MAJ Charles Whittlesey

Aug 3, 2019 | Army

U.S. forces pinned down in the Argonne Forest (Credit: Getty Images) An attorney by trade, Major Charles Whittlesey later made his name as the uncompromising commander of the so-called “Lost Battalion,” an American unit that became stuck behind German lines. On...

Sergeant Alvin York

Jul 28, 2019 | Army

Sergeant Alvin York was once described as World War I’s “greatest civilian soldier,” yet he began the conflict as a conscientious objector. A deeply devout man from the small mountain town of Pall Mall, Tennessee, York initially resisted serving on the grounds that...

Frank Luke

Jul 27, 2019 | Army Air Corps

Renegade pilot Frank Luke was America’s greatest “balloon buster,” the nickname assigned to the brash aviators who attacked German observation balloons used to sight artillery. Luke joined the 27th Aero Squadron in France in July 1918, and wasted little time in...

SFC Elmelindo Rodrigues Smith

Jul 19, 2019 | Army

There was nothing to suggest in the early morning hours of July 27, 1935 that the new baby being born from the backwater town of Wahiawa on the island of Oahu was different from any other baby born that day. The baby boy of Hispanic-Asian descent was christened...

SSG David Bellavia

Jul 8, 2019 | Army

In 2004, on the day he turned 29, then-Army Staff Sgt. David Bellavia charged into a darkened house in Fallujah, Iraq and fired his weapon at lurking insurgents as the squad he led scrambled outside. “Staff Sgt. Bellavia single-handedly saved an entire squad,...