On March 6, 1945, the Navy found its solution in Jane Kendeigh and her 11 fellow flight nurses. For the first time in the war, the U.S. Navy began deploying combat nurses to an active battlefield. With only six weeks of training, these nurses began to instantly triage and evacuate wounded Marines, working in frigid, unpressurized aircraft amid constant enemy assaults.

Oftentimes called “mom” by their wounded comrades, these 12 women evacuated 2,393 men on 125 flights — more than 13% of everyone evacuated from Iwo Jima — and continued their bloody, lifesaving work in what was to become the largest Allied amphibious landing in the Pacific theater and the final island battle of the Pacific, Okinawa.

Author and professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, Leah Garrett, sat down with Military Times to discuss her latest work, The Flight Nurses’ War: The American Women Who Saved Thousands of Lives at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, as well as the conditions these women worked under and how researching her latest book left her with one of “the most moving moments of my life.”

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

Military Times: When one thinks of Iwo Jima, images come to mind of the blackened sand, brutal conditions and Mount Suribachi, but never women. How did the story of these 12 women come to your attention?

Leah Garrett: When I was writing my last book, I kept hearing these rumors that there had been women at Iwo Jima, and I thought there was no way that there were women at Iwo Jima. I reached out to the Navy, and I got military clearance and worked with an archivist there. He had written a bit about it, but there had never been a book about it — the full story of who these women were and what they were doing there.

Once I started to search about it, I found out that there had indeed been these 12 Navy flight nurses who had landed at Iwo Jima under fire, and in the worst kind of nightmare anyone can imagine, and flew out these men. Part of the reason that no one had done their stories is that these women themselves … I don’t think they realized how extraordinary it was what they had done.

I started to reach out to the families of those 12 flight nurses, and discovered that every historian wants to discover — there was a massive amount of material. Most of the story was actually in these well-cared-for boxes in basements and garages, and so the way I wrote the story was I worked with the military archivists, but then I flew around the country and met with the families themselves, interviewed the children, and went through the boxes and found just all this extraordinary first-person material: photographs, letters, memoirs.

Before we get into the nurses themselves, can you talk about the creation of flight nurses?

All of the flight nurses signed up to join the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor. For each of them, that was the watershed moment when they said, “I need to serve.”

There’s this one woman named Mary O’Connor who goes to Washington and says, “Look, we want you to set up a flight nurses program.” The reason that they wanted to set it up is that the Army had women in combat positions who were nurses, but the Navy didn’t.

As we get into 1945, the final two battles in the Pacific were really far more horrific than anyone expected them to be in the Navy, particularly at Iwo Jima. The Japanese were targeting the medical corps as well, so there was a massive attrition rate, and they did not have enough people there to take care of the men. And also, Iwo Jima is really complicated because you can’t set up field hospitals in Iwo Jima because of the landscape; it’s just too exposed. So then the question becomes: “Well, how do we get these men out?”

What happens is all these different nurses are serving in the Navy at different military hospitals, Navy hospitals around the country, and their supervisors reach out to the best one or two of each group and say, “Look, would you be interested in overseas service?” Nobody knows what it will be, but these women say yes. O’Connor gets hundreds of applications. She picks the top 24 that seem the best to her — basically smart, very capable, very brave women. So these 24 women are then sent out to Alameda, California, to do … this very intense six-week training.

The cream de la creme of the 24 were then flown to Guam, and once they’re in Guam, they’re going to be given their assignment. This had never been done before. The Navy had never put women in combat positions under direct fire, and it was a very incredibly dangerous thing to do. I mean, what if they’re killed? What if they’re captured? What if they’re used for propaganda? Like, there’s so much that could have gone wrong, and I think, much to everyone’s surprise, probably including some of the women, they were so effective in getting those men out.

On March 6, 1945, Jane Kendeigh became the first Navy flight nurse to appear on an active Pacific battlefield. Ultimately, she and 11 other nurses evacuated 2,393 men from Iwo Jima. That’s an incredible statistic, but does any story in particular stand out to you?

One of the crazy aspects of this story is that when you’re in an aircraft flying from Iwo Jima to Guam, there are no doctors on these flights. They fly over there with their corpsman and then a pilot, maybe a navigator. And when they get to Iwo Jima, it’s active fire.

Every time they’re supposed to be landing, there’s supposed to be a lull. There’s no lull because it’s such a horrific battle. They can’t turn around. They have to land. And when they land, they all talked about this visceral aspect of it. The smell of death. The sulfur smell. That the airstrip is shaking. And again, because there are no field hospitals there, they walk over to scores of extremely wounded Marines who are just lying there on stretchers on the ground in terrible, terrible shape.

It’s absolute chaos that they have to face, and then they’re on the aircraft, and they’re by themselves. One of them said, “I can’t even phone anyone to ask what I should do. I’m in the middle of the Pacific. There are these men who are dying or near death all around me, and I have to figure out what to do.” All of it was this learning curve on the plane. It’s freezing cold. There’s no air pressure.

One of the stories that moved me so much — it’s actually one of the more famous stories — but I think one of the most moving ones is about Kendeigh’s first flight. She’s actually not supposed to go on the first flight. There’s this photo a Navy photographer takes of Jane, where she gets off the plane, and she walks over to a Marine, Sgt. Bill Wyckoff, lying there. He’s got bandages all over his face. Wyckoff later said it was like an angel took my hand. He’s lying there near death, and he hears this woman whispering in his ear, “It’s going to be okay.”

Albeit brief, what kind of relationship did these Marines and nurses forge?

The men called them mom. They would say, “Mom, can you come here?”

“Mom, can you put on your lipstick?”

“Can I watch you put on your lipstick like my mom used to do?”

When the book was published, I insisted the font color on the cover be that lipstick red.

The women always said, “We were treated with the greatest respect by these men.” They never dealt with any hassling, no sexualization, none of that. It was just pure respect and love that they received and gave back.

One of my colleagues likes to talk about “research rapture.” What was the process like researching for The Flight Nurses’ War?

The families were incredible because I think that they were so glad somebody was finally telling these amazing stories of their role. And I had so many extraordinary moments. Part of the way that the unpacking of the boxes would work was that I would be with the children as we unpacked the boxes, so it was this extremely moving and rich moment that the kids would remember: “Oh wait, like there’s a shell necklace from Guam,” and then they would tell the story of how the mom got it when she was there.

I talk about this moment a lot in the book, and I always get very seriously teary when I talk about it. Another one of the flight nurses, Mary Leahy Hudnall, came from Massachusetts. She didn’t particularly want to go on planes. She joined the Navy because she thought that she would be on a ship. There you go.

She ends up on these flights, and in one instance they’re putting these men on the aircraft who are mortally wounded, right? There’s no doctor; it’s just them and the corpsman. One of the Marines on her flight out of Iwo Jima, who she knows is very, very, very wounded. He’s probably not going to make it, and he insists that she take a vial of sand from Iwo Jima that he took. She says, “No, you’re going to be fine, you’re going to be fine,” but he keeps saying, “No, can you please take this. I need you to take it because you need to tell the story of what we went through.”

So she takes the vial of sand, and then he unfortunately passes away. She gives that vial of sand to her daughter, and then when I’m in Canada visiting with her daughter, we find that vial of sand in one of the boxes. I got to hold it, and it was honestly one of the most moving moments of my life.

I took a picture of it and put it in the book because, as a historian, it’s my imperative to tell his story. I’m not only telling the story of the nurses, but I’m equally telling the story of the wounded men under their care whose stories need to be told.

At roughly 10:13 p.m., officers with the Prince William County Police Department responded to calls about property destruction near Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.

Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano, 27, was arrested at the scene and has been charged with felony destruction of property, trespass with intent to damage property, and felony injury to a monument, per the police department.

The alleged destruction via a sledgehammer has caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the historic military monument, police said.

Per the Washington Post, a second Marine from the statue is missing the bayonet from the rifle slung over his back, while a third figure’s helmet and face had been “chipped and gouged.”

The memorial was created in honor of Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of U.S. Marines raising the flag over Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945.

Austrian-born American sculptor Felix de Weldon, serving with the U.S. Navy at the time, was so moved by the image that he immediately constructed a scale model of the flag raising.

It would take him another nine and a half years to complete the full-sized model now standing in Arlington, Virginia. The smaller monument, allegedly defaced by Maldonado Soriano, stands near the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Maldonado Soriano is being held without bond pending a court appearance.

On Aug. 1, 1943, Lt. Ernie Poulson co-piloted the Consolidated B-24 Liberator on a low-level bombing run of an oil refinery in Campina — part of the deadly American aerial raid of the Ploesti oil fields, codenamed Operation Tidal Wave. His aircraft was one of 53 lost that day. Paulson and his crew crash-landed on a river bank and were taken captive by the Romanian home guard.

As they awaited their fate in that dank, dark pit, the young American airmen could hear a commotion above them. Suddenly, a trap door opened and a head appeared. A woman’s voice spoke to them in heavily accented English:

“Hello, boys. There are only friends here. Now come up and let us help you.”

Poulson and the others didn’t know it at the time but they had just been saved by a guardian angel. Princess Catherine Caradja, a member of Romanian royalty, was now responsible for their lives as the hell of World War II raged around them in Europe.

That scene is a pivotal moment in Adam Makos’ new book Tidal Wave: The Pilots, the Princess, and the Enemy Ace – A True Story of Courage and Survival in WWII. The bestselling author of World War II books A Higher Call and Spearhead details an amazing account of a little-known side story of the ill-fated mission to destroy “Hitler’s gas station.”

“That’s what the brass thought in 1943 when they sent those bombers into Romania at low level: wipe out Hitler’s refineries in one great raid,” Makos told Military Times.

“They said it would shorten the war by six months. The truth was, Operation Tidal Wave was the opening salvo in a campaign that took an entire year to knock Romania out of the war and deny Hitler its oil. It took more than 67 American missions — and 237 bombers lost — to batter Romania enough to cause regime change,” he added.

At the time, Romania was a reluctant ally of Germany. Ruled by a despotic fascist, the country had joined the Axis powers to fight its archnemesis, the Soviet Union. However, many in Romania were wary of the Nazis and favored the Allies.

One of those who believed the country was on the wrong side of the war was Princess Catherine. When the Chattanooga Choo Choo crashed on her estate, she took an active interest in the welfare of its crew, rescuing them from internment in a Luftwaffe POW camp.

Instead, Poulson and his men went to a safer Romanian prison camp where Princess Catherine could protect them. She even managed to have the camp commander replaced when he became too severe in his handling of the Americans.

Makos was tipped off to the story by Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx, who died in 2025. Smith told the author about Poulson and how his crew was aided by the Romanian princess. As the author investigated, he learned the B-24 copilot was still alive

“We found one of the last survivors of the 1,700 men that flew that mission in 1943. I was overjoyed,” says Makos, adding, “Ernie had a sharp mind and was physically fit. At 97, as he was telling me this story, you could tell he was still a tough guy.”

As the war progressed, more and more Romanians were killed in the senseless slaughter of the Eastern Front in Russia. Support for the Nazis weakened and in 1944, the country’s monarch — Michael I, who was king in name only — led a coup against the country’s dictator and flipped sides to join the Allies.

This enabled Romania’s leading fighter ace — Prince Constantin “Buzz” Cantacuzino, who hated the Nazis — to assist Allied airmen held prisoner in his country, including Lt. Col. James Alexander Gunn, the highest-ranking U.S. officer shot down in the Ploesti Raid.

In a Messerschmitt Bf 109 painted with two large American flags on its sides, Cantacuzino flew Gunn to safety in Italy. From there, the colonel helped plan the Operation Reunion rescue of more than 1,000 captured Allied airmen, including Poulson and his crew, in Boeing B-17 bombers converted into troop transports.

Buzz flew escort for the Flying Fortresses in a North American P-51 Mustang.

Like most of Makos’ books, the narrative doesn’t end with the guns falling silent. The author writes about how Princess Catherine and Poulson meet again years later in Europe, where the American learned just how much was at stake for his benefactor if she had been caught.

After the Communists seized control in Romania, Catherine escaped to America, where she lived in Texas with one of the airmen on Poulson’s plane: Richard Britt. Following the Romanian Revolution in 1989, the princess returned to her homeland, where she died at 100 in 1993.

“This is such an amazing story,” Makos says. “We were so lucky that many of the people involved wrote memoirs, so we were able to piece it together and triangulate all the incredible events for accuracy. I interviewed Ernie Poulson in 2018 to get his side of it. He played such a movie-like role in this story.”

Poulson later headed the Atlas missile program for the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a colonel in 1961. He then became a professor of business at the University of Utah. He died in 2020.

Tapping into unreleased family archives, diaries, letters and firsthand accounts, Makos crafts a fast-paced, action-packed narrative that ties together many important individuals and historic events into a personal story about World War II. By presenting this aspect of the Ploesti Raid, he says he is focusing on the brave men who sacrificed so much to stop the Nazi war machine.

“Some 310 of them gave their lives, and they did help bring about an earlier end to the most terrible war in human history. Are we a country that remembers our heroes, those audacious young men who flew into the jaws of hell? Or will they be just a footnote in history?

“That’s why I wrote Tidal Wave: to make sure their names and their story are known.”

The battleship suffered more loss of life than any American ship during the attack, its 1,177 dead comprising nearly half the 2,403 killed at Pearl Harbor.

Of the ship’s dead, 277 of its sailors and Marines are buried in Honolulu’s National Memorial of the Pacific. The identity of 86 of those men remains unknown to this day.

The exhumations will begin with the disinterment of eight caskets from the National Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the “Punchbowl,” on Dec. 7 and will continue with about eight caskets removed each week until the total of 86 is reached, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Forensic specialists from DPAA will then seek to match DNA from the remains with DNA provided by the family members.

“DPAA is honored to be able to provide long-sought answers to families of these Unknowns,” Kelly McKeague, a retired Air Force major general and director of DPAA, said in a statement.

“Being able to disinter the 86 Unknowns associated with USS Arizona is singularly due to the determined initiative and extraordinary efforts of Operation 85,” McKeague said, referring to the group led by Kevin Kline, a Virginia real estate agent and grandnephew of Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Robert Edwin Kline who perished when the Arizona was hit by at least eight bombs dropped by Japanese warplanes.

Kline’s group began gathering DNA Family Reference Samples from the families of those listed as unknowns as part of the USS Arizona (BB39) Unknown Identification Project after the Navy and the Defense Department said the project could not be done and would cost too much to attempt.

Then last April, DPAA announced that Operation 85 had reached the 60% threshold of DNA Family Reference Samples for the Unknowns, allowing disinterments to begin.

”Reaching this milestone does not conclude the search for additional USS Arizona and associated Pearl Harbor family members who may be able to provide viable DNA Family Reference Samples,” DPAA said in the April announcement. “DPAA, Operation 85, and the service casualty offices continue to encourage any family member who may be related to a missing USS Arizona crew member to participate in this ongoing effort.”

In a phone interview with Military Times, Kevin Kline said the beginning of exhumations on Dec. 7 “doesn’t mean we’re done. We’re still looking [to] take those words unknown off those graves” remaining in the Punchbowl. “I think this is a problem we can fix.”

A total of 1,177 sailors and Marines from the Arizona were killed in the surprise Pearl Harbor attacks, and more than 900 of those killed remain entombed within the sunken hull of the ship beneath the stunning USS Arizona Memorial.

On board the submarine, the crew had assembled on the deck in dress uniforms, which were starkly different than what American sailors were wearing. A dashing figure in officer’s regalia bearing a row of medals across his chest stood at the conning tower. Suddenly, the larger vessel was bumped by a small motor launch with a reporter on board.

“Have you come here to be interned?” asked the curious newspaperman.

“No,” answered the distinguished officer. “But I’ve brought a letter for the German ambassador. Will you mail it for me?”

The submarine’s commander was Kapitänleutnant Hans Rose of the Imperial German Navy. On Oct. 7, 1916, while World War I raged across Europe, he boldly sailed his submarine, U-53, into the neutral port under the incredulous gaze of the U.S. Navy in an attempt to rattle the American public and convince the country to stay out of the conflict.

“Audacity,” says Ret. Rear Admiral Samuel J. Cox, director of naval history and curator for the Navy at the Naval History and Heritage Command. “That’s the only word I can think of to describe Rose cruising into Newport. The U.S. was still neutral then, but he did not know how the Navy would react to his arrival.”

That event 110 years ago made banner headlines in newspapers across the country and around the globe. Planned months in advance, Rose was under strict orders to sail across the Atlantic Ocean and show up at the Rhode Island naval base to introduce himself to American officers as a “goodwill” gesture. In reality, his courtesy call was a propaganda move designed to shock the United States into fearing the far-reaching dangers of German submarine warfare.

“Rose was basically trying to say, ‘My U-boat can reach your shores and you should be aware if you decide to get involved in the First World War,’” said David Kohnen, Naval War College professor, in a video posted on C-Span Classroom

At the time, millions of lives were being sacrificed on the killing fields of Europe as the Central Powers of Germany, Austria and Turkey tried to deliver a knockout blow to the Entente allies: France, England and Russia. With an impartial stance, the United States looked on as both sides became mired in the mud of trench warfare.

Though officially neutral, American factories were churning out armaments — mostly for Entente armies, but also for the Central Powers. Cargo ships of all registries transported this matériel from U.S. ports to the battlefront, prompting the Imperial German Navy to begin hunting freighters carrying “contraband” on the open sea.

Early in the war, Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare — meaning its unterseeboots would attack ships without warning if they believed they were transporting munitions. That changed in 1915 with the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, a British luxury ocean liner. Some 128 American citizens were killed in the attack, prompting calls for U.S. intercession in the war.

To calm nerves across the Atlantic, Germany then intercepted ships and checked manifests for wartime supplies. If carrying such a cargo, the ship would be sunk after passengers and crew were offloaded onto lifeboats.

“Americans were concerned by the sub threat,” Cox says. “Newspapers carried stories of how freighters were being sunk, some not far off U.S. shores. There was a great deal of tension since ships were the way most people traveled distances then.”

Rose received his orders from Cmdr. Hermann Bauer, who was in charge of the German U-Boat fleet. Bauer had cleared the plan with German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II, who believed it would shock the United States into staying out of the war.

“Convinced the Americans were essentially spineless, [the Kaiser] reasoned that a German U-boat sally into a U.S. naval harbor would be so intimidating as to keep the United States out of the war,” wrote journalist Wellington Long in a 1966 article.

On the mission, U-53 was supposed to escort the Bremen, an unarmed merchant submarine designed to carry cargo under the British blockade of Germany. However, the two vessels failed to rendezvous, so U-53 crossed the Atlantic on its own (the Bremen was later presumed lost at sea, possibly sunk by a British mine or torpedo).

It took U-53 three weeks to make the trip. On Oct. 7, Rose and his crew surfaced in American territorial waters just off the coast of Rhode Island. According to neutrality laws, belligerent warships were allowed into neutral ports for 24 hours, usually for food, water, fuel, repairs or to surrender. Rose needed none of those things, but was concerned how he would be received in the American port, home of the Navy’s Atlantic destroyer fleet.

“There I was, a 31-year-old German naval officer… heading my submarine for Newport naval harbor, and no one really knew how neutral those American destroyers would be,” the U-53 commander told Long in an interview.

Uncertainty was prevalent that day. Telegrams flew between Newport and Washington, D.C., as local commanders sought guidance on how to respond to the unusual situation. Eventually, the commander of the Second Naval District arrived to find out what was going on in his homeport.

A confused Rear Admiral Austin M. Knight asked if Rose required repairs, fuel or anything else, only to be told no. Finally, the American officer stammered, “Well, then, what the devil do you want here?”

“I only wanted to visit you, Admiral,” Rose responded.

U-53 became a spectacle in Newport Harbor. Yachts and pleasure craft tied up next to the German submarine for a closer look. Citizens and reporters walked her deck and were greeted by friendly German sailors. Officers of anchored American destroyers, including USS Jacob Jones, stopped by to see the U-Boat. Even Rear Admiral Albert Gleaves, commander of the destroyer flotilla at Newport, came aboard — along with his wife and daughter. They were given a tour below decks of the submarine.

That afternoon, Rose left the U-53 by water taxi and visited Coasters Harbor Island. He strolled up the steps to the Naval War College and knocked on the door, according to Kohnen. When greeted, Rose answered, “I’m here to mail a postcard.” It was addressed to his mother back in Germany.

Eventually, Rose sensed his welcome was wearing thin, so he bid farewell to his hosts and left the harbor. He anchored off of Nantucket Lightship that evening. At first light the next day, he was underway and cruised past the U.S. 3-mile territorial limit. Then it was back to war as he began hunting for cargo ships carrying contraband.

U.S. Navy destroyers left Newport and stayed a short distance away as U-53 intercepted, inspected and sank five freighters. The American ships rescued 216 survivors from British, Canadian, Dutch, Norwegian and U.S. freighters.

Before the mission, Rose said he was informed by Cmdr. Bauer that the Kaiser planned to announce a return to unrestricted submarine warfare — something Rose believed was necessary if Germany was to win the war. That didn’t happen until 1917. The Kaiser was reticent to do so, fearing it would provoke the Americans into joining the war, which it did. A year later, the United States declared war on Germany.

Rose would go on to become one of Germany’s most successful U-boat captains, sinking 81 merchant ships with a gross weight in excess of 200,000 tons. He was also credited with sinking the USS Jacob Jones, whose officers toured his submarine in Newport Harbor. It was the only U.S. destroyer to be lost in enemy action in World War I.

Designed to strike fear into the American public, the arrival of U-53 in Newport had the reverse effect. If anything, it confirmed U.S. suspicions that Germany was dangerous and forced many isolationists to reconsider their neutral stance. It also proved to the United States just what was at stake in the Atlantic with German submarines on the prowl.

“U-53 demonstrated that the U-boat commanders were audacious and a foe that deserved to be treated with respect,” Cox says.

Bernardino Mijares has spent most of his life searching for his father.

For many years, all the 33-year-old tricycle taxi driver knew was the name his mother had told him — which later was found to be incorrect — and that his father had served in the Philippines with the U.S. Navy. Growing up in the city of Antipolo, Mijares was often singled out because of his darker skin and curly hair. He came to understand that his father was Black, but looking different from other Filipinos exposed him to bullying at school and limited his opportunities later in life.

“Discrimination, it’s hard,” Mijares said. “I didn’t have recognition in school. I don’t have a family tree. I feel incomplete.”

Mijares is one of more than 100,000 Amerasians, a term commonly used for children born in Asian countries to U.S. service members and local women. Many grew up in the aftermath of American wars and military deployments in Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere, often facing stigma, poverty, and exclusion. While U.S. forces over the years have been deployed worldwide, the scale of the Vietnam and Korean wars resulted in high numbers of children fathered by US servicemen in Asia. This, coupled with the perception of the U.S. as the enemy or an occupying force, contributed to heightened stigma for the children they left behind.

Now, as many of the American servicemen from those wars enter their twilight years, some Amerasian children are running out of time to find them.

Those who served in Vietnam and Korea, in particular, “are getting old,” said Chelle Reed, founder of the charity WarBabies, which works to reconnect U.S.-based Amerasians with their fathers. Her father was a Vietnam War veteran who she later learned had fathered a son during his deployment before she was born. Unfortunately, her father died before her brother was found.

Stories like these are why Mijares considers himself one of the lucky ones. After years of searching — and a decade spent talking with a man who turned out not to be his father — a DNA test finally gave him an answer.

Days before Father’s Day in June 2025, the nonprofit Father Founded confirmed that Clifford Jeudy, a 52-year-old radio DJ living in Orlando, Florida, was Mijares’ biological father.

Jeudy had no idea he had left a child behind during a three-week stint to the Filipino island of Luzon in 1992.

He was 18, fresh out of high school, and serving on his first Navy deployment aboard the USS Belleau Wood. The ship was stationed in Subic Bay as the United States prepared to end its permanent military presence in the Philippines.

Jeudy described his relationship with Mijares’ mother as a “whirlwind.” He said he was drawn to her resemblance to Holly Robinson, one of his favorite actresses at the time. But the relationship ended when the ship departed.

“We didn’t have the internet [or] cell phones,” Jeudy recalled. “We talked about her coming over, but it was such a whirlwind type of situation, and the next thing you know, I’m in my dress uniform on the ship and we’re leaving Subic Bay.”

Neither heard from the other again and so he had no idea that months after he left, she gave birth to a son.

Thirty-three years later, Jeudy was on his way home from work in Florida when his fiancée called to say she had signed for an important-looking envelope. He asked her to read it aloud. As he stared at the road ahead, hands gripping the steering wheel, he learned that he not only had a son, but three grandchildren.

Father Founded, which has successfully identified family members in 452 cases, had used DNA to identify Jeudy and contacted him on Mijares’ behalf. The nonprofit also served as an intermediary between a father and son living on different continents and speaking different languages.

Jeudy was stunned.

“I went from having one biological son and two stepsons to having a whole bloodline,” said Jeudy, who had no other grandchildren. He did not need to study the DNA results. The enclosed photograph of Mijares was enough.

“The pictures when he was young … the similarity [is] amazing,” Jeudy said.

Jeudy’s other son and extended family welcomed Mijares, albeit only over video calls so far. Jeudy says he hopes to visit the Philippines soon.

The Cost of Being Amerasian

Mijares’ reunion with his father brought answers after decades of uncertainty. But his childhood reflected a broader pattern experienced by many Amerasian children born in the aftermath of U.S. wars and military deployments.

Brian Hjort, founder of Father Founded, said Amerasian children were often stigmatized because of their American parentage and mixed-race appearance in Vietnam. In some communities, he said, they were treated as reminders of “the enemy.”

“[They] are discriminated [against], not allowed to take certain jobs or education,” Hjort said. “They grow up being outcasts.”

Mijares’ mother left him in the care of his grandmother and went on to marry and have three other children. He had to navigate life as an Amerasian without any of his peers looking like him or knowing who his father might be.

“My mother could not take care of me back then because she had her own family, and her other children were her priority,” he said. “People would always ask where my father was, wonder why I had no middle name, or notice I stood alone during family days. … But I managed to get through all of that.”

With limited financial means, he was not able to go past the elementary level in school, narrowing his employment options and earning potential. He relied on friends and his grandmother to support him until he was old enough to work.

“I was only 12 years old at the time and I could not work to provide for myself,” Mijares said of his life after finishing elementary school. “I just went wherever I could, until I was no longer able to continue schooling.”

For Julie Henning, who grew up in South Korea after the Korean War, the consequences were even more severe.

Henning said she and her mother were shunned because she was the child of a Korean woman and an American serviceman. People saw them as bringing shame and dishonor to the community.

“[I was] considered a half-breed, less than a dog,” Henning said.

Her father had returned to the United States by the end of the war in 1953. At this time, South Korea had plunged into the worst levels of poverty globally, and Henning’s mother struggled to support her family. It didn’t help that societal stigma from having been involved with an American soldier blocked her from certain employment. Henning remembers growing up without running water and foraging for dandelions, mushrooms, and snails. Her sister died of malnutrition.

Henning said her mother considered putting her up for adoption multiple times, but could not go through with it.

When Henning was 13, she received a scholarship to attend the Pearl S. Buck Opportunity Center near Seoul, run by the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which served children who faced discrimination because of their mixed heritage. Soon after Henning arrived in the South Korean capital, her mother died.

Henning has long believed that her mother saw her departure for school as a chance for her daughter to build a different life.

“[My mother] impressed upon me to get an education and go to America, the land of your father,” Henning said through tears.

The author Pearl S. Buck later adopted Henning and brought her to the United States, where she attended college and became a math teacher and author.

Mijares’ and Henning’s experiences were not unusual. The discrimination Amerasians faced was one reason Hjort started a group to help them.

In Vietnam, some Amerasian children were derided as “dust,” a reference to those left to survive on the streets. In South Korea, biracial children were sometimes labeled “mixed bloods,” while in Thailand they were called “half children.” Research has documented Amerasians struggling with poverty, limited educational opportunities, and lasting harm to employment, income, and mental health.

“I saw the Vietnamese really treat them badly … talk down to them and abuse them,” Hjort said, speaking of the time he spent in Vietnam in the 1990s and the impetus for creating Father Founded.

His work is made harder because many veterans themselves do not know they left children behind, but finding them has become easier than it was in the 1990s. Researchers once relied on military records to determine where servicemen had been stationed and when.

Today, DNA testing, ancestry databases, and social media can narrow the search. Even so, some cases take years. Once the organization identifies a likely father, it contacts him on the child’s behalf. Some men are overjoyed. Others are hesitant.

“Sometimes people don’t want to be reminded about the past,” Hjort said. “[These were] very bad wars and people have remarried and had their own kids.”

For the children, however, the past has never been distant. Many grew up facing discrimination because of their appearance and American parentage, without knowing the identity of the father who shaped how others saw them.

The Immigration Barrier

For some Amerasians, finding an American father is tied not only to identity, but also to hope of learning more about the United States and perhaps one day visiting.

The Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 allowed certain Vietnamese children of U.S. service members born between 1962 and 1976, and their immediate family, to immigrate to the United States without definitive proof of paternity. Applicants could qualify based on interviews, physical appearance, testimony, and other evidence. Prior to this, a broader act, the Amerasian Act of 1982, applied to those born in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand after 1950 and before 1982, but only applied to the Amerasians themselves, not the family members.

The law ultimately allowed at least 25,000 Vietnamese Amerasians and 70,000 relatives to immigrate.

“Our country knew that our men over there did this and left so many children behind,” said Reed. “They didn’t have DNA testing back then … but the government wanted to do the right thing.”

WarBabies’ Reed said the law allowed her Amerasian brother to leave Vietnam in 1990 even though he had not yet identified their shared father. Reed has a different mother from her brother and was born after her father returned to the U.S. Years after finding one another, brother and sister now live in Georgia, about 15 minutes away from one another.

For Amerasians born elsewhere in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines, no comparable program exists. Without documented proof of paternity in the form of a birth certificate or a recognized claim to U.S. citizenship, immigration can be difficult.

“They want to have the love of their father and to be accepted,” Hjort said. “Of course, they hope to go to America, but they realize … it’s not easy.”

For Mijares, however, the search was never about moving to the United States. He wanted to know who his father was, understand his American heritage, and fill a gap that shaped his life.

Mijares now speaks regularly with his younger brother and has connected with members of Jeudy’s extended family. Jeudy hopes to meet his son and grandchildren in person in the near future.

Jeudy said he believes children who can prove a biological relationship to an American parent should have a clearer path to recognition, and, where legally justified, United States citizenship. The State Department offers support if a person can prove their father’s U.S. citizenship and has their name on their birth certificate. The challenge is when an individual lacks that vital paperwork or doesn’t know who their father is. Even in cases where they have identified them and there is DNA available, it would need to be backed up with an affidavit from the father in place of a birth certificate, but even then citizenship is at the discretion of the embassy or consulate in question.

“If we could prove that these are our children … they should have the option to get their names changed and potentially citizenship,” Jeudy said.

Time is Running Out

As Vietnam veterans in particular enter their final years, Amerasian families are running out of time to find them.

“A lot of them have Agent Orange exposure, and they’re very ill,” said Reed. She said her organization has helped reunite 102 families.

The time factor applies to veterans from other missions too. By the time math teacher and author Julie Henning found her father’s relatives in South Carolina, he had been dead for four years. She later visited his grave, the only connection still available to her.

“This is the man I never knew, but this is the man who gave me life,” Henning said. “It was [a] really strange unreal feeling. … You cannot quite put it in words.”

She also learned that she had a brother, but he too passed away, months after she spoke to him for the first time.

Reunions are not always simple.

Families may face language barriers, cultural differences, conflicting expectations, and resentment over decades of absence.

People have ideas that their mystical father will be “sitting on a white horse,” Hjort said, then they realize he’s more likely to be “an old chap with a beer gut.”

Some fathers have also spent decades searching for children they left behind.

Jim Reischl served one tour in Vietnam when he was 21 and had a girlfriend, whom he rented a room for near his base. After a few months of dating and just before he was set to head home, she told Reischl she was pregnant. He didn’t want to stay in the country longer than necessary, and he’d been warned in orientation upon arrival in Vietnam that this was a common line used to try to secure passage to America. Skeptical, Reischl left Vietnam but wrote her letters, hoping to learn more about whether the child existed. He never heard back.

In 2005, the question mark over whether he had a child in Vietnam loomed too large, so he reached out to Hjort’s team for help locating the woman and her potential child. He found her after placing an ad in a local newspaper in 2015, and he traveled to Vietnam the following year to visit in person. Reischl’s former girlfriend said that after giving birth, she gave the baby to a local woman to put up for adoption after her family warned of the difficulties of raising a biracial baby. But with few details, he’s still unsure whether he has a child out there or who they might be.

Robert Elliot left a military base near Da Nang, Vietnam, in 1971, knowing the woman he had been seeing was eight months pregnant. He felt that staying wasn’t a realistic option at the time, but planned to maintain contact and figure out a solution. That didn’t happen.

Now, 55 years after leaving Vietnam, Elliot still does not know what became of the child.

“I’ve been searching for close to 30 years, but I haven’t received any hits on DNA,” Elliot said.

Reed said such unresolved cases are common. Her organization has 29 open searches, and many Amerasian families continue looking without knowing whether the veteran they seek is still alive.

“They don’t want to … disrupt their [fathers’] lives,” Reed said. “But they have a deep, internal knowing that they need to know who they are—just a picture or a name. Even to be able to give that to them would satisfy them.”

She urges veterans who believe they have fathered children overseas or their family members to submit DNA to ancestry databases that can then help to identify family members and ancestral ties. Even when Amerasians do not find their fathers in time, DNA testing can connect them with siblings, cousins, or other relatives.

“I don’t care if they think or deny that they had a possibility of children,” Reed said. “They should get tested now.”

For some veterans, testing can create a reunion — or help some other family resolve their case. But for others, a match may only lead to a grave, a photograph, or the name of someone who died before they could be found.

But with each passing year, even those answers become harder to reach.

This article from The War Horse was edited by Paul Szoldra, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

Growing up in the Depression era Jim Crow South, Greason never let prejudice define him. Rather, he kept moving forward with dignity, humility, and a sense of humor, creating a legacy that began with one question: Did I help someone?

Before Greason teamed up in the Negro Leagues with Hall of Famer and U.S. Army veteran Willie Mays — and decades before he preached the Gospel from the pulpit — he was a Montford Point Marine, America’s first group of African Americans to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II.

In 2012, Greason joined roughly 400 Montford Point Marines in Washington, D.C., to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Today, fewer than 400 Montford Point Marines survive among the 20,000 who served during the war.

Born in Atlanta on Sept. 3, 1924, Greason grew up across the street from Martin Luther King Jr. in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood bustling with Black-owned businesses, jazz and ragtime. His father, James, was a laborer, while his mother Lizzie took in laundry for white families.

Greason spoke with a whisper and chuckled about his circuitous path into baseball when he spoke to the author about his athletic legacy. He said, “I wanted to become a doctor and played two years of semi-pro football, but the Lord had other ideas for me, and I didn’t argue with him.”

To this day, he proudly wears a Marine Corps ballcap embroidered with the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor — a declaration that says, “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

The first Black Marines

As war loomed and fascism rose across Europe, there were few opportunities for Blacks to serve in the U.S. military. That scenario changed six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, permitting Blacks to join the Marine Corps and any branch of the U.S. military — albeit segregated.

For a poor young man from Atlanta, this breakthrough signaled a chance.

At Booker T. Washington High School, Greason was an athlete and a budding leader. According to his military records, he captained the school’s softball team. He also participated in boxing, football, baseball, basketball, tennis and wrestling, so he was in fighting shape when he enlisted in the service in Macon, Georgia, at age 17 on May 13, 1943.

Greason soon found himself at a remote coastal North Carolina installation, built on swampy lowland behind a piney curtain, inhabited by snakes, bears and blood-thirsty swarms of deer flies and mosquitoes.

For Black Marines, Montford Point was their Parris Island, just on rougher terrain with fewer luxuries.

The first Montford Marines cleared the land with basic tools and saws in 1942. They laid gravel roads, dug latrines and built dozens of prefabricated huts, along with a mess hall, a chapel and supply warehouses to create a functioning Marine installation for thousands of men.

Montford Point would ultimately produce more than 20,000 Marines, including 13,000 who went on to serve in the Pacific during World War II.

Private Greason shipped out to the Pacific Theater with the 66th Supply Platoon, 34th Marine Depot Company, V Amphibious Corps. The men arrived on Iwo Jima several days after the initial invasion, when the island looked like a jagged moonscape choked with volcanic ash, smoke and blood.

His platoon’s job was one of the most dangerous on the beachfront — unloading heavy ammunition and critical supplies from ships onto the shore under the constant spray of enemy fire.

“Two of my best friends were killed on that island. I prayed and said, ‘Lord, if you get me off this island, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it,’” he told MLB in an interview.

Greason’s Iwo Jima

As U.S. forces prepared to land on the beach, Greason was instructed to move forward, no matter the casualties that surrounded them, and not tend to the wounded, according to Gerard Choucroun, the executive director of the Heart and Armor Foundation.

As they advanced onto the island, Greason saw that his best friend at Montford Point, Hubert “Claro” Duverney, a fellow squad leader from New York, and another good friend, James Wilkins, from Tennessee, had been hit by enemy fire. Cpl. Duverney was alive. As blood poured from his stomach, Greason made the choice to disobey orders and picked up his friend and carried him to the medical tent overrun with wounded and dying Marines.

Wilkins perished. His valor is memorialized with a Purple Heart. And despite Greason’s heroics, Duverney died two days later.

Greason spent 13 months in Japan with the American occupation force, where he was stationed in Sasebo and Nagasaki, after the United States leveled the city with the second atomic bomb. Choucroun recounts that his 102-year-old friend still dreams about being on the island.

On April 1, 1946, Greason was discharged from duty, yet he soon faced another battle — finding a job to come home to.

Though the young Marine was a capable leader with solid mechanical skills, trade jobs with decent wages were hard to find for Blacks, especially in the Jim Crow South.

So he turned to the Marines to find work as a ball player.

In a typed letter, received June 3, 1946, to his rehabilitation officer at the 6th Marine Reserves District, he wrote: “I am now unemployed. I would appreciate it very much if you could contact some team, it doesn’t matter where, but I am sure I have what it takes to make any team, and I would like a chance to prove myself, if given the chance.”

The age of athletic patriotism

Greason, never formally trained as a baseball player, calls baseball a “Gift from God.”

Standing five foot ten, weighing 170 pounds, the Marine was blessed with a strong arm, a quick mind and a relentless work ethic that soon landed him with the Nashville Black Vols in 1947, and the Birmingham Black Barons from 1948 to 1951.

As Greason perfected his fastball and scouts took note of his Major League potential, Greason once again put his potential on hold, joining the ranks of future Hall of Famers, including Marine combat pilots Ted Williams and Jerry Coleman, who left the game to serve in Korea. However, Greason’s war stayed closer to home this time.

Reflecting on his second tour of duty at Camp Lejeune, in an interview with The Oklahoman in 2012, Greason said he had a good camp commander, who said, ‘That’s a no-win war. You stay here. I’m going to have a baseball team.’”

During the Korean War, Camp Lejeune became a high-profile baseball hub for major and minor league talent who boosted morale. The Lejeune Leathernecks bested Fort Bragg, Cherry Point and Fort Jackson in America’s favorite pastime. Greason certainly delivered on the mound, winning all but one game, and even beating a team with Brooklyn Dodgers ace and future Hall of Famer Don Newcombe.

A barrier-breaking debut

After eight years in the Corps, Greason faced difficulties with team owners, reluctant to sign players who might get called back to duty.

On July 23, 1952, the pitcher once again wrote a letter to his superior officer with the 6th Marine Corps Reserve District, requesting acceptance of his resignation from the reserves.

In loopy cursive handwriting slanting to the left, Greason wrote, “I served proudly with the Corps. and would be glad to serve again if another need should arise, but I do not wish to make a career of it. As we say, once a Marine, always a Marine, therefore, there is no other outfit I would care to serve in if there was another war.”

The Marines released Greason on July 25, 1952. Just three days later the rookie broke the color barrier in professional sports as the first Black player for the Oklahoma City Indians of the Double-A Texas League.

The Marines cheered on their pitcher when he landed on the biggest stage of all, making history as the St. Louis Cardinals’ first Black pitcher in 1954.

There were 35,000 people in the stands at Wrigley Field on Memorial Day when the 29-year-old Marine pitched against the Chicago Cubs — the first game of a doubleheader. Greason could whip a wicked fastball. He could paint the corners of the strike zone but gave up a few runs in three innings, including Ernie Banks’ homer smashed onto the back row of the left field bleachers. The Cardinals lost the rain-shortened game, 14-4.

After finishing out his career with Cardinals farm teams and playing ball in Puerto Rico with Roberto Clemente, the first Latin American player enshrined in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Greason retired in 1959.

Greason and his wife Willie settled in Birmingham, where he drove a delivery truck for Pizitz Department Store and joined the 16th Street Baptist Church. On Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, however, the Greasons weren’t in their usual spots in the church. As they headed to a baseball game in Tuscaloosa, they heard the distant “boom” of an explosion that killed four innocent young girls at their church.

That infamous Baptist Street Bombing signaled a spiritual turning point for the budding minister, who went on to receive a doctoral degree in divinity.

Did I help someone?

Whether holding a bayonet, a baseball or a Bible, Greason maintains the same quality — that of a consummate team player.

“I’ve been through a lot of stuff. I know nobody, but God brought me out,” he told the author in 2021. “No matter what happens in the world, nothing is impossible with God.”

Today Greason is a Veteran Ambassador for Heart and Armor, serving as a role model for veterans transitioning from difficult military service to civilian life.

“Reverend Greason has an astounding resume of achievement and citizenship. But his most inspiring qualities are his most subtle — humor and humility, said Choucroun. “Whatever uniform he wears — military, baseball or clergy — he plays for the team, not for himself. His personal warmth and longevity are indomitable. But these qualities are real and, when viewed up close, massively inspiring.”

Anne R. Keene writes about the age of Athletic Patriotism, celebrating athletes who served in World War II and the Korean War. She is the author of the wartime classic, “The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win WWII.”

The reason: advances in DNA technology.

During a Sept. 1 webinar, Kelly McKeague, the director of the DPAA, told Stars and Stripes that “We will petition Arlington National Cemetery to disinter the remains at the Tomb of the Unknown simply because the probability is high that we will be able to identify that unknown,” he said.

According to McKeague, the agency now possesses DNA samples from 94% of the roughly 7,400 American service members still listed as missing from the Korean War.

While the agency plans to petition the Army, which oversees Arlington, the potential exhumation and identification process will not commence until all Korean War unknowns — currently residing in the Honolulu cemetery — are exhumed and identified.

There are fewer than 50 Korean War unknowns left, Lance Pridemore, assistant director at the cemetery, told Stripes. And that process should be complete by the end of November.

The Korean War Unknown has rested in the national cemetery since May 30, 1958, when both the Korean and WWII Unknowns were interred during ceremonies presided over by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The former five-star general and commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during the Second World War presented the Medal of Honor to each Unknown.

The exhumation would have some precedent.

In the decade following the Vietnam War, there were calls from the American public to designate another unknown.

Known only as X-26, the remains of an American service member were being held in the U.S. Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. Found near a stream in An Loc in 1972, X-26 had remained unidentified for over a decade when the remains were selected to represent the nation’s missing from that war and buried at Arlington on Memorial Day, 1984.

During the ceremony, President Ronald Reagan awarded the Medal of Honor to the unknown.

However, in 1994, in the face of mounting evidence that their son, Capt. Michael J. Blassie, was the Vietnam War unknown, the family of the Air Force pilot submitted a formal request to the DOD to exhume X-26’s body and submit it for DNA testing.

Of the exhumation, then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen remarked that, “We disturb this hallowed ground with profound reluctance. And we take this step only because of our abiding commitment to account for every warrior who fought and died to preserve the freedoms that we cherish.”

The remains were taken to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the test result confirmed on June 28, 1998, that the Unknown Soldier was indeed Blassie.

Several weeks later, an MC-130E aircraft from his former unit, the 8th Special Operations Squadron, flew his remains back to his home state of Missouri. He was then re-interred at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Saint Louis County, Missouri, according to the Society of the Honor Guard.

The marble crypt that once honored him was ultimately changed to read: Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958–1975.

For Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, the 10 years of wanderings on a perilous sea as Odysseus took the really, really long way home could be seen as an “allegory for the real problems of combat veterans returning to civilian society.”

Shay, a psychiatrist at the Boston VA Medical Center, wrote that “Time and again, Odysseus shows himself as a man who does not trust anyone, a man whose capacity for social trust has been destroyed. This is the central problem facing the most severely injured Vietnam veterans.”

Shay connected the trials of Odysseus in returning to Ithaca to the recurring patterns he observed in his clinical practice with combat veterans — patterns of homelessness, explosive violence, mistrust of anyone other than combat veterans, substance abuse, a fixation on grievances and a “deep suspicion of others’ motives.”

“Odysseus stands for the veterans but as a deeply flawed military leader himself, he also stands for the destroyers of trust. Homer’s Odysseus sheds light, not always flattering light, on today’s veterans and military leaders,” Shay wrote.

For 10 years, Odysseus would remain the artful dodger through the harrowing journey back to Ithaca, where the conflicting traits of Odysseus’ character — war hero and war criminal, master strategist and liar only contribute to his charisma as the “master of cool,” according to Elizabeth Samet, the West Point literature professor and author of No Man’s Land.

Samet draws a similar parallel for modern-day veterans and the difficult journey home.

In a 2007 Book Browse Author interview, Samet called Odysseus her favorite hero in all literature — “He never bores you with his twists and turns, and he outfoxes everyone. Odysseus has restraint, but he can also lose his composure on occasion. He is an epic hero yet somehow a recognizably human creature.”

For Shay, the parallels between Odysseus and modern-day veterans are all too clear.

“I see the adventure with the Cyclops as an emblem for combat veterans’ attraction to danger, an attraction that has cost so many of them their lives after returning home, and tortured those who love them with untold hours of fear for their safety,” Shay wrote.

The Odyssey has survived and endured while so many other oral epics were lost “in no small part because it was — and still remains — the work of literature most seriously engaged with the question of how to reintegrate a damaged, troubled soldier back into civilian life,” according to Shay.

Shay has been credited with introducing the concept of “moral injury” that has been experienced by combat veterans. Shay described moral injury as “the profound psychological and spiritual damage experienced by combat veterans when fundamental moral codes are violated.”

Perhaps Shay’s most crucial insight stems from his conviction that psychologically wounded soldiers can be best healed by sharing their stories with other veterans. “For veterans, recovery from their psychological injuries best happens in the community of other veterans,” he said in an August 2009 interview with Metro West Daily News.

As a result of his work and that of others, moral injury has increasingly been recognized as a signature wound of service members who fought in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom following the 9/11 attacks.

In response to the work of Shay and others on PTSD, Military.com reported in 2023 that the Department of Veterans Affairs had begun “the first-ever large-scale population study of moral injury to be conducted among veterans of the post-9/11 wars.”

The main result of the study was the development of the “Moral Injury and Distress Scale (MIDS),” which the VA called “the first measure to assess moral injury symptoms indexed to a specific event and validated across several high-risk populations.”

MIDS was “being adopted throughout VA as a tool for identifying veterans with moral injury,” described as “the distressing psychological, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of witnessing, failing to prevent, or participating in events that contradict one’s deeply held values and beliefs,” according to a March 2025 release from VA Health Systems Research.

In his chapter of the book titled Among the Dead: Memory and Guilt, Shay dealt with the concept of “survivors’ guilt” and contrasted Odysseus’s haunted memories with the profound “survivor’s guilt” experienced by modern soldiers over the loss of comrades as they second-guess choices that led to the deaths of their friends.

But the poet of the Odyssey, perhaps, put it best in describing the grief of Odysseus’ crew following their losses in the battle of Ismarus:

“Six benches were left empty in every ship that evening when we pulled away from death. And this new grief we bore with us to sea: our previous lives we had but not our friends. No ship made sail next day until some shipmate had raised a cry, three times, for each poor ghost unfleshed. Then two long days and nights we lay offshore worn out and sick at heart, tasting our grief.”

Buzz Bissinger, author of The New York Times bestselling book Friday Night Lights, and its subsequent film’s director, Peter Berg, are teaming up to deliver the true story of The Mosquito Bowl, which saw 65 Marines of the 4th and 29th regiments, 6th Marine Division, facing off on the “gridiron” of Guadalcanal before being shipped off to Okinawa.

Based on Bissinger’s 2022 book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, the film follows four of America’s top college football stars, who traded a pigskin for an M1 Garand.

Netflix dropped the official teaser trailer Wednesday, featuring Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You) as John McLaughry, Bill Skarsgård (It) as Bob Bauman, Ray Nicholson (Smile 2) as Tony Butkovich and Tom Francis (Broadway’s Sunset Boulevard) as Dave Schreiner.

Berg, who penned the adaptation alongside Mark L. Smith, produced the film with Alex Gayner and Brian Grazer for Imagine Entertainment. Grazer and Imagine Entertainment previously collaborated with Berg on Friday Night Lights. Ezra Emanuel is the executive producer.

As the days of December 1944 passed on Guadalcanal, the island was beset with rumors of where and when the Marines would ship out. It also became the home to some lively trash talk.

Relief from the daily drudgery came over sips of beer and the promise that the “29th would kick the 4th’s ass if there was ever a football game between the two,” writes Bissinger.

That promise swiftly took shape into an all-American sporting event — some thousands of miles from home.

These men were not, according to Bissinger, run-of-the-mill former collegiate football players. Within the 29th alone came an “All-American running back from Purdue who had set a scoring record in the Big Ten; an All-Missouri Valley Conference end; starters from Cornell, Notre Dame, Illinois and Duquesne; and five former captains, including from Notre Dame, Illinois and Purdue.”

The 4th was no slouch when it came to its “roster” either. The unit touted a two-time All-American wide receiver from Wisconsin and another at center from the University of California; an Ivy Leaguer who had started with the New York Giants; and starters from Wisconsin, Michigan State, Fordham, Montana and Ohio Northern, according to Bissinger.

On Dec. 24, 1944, the 65 Marines strode out onto a “field” made up of dirt, pebbles and shards of sharp coral, wearing cut-off dungarees and T-shirts with numbers stenciled on the front. Roughly 1,500 Marines ringed the field with a broadcast on Guadalcanal-based Mosquito Network going out to various Navy and Marine units fighting across the Pacific. The score, according to Bissinger, was occasionally flashed to destroyers at sea.

Tragically, it would be the last game many of the footballers-turned-Marines would play. Fifteen of the 65 players who suited up for The Mosquito Bowl were killed during the Typhoon of Steel.

The film is set to hit theaters on Oct. 30 and premiere on Netflix on Nov. 25.