U.S.Veterans Magazine

I've always known that I wanted to be a reporter. I started watching the news around 10th grade, and I was a big fan of WNBC. I learned that you could make so much of an impact on people’s lives as a reporter, and that really motivated me.

So, as soon as I got to college, I declared my major as broadcast journalism. While I was still in undergrad, 9/11 happened. As a native New Yorker, I wanted to do something for my country; I wanted to be a part of something bigger, and I was drawn to the military.

I initially planned to join the Marines, but I ran into an Army recruiter before my decision was final, and they were able to offer me a schedule that worked better for pursuing my education and military service at the same time. I started as an enlisted soldier; then, after completing basic training and receiving my master’s degree in mass communication and media studies, I was commissioned and became a public affairs officer. I started out as a private; now, I’m a major in the Army Reserve.

I moved my way up the ranks while moving around the country: in South Carolina, I worked as an assignment editor for WIS-TV; in Kansas, as a television news reporter for WIBW-TV; in Missouri, as an anchor for KMBC; in Washington, D.C., as a multi-platform reporter for ABC.

During that time, I remained in the Reserve, reporting to units that corresponded with each new location, participating in training exercises and taking military courses. In 2008, while I was in Kansas, I deployed to Baghdad for the first time for a year, serving as a historical ambassador at Camp Slayer in Victory Base Complex...

BY NICHOLAS SLAYTON | PUBLISH BY Task and Purpose

Nearly eight decades after fighting his way through North Africa, Italy, France and Germany, a retired Army soldier received one last award. Not an American military one, but a French one. This past week John Gojermac was given France’s highest award for his services during World War.

Gojmerac was honored at the Veterans of Foreign Wars post in Tonawanda, NY on Friday, Oct. 20. The ceremony included tributes to him from his family. Jérémie Robert, France’s consul general for New York, presented the 99-year-old veteran with the medal for the Knight of the Legion of Honor. The Legion of Honor, with five distinctions, is the highest award France can give to anyone, military or otherwise. 

Gojmerac himself is not French, but he did fight to help liberate the country from Nazis. John Gojmerac was born in Slovenia and his family moved to the United States when he was 14. When he turned 18 he was drafted, although at the time he said he was not an American citizen. Gojmerac was assigned to the 3rd Infantry Division, 7th Infantry Regiment, and sent to North Africa as a replacement soldier.

By Blake Stilwell, Military.com

There are a lot of surprising facts about the life of pop-culture icon Mr. T, but for starters, pity the fool that doesn't know he was a soldier in the U.S. Army.

The man who would be Mr. T started life as part of a large family in a Chicago project with the name Laurence Tureaud. The young Tureaud was a physical beast from an early age, becoming the citywide high school wrestling champion -- three times. He also played football, studied martial arts and even earned a football scholarship to Texas' Prairie View A&M University.

Academic life didn't suit him, however, and he went to work at a gym for a few years. During this time, before he was ever famous, he changed his name. The reason? Respect.

"I think about my father being called 'boy,' my uncle being called 'boy,' my brother, coming back from Vietnam and being called 'boy,'" he told the Huffington Post. "So I questioned myself: 'What does a Black man have to do before he's given respect as a man?' So when I was 18 years old, when I was old enough to fight and die for my country, old enough to drink, old enough to vote, I said I was old enough to be called a man. I self-ordained myself Mr. T, so the first word out of everybody's mouth is 'Mr.'"

Mr. T didn't join the military in time to serve in Vietnam, but he did join the Army National Guard. In 1975, he became Pvt. Mr. T. By all accounts, he was a good soldier, earning a letter of recommendation from his drill sergeant, joining the Military Police corps and earning the position of squad leader at Fort McCoy, Wisconsin.

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 by Blake Stilwell, Military.com

It all started with a World War II veteran's hamburger stand. 

Glen Bell didn't invent the taco. He didn't even invent the hard-shell taco. What Bell did was recreate a taco recipe from a competing food stand and brought it to the rest of the United States. From that first taco recipe in 1951, Glen Bell started what would become Taco Bell in 1962.

When it first started, Taco Bell offered tacos, burritos, tostadas, refried beans and chili burgers. Today, Taco Bell pulls in nearly $9.2 billion in revenues annually, selling everything from Mexican pizzas to Cheetos burritos. Though the chili burger might be gone, you can still get the original hard-shell taco.

A child of the Great Depression, Bell picked up some culinary skills in a short business venture with his aunt while selling pies and other comfort foods to make extra cash. He joined the Marine Corps in 1943 and spent much of World War II cooking for high-ranking Army and Navy officers in the Solomon Islands. After the war, he went home to San Bernardino, California.

There, he saw two brothers named McDonald working a new kind of burger stand, one where customers came and went (and came back) all day. With years of food service under his belt, he figured he could do something similar. He bought a grill and opened Bell's Burgers in 1948.

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By Flip Cuddy and Christine Cuddy

She was the first Asian American woman in the Navy and the first woman gunnery officer teaching air combat tactics. During World War II, Lieutenant Cuddy trained Navy pilots in dogfighting maneuvers and firing .50-caliber machine guns.

But her children, Flip and Christine Cuddy, didn’t know about her accomplishments until later in life. In 2018, they came to StoryCorps to remember her.

To read more about this story watch the video ... https://storycorps.org/stories/a-brother-and-sister-remember-their-trailblazing-mother-lieutenant-susan-ahn-cuddy/

Editor’s note: This book excerpt was first published in The War Horse, an award-winning nonprofit news organization educating the public on military service. It was republished with permission. Subscribe to their newsletter.

Author David Chrisinger spent the past four years walking in war journalist Ernie Pyle’s footsteps for his new book. This excerpt first appeared in “The Soldier’s Truth: Ernie Pyle and the Story of World War II,” from Penguin Publishing Group.

Yomna Mansouri cinched the belt on her coat as a rundown pickup loaded down with sheep blew past us. A blazing sun high in the clear December sky warmed my face and the top of my head. Once she was ready, we darted across the two-lane highway, hopped a concrete water pipe that ran the highway’s length, and landed in a ditch. The ground beneath our feet was spongy and uneven where the earth had healed over discarded plastic shopping bags, crinkled water bottles, and paper espresso cups. A stiff wind kicked up sand from the west, stirring the smells of modern life in rural Tunisia into an odd bouquet of damp earth, truck exhaust, and the sweet smell of barbequed camel.

“We will not be eating that,” Yomna told me when I asked about the food served up by the roadside eatery we passed a few hundred yards down the highway from where we parked.

On the other side of the ditch, a small field with neatly cultivated rows sprawled out before us. In the far corner of that field, two farmers Yomna had spotted, a man and a woman, picked onions with their two mangy dogs.

We were there to climb Djebel Hamra, the Red Mountain—a jagged, steep-sloped escarpment that juts out of the desert valley a short distance from the farmers’ field. On Feb. 15, 1942, Ernie Pyle scaled Djebel Hamra after he and several other correspondents were assured its summit would provide an unobstructed view of the Americans’ planned counterattack on the ancient camel-trading city of Sidi Bou Zid, which had fallen easily to the two German Panzer tank divisions the day before.

Despite the devastating losses sustained at Sidi Bou Zid, an impenetrable sense of denial blanketed the Allied high command over the border in Algeria. Rather than withdraw and regroup, they issued an order to counterattack more than 200 German tanks, half-tracks, and big guns with what little was left of the American force: a tank battalion, a tank destroyer company, an infantry battalion, and some artillery pieces.

“We are going to kick the hell out of them today,” an army officer told Ernie, “and we’ve got the stuff to do it with.”

“Unfortunately,” Ernie would report, “we didn’t kick hell out of them. In fact, the boot was on the other foot.”

by J.D. Simkins, Observarion Post

The seventh installment in an illustrated series dedicated to soldiers whose actions earned them the nation’s highest award for military valor is now available online.

The newest issue of “Medal of Honor,” a graphic series produced by the Association of the U.S. Army, spotlights the Civil War heroics of Mary Walker, the first woman in the U.S. to earn a medical degree and the only woman to ever receive the Medal of Honor.

Born in Oswego, New York, to abolitionist parents, Walker attended Syracuse Medical College prior to the outbreak of the Civil War, when she saw an opportunity to serve as a surgeon in the U.S. Army.

But the arrangement wasn’t a seamless one. In 1861, Walker attempted to join the ranks of U.S. Army surgeons but was denied for being a woman. Like many obstacles she encountered prior to 1861, Walker refused to allow the hiccup to derail her.

Years as an unpaid surgeon’s assistant finally paid off when, at the height of the war, Walker was issued a contract as a credentialed War Department surgeon at the recommendation of Maj. Gen. William T. Sherman and Maj. Gen. George H. Thomas.