Mary Phillips Gettys was a South Carolina civic ambassador for decades and a World War II veteran.

Korean War veteran Ralph Calabrese, who once took it upon himself to lead the way in saving an upstate New York VA medical center, died on Dec. 5, at the same facility he helped save. He was 92.

Throughout his long public career, Bob Dole championed veterans’ issues and was a driving force behind construction of the World War II Memorial, where he spent his final years greeting fellow veterans. Dole died Sunday at age 98.

Lee Elder, an Army veteran who shattered one of golf’s last racial barriers when in 1975 he became the first African American to compete in the tradition-bound Masters tournament in Augusta, Ga., has died at 87.

In 2005, while a captain in the 82nd Airborne Division, Ian Fishback wrote to Sen. John McCain about his concerns over the treatment of detainees and whether the Geneva Convention applied to Iraq and Afghanistan. Later that year, the Senate passed legislation from McCain to prohibit inhumane treatment and Time magazine named Fishback to its list of the 100 most influential people in the world.

Robert Bly, the National Book Award-winning poet who started out writing bucolic poems about rural Minnesota and went on to shake up the complacent world of 1950s poetry, has died. He spent two years in the U.S. Navy, starting in 1944, working with radar and sonar.

Julia Kabance, 111, the nation’s oldest living female World War II veteran and oldest living member of the Prairie Band Potawatomi Nation, died Tuesday, the tribe announced. She served from 1943 to 1945 in the Women’s Army Corps.

Minoru “Daddy Mike” Yoneda, who died Nov. 3 at age 91, was a Navy veteran. He was a base ambassador, resident philosopher, historian and tour guide. He was a connoisseur of fine dining and an advocate for the children of military families.

In 1942, retired Army Col. Ben Skardon and some 75,000 other American and Filipino troops were forced to march 65 miles to prison camps in what has become known as the Bataan Death March. It was hot, and the Japanese tortured their captives.

Max Cleland, an Army captain whose injuries during the Vietnam War left him a triple amputee and propelled his career in public service, died at his home in Atlanta.