When Americans picture the Pacific War, they usually imagine palm trees and jungle heat. But in 1942–43, World War II came to the frozen edge of Alaska. On the remote Aleutian Islands of Attu Island and Kiska Island, U.S. and Japanese forces fought a brutal campaign of fog, wind, snow, and rock, the only land battle of World War II fought on American soil.

Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a virtual conversation with Allen Frazier, Military.com journalist and historian, whose deeply researched article brings this overlooked campaign into sharp focus. Drawing on military records and human stories, Frazier recounts how more than 15,000 American troops battled not only entrenched Japanese defenders, but exposure, frostbite, and terrain so unforgiving that weather claimed more casualties than enemy fire.

This conversation will explore:

• The Japanese attacks on Dutch Harbor and the occupation of Attu and Kiska

• Operation Landcrab and the savage 18-day fight to retake Attu

• The role of “Castner’s Cutthroats,” Alaska Native scouts crucial to the campaign

• Acts of heroism, including Private Joe Martinez’s Medal of Honor charge

• The final banzai assault on Attu—and its devastating cost

• The bloodless but deadly Allied landing on evacuated Kiska

• The forgotten civilian story: the Unangax̂ (Aleut) people, whose village was destroyed and whose culture was nearly erased

Frazier also confronts the moral weight of the campaign: the forced relocation of Aleut civilians, the deaths of Attuan villagers in Japanese captivity, and the fact that survivors were never allowed to return home. The Battle for Alaska secured U.S. territory, but at an immense human cost that still echoes today.

As always, VBC’s livestream will invite reflection, questions, and conversation. This is a chance to revisit a chapter of World War II that is both uniquely American and too often forgotten.

Join the Veterans Breakfast Club for a conversation with Vietnam veteran, writer, and longtime veterans advocate Doug Bradley, whose new book The Tracks of My Years: A Music-Based Memoir uses popular music to trace his own life story from first loves and hometown restlessness to Vietnam and coming home. Wisconsin Public Radio describes the book as a memoir in which Bradley lets music guide memory “like a playlist.”

Bradley is also one of the best-known writers on the soundtrack of the Vietnam War. In his widely read co-authored book We Gotta Get Out of This Place: The Soundtrack of the Vietnam War, he argues that music was a lifeline and a bridge back to the world at home

In this livestream, we’ll talk with Doug about:

• How a “music-based memoir” works and why songs can unlock memory more honestly than chronology ever can

• Vietnam and the long coming-home. Bradley served as an Army combat correspondent in Vietnam (Long Binh) in 1970–71, then helped build veteran community support after the war

• What Vietnam-era music meant in country vs. what it meant back home and how those meanings still collide today

• The difference between nostalgia and memory, and why certain songs can still hit like a flashback

• Why Doug keeps returning to music as a way to talk across divisions of class, politics, generation

If like music or are someone for whom songs are tied to life chapters, this program is for you!