Here are some of them.
I come from a warrior society.
My great-grandfathers fought in the Battle of Rosebud in 1876 and the Battle of Little Bighorn eight days later.
My uncle fought in the trenches during World War I.
My father was a Lakota code talker, and he fought in the Battle of the Bulge.
He did not even tell me that he was a code talker until 1968.
I graduated from South Dakota State University in 1967 and enlisted in the Army that year.
I wound up training as a medic.
I landed in Vietnam on March 20, 1969.
Before that, I had never flown on an airplane and I had never been to another country.
I remember seeing a body bag for the first time.
I didnt know what it was.
What was the job like?
I have thought about it over and over in my mind.
When someone gets wounded in battle and yells Medic!, we have to go get that guy.
My job was to keep that guy alive until we could get him onto a helicopter.
Sometimes theyd send a medevac, and they would come in without guns.
Those guys had a ton of courage.
The casualty rate of medics in Vietnam was very high.
We went through 27 medics the first nine months that I was in Vietnam.
I wouldnt say that medics were fearless, because there was a lot of fear of getting killed.
But we hid our fear.
Battlefield adrenaline is different than other kinds of adrenaline.
It makes you move faster.
There is an invisible bond between medics and the infantry.
Men become brothers for life.
I remember one time, we were trying to figure out our location.
The jungle was so thick that we couldnt make out the terrain.
Because I was a medic, the guys all called me Doc.
All the medics were called Doc.
Someone said, Docs an Indian.
Ask Doc where we are.
Indians never get lost.
I said, I come from the plains.
I come from South Dakota.
you might always see 10 miles all around you.
I had no idea where we were.
The Army spread a lot of Agent Orange up in the jungle mountains.
It came down into the water, into small creeks and rivers.
We put our canteens in this water, not knowing that the dioxin was in there.
Everybody was exposed to it.
That is where I was wounded, by shrapnel.
I still had work to do, and I had to keep going.
There were lives to save.
I earned a Purple Heart, and I got out of the military in 1970.
Three years later, I was accepted into Harvard, where I earned a graduate degree in education.
But I started getting rashes.
The doctors did not know what it was, at the time.
I ended up having a successful career.
But I also ended up with cancer.
But cancer is killing me a little bit, every day.
Two of my sons, Colin and Brendan, have continued the tradition of service.
Both were deployed to Iraq.
One was wounded by a sniper in Baghdad.
He recovered and returned to finish his tour.
She lives in North Middletown, Kentucky.
I was coming out of graduate school with a Ph.D. in biochemistry, and I wanted a research job.
I was interested in working for government services.
The only catch is, you have to join the Army.
I had never considered joining the Army.
I didnt know anybody in the Army.
They had plenty of money.
I wouldnt have to teach.
So, I joined.
I was a single mother by this time.
I looked at my choices and decided to go to the military medical school in Bethesda, Maryland.
There I met Kory Cornum, my husband.
On Aug. 2, 1990, I watched Iraqi tanks roll into Kuwait on television the invasion of Kuwait.
Soon after, a commander of an helicopter battalion asked me if I would accompany his unit to Iraq.
I decided that I had to go.
I thought,Youre really going to war, Rhonda.I remember thinking that I could die.
What came to mind was something my grandfather once told me.
He was a veteran of World War II.
He said, Rhonda, there are worse things than dying.
There is living with dishonor.
We just had coordinates.
In fact, we were headed into the biggest ammunition supply point in southern Iraq.
We got shot down.
I was shot in the back.
I broke both my arms.
I had a transected anterior cruciate ligament in my right leg.
I lost a lot of blood.
I ended up a prisoner of war.
I was very fortunate to have survived the wreck, as five guys from my aircraft did not.
After eight days in captivity, I was repatriated.
It took a few surgeries to heal me up.
I realized that people would listen to me, and I had a lot to say.
I got asked by congressional panels and the media to speak about my experiences.
I was asked to develop a psychological fitness training program for the Army.
The reason I fared well as a wounded prisoner of war was because I was mentally prepared.
We have a bunch of people serving our country who are brave and patriotic but not always psychologically robust.
They dont always have good coping skills.
When I was a child, I read a book that had the most remarkable quote in it.
I internalized that, and I have been living my life by those words ever since.
George B.
Price, 93
Price is a retired U.S. Army brigadier general living in Columbia, Maryland.
I have to give credit to my hometown of Laurel, Mississippi.
Every day when I went to school, we sang the National Anthem.
We said the Pledge of Allegiance.
We had veterans in our community who had served in all the branches of service.
So we had role models.
It was a community spirit.
I qualified for ROTC.
We worked through that.
It was difficult, but we focused.
I graduated college and went back to Fort Benning.
I finished my training and was assigned as an officer to the 45th Infantry Division in Korea.
So thats what I did.
I served in Korea, where I was in combat nearly every day I was there.
I was wounded and ended up spending six months in the hospital in Virginia.
I went to airborne school.
I went to Army Ranger school.
I served in Central America and I was a brigade commander in Germany.
Then I ultimately became chief of staff of the First United States Army, in 1976.
At the time, a core group of people about 12 folks were working on this.
The team was led by Jan Scruggs, a Vietnam veteran whose dream it was to build this memorial.
I met with them, and I was captivated by their plans.
At one point, there was a political backlash in Washington.
Some powerful people were trying to stop the memorial from being built.
The designer and architect in charge, Maya Lin, came under fire.
As far as I was concerned, this was a major display of ignorance.
I wasnt going to put up with it.
Ultimately, we got the job done.
Those people involved such as Maya Lin and Jan Scruggs deserve the highest praises that this country can offer.
It might have taken years for this monument to be realized.
But it was worth every minute.
He lives in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida.
My father was a lieutenant colonel in the South Vietnamese Air Force.
Evacuations started in secrecy because they didnt want the whole country to panic.
The planes started flying out at 2 a.m. on April 22.
We were on the second flight me, my three sisters and my mother.
My father remained behind and became a military prisoner.
For many years, we never knew if he was alive or dead.
My family ended up in Oxnard, California.
When we moved there, people would say, What are you doing here?
I thought you were the enemy.
I said, No, were on the American side.
We lost the war.
My father was my hero, and I had dreams of becoming a military pilot like him.
But those dreams vanished.
I went to UCLA to study economics.
Then one day, I saw a Marine captain on campus, a recruiter in his dress blues.
The biggest shock was how much theVietnam War was still on the minds of the U.S. military.
There were a lot of racial slurs.
But there was no way I was not going to make it through.
When I became an officer, things changed.
I was a new copilot aboard a CH-46 Sea Knight helicopter, and I volunteered to go.
We flew medevac, and I was part of a two-helicopter team.
We flew the first medical evacuation out of Kuwait International Airport, on Feb. 27, 1991.
We went through smoky fields at 120 knots, 50 feet off the desert floor.
We got Marines evacuated, and we flew out some Iraqi prisoners.
As I was getting ready for my second deployment, my father finally arrived in America.
Now in May 1992, here he was in California, a free man.
I was a Marine pilot.
We were united, and my life had come full circle.
I spent three very special days with him.
Then I went back to the Persian Gulf and later to Somalia.
It was a sense of dutyand that is where the title of my book comes from.
The country gave me an opportunity, and it was my way to pay it back.
As a kid, I dreamed of following in my fathers footsteps to become a military pilot.
I never imagined that America would trust me to fly U.S. Marines off a ship at night.
People ask me if I would do it again.
Yes without a doubt.
I was 18 when I was drafted into the Army in 1943.
I thought that nothing could go wrong; I never felt that I could be killed or wounded.
I got to my first camp in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, and I liked it very much.
You had your duties.
Being Jewish and coming from a kosher home was a little bit of a problem.
In other words: Eat but dont enjoy it.
I went across the Atlantic and joined the 90th Division of the 3rd Armyjust after D-Day.
I was in the Battle of the Bulge.
The Germans had set it up.
About the fifth day, we had to give up.
Our dog tags had our religion on them.
Mine had an H stamped on it, for Hebrew.
By this time, Hitlers Final Solution was well known to the world.
Before I got captured, I got rid of my dog tag.
Naturally, I was terrified.
This guy looked at me and said, Radish.
What kind of name is that?
I realized what he was gunning for.
I said, Its a vegetable.
He laughed, and that was it.
In this camp, all we had was a cup and a blanket.
Then, one day, I spoke Yiddish to a guy who turned out to be an SS guard.
I said to him, Vi lang?which means, how long?
He looked at me and screamed, Youre the Jew!
You started the war!
And he rapped me on my arm.
Each morning we got a loaf of bread maybe 8 or 10 inches long.
That had to be sliced up for 12 guys.
We had a deck of cards and wed all pick one.
The guy who got the high card got the job of slicing the bread.
That was extra for him.
The Germans sometimes brought around barrels of what they called soup.
It was just hot water and, occasionally, some vegetables.
We did get Red Cross packages, and in there you had juice, powdered milk and cigarettes.
I found out that if I gave a guard two cigarettes, he would give me an apple.
I was there for about four months, and I lost about 30 pounds.
One of the worst parts was the lice.
That was just miserable.
One night, the German guards came into our barracks and said, The British are out there!
You are not to go outside!
The next morning, we woke up and there wasnt a German in sight.
They brought in these wagons with hot noodles and other things to eat.
We got British uniforms.
We ended up in a camp near Le Havre called Lucky Strike named after the cigarettes.
When I got back to New York, I went straight to a phone booth and called my mother.
She said, My God!
When I finally saw her, I couldnt believe my eyes.
When I had left for the war, she was this vivacious dark-haired housewife.
Now, she looked like a broken gray-haired woman.
She was sick with worry, because of that telegram.
It took months before she was herself again.
I consider myself lucky.
I made it out of Europe alive.
He lives in Naples, Florida.
My father was in World War II.
He was in the U.S. Navy and had 13 battle stars.
My uncles were all in the Korean War.
My older brother, a Marine, was in Vietnam.
Naturally, I wanted to serve.
I was living in Boston, where I was raised, and I enlisted in the Army in 1982.
We all looked at each other and didnt know what they were talking about.
We were just 18-year-old kids.
Eventually, I ended up going to Korea and was stationed along the DMZ, patrolling.
Wed hear the North Koreans every night.
They were on a loudspeaker, and they would blast music.
They would drop leaflets of propaganda on us from balloons.
It was an incredible place.
They teach you things in the military they dont teach you in college.
They are as close to you as your own family, or closer.
Thats what the military was about for me.
Ive carried those values with me every day.
That helped me to get started in my career.
I ended up marrying a woman who had served in the Navy.
We have a son and a daughter.
Our son Vincent went into the Army after 9/11.
He wanted to serve, like his father and his uncles and his grandfathers.
He served with the 82nd Airborne.
His team leader opened the door and a bomb blew him up and killed him.
My son was 4 feet away, to his right.
You never forget that phone call when it comes.
The Army wanted to send Vincent to a VA polytrauma center in Tampa.
But our family was based in Massachusetts.
I knew Boston had a great brain injury program at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital.
I had to fight to get Vincent there.
My wife and I did everything in our power to save him.
At Spaulding, my son finally came out of a coma after a year.
In total, Vincent has had 48 operations.
He has unique injuries, and you cant bring him to any doctor.
He has to be carefully cared for.
My wife and I now live in Florida, and he lives with us.
