West Coast Marines have expanded their ongoing barracks refresh to more installations to address backlogged maintenance issues in Marine housing.

The two-week surge began Sept. 15 with Operation Clean Sweep III, hosted by I Marine Expeditionary Force and Marine Corps Installations West, according to a service release.

The third iteration of the barracks cleanup and repair project expands beyond Camp Pendleton to more bases in California and one in Arizona, including Marine Corps Air-Ground Combat Center Twentynine Palms, Marine Corps Logistics Base Barstow, Marine Corps Air Station Miramar and Marine corps Air Station Yuma.

The Corps kicked off the first Operation Clean Sweep at Camp Pendleton in October 2024 and ran a second iteration from late March through early April of this year.

So far, the initiative has completed more than 8,500 self-help projects and more than 4,500 work orders, according to the Marine Corps.

Deferred maintenance and funding shortfalls have worn down Marine housing over decades, which led to wall-to-wall inspections of the service’s more than 60,000 barracks rooms in early 2024.

Marines’ barracks-fixing ‘Operation Clean Sweep’ returns to California

The work falls under a larger effort dubbed Barracks 2030, which includes consolidating Marines into better buildings and demolishing the worst locations, hiring professional barracks managers and increasing funding for barracks restorations.

The Barracks 360 Reset, which includes Operation Clean Sweep, is a local initiative between I MEF and Marine Corps Installations-West to address immediate concerns.

I Marine Expeditionary Force and Marine Corps Installations-West invested nearly $9.6 million in housing maintenance and repairs as of 2024. Operation Clean Sweep II was funded by Headquarters Marine Corps at a cost of $6.27 million. Headquarters contributed another $4 million to quality-of-life improvements not directly linked to the second operation.

Half of the initial funding was spent on a “surge” to address backlogged maintenance requests.

A separate but related effort saw the launch of QSRMax system in July 2024. The system allows Marines to submit maintenance requests via a QR code, which are then routed to barracks and building managers.

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

Around 87,000 Marines live in barracks, according to a February 2024 Marine Corps Gazette article. An estimated 17% of the service’s 658 barracks buildings at the time were listed in “poor or failing condition.”

As of March 2024, approximately 17,000 Marines, or 20%, lived in barracks that fell short of military standards related to privacy and room configuration, according to the GAO report.

During a White House press event on Aug. 25, President Donald Trump remarked that the Department of Defense name “didn’t sound good” to him.

“Department of Defense, I don’t want to be defense only,” he continued. “We want defense, but we want offense, too.

The president noted that under the old moniker, the Department of War, the United States enjoyed an “unbelievable history of victory” that included the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, the wars against Native Americans, the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II.

“We’ve reestablished at the department the warrior ethos. We want warriors, folks that understand how to exact lethality on the enemy,” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told “Fox & Friends” several days later.

“We don’t want endless contingencies and just playing defense,” he continued. “We think words and names and titles matter. So, we’re working with the White House and the president on it. Stand by.”

Origins of the War Department

In 1789, President George Washington signed legislation to create America’s first iteration of the War Department. Under Henry Knox, the first secretary of war, the Department of War replaced the wartime Board of War and Ordnance, which was established under Washington in 1776.

The act was responsible for “for military commissions, land and naval forces, warlike stores, Indian affairs, and granting lands for military services.” However, the War Department primarily oversaw the Army, with the Navy getting its own Cabinet-level department less than a decade later — which also oversaw the Marines.

That structure remained in place until 1947, when President Harry Truman received approval from Congress to create a National Defense Establishment. The NDE eventually took power from the Army and Navy, as well as the newly formed Air Force.

It was, writes Air and Space Forces Magazine, “a landmark in the organization of America’s military establishment.”

Just a few months after the conclusion of World War II, Truman announced his goal to implement a new governing structure for the military, as the war had induced a need for a more codified command structure.

In a special message to Congress on Dec. 19, 1945, Truman stated:

“I recommend that the Congress adopt legislation combining the War and Navy Departments into one single Department of National Defense. Such unification is another essential step — along with universal training — in the development of a comprehensive and continuous program for our future safety and for the peace and security of the world.

One of the lessons which have most clearly come from the costly and dangerous experience of this war is that there must be unified direction of land, sea and air forces at home as well as in all other parts of the world where our Armed Forces are serving.

We did not have that kind of direction when we were attacked four years ago — and we certainly paid a high price for not having it."

Cognizant of the potential pushback from the Army and Navy and its generals who might view the proposal as a threat to their service’s autonomy, Truman wrote in a White House press release on April 5, 1946, “Unification does not mean subordination of any branch of the service. It does not mean a loss of identity.

“It means just what the word says — unification. It means a concentration and cohesion of our best military thought and our best military resources, geared to maximum efficiency. It means using our experience in World War II for the peace of the world.”

However, Truman’s words of pacification did little to placate certain members of the Navy. In 1949, a small group of senior Navy officers took their private feud with the Army and Air Force public, calling into question the strategy to defeat a Soviet invasion of Europe and the allocation of scarce budget dollars, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

The resulting civilian-military dustup, dubbed the “Revolt of the Admirals” would later involve two congressional hearings and amendments to the National Security Act of 1947 “that decisively shaped the character and organization of the military for the next half century,” according to the Air and Space Forces Magazine.

Revolt of the admirals

The cause for the revolt was twofold, arising from both a mismatch between the United States’ expansive postwar conception of its national security and the demands for fiscal orthodoxy, according to the U.S. Naval Institute.

In a tale as old as time, senior officials wanted a global presence in the wake of World War II — but didn’t want to pay for it. The Truman administration was determined to hold the defense budget to about $13 billion per year.

That relatively tight budget was split into thirds — one slice each for the land, air and the sea.

“This intensified the roles-and-missions struggle,” writes the Institute. “The Navy thought it was in danger of losing its air arm to the Air Force. The Air Force was convinced that the Navy was attempting to build a strategic air force of its own.”

According to historian Anand Toprani, there were two stages of the revolt. In the first, a civilian employee of the Navy (and a naval reservist) fabricated and then leaked to a sympathetic congressman (a retired reservist) an “Anonymous Document” accusing then Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington of corruption for favoring the procurement of the B-36 heavy bomber.

The publication of the document resulted in the first of two congressional hearings in August of 1949, which ultimately vindicated Johnson and Symington — much to the embarrassment of the Navy.

The second stage, according to Toprani, involved a Navy officer attached to the Joint Staff releasing an “internal Navy correspondence alleging that Johnson’s policies — including the cancellation of the first ‘supercarrier’ [USS United States (CVA-58)] back in April — were harmful to the Navy’s morale and detrimental to national security.”

The correspondence led to senior Navy officers publicly breaking with Johnson and Symington, describing the Air Force’s “fetish” for strategic bombing against the Soviet Union as immoral and ineffective.

Creation of the DOD

In light of this “revolt,” several amendments to the National Security Act were implemented, converting the National Military Establishment into the Department of Defense.

The amendments made the DOD a cabinet-level department and downgraded the services from executive to military departments. The secretary of defense gained complete “direction, authority, and control” over the entire department, becoming the “principal assistant to the President in all matters relating to the Department of Defense.”

In addition, changes to the National Security Act included the creation of a chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who would directly advise both the president and the secretary of defense. Gen. Omar Bradley became the first chairman in 1949.

“We finally succeeded,” Truman noted, “in getting a unification act that will enable us to have unification, and as soon as we get the crybabies in the niches where they belong, we will have no more trouble.”

On Sept. 5, 2025, Trump issued an executive order to restore the use of the Department of War name, albeit as a “secondary title” for the Department of Defense.

As it stands, only an act of Congress can approve the permanent name change.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A former U.S. Naval Academy midshipman has been charged in federal court with making a threat across state lines related to a lockdown and shooting at the military college in Maryland last week, the U.S. attorney’s office in Indiana said Tuesday.

Jackson Fleming, 23, was arrested Friday on suspicion of sending an online threat through a social media application concerning the academy, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Indiana said in a news release. Fleming, of Chesterton, Indiana, was charged with one count of transmitting a threat in interstate communication, the release said.

Jonathan Bedi, Fleming’s attorney, wrote in an email that “we intend to fight these charges in court vigorously.”

“No one, including Jack, should be judged by a mere accusation from the government,” Bedi wrote. “We are prepared to mount the strongest possible defense, and I am confident that when the complete facts emerge, Jack will be vindicated.”

Fleming attended the academy from June 30, 2021, to Jan. 5, 2024, the academy confirmed.

The threatening post triggered a lockdown at the academy Thursday. It prompted authorities to respond to what turned out to be a false report of a gunman. And during the investigation, a midshipman who had mistaken security personnel as a threat was shot in the shoulder in the ensuing confusion.

The academy said in a statement last week there was no active shooter threat.

The wounded midshipman was released from the hospital Friday. A member of the naval security force also received minor injuries, the academy said, and was treated at a hospital before being released.

The false report was made amid anxiety over a spate of recent violence at schools nationwide, including the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college. A shooting at a high school in Denver last week left two students injured and the gunman dead, while a shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic church left two children from an affiliated school dead and 17 injured over two weeks ago.

When the U.S. military sank a boat allegedly carrying illegal narcotics from Venezuela to the United States earlier this month, the incident created not just controversy but also a precedent.

To some proponents, using the military is a justified means of mitigating a drug epidemic that killed 80,000 Americans last year. And if military force is to be used, sinking drug vessels is a particularly enticing option: Better to drop bombs in the Caribbean than to send troops on drug raids into Mexico, the theory goes.

Yet sinking ships on the high seas also carries risks, some U.S. experts argue.

“Attacking cartel assets at sea avoids the sovereignty issues that arise with attacks on land,” warn researchers Mark Cancian and Chris Park in an analysis for the Center for International and Strategic Studies, a U.S. think tank, published Sept. 8. “That does not mean that international waters are a free-fire zone.”

Cancian and Park liken employing the U.S. military to attack drug smugglers, “to swatting flies with golden hammers — possible, but other approaches are better. The long-term military solution is to beef up the Coast Guard.”

US strikes another alleged Venezuelan drug boat, killing 3, Trump says

Indeed, maritime drug interdiction has historically been the job of the Coast Guard. While a branch of the U.S. armed forces, the Coast Guard is part of the Department of Homeland Security. It is trained, equipped — and has legal authority — to conduct law enforcement operations.

The U.S. military has long assisted drug interdiction, especially the Navy, which provides surveillance and assists boarding operations. However, actual police functions — such as arresting suspects — were made by Coast Guard Law Enforcement Detachments, or LEDET, that have been stationed on Navy vessels assigned to anti-drug patrols since the 1980s.

But when American missiles destroyed the drug boat Sept. 2, killing 11 suspected members of a Venezuelan gang, the incident seemed less like law enforcement and more like open warfare.

“What was unprecedented in the September 2 strike was the method of interdiction — a missile strike sank the boat without warning and with the crew onboard,” CSIS wrote. “While the Coast Guard does use force in such missions, it typically targets a vessel’s propulsion with machine guns or sniper rifles to disable it, not to destroy the ship while the crew is still on board.”

Troops and police — at least in a democracy — have very different mindsets, training and habits when it comes to lethal force.

“The military sees threats to remove,” Cancian told Defense News. “Law enforcement wants to protect citizens while detaining criminals and collecting evidence.”

The Trump administration argues that classifying the Venezuelan cartel Tren de Aragua as a terrorist organization allows the military to use lethal force. Critics counter that this falls under the War Powers Act of 1973, which requires the president to seek congressional consent. While Congress has never invoked the War Powers Act, and previous administrations have targeted terrorists without congressional approval, this is a novel use of the armed forces.

“Globally, it is rare for military forces to conduct law enforcement activities,” Cancian noted. “Most countries use their coast guard instead.”

The fact that experts are citing the infamous free-fire zones of the Vietnam War is significant. Free-fire zones allowed U.S. forces to attack anyone in a designated area, without first determining if they were an actual enemy. That policy generated furious domestic and international protests, and has become a meme for indiscriminate use of firepower.

“We will see if similar sympathies extend to members of drug cartels,” said Cancian.

CSIS expects that the “military’s primary mission will likely be conducting surveillance across the Caribbean and along the U.S. West Coast.” Missile strikes on ships and land targets are also possible, but “Marine and special operations raids are unlikely because of the high risk.”

The number of Navy ships assigned to U.S. 4th Fleet — the naval component of U.S. Southern Command — has more than doubled between February and August 2025, according to CSIS. In addition, larger vessels are being deployed. Destroyers have been joined by cruisers, littoral combat ships, amphibious transports and attack submarines: Total tonnage soared from 20,000 tons in February to almost 140,000 tons in August.

This raises a strategic argument against tasking the military with drug interdiction. The Navy is already understrength and overworked as it prepares for conflict in the Pacific. So far, the forces deployed to the Caribbean are too small to affect U.S. strength in Asia, according to Cancian. However, “if the administration deploys more forces to the region or makes this a long-term commitment, the forces will be more stressed, and some might need to come from the Pacific.”

And if the Trump administration were to invade Venezuela in the name of anti-drug regime change, this “would certainly stress the U.S. ability to deal with crises in the Pacific,” Cancian said.

The Coast Guard has already received a $25 billion budget boost in Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill, including 21 new cutters and more than 40 helicopters. However, CSIS argues that the Coast Guard will need even more resources to handle increased counter-drug operations. While one-eighth the size of the Navy, “this small service has 11 statutorily defined missions, including search and rescue, security of 360 ports and 95,000 miles of shoreline, and polar exploration,” CSIS noted.

With the Coast Guard slated to add 15,000 new personnel by 2028, an effort could be made to add 3,000 new members next year, CSIS suggests. In addition, the service life of medium endurance cutters could be extended, procurement of the new offshore patrol cutter accelerated and more national security cutters acquired.

Either way, a policy of sinking drug vessels on sight is problematic, CSIS warned.

“There is an immense amount of traffic in the Caribbean, and nearly all of it is legitimate,” CSIS noted. “Identifying the few bad actors takes a lot of effort.”

“The risk with shooting first and asking questions later is that, sooner or later, forces will make a mistake,” CSIS concluded.

A longtime U.S. Navy doctor was removed from her leadership position after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly reposted a social media link chastising her for a position it appears she never held.

Janelle Marra was relieved of her duties this month as director of medical services at Expeditionary Medical Facility 150-Bravo in San Diego, California, shortly after Hegseth’s post on X announcing her firing, a U.S. defense official confirmed to Military Times.

On Sept. 4, the X account Libs of TikTok, a conservative account with 4.4 million followers on the platform, posted a message along with a screenshot of Marra’s LinkedIn account. The account took issue with information on her profile.

The screenshot called attention to Marra’s displayed pronouns, “she/her,” as well as her displayed title of “Navy Deputy Medical Director for Transgender Health Care,” with a caption that asked the defense secretary to look into the role.

“Yikes,” the Libs of TiKTok post said in response to Marra’s listed job title.

Several hours later, Hegseth reposted the Libs of Tiktok post on his X account with a caption that read, “Pronouns UPDATED: She/Her/Fired.”

Pronouns UPDATED: She/Her/Fired https://t.co/j8nboQZO9Z

— Pete Hegseth (@PeteHegseth) September 5, 2025

That same day, Marra was removed from her leadership position in her Navy unit due to a loss of confidence in her leadership and a potential misuse of social media, the U.S. defense official told Military Times on the condition of anonymity.

The Navy initiated an investigation into Marra’s social media practices after the administrative removal took place, the official said.

It appears Marra never held the position the Libs of TikTok account asked the defense secretary to investigate. The job was intended to be part of a once-proposed transgender health center within the Defense Health Agency, but the center was never created.

“That was a position that DHA solicited for nominations from the services during the last administration,” the defense official told Military Times. “She was nominated for that position.”

However, it appears the role was never filled, and the idea for the center was dropped. The Defense Health Agency corroborated the official’s statement.

“The Department does not have a Transgender Health Center,” a Defense Health Agency spokesperson told Military Times. “It was considered last year, but the idea was abandoned.”

It’s unclear why Marra added the title to her LinkedIn profile. She did not respond to questions following her firing. The Pentagon declined to comment.

Col. Bree Fram, a transgender service member in the U.S. Space Force with nearly 23 years in the military, said Marra’s firing was emblematic of a culture of sensationalism and headlines that derive from very little. Fram spoke to Military Times to offer her own opinions, which she noted do not reflect the those of the Defense Department.

“To suffer through a firestorm of controversy over something in the past that was assigned to her as a role by the Navy is really disappointing,” Fram said. “When service members are attacked, we would hope that their superiors come to their defense when there is nothing to the allegations that are being made.”

Libs of TikTok was founded by Chaya Raichik, an activist who has admitted to being at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, has joined ICE ride-alongs with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and has recently used her social media presence to identify and fire individuals who the account accuses of celebrating the murder of conservative media figure Charlie Kirk.

President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a hard-line approach on LGBTQ+ issues in the military, issuing an executive order banning all transgender service members and ending gender-affirming care for transgender troops.

A Feb. 26 Pentagon memo said individuals with a diagnosis or symptoms of gender dysphoria have medical, surgical and mental health constraints that are “incompatible with the high mental and physical standards necessary for military service.”

Defense officials have said that about 4,000 transgender individuals are currently serving in the military, both on active duty and in the reserves.

Transgender service members and legal advocates who spoke to Military Times in April described the rollout of the ban as “utter chaos,” as initial information for voluntary separation showed conflicting deadline dates and cast inaccurate portraits of their service.

The U.S. Navy unveiled new plans to grow the number of housing units for service members and their families who are stationed in the Western Pacific.

In collaboration with Joint Region Marianas, the service will begin an initiative aimed at expanding housing capacity by 2,400 housing units to meet an increase in service members heading to Guam over the next decade, according to Joint Region Marianas.

“This effort is not just about meeting housing numbers,” said Rear Adm. Brett Mietus, commander of Joint Region Marianas. “It’s about ensuring our military members have the quality of life they deserve.”

The service expects military personnel on Guam to grow from 17,000 active-duty members in fiscal 2024 to almost 24,000 personnel in fiscal 2033.

The Navy “is considering a range of acquisition approaches, which may include lease, lease-to-purchase, purchase, or other transaction structure” for up to 1,600 family housing units and 800 unaccompanied housing units on the island, according to a Navy contract solicitation published Friday.

By June 2028, according to the solicitation, the Navy plans to have 917 family units and 400 unaccompanied units available for occupancy.

The remaining housing units are expected to be available by June 2032.

The first phase of the initiative requires information from developers — due Oct. 13 — on available homes and potential housing sites, according to the solicitation. The second phase will see chosen developers submit housing proposals, with a stated release date of November 2025.

He was bayoneted in Guam. Shot on Iwo. Now, at 100, he is a sergeant.

The Navy is focused on providing homes for military families with between two and four bedrooms, apartments for single military personnel, housing available as early as 2028 and building 75% of the new housing units in Guam’s central region, Joint Region Marianas said in a release.

Roughly 21,000 people affiliated with the U.S. military live on Guam currently, a U.S. territory that houses Andersen Air Force Base, Naval Base Guam and Marine Corps Base Camp Blaz.

The latter was activated in 2020, becoming the first new Marine Corps base in nearly 70 years.

As part of a 2012 agreement between the U.S. and Japan, 4,000 Marines are expected to relocate from Okinawa to Guam, in an effort to reduce the American military footprint on the Japanese island.

LOS ANGELES — A California man who illegally landed his small aircraft on a naval base twice and stole a Navy truck has pled guilty to federal charges, officials said.

Andrew Kyle White, 37, pleaded guilty to a felony count of theft of government property and illegal entry into a naval installation.

The San Diego man first flew a Glastar airplane — a home-built kit airplane popular among hobbyists — to San Clemente Island in October 2023 and landed on a U.S. Navy airstrip without permission.

The wind-swept island, part of Naval Base Coronado, is off the Pacific coast about 65 miles northwest of San Diego and is the southernmost of California’s Channel Islands.

At the time, he received and signed a letter that notified him that it was a federal crime to travel to San Clemente Island without the Navy’s permission and instructed him not to return.

But on April 6 of this year, military authorities say, White flew his plane to San Clemente Island again and landed it without permission. While on the island, he stole a Navy-owned Ford F-150 truck and drove it around the island, crashing it into locked gates that blocked off certain locations.

He was not detained until the next morning when he was seen on security footage walking around, according to charging documents. Officials discovered he had driven the truck onto unpaved terrain and gotten stuck.

White’s attorney did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

Officials estimate that White’s intrusion onto the base cost nearly 500 man-hours and resulted in a $500,000 loss to the Navy.

“Whatever (White’s) intentions were, the military did not know them,” prosecutors said in court documents. “The island went on a complete lockdown.”

White was initially released on bond but has been in federal custody since he cut off his ankle bracelet earlier this year.

He will be sentenced Sept. 29 and faces a maximum penalty of 10 years in federal prison for theft of government property and up to six months for illegally entering a naval installation.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s pursuit of a clean-shaven military took its latest step Monday when the Pentagon announced that troops who require medical shaving waivers for longer than a year will face involuntary separation, according to an official memo.

The announcement, which is dated Aug. 20, follows a force-wide review launched by the Pentagon in March to assess military grooming and fitness standards.

In the memo, Hegseth mandates that troops who seek individual exemptions must receive final waiver approval through their unit commander, which can only be granted after a written recommendation from a medical officer.

Service members granted waivers must then “participate in a medical treatment plan,” the memo states.

If medical treatment does not resolve the issue and a waiver is required beyond the one-year window, those troops will face separation.

“I have full confidence in our leaders at all levels to provide an accurate assessment of whether retention is appropriate,” Hegseth wrote.

The Aug. 20 memo, which does not mention whether mustaches will be impacted, is the latest in a series of shaving regulation tweaks by the Pentagon this year.

In March, the Marine Corps ordered Marines diagnosed with pseudofolliculitis barbae, which leads to unwanted bumps and painful ingrown hair from frequent shaving, to undergo medical reevaluation within 90 days to determine whether they still required a waiver.

That administrative message outlined a phased treatment plan for Marines affected by the condition, with the ultimate goal of “returning service members to grooming standards and ensuring maximum warfighting readiness.”

About 60% of Black men are affected by the condition, according to the American Osteopathic College of Dermatology.

Beyond medical reasons, troops in recent years have been able to submit exemption requests citing religious accommodations.

The Army, for example, amended its guidelines in 2017 after years of beard-exemption requests and legal pressure from Sikh soldiers seeking to preserve religious traditions while wearing a U.S. uniform.

Some of those exemption boundaries, however, were blurred under such rules that failed to specify exactly which religions qualified.

In April 2018, a heathen soldier applied for an exemption under the updated policy and was approved for a beard waiver in accordance with his faith. But while Norse paganism encourages beard growing, it doesn’t require it.

In 2019, Army Spc. John Hoskins further tested those boundaries — and was denied — when he applied for a beard exemption as part of his strict devotion to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, a faith also known as “Pastafarianism.”

Hegseth, in the Aug. 20 memo, did not mention whether religious accommodations would be impacted by the new ruling.

“The grooming standard set by the U.S. military is to be clean shaven and neat in presentation for a proper military appearance,” he wrote.

“The Department must remain vigilant in maintaining the grooming standards which underpin the warrior ethos.”

When “The Terminal List” launched on Amazon Prime Video in 2022, it was met with critical skepticism but overwhelming audience enthusiasm. The Chris Pratt–led series quickly climbed to the platform’s top charts, powered by its unapologetic depiction of Navy SEAL grit and shadowy government conspiracies.

Now, three years later, Prime Video has doubled down with “The Terminal List: Dark Wolf,” a prequel that is outperforming expectations and cementing the dominance of military thrillers in the streaming era.

Released on Aug. 27 with a three-episode premiere, “Dark Wolf” immediately surged to Prime’s top ten most-watched shows. It follows Taylor Kitsch’s Ben Edwards, the Navy SEAL turned CIA operative whose fate was sealed in the original series. Chris Pratt returns as James Reece, tying the spinoff to its roots, while a new cast of operatives fills out a globe-trotting, action-heavy storyline.

The series has been better received than its predecessor.

Critics awarded “Dark Wolf” a 73% Rotten Tomatoes score — compared to the 40% rating of season one — while audiences continue to back the franchise with an 81% score.

Richard Roeper of RogerEbert.com called it “pulse-pounding” and compared its set pieces to “Bourne” and “Mission: Impossible,” praising Kitsch for bringing “genuine star power” to the brooding anti-hero role.

Action with authenticity

What sets “Dark Wolf” apart is its exploration of the brotherhood at the core of special operations.

Roeper highlights how the series begins with a military funeral and the stark line delivered by Pratt’s Reece: “Every battle is about bringing your brothers home. And the only thing that’s worse is when you give up that brotherhood.”

That theme threads through Edwards’ journey from highly decorated SEAL to compromised CIA asset, showing how loyalty and betrayal can coexist in the same mission.

Screen Rant notes the series feels like a natural fit alongside Taylor Sheridan’s “Special Ops: Lioness,” which similarly blends covert missions with character-driven tension. Both shows lean into military authenticity and the psychological burden of living a life in the shadows.

“Dark Wolf” spares no expense on production. From Mosul training camps to nightclubs in Austria, the show moves across Europe and the Middle East with cinematic flair.

Jack Carr, a former Navy SEAL, the author of the novel “The Terminal List” and a co-creator of the series, confirmed “Dark Wolf” filming took place in Hungary, providing much of the realism. At the same time, former Navy SEAL Jared Shaw served as an advisor to keep missions accurate to special operations practice.

The action sequences are relentless: a prisoner exchange gone wrong on a bridge in Iraq, a bloody nightclub mission in Vienna and high-stakes operations in Tehran and Tel Aviv, among them.

Roeper singled out the technical detail, from sniper drills to centrifuge bearings as a nuclear MacGuffin, which grounded the series in the “techno-thriller” tradition while keeping the pace brisk.

A streaming formula that works

The success of “Dark Wolf” reflects broader audience demand for military and espionage dramas.

TechRadar called it “Prime Video’s explosive new crime thriller you need to start streaming,” pointing out that the series plays into viewer appetites for morally complex characters and relentless pacing.

Esquire noted the spinoff’s immediate popularity has already fueled conversations about the future of the franchise, including additional seasons and tie-ins. Tom’s Guide placed it on its “must-watch” list of Prime Video shows for late August, underscoring how it has quickly become one of the platform’s tentpoles.

The genre’s enduring power lies in its ability to channel real-world anxieties through high-stakes storytelling.

The Guardian recently argued that spy thrillers resonate in uncertain times because they provide “a compelling mirror” for public mistrust and geopolitical unease. “Dark Wolf” embodies that point, balancing escapist firefights with questions about loyalty, morality, and the cost of endless war.

Chris Pratt himself acknowledged a leap in quality with the spinoff, saying in one interview he was moved to tears during the premiere because “we knew we had something special.” Taylor Kitsch echoed that sentiment, crediting the final scene of the original series as the creative spark that led to “Dark Wolf.”

As Prime Video continues to invest in Carr’s universe, “Dark Wolf” stands as proof that audiences are not only willing to return, but eager for more. It offers the rare combination of authentic military detail, blockbuster-style action, and character arcs built on loyalty, betrayal, and the pursuit of survival.

For veterans and civilians alike, the resonance is clear. Military thrillers keep winning because they tell stories of sacrifice and brotherhood in a form that is both entertaining and uncomfortably close to the real thing.

President Donald Trump on Monday signed an order sending the National Guard into Memphis to combat crime, constituting his latest test of the limits of presidential power by using military force in American cities.

Trump made the announcement with Republican Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee visiting the Oval Office, calling what’s coming a “replica of our extraordinarily successful efforts” in Washington.

That was a reference to last month, when the president deployed National Guard troops to the nation’s capital and federalized the city’s police force in a crackdown he has since argued reduced crime.

Troops in DC encounter few crises, but plenty of walking and yard work

Trump said that, in addition to troops, the push in Memphis would involve officials from various federal agencies, including the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Marshall’s service: “We’re sending in the big force now.”

Shortly before Trump’s announcement, the White House said on social media that the Memphis total crime rate was higher than the national average and suggested that the rate had increased since last year, bucking national trends.

That’s despite Memphis police recently reporting decreases across every major crime category in the first eight months of 2025 compared to the same period in previous years. Overall crime hit a 25-year low, while murder hit a six-year low, police said.

Despite the overall decrease, Memphis has dealt with stubborn gun violence problems for years. In 2023, the city set a record with more than 390 homicides.

Tennessee’s governor embraced the troop deployment as part of a broader law enforcement surge in Memphis. “Lee said Monday that he was “tired of crime holding the great city of Memphis back.”

Trump first suggested he’d be deploying the National Guard to Memphis on Friday, drawing pushback from the Democratic leader of Memphis, which is majority Black.

“I did not ask for the National Guard, and I don’t think it’s the way to drive down crime,” Mayor Paul Young told a news conference Friday while acknowledging the city remained high on too many “bad lists.”

Speculation had centered on Chicago as Trump’s next city to send in the National Guard and other federal authorities. But the administration has faced fierce resistance from Democratic Illinois J.B. Pritzker and other local authorities.

President says he will deploy National Guard troops to Chicago

Trump said Monday, “We’re going to be doing Chicago probably next” but also suggested that authorities would wait and not act immediately there.

“We want to save these places,” Trump said. He singled out St. Louis and Baltimore, but didn’t say either place would be getting federal forces or the National Guard.

President Donald Trump says the U.S. military again targeted a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, killing three aboard the vessel.

“The Strike occurred while these confirmed narcoterrorists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the U.S.,” Trump said in a Truth Social post announcing the strike. “These extremely violent drug trafficking cartels POSE A THREAT to U.S. National Security, Foreign Policy, and vital U.S. Interests.”

The strike that Trump says was carried out Monday came two weeks after another military strike on what the Trump administration says was a drug-carrying speedboat from Venezuela that killed 11.

Venezuela says US Navy raided tuna boat in Caribbean as tensions rise

The Trump administration justified the earlier strike as a necessary escalation to stem the flow of drugs into the United States.

But several senators, Democrats and some Republicans, have indicated their dissatisfaction with the administration’s rationale and questioned the legality of the action. They view it as a potential overreach of executive authority in part because the military was used for law enforcement purposes.

The Trump administration has claimed self-defense as a legal justification for the first strike, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio arguing the drug cartels “pose an immediate threat” to the nation.

U.S. officials said the strike early this month targeted Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan gang designated by the U.S. as a terrorist organization. And they indicated more military strikes on drug targets would be coming as the U.S. looks to “wage war” on cartels.

Trump did not specify whether Tren de Aragua was also the target of Monday’s strike.

The Venezuelan government did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the reported strike.

The Trump administration has railed specifically against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro for the scourge of illegal drugs in U.S. communities.

Maduro during a press conference earlier on Monday lashed out at the U.S. government, accusing the Trump administration of using drug trafficking accusations as an excuse for a military operation whose intentions are “to intimidate and seek regime change” in the South American country.

Maduro also repudiated what he described as a weekend operation in which 18 Marines raided a Venezuelan fishing boat in the Caribbean.

“What were they looking for? Tuna? What were they looking for? A kilo of snapper? Who gave the order in Washington for a missile destroyer to send 18 armed Marines to raid a tuna fishing vessel?” he said. “They were looking for a military incident. If the tuna fishing boys had any kind of weapons and used weapons while in Venezuelan jurisdiction, it would have been the military incident that the warmongers, extremists who want a war in the Caribbean, are seeking.”

Speaking to Fox News earlier Monday, Rubio reiterated that the U.S. doesn’t see Maduro as the rightful leader of Venezuela but as head of a drug cartel. Rubio has consistently depicted Venezuela as a vestige of communist ideology in the Western Hemisphere.

“We’re not going to have a cartel, operating or masquerading as a government, operating in our own hemisphere,” Rubio said.

Following the first military strike on a boat allegedly carrying drugs from Venezuela, America’s chief diplomat said Trump was “going to use the U.S. military and all the elements of American power to target cartels who are targeting America.”

AP and others have reported that the boat had turned around and was heading back to shore when it was struck. But Rubio on Monday said he didn’t know if that’s accurate.

“What needs to start happening is some of these boats need to get blown up,” Rubio said. “We can’t live in a world where all of a sudden they do a U-turn and so we can’t touch them anymore.”

AP writer Matthew Lee in Jerusalem contributed reporting.

A 75-year-old commission advocating for women in the armed services will be revived as part of a phased restoration of 39 Pentagon advisory groups put on pause earlier this year, Military Times has learned.

The move, detailed in an internal memo, follows a May memo that recommended termination for the Defense Advisory Committee on Women in the Services, as well as a number of other committees now set to be restored.

The Sept. 8 memo, signed by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, also introduces four new advisory committees, including groups focused on artificial intelligence and education.

“To effectively manage DOD resources that support each DOD advisory committee, the Department will use a phased approach … for resuming committee operations and appointment of new advisory committee members,” Hegseth wrote. “Pending the nomination and appointment of new advisory committee members, each DOD Sponsor may authorize the resumption of operational support, to include funding, for each DOD advisory committee they sponsor.”

The new boards, labeled in the memo as “pending establishment,” include:

• Advisory Panel on the Requirements Process of the Department of Defense
• Board of Advisers for the Office of the Senior Official with Principal Responsibility for Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
• Managed Aquifer Recharge Working Group
• School Advisory Committees

The creation of each of these new groups was mandated by recent legislation.

In February, Military Times reported that all existing DOD advisory groups were put on notice and given a week to deliver to the Pentagon’s office of personnel and readiness a report on their mission, members and operating expenses, as well as a one-page summary of how the “advice of the committee benefited the Department, Federal Government, United States, warrior ethos, etc. and how it aligns to the President’s and Secretary of Defense’s objectives.”

The committees were also asked to justify their continued existence. The demand, which preceded a pause in all advisory committee activity, was issued as Hegseth worked to slash 8% from Pentagon operating expenses.

In May, an email sent by Pentagon Deputy Director of Washington Services Bob Salesses and reviewed by Military Times recommended that 14 of the 40-plus existing advisory boards be terminated, including DACOWITS, the Department of Defense Board of Actuaries, and the Defense Advisory Committee on Military Personnel Testing, among others.

But the new Hegseth memo runs counter to most of these recommendations.

At deadline, Pentagon officials had not responded to a query about the timeline for the phased committee restoration or the reason why numerous boards previously highlighted for elimination had been spared.

A source with knowledge of planning said that the Pentagon was now nearing the end of Phase I in the timeline.

Committees whose activities have already fully or partially resumed, according to the memo, include:

• Advisory Board for National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
• Advisory Board for the National Reconnaissance Office
• Board of Visitors for the U.S. Air Force Academy
• Corps of Engineers Western Water Cooperation Committee
• Gold Star Advisory Council
• National Security Emerging Technology Board
• National Security Education Board
• Strategic Research and Development Program Scientific Advisory Board
• U.S. Military Academy Board of Visitors
• U.S. Naval Academy Board of Visitors

The NGA and NRO boards, as well as the emerging technology board, had been recommended for termination in Salesses’ letter.

Those recommended for restoration in Phase I of the new plan include (with those previously recommended for termination starred):

• Defense Policy Board
• Defense Science Board
• Department of Defense Board of Actuaries*
• Department of Defense Medicare-Eligible Retiree Health Care Board of Actuaries*
• Department of Defense Wage Committee
• U.S. Strategic Command Strategic Advisory Group*
• Uniform Formulary Beneficiary Advisory Panel

Boards in Phase II Include:

• The Air University Board of Visitors
• The Army Education Advisory Committee
• The Board of Regents, Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences
• Board of Visitors, Marine Corps University
• Board of Visitors, National Defense University
• Defense Business Board
• Defense Health Board
• Defense Innovation Board
• Department of the Navy Science and Technology Board
• Education for Seapower Advisory Board
• Military Justice Review Panel
• Reserve Forces Policy Board
• Strategic and Critical Minerals Board of Directors
• U.S. Army Science Board

Phase III Includes:

• Advisory Committee on Arlington National Cemetery
• Advisory Panel on Community Support for Military Families with Special Needs
• Armed Forces Retirement Home Advisory Council
• Defense Advisory Committee for the Prevention of Sexual Misconduct
• Defense Advisory Committee on Investigation, Prosecution, and Defense of Sexual Assault in the Armed Forces
• Defense Advisory Committee on Military Personnel Testing*
• DACOWITS*

The Defense Advisory Committee for the Prevention of Sexual Misconduct and the Defense Advisory Committee on the Investigation Prosecution and Defense of Sexual Assault in the Armed Forces were recommended for merger in Salesses’ letter; the Hegseth memo retains them and keeps them separate.

The committees in Phase IV, the final phase, include:

• Board on Coastal Engineering*
• Board of Visitors for the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation*
• Department of Defense Military Family Readiness Council
• Non-Federal Interest Advisory Committee*
• Tribal and Economically Disadvantaged Communities Advisory Committee*

Ultimately, only two of the 14 committees recommended for termination were not retained: The Table Rock Lake Oversight Committee and the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program Advisory Board.

The retained groups, meanwhile, may still face change.

“As part of the resumption of operations, each DOD sponsor will review the charters of each advisory committee they sponsor to ensure alignment with the President’s priorities and those of the Department,” Hegseth’s memo states.

For some who have worked in and with the advisory committees, the back-and-forth of recent years — beginning with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s "zero-based review" in 2021 that put all the committees on ice and threatened to merge DACOWITS with other boards — has left them feeling protective of fragile progress.

Jessica Ruttenber, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and KC-135 refueling aircraft pilot, saw the Air Force Women’s Initiative Team she’d worked with to improve gear for female pilots shuttered by the Pentagon in January amid efforts to shut down DEI initiatives.

After reports that DACOWITS was next to close, she said she scrambled to make copies of all the studies and documentation DACOWITS has posted on its public site over the years.

“We’re at 16%, 17% women in the DOD on active duty. We’re allowed to be in everything but I don’t think we’re fully integrated into everything,” Ruttenber said.

Nonetheless, she said, women have played a critical role in the historic military recruiting surge that began last fall.

“When you bring the warrior ethos, women are stepping up,” she said. “So, we need committees for women.”

TOKYO — The U.S. Army revealed Monday its mid-range missile system, Typhon, at one of its bases in Japan for the first time as the two allies stepped up their deterrence against China ‘s growing assertiveness in the region.

Typhon was featured during the annual bilateral exercise Resolute Dragon, which started last week, with more than 19,000 U.S. and Japanese troops participating in the exercise that focuses on maritime defense and littoral protection and held across Japan, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.

The land-based weapon, capable of firing the Standard Missile-6 and the Tomahawk cruise missiles that can hit targets on China’s eastern coasts, was delivered last month to the U.S. Marine Corps Base in Iwakuni, in southwestern Japan. Its exhibition in Japan follows its deployment in the Philippines last year, triggering criticisms from China and Russia.

The U.S. Army is not expected to fire Typhon or other advanced missile systems during the Resolute Dragon exercise, and its deployment in Iwakuni is only for the exercise ending on Sept. 25, Japanese public television NHK reported.

US Army readies second Typhon battery for Pacific deployment

Japan has been rapidly accelerating its military buildup, especially the so-called strike-back capability with mid- to long-range missiles as a counter to missile and nuclear threats from China, as well as North Korea and Russia.

“Employing multiple systems and different types of munitions, it is able to create dilemmas for the enemy,” Col. Wade Germann, commander of the U.S. Army’s 3d Multi-Domain Task Force, said in a televised news conference from Iwakuni.

It also comes days after Japan’s Defense Ministry said it spotted China’s newest aircraft carrier Fujian for the first time in the East China Sea, in waters just north of Japanese-controlled disputed islands Senkaku, which Beijing also claims and calls the Diaoyu.

Flying a fighter jet is often compared to being in a car crash over and over again.

Retired Navy F/A-18 Hornet pilot Matthew “Whiz” Buckley, a TOPGUN graduate and former instructor, remembers being hurled off the deck of an aircraft carrier at 150 to 200 miles-per-hour in less than two seconds.

Every catapult launch, every high-G turn, felt like an assault on the body and the brain.

Arrested landings were even more violent. Pilots, including Buckley, described them as controlled crashes: going from 150 miles-per-hour or more to a complete stop in approximately one second.

Strapped into the seat, the body could be restrained, but nothing stopped the head from snapping forward. Those forces were repeated daily, sometimes multiple times.

On deployments, pilots typically logged one to two arrested landings a day, one former aircraft carrier captain told Military Times on the condition of anonymity. Over a cruise, a junior aviator could expect to reach one hundred arrested landings. Mid-grade officers often doubled or tripled that number, with three hundred or more over the course of a career.

In naval aviation, those numbers were more than milestones. They were markers of credibility, proof of experience and proficiency.

Pilots knew their records were scrutinized by senior officers and by peers, the former captain said. Achieving higher totals meant not only a stronger professional reputation but better chances at advancement and post-Navy airline careers.

The culture created constant pressure to fly as much as possible, regardless of the physical toll.

Buckley flew 44 combat sorties over Iraq and spent years at the pinnacle of naval aviation. He loved every moment in the cockpit. But like many of his peers, he now says he lives with the hidden cost of flying: lingering brain trauma that no one in the Navy warned him about.

That silence is now drawing national scrutiny. The House Oversight Committee has launched an investigation into whether the Navy ignored evidence of widespread traumatic brain injuries among aviators.

Lawmakers want to know why no comprehensive study has been conducted and why projects like the little-known “Odin’s Eye” — an internal Navy project to evaluate the physiological and psychological effects inflicted on TOPGUN trainees — were kept in the shadows.

For pilots who spent years strapping into multi million-dollar aircraft and being blasted into the sky, the questions are long overdue.

A culture of silence

The silence begins in the cockpit. Pilots are trained to push through discomfort and never admit weakness.

In naval aviation, Buckley said, honesty with a flight surgeon can mean the end of a career.

“You tell a doctor you’re dizzy, you’ve got memory problems, or you’re not sleeping? You stop flying,” he said. “That’s why so many of us kept quiet. We wanted to stay in the air.”

The pressure is not just personal. Naval aviators live in a dog-eat-dog environment where racking up landings, missions and qualifications determines who advances.

Buckley said the culture emphasizes toughness and perfection, yet discourages transparency about physical or mental challenges.

The result is that repeated head and neck trauma, suffered in silence, accumulates over years of service.

Dr. Robert Cantu, one of the world’s leading experts on concussion and co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, has spent decades studying brain injuries in athletes.

What pilots endure is comparable and possibly worse, he said.

“In football or hockey, we see how repeated sub-concussive hits cause inflammation, axonal injury and in some cases chronic traumatic encephalopathy,” Cantu explained. “Pilots may not get tackled every Sunday, but every catapult launch, every high-G maneuver, every landing is stress on the brain. Over years, it adds up.”

Cantu pointed to reforms in professional sports as examples of what the Navy has yet to adopt.

The NFL and NCAA introduced baseline testing, limits on full-contact practices and protocols for removing players showing concussion symptoms. Combat sports like the UFC have implemented stricter medical checks and suspensions after knockouts.

These measures followed years of denial, lawsuits and public outcry.

“We learned the hard way in sports,” Cantu said. “Denial only delays the damage.”

What remains difficult to measure in aviation is the toll of sub-concussive events. A football player might suffer a handful of hard hits in a game, but a naval aviator is subjected to rapid acceleration and deceleration every time he or she launches or lands.

Arrested landings on carriers, described by Buckley as “like a shot to the body,” occur multiple times a day in training cycles. Even when no concussion is diagnosed, the brain and neck endure jarring forces that, according to neurologists, can still inflict microscopic injuries over time.

A ‘moral obligation’ for TBI prevention

Engineering experts like Dr. Bryan Pfister are continuing to explore potential solutions.

As the chair of biomedical engineering at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, Pfister studies how blast waves and blunt trauma affect the brain. Technology already exists to better understand what happens inside a pilot’s head, he said.

“Sensors in helmets, neck collars, even cockpit design — these are all tools to measure and potentially reduce the risk,” he explained.

If those tools were adopted, the Navy could collect real-time data about the stresses pilots endure, instead of leaving questions unanswered.

Other fields have already turned research into practical safety equipment.

Dr. Tamara Reid Bush, professor of mechanical engineering at Michigan State University, has studied the Head and Neck Support device used in auto racing. The HANS device stabilizes the skull and spine during impact, dramatically reducing the risk of devastating injuries.

“In racing, we reduced catastrophic head and neck injuries by stabilizing the skull and spine during impact,” she said. “The principles could be adapted for pilots.”

Integrating such a device into aviation, however, would not be simple.

Cockpit space, oxygen masks, ejection seat systems and helmets all create challenges that racing engineers do not face. Still, Bush sees promise in adapting cross-industry safety lessons for military aviation.

For now, naval aviators lack the kind of baseline testing and monitoring that athletes receive. They also lack the cultural permission to acknowledge symptoms.

Buckley remembers friends who suffered from memory loss, insomnia and mood swings but told no one for fear of being grounded.

He has counted 16 friends lost in aviation mishaps and four to suicide. These are pilots who loved flying, who lived for it. Yet when the flights ended, they were left with unspoken damage — sometimes staring into the mirror at someone they no longer recognized.

Unlike professional athletes, who now have medical protocols and, in some cases, lifetime health monitoring, aviators transitioning to civilian life often find themselves isolated.

Disclosure of mental health symptoms to FAA doctors can threaten their airline careers, creating another incentive for silence.

“We silence them into being perfect each step of the way,” Buckley said, “and at the end when they are done many are left with irreversible damage.”

The stakes extend beyond individual health. Naval aviation operates multimillion-dollar aircraft in complex, unforgiving environments. A football player’s concussion affects the player and the team. A fighter pilot’s momentary lapse could endanger an entire crew, an aircraft carrier or a mission.

Lawmakers are pressing for answers. House Oversight Committee Chair Rep. James Comer, R-Ky., and committee member Rep. William Timmons, R-S.C., have demanded the Navy provide studies, data and communications related to aviator health since 2023. They asked specifically about Project Odin’s Eye, the initiative reportedly aimed at studying brain trauma among pilots.

Their letters stress that aviators deserve transparency about the risks they face.

For Buckley, the answer is clear: The Navy must follow the lead of institutions that once resisted acknowledging brain injuries and are now working to protect their people.

The NFL and UFC once silenced athletes and are now investing heavily in research, protective gear and cultural change. Motorsports turned tragedy into reform with the HANS device. Naval aviators, Buckley argues, deserve the same commitment.

“Protecting aviators isn’t just about readiness,” Buckley said. “It’s a moral obligation.

“These men and women love flying enough to pay the price with their bodies. The least the Navy can do is protect them from avoidable harm.”

Personnel from a U.S. warship boarded a Venezuelan tuna boat with nine fishermen while it was sailing in Venezuelan waters, Venezuela’s foreign minister said on Saturday, underlining strained relations with the United States.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Tensions between the two nations escalated after U.S. President Donald Trump in August ordered the deployment of warships in the Caribbean, off the coast of the South American country, citing the fight against Latin American drug cartels.

While reading a statement on Saturday, Foreign Minister Yván Gil told journalists the Venezuelan tuna boat was “illegally and hostilely boarded by a United States Navy destroyer” and 18 armed personnel who remained on the vessel for eight hours, preventing communication and the fishermen’s normal activities. They were then released under escort by the Venezuelan navy.

The fishing boat had authorization from the Ministry of Fisheries to carry out its work, Gil said at a press conference, during which he presented photos of the incident.

Along with the statement, Venezuela’s foreign affairs ministry distributed a short video, taken, according to the ministry, by the Venezuelan fishermen.

In the video, it is alleged that part of the fishing boat, U.S. Navy personnel and the U.S. warship can be seen.

“Those who give the order to carry out such provocations are seeking an incident that would justify a military escalation in the Caribbean,” Gil said, adding that the objective is to “persist in their failed policy” of regime change in Venezuela.

Gil said the incident was “illegal” and “illegitimate” and warned that Venezuela will defend its sovereignty against any “provocation.”

The Venezuelan foreign minister’s complaint comes days after Trump said that his country had attacked a drug-laden vessel and killed 11 people on board. Trump said the vessel had departed from Venezuela and was carrying members of the Tren de Aragua gang, but his administration has not presented any evidence to support that claim.

Venezuela accused the United States of committing extrajudicial killings. The South American country’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, said Washington’s version is “a tremendous lie” and suggested that, according to Venezuelan government investigations, the incident could be linked to the disappearance of some individuals in a coastal region of the country who had no ties to drug trafficking.

The Trump administration has accused Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro of leading a cartel to flood the U.S. with drugs, and doubled the reward for his capture from $25 million to $50 million.

The U.S. government has given no indication that it plans to carry out a ground incursion with the more than 4,000 troops being deployed in the area.

But the Venezuelan government has nonetheless called on its citizens to enlist in the militias - armed volunteers - in support of its security forces in the event of a potential incursion. On Saturday, it urged them to go to military barracks for training sessions.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — A post on an anonymous chat platform triggered a lockdown at the U.S. Naval Academy this week, and authorities investigating what turned out to be a false report of a gunman then shot and injured a midshipman who had mistaken them as a threat, a military official said Friday.

The base that hosts the academy went into lockdown around 5 p.m. Thursday after it received a threat. However, the official said the threat wasn’t real — it came from a computer belonging to a former midshipman who was later confirmed to be in another part of the country. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to speak freely about an ongoing investigation.

The false report comes amid anxiety over a spate of recent violence at schools nationwide, including the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college. A shooting at a high school in Denver this week left two students injured and the gunman dead, while a shooting at a Minneapolis Catholic school left two children dead and 17 injured just over two weeks ago.

During the lockdown at the Naval Academy on Thursday, the Navy said in a statement at the time that it was responding to “reports of threats” but that the lockdown was “out of an abundance of caution.”

Police were seen near Bancroft Hall, which houses midshipmen in more than 1,600 dorm rooms. It is considered the biggest single college dormitory in the world, according to the school’s website.

Online speculation and misinformation led to reports that ranged from an assailant who was dressed in a police uniform to several injured midshipmen.

Colin Campbell, a student at nearby St. John’s College, said he heard multiple alarms go off at the academy after 5 p.m., warning of an “active threat” over loudspeakers.

“It was extraordinarily loud, multiple speakers going off at the same time,” said Campbell, who was walking near the academy at the time.

About 90 minutes after the lockdown took effect, the school’s deputy commandant emailed students, telling them that as law enforcement worked to secure the school, a midshipman mistook police for a threat and engaged them, according to the official.

The official added that the midshipman was armed with a parade rifle and struck an officer in the head. Law enforcement, in turn, fired on the midshipman, striking him in the arm. The account was reported earlier by The New York Times.

Hours later, at 9:40 p.m., a Navy statement confirmed that there was no threat of an active shooter and that one person was flown by helicopter with injuries but was in stable condition. The lockdown was lifted shortly after midnight.

The wounded midshipman has been released from the hospital, the academy said in a statement Friday. A member of the naval security force also received minor injuries, the academy said, and was treated at a hospital before being released.

“A full investigation into the incident is underway with NCIS and law enforcement,” the academy said in a news release.

Lucille Trott, who attends St. John’s College and lives across the street from the academy, described hearing the alerts and what followed as a terrifying experience after a week of gun violence in the country.

“On 9/11, the week that we’ve been having, so many shootings, so much gun violence, I feel like there needs to be a major shift in just the climate right now,” Trott said. “It all just makes one big pressure cooker.”

Toropin reported from Washington.

Almost no Marine of the U.S. 1st Marine Division stationed on Guadalcanal — an island 90 miles long and 25 miles wide in the Solomons Archipelago of the South Pacific Ocean — had experienced combat before stepping onto the island. The struggle, which had settled into a repetitive daily pattern since Aug. 10, 1942, had set the Marines on edge.

Stultifying heat and humidity enveloped the men in constant sweat while swarms of insects of biblical proportions greedily feasted on the men, who themselves felt the undeniable gnawing of hunger. Dysentery and malaria were rampant, so much so that one Marine recalled, writes historian Ian Toll, “It was so bad and so prevalent that a solid bowel movement was a cause for rejoicing.”

Marines could set their watches to when Japanese bombers would appear overhead — just shortly after noon — to pound their location. And, after Aug. 16, 1942, harrowing nighttime bombardments by Japanese submarines, ships and planes. Dubbed “Washing Machine Charley” or “Louise the Louse,” the nighttime raids by air did little damage but kept the Marines awake and on edge.

The “Guadalcanal twitch,” where Marines would execute a half-awake rolling maneuver into his foxhole, became the norm.

Amid this backdrop, the prevailing thought had become — almost as consistent as the nightly G4M “Betty” bomber attacks — where was the U.S. Navy?

Battle of Savo Sound

On Aug. 7, 1942, 19,000 men of the U.S. 1st Marine Division had stormed ashore on Guadalcanal. Although the Marines handily outnumbered the Japanese garrison and swiftly captured the airfield, their victory, writes historian Mark Grimsley, was deceptive.

The invasion, called Operation Watchtower, had been cobbled together in haste. There was little unity in its oversight, with separate commanders responsible for the landing force, the naval screening force and the three aircraft carriers (USS Enterprise, USS Saratoga and USS Wasp) covering the invasion.

“Most critically,” writes Grimsley, “the invasion has been mounted without first completing one of the cardinal tasks of amphibious warfare: the isolation of the beachhead from a naval counterstroke by the enemy.”

Said counterstroke occurred less than 24 hours after the initial Marine landing, with a mammoth Japanese air strike consisting of 53 Zero fighters and two-engine Betty bombers. The resulting attack sank one Australian heavy cruiser, HMAS Canberra, and three American heavy cruisers, USS Quincy, USS Vincennes and USS Astoria, as well as damaged other Allied vessels.

As the burning hulks of the Canberra and Astoria drifted aimlessly through the Sealark Channel, U.S. Navy Vice Adm. Frank Jack Fletcher considered his carriers to be too vulnerable and made the decision to withdraw them.

For the Marines stationed on Guadalcanal, looking out over the empty “Ironbottom Sound” on Aug. 9, 1942, was an exceedingly terrifying moment.

“What’s happened to the Navy?” Gen. Alexander Vandegrift, commanding officer of the 1st Marine Division, wondered aloud, as recalled in Toll’s The Conquering Tide.

“I don’t believe the first team has taken the field, General,” replied a staff sergeant.

For nearly six months following the Battle of Savo Island, the Marines would battle on, ultimately to victory — but at a heavy cost.

Between the Marines and U.S. Army soldiers, approximately 1,598 U.S. troops were killed, and more than 4,700 were wounded. Nearly 300 Marine, Army and Allied aviators flying from Henderson Field were killed. By comparison, however, close to 31,000 Japanese troops were killed in Guadalcanal.

“S--- hit the fan”

“One miserable night on that crocodile-infested island, a few officers decided the division deserved a medal — not for heroism in the traditional sense, but simply for surviving that dreadful place,” writes Chase Tomlin for the National World War II Museum.

What started as a jest soon became cast in bronze.

In postwar interviews, Lt. Col. Merrill B. Twining recalled that, “One evening on Guadalcanal … a group of us were discussing the situation — the enemy, the lack of support, chow, ammunition, and everything else, when I suggested that we design a medal to commemorate the campaign.”

Twining continued, “We all got a good laugh out of that.”

A popular idiom of the time — “Let George do it!” — had become the division’s unofficial motto, according to the Marine Corps University Press. The phrase meant to leave an undesirable task for another. By the end of the Guadalcanal campaign, every Marine — 1st Division or not — had become “George.”

As a result, the men christened it as the “George Medal.”

The men roped in Capt. Martin Clemens, a Cambridge-educated British military officer and coastwatcher on Guadalcanal, to translate their title into Latin for an added touch of class. The loose translation of “Faciat Georgius” adorned the medal.

In addition to Clemens, Capt. Donald Dickson, an adjutant of the 5th Marines who would later become a well-known illustrator and editor for Leatherneck magazine, sketched up the design.

Dark humor, the bedrock on which the military — and in particular the Marines — stands, was on full display.

On the front, an outstretched hand, presumably a U.S. Navy admiral, drops a “hot potato” as a scrambling Marine runs with his arms outstretched to receive it. A large Saguaro cactus looms to the left, a nod to the codename “Cactus” for the island of Guadalcanal.

The reverse side requires less deciphering. It is, as Owen Linlithgow writes for the Marine Corps University Press, “less subtle and more scatological in nature.”

“Original suggestions for a depiction of a Japanese soldier relieving himself, strategically placed near a large running office fan, were eventually overruled in favor of a more conservative cow exercising the same bodily action,” Linlithgow continued.

The formal, sardonic inscription reads: “In fond remembrance of the happy days spent from Aug. 7th, 1942, to Jan. 5th, 1943 – U.S.M.C.”

The George is cast

When the 1st Marine Division arrived in Melbourne, Australia, in January 1943, for rest and recuperation, the men set out to make “Faciat Georgius” a reality. Lt. Herbert C. Merillat, the division’s press officer, was thwarted on the first try after a local manufacturer turned him away due to fears of repercussions for casting an award that was not official.

In a previously unpublished letter to the 1st Marine Division Association written in 1974, Cpl. Vernon C. Stimpel provided further details as to how the medal was cast.

According to Stimpel, who was the division’s intelligence section clerk, he took the concept of the medal to a small engraving shop near Little Collins Street in Melbourne.

There, the engravers created a crude sand cast mold with Stimpel donating his own “herringbone twill utility uniform to be cut apart and serve as the source for the first run of the medals’ ribbons.”

In the letter, he recalled that 100 awards were to be cast. Stimpel himself owned medal number 45 of 100. The ribbon, according to the lore, would only be legitimate if it had been washed in the muddy waters of the Lunga or Matanikau rivers on Guadalcanal.

According to the Marine Corps University Press, “the distinctive stripes of a Navy admiral were clearly seen on the sleeve of the arm on the medal’s front,” but as word spread among Guadalcanal veterans and the demand grew, “a second run of 400 awards were made by the same engraving shop. Over time, each subsequent casting began to lose the original detail of the first batch, with small details such as the admiral’s sleeve markings becoming less prominent. This later contract also forfeited the traditional metal pin and clasp; they were presented with a comically oversized laundry bag safety pin instead.”

In addition to the medal, a deliberately sarcastic certificate accompanied each award, noting that the Marine had been there when “s--- hit the fan.”

But while the medal itself was a joke, the process of receiving one became remarkably bureaucratic.

On April 15, 1943, the Division Intelligence Section issued an official circular outlining eligibility, production and distribution, according to the National World War II Museum.

To qualify, a Marine had to have served on Guadalcanal, Tulagi or adjacent islands “during the heroic period which dates from the landing attacks … until the time of the Division’s relief.” Marines evacuated due to wounds or illness still qualified, as did reinforcements from the 7th Marines and U.S. Army’s 164th Infantry, who “did their share in the dark days.”

Those who fought briefly or were latecomers to the battle did not.

According to the museum, to receive the medal, “It required the endorsement of a witness in the recipient’s unit who could personally verify that the Marine had, in the certificate’s blunt words, truly been there ‘when the s--- hit the fan.’ Also, a committee planned to review each submission, ‘ensuring that none receive the medal who do not rate it.’”

The first Marine to receive the George Medal? None other than Gen. Vandegrift.

Presently, there is no way to determine how many original Australian-made medals were produced, as rumors and unverified stories from veterans claim that the original casting mold broke during the order for 400 more George Medals.

However, in 1978, the U.S. Marine Corps History and Museums Division received a mold for manufacturing the George Medal from the son of Gen. James J. Keating, who served as the commanding officer of 3d Battalion, 11th Marines, on Guadalcanal

According to the Marine’s family, Keating had it commissioned after the war’s end to create more George Medals for veterans who had previously been unable to obtain one. These were presented at various veteran reunions and confirm that there have been at least three iterations of the George Medal.

The George Medal is not a Distinguished Service Meal. It’s not a Purple Heart, nor a Medal of Honor. It is, however, a badge of honor for the men who celebrated the passing of a solid stool, sweated it out amid malarial fever dreams and endured nearly continuous shelling from a fanatical and brutal enemy.

It is, writes the museum, “a keepsake that says, ‘You survived Hell. Here is something for that.’”

Editor’s note: This article first appeared on The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service, under the headline “POW Witness: He was forced to watch an execution of U.S. soldiers. 80 years after WWII, his story sparks a search for their remains.” Subscribe to their newsletter.

Growing up in the Philippines on the island of Mindanao, Ben Hagans and his friends climbed coconut trees on his family’s plantation, fished for tuna and mahi-mahi, and raced homemade boats in the ocean—all without a stitch of clothing. When Ben was 9, his father took him on a six-month sailing adventure to Australia, India, and Vietnam.

But when he was 12, Ben’s idyllic childhood abruptly ended. Imperial Japan invaded the archipelago nation just hours after bombing Pearl Harbor. And after Allied forces surrendered to the Japanese on Mindanao Island six months later, Ben and his parents spent most of World War II in Japanese prisoner-of-war camps, where his mother was forced into sexual slavery and Ben and his dad nearly died from starvation and illness.

Now, in the twilight of an extraordinary life, Benjamin Broadwell Hagans has emerged as an eyewitness to the savage executions of three U.S. soldiers on July 3, 1942. The 96-year-old retired firefighter’s still-vivid memory of the killings is providing solid clues to finding the remains of not only those soldiers but also those of Army Brig. Gen. Guy Fort, the highest-ranking American military officer executed by enemy forces in World War II.

Fort, who lived on Mindanao Island for four decades, was called “a regular Daniel Boone” because of his wilderness skills and deep immersion in the local culture and languages. He is also remembered for his courage and unwavering resistance to the Japanese after his superiors ordered him to surrender 46 Americans and 300 Filipinos under his command in May 1942. He was executed by his captors that fall because he refused to order bands of fierce Muslim Moro guerrillas to stop fighting after supplying them with rifles and military equipment.

Fort reportedly taunted his executioners to the end, shouting: “You may get me, but you will never get the United States of America.”

The general and the three U.S. soldiers executed on July 3—Lt. Col. Robert Vesey, Capt. Albert Price, and 1st Sgt. John Chandler—are memorialized on the Tablets of the Missing at the Manila American Cemetery. The tablets are inscribed with the names of 36,286 Americans who perished in the Pacific theater during the Second World War but have no known graves.

Fifty-two years after a U.S. spy plane was shot down over Laos, a family still fights for answers: Did the crew all perish or were half of them LEFT BEHIND?

In the late 1940s, the U.S. military failed to find the remains of Fort, Vesey, Price, and Chandler and deemed them “nonrecoverable.” But a newly formed POW/MIA group is now hoping Ben Hagans’ sharp memory will lead to identifying the remains at the site of a former Japanese POW camp where the four Americans were executed.

“Never in a million years did I think that someone would still be alive who could help our family—someone who actually knew Brig. Gen. Fort and someone who knows the Philippine islands so well because he actually grew up there,” said Barbara Fox, a Southern California banker and real estate consultant whose stepfather, James Fort, was the son of the general.

The War Horse set out to unravel the remarkable series of events that led to the renewed search for the remains of the four soldiers more than 80 years after the executions—which ultimately resulted in the 1949 hanging of Japanese Lt. Col. Yoshinari Tanaka for war crimes. Interviews with Ben Hagans and family members—along with transcripts and documents from international war-crimes tribunals in postwar Japan, as well as U.S. and Philippine military and POW records—all tell the story.

It was a flurry of emails and phone calls between Barbara Fox and POW/MIA researcher John Bear last September that prompted Bear to take an intense interest in the Fort execution and begin digging into the Philippines’ wartime history.

In May, Bear came across a post by Kelly Hagans, Ben’s daughter-in-law, on a Facebook group aimed at protecting the legacy of the Philippine Scouts, a highly respected supplemental U.S. Army force that was mainly composed of Filipino soldiers and commanded by U.S. officers.

The post highlighted her father-in-law’s life and led Bear to a spellbinding interview Ben gave to the National World War II Museum in New Orleans in 2022 as part of an oral history project. Deep into the interview, Ben mentioned that he had witnessed the execution of American soldiers when he was a POW after serving in the Philippine Scouts.

Bear subsequently found a 1932 aerial photo of Camp Keithley, a former U.S. military installation on Mindanao Island that the Japanese had turned into a POW camp. He then tracked down Marty Hagans, Ben’s son, a retired California State Police officer who lives with his wife and his father in Dayton, Nevada. Bear asked Marty to show the photo to his dad to see if he could pinpoint where Vesey, Price, and Chandler were executed and buried.

As Kelly recorded a video of the conversation between her father-in-law and husband, Ben pointed to specific Camp Keithley features such as the nearby Agus River and a bridge that crosses the river—features that were not easily seen in the photo because of the camera angle.

“I knew then that his memory was sharp as a tack,” Bear recalled. “Once Ben had oriented himself to the photo, he pointed out where he remembered the execution taking place.”

Ben also pointed to the spot where he believes Vesey, Price, and Chandler were buried—close to an obelisk monument that was erected in 1939 to honor Pvt. Fernando Guy Keithley, a hero in the Philippine-American War.

Marty Hagans says when he explained the historical significance of his father’s vivid memories to him, he immediately agreed to help in the decades-old search for the soldiers’ remains. “He was absolutely stunned when he found out that the remains of these heroes haven’t been returned to their families,” his son told The War Horse.

Through his research, Bear is convinced that when teams of American soldiers searched in vain for Gen. Fort’s remains in the late 1940s, they were looking on the wrong side of the Agus River because the north-south axis of the hand-drawn map the soldiers were using was substantially off.

Mike Henshaw, a 25-year U.S. Army veteran from Virginia who has taken part in scores of recovery missions that have led to the identification of the remains of more than 100 service members missing from past wars, reviewed the new evidence and believes there’s a strong chance of locating the four sets of remains.

The timing was auspicious. In January, Henshaw founded the Asymmetric MIA Accounting Group, an all-volunteer nonprofit dedicated to bringing home the remains of missing service members. He and his recovery team plan to travel to the Philippines sometime this fall.

The obelisk monument is now gone, but finding its buried foundation with ground-penetrating radar “should be straightforward—and could provide the key to solving the mystery,” Henshaw said.

Jay Silverstein, a prominent POW/MIA forensic anthropologist, told The War Horse that Henshaw’s team should be able to find identifiable remains if the new information from Ben Hagans and Bear helps them locate the graves.

“There’s a very good chance that you’ll find teeth, and there’s a fair chance you’ll find bones as well. Some of the denser areas of the skull preserve well and are also good for extracting DNA. But it really depends on the environmental conditions. From my experience, skeletal remains—although in some cases degraded by insects and roots, or fragile due to moisture and soil chemistry—endure for hundreds or even thousands of years in most environments.”

The task of locating and retrieving the four soldiers’ remains became more daunting in May 2017 when Philippine security forces conducted an operation to capture an ISIS-aligned emir believed to be hiding in the Islamic City of Marawi, formerly known as Dansalan. The operation was met with violent resistance by Islamist militants, sparking a five-month-long battle.

Because the U.S. State Department still considers the area unsafe to visit, the U.S. Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency has expressed concern about operating there. But Henshaw, a Desert Storm and Operation Iraqi Freedom combat veteran with two Bronze Stars, said his organization was formed to operate in difficult environments where official agencies cannot. “I plan to move forward cautiously but remain determined to honor the fallen,” Henshaw said.

The executions of Vesey, Price, and Chandler occurred several weeks after Ben Hagans’ regiment of the Philippine Scouts surrendered in May 1942, when the prisoners were moved to Camp Keithley. Ben’s mother and father, a U.S. Army officer, also were taken captive.

The Japanese warned the new prisoners not to try to escape. If they did, the captors vowed, they would execute an equal number of POWs.

After four American soldiers escaped on the night of July 1 or July 2, the Japanese showed their captives it was no idle threat. The next day, the captors tied Gen. Fort and three other American soldiers to wooden stakes and prepared to execute them.

Then, Ben said, Lt. Col. Vesey stepped forward and told the executioners: “Cut the general down. I’ll take his place.”

At the last minute, the camp’s commander also granted a reprieve to one of the four Americans originally targeted for execution, Col. Eugene Mitchell, at the request of a Japanese lieutenant who had befriended Mitchell.

Fort’s reprieve proved to be temporary. On or about Nov. 11, 1942, the Japanese executed him by firing squad at Camp Keithley for continually spurning their pleas to tell the Moro guerrillas to lay down their arms. He was buried less than a mile from the graves of the other executed soldiers, researcher Bear has calculated.

For the 12-year-old Ben, Vesey’s execution was excruciatingly painful. Vesey was a 1918 West Point graduate whose hometown was Hope, Arkansas, and he was a longtime friend of Ben’s father, Broadwell Hagans. A major in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Hagans worked closely with Gen. Douglas MacArthur (who called Hagans’ precocious son “Benny”) on the Malinta tunnel complex on Corregidor Island.

“Col. Vesey was a great man,’’ Ben told The War Horse. “He was loved by everybody. I probably saw him three times a week when I was growing up. He would come by our house to talk to my father, but he always greeted me and always told me, ‘It was a pleasure talking to you.’’’

Ben recounted how he and about 100 other prisoners were forced to stand about 50 yards from the execution site as Vesey and the other soldiers were repeatedly bayoneted. “It took them two and a half hours to bleed to death as we stood there,” Ben said. “I put my eyes down and tried not to look.”

The next day was the Fourth of July, and Ben and his parents were among the hundreds of Filipino and American soldiers and civilians forced to march about 25 miles in one day from Camp Keithley to Iligan, where Ben grew up.

The Mindanao Death March, which the Japanese had mockingly dubbed “The Independence Day March,” has been overshadowed in history books by the infamous Bataan Death March on the island of Luzon. But it was no less brutal.

As the scorching tropical sun bore down on them, Ben said, the Mindanao marchers hiked through a mountainous jungle and were given little food and water. Those who were unable to keep up were often shot to death, usually in the forehead.

The Americans were tied together with telephone wire in groups of four. The Filipino prisoners, many dressed only in rags, were forced to walk barefoot on a hot and rocky dirt road.

Ben recalls Filipino villagers along the way slipping the marchers gourds of rainwater, bananas, and rice. Those villagers caught helping the prisoners were beaten or fatally shot, and their homes were torched as a warning to others to stay away.

After arriving in Iligan, the prisoners spent two nights in a dilapidated school building and then were crammed onto a cannon boat that sailed to Cagayan de Oro, where they spent two days on a pier waiting to be taken to a network of POW camps. Ben told The War Horse he watched in horror as Japanese troops raped his mother.

Ben and his father were sent to different camps for military POWs. His mother, Ignacia, who was born in the Philippines and was of Spanish and Scottish descent, was sent to the sprawling Santo Tomas Internment Camp for civilians in Manila and forced to become a “comfort woman”—the Japanese euphemism for a sex slave.

She was one of as many as 200,000 women and girls forced into sexual servitude during Japan’s conquest of Asian countries. The overwhelming majority of the women were Asian—mostly Korean, Chinese, and Filipina. But a tiny percentage were European and American civilians captured during the war.

“She never got over it,” Ben said. “She was very, very bitter and became reclusive and stayed in the Philippines her whole life. I did not resent her for that.”

Ben was only 12 when he joined the 43rd Infantry Regiment of the Philippine Scouts just two days after Pearl Harbor. He had tried to join the U.S. Army, but was turned down because of his age.

The Scouts were thrilled to have him because he not only spoke fluent English but had also mastered Cebuano, the main language spoken on Mindanao Island. So after three days of military training, he was put to work as a courier. He was also issued a .30-40 Krag-Jørgensen rifle and was once gravely wounded when the shrapnel from a mortar round ripped into his legs and left arm.

In his two and a half years as a POW, he was shuttled from camp to camp—seven in total.

“The food was almost nonexistent,” Ben said.

His diet consisted mostly of watered-down rice and only an occasional vegetable. The POWs, he said, were often forced to kill their own food, eating virtually anything that moved for protein—snakes, dogs, cats, rats, and millipedes.

On Oct. 20, 1944, Gen. MacArthur’s forces landed on Leyte Island, marking the start of the Philippines liberation campaign. But little information filtered into the POW camps.

Ben’s eyes light up when he talks about the January day in 1945 when he was transferred to the Santo Tomas camp and saw his parents for the first time in two and a half years.

“Until then I didn’t know where they were, or if they had survived or not,’’ he said.

He also cracks a smile when he talks about Feb. 3, 1945.

“It was about 9 p.m. when I looked at the front gate of the camp, and I saw this tank coming in and thought it was a Japanese tank,” he said. But soon a soldier from the U.S. Army’s 1st Cavalry Division popped out of the top of the tank and asked Ben and his fellow POWs where they could find their Japanese captors. “Then the soldier reached down and started throwing candy bars at us,” Ben said.

After a ferocious firefight in which the Japanese held more than 200 internees hostage in a building, the enemy troops were granted safe passage in exchange for releasing the hostages.

Then, at midnight, the 1st Cavalry laid out a great spread for all the prisoners. “Apples, pears, oranges, sweet rolls, oatmeal, ham, good old Spam,” Ben recalled.

Ben’s teeth were so loose that all he could eat was the oatmeal. But he went through the line nine times.

The next morning, Army medical officers gave all the prisoners a series of shots and vitamin pills and put everyone on a scale. Ben, then 15 years old, weighed 56 pounds.

A few days after the camp was liberated, Ben thought he spotted someone he knew from a distance, but suspected it might be a mirage. Could that be his older brother Bill? In a U.S. Navy officer’s uniform?

“It’s Bill! It’s Bill!” he shouted to his parents, who refused to believe it until they all fell into each other’s arms.

Bill was one of Ben’s four half-siblings from his father’s first marriage. The four had all left the Philippines before the Japanese invaded in 1941. But Bill enlisted in the Navy in Michigan and was sent on a three-year mission in the Philippines to find out the location of the POW camps and who was in them. The short, fair-complected Bill had posed as a Filipino peasant by taking the bark of betel nut trees, mashing it into pulp, and rubbing it over his skin to darken it.

Two months after Mindanao’s camps were liberated, Ben boarded a ship to the States to be treated for a host of diseases, including dysentery, beriberi, parasitic flatworms, dengue fever, and malaria. He was in three military hospitals for a year and a half before a physician discovered Ben had cholera and that all his other diseases were masking the symptoms.

Once he was treated for cholera, Ben recovered and was released within weeks.

Ben, who had been homeschooled in the Philippines, settled in California’s San Joaquin Valley and entered Fresno State to study agriculture and forestry. He had just finished his freshman year when North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel into South Korea, and President Harry Truman ordered the U.S. military to intervene.

An Army reservist, Ben was called up in his sophomore year. Although Army officials told him he wouldn’t have to go to Korea because he was a former POW, he didn’t ask for an exemption and was sent to Fort Benning in Georgia to train to become a paratrooper. He ended up doing two tours in Korea and getting promoted on the battlefield to second lieutenant.

After that war was over, he joined California’s Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and became a firefighter. He ended his 32-year career as a battalion chief in Tulare County.

He earned a fistful of medals from his wartime experience, including three Purple Hearts and a POW medal. But the one that would mean the most to him—a medal for his service in the Philippine Scouts—has eluded him for decades. He and his son were told the records were among the millions destroyed in the 1973 fire at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis.

Ben still has nightmares about the time his Japanese captors beat him severely for stealing oats and rice meant for the horses, the three days he was forced to drink his own urine to survive a “hell ship” transporting POWs, and seeing fellow prisoners having their heads lopped off with swords.

“He has these dreams every single day and every single night,” his son said. “I hear him, and I know which are the bad ones.”

Ben uses a walker now. But that didn’t stop him from celebrating his 96th birthday in July by skydiving. It was his second birthday jump in two years. Counting his jumps as a paratrooper in Korea, that makes 117.

Is he going to stop now?

“Nope,” he said with a chuckle. “The next jump is when I turn 100. That will be the last one.”

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

Ken McLaughlin is a freelance writer based in Scotts Valley, California. He spent 35 years at the San Jose Mercury News as a reporter, editorial writer and editor. He’s written extensively about politics, marine science, Vietnam, immigration, and race and demographics. He has a master’s in journalism from Stanford University and taught aspiring science writers for a decade at UC Santa Cruz.

SAVANNAH, Ga. — Leaders of a Georgia-based church with congregations in five states have been charged by federal prosecutors with swindling millions of dollars in veterans benefits from parishioners serving in the military.

An indictment unsealed Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Savannah charges House of Prayer Christian Churches of America founder Rony Denis and seven other church leaders with conspiring to commit bank fraud and wire fraud, as well as other federal crimes.

Authorities say church leaders exploited soldiers and other congregation members by enrolling them in seminary programs that drained their G.I. Bill education benefits. They also say church officials used parishioners’ names on fraudulent mortgage applications to buy homes that the church then rented to congregation members.

“The defendants are accused of exploiting trust, faith, and even the service of our nation’s military members to enrich themselves,” Paul Brown, the agent in charge of the FBI’s Atlanta office, said in a news release.

Prosecutors say church raked in $23 million from veterans benefits

Prosecutors say they don’t even know the real name of Denis, alleging he assumed that name after stealing another person’s identity in 1983. He founded House of Prayer roughly two decades ago. The church is headquartered in Hinesville, a southeast Georgia city that is home to thousands of veterans and Army soldiers serving at neighboring Fort Stewart. The congregation there grew to as many as 300 members, the indictment says.

House of Prayer branched out, opening up to a dozen churches in five states, often near military bases, according to prosecutors. It also established affiliated Bible seminaries in Hinesville as well as Fayetteville, North Carolina; Killeen, Texas; and Tacoma, Washington.

The indictment says the church focused on recruiting military service members to join their congregations and pressured them to spend their G.I. Bill education benefits on enrollment in its seminary programs.

The seminaries in all four states earned House of Prayer leaders $23.5 million in G.I. Bill payments for tuition, fees, books and housing costs from 2013 and 2021, according to the indictment.

Charges against Denis and others stem from just $3.2 million of those benefit payments made to House of Prayer’s two seminaries in Georgia. That is because the programs operated in Georgia under a religious exemption granted by state regulators. Prosecutors say that exemption prohibited the Georgia seminaries from receiving federal funding — including G.I. Bill benefits from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.

The indictment says church officials lied to Georgia regulators in annual forms saying the seminaries received no federal money.

Steven Sadow, listed in court records as an attorney for Denis, did not immediately return an email message seeking comment Thursday.

A group called Veterans Education Success wrote to the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in 2020, saying former students had complained that the House of Prayer seminaries had drained their benefits while providing them with little education. FBI agents served search warrants on several House of Prayer churches in 2022, according to local news outlets.

Church accused of profiting off rental homes bought with false documents

The indictment says church officials also used its members as straw buyers to conceal the leaders’ purchase of rental properties. Prosecutors say church leaders falsified loan applications and closing documents and forged powers of attorney to buy and transfer homes that were rented to congregation members.

The indictment says House of Prayer received $5.2 million in rent payments between 2018 and 2020, with some of that money being used to pay for Denis’ two homes as well as church leaders’ credit card bills.

Denis was also charged with helping falsify his federal income tax returns for 2018, 2019 and 2020. On Wednesday, FBI agents and Columbia County sheriff’s deputies arrested the church founder at his mansion in Martinez west of Augusta, WRDW-TV reported.

In a separate case, federal prosecutors also indicted Bernadel Semexant, a pastor at the House of Prayer church in Hinesville. The indictment unsealed Wednesday charges Semexant with sex abuse of a girl between the ages of 12 and 15. William Joseph Turner, listed in court records as the pastor’s attorney, did not immediately return an email message.

Editor’s note: This is a developing story.

ANNAPOLIS, Md. — The United States Naval Academy in Maryland was put on lockdown Thursday and a building was cleared in response to reports of threats made to the miliary school, and one person was injured, officials said.

The person injured was airlifted to a hospital and was in stable condition, Lt. Naweed Lemar, the spokesperson for the base that hosts the academy, said in a statement.

Naval Support Activity Annapolis security and local law enforcement had responded to the reports of suspicious activity, Lemar said. Additional details about the threat and how the person was injured were not immediately available.

Lemar had said earlier that the academy in Annapolis was on lockdown “out of an abundance of caution.”

Police were seen near Bancroft Hall, which houses midshipmen in its more than 1,600 dorm rooms. It is considered the biggest single college dormitory in the world, according to the school’s website.

The Navy has relieved the commanding officer of the USS Santa Barbara, the service announced Thursday.

Cmdr. Adam Ochs was removed from his position by Capt. Kelley Jones, commander of Task Force 55, on Thursday, “due to a loss of confidence” in Ochs’ ability to command the littoral combat ship, the Navy said in a brief release.

“The Navy maintains the highest standards for leaders and holds them accountable when those standards are not met,” the release said.

The release did not provide additional details on what led to Ochs’ dismissal, but the service typically uses “loss of confidence” as a blanket statement when dismissing senior leadership.

Ochs, who assumed his role as USS Santa Barbara’s commanding officer on Nov. 22, 2023, has been temporarily reassigned to commander of Naval Surface Group Southwest, according to the release.

Navy relieves commander of New Hampshire Reserve center

Blue crew executive officer Cmdr. Jeff Steiner has temporarily assumed command of the littoral combat ship. Gold crew commanding officer Cmdr. Linzy Lewis is expected to assume command Friday, the Navy said.

Ochs’ departure will not affect the “mission or schedule” of the ship, which is currently on a scheduled deployment in the U.S. 5th Fleet area of operations, according to the release.

U.S. 5th Fleet’s jurisdiction includes the Arabian Gulf, Red Sea, Gulf of Oman and parts of the Indian Ocean.

Ochs, a career surface warfare officer, previously served aboard the USS McInerney, USS Princeton and USS Leyte Gulf, according to his Navy biography. He’s also served as an AEGIS Training and Readiness instructor; an action officer on the OPNAV staff for the director of Navy Plans, Policy and Integration; and an assistant chief of staff for administration and flag secretary to the commander of Carrier Strike Group 10.

The Pentagon last month held its first “Top Drone” school for drone pilots to demonstrate their skills in a threat-representative environment.

The event took place as part of the Defense Department’s Technology Readiness Experimentation, or T-REX, a semiannual showcase and evaluation staged at Camp Atterbury in Indiana. The event aims to validate prototypes built to fill urgent capability gaps across the military services and combatant commands.

Lt. Col. Matt Limeberry, commander of the Pentagon’s Rapid Assessment or Prototype Technology Task Force, told Defense News in an interview Monday that DOD plans to host at least two Top Drone schools each year.

The goal, he said, is to provide a chance for service members, industry and academia to prove out tactics, operational procedures and drone capabilities on a test course that mimics the kinds of terrain and adversary effects an operator might see in the field. It also allows the department to validate and refine its own counter-uncrewed aircraft system sensors.

“It’s a dual effect of data collect but also benefits the warfighter and industry flying through this threat-represented and emulated environment,” Limeberry said.

For the inaugural, four-day event, the task force set up a training course at the Muscatatuck Training Center just south of Camp Atterbury, designing it to imitate an urban setting and focusing on maneuverability, endurance and reconnaissance. Two companies, Vector and Code 19, flew drones alongside two service partners — the Army’s Combat Lethality Task Force and its Aviation Center of Excellence.

The drones were a mix of untethered first-person view systems and fiber-optic-connected drones.

The department also staged a trial at a separate test range at Camp Atterbury that was supporting T-REX where the Marine Corps Attack Drone Team conducted live fire demonstrations.

Limeberry said he was impressed with how well service members participating in Top Drone performed, navigating and identifying targets. For future events, he hopes to expand the trials over multiple weeks to allow operators to “refine” their tactics against more complex obstacles.

The department is also building a secondary Top Drone course at Camp Atterbury to emulate a more dense, wooded environment.

“As we continue to scale the complexity, it will be an a la carte menu of [electronic warfare] jamming and providing a real-world, adversarial threat-informed environment that we need to fly with and through to make sure that we’re staying competitive,” Limeberry said.

Senior leaders in the Pentagon in recent months have ramped up their drive for what Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has called “drone dominance.” The intent is for the military services to not only field more drones to operators, but also develop the organizational and training infrastructure to support broader adoption by 2027.

Top Drone supports that push as did much of last month’s T-REX event, which focused on low-cost, attritable attack drones as well as counter-uncrewed aircraft system technologies like interceptors and sensors.

Over the course of the two-week showcase, the department assessed 58 technologies, some of which were sponsored by a military service or combatant command and others brought by firms that had never engaged with the Defense Department but had technology with the potential to address a critical capability gap.

Of those technologies, some number will progress into joint, rapid experimentation and others will require further development and iteration or experimentation. Limeberry noted that DOD has a number of innovation pathways aimed at further maturing technology and T-REX is a good way to identify which route makes the most sense for a particular capability.

“The goal of T-REX is to come out and you find your best transition partner, an innovation pathway that fits the need of your company or fits the need of the government, depending on where the gap and critical need is,” he said.

Decisions about which technologies will transition into the rapid experimentation phase are pending, Limeberry said. He expects the team will brief Undersecretary for Research and Engineering Emil Michael in the coming weeks and have a determination before the end of September.

Along with the technology demonstrations, T-REX also featured static displays from another 50 companies whose capabilities are in an early stage of development. Those capabilities may be considered for participation in future T-REX assessments.

“They were showcasing emergent and urgent capabilities but didn’t have the capacity yet to fully assess and put their prototypes into the environment, so we put them on a prototype technology display,” Limeberry said.

The United States marked 24 years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks on Thursday with somber ceremonies at the Pentagon, New York and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

Family members and loved ones of the nearly 3,000 people killed read out their names as politicians honored their sacrifices.

“Today, as one nation, we renew our sacred vow that we will never forget Sept. 11, 2001,” President Donald Trump said during the observance at the Pentagon, which took place in an internal courtyard of the building this year rather than its traditional location outside its walls near the building’s 9/11 memorial.

“If you attack the United States of America, we will hunt you down, and we will find you,” he added.

The attack at the Pentagon killed 184 service members and civilians when hijackers steered a passenger jet into U.S. military headquarters. The youngest Pentagon attack victim, Dana Falkenberg, was just three years old.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who served in the Army National Guard, said at the ceremony that day gave him “an unshakable call to action, a duty to defend our sacred homeland with everything I had.”

“Like all of you, 9/11 was the ultimate validator to serve,” he said.

The secretary took a moment during the ceremony to warn that the United States should use its military “ruthlessly” for limited operations.

“War must not become a mere tool for Global Social Work eager to risk American blood and treasure for utopian fever dreams. We should hit hard, wreak vengeance and return home,” he said.

The remembrances, in which the nation comes together in a time of unity, are being held during a time of increased political tensions. On Wednesday, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah.

The president announced Kirk would be posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, calling him a “giant of his generation” and a “champion of liberty.”

A drumbeat of attacks and threats against political figures has steadily reverberated into American society this year. Just three months ago, a masked gunman shot and killed Minnesota State Representative Melissa Hortman, alongside her husband, Mark. That same morning, State Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, were also shot and injured in a separate, but related, attack. Both survived.

Two months before that, an arsonist set the Pennsylvania governor’s mansion ablaze while Democratic Gov. Josh Shapiro and his family slept inside.

Rick Rescorla knew his history. The native of England knew how stories of the past, recent or distant, could move people. Be it the English victory at Agincourt in 1415 or the British victory at Rorke’s Drift in the Zulu War of 1879, his tales of individuals surmounting incredible odds could lift people that last small bit to keep fighting. To survive. To win. He wrote and sang songs to puff up morale and calm nerves. We know because his singing was captured on a reel-to-reel tape in a ramshackle officers club at the U.S. base at An Khe in 1966. The percussion heard on the recording was outgoing harassment and interdiction fire.

It is almost 60 years now since Rick showed his courage at Ia Drang, where the U.S. Army waged its first big battle with North Vietnamese troops, and exactly 24 years since he braved the fire in New York when the city was hit by the deadliest terrorist attack in history.

On 9/11 Rick died doing what he did best: rallying the troops — the employees of Morgan Stanley Dean Witter at the World Trade Center. When Tower Two collapsed around him at 9:59 a.m., 73 minutes after the first plane flew into the Twin Towers, Rick, head of security at the largest financial institution in the building, had already sped the evacuation of more than 2,000 employees. Only three had not safely exited, and he was going back in to get them.

Thousands of civilians in New York lived because of Rick, just as soldiers in Ia Drang lived because of him.

Rick was in Vietnam at the beginning of combat operations in 1965, just as he was in New York at the start of another war in 2001. The children of those saved by Rick will pass the story on to their own children, and Rick’s memory will be preserved.

My first memory of Cyril “Rick” Rescorla is at a reunion of Ia Drang veterans in 1996. I was a young captain, commanding a company in the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry Regiment, 1st Cavalry Division, at Fort Hood, Texas, and being invited to this reunion was a great honor. Rick was one of the most famous veterans of our battalion. When retired Lt. Gen. Hal Moore, who as a lieutenant colonel commanded the 1st Battalion of the 7th at Ia Drang, says a man is “the best combat platoon leader I ever saw,” that sort of thing rather sticks. Induction into the Officer Candidate School Hall of Fame is another point toward immortality.

The November 1965 fighting at Landing Zones X-Ray and Albany in the Ia Drang Valley immediately became front-page news because of the high casualty rate. Both formally and informally, the battles profoundly affected the ways American forces would fight throughout the rest of the war. It validated the concept of “air assault” (transporting troops to the battlefield in helicopters), which then became the overarching American tactical concept for the use of infantry in Vietnam.

The dual battles at Ia Drang were immortalized by Gen. Moore and my friend journalist Joe Galloway, who was on the ground from day one, in their 1992 book We Were Soldiers Once…and Young, which become a New York Times bestseller. On the book’s cover is a photo of Rick taken by Associated Press journalist Peter Arnett, who also covered the battle.

Heroism at Ia Drang

Rescorla, born in Hayle, Cornwall, England, served in the British Army, then became a member of the Rhodesian paramilitary police and later joined the U.S. Army to help fight the Communists in Southeast Asia. After Officer Candidate School, he was assigned to the 7th Cavalry Regiment and led the men of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion.

On Nov. 14, 1965, Moore’s 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, air-assaulted into the remote Ia Drang Valley, less than 10 miles from the Cambodian border. The troop drop stirred up a hornets’ nest. Hours later, Lt. Rescorla’s Bravo Company was ordered to the center of that area to support Moore’s battalion. Moore’s men were surrounded by more than 2,000 soldiers of the North Vietnamese Army.

As Rescorla’s troops landed at LZ X-Ray, the lieutenant ordered his men to set up a new defensive perimeter, 50 yards behind the previous one, and dig deep foxholes. They rigged grenades and booby traps in front of them. They carefully emplaced their machine guns and piled up ammunition.

Then they waited overnight. Rescorla sang songs to steady the men. At 0400, grenades and booby traps began to erupt in front of Bravo, but the company was primed. The NVA assaulted four times, attacking in human waves. In the first rush, an attack by as many as 300 NVA was stopped cold.

Around 0630, the North Vietnamese launched a heavier attack. Rescorla and his men continued to pump rounds into the clumps of bodies nearest their holes. At 0655 they commenced a “mad minute” of firing. Ultimately, the 2½ hour predawn attack failed.

In daylight, Rescorla took a patrol through the silenced battlefield, policing up the area. After his men left the perimeter, they came under heavy machine-gun fire, and Rescorla gave the command “Fix bayonets!” Arnett just happened to be nearby and snapped the photo that would become a book cover. Rescorla lobbed a grenade at an enemy gunner and wiped out a nest of NVA.

On Nov. 17, the rest of the 2nd Battalion, which had arrived on foot, began a tactical march to a new landing zone, Albany, for a helicopter pickup. On the march, the battalion came under another NVA attack, and Rick’s platoon was again deployed in relief. Rick, the sole remaining officer platoon leader in Bravo Company, led the initial reinforcement into the Albany perimeter.

“We Were Soldiers”

As the helicopter carrying Rick descended into Albany under heavy fire, the pilot was hit and started to lift up. Rick and his men jumped the remaining 10 feet, bullets flying at them, and made it into the beleaguered perimeter.

Leading 1st Platoon, Rick yelled, “Come on, let’s let them have it!” according to Lt. Larry Gwin, whose book Baptism recounts the same events.

“I saw Rick Rescorla come swaggering into our lines with a smile on his face, an M-79 on his shoulder, his M-16 in one hand, saying: “Good, good, good! I hope they hit us with everything they got tonight — we’ll wipe them up,” Gwin wrote. “His spirit was catching. The troops were cheering as each load came in, and we really raised a racket. The enemy must have thought that an entire battalion was coming to help us because of all our screaming and yelling.” But it was just Rescorla and a few of his men.

Dozens of wounded Americans lay at Albany, awaiting medevacs throughout the night. Brave aviators risked everything for the wounded in Albany. Rick, inside the perimeter, disciplined the men, admonishing no more firing. “As dawn broke over the Albany battlefield on Friday, November 18, a profound shock awaited the Americans who had survived the night,” wrote Moore and Galloway in We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. “To this point no one had a clear picture of the extent of the losses suffered by the 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.... Rescorla described the scene as a “long, bloody traffic accident in the jungle.”

In the movie We Were Soldiers, based on the book, Moore went outside the perimeter, found the body of one of his lieutenants and brought it back. That part was true. Moore would bring every man out. But the part about Moore finding an NVA bugle was not true. It was Rick who found that bugle on a dying enemy soldier forward of his lines during a sweep at LZ Albany.

“We returned to [Camp] Holloway and for a while we were buoyed up with the fact that we had survived,” Rick said. “All gloomy memories were shoved below the surface.” The bugle can still be seen at the infantry museum at Fort Benning.

After those two swirling fights, in which Rescorla’s men defeated forces estimated at five or six times their own size, company commander Capt. Myron Diduryk approached the lieutenant and asked him (not told, asked) if he would mind if the entire company adopted the nickname of Rick’s 1st Platoon, “Hard Corps.” Thus Rick, whose radio call sign in the platoon was One-Six, became “Hard Corps One-Six” on the company and battalion networks.

There is no easy or simple way to describe the life of Rick Rescorla. The men who knew the 26-year-old second lieutenant in Vietnam mostly knew him for only a year and then did not see him for decades. Those who knew him longer offer a host of descriptions: poet, romantic, playwright, a man truly addicted to song, academic, intellectual, raconteur, Cornishman, dedicated father, a man known for his fierce loyalty to those he felt deserved it, whether superiors, peers or subordinates.

Everyone who knew Rick, regardless of what they remembered about him, could agree on one thing: Rick Rescorla was, always, the baddest son of a bitch in the valley.

Following his tour in Vietnam, Rescorla spent a year teaching at Fort Benning in Georgia and then got out of the Army — sort of. He joined the Army Reserve, advancing to colonel before he retired in 1990. Along the way, Rick picked up a master’s degree and a law degree. In 1985, he took a corporate security position with Dean Witter.

At the Ia Drang reunion in ’96, I had mostly tried to keep my mouth shut and let the veterans of combat talk to each other. But Rick was having none of that. Drawing me out, he learned of my own inclinations: history, academia, writing, even acting, all very nontraditional for your standard airborne infantry Ranger. As one who aspired to someday become a historian, I sat and had a good scotch while he told me his stories, which I was writing down in an untutored oral-history kind of way. Later, I asked him to inscribe my copy of We Were Soldiers Once…and Young.

Rick ordered a fresh glass of single-malt scotch, took my book, borrowed my pen and walked over to the other side of the room where he sat, facing away, seemingly looking into the distance…though the distance was a wall just a few feet away.

Leadership in Action

The secret to Rick’s successes, in battle and in life, was his instinctive ability to be a leader. And like the best leaders, it was not because of any military rank he ever wore, in the British Army, the Rhodesian paramilitary police or the U.S. Army. He was a leader because he understood men. He knew, in his bones, what some who reach far higher ranks never do learn.

What he knew is simple: When things drop in the pot, when lives are at stake and the danger is real, people want to believe that the one they are following is something more than they are themselves. Smarter. Stronger. Not as afraid as they are at that moment. Rick, adept at suppressing his own fear when it mattered, inspired other men to greatness. When he entered the maelstrom, his people followed.

After terrorist hijackers flew a plane into Tower One of the World Trade Center on 9/11, Rick was told by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which managed the towers, to “shelter in place.” Rick replied, “Bugger that!” (a very, very…very impolite term when used by a Brit) and initiated an evacuation of his entire company. In other places chaos reigned, but not where Rick was in command.

Rick had been training employees for such an attack since 1993, when a truck bomb exploded in the structure’s basement. Even before then, Rick had realized the building’s allure as a target for terrorists. In 1990, he had arranged a meeting with a security official at the port authority to discuss the building’s vulnerability, but the authority didn’t take any action, according to a New Yorker story in 2002.

In the 1993 attack, Rick safely evacuated all of his company’s employees from the building. He immediately began pushing to beef up security at Dean Witter, which merged with Morgan Stanley in 1997. He recommended fail-safe lighting and smoke extractors and made sure that they were installed in the emergency stairwells. Employees had to go through regular evacuation drills, in an orderly and organized way. Rick got that much past corporate.

In 2001, Rick’s office was on the 44th floor. His company had more than 2,000 employees on 22 floors, and as always, Rick felt responsible for each one of them. Two by two, just as he had trained them, the employees of Dean Witter Morgan Stanley exited down the stairwells.

Here is a number: 2,684. That was the number of employees that Rick successfully evacuated. That does not include the thousands of others who made it down those stairwells because Rick coordinated a professional, disciplined and military-like evacuation of his people. Those additional numbers will never be known.

But Rick knew that three employees were unaccounted for and he went back in for them. Rick was last seen on the 10th floor, heading up. He would leave nobody behind.

The last time I saw him

The last time I saw Rick was earlier in 2001, when I was teaching military history at West Point. Gen. Moore had been invited to address the cadets in the military history courses, and the department turned to me for advice on what to give him as a memento. They knew Moore was writing the introduction to my next book and that he was the honorary colonel of my regiment. What do you give the man who has everything?

I knew that Rick lived in New Jersey and worked in Manhattan, about 50 miles from West Point. I also knew that Rick was a rare attendee at the regiment’s reunions, which are held every year.

He came to see friends, but he was really fairly reluctant to drop into the “old soldier” mode and retell stories long rehashed. He had only seen Moore a few times since Vietnam. I knew this, and I knew Rick had been fighting cancer. I got on the phone and invited Rick and his new wife, Susan, to West Point for Moore’s address to the cadets.

When the day arrived, we planned a small dinner, just 12 people or so, on post at the Hotel Thayer, before the West Point ceremony. When Rick and Susan came in, which was a surprise to Moore, I watched as confusion, recognition and joy flashed in quick succession across the general’s face. Later, at the ceremony, Moore gave the assembled cadets his wisdom about war. These cadets, who would be lieutenants, then captains, then majors, soaked it up.

Rick and Susan were sitting in the front row. I had not realized, until Rick explained to me later, that Susan knew little of his military story at the time. They had met only a few years earlier. Both divorcees, they found something in each other that worked and had married just a year before. And since Rick had retired from the Army Reserves in 1990, there really was no reason for him to say much about that part of his past. So he never did.

He never mentioned the bestselling book, the Peter Arnett photo, the movie. To Susan, her Rick was the head of security at a major investment thingamabob. He had a soul with a sense of humor miles deep. Soldier? No, that was just something he once did sort of casually.

Susan wondered why this West Point event was such a big deal. In addition to the thousand cadets, the faculty had come out in force, and the crowd far exceeded the seating room of the capacious auditorium. Moore talked about war. Not nice platitudes, but the dirty bits that we usually don’t talk about. How to take normal, decent, young American boys into hell, and then out of it, alive. Moore never did mince his words.

At the end of his address, Moore said something that stunned Susan: “And now I want to introduce you to the best combat leader I ever saw, Rick Rescorla, Hard Corps One-Six, 2nd Battalion, 7th Cavalry.”

The foundations shook as the cadets and the officers and every single person who could cram into Eisenhower Hall that night leapt to their feet in the sort of applause that makes “thunderous” an entirely inadequate word. Rick stood up.

He just gave a short wave and sat down again.

Susan was awestruck. That was her Rick. Her goofball. Her poet and romantic. Always surprising.

“Head For the Storm,” he wrote

I look back on the Ia Drang reunion of 1996, when I first met Rick and he autographed my copy of We Were Soldiers Once…and Young. He returned the book to me after several minutes of reflection; the scotch he had poured was mostly gone. Later, discreetly, I looked at the inscription:

To: Captain Bob Bateman

Old Dogs and Wild Geese are Fighting

Head for the Storm, As you faced it Before

For where there is the Seventh, There’s Bound to be Fighting

And when there’s no Fighting, It’s the Seventh no More

Best Regards,

Rick Rescorla, Hard Corps One-Six

A poet, as always. And as always, much more. After Rick’s death, his memory inspired me to compose an ode of my own for him:

So after you read this, Get your canteen cup

And fill it with mead, or scotch or rotgut

Then pour it right out, on the ground, on the floor

For the heart of the Seventh, Rescorla’s no more

First published in Vietnam Magazine’s October 2016 issue.

At 69 years old, after decades in uniform and a promise of lifetime health care, I never thought I would have to fight the Pentagon for medications my doctor deems essential.

Yet the Defense Health Agency has terminated coverage of weight-loss medications for 2.5 million Medicare-eligible veterans in Tricare for Life — the Tricare plan for Medicare-eligible military retirees and their Medicare-eligible family members — while continuing to cover the exact same prescriptions for younger retirees.

This is not just unfair, it is unlawful.

In 2001, Congress ended decades of second-class treatment for older retirees with the creation of the Senior Pharmacy Program, guaranteeing Medicare-eligible retirees the same pharmacy coverage as younger beneficiaries.

Lawmakers also restored full Tricare eligibility for those enrolling in Medicare Part B. The intent was clear: Service members would no longer see benefits curtailed simply because they turned 65.

A governing statute — 10 U.S.C. § 1074g — reinforces that commitment by requiring a uniform formulary of covered drugs for all beneficiaries.

The Defense Department’s own 2002 rule was equally unambiguous, promising Medicare-eligible retirees “the same coverage for pharmacy services and the same requirements for cost-sharing and reimbursement.”

For more than 20 years, that promise held. When I turned 65, nothing changed: same formulary, same co-pays, same access. Until now.

DOD’s misreading

The Defense Health Agency now claims authority to deny Tricare for Life beneficiaries coverage for GLP-1 medications by invoking 32 C.F.R. § 199.17(f)(3), a regulation stating that treatment of obesity is covered under Tricare Prime and Select “notwithstanding” a statutory exclusion that applied to dependents in § 1079(a)(10).

The logic is tortured. First, § 1079(a)(10) governs dependent coverage, not retiree benefits.

The obesity exclusion was added in the 1970s to prevent the Civilian Health and Medical Program of the Uniform Services (CHAMPUS) from paying for elective weight-loss clinics for spouses and children, not to deny treatment to retirees themselves.

Second, DOD’s own regulation at § 199.17(a)(6)(ii)(C) flatly states that Tricare for Life is “unaffected by this section.”

In plain English: The regulation DHA cites does not apply to Tricare for Life.

Third, when Congress addressed obesity treatment in the FY 2017 National Defense Authorization Act, it did so by authorizing programs for all “covered beneficiaries,” not by singling out Prime and Select.

The Pentagon elected to implement that authority narrowly — it was not required. That choice cannot override a statutory command for a uniform formulary.

The human cost

This is not an abstract dispute. It is a matter of health and dignity for older veterans.

Without coverage, the monthly cost for me and every other retiree on TFL ranges from $499 at best to $1,349 at retail.

On a fixed retirement income, that is devastating.

Meanwhile, a 64-year-old retiree on Tricare Select pays a $35 co-pay for the same drug. The only difference between us is that I lived long enough to become Medicare-eligible.

And it is cruelly targeted. Older adults are more likely to suffer from obesity, less able to lose weight through exercise, and least able to absorb thousands of dollars in new drug costs.

Many suffer mobility issues caused by service-connected injuries. After decades of service, we now are asked to choose between essential medications and groceries.

The Pentagon’s misreading of its own rules cannot stand.

Congress should: Suspend the policy immediately pending review, investigate how DHA justified such a clear violation of statutory and regulatory text, clarify by statute that no drug on the uniform formulary may be denied to Tricare for Life beneficiaries if it is available to any other Tricare enrollee and require public accountability by compelling DOD to explain why it used a regulation that expressly excludes Tricare for Life to strip benefits from older veterans.

“Tricare for Life” was meant to be just that — for life. Not “for life with exceptions,” not “for life until you’re too old.”

The law promises uniform coverage for all beneficiaries.

By twisting a regulation, DOD has broken faith with those who served longest.

If the Pentagon believes these medications are too costly, it should seek new authorization from Congress — not engage in bureaucratic sleight of hand that punishes seniors.