by Todd DePastino Yesterday, I spent the best afternoon imaginable at The Residence in Bethel Park retirement community, where I met a wonderful 90-year-old man named Chuck Nice. I told him how apt his last name was. He said to me, “I don’t even like to argue with people, and yet
The world’s most useful tool was the brainchild of a Blue Star mother and WWII war plant worker from Illinois named Vesta Stoudt. Vesta had two sons in the Navy, and she got a job packing rifle grenades in cardboard boxes sealed with wax for waterproofing. She saw immediately how difficult the
Todd DePastino Franz-Ferdinand's Gräf & Stift at the Imperial War Museum, Vienna On June 28, 1914, a driver made a wrong turn in Sarajevo, and the world stumbled across an unseen geopolitical tripwire. A Gräf & Stift open-topped touring car stopped outside Schiller’s Delicatessen on Franz Josef Street. Inside
After the landing at Inchon, South Korea, on September 15, 1950, a patrol of ten SeaBees volunteered to go behind enemy lines and commandeer several locomotives located at the Kirin brewery. The Seabees captured eight locomotives and began racing back to American lines . . . but not before they threw aboard
Several years ago, WWII veteran George Herwig told a story at the Veterans Breakfast Club about turning out for physical training in 1943 at the Coast Guard Training Station in Brooklyn. Stepping forward to lead the men was a burly “old guy,” a lieutenant, by the name of William Harrison "Jack" Dempsey,
In the wake of our conversation about returning Japanese WWII flags to families in Japan, Vietnam veteran Jim Roberts casually mentioned he used hoax souvenir flags for bartering with unsuspected GIs. Jim wrote about this in his book, MAT 111, Dong Xaoi, Vietnam, 1971. Jim spent a year in Vietnam as part
