Garrett Anderson is a writer and filmmaker in Portland, Oregon. As a Marine rifleman, Anderson fought in the second Battle of Fallujah in Iraq and later in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley. He is writer, director and producer of The November War, a documentary about a squad of Marines on one of their worst days in the Battle of Fallujah.
Dr. Donnelly Wilkes earned his medical degree in an unconventional way. He signed up for the pre-9/11 Navy at the end of a long period of relative peace for the United States. His deal with the Navy was it would pay his tuition at Tulane University’s ...
Like many veterans of “The Greatest Generation,” 95-year-old Palmer Andrews kept his war experience to himself for decades after he returned home. Such “combat silence” is not uncommon among veterans. Veterans often have good reasons not to ...
Too many dead friends. Some died in combat. Others died from suicide after they came back home. Not long after I was discharged I attempted suicide and was hospitalized. There were no easy answers. In the hospital, we had group therapy. Some ...
By mid-November 2004, my platoon had been clearing houses from dawn to dusk for more than a week in the city of Fallujah in Iraq’s Anbar Province. It was tiring and monotonous work. The sounds of distant gunfire and explosions were incessant, but ...
Third squad assembled into our proper order of formation for our dress blues inspection. It was Nov. 10, 2005 — the 230th birthday of the United States Marine Corps, aka the world’s finest fighting force. Humidity was common aboard Marine Corps ...
Hours after Sean Connery died on Saturday, I watched The Man Who Would Be King because I’d heard it was a masterpiece. And as a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, I wanted to see what the film could tell me about the country whose land I fought ...
Many Americans have come to know the work of Erich Maria Remarque through his acclaimed 1929 novel All Quiet on the Western Front. The novel — often assigned as required reading in high school — is widely considered the German author’s defining ...
