Stories

A tribute to the 11 soldiers with Iowa ties who paid the ultimate sacrifice in Iraq and Afghanistan during the past year:

In Memory of

Mother Jones reports on music used as torture by the U.S. military, and provides a top 23 list worthy of the record store geeks from the film High Fidelity. Of course, this isn’t funny, but five years into the war I’m so numb that dark humor is all I have left.

Note: one song title on [...]

In light of the adage “Truth is the first casualty of war,” the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) is under fire for allegedly covering up the suicide crisis among our nation’s veterans in November.

The veterans’ rights group, Veterans for Common Sense, filed a class-action suit against the VA, and a federal court in San [...]

About 250 members of an Iowa Air National Guard unit, the 132nd Fighter Wing, will be deployed this week to support troops in Iraq, the Department of Defense announced this week. The deployment is the 132nd’s second since Operation Iraqi Freedom began, and they are expected to spend about two months in the Persian Gulf [...]

Gov. Chet Culver ordered Friday that all flags in the state be flown at half staff on Monday, April 14, 2008, from 8 a.m. (CST) until sunset in honor of Maj. Stuart Wolfer, 36, who died on April 6, 2008 while serving in Iraq. Wolfer served in Des Moines from May 1994 through November 1996 [...]

For the second day in a row, Iowans will say goodbye to another soldier with Iowa ties. Maj. Stuart Wolfer, 36, who served in Des Moines from May 1994 to November 1996 with the Army Reserve’s 19th Theatre Army Area Command of Fort Des Moines, was killed Sunday in Baghdad.

Map of Iowa’s fallen soldiers killed [...]

Gov. Chet Culver has ordered that all flags in the state be flown at half-staff from 8 a.m. until sunset on Thursday, April 10, in honor of Marine Lance Cpl. Cody Wanken, 20, of Hampton who died April 2 at the Wounded Warriors hospital in San Diego. Services for Wanken will be at 10 a.m. [...]

Sister Simone Campbell, who will visit Iowa on Tuesday, met with Iraqi refugees earlier this year with a delegation of women religious. For 10 days in January, on a visit sponsored by Catholic Relief Services, she heard stories from families in Syria and Lebanon. The trip was her second to the region; in 2002, she [...]

Eli Painted Crow, a 22-year retired Army veteran, experienced a spiritual rebirth while serving in Iraq in 2004, which paved her current path to peace. “The defining moment for me, when I knew I had to get out of Iraq and the military, was when I fully realized that I was participating in the very [...]

In case you didn’t already know, last week marked the fifth anniversary of the Iraq war. If you didn’t, don’t feel too bad, for you are in good company. A Pew Research Center poll recently found that only 28 percent of American adults surveyed were able to say that approximately 4,000 Americans have died in [...]