors had recommended four years in prison for Caldwell.

Ten days later, on his first day back in the White House, Trump issued a sweeping grant of clemency to all 1,500-plus people charged in the Capitol riot. Trump commuted the sentences of several defendants who were leaders and members of the Oath Keepers or Proud Boys extremist groups.

More than a dozen defendants were convicted of seditious conspiracy for what prosecutors said were violent plots to keep Trump in power.

Prosecutors had alleged at trial that Caldwell helped coordinate “quick reaction force” teams prosecutors said the Oath Keepers stationed outside the capital city to get weapons into the hands of extremists if they were needed. The weapons were never deployed, and lawyers for the Oath Keepers said they were only there for defensive purposes in case of attacks from left-wing activists.

But Caldwell, who didn’t enter the Capitol, took the witness stand and down played messages he sent leading up to Jan. 6, including one floating the idea about getting a boat to ferry “heavy weapons” across the Potomac River. Caldwell said he was never serious about it, calling it “creative writing.”

Fischer said his client was “first among equals for a pardon.”

“When a progressive D.C. jury acquits him of most of the charges and an Obama-appointed judge sentences him to basically time served and a fine, I think it’s safe to say the government got it wrong,” the attorney said.

Associated Press writer Alanna Durkin Richer contributed to this report.

Since the North Korean invasion of the South on June 25, 1950, United Nations forces had managed to reverse the situation by September, retaking the capital of Seoul and driving a routed Korean People’s Army (KPA) back into its home territory.

The newly established communist China, however, could not tolerate a united pro-Western Korea on its Manchurian border, and in late October, the so-called People’s Volunteer Army (PVA) intervened in the conflict, crossing the Yalu River into Korea.

By mid-November the PVA had thrown the U.N. forces back, retaking Seoul and giving the North Koreans a chance to regroup. In February 1951, however, the Chinese supply lines were overextended and recovering U.N. forces brought their offensive to a halt in the Battle of Chipyong-ni on Feb. 13-14 and Operation Killer nearly a week later.

On March 7, the U.N. launched another offensive, dubbed Operation Ripper, conceived by Gen. Matthew Ridgway to flank Seoul and destroy the PVA and KPA.

Ridgway achieved the first objective, with his troops advancing an average of 30 miles of frontage, flanking Seoul and encountering virtually no opposition as the South Korean capital changed hands for the fourth — and last — time on March 15.

By the declared conclusion of the offensive on March 23, the communist armies suffered thousands of casualties, but a well-executed fighting retreat kept them intact for the fighting yet to come — which for the next two years would see even greater casualties but no decisive battles on either side.

It was at the very beginning of Operation Ripper that Sfc. Nelson Brittin experienced the sort of savage hill fighting that became the norm for the rest of the Korean War.

Nelson Vogel Brittin was born in Audubon, New Jersey, on Oct. 31, 1920, and was drafted into the U.S. Army on July 7, 1942. Brittin served in Italy during World War II and discharged in 1946. He briefly attending the University of Florence, Italy, before deciding to reenlist in 1948, serving in the occupation forces in Japan.

He had risen in rank to sergeant first class when he was shipped to the Republic of Korea with I Company, 3rd Battalion, 19th Regiment, 24th Infantry Division. He was wounded in December 1950 and February 1951, but had returned to his unit in time for Operation Ripper.

On March 7, 1951, U.N. forces on either side of Seoul crossed the Han River, encountering small, often stubborn pockets of Chinese resistance whose sole purpose proved to be slowing down the U.N. offensive while the bulk of their armies withdrew northward to more defensible ground.

Near Yonggong-Ni that day, I Company crossed the Han and encountered a pocket of resistance in the form of fortified machine gun positions on a hill.

Brittin volunteered to lead a squad to secure the hill and due to the meager cover it afforded, he ordered his men to cover him while he moved up alone. He threw a grenade at the first enemy position he engaged, but the enemy returned it in kind with a grenade of their own, which knocked him down and wounded him.

Refusing medical attention, Brittin replenished his grenade supply, which he hurled at several enemy positions until their occupants abandoned them and he shot them as they fled. As he approached one defensive position, Brittin’s rifle jammed, but without hesitation he leaped into the hole and killed all its occupants using his bayonet and his rifle butt.

At that point, Brittin noticed one of his squads pinned down by an enemy machine gun, so he rushed it from behind, threw a grenade into it, then ran around to the front to kill the emerging three-man crew with his rifle.

As they resumed their climb, Brittin and his squad had not advanced 100 yards before coming under fire with what his citation described as a “camouflaged, sandbagged machine gun nest well-flanked by supporting riflemen.”

As his citation continued, “Brittin again charged this new position in an aggressive endeavor to silence this remaining obstacle and ran directly into a burst of automatic fire which killed him instantly. In his sustained and driving action, he had killed 20 enemy soldiers and destroyed four automatic weapons, the conspicuous valor, and noble self-sacrifice displayed by Sfc. Brittin enabled his inspired company to attain its objective.”

Brittin’s body was returned home in November 1951 and buried at Beverly National Cemetery in Beverly, New Jersey. On Jan. 16, 1952, his parents received a posthumously awarded Medal of Honor from then-Defense Secretary Robert Lovett. The roll on/roll off Military Sealift Command cargo ship ESB-4, built in 2002, is named Nelson V. Brittin in his honor.

Three of the four U.S. soldiers who were reported missing at a Lithuanian training site last week were found deceased, Secretary of the Army Daniel Driscoll said Monday.

The Army did not immediately release the names of the three soldiers, who were all part of the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division. The fourth soldier remains missing.

“We will not rest until the fourth and final soldier is found and brought home,” Driscoll said in a statement. “No words can truly capture the pain of this loss, but my deepest condolences go out to the families, friends, and fellow soldiers mourning their heroes.”

The confirmation came after recovery teams pulled from a Lithuanian peat bog Sunday night the M88A2 Hercules armored vehicle the soldiers were operating when they were reported missing March 25. The Lithuanian Defense Ministry announced on social media Sunday that both Lithuanian military police and U.S. investigators were working the site after the vehicle was dislodged.

At the time the soldiers were reported missing, they had been conducting a maintenance mission to recover another Army vehicle at a training area near Pabadre, Lithuania, U.S. Army Europe and Africa said in a release. The soldiers were deployed to Lithuania as part of Operation Atlantic Resolve, which has been sending rotations into Europe since Russia invaded the Crimea region of Ukraine in 2014.

The soldiers were permanently stationed at Fort Stewart, Georgia.

“The Raider family is heartbroken over the tragic loss of our soldiers,” Col. Jim Armstrong, commander of 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division, said in a statement. “We are ensuring we provide the needed support to their families and our soldiers as we go through this grieving process.”

The initial search for the soldiers included military helicopters, Lithuanian diving teams and hundreds of U.S. and Lithuanian soldiers and law enforcement officers looking through thick forests and swampy terrain. On March 26, search teams found the soldiers’ vehicle 15 feet underwater.

What followed was an arduous, multiday effort to get to the vehicle, which continued to sink and be encased in mud as time went on. Officials brought in engineers, tons of gravel, excavators and slurry pumps. The Polish Armed Forces volunteered a unit of 150 military engineers to help in the recovery. And over the weekend, a U.S. Navy dive crew from Commander, Task Force 68, headquartered in Rota, Spain, arrived on site.

There was a breakthrough in the recovery effort Sunday when the Navy dive crew — after multiple failed attempts — attached steel cables to two of the hoist points on the M88A2 Hercules, the Army said. To get to the hoist points, divers maneuvered through layers of mud, clay and sediment, using a ground-penetrating radar provided by Lithuanian experts to find their way.

Two hours after the cables were attached, the vehicle was unearthed from the bog. By that time, the recovery team grew to include hundreds of personnel from multiple services and countries, the Army said.

Earlier on Sunday, a mass was held at the Cathedral Basilica of St. Stanislaus and St. Ladislaus in the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius to pray for the soldiers, their families and the recovery teams. American and German soldiers deployed to Lithuania attended the mass, as did U.S. and NATO military leaders, the Lithuanian minister of defense, the commander of the Lithuanian Armed Forces and the U.S. ambassador to Lithuania.

“We cannot thank our allies enough for everything they’ve done for us to help find our soldiers,” Armstrong said. “They see our soldiers as their own soldiers, and we are absolutely in this together.”

Recovery personnel remained on site Monday, searching for the fourth soldier. The Army, as well as Lithuanian authorities, are investigating the cause of the incident.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The U.S. Naval Academy will no longer consider race, ethnicity or sex as a factor for admission to the service institution, a response to an executive order by President Donald Trump, according to federal court documents made public Friday.

The change in policy was made in February by Vice Adm. Yvette Davids, the academy’s superintendent, in response to an executive order issued by President Donald Trump in January, according to a court filing by the U.S. Justice Department in the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.

The president’s order on Jan. 27 said that “every element of the Armed Forces should operate free from any preference based on race or sex.” It also directed the secretary of defense to conduct an internal review with respect to all “activities designed to promote a race- or sex-based preferences system,” including reviews at the service academies.

“Under revised internal guidance issued by the Superintendent on Feb. 14, 2025, neither race, ethnicity, nor sex can be considered as a factor for admission at any point during the admissions process, including qualification and acceptance,” according to the court filing made public Friday.

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The decision comes after a federal judge ruled in December that the academy could continue considering race in its admissions process. In that case, the judge found that military cohesion and other national security factors mean the school should not be subjected to the same standards as civilian universities.

During a two-week bench trial in September, attorneys for the academy argued that prioritizing diversity in the military makes it stronger, more effective and more widely respected.

The case against the policy was brought by the group Students for Fair Admissions, which was appealing the judge’s decision.

The Justice Department asked in the filing on Friday to suspend the current briefing schedule in the case while the parties consider the change in the academy’s policy.

“The parties require a reasonable amount of time to discuss the details of the Academy’s new policy and to consider the appropriate next steps for this litigation, including whether this litigation is now moot and, if so, whether the district court judgment should be vacated,” the Justice Department wrote.

Maryland Rep. Sarah Elfreth, a Democrat who serves on the academy’s Board of Visitors, criticized the change, saying “this disastrous decision will have negative implications on our military’s recruitment and retention for decades to come.”

“A Navy and Marine Corps that reflect the diversity of our country is our strongest Navy and Marine Corps,” Elfreth said. “Diversity and inclusion allow our academies to not just reflect how our country looks but are critical to mission readiness and strong national security.”

Students for Fair Admissions also brought the lawsuit challenging affirmative action that resulted in a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling in 2023.

The high court’s conservative majority broadly prohibited the consideration of race and ethnicity in college admissions, ending a long-standing practice meant to boost opportunities for historically marginalized groups and sending shock waves through higher education. But it carved out a potential exemption for military academies, suggesting that national security interests could affect the legal analysis.

Students for Fair Admissions later sued the Annapolis-based Naval Academy, challenging the exemption. But Judge Richard Bennett rejected their arguments, saying that the school had “established a compelling national security interest in a diverse officer corps.”

Attorneys for the group argued during trial that prioritizing minority candidates is unfair to qualified white applicants and that cohesion should arise from other sources such as training and command structure.

The academy argued in that case that its admissions process considers many factors, including grades, extracurricular activities, life experience and socioeconomic status, according to court testimony. Race often played no role in the process, but sometimes it came under consideration in a “limited fashion,” attorneys for the academy wrote in court papers.

Sgt. Joe Harris, believed to be the oldest surviving World War II paratrooper and a member of the U.S. Army’s first all-Black parachute infantry battalion, has died. He was 108.

Harris died March 15 in a hospital in Los Angeles surrounded by family, grandson Ashton Pittman told The Associated Press. He will be honored with a full military funeral on April 5.

“He was a very loving, loving, loving man,” said Pittman. “That was one of the things that he was very strict upon was loving one another.”

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Harris was among the last surviving members of the historic 555th Parachute Infantry Battalion, nicknamed the Triple Nickles. The battalion helped protect the U.S. from deadly Japanese balloon bombs, according to Robert L. Bartlett, a retired Eastern Washington University professor who specializes in the 555th. In 1944 and 1945, the Japanese launched thousands of balloons to be carried by the Pacific jet stream to the U.S. mainland to explode and start fires.

During World War II, Black Americans were often relegated to more support-level jobs in the racially segregated military and President Franklin Roosevelt faced pressure to put them in combat units. As a result, the military recruited Harris and hundreds of other Black men, trained them and sent them into blazes on the West Coast, where they fought fires, Bartlett said.

Throughout their time in the military, they faced overt racism, including being barred from going to the base commissary and officer’s clubs unless they were specifically for Black people.

“This unit had to fight to be recognized as human beings while training to fight an enemy overseas, fight in their own country for respect even within the military,” Bartlett said.

That was not lost on Pittman, who said his grandfather was brave enough to serve the U.S. “during a time when the country didn’t love him, honestly, didn’t care about him.”

Harris was born on June 19, 1916, in West Dale, Louisiana, according to Tracie Hunter, spokesperson for WWII Beyond The Call, a nonprofit organization that works to document veterans’ accounts. After filling out his draft registration card, he began his military service in 1941 when he was 24.

By the time he was honorably discharged in November 1945, he had completed 72 parachute jumps, according to Hunter.

After the war, he worked for the U.S. Border Patrol. He also spent more than 60 years in Compton, California, where Pittman said he was the neighborhood patriarch, a man everyone on the block knew and gravitated to.

“His life is to be celebrated,” Pittman said. “Obviously people are going to morn because he’s not here anymore. But ultimately what I know from conversations that I’ve had with my grandfather is that he wants to be celebrated. He deserves to be celebrated.”

He is survived by his son, Pirate Joe Harris Sr., and two daughters, Michaun Harris and Latanya Pittman, along with five grandchildren, according to Hunter. His wife, Louise Harris, died in 1981, and a sixth grandchild has also died.

Pittman said that his grandfather would sometimes ask him if he would ever jump out of a plane. In October, Pittman had the opportunity to follow in his grandfather’s airborne footsteps.

For a week, he did paratrooper jump training in Corsicana, Texas, through the Liberty Jump Team, an organization that works to preserve the memory of veterans.

“When I got my wings, I actually broke down and started crying because everything in that moment just resonated with me,” he said. “It was like, dang I’m literally doing what my grandfather did.”

Shortly before Harris’ death, he got a landing zone, in Tuskegee, Alabama, dedicated in his name. Pittman said he plans to be the very first person to jump in the Sgt. Joe Harris Dropzone.

A specialized U.S. Navy dive crew and a unit of Polish Armed Forces engineers were traveling Friday to a training site in Lithuania to help with the recovery of four U.S. soldiers who were first reported missing Tuesday.

U.S. and Lithuanian personnel were still working Friday to access the site where the soldiers’ M88 Hercules armored vehicle was found 15 feet underwater Wednesday in a swamp on a training site near Pabrade, Lithuania. Thick mud and soft ground were keeping emergency personnel from accessing the vehicle and complicating the multiday recovery effort.

Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, commanding general of the 1st Armored Division, said in a statement Friday it would be a “long and difficult recovery operation.”

“The area around the site is incredibly wet and marshy and doesn’t support the weight of the equipment needed for the recovery of the 70-ton vehicle without significant engineering improvements,” U.S. Army Europe and Africa said in the statement. “Draining the area has been slow and difficult due to groundwater seepage.”

By Friday, the second full day of the recovery mission, subject matter experts from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers had arrived on site. Authorities also brought in a large-capacity slurry pump, cranes and more than 30 tons of gravel.

The Polish Armed Forces volunteered a unit of military engineers to help in the recovery. Its 150 personnel, water pump and tracked recovery vehicles were on their way to the site Friday, as was a Navy dive crew from Commander Task Force 68, headquartered in Rota, Spain. The crew was expected to join the recovery efforts within the next 24 hours.

Before being reported missing, the soldiers, all part of 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, had been conducting a maintenance mission to recover another Army vehicle. The initial search included military helicopters, Lithuanian diving teams and hundreds of U.S. and Lithuanian soldiers and law enforcement officers looking through thick forests and swampy terrain.

Since Wednesday, personnel have focused on the area where their armored vehicle was found. Around the clock, they’ve been working to drain water and dredge mud from the site to better stabilize the ground, the Army said.

The service has held off confirming the fates of the four soldiers, and their names had not yet been released Friday. The Army said it was keeping the families of the soldiers updated on the situation.

Lithuanian President Gitanas Nausėda and Kara C. McDonald, the U.S. ambassador to Lithuania, joined Taylor at the site Friday to “gain a better understanding of the complexity of the operation,” an Army release said.

“We are absolutely committed to bringing our soldiers home,” Taylor said in the release. “I remain incredibly impressed by the discipline, commitment and camaraderie in this unit as they attempt to recover their missing comrades.”

The U.S. Navy’s eldest aircraft carrier set sail out of San Diego on Wednesday for what is sure to be its final trip.

The Nimitz, which was first commissioned in 1975 and given a service lifespan of 50 years, left Naval Air Station North Island, San Diego — once its homeport for 11 years — for a regularly scheduled deployment to the Indo-Pacific region, according to a Navy social media post. The Nimitz Carrier Strike Group arrived in California after leaving Naval Base Kitsap in Bremerton, Washington, on March 21.

“Seeing our Sailors man the rails today — with reflections from our very first deployment in 1976 — reminds us how far we’ve come, and how strong our legacy remains,” the post read.

The Nimitz Carrier Strike Group includes the aircraft carrier Nimitz, as well as the nine squadrons of Carrier Air Wing 17 and the four Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyers of Destroy Squadron 9.

The Nimitz most recently completed a six-month deployment to the Indo-Pacific in June 2023, where it visited Japan and India, took part in the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s Large Scale Global Exercise and provided disaster relief to Guam after Typhoon Mawar.

During its newest deployment, the strike group “will focus on protecting security, freedom, and prosperity for the United States, our allies and partners, and demonstrating the U.S. Navy’s unwavering commitment to a free and open Indo-Pacific,” according to a Navy release.

One of the largest ships in the world, the Nimitz was first deployed on July 7, 1976, to the Mediterranean, according to a Navy website on the Nimitz.

Aircraft carrier Nimitz returns to sea after maintenance stint

Two years later, the carrier was sent to the Indian Ocean after Iran took 52 U.S. hostages following an attack on the U.S. embassy in Tehran. Eventually, the carrier assisted with Operation Evening Light in an attempt to rescue those hostages, though the mission was called off after the U.S. wasn’t able to secure enough helicopters to pull off the rescue. All 52 hostages were eventually released and returned to the U.S.

The carrier provided support for Operation Desert Storm in the Arabian Gulf in 1991 and Operation Southern Watch in 1993 and 1997.

Nimitz spent 12 years at Naval Station Norfolk until 1987, when it relocated to what is now Naval Base Kitsap, Washington. Then, in 2001, the Nimitz found its newest home at Naval Air Station North Island in San Diego, where it set off from in 2005 to support Operation Iraqi Freedom and the Global War on Terrorism.

In 2012, the Nimitz relocated again to another homeport in Everett, Washington, and deployed in 2013 in support of Operation Enduring Freedom.

The Nimitz also etched its name in the annals of Navy lore when it fielded the Navy F-35 Lightning’s first carrier landing at sea.

In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Nimitz embarked on a historically long 341-day deployment — the longest since the Vietnam War — and returned home in March 2021.

“Nimitz, in its 50th year of service, continues and celebrates its legacy of strengthening alliances and partnerships, demonstrating the power of teamwork and cooperation in maintaining peace and security,” the Navy release said.

The Nimitz will eventually return to Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, in 2026, before it is set to be decommissioned.

The U.S. Navy is hoping to nearly double the amount of battle force ships in oceans around the world within the next three decades — a jump from 296 ships, including submarines, aircraft carriers and destroyers, to 381.

The current state of American shipbuilding, however, is sorely in need of a complete overhaul if that plan is to be achieved, according to recent testimony and a new government watchdog report.

“It is way past time that we get after it,” Dr. Brett A. Seidle, acting assistant secretary of the Navy for research, development and acquisition, told the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday.

“Simply put, we need more ships delivered on time and on budget and we are challenged in both of these arenas. Costs are rising faster than inflation and schedules on multiple programs are delayed one to three years late.”

The same day as Seidle’s testimony, the Government Accountability Office released a report detailing 20 years’ of lackluster progress in U.S. shipbuilding. Not enough ships are being built, newly constructed ships are failing to function as expected and ships are being delivered up to three years later than ordered, the report said.

While the Navy nearly doubled its shipbuilding budget during the last two decades, it failed to reach its planned ship count, according to GAO.

Seidle offered ideas for solutions during his testimony Tuesday, including “increased modernization, infrastructure investment, better workforce hiring and retention, and improved supply chain performance.”

In a statement to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Shelby S. Oakley, a director at GAO, said that unrealistic expectations of costs and timing has diverted resources and introduced delays in shipbuilding, with the result that Navy programs and shipbuilders have been “effectively made to operate in a perpetual state of triage.”

“We found that Navy ships cost billions more and take years longer to build than planned while often falling short of quality and performance expectations,” Oakley said.

Since 2015, GAO has made 90 recommendations to the Navy to improve shipbuilding. Only 30 of those have been partially or fully addressed to date.

Shipyards, military clinics exempted from Pentagon hiring freeze

Shipbuilding is a complex process. To build a ship takes eight phases on average, from the award of a contract to design and construction phases, and eventually ending in launch and delivery of the vessel. The Navy currently has 92 ships under contract with 56 actively undergoing construction, according to the Defense Department.

The GAO’s grim report comes at a time when the current administration has announced plans to create a new White House Office of Shipbuilding, and the DOD has prioritized a focus on the Indo-Pacific region across all branches.

In February, the cruiser San Diego made a historic visit to the Japanese port of Ishigaki to strengthen ties, while throughout March and April, the U.S. Army’s Project Capstone 5 exercise is expanding its focus to include scenarios about the Indo-Pacific region.

The U.S. Naval Forces Central Command in Bahrain also hosted Vigilant Resolve, a “first-of-its-kind” exercise involving mass casualty, a shelter-in-place order and the evacuation of noncombatants — preparing naval personnel and U.S. partners for a large-scale international emergency response.

“I fervently believe our Navy has never been more important than it is right now,” Seidle told lawmakers this week. “The United States projects its presence around the globe via our blue-water Navy, impacting geopolitical decisions on a daily basis and helping to maintain our way of life.”

The aircraft carrier Carl Vinson and its strike group dropped anchor in Guam on March 24 for a scheduled port visit before joining the escalating U.S. campaign to combat the Houthi rebels in Yemen.

The Carl Vinson Carrier Strike Group, which includes seven vessels in total, will soon travel to the Red Sea and join the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group. The aircraft carrier Harry S. Truman participated in high-profile airstrikes against the Houthis earlier this month.

“Guam is strategically important to the region and ensuring a free and open Indo-Pacific,” said Carrier Strike Group Commander Rear Adm. Michael Wosje. “Our port visit here is part of our routine presence in the 7th Fleet area of operations, and allows us to recharge and resupply to remain operationally ready for any mission.”

President Donald Trump’s administration has ratcheted up attacks against the Iran-backed militant group, which has hijacked commercial ships, launched missile and drone attacks against U.S. vessels — including the Harry S. Truman — and blocked international shipping routes in the area since November 2023.

Hegseth beefs up Middle East warship presence with 2 aircraft carriers

U.S. airstrikes, which only targeted launch sites during former President Joe Biden’s administration, are now aimed at specific Houthi military personnel, as well as neighborhoods, according to a report from the Associated Press.

The U.S. struck 30 Houthi targets in Yemen over a busy two-day stretch from March 15 to March 17. Attack plans for the series of airstrikes were inadvertently shared with a journalist from The Atlantic several hours before the first bombs dropped. Officials at the time said the campaign could go on for weeks.

The Houthis vowed retaliation for the attack, which the Houthi health ministry said killed 53, but their attempts at targeting the Harry S. Truman Carrier Strike Group in the direct aftermath of the March 15 airstrikes were unsuccessful, according to several reports.

The Houthis, who often use the social media platform X to report alleged military operations, claimed responsibility for another failed attack against the Harry S. Truman early Wednesday morning local time, according to The Jerusalem Post, which included a statement from a Houthi military spokesman.

The U.S. Defense Department has yet to validate those claims.

The U.S. and Philippine militaries will launch the 2025 Balikatan military exercise in April, marking 40 years of joint drills aimed at strengthening the countries’ defense capabilities in the Indo-Pacific.

Set for April 21 to May 9 on the Philippine islands of Luzon and Palawan, the annual exercise will include U.S. Marines alongside other U.S. military forces and troops from the Armed Forces of the Philippines, or AFP, conducting coordinated military operations across land, sea, air, space and cyber domains, according to 2nd Lt. Ben Gillman, spokesperson for the I Marine Expeditionary Force and 2025 Balikatan exercise.

This year’s exercise will also include a “full battle test” between U.S. and Philippine forces, Gillman said.

“The exercise covers a range of scenarios, from conventional warfare to humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, ensuring that both nations are prepared for various contingencies,” Gillman said. “The Full Battle Test is a culmination of past bilateral planning and training that will showcase the modernization efforts of the Philippines and our ability to operate as a team to advance our shared interests.”

The I Marine Expeditionary Force Command Element, 1st Marine Division, 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing, 1st Marine Logistics Group, 3rd Marine Littoral Regiment and 1st Marine Aircraft Wing will participate in the event.

The Army, Navy and Air Force will join the Marine Corps in the exercise, which will also include troops from Australia and Japan, plus up to 16 other countries invited to the international observer program. While the exact number of troops involved was still being finalized, according to Gillman, 16,000 troops from the Philippines and the U.S. took part in Balikatan 2024.

Events will include integrated air and missile defense exercises between the AFP and the U.S. military; a joint sail between the U.S., Philippine Navy and Japanese Maritime Self-Defense Force; and counter-landing live-fire training between U.S. and AFP forces.

See US, Philippines stage Balikatan military exercise

Gillman described the Balikatan — Tagalog for “shoulder-to-shoulder” — exercise as a way to improve the collective capability to defend the Philippines, the U.S.’s oldest ally in the Pacific region, and maintain a peaceful Indo-Pacific.

Balikatan will take place near the disputed South China Sea, which has seen a spike in hostilities between Chinese and Philippine vessels in recent years. China has been vocal about its disapproval of Balikatan and has intimated potential retaliation against the Philippines for teaming up with the U.S.

The U.S. pledged $500 million in military aid to the Philippines in June 2024, fortifying its military’s ability to defend the country by providing equipment that might include asymmetric systems like missiles, drones or commercial-style arms, Defense News previously reported.

This year’s Balikatan comes as U.S. Marine Corps has expanded its footprint in the region in recent years to bolster defense capabilities against adversaries like China. The service announced its first littoral regiment in 2021, based in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii, and converted the 12th Marine Regiment out of Okinawa, Japan, to the 12th Marine Littoral Regiment. Another littoral regiment is planned for Guam sometime this year.

HUNTSVILLE, Ala. — The Marine Corps’ answer to mobile, long-range fires now features a multirocket launch system and autonomous tech.

Oshkosh Defense unveiled the newest iteration of the Remotely Operated Ground Unit for Expeditionary Fires, or ROGUE-Fires, at the Association of the U.S. Army’s Global Force Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, this week.

The payload-agnostic platform, carried by the Joint Light Tactical Vehicle, or JLTV, allows for long-range fires, autonomous resupply and logistics operations, according to a company release.

Ship-sinking missile for Marines headed to test fire

“As the battlefield continues to evolve, we are leveraging the mature and proven Oshkosh families of vehicles to design payload-agnostic autonomous platforms that deliver unmatched flexibility, enabling forces to outpace emerging threats and maintain operational dominance,” said Pat Williams, chief programs officer at Oshkosh Defense.

The Marines first awarded a $40 million contract to Oshkosh to build the unmanned missile launcher after a prototyping phase ended in September 2023.

Developers removed the JLTV cab and attached a missile launcher to build a mobile firing platform that can be operated autonomously.

Until this newest variant, the focus of the ROGUE-Fires platform had been to house the Naval Strike Missile, the Marines’ key to knocking out enemy ships to protect and gain access for U.S. Navy ships in littoral regions.

The multiple launch rocket system family of munitions, or MFOM, gives the platform a new capability on top of existing features such as long-range precision fires, autonomous resupply and logistics operations.

The company has also developed a power train that can be adapted for hybrid-electric power, which allows for silent modes of operation and fuel savings as well as electrical charging for devices and other platforms.

Williams told Military Times that the company unveiled this new variant at an Army show in part because the system also fits Army needs, which include mature systems that have autonomous features and multipayload options.

The original concept evolved out of a previous program known as “leader follower,” which uses autonomy to drive ground vehicles.

The Army used the same software in the ROGUE platform for its own autonomous driving in both the Expedient Leader Follower and Autonomous Ground Resupply programs, according to a 2021 Army release.

The software allows for one manned vehicle to lead a series of unmanned vehicles in a convoy operation.

The Marines awarded Oshkosh Defense the contract to add an off-road, self-driving package developed by Forterra, a ground-based autonomy company, to the ROGUE Fires vehicle in January, Defense News previously reported.

The AutoDrive system gives the ROGUE Fires Oshkosh-built vehicle off-road, self-driving technology in “nearly any environment,” which moves “beyond Leader-Follower capabilities,” Forterra said in a Jan. 13 statement.

The first test fire of the Naval Strike Missile from the platform happened in June 2020. The project sought to give Marines the punch needed for long range, anti-ship fires on a platform more mobile and able to hit moving targets than the legacy High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, or HIMARS.

The missile has a range beyond 750 kilometers, which aligns with Marine warfighting concepts in which Marine units, some platoon or squad-sized, seize terrain for short periods and conduct sea control and sea denial for naval commanders.

U.S. and Lithuanian personnel were still working Thursday to recover four missing U.S. soldiers whose Hercules armored vehicle was found submerged in a body of water at a training site in Lithuania on Wednesday, officials said.

The soldiers, all part of 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, have been missing since early Tuesday, when they were conducting a maintenance mission to recover another Army vehicle during a training exercise, according to U.S. Army Europe and Africa. The training site is the General Silvestras Žukauskas Training Area near Pabrade, north of the capital Vilnius, Lithuania.

Search and recovery efforts have continued without pause since the soldiers were reported missing, the Army said in a statement Thursday. The initial search included military helicopters, Lithuanian diving teams and hundreds of U.S. and Lithuanian soldiers and law enforcement officers looking through thick forests and swampy terrain.

Now, personnel are focusing on the area where the armored vehicle was found.

“We are leveraging every available U.S. and Lithuanian asset to coordinate for and provide the required resources for this effort,” U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, the commanding general of 1st Armored Division, said in a statement.

As of Thursday, thick mud and soft ground were keeping emergency personnel from accessing the vehicle and complicating and slowing the recovery efforts, the Army said. Engineers were creating berms to establish a contained area, from which water and mud could be dredged away to better stabilize the ground.

“Due to the terrain, this is an incredibly complex engineering effort. The team on the ground is working to remove enough water and mud for rescue teams to safely reach, stabilize, and access the vehicle,” Maj. Robin Bruce, 1st Armored Division Engineer, said in a statement. “The team is exploring every available option to speed up this process.”

Families of the soldiers are being updated about the recovery efforts, the Army said. The service has not yet released the names of the four troops.

NATO on Wednesday clarified comments Secretary-General Mark Rutte made earlier that day, when he suggested the soldiers had died, even though the U.S. Army said their fate was not yet confirmed.

“The search is ongoing,” NATO said in a statement posted on X. “We regret any confusion about remarks @SecGenNATO delivered on this today. He was referring to emerging news reports & was not confirming the fate of the missing, which is still unknown.”

During a trip to Warsaw, Rutte told reporters that he had received word of the deaths of the four soldiers while he was delivering a lecture, and that his thoughts were with their families and with the United States.

“This is still early news so we do not know the details. This is really terrible news and our thoughts are with the families and loved ones,” Rutte said in Warsaw.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

A group of California-based Marines are again clearing out maintenance and repairing swaths of barracks and housing as part of the Corps’ Operation Clean Sweep.

Marines with 7th Engineer Support Battalion, 1st Marine Division used funds to conduct in-house repairs instead of hiring contractors to do basic maintenance on the facilities, according to a Marine release.

“There was a lot of help from everybody in the command when we first started to plan what was needed at first which cut down in delays with the work that needed to be done,” said Sgt. Martin Torres, 7th ESB barracks manager. “The whole battalion took a couple days off their schedule to come down to provide hands and people for Operation Clean Sweep.”

Marines tackle barracks repairs with elbow grease and outside expertise

Operation Clean Sweep has highlighted long-standing barracks problems and prioritized the need for ongoing improvements, according to the release.

Deferred maintenance and funding shortfalls have beleaguered Marine housing for decades. The conditions led to “wall-to-wall” inspections of the Corps’ more than 60,000 barracks rooms last year as Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith’s launched a barracks overhaul initiative.

The inspections found that half of all barracks rooms were “partially mission capable,” which means the rooms were deficient in at least one of the regulated living standards, Marine Corps Times previously reported.

As part of the initiative, the Corps will consolidate Marines in the better buildings and demolish the worse ones, hire professional barracks managers and increase funds for barracks restoration.

Assistant Commandant Gen. Christopher Mahoney previously said initial inspections were the “baseline” for understanding where the Corps should focus.

The “Barracks 360 Reset,” which includes Operation Clean Sweep, is a local initiative between I Marine Expeditionary Force and Marine Corps Installations-West to address immediate issues as the Corps works on its larger Barracks 2030 plan.

Barracks 360 seeks to address some low-level fixes by pairing experts in areas such as drywall repair, window screen replacement and air conditioning installation with Marine staff to make minor repairs.

I Marine Expeditionary Force and Marine Corps Installations-West are investing nearly $4.2 million in housing maintenance and repairs, as of 2024.

More than half of the funding was spent on a “surge” to clear backlogged maintenance. Remaining money was spent on air-conditioning units.

The Marines have also identified housing rights and responsibilities and minimum acceptable standards for barracks rooms in a “resident’s guide.”

“Marines now feel the barracks have become an actual home, transforming it from a ‘prison cell,’ as some described it, into a more comfortable space to look forward to after the workday is over,” Torres said.

Current plans call for 1st Marine Logistics Group to hold such clean sweeps twice a year, according to the release.

In October, Marines at Camp Pendleton, California held a two-week standdown to address barracks housing problems across the base, Marine Corps Times previously reported.

In a separate effort, the Corps rolled out the QSRMax system in July, which allows Marines to submit maintenance requests to USMCMax through a QR code on their phone. QSRMax then sends requests to barracks and building managers on the base, Marine Corps Times previously reported.

Marine housing conditions had deteriorated as the Corps prioritized spending on weapons and training over the past two decades during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“So, again, I can’t apologize for previous generations of Marines to prioritize training and equipping over quality of life,” Marine Corps Commandant Gen. Eric Smith said in May 2024. “But now the tide has to turn, and we have to get back to quality of life.”

A 2023 Government Accountability Office report found “mold, dysfunctional plumbing, and poor heating and cooling” in many Marine barracks.

As of 2024, an estimated 87,000 Marines live in barracks, Maj. Gen. David Maxwell, head of Marine Corps Installations Command, wrote in a Marine Corps Gazette article.

The article noted that 17% of the Corps’ 658 barracks buildings were listed as in “poor or failing condition.”

As of March 2023, an estimated 17,000 Marines, or 20%, lived in barracks that fell short of military standards regarding privacy and room configuration, according to the GAO report.

Recently, the Corps has spent an average of about $200 million annually for barracks maintenance.

The Corps requested $274 million in its fiscal 2025 budget to address barracks conditions, a $65 million increase over fiscal 2024. The service’s total fiscal 2025 budget was $53.7 billion.

An internal memo obtained by Marine Corps Times in 2024 showed that the service estimates it will need about $1.5 billion each year to bring all its barracks up to “good/fair” condition.

As of 2024, the Corps’ deferred maintenance amounted to more than $15.8 billion, according to Navy budget documents.

Military films often depict war zones, firefights and battlefield heroics, but Denzel Washington’s 2002 directorial debut “Antwone Fisher” takes a different approach. Based on a true story, the film follows Antwone Fisher, a young Navy sailor whose violent outbursts and disciplinary issues stem from a deeply traumatic past. The story focuses on the internal war Fisher fights, a struggle some service members face long before they put on a uniform.

Fisher, played by Derek Luke, is stationed at Naval Station San Diego, where his quick temper and inability to control his emotions lead to repeated altercations. Rather than discharging him, his superiors order him to undergo mandatory therapy sessions with Navy psychiatrist Dr. Jerome Davenport, played by Washington.

The relationship that develops between Washington and Luke serves as the film’s emotional core, illustrating how leadership in the military isn’t just about discipline but also recognizing and addressing the underlying struggles of those who serve.

First look at ‘Warfare’ brings viewers into tenacity of Iraq War

Unlike many military films centered around war, “Antwone Fisher” presents the military as both a refuge and a crucible. Fisher is not fighting an enemy overseas; he is fighting the ghosts of his past. The film uses flashbacks to reveal his troubled childhood in foster care, where he suffered physical, emotional and sexual abuse. These memories manifest in his present-day outbursts, but the Navy provides him with something his past never did: structure, accountability and an opportunity for healing.

The disciplinary system within the military plays a major role in Fisher’s story. The film highlights the real-world consequences of misconduct under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Fisher’s aggression and inability to control his emotions put him at risk of discharge. Still, instead of being cast aside, he is given a chance to address the root of his behavior. His therapy sessions with Davenport are not just about compliance; they become battles of their own. Fisher resists, denies and deflects, much like a soldier refusing to acknowledge a wound.

Rather than treating Fisher as just another troubled sailor, Davenport takes a personal interest in his rehabilitation. The film gradually shifts from portraying Davenport as merely a psychiatrist to showing him as a mentor, even a surrogate father. His stern yet compassionate approach forces Fisher to confront his pain, mirroring the role of many military leaders in shaping and guiding their subordinates.

In the film, the structure, rules and discipline of the military — once suffocating for Fisher — become essential in helping him regain control over his life. But the film also makes it clear that the military, despite its ability to provide order, cannot erase personal trauma. Service members do not enlist as blank slates — they bring their pasts. Fisher’s story is one of resilience, showing that personal growth and healing are possible even within the rigid framework of the military.

The film’s climax is not on a battlefield but in Fisher’s return to his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio. After years of suppressing his past, he decides to seek out the biological family he has never met. His reunion with his relatives, particularly the embrace of his long-lost aunt and grandmother, is the emotional equivalent of a soldier coming home after the war. He also confronts his former foster mother, standing up to her in a moment that is both heartbreaking and triumphant. Here, Fisher wins his greatest battle — not against an enemy, but against the hold his past had over him.

More than 20 years after its release, “Antwone Fisher” remains one of the most overlooked military films, yet it tells a profoundly relevant story to many service members. While most war films focus on external combat, this one examines the internal battles many military personnel carry. The trauma that Fisher endures does not stem from combat — it precedes it. His enlistment does not immediately solve his problems but provides the structure and support he needs to face them.

While many military films are about survival on the battlefield, “Antwone Fisher” is about survival beyond it. It is about how the military can be a place of redemption for those who arrive carrying burdens far heavier than a rucksack. It is about leadership beyond the chain of command, mentorship beyond standard orders and battles that do not end with enlistment. For anyone who has served or ever struggled with the weight of their past, “Antwone Fisher” is a film that deserves to be remembered.

It has been years, decades even, in the making but on Tuesday, the National Medal of Honor Museum opened its doors to the public in Arlington, Texas.

“Our mission is pretty simple,” Chris Cassidy, CEO and president of the National Medal of Honor Museum Foundation, told Military Times. “Our aim is to inspire Americans through stories like Tommy’s [Norris] of courage, sacrifice, service to others, service over self, through the interaction of those stories in the museum to bring that into one’s own life.”

The 100,000-square-foot museum boasts exhibits such as “More Than a Medal,” which explores the “ordinary lives” of medal recipients, like Marine Kyle Carpenter, and an interactive display featuring interviews with the 61 Medal of Honor recipients living today.

Since its inception in 1861 during the American Civil War, the Medal of Honor has been awarded to less than 4,000 men and one woman among the 40 million Americans who have served in the United States armed forces.

Despite the award’s prestige, however, some are less familiar with the Medal of Honor’s history and its recipients.

“We want to flip that around,” Cassidy said. “We want people to walk out of the museum experience and have connected in a personal way, because people, human beings, like to hear stories of other human beings.”

While the National Medal of Honor Museum is not the first of its kind — the Medal of Honor Museum at Patriots Point, South Carolina, was designated by Congress as an official National Medal of Honor Memorial site in 1999 and is operated by the Congressional Medal of Honor Society — the scale of the museum and the stories it shares is unprecedented.

Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones and his family donated the first $20 million to get the staggering $300 million project started, with the museum site just a stone’s throw from the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

Thirty-two of the recipients traveled down to Arlington to mark the museum’s grand opening, with Medal of Honor recipient and Navy veteran Thomas “Tommy” Norris telling Military Times that the museum “is an incredible avenue to be able to give to the American public those values that are held within the people that have served in order to receive this medal.”

For Norris, who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his 1972 actions in Quang Tri, Vietnam, these values aren’t only displayed in the military.

“Individual recipients don’t wear the medal for themselves. It’s for our teammates and for those that never returned, the ones we lost,” Norris said. “But what it took to do that mission are the values and the inspiration we want to impart on all the people that are able to come here and see this incredible museum.

“There are a lot of people out there that are heroes. A lot of people out there have done amazing things and are not always recognized. But they don’t need to be. They can be self-satisfied with having the inspiration, the commitment to achieve whatever it is that they’re trying to achieve.”

PHILADELPHIA — A federal judge in New Jersey has issued a temporary ban on the removal of two transgender men from the Air Force, following a similar ruling last week from a judge in Washington, D.C.

U.S. District Judge Christine O’Hearn after a hearing Monday said the pair have shown their separation would cause lasting damage to their careers and reputations.

She issued a two-week ban on enforcement of President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from military service.

Navy details separation process for transgender personnel

O’Hearn found that Master Sgt. Logan Ireland and Staff Sgt. Nicholas Bear Bade are likely to prevail on equal protection grounds by showing they have been singled out due to their sex and the defendants cannot justify the differential treatment.

“The loss of military service under the stigma of a policy that targets gender identity is not merely a loss of employment; it is a profound disruption of personal dignity, medical continuity, and public service,” O’Hearn wrote in an order granting a 14-day restraining order.

The Pentagon deferred comment on the ruling to the Justice Department, which did not immediately respond to a message seeking comment.

Both men have already been put on administrative leave, Ireland from a training program at Joint Base McGuire-Dix-Lakehurst in New Jersey and Bade from a deployment in Kuwait, the order said. Ireland has more than 14 years of service, with deployments in Afghanistan, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, while Bade has served for more than six years. Both men have won numerous awards and medals, according to court files.

“Plaintiffs’ involuntary loss of decorated military status, military healthcare, and the ability to serve their country under a policy they have faithfully abided by for years cannot be repaired by monetary damages,” said O’Hearn, who was appointed by President Joe Biden.

On Jan. 27, Trump signed an executive order that claims the sexual identity of transgender service members “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life” and is harmful to military readiness.

What happens when a retired Navy captain and a military historian walk into a bar? That’s what Capt. William Toti and Seth Paridon, hosts of the “Unauthorized History of the Pacific War” podcast, wanted to find out in 2022.

Two years later, what started as a lark has turned into a powerhouse program — hovering at the number seven slot for top military podcasts in the world, approaching 10 million listeners and accumulating a die-hard fanbase.

Paridon, the former staff historian at The National WWII Museum for 15 years, provides the story arc for each episode while Toti, who served more than 26 years in the Navy, “riff[s] on the strategic concepts and the battle plan,” the retired officer said. “I’ll pull it up to the strategic level and try to put it in context that way.”

Toti’s “riffs” have more substance than that, however. His 26-year Navy career included “tours as commander of Fleet Antisubmarine Warfare Command Norfolk, as commodore of Submarine Squadron 3, and as commanding officer of the nuclear fast attack submarine USS Indianapolis (SSN-697),” according to his biography. “He served for more than nine years in the Pentagon, including tours as special assistant to the Vice Chief of Naval Operations, as Navy representative to the Joint Requirements Oversight Council and as deputy director of the Navy War Plans Cell, Deep Blue.”

Toti recently spoke to Military Times about plans for the pair’s podcast and his key role in exonerating Charles McVay, captain of the World War II heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, which has the unpleasant distinction of being known as the worst naval disaster in U.S. history.

Some answers have been edited for clarity.

You and your co-host Seth Paridon started the podcast back in 2022. What was your initial motivation to do so?

He and I were both on a Fox TV show together called “The Lost Ships of World War II.” It was an exploration of footage that was filmed and paid for by Microsoft co-founder, Paul Allen.

Fox took this footage and I was the Navy analytical talking head. He was the historian. We got canceled after eight episodes — which is not surprising for a World War II TV show. We were commiserating after the show got canceled and said, “You know, it’s sad, because [Seth] has done over 4,000 oral histories.” He was the chief historian at the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, so we had all of these oral histories from WWII veterans who had stories to tell.

I’m not a historian, but I’ve been interested in WWII, particularly the submarine service, since I was a midshipman. After the movie “Jaws” [featured] the story of Indianapolis, I ended up commanding the submarine Indianapolis and got to know the survivors of the cruiser. And that’s really when I got pulled in deeply into the WWII history world.

We were commiserating after the TV show gets canceled and we said, “Podcasts are kind of hot. Maybe we should try that? We’ll do it for a few months, there will be no listeners and we’ll quit. But at least we’ll have tried.” Our plan was to start at Pearl Harbor and then move chronologically through the war.

If we had 1,000 viewers we would have been happy, but within a few months — I have no idea how since we didn’t pay for any advertising, we didn’t do anything, it’s all word of mouth, as far as I can tell — we had 5,000 subscribers. Now we have close 40,000.

We’re getting several thousand views an episode and we’re getting close to crossing the 10 million views threshold. We’ve already crossed the 1 million audio downloads threshold. There’s a contingent of people whose grandpa or great uncle or great grandpa went to the war, they came home, they never talked about it. And now there’s this group of people, family members, who wondered what they did.

We’re trying to put together truthful, character-based stories that haven’t been told, to bust myths as we come across them and expose truths that people would find hard to believe. What we don’t do is an academic script reading over video. Our concept was two guys talking about World War II. That’s the way we tried to frame it, and it seems to have worked.

Can you give a little bit of background on how you structure the episodes?

Seth [Paridon] does the background research, because he’s got it all at his fingertips. He has a million pages of archive material and over 4,000 oral history video interviews that have been transcribed. He’s got footage and he’s got photographs, so he kind of frames what he thinks the talking points are going to be for an episode and we decide together what subjects we’re going to review.

He’ll do several hours to maybe a couple of days of research per episode, and I’ll spend a few hours editing it and then we just kind of talk through it thematically. We know where we want to hit each plot point. We also know how many pages it takes for a two-hour segment. So, sometimes we go fast, sometimes we go a little long, but generally we try to target it to two hours.

We actually wanted to cut it back, thinking two hours was too long. We were actually getting hate mail saying why did you cut it down? [Laughs] So, we went back to two.

When you look at the Pacific War, it’s a swirling mass of battles, geography, personalities and bloodshed. How do you cull it down into digestible episodes?

We assume people have no knowledge when we go into each episode. And by the way, I’m not sure they’re digestible, on average. Would you listen to me for two hours? I don’t think I wouldn’t listen to me for two hours! [Laughs]

We try to tell a story in an understandable way by focusing on the people. Every one of those guys and gals came back suffering from PTSD. We didn’t know what that was called back then. And so what did they do? They self-medicated with alcohol. There were way more suicides than we want to admit. Among the Indianapolis crew alone, there were 12 suicides, including the captain who was court-martialed. They didn’t think about it. They just kind of buried it because they believed that was the best way to deal with it.

Many of these stories maybe got written down, recorded in history books and forgotten. That’s the great thing about Seth — he hasn’t forgotten. He has it at his fingertips.

If you talk to high school kids about World War II, they’ll know Pearl Harbor or dropping the atomic bomb, but they don’t know anything else about the Pacific. We hope our episodes reach some of them and help bridge that gap.

“Unauthorized History” has put out over 200 episodes in the past two-plus years. Are there any episodes in particular that stand out to you?

I love [Adm. Chester] Nimitz. I love [Adm. Raymond] Spruance. I have a love-hate relationship with [Adm. William] Halsey. I think Halsey said horribly racist things that were counterproductive, but early in the war, in the Guadalcanal campaign, he was vital. There are those kind of personalities that are not monolithic. It’s not: “This is a good guy. This is a bad guy.”

Halsey was good at the beginning, and then the war passed him by. It got too complicated for him and he didn’t know how to fight in any longer. After 1943 Halsey was probably doing more harm than good. He was only a morale builder, not a strategist.

Obviously, I like the submarine episodes. I love the “Mush” Morton, Wahoo episode we did. I love the [Richard] Dick O’Kane episode. O’Kane is the reason I became a submariner. He came to the academy, talked up submarines when I was a junior and convinced me.

We did over 10 episodes on Guadalcanal I think are very good. No one has touched us as far as our accuracy and depth. There’s a myth that that the Navy abandoned Guadalcanal but the Navy lost almost four times as many people as the Marines did in the Guadalcanal campaign. I talk to Navy officers and ask, “Who lost more people?” Zero have gotten it right so far. They’ve all swallowed the Marine myth. Why doesn’t the Navy tell that story? Well, we’re telling it.

We’ve done four episodes now on the atomic bomb, including the best episode I’ve ever seen on the morality of dropping the bomb. We did two of those — one with Richard Frank, a leading world leading historian, and one with John Parshall. If anybody watches those two episodes and afterward does not agree with the decision to drop the bomb, there’s something wrong with their head.

Going back to the USS Indianapolis — what led you to “exonerate,” as it were, the ship’s captain, Charles McVay?

I saw an injustice and I committed myself to correcting it. I invited all survivors of the cruiser to come to the decommissioning of the [submarine] Indianapolis. They never got to decommission their ship, so I wanted them to come to mine.

They came and they stood in formation with my crew. It was incredible. Afterwards, two guys — Paul Murphy and Glenn Morgan — grab me, not quite pushing me against the wall, but metaphorically so, and said, “Bill, you’re the last captain of the submarine Indianapolis. McVay was the last captain of the cruiser. He needs you.”

When I started reviewing, I was aware, but hadn’t studied in depth the sinking. I hadn’t read [Mochitsura] Hashimoto’s book. I talked to [Capt.] Ed Beach, who was still alive at the time and was trying to get [Husband] Kimmel and [Walter] Short exonerated. He said, “Well, you know what you’re gonna have to do, right? Failure to zigzag? You’re gonna have to demonstrate that failure to zigzag didn’t hazard the ship.”

As we were decommissioning we had this actual torpedo fire control computer — it was about the size of my desk. You could program the torpedo and then it would run intercept courses and things like that.

So, what I did was run how to do this manually, as many runs of the Indianapolis’ course, with as many zigs as possible against Hashimoto’s firing solution. I just did run after run. I stopped counting after 90 of these, and in every case, at least one of Hashimoto’s torpedoes hit.

I had this data and I got assigned to the Office of the Vice Chief of Naval Operations when the exoneration language was being voted on by Congress. The Navy’s position continued to be that the court-martial was just.

These Navy JAG officers kept arguing that if that single torpedo didn’t sink the ship, Hashimoto would have gone home. I said, “You don’t understand the way this works. That first torpedo blew the bow off the ship. They were going to get sunk regardless.”

That’s what the data proves. They couldn’t do that in 1945 but we can do it now.

I was proud of my role in all of that, even though I was kind of working against my Navy. I think it was the right thing to do, and I’m happy with the way it turned out.

You’ve worked your way chronologically through the Pacific. As you approach the end of 1945, what’s next for your podcast? Is there a next?

We kept saying we were going to end in September 1945 when the treaties were signed on the Missouri. We kept saying that. And probably six months ago we started getting emails and YouTube comments — probably 150 to 200 a day — telling us that we couldn’t stop, so we gave in. [Laughs]

We know there are a lot more stories in our queue. So, we’re going to go back to 1941 again and do the stories we skipped as we went through. There’s a whole lot more submarine stories to tell and those are near and dear to my heart, obviously. But there’s a lot of stuff to tell.

There’s a guy who lives not too far from me who’s a 103-year-old veteran who served at Peleliu. He was a Seabee, and you know, generally the Seabees in World War II would go in on the fifth wave. I assumed he went in on the fifth wave and I did an episode with him and asked probably the stupidest question I’ve ever asked in my life: “By the time you got there, did you see any Japanese?”

Turns out he went in on the first wave with the Marines and he said, “Did I see any Japanese? I saw a ton of Japanese. Most of them were dead.” He was looking at me like, “How stupid are you?”

What’s your favorite tidbit you’ve come across since the launch of your podcast?

I’m not sure this is exactly upbeat but as we approach the 80th anniversary of the end of the war, I’m hoping there’s going to be an uptick in interest.

I know there are going to be celebrations and things like that, but I hope there’s also improved understanding of the most horrific war the world has ever known. Forget about learning about it — I fear we’re not interested in learning anything from it as we face other potential conflicts in the Pacific and elsewhere.

You know how sad that would be? I’m not looking for contrived meaning or linkages, but I do try to connect learnings from the Pacific War to things we need to understand today as we face new Pacific adversaries — and there are many.

Is anybody listening? That’s the question.

The U.S. Navy released an administrative order earlier this month, reminding sailors and Marines of the service’s social media guidelines.

The message told service members of policies that require them to temper any expressions of their political ideologies, in keeping with the U.S. military’s code of conduct.

“Service Members may not engage in partisan political activity while on duty and should avoid inferences that their personal political activities imply, or appear to imply, official sponsorship, approval, or endorsement by the [Department of the Navy] or [Defense Department],” the memo stated.

Service members are allowed to operate personal accounts, the memo reads, so long as they do not conduct official DOD communications on social media platforms or misrepresent the armed forces in their online activity.

Pentagon orders new social media purge to remove diversity mentions

If a service member is unsure whether their content is a clear representation of their own opinions, they are urged to add clarifying disclaimers to their posts.

The memo reiterates there are limits to service members’ self-expression online, whether on or off duty. It states that their actions are always subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, under penalties that include Article 88, Contempt Towards Officials; Article 92, Failure to Obey an Order or Regulation; Article 133, Conduct Unbecoming an Officer; and Article 134, Disorders and Neglects to the Prejudice of Good Order and Discipline or Conduct of a Nature to Bring Discredit Upon the Armed Forces.

The memo, signed by Acting Secretary of the Navy Terence G. Emmert, refers service members to the Marine Corps and Navy social media handbooks for further instructions.