written by Todd DePastino Elvis cleaning his new company’s sign at Ray Barracks, Friedberg, Germany, 1958 Three-hundred miles due west of Memphis, close to the Oklahoma border, stands a vintage Army barracks with a barber pole fixed to its whitewashed clapboard. Inside is the room where the “Haircut Heard ‘Round the World”
Robert J. Dvorchak has been awarded the 2023 silver medal for writing in the history category of the annual competition held by the Military Writers Society of America, a national organization of writers, poets and authors who share the common bond of military service. His book, The Golden Brigade: The 82nd Airborne in Vietnam
written by Todd DePastino Cold War history cycles through our collective memory like snapshots on a slidewheel: Berlin, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, El Salvador. Rarely included in the Cold War montage is Taiwan. Yet, 65 years ago this month, during what is called the “Second Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1958,” we came as
written by Todd DePastino Former USAF pilot Dick Westerhoff recently mentioned that when he flew the F-104 in the late 1950s, the ejection seat fired downward out the bottom of the aircraft. If you think that sounds like a bad idea, you're right. It was. Dick's Lockheed F-104 Starfighter was the leading
By Phil Metzler In the spring 2023 issue of VBC Magazine, we ran an article about the Berlin Airlift of 1948-1949. Army veteran Phil Metzler of Lancaster, PA, responded by sharing his own memories of serving in Berlin, not in the Airlift, but thirteen years later during the second Berlin Crisis. Below is his
Written by Todd DePastino It was hardly a speech. The 674 spoken words were more like "remarks." But what remarks they were. On June 26, 1963, President John F. Kennedy stood before a crowd of 120,000 West Berliners on Rudolph Wilde Platz and, in the German language, declared himself citizen of that partitioned city.
