Spc. Ezra Maes spent four months in intensive care undergoing near daily surgeries and battling an infection. He’s now assigned to the Warrior Transition Battalion and undergoing physical and occupational therapy.

The operation, led by Chief Warrant Officer 2 Frank Cocciolillo, was a team-building opportunity for the unit, which supports the Jordan Armed Forces Joint Training Center in Amman.

Brendan Bialy, 18, who helped tackle and disarm a gunman during a school shooting earlier this year, has graduated Marine Corps boot camp, where he distinguished himself as platoon honor man.

The soldiers of Special Operations Task Force 102 received five Silver Star medals, seven Bronze Star medals with Valor devices, 15 Army Commendation medals with Valor devices and 21 Purple Hearts in one deployment.

Soldiers from the Fort Bragg, N.C.-based 432nd Blood Support Detachment jumped out of a CH-47 Chinook with rehydrated, freeze-dried plasma packed in their ruck sacks.

Tech. Sgt. Ken O’Brien has been called "Superman" by some and a hero by others — and, while en-route to receive one of the 12 Outstanding Airmen of the Year awards, O'Brien lived up to his reputation when he saved a child's life.

Drop zones at Edwards to be named after parachutist who died in training jump

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Kids high-fived Wookiees, hugged Jawas and posed for photos with Spider-Man at the main exchange on Ramstein Air Base over the weekend, as the mall celebrated its 10th anniversary.

“These uniforms were nonstandard in nature, which demonstrates the uniqueness of U.S. Army Special Forces and their mission,” said Lt. Col. Loren Bymer, U.S. Army Special Operations Command spokesman.

A U.S. Air Force civilian who died this week in a noncombat incident at Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar was identified Friday as 32-year-old intelligence analyst Jason P. Zaki.

The 510th Regional Support Group and six subordinate units were activated at Sembach Kaserne.

The name of the servicemember was being withheld until 24 hours after next of kin notification, per standard procedure, according to a statement released Monday by the U.S.-led Resolute Support mission in Kabul.

Even without the risk of lung disease, vaping may be harmful to soldiers’ health, Army public health officials said. It has been associated with anxiety, increased blood pressure and seizures.

Staff Sgt. Adam K. Erickson, 29, was killed in California during a training accident on a routine military proficiency jump.

Lt. Gen. Pat White, leader of the Army's III Armored Corps, assumed command of Operation Inherent Resolve from Lt. Gen. Paul LaCamera, head of the service’s XVIII Airborne Corps, in a ceremony in Baghdad on Saturday.

Pfc. Josue Valdez Sarmiento is now under investigation following his actions at a California school, where he attempted to break up a fight by tackling two students.

The U.S. government continued to provide dozens of bomb-sniffing dogs to the Kingdom of Jordan, even as the animals were dying of serious health problems and others were so poorly treated that they had “lost the will to work,” a government evaluation found.

Bernard Bartusiak of Chicago earned more than one Distinguished Flying Cross and several Air Medals during the war, but, “for reasons unknown,” didn’t receive them, a Navy spokesman said.

Coalition and Iraqi forces carried out airstrikes Tuesday against an island south of Mosul in the Tigris River believed to be a safe haven for the Islamic State group in Iraq.

Staff Sgt. Conrad Robinson followed one of his grandfathers into the Army, but what he shared with few colleagues before he died was that his other one was “the Genius" of soul music, Ray Charles.

Officials have been looking for surviving relatives of the 111 Coast Guard and four Navy crewmembers who perished aboard the Coast Guard Cutter Tampa for the past two decades. They’ve found nearly half of them.

A recent Defense Department report found more than 17% of military personnel are considered obese, up from less than 16% four years earlier.

First Lt. Chelsey Hibsch, an Air Force security forces officer, and Second Lt. Marshall Plumlee, a member of Duke University’s 2015 NCAA Championship basketball team and former New York Knicks player, were among the graduates of the Army's most recent Ranger School class.

Sgt. 1st Class Dustin Ard, 31, of Idaho Falls, became the 15th U.S. combat casualty in that country this year.

Staff Sgt. Aaron Metzger was wounded while he treated two severely injured Afghan commandos during a nighttime raid against the Taliban in April 2018.

The Kaiserslautern cafe/bistro/bar Storchenturm has done an on-again, off-again routine both baffling and familiar to me after more than three years living in this town.

Retired Adm. Bill Moran showed poor judgment and broke Pentagon rules by using his personal email account to conduct official communications with a former officer who had been disciplined for sexual misconduct, an investigation has found.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Shannon Kent, who was killed in Syria earlier this year, trained at the Defense Language Institute and was a 2005 graduate of the language school’s Arabic course.

High-ranking enlisted troops in Africa aren’t always proud of their rank, one senior noncommissioned officer confessed to a roomful of his peers from nearly 30 African countries and the U.S.

The family of a U.S. soldier killed during an October 2017 ambush in West Africa was presented the country’s third-highest valor award Friday in Florida, the fourth posthumous medal for valor in that incident presented in the past week.

Users will be unable to download material from a popular military file exchange service after Thursday, as the Defense Department transitions to a new site with larger capacity and better security.

Showing “total disregard for his personal safety or life,” Staff Sgt. Dustin Wright crossed open terrain under intense enemy fire to protect and recover two fallen comrades, his medal citation says. The medal was one of three posthumous awards presented in recent days to families of those slain in the attack.

Marine Corps Exchanges are selling off their stocks of DVDs and Blu-ray discs and will end sales of the media in the next few months, an official said.

U.S. Special Operations Command on Monday confirmed that a 2018 blast in Syria that killed two special operations soldiers from the U.S. and the U.K. was caused by coalition explosives, not a roadside bomb.

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Civil affairs soldiers serve as cultural and governance experts who form a key part of the U.S. mission as it competes with other world powers making inroads in East Africa.

The USS Boxer pulled into Bahrain’s Khalifa bin Salman Port on Thursday for a visit, days after the amphibious assault ship made headlines for downing at least one Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz.

The apparent breakdown in discipline among the elite Navy team comes at a time of increased scrutiny of the special operations communities that have borne the strain of a high operational tempo over more than 17 years of war in the Middle East.

The search for Petty Officer 2nd Class Slayton Saldana was called off Friday after “extensive attempts to locate the sailor” involving three ships and aircraft from two patrol squadrons, 5th Fleet said.

A sailor who was reported overboard from a U.S. aircraft carrier in the Arabian Sea earlier this week remains missing after the Navy ended its search-and-rescue efforts, officials said Saturday.

Sgt. William Edward Friese, 30, a light-wheeled vehicle mechanic in the West Virginia Army National Guard, died Thursday at Camp Buehring, the military said. Details of the incident were not released, and a Pentagon statement said it remained under investigation.

Senior Iranian officials said that none of the country’s drones in the region had been destroyed, although a top military spokesman in the country suggested that one had approached the USS Boxer.

The USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, was in international waters traveling into the Strait of Hormuz when a drone “closed within a threatening range," U.S. officials said. Iran denied that it had lost a drone.

About 500 servicemembers are expected to be sent to Prince Sultan Air Base in the desert east of the Saudi capital of Riyadh, unnamed Defense Department officials said Wednesday.

Wahlburgers, a fast-casual burger chain founded by a trio of brothers from Boston, is among the eateries slated to open at military exchanges in Europe in the coming months, along with pizza, barbecue and chicken stands.

Word that the Pentagon was set to mandate a low-carbohydrate, high-fat ketogenic diet for servicemembers spread like spilled avocado oil across the internet last week, with some respected outlets repeating the claim. These reports, sources said, were not true.

Last week, Iraqi, U.S. and Italian officials celebrated the completion of a $530-million project to shore-up Iraq's largest dam. But while the work has stabilized the dam, construction flaws that have posed a threat since its completion in 1984 have yet to be permanently fixed, a research paper says.

The RQ-4A Global Hawk maritime surveillance drone was flying in international airspace over the Strait of Hormuz when it was downed by an Iranian surface-to-air missile, U.S. Central Command said in a statement, though Tehran has claimed it was flying in Iranian airspace.

The CENTCOM statement confirmed earlier reports of the incident, which took place earlier this month, and comes as the U.S. has accused Iran of attacking merchant ships in the region amid rising tensions in a standoff between Washington and Tehran.

Obituary

A memorial Monday at an Alaska National Guard armory will celebrate a Special Forces veteran whose role in the fight against the Islamic State group in Syria was relatively unknown before he died in a climbing accident last month.

Army Maj. Gen. Michael D. Turello assumed command of U.S. military efforts in East Africa, where a proposal may shift the mission focus from multinational training and counterterrorism to a permanent presence that seeks to strengthen American influence on the continent.

A new urban training range located about 25 miles north of Baghdad at the Taji Military Complex has the capacity to train up to a battalion of Iraqi troops at a time in urban operations, the Australian and New Zealand-led Task Group Taji said in a statement Thursday.

In high-level talks in Mogadishu on Tuesday, U.S. Africa Command’s Gen. Thomas D. Waldhauser and U.S. Ambassador to Somalia Donald Yamamoto discussed how to keep momentum “moving forward” in the Horn of Africa country, which has been in disarray for more than 20 years.

During an investigation into “online behavior that is not consistent with Army values,” Cadet Martha Gerdes of the University of North Carolina-Charlotte admitted to posting anti-Semitic, racist and anti-gay statements on Twitter, Maj. Dean Carter, a command spokesman, said Monday in an emailed statement.

Despite the desert heat, dozens of soldiers in Kuwait last week earned the prestigious Expert Infantry Badge, including one of the first women to receive the decoration since women began making inroads into combat arms fields previously closed to them.

Most Americans believe the United States was right to participate in World War II but many are either skeptical or don’t know, according to a poll released ahead of the 75th anniversary of the D-Day invasion that kicked off the liberation of Europe.

An online fundraiser for the family of Army Ranger Maj. Agustin “Augie” Gonzalez had raised more than $140,000 as of Friday, after news that he and his daughters Noelle, 6, and Gwen, 2, died in a car crash over Memorial Day weekend.

The film is scheduled to run on June 6 in more than 20 base theaters overseas in Europe and the Middle East.

A Vietnam War veteran presented two of his medals posthumously to a University of North Carolina-Charlotte ROTC cadet who was killed when he tackled a gunman who opened fire inside a classroom.

Riley Howell, a University of North Carolina Charlotte student and ROTC cadet who died after charging and tackling a gunman who opened fire in a university classroom, was posthumously awarded the ROTC Medal of Heroism earlier this month.

Former Sen. Bob Dole was officially promoted from Army captain to the honorary rank of colonel during a ceremony Thursday at the World War II Memorial in Washington, becoming the third and only living recipient of such an honor in the service’s 244-year history.

The State Department has ordered all non-emergency U.S. government employees at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad and the U.S. consulate in Erbil to leave the country, according to a statement posted on the embassy’s website Wednesday.

The mission was the first for the unit since it was deployed to the Persian Gulf last week, in response to what U.S. officials have described as indications of Iranian threats against U.S. forces in Iraq, Syria and at sea.

Nicholas Eslinger's quick action that night in October 2008 saved six soldiers from potential injury or death, earning him a Silver Star Medal in 2009. Last week, he received an upgraded award — a Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for combat valor.

The Pentagon could be responsible for 5,000 publicly accessible websites. Or it could be less than half that. Nobody appears to know for sure.

“We have lost-in-translation moments more than you would realize,” Australian Air Force Group Capt. Stewart Dowrie told the country’s 10 Daily last week. “The time to figure that out is not on the battlefield when the bullets are flying.”

The service's first combat use of the F-35A Lightning II was an airstrike conducted deep in Iraq’s Hamrin Mountains, according to U.S. Air Forces Central Command.

Pfc. Michael A. Thomason, 28, of Lincoln Park, Mich., died of “wounds sustained from a non-combat incident” in Kobani, Syria, according to a statement issued late Monday by the Pentagon.

The proposed legislation comes amid fresh scrutiny on the state’s military department after allegations of misconduct and claims of reprisal forced the removal of three top officers from their posts in the California Air National Guard earlier this month.

The Army will revamp its centralized promotion board processes over the next few years to focus on advancing senior noncommissioned officers on merit, not time served.

Two soldiers have been awarded Silver Star medals for a July mission where they said they barely noticed the enemy gunfire peppering their Black Hawk helicopter in Afghanistan.

The hit Warner Bros. superhero film “Shazam!” is based on a character whose origins begin with an Army veteran’s little-known struggle a century ago to adjust to life after war.

Cpl. Robert A. Hendriks, Sgt. Benjamin S. Hines and Staff Sgt. Christopher K.A. Slutman were all assigned to 25th Marine Regiment, 4th Marine Division, Marine Forces Reserve, and were in Afghanistan as a part of Operation Resolute Support.

All three American servicemembers killed in a bombing outside Bagram Air Field were Marines, it was announced Tuesday, while the military said an Afghan contractor initially reported dead has been found alive.

Marines are raising money to donate a service dog to another Marine in need in honor of retired Col. Mark A. Smith, who died late last month and was known for his personal leadership style.

Retired Col. Mark A. Smith, who wrote dozens of letters praised for their compassion and eloquence to the families of his Marine Reserve battalion during a deployment early in the Iraq War, was remembered this week as a “Marine’s Marine.”

The Department of Defense on Saturday identified the two soldiers who died Friday in Kunduz Province, Afghanistan, as a result of wounds sustained while engaged in combat operations.