Written by Todd DePastino WWII veteran Ed Cottrell passed away quietly on March 28, 2025, after just a couple weeks in hospice. He was 103 years old and participated in Veterans Breakfast Club Zoom conversations right up to the end. We will post memorial service arrangements as we receive them. Ed was perhaps the
Written by Will Bardenwerper Will Bardenwerper served as an Airborne Ranger-qualified infantry officer in Iraq and came on our Veterans Breakfast Club program in 2023 to talk about Saddam Hussein’s last days in 2006, a story captured in his book The Prisoner in His Palace: Saddam Hussein, His American Guards, and What History Leaves
Written by Milan Omar Georgia, Jr. I graduated from high school in June 1966, and by November 1967, I had been drafted into the U.S. Army. My formal induction happened in February 1968, and from that point on, my life took a direction I never could have predicted. Basic training was at Fort Bragg,
Mike Kelley in Nha Trang, Vietnam, 1966 (Michael L. Kelley) by Michael L. Kelley Army veteran Mike Kelley is the “Gunner” half of the superbly-written dual memoir, The Gunner and The Grunt: Two Boston Boys in Vietnam with the First Cavalry Division Airmobile (Casemate). Vietnam Magazine praises the book as “a standout
Roy Lewis (left) on patrol in Baghdad 2007 (Roy Lewis) by MSG Roy Lewis (USA, ret.) VBC member and Army veteran Roy Lewis recently joined us on our Monday night virtual “Open Conversation” and shared bits and pieces of his 36-year Army career. While deployed to Iraq as part of The Surge
by George Kokiko George Kokiko attended our storytelling programs often in the early days of the Veterans Breakfast Club. He never shared his story, but he listened closely to others and jotted notes in his little notebook through each breakfast. One day, I ran into George at a grocery store and remarked that I
