Roland Lajoie had a storied but largely behind-the-scenes career in which he rose to major general, became one of the Army’s leading experts on the Soviet military and managed dangerous Cold War tensions.

Ken Mattingly, a NASA astronaut who was scrubbed from the Apollo 13 mission a few days before launch after being exposed to measles, then wound up helping devise a plan to return the crew safely to Earth following an onboard explosion, died Oct. 31 in Arlington, Va. He was 87.

Burt Young, a Hollywood tough guy whose prolific career included “Chinatown” and an Oscar-nominated turn in “Rocky,” died Oct. 8 in Los Angeles. He was 83. Young served in the Marine Corps from 1957 to 1959.

More than 100 people came together at Nick Maimer’s recent memorial in Boise that included the formal presentation of an American flag to his mother and other military honors, and a subsequent celebration of life. Maimer was killed in May in Bakhmut, Ukraine.

Marilyn Lovell, whose husband commanded the troubled Apollo 13 spacecraft and whose outward stoicism and inward agony epitomized the emotional rigors of the space program for astronauts’ wives, died Aug. 27 in Lake Forest, Ill. She was 93.

He was an instrumental figure in helping amputees and paralyzed patients feel textures, temperatures and shapes through bionic devices.

Cosmas Eaglin was a veteran of three American wars between the 1940s and 1960s and was one of the first 300 Black recruits to enter the Marines.

At Yale, James Buckley wrote a column on world affairs for the Yale Daily News while advocating conservative positions in campus debates. After graduation in 1943, he served in the Navy in the Pacific during World War II and then completed Yale Law School in 1949.

Retired Army veteran John Mahle, a longtime school board president in Pa., has died. He was 67, according to a local report. Mahle had been fighting cancer but often showed up at School Board meetings upbeat and positive, sometimes boasting of how he still made the sessions despite the challenges.

Andrew Brian Casler, of Syracuse, died unexpectedly on Aug. 3, two weeks shy of his 61st birthday. Casler, a Mensa genius according to his obituary, was “a man who remembered many obscure and random bits of information, he was always the winner at Trivial Pursuit.”

Robert Fowler had just graduated high school when he joined the U.S. Army Air Corps at age 17. Nearly seven decades later, in 2012, he flew on the maiden voyage of Honor Flight Kern County and came home to Bakersfield, Calif., a changed man.

Retired Army Col. Desmond Bailey, who was in the Marines before joining the Army, served in Iraqi Freedom and Spartan Shield. His Army unit helped capture Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in December 2003. Bailey, who was in his early 50s died suddenly on July 19. No cause of death has been released.

James Reston Jr., who brought a novelist’s sensibility to prodigiously researched and well-received books that covered a vast range of current events and history — the Vietnam War, Martin Luther, Richard M. Nixon, Galileo, Jim Jones — died July 19 at his home in Chevy Chase, Md. He was 82.

James Dobbins, a U.S. diplomatic troubleshooter whose assignments included reopening the embassy in Kabul after the 2001 invasion and then returning more than a decade later as a special envoy during a grinding war and fading hopes of stabilizing Afghanistan, died July 3 at a hospital in Washington. He was 81.

The missions he led vastly expanded human understanding of the Red Planet and made him a hero to fellow Iranian Americans.

Esteban Volkov, who witnessed the dying breaths of his grandfather, Leon Trotsky - the exiled Russian revolutionary leader whose assassination in Mexico in 1940 had been ordered by archrival Joseph Stalin - and who devoted his final decades to preserving Trotsky's legacy, died June 16 in Tepoztlán, Mexico.

Sheldon Harnick, a Broadway lyricist whose creative partnership with composer Jerry Bock led to some of the most enduring scores in American musical theater history, notably "Fiddler on the Roof," died April 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99.

Disillusioned by the Vietnam War, he leaked a top-secret history of the conflict, leading to a landmark Supreme Court case.

Janice Lufkin served in the Navy Nurse Corps from 1966 to 1992 and earned a dozen medals, stars, ribbons and citations, including the Meritorious Service Medal and the National Defense Service Medal.