As most of you know today is Veterans Day. As I began thinking about the day and all the veterans who have served our country and those who have lost their lives, I realized it one of the only holidays that the greeting card manufacturers and retailers haven’t commercialized.
I have seen some Veterans Day cards […]

By Fred W. Baker III, American Forces Press Service
Americans must recognize the sacrifices and struggles of today’s troops and their families and work harder to reintegrate them into their communities, the nation’s top military officer said yesterday.
The past nine years of war and multiple combat deployments have stressed the force, leaving in their wake veterans […]

By JEFF HEMMEL, Tribune correspondent
Most serious competitors sweating through Bay area triathlons and road races do so stripped down to the latest in featherweight shorts and hyperlight shoes.
Not Dianne Villano.
She pulls on U.S. Marine Corps combat boots and camouflage utilities - boots ‘n’ utes - a regulation pack and sometimes a helmet. Just 5-foot-2 and […]

By Cpl. Bryan Lett, Marine Blog
Two weeks ago I busted my chin up in a firefight in Afghanistan’s Kunar Province, today I’m writing this blog from a cubicle in Washington.
Transitioning from a combat zone back to normalcy can be hard and unpredictable.
I’m not writing about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, I’m writing about the transition from combat […]

I certainly have a love/hate relationship with the Internet when my husband is gone, especially with this deployment. As if I don’t spend enough time on the computer at work, I come home and after dinner I scour the Internet for information on my husband’s battalion and unit.
I check message boards, the news, the […]

By VICKI SMITH (AP)
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — A West Virginia innkeeper who started letting military families stay free for Veterans Day in 2008 has recruited 400 inns across the U.S. and Canada as part of an initiative to offer free rooms this fall.
B&Bs for Vets is a way to thank active and retired military members for […]

Forty female Marines volunteered to go to the highly segregated southern Pashtun region to try to connect with the half of the population inaccessible to male Marines
By Gretel C. Kovach, Sign On San Diego

MARJAH, Afghanistan — Sgt. Vanessa Jones and her teammates filed through the countryside with a squad of U.S. infantrymen and Afghan troops. […]

I heard this story on NPR this morning on my way to work.  I couldn’t have explained the emotions any better than this Army wife.  It brought tears to my eyes.  These raw emotions can only be truly understood by another military wife, child or parent.
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By Georgie Hanlin, NPR
Members of the Army’s 1st Battalion, […]

A friend of mine from the gym, Susan, always asks about my husband. I hadn’t seen her in quite a while but she recently started attending one of my staple classes again. So being a military brat herself and a mom of an Air Force pilot, she asked how he was doing a […]

Today we learned about another Marine from my husband’s battalion that gave the ultimate sacrifice. The battalion continues to send out official emails, but this one I knew was coming.
This time my reaction was a bit different. I felt that I had to look online to find out what happened, to make this […]