Veterans and Their Stories

In honor of our Veterans on this Veterans Day, Byliner sent out this letter with links to stories that have been published in recent years.  Maybe you will find one or two worth your reading time.  At least we can take a moment and thank our veterans for their service. 

	Dear Readers, In honor of Veterans Day, we bring you stories of Americans who’ve served this nation at war. In his recently released Byliner Original “The Living and the Dead,” acclaimed journalist and Iraq war veteran Brian Mockenhaupt tells the wrenching tale of three Marines— their friendships, struggles, and lives led on the battlefield and the home front. This excerpt follows them on what began as a relatively normal day: “Muzzle flashes twinkled from alleyways and darkened windows. The Marines at Dakota were terrified of buried bombs—the utter lack of control—but they loved firefights. Here they could influence the outcome.” The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have produced nearly two million veterans, many of whom suffer from physical and psychological injuries. Last year in Esquire, Mike Sager wrote about one veteran who began taking in others in need on his Tennessee farm. “Vetville,” Sager wrote, is “a sort of do-it-yourself halfway house for Marines broken by war. Some stay for a week; some stay for months; one guy is working on year two.” “I was a soldier in Vietnam and have talked to a number of those who went. It is always hard to know if a veteran’s problems stem from his war, hard to know even for the veteran himself,” Tracy Kidder wrote in a 1974 Atlantic article, “Soldiers of Misfortune.” He summarized the scale of the problem faced by veterans such as himself: “The United States sent 2,796,000 soldiers to Vietnam: 57,002 died, and 300,000 were wounded— about 150,000 seriously enough to be hospitalized. About 75,000 were left severely handicapped, and some 25,000 came home totally disabled. But information on what happened to the wounded and to the rest of the survivors is sketchy. To some extent, Vietnam veterans have been, as one observer puts it, ‘tarred with the brush of My Lai.’” Nancy L.W. Hoffman wrote about a female Korean War veteran in a more lighthearted 1992 Leatherneck article, “Sgt Reckless: Combat Veteran.” Hoffman’s brave, beloved, beer-drinking Marine wasn’t remarkable just because of her gender. “In fact, she was a horse—a small, sorrel or chestnut-colored horse with a white blaze on her face and three white stocking feet.” “Nine years ago, there were 700 left alive,” Evan Fleischer reflected in “The Last Two Veterans of WWI,” written last year for The Awl. “Nearly 10,000,000 men were killed in the conflict, 65 million participated, and now we are left with two. Think about that. Think about those numbers. What are you supposed to do when an era is inches away from disappearing?” To our veterans and their families, thank you. The Byliner Team