The battleship suffered more loss of life than any American ship during the attack, its 1,177 dead comprising nearly half the 2,403 killed at Pearl Harbor.

Of the ship’s dead, 277 of its sailors and Marines are buried in Honolulu’s National Memorial of the Pacific. The identity of 86 of those men remains unknown to this day.

The exhumations will begin with the disinterment of eight caskets from the National Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the “Punchbowl,” on Dec. 7 and will continue with about eight caskets removed each week until the total of 86 is reached, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency.

Forensic specialists from DPAA will then seek to match DNA from the remains with DNA provided by the family members.

“DPAA is honored to be able to provide long-sought answers to families of these Unknowns,” Kelly McKeague, a retired Air Force major general and director of DPAA, said in a statement.

“Being able to disinter the 86 Unknowns associated with USS Arizona is singularly due to the determined initiative and extraordinary efforts of Operation 85,” McKeague said, referring to the group led by Kevin Kline, a Virginia real estate agent and grandnephew of Gunner’s Mate 2nd Class Robert Edwin Kline who perished when the Arizona was hit by at least eight bombs dropped by Japanese warplanes.

Kline’s group began gathering DNA Family Reference Samples from the families of those listed as unknowns as part of the USS Arizona (BB39) Unknown Identification Project after the Navy and the Defense Department said the project could not be done and would cost too much to attempt.

Then last April, DPAA announced that Operation 85 had reached the 60% threshold of DNA Family Reference Samples for the Unknowns, allowing disinterments to begin.

”Reaching this milestone does not conclude the search for additional USS Arizona and associated Pearl Harbor family members who may be able to provide viable DNA Family Reference Samples,” DPAA said in the April announcement. “DPAA, Operation 85, and the service casualty offices continue to encourage any family member who may be related to a missing USS Arizona crew member to participate in this ongoing effort.”

In a phone interview with Military Times, Kevin Kline said the beginning of exhumations on Dec. 7 “doesn’t mean we’re done. We’re still looking [to] take those words unknown off those graves” remaining in the Punchbowl. “I think this is a problem we can fix.”

A total of 1,177 sailors and Marines from the Arizona were killed in the surprise Pearl Harbor attacks, and more than 900 of those killed remain entombed within the sunken hull of the ship beneath the stunning USS Arizona Memorial.

On board the submarine, the crew had assembled on the deck in dress uniforms, which were starkly different than what American sailors were wearing. A dashing figure in officer’s regalia bearing a row of medals across his chest stood at the conning tower. Suddenly, the larger vessel was bumped by a small motor launch with a reporter on board.

“Have you come here to be interned?” asked the curious newspaperman.

“No,” answered the distinguished officer. “But I’ve brought a letter for the German ambassador. Will you mail it for me?”

The submarine’s commander was Kapitänleutnant Hans Rose of the Imperial German Navy. On Oct. 7, 1916, while World War I raged across Europe, he boldly sailed his submarine, U-53, into the neutral port under the incredulous gaze of the U.S. Navy in an attempt to rattle the American public and convince the country to stay out of the conflict.

“Audacity,” says Ret. Rear Admiral Samuel J. Cox, director of naval history and curator for the Navy at the Naval History and Heritage Command. “That’s the only word I can think of to describe Rose cruising into Newport. The U.S. was still neutral then, but he did not know how the Navy would react to his arrival.”

That event 110 years ago made banner headlines in newspapers across the country and around the globe. Planned months in advance, Rose was under strict orders to sail across the Atlantic Ocean and show up at the Rhode Island naval base to introduce himself to American officers as a “goodwill” gesture. In reality, his courtesy call was a propaganda move designed to shock the United States into fearing the far-reaching dangers of German submarine warfare.

“Rose was basically trying to say, ‘My U-boat can reach your shores and you should be aware if you decide to get involved in the First World War,’” said David Kohnen, Naval War College professor, in a video posted on C-Span Classroom

At the time, millions of lives were being sacrificed on the killing fields of Europe as the Central Powers of Germany, Austria and Turkey tried to deliver a knockout blow to the Entente allies: France, England and Russia. With an impartial stance, the United States looked on as both sides became mired in the mud of trench warfare.

Though officially neutral, American factories were churning out armaments — mostly for Entente armies, but also for the Central Powers. Cargo ships of all registries transported this matériel from U.S. ports to the battlefront, prompting the Imperial German Navy to begin hunting freighters carrying “contraband” on the open sea.

Early in the war, Germany declared unrestricted submarine warfare — meaning its unterseeboots would attack ships without warning if they believed they were transporting munitions. That changed in 1915 with the sinking of the RMS Lusitania, a British luxury ocean liner. Some 128 American citizens were killed in the attack, prompting calls for U.S. intercession in the war.

To calm nerves across the Atlantic, Germany then intercepted ships and checked manifests for wartime supplies. If carrying such a cargo, the ship would be sunk after passengers and crew were offloaded onto lifeboats.

“Americans were concerned by the sub threat,” Cox says. “Newspapers carried stories of how freighters were being sunk, some not far off U.S. shores. There was a great deal of tension since ships were the way most people traveled distances then.”

Rose received his orders from Cmdr. Hermann Bauer, who was in charge of the German U-Boat fleet. Bauer had cleared the plan with German leader Kaiser Wilhelm II, who believed it would shock the United States into staying out of the war.

“Convinced the Americans were essentially spineless, [the Kaiser] reasoned that a German U-boat sally into a U.S. naval harbor would be so intimidating as to keep the United States out of the war,” wrote journalist Wellington Long in a 1966 article.

On the mission, U-53 was supposed to escort the Bremen, an unarmed merchant submarine designed to carry cargo under the British blockade of Germany. However, the two vessels failed to rendezvous, so U-53 crossed the Atlantic on its own (the Bremen was later presumed lost at sea, possibly sunk by a British mine or torpedo).

It took U-53 three weeks to make the trip. On Oct. 7, Rose and his crew surfaced in American territorial waters just off the coast of Rhode Island. According to neutrality laws, belligerent warships were allowed into neutral ports for 24 hours, usually for food, water, fuel, repairs or to surrender. Rose needed none of those things, but was concerned how he would be received in the American port, home of the Navy’s Atlantic destroyer fleet.

“There I was, a 31-year-old German naval officer… heading my submarine for Newport naval harbor, and no one really knew how neutral those American destroyers would be,” the U-53 commander told Long in an interview.

Uncertainty was prevalent that day. Telegrams flew between Newport and Washington, D.C., as local commanders sought guidance on how to respond to the unusual situation. Eventually, the commander of the Second Naval District arrived to find out what was going on in his homeport.

A confused Rear Admiral Austin M. Knight asked if Rose required repairs, fuel or anything else, only to be told no. Finally, the American officer stammered, “Well, then, what the devil do you want here?”

“I only wanted to visit you, Admiral,” Rose responded.

U-53 became a spectacle in Newport Harbor. Yachts and pleasure craft tied up next to the German submarine for a closer look. Citizens and reporters walked her deck and were greeted by friendly German sailors. Officers of anchored American destroyers, including USS Jacob Jones, stopped by to see the U-Boat. Even Rear Admiral Albert Gleaves, commander of the destroyer flotilla at Newport, came aboard — along with his wife and daughter. They were given a tour below decks of the submarine.

That afternoon, Rose left the U-53 by water taxi and visited Coasters Harbor Island. He strolled up the steps to the Naval War College and knocked on the door, according to Kohnen. When greeted, Rose answered, “I’m here to mail a postcard.” It was addressed to his mother back in Germany.

Eventually, Rose sensed his welcome was wearing thin, so he bid farewell to his hosts and left the harbor. He anchored off of Nantucket Lightship that evening. At first light the next day, he was underway and cruised past the U.S. 3-mile territorial limit. Then it was back to war as he began hunting for cargo ships carrying contraband.

U.S. Navy destroyers left Newport and stayed a short distance away as U-53 intercepted, inspected and sank five freighters. The American ships rescued 216 survivors from British, Canadian, Dutch, Norwegian and U.S. freighters.

Before the mission, Rose said he was informed by Cmdr. Bauer that the Kaiser planned to announce a return to unrestricted submarine warfare — something Rose believed was necessary if Germany was to win the war. That didn’t happen until 1917. The Kaiser was reticent to do so, fearing it would provoke the Americans into joining the war, which it did. A year later, the United States declared war on Germany.

Rose would go on to become one of Germany’s most successful U-boat captains, sinking 81 merchant ships with a gross weight in excess of 200,000 tons. He was also credited with sinking the USS Jacob Jones, whose officers toured his submarine in Newport Harbor. It was the only U.S. destroyer to be lost in enemy action in World War I.

Designed to strike fear into the American public, the arrival of U-53 in Newport had the reverse effect. If anything, it confirmed U.S. suspicions that Germany was dangerous and forced many isolationists to reconsider their neutral stance. It also proved to the United States just what was at stake in the Atlantic with German submarines on the prowl.

“U-53 demonstrated that the U-boat commanders were audacious and a foe that deserved to be treated with respect,” Cox says.

Bernardino Mijares has spent most of his life searching for his father.

For many years, all the 33-year-old tricycle taxi driver knew was the name his mother had told him — which later was found to be incorrect — and that his father had served in the Philippines with the U.S. Navy. Growing up in the city of Antipolo, Mijares was often singled out because of his darker skin and curly hair. He came to understand that his father was Black, but looking different from other Filipinos exposed him to bullying at school and limited his opportunities later in life.

“Discrimination, it’s hard,” Mijares said. “I didn’t have recognition in school. I don’t have a family tree. I feel incomplete.”

Mijares is one of more than 100,000 Amerasians, a term commonly used for children born in Asian countries to U.S. service members and local women. Many grew up in the aftermath of American wars and military deployments in Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and elsewhere, often facing stigma, poverty, and exclusion. While U.S. forces over the years have been deployed worldwide, the scale of the Vietnam and Korean wars resulted in high numbers of children fathered by US servicemen in Asia. This, coupled with the perception of the U.S. as the enemy or an occupying force, contributed to heightened stigma for the children they left behind.

Now, as many of the American servicemen from those wars enter their twilight years, some Amerasian children are running out of time to find them.

Those who served in Vietnam and Korea, in particular, “are getting old,” said Chelle Reed, founder of the charity WarBabies, which works to reconnect U.S.-based Amerasians with their fathers. Her father was a Vietnam War veteran who she later learned had fathered a son during his deployment before she was born. Unfortunately, her father died before her brother was found.

Stories like these are why Mijares considers himself one of the lucky ones. After years of searching — and a decade spent talking with a man who turned out not to be his father — a DNA test finally gave him an answer.

Days before Father’s Day in June 2025, the nonprofit Father Founded confirmed that Clifford Jeudy, a 52-year-old radio DJ living in Orlando, Florida, was Mijares’ biological father.

Jeudy had no idea he had left a child behind during a three-week stint to the Filipino island of Luzon in 1992.

He was 18, fresh out of high school, and serving on his first Navy deployment aboard the USS Belleau Wood. The ship was stationed in Subic Bay as the United States prepared to end its permanent military presence in the Philippines.

Jeudy described his relationship with Mijares’ mother as a “whirlwind.” He said he was drawn to her resemblance to Holly Robinson, one of his favorite actresses at the time. But the relationship ended when the ship departed.

“We didn’t have the internet [or] cell phones,” Jeudy recalled. “We talked about her coming over, but it was such a whirlwind type of situation, and the next thing you know, I’m in my dress uniform on the ship and we’re leaving Subic Bay.”

Neither heard from the other again and so he had no idea that months after he left, she gave birth to a son.

Thirty-three years later, Jeudy was on his way home from work in Florida when his fiancée called to say she had signed for an important-looking envelope. He asked her to read it aloud. As he stared at the road ahead, hands gripping the steering wheel, he learned that he not only had a son, but three grandchildren.

Father Founded, which has successfully identified family members in 452 cases, had used DNA to identify Jeudy and contacted him on Mijares’ behalf. The nonprofit also served as an intermediary between a father and son living on different continents and speaking different languages.

Jeudy was stunned.

“I went from having one biological son and two stepsons to having a whole bloodline,” said Jeudy, who had no other grandchildren. He did not need to study the DNA results. The enclosed photograph of Mijares was enough.

“The pictures when he was young … the similarity [is] amazing,” Jeudy said.

Jeudy’s other son and extended family welcomed Mijares, albeit only over video calls so far. Jeudy says he hopes to visit the Philippines soon.

The Cost of Being Amerasian

Mijares’ reunion with his father brought answers after decades of uncertainty. But his childhood reflected a broader pattern experienced by many Amerasian children born in the aftermath of U.S. wars and military deployments.

Brian Hjort, founder of Father Founded, said Amerasian children were often stigmatized because of their American parentage and mixed-race appearance in Vietnam. In some communities, he said, they were treated as reminders of “the enemy.”

“[They] are discriminated [against], not allowed to take certain jobs or education,” Hjort said. “They grow up being outcasts.”

Mijares’ mother left him in the care of his grandmother and went on to marry and have three other children. He had to navigate life as an Amerasian without any of his peers looking like him or knowing who his father might be.

“My mother could not take care of me back then because she had her own family, and her other children were her priority,” he said. “People would always ask where my father was, wonder why I had no middle name, or notice I stood alone during family days. … But I managed to get through all of that.”

With limited financial means, he was not able to go past the elementary level in school, narrowing his employment options and earning potential. He relied on friends and his grandmother to support him until he was old enough to work.

“I was only 12 years old at the time and I could not work to provide for myself,” Mijares said of his life after finishing elementary school. “I just went wherever I could, until I was no longer able to continue schooling.”

For Julie Henning, who grew up in South Korea after the Korean War, the consequences were even more severe.

Henning said she and her mother were shunned because she was the child of a Korean woman and an American serviceman. People saw them as bringing shame and dishonor to the community.

“[I was] considered a half-breed, less than a dog,” Henning said.

Her father had returned to the United States by the end of the war in 1953. At this time, South Korea had plunged into the worst levels of poverty globally, and Henning’s mother struggled to support her family. It didn’t help that societal stigma from having been involved with an American soldier blocked her from certain employment. Henning remembers growing up without running water and foraging for dandelions, mushrooms, and snails. Her sister died of malnutrition.

Henning said her mother considered putting her up for adoption multiple times, but could not go through with it.

When Henning was 13, she received a scholarship to attend the Pearl S. Buck Opportunity Center near Seoul, run by the Pearl S. Buck Foundation, which served children who faced discrimination because of their mixed heritage. Soon after Henning arrived in the South Korean capital, her mother died.

Henning has long believed that her mother saw her departure for school as a chance for her daughter to build a different life.

“[My mother] impressed upon me to get an education and go to America, the land of your father,” Henning said through tears.

The author Pearl S. Buck later adopted Henning and brought her to the United States, where she attended college and became a math teacher and author.

Mijares’ and Henning’s experiences were not unusual. The discrimination Amerasians faced was one reason Hjort started a group to help them.

In Vietnam, some Amerasian children were derided as “dust,” a reference to those left to survive on the streets. In South Korea, biracial children were sometimes labeled “mixed bloods,” while in Thailand they were called “half children.” Research has documented Amerasians struggling with poverty, limited educational opportunities, and lasting harm to employment, income, and mental health.

“I saw the Vietnamese really treat them badly … talk down to them and abuse them,” Hjort said, speaking of the time he spent in Vietnam in the 1990s and the impetus for creating Father Founded.

His work is made harder because many veterans themselves do not know they left children behind, but finding them has become easier than it was in the 1990s. Researchers once relied on military records to determine where servicemen had been stationed and when.

Today, DNA testing, ancestry databases, and social media can narrow the search. Even so, some cases take years. Once the organization identifies a likely father, it contacts him on the child’s behalf. Some men are overjoyed. Others are hesitant.

“Sometimes people don’t want to be reminded about the past,” Hjort said. “[These were] very bad wars and people have remarried and had their own kids.”

For the children, however, the past has never been distant. Many grew up facing discrimination because of their appearance and American parentage, without knowing the identity of the father who shaped how others saw them.

The Immigration Barrier

For some Amerasians, finding an American father is tied not only to identity, but also to hope of learning more about the United States and perhaps one day visiting.

The Amerasian Homecoming Act of 1987 allowed certain Vietnamese children of U.S. service members born between 1962 and 1976, and their immediate family, to immigrate to the United States without definitive proof of paternity. Applicants could qualify based on interviews, physical appearance, testimony, and other evidence. Prior to this, a broader act, the Amerasian Act of 1982, applied to those born in Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand after 1950 and before 1982, but only applied to the Amerasians themselves, not the family members.

The law ultimately allowed at least 25,000 Vietnamese Amerasians and 70,000 relatives to immigrate.

“Our country knew that our men over there did this and left so many children behind,” said Reed. “They didn’t have DNA testing back then … but the government wanted to do the right thing.”

WarBabies’ Reed said the law allowed her Amerasian brother to leave Vietnam in 1990 even though he had not yet identified their shared father. Reed has a different mother from her brother and was born after her father returned to the U.S. Years after finding one another, brother and sister now live in Georgia, about 15 minutes away from one another.

For Amerasians born elsewhere in Southeast Asia, including Thailand, Cambodia and the Philippines, no comparable program exists. Without documented proof of paternity in the form of a birth certificate or a recognized claim to U.S. citizenship, immigration can be difficult.

“They want to have the love of their father and to be accepted,” Hjort said. “Of course, they hope to go to America, but they realize … it’s not easy.”

For Mijares, however, the search was never about moving to the United States. He wanted to know who his father was, understand his American heritage, and fill a gap that shaped his life.

Mijares now speaks regularly with his younger brother and has connected with members of Jeudy’s extended family. Jeudy hopes to meet his son and grandchildren in person in the near future.

Jeudy said he believes children who can prove a biological relationship to an American parent should have a clearer path to recognition, and, where legally justified, United States citizenship. The State Department offers support if a person can prove their father’s U.S. citizenship and has their name on their birth certificate. The challenge is when an individual lacks that vital paperwork or doesn’t know who their father is. Even in cases where they have identified them and there is DNA available, it would need to be backed up with an affidavit from the father in place of a birth certificate, but even then citizenship is at the discretion of the embassy or consulate in question.

“If we could prove that these are our children … they should have the option to get their names changed and potentially citizenship,” Jeudy said.

Time is Running Out

As Vietnam veterans in particular enter their final years, Amerasian families are running out of time to find them.

“A lot of them have Agent Orange exposure, and they’re very ill,” said Reed. She said her organization has helped reunite 102 families.

The time factor applies to veterans from other missions too. By the time math teacher and author Julie Henning found her father’s relatives in South Carolina, he had been dead for four years. She later visited his grave, the only connection still available to her.

“This is the man I never knew, but this is the man who gave me life,” Henning said. “It was [a] really strange unreal feeling. … You cannot quite put it in words.”

She also learned that she had a brother, but he too passed away, months after she spoke to him for the first time.

Reunions are not always simple.

Families may face language barriers, cultural differences, conflicting expectations, and resentment over decades of absence.

People have ideas that their mystical father will be “sitting on a white horse,” Hjort said, then they realize he’s more likely to be “an old chap with a beer gut.”

Some fathers have also spent decades searching for children they left behind.

Jim Reischl served one tour in Vietnam when he was 21 and had a girlfriend, whom he rented a room for near his base. After a few months of dating and just before he was set to head home, she told Reischl she was pregnant. He didn’t want to stay in the country longer than necessary, and he’d been warned in orientation upon arrival in Vietnam that this was a common line used to try to secure passage to America. Skeptical, Reischl left Vietnam but wrote her letters, hoping to learn more about whether the child existed. He never heard back.

In 2005, the question mark over whether he had a child in Vietnam loomed too large, so he reached out to Hjort’s team for help locating the woman and her potential child. He found her after placing an ad in a local newspaper in 2015, and he traveled to Vietnam the following year to visit in person. Reischl’s former girlfriend said that after giving birth, she gave the baby to a local woman to put up for adoption after her family warned of the difficulties of raising a biracial baby. But with few details, he’s still unsure whether he has a child out there or who they might be.

Robert Elliot left a military base near Da Nang, Vietnam, in 1971, knowing the woman he had been seeing was eight months pregnant. He felt that staying wasn’t a realistic option at the time, but planned to maintain contact and figure out a solution. That didn’t happen.

Now, 55 years after leaving Vietnam, Elliot still does not know what became of the child.

“I’ve been searching for close to 30 years, but I haven’t received any hits on DNA,” Elliot said.

Reed said such unresolved cases are common. Her organization has 29 open searches, and many Amerasian families continue looking without knowing whether the veteran they seek is still alive.

“They don’t want to … disrupt their [fathers’] lives,” Reed said. “But they have a deep, internal knowing that they need to know who they are—just a picture or a name. Even to be able to give that to them would satisfy them.”

She urges veterans who believe they have fathered children overseas or their family members to submit DNA to ancestry databases that can then help to identify family members and ancestral ties. Even when Amerasians do not find their fathers in time, DNA testing can connect them with siblings, cousins, or other relatives.

“I don’t care if they think or deny that they had a possibility of children,” Reed said. “They should get tested now.”

For some veterans, testing can create a reunion — or help some other family resolve their case. But for others, a match may only lead to a grave, a photograph, or the name of someone who died before they could be found.

But with each passing year, even those answers become harder to reach.

This article from The War Horse was edited by Paul Szoldra, fact-checked by Jess Rohan, and copy-edited by Mitchell Hansen-Dewar.

Growing up in the Depression era Jim Crow South, Greason never let prejudice define him. Rather, he kept moving forward with dignity, humility, and a sense of humor, creating a legacy that began with one question: Did I help someone?

Before Greason teamed up in the Negro Leagues with Hall of Famer and U.S. Army veteran Willie Mays — and decades before he preached the Gospel from the pulpit — he was a Montford Point Marine, America’s first group of African Americans to serve in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II.

In 2012, Greason joined roughly 400 Montford Point Marines in Washington, D.C., to receive the Congressional Gold Medal, the nation’s highest civilian honor. Today, fewer than 400 Montford Point Marines survive among the 20,000 who served during the war.

Born in Atlanta on Sept. 3, 1924, Greason grew up across the street from Martin Luther King Jr. in the Sweet Auburn neighborhood bustling with Black-owned businesses, jazz and ragtime. His father, James, was a laborer, while his mother Lizzie took in laundry for white families.

Greason spoke with a whisper and chuckled about his circuitous path into baseball when he spoke to the author about his athletic legacy. He said, “I wanted to become a doctor and played two years of semi-pro football, but the Lord had other ideas for me, and I didn’t argue with him.”

To this day, he proudly wears a Marine Corps ballcap embroidered with the Eagle, Globe, and Anchor — a declaration that says, “Once a Marine, always a Marine.”

The first Black Marines

As war loomed and fascism rose across Europe, there were few opportunities for Blacks to serve in the U.S. military. That scenario changed six months before the attack on Pearl Harbor when President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, permitting Blacks to join the Marine Corps and any branch of the U.S. military — albeit segregated.

For a poor young man from Atlanta, this breakthrough signaled a chance.

At Booker T. Washington High School, Greason was an athlete and a budding leader. According to his military records, he captained the school’s softball team. He also participated in boxing, football, baseball, basketball, tennis and wrestling, so he was in fighting shape when he enlisted in the service in Macon, Georgia, at age 17 on May 13, 1943.

Greason soon found himself at a remote coastal North Carolina installation, built on swampy lowland behind a piney curtain, inhabited by snakes, bears and blood-thirsty swarms of deer flies and mosquitoes.

For Black Marines, Montford Point was their Parris Island, just on rougher terrain with fewer luxuries.

The first Montford Marines cleared the land with basic tools and saws in 1942. They laid gravel roads, dug latrines and built dozens of prefabricated huts, along with a mess hall, a chapel and supply warehouses to create a functioning Marine installation for thousands of men.

Montford Point would ultimately produce more than 20,000 Marines, including 13,000 who went on to serve in the Pacific during World War II.

Private Greason shipped out to the Pacific Theater with the 66th Supply Platoon, 34th Marine Depot Company, V Amphibious Corps. The men arrived on Iwo Jima several days after the initial invasion, when the island looked like a jagged moonscape choked with volcanic ash, smoke and blood.

His platoon’s job was one of the most dangerous on the beachfront — unloading heavy ammunition and critical supplies from ships onto the shore under the constant spray of enemy fire.

“Two of my best friends were killed on that island. I prayed and said, ‘Lord, if you get me off this island, whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it,’” he told MLB in an interview.

Greason’s Iwo Jima

As U.S. forces prepared to land on the beach, Greason was instructed to move forward, no matter the casualties that surrounded them, and not tend to the wounded, according to Gerard Choucroun, the executive director of the Heart and Armor Foundation.

As they advanced onto the island, Greason saw that his best friend at Montford Point, Hubert “Claro” Duverney, a fellow squad leader from New York, and another good friend, James Wilkins, from Tennessee, had been hit by enemy fire. Cpl. Duverney was alive. As blood poured from his stomach, Greason made the choice to disobey orders and picked up his friend and carried him to the medical tent overrun with wounded and dying Marines.

Wilkins perished. His valor is memorialized with a Purple Heart. And despite Greason’s heroics, Duverney died two days later.

Greason spent 13 months in Japan with the American occupation force, where he was stationed in Sasebo and Nagasaki, after the United States leveled the city with the second atomic bomb. Choucroun recounts that his 102-year-old friend still dreams about being on the island.

On April 1, 1946, Greason was discharged from duty, yet he soon faced another battle — finding a job to come home to.

Though the young Marine was a capable leader with solid mechanical skills, trade jobs with decent wages were hard to find for Blacks, especially in the Jim Crow South.

So he turned to the Marines to find work as a ball player.

In a typed letter, received June 3, 1946, to his rehabilitation officer at the 6th Marine Reserves District, he wrote: “I am now unemployed. I would appreciate it very much if you could contact some team, it doesn’t matter where, but I am sure I have what it takes to make any team, and I would like a chance to prove myself, if given the chance.”

The age of athletic patriotism

Greason, never formally trained as a baseball player, calls baseball a “Gift from God.”

Standing five foot ten, weighing 170 pounds, the Marine was blessed with a strong arm, a quick mind and a relentless work ethic that soon landed him with the Nashville Black Vols in 1947, and the Birmingham Black Barons from 1948 to 1951.

As Greason perfected his fastball and scouts took note of his Major League potential, Greason once again put his potential on hold, joining the ranks of future Hall of Famers, including Marine combat pilots Ted Williams and Jerry Coleman, who left the game to serve in Korea. However, Greason’s war stayed closer to home this time.

Reflecting on his second tour of duty at Camp Lejeune, in an interview with The Oklahoman in 2012, Greason said he had a good camp commander, who said, ‘That’s a no-win war. You stay here. I’m going to have a baseball team.’”

During the Korean War, Camp Lejeune became a high-profile baseball hub for major and minor league talent who boosted morale. The Lejeune Leathernecks bested Fort Bragg, Cherry Point and Fort Jackson in America’s favorite pastime. Greason certainly delivered on the mound, winning all but one game, and even beating a team with Brooklyn Dodgers ace and future Hall of Famer Don Newcombe.

A barrier-breaking debut

After eight years in the Corps, Greason faced difficulties with team owners, reluctant to sign players who might get called back to duty.

On July 23, 1952, the pitcher once again wrote a letter to his superior officer with the 6th Marine Corps Reserve District, requesting acceptance of his resignation from the reserves.

In loopy cursive handwriting slanting to the left, Greason wrote, “I served proudly with the Corps. and would be glad to serve again if another need should arise, but I do not wish to make a career of it. As we say, once a Marine, always a Marine, therefore, there is no other outfit I would care to serve in if there was another war.”

The Marines released Greason on July 25, 1952. Just three days later the rookie broke the color barrier in professional sports as the first Black player for the Oklahoma City Indians of the Double-A Texas League.

The Marines cheered on their pitcher when he landed on the biggest stage of all, making history as the St. Louis Cardinals’ first Black pitcher in 1954.

There were 35,000 people in the stands at Wrigley Field on Memorial Day when the 29-year-old Marine pitched against the Chicago Cubs — the first game of a doubleheader. Greason could whip a wicked fastball. He could paint the corners of the strike zone but gave up a few runs in three innings, including Ernie Banks’ homer smashed onto the back row of the left field bleachers. The Cardinals lost the rain-shortened game, 14-4.

After finishing out his career with Cardinals farm teams and playing ball in Puerto Rico with Roberto Clemente, the first Latin American player enshrined in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, Greason retired in 1959.

Greason and his wife Willie settled in Birmingham, where he drove a delivery truck for Pizitz Department Store and joined the 16th Street Baptist Church. On Sunday, Sept. 15, 1963, however, the Greasons weren’t in their usual spots in the church. As they headed to a baseball game in Tuscaloosa, they heard the distant “boom” of an explosion that killed four innocent young girls at their church.

That infamous Baptist Street Bombing signaled a spiritual turning point for the budding minister, who went on to receive a doctoral degree in divinity.

Did I help someone?

Whether holding a bayonet, a baseball or a Bible, Greason maintains the same quality — that of a consummate team player.

“I’ve been through a lot of stuff. I know nobody, but God brought me out,” he told the author in 2021. “No matter what happens in the world, nothing is impossible with God.”

Today Greason is a Veteran Ambassador for Heart and Armor, serving as a role model for veterans transitioning from difficult military service to civilian life.

“Reverend Greason has an astounding resume of achievement and citizenship. But his most inspiring qualities are his most subtle — humor and humility, said Choucroun. “Whatever uniform he wears — military, baseball or clergy — he plays for the team, not for himself. His personal warmth and longevity are indomitable. But these qualities are real and, when viewed up close, massively inspiring.”

Anne R. Keene writes about the age of Athletic Patriotism, celebrating athletes who served in World War II and the Korean War. She is the author of the wartime classic, “The Cloudbuster Nine: The Untold Story of Ted Williams and the Baseball Team That Helped Win WWII.”

The reason: advances in DNA technology.

During a Sept. 1 webinar, Kelly McKeague, the director of the DPAA, told Stars and Stripes that “We will petition Arlington National Cemetery to disinter the remains at the Tomb of the Unknown simply because the probability is high that we will be able to identify that unknown,” he said.

According to McKeague, the agency now possesses DNA samples from 94% of the roughly 7,400 American service members still listed as missing from the Korean War.

While the agency plans to petition the Army, which oversees Arlington, the potential exhumation and identification process will not commence until all Korean War unknowns — currently residing in the Honolulu cemetery — are exhumed and identified.

There are fewer than 50 Korean War unknowns left, Lance Pridemore, assistant director at the cemetery, told Stripes. And that process should be complete by the end of November.

The Korean War Unknown has rested in the national cemetery since May 30, 1958, when both the Korean and WWII Unknowns were interred during ceremonies presided over by President Dwight D. Eisenhower. The former five-star general and commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force during the Second World War presented the Medal of Honor to each Unknown.

The exhumation would have some precedent.

In the decade following the Vietnam War, there were calls from the American public to designate another unknown.

Known only as X-26, the remains of an American service member were being held in the U.S. Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii. Found near a stream in An Loc in 1972, X-26 had remained unidentified for over a decade when the remains were selected to represent the nation’s missing from that war and buried at Arlington on Memorial Day, 1984.

During the ceremony, President Ronald Reagan awarded the Medal of Honor to the unknown.

However, in 1994, in the face of mounting evidence that their son, Capt. Michael J. Blassie, was the Vietnam War unknown, the family of the Air Force pilot submitted a formal request to the DOD to exhume X-26’s body and submit it for DNA testing.

Of the exhumation, then-Secretary of Defense William Cohen remarked that, “We disturb this hallowed ground with profound reluctance. And we take this step only because of our abiding commitment to account for every warrior who fought and died to preserve the freedoms that we cherish.”

The remains were taken to the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, and the test result confirmed on June 28, 1998, that the Unknown Soldier was indeed Blassie.

Several weeks later, an MC-130E aircraft from his former unit, the 8th Special Operations Squadron, flew his remains back to his home state of Missouri. He was then re-interred at Jefferson Barracks National Cemetery in Saint Louis County, Missouri, according to the Society of the Honor Guard.

The marble crypt that once honored him was ultimately changed to read: Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958–1975.

For Jonathan Shay, author of Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, the 10 years of wanderings on a perilous sea as Odysseus took the really, really long way home could be seen as an “allegory for the real problems of combat veterans returning to civilian society.”

Shay, a psychiatrist at the Boston VA Medical Center, wrote that “Time and again, Odysseus shows himself as a man who does not trust anyone, a man whose capacity for social trust has been destroyed. This is the central problem facing the most severely injured Vietnam veterans.”

Shay connected the trials of Odysseus in returning to Ithaca to the recurring patterns he observed in his clinical practice with combat veterans — patterns of homelessness, explosive violence, mistrust of anyone other than combat veterans, substance abuse, a fixation on grievances and a “deep suspicion of others’ motives.”

“Odysseus stands for the veterans but as a deeply flawed military leader himself, he also stands for the destroyers of trust. Homer’s Odysseus sheds light, not always flattering light, on today’s veterans and military leaders,” Shay wrote.

For 10 years, Odysseus would remain the artful dodger through the harrowing journey back to Ithaca, where the conflicting traits of Odysseus’ character — war hero and war criminal, master strategist and liar only contribute to his charisma as the “master of cool,” according to Elizabeth Samet, the West Point literature professor and author of No Man’s Land.

Samet draws a similar parallel for modern-day veterans and the difficult journey home.

In a 2007 Book Browse Author interview, Samet called Odysseus her favorite hero in all literature — “He never bores you with his twists and turns, and he outfoxes everyone. Odysseus has restraint, but he can also lose his composure on occasion. He is an epic hero yet somehow a recognizably human creature.”

For Shay, the parallels between Odysseus and modern-day veterans are all too clear.

“I see the adventure with the Cyclops as an emblem for combat veterans’ attraction to danger, an attraction that has cost so many of them their lives after returning home, and tortured those who love them with untold hours of fear for their safety,” Shay wrote.

The Odyssey has survived and endured while so many other oral epics were lost “in no small part because it was — and still remains — the work of literature most seriously engaged with the question of how to reintegrate a damaged, troubled soldier back into civilian life,” according to Shay.

Shay has been credited with introducing the concept of “moral injury” that has been experienced by combat veterans. Shay described moral injury as “the profound psychological and spiritual damage experienced by combat veterans when fundamental moral codes are violated.”

Perhaps Shay’s most crucial insight stems from his conviction that psychologically wounded soldiers can be best healed by sharing their stories with other veterans. “For veterans, recovery from their psychological injuries best happens in the community of other veterans,” he said in an August 2009 interview with Metro West Daily News.

As a result of his work and that of others, moral injury has increasingly been recognized as a signature wound of service members who fought in Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom following the 9/11 attacks.

In response to the work of Shay and others on PTSD, Military.com reported in 2023 that the Department of Veterans Affairs had begun “the first-ever large-scale population study of moral injury to be conducted among veterans of the post-9/11 wars.”

The main result of the study was the development of the “Moral Injury and Distress Scale (MIDS),” which the VA called “the first measure to assess moral injury symptoms indexed to a specific event and validated across several high-risk populations.”

MIDS was “being adopted throughout VA as a tool for identifying veterans with moral injury,” described as “the distressing psychological, behavioral, social, and sometimes spiritual aftermath of witnessing, failing to prevent, or participating in events that contradict one’s deeply held values and beliefs,” according to a March 2025 release from VA Health Systems Research.

In his chapter of the book titled Among the Dead: Memory and Guilt, Shay dealt with the concept of “survivors’ guilt” and contrasted Odysseus’s haunted memories with the profound “survivor’s guilt” experienced by modern soldiers over the loss of comrades as they second-guess choices that led to the deaths of their friends.

But the poet of the Odyssey, perhaps, put it best in describing the grief of Odysseus’ crew following their losses in the battle of Ismarus:

“Six benches were left empty in every ship that evening when we pulled away from death. And this new grief we bore with us to sea: our previous lives we had but not our friends. No ship made sail next day until some shipmate had raised a cry, three times, for each poor ghost unfleshed. Then two long days and nights we lay offshore worn out and sick at heart, tasting our grief.”

Buzz Bissinger, author of The New York Times bestselling book Friday Night Lights, and its subsequent film’s director, Peter Berg, are teaming up to deliver the true story of The Mosquito Bowl, which saw 65 Marines of the 4th and 29th regiments, 6th Marine Division, facing off on the “gridiron” of Guadalcanal before being shipped off to Okinawa.

Based on Bissinger’s 2022 book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, the film follows four of America’s top college football stars, who traded a pigskin for an M1 Garand.

Netflix dropped the official teaser trailer Wednesday, featuring Nicholas Galitzine (The Idea of You) as John McLaughry, Bill Skarsgård (It) as Bob Bauman, Ray Nicholson (Smile 2) as Tony Butkovich and Tom Francis (Broadway’s Sunset Boulevard) as Dave Schreiner.

Berg, who penned the adaptation alongside Mark L. Smith, produced the film with Alex Gayner and Brian Grazer for Imagine Entertainment. Grazer and Imagine Entertainment previously collaborated with Berg on Friday Night Lights. Ezra Emanuel is the executive producer.

As the days of December 1944 passed on Guadalcanal, the island was beset with rumors of where and when the Marines would ship out. It also became the home to some lively trash talk.

Relief from the daily drudgery came over sips of beer and the promise that the “29th would kick the 4th’s ass if there was ever a football game between the two,” writes Bissinger.

That promise swiftly took shape into an all-American sporting event — some thousands of miles from home.

These men were not, according to Bissinger, run-of-the-mill former collegiate football players. Within the 29th alone came an “All-American running back from Purdue who had set a scoring record in the Big Ten; an All-Missouri Valley Conference end; starters from Cornell, Notre Dame, Illinois and Duquesne; and five former captains, including from Notre Dame, Illinois and Purdue.”

The 4th was no slouch when it came to its “roster” either. The unit touted a two-time All-American wide receiver from Wisconsin and another at center from the University of California; an Ivy Leaguer who had started with the New York Giants; and starters from Wisconsin, Michigan State, Fordham, Montana and Ohio Northern, according to Bissinger.

On Dec. 24, 1944, the 65 Marines strode out onto a “field” made up of dirt, pebbles and shards of sharp coral, wearing cut-off dungarees and T-shirts with numbers stenciled on the front. Roughly 1,500 Marines ringed the field with a broadcast on Guadalcanal-based Mosquito Network going out to various Navy and Marine units fighting across the Pacific. The score, according to Bissinger, was occasionally flashed to destroyers at sea.

Tragically, it would be the last game many of the footballers-turned-Marines would play. Fifteen of the 65 players who suited up for The Mosquito Bowl were killed during the Typhoon of Steel.

The film is set to hit theaters on Oct. 30 and premiere on Netflix on Nov. 25.

Now, on the 25th anniversary of the attack, the National Museum of the United States Army is providing key insight into the logistical hurdles of rescue and cleanup that began mere moments after the first hijacked plane struck the Twin Towers.

In its latest exhibit, “Steel and Stone,” the museum highlights the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and its role in the nation’s response and recovery at Ground Zero, the Pentagon and Shanksville, Pennsylvania.

“It’s a story that a lot of people don’t know about,” Paul Morando, the museum’s director, told Military Times. “We wanted to bring out those stories, those artifacts that have never been seen before and put them on display.”

Pieces from the exhibit include the Pentagon clock, first installed in the early 1940s, that marks the moment Flight 77 crashed into the building; the ID card belonging to Rick Rescorla — a decorated Vietnam veteran credited with personally saving more than 2,000 civilians — was found among the rubble near the South Tower; and a New York Police Department patrol car that was shredded by the collapse of the World Trade Center building.

The exhibit also includes the American flag — on display for the first time in nearly 20 years — that was unfurled over the smoldering Pentagon the day after the attack.

Charged with recording oral histories in the aftermath of the attack, Dr. John Lonnquest, chief of the Office of History, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, recalled that he was just a young staff historian on that day.

“I was one of the first historians deployed to New York City,” Lonnquest told Military Times. “We did oral history interviews — back then we were armed with cassette recorders. We interviewed about 58 people, and those interviews are the heart of our collection efforts [here] because you hear in those interviews the drama, the anxiety. In some cases, raw fear of the folks as they were trying to figure out what was happening and how they could help.”

The Corps of Engineers’ response to the tragedy wasn’t piecemeal, however, but built on decades of planning.

“A sophisticated response doesn’t just happen overnight, right?” Lonnquest said. “In the Corps of Engineers, we like to say that we engineer solutions for the nation’s toughest challenges, and what you saw on 9/11 was the result of literally decades of planning. We had planning response teams. These were subject matter experts that could deploy in the span of 24 hours, so they could do debris removal, temporary power, structural assessment. So those folks were ready to go. We also had communication vans that we could dispatch to affected areas.”

One oral history that stands out to Lonnquest is that of Col. John O’Dowd who, on the evening of Sept. 11, “recalled going through the darkness and the debris piles looking for the New York City Fire Department.”

When he found them, according to the historian, “They were using paper maps on sheets of plywood spread over sawhorses. They had flashlights that were running out of batteries. They had radios that weren’t working — and they were trying to coordinate disaster response efforts. So it was then that Col. O’Dowd realized, ‘We need to get advanced comms in here.’ That was one of the many things that the Corps of Engineers could bring to the response effort.”

The museum, located just down the road from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, hopes that its latest exhibit “Steel and Stone” taps into uncharted history of the tragic event that altered the course of America in the 21st century, rooted in personal artifacts from that day.

Her grandfather, Lt. Murray Simon, seldom spoke of wartime experiences, let alone the details regarding being shot down in a B-24 on a secret mission one month prior to D-Day.

All that was left was a piece of that downed plane — an antenna cover loop — painted black to blend into the cover of darkness.

Still, that and a shoebox full of military medals was all “just a little bit of mythology to me,” Sanders told Military Times.

But in 2016, the thread of Simon’s war years started to come undone thanks to Sanders’ persistence and a 1949 recording of the TV hit “This Is Your Life.”

The series, which ran from 1950 to 1990, ran on the premise of luring unsuspecting guests onto the show and then surprising them with loved ones or those whose lives they had touched.

In 1949, the guest of honor for one episode featured, according to its host Ralph Edwards, “a Marine whose life has been packed with enough adventure, thrills, hair-raising escapes, raw courage, and excitement to make half a dozen movies.”

The guest, Peter Ortiz, a lanky man with thick brunette hair and a neatly trimmed mustache, strolled onto stage — only to be surprised by Sanders’ grandfather a short while later.

With that recording and the blackened antenna cover loop, Sanders began to unravel the ties that bound these two men inexplicably together.

“Who was this multilingual, Hollywood-handsome figure who had parachuted behind enemy lines with bags of cash and ammunition for the Maquis, who he was at work training, between blowing up Wehrmacht railcars and eavesdropping on off-duty Nazis at pubs?” Sanders pondered, adding, “How was this not already a Netflix series?”

The full picture of Ortiz, a Marine Corps officer and Office of Strategic Services legend, quickly took shape, resulting in “Ortiz’s War,” written by Sanders and her co-author, retired Marine and CIA officer Nicholas Reynolds.

The book, published Tuesday, weaves the tale of the most battle-decorated member of the OSS who lived a multitude of lives before his death in 1988: as a French Legionnaire, a POW, a U.S. Marine, a spy and, to cap off his career, an actor.

While the OSS, created in 1942 as the first independent U.S. intelligence agency, was short-lived, the exploits of some of its legendary “glorious amateurs” such as William “Wild Bill” Donovan, Julia Child and Mo Berg live on within the American lexicon.

Ortiz, however, despite his many hair-raising adventures and numerous accolades, has lurked in the classified shadows for decades.

Something Sanders and Reynolds hope to rectify in “Ortiz’s War.”

“Even within this sort of very fascinating subset of American operatives, he really stood out,” Sanders said.

One of only 80 Marine Corps officers to serve in the OSS during the war, Ortiz was originally tasked with evaluating the strength and capabilities of the local resistance movement in the Vercors area in southeastern France. He then organized and armed the Maquis in preparation for the long-awaited D-Day assault, according to the CIA.

While operating in France, Ortiz often donned his U.S. Marine uniform — a unique sight, even after June 6, 1944.

“Ortiz felt that entering occupied France at a time when doing so was incredibly dangerous — and there weren’t many allies around — that the actual impact of that gesture on the resistance” was meant to boost morale when the promises of the liberation of France seemed more like a whisper of hope rather than reality, Sanders said.

“He was very symbolic, very literary in a lot of ways,” she continued. “He was there to arm, assess, and mobilize the resistance. So here he was coming in the middle of occupied France and he looks the part.”

That, Sanders said, was very much deliberate.

It was there, while operating in France, that Sanders’ personal family story intertwines with Ortiz’s.

Shot down in May 1944, her grandfather, Simon, had hurled himself out of his burning plane before being rescued by members of the French Underground. Initially hidden by a French Army doctor, Sanders recounts that after the war the doctor, tongue in cheek, demanded “two eggs” from the U.S. government because he had given Simon his last two.

Details like that, Sanders noted, while researching the book, “were very humanizing.”

From there, Simon was disguised as a deaf-mute Frenchman and transported to Valence, France, where he was introduced to the American commando.

Ortiz, codenamed “Chambellan” or ”Jean-Pierre” was the “person who, in my grandfather’s case, you would pray to be intercepted by when you’re a Jewish kid from Queens, New York, shot down over Nazi-occupied France,” Sanders said.

Simon’s encounter with Ortiz, who eventually led him to safety over the Pyrenees, was just one small deed in a series of larger sacrifices, however.

Following the success of Operation Overlord, Ortiz was directed to engage in acts of violent sabotage to prevent the retreating Germans from destroying key installations throughout the region.

During fighting near Albertville, France, in early August 1944, Ortiz, commanding five Marines, a Free French officer and an Army Air Forces captain, was soon overrun by several hundred troops of the German 157th Alpine Reserve Division.

Ortiz surrendered rather than risk German reprisals on the French village.

The commando made numerous escape attempts before being liberated by the British 7th Guards Armored Division on April 29, 1945. By October of that year, with the OSS disbanded Ortiz set his cap on Hollywood.

As for Simon, he “lived and died very grateful,” Sanders said.

“Ortiz’s War” by Nicholas Reynolds and Katie S. Sanders is out now.

But as America celebrates the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, it is easy to forget that independence was not guaranteed. As they shivered at Valley Forge in the winter of 1778, George Washington and his troops would have scoffed at the notion that victory would come on a silver platter.

For the American Revolution to succeed, the colonists had to create an army. Whether the Continental Army was defeated on the battlefield — as it frequently was — mattered less. As long as the United Colonies could keep an army in the field, Britain would be forced to continue what seemed like a forever war.

“American Revolutionary War” is a computer wargame that depicts the battles of the American Revolution, or what the British call the War of American Independence.

With 148 scenarios, from small engagements like Hubbardton and Kettle Creek, to larger battles such as Princeton, Brandywine and Saratoga, American Revolutionary War is part of publisher Wargame Design Studio’s Musket & Pike series. These games depict warfare from the 15th through the 18th Centuries, an era where polearms were gradually replaced by gunpowder weapons, such as muskets.

By the 1770s, the pike had been replaced by the bayonet, and the primitive arquebus by more reliable flintlock muskets including Britain’s “Brown Bess.”

With a 114-page user manual, American Revolutionary War is not exactly casual entertainment. It is a highly detailed simulation not just of 18th Century European-style warfare — but also how difficult it was to conduct armies’ European-style warfare in the 18th Century North American wilderness.

The game depicts battles at the grand tactical scale, with battalions and companies of infantry, as well as batteries of artillery and the occasional horse soldier (cavalry was much rarer than the later Napoleonic and American Civil Wars). The American have Continental regulars and local militia, while the Crown fields a polyglot force of British regulars, German mercenaries, Loyalist troops and Native American allies.

These units maneuver across a 2-D hex-grid map of eastern North America in its pre-industrial glory. The terrain is studded with forests, fields, marshes and streams.

Units are rated for how many troops or guns they have, and their weaponry (musket, 3-pounder artillery, etc.). Most important is a quality rating from A to F, which affects combat proficiency and movement. The British regulars tend to be quality As and Bs, while the Continentals tend to be Cs and Ds, and the American militias Fs.

Players alternate taking their turns, with each turn representing about 15 minutes of real time. Each player conducts movement and fire combat, followed by a melee phase to resolve assaults. Combat inflicts casualties as well as “fatigue,” which saps morale and effectiveness until units break or rout.

Western battlefield tactics in the 18th and 19th Centuries centered on assuming the right formation in an era when troops fought shoulder to shoulder. Column formation was used to expedite movement, though at the cost of firepower and presenting a juicy target. When engaging in a firefight, infantry would assume line formation, standing in two or three ranks.

Units in line that move through rough terrain, or obstructions, such as walls, run the risk of becoming “disordered,” with movement and fire penalties. On the other hand, a densely packed column can take heavy casualties from enemy troops deployed in line. Dispersing troops into open order makes them less vulnerable to enemy fire, but penalizes them in melee.

One myth is that the conflict “was fought by the British in a strictly linear fashion, while the Americans were primarily in skirmish,” Mike Cox, designer of American Revolutionary War, told Military Times. Both sides were capable of assuming a variety of formations, though this presented challenges for under-trained Continentals.

“The Americans often tried to fight linearly, too,” added Cox. “It just didn’t often work out well.”

Particularly useful are the detachments of light infantry.

“Learning to master your light troops is extremely important,” Cox said. “When to deploy as skirmishers to delay or scout, or recall and use them to effectively melee to push back the enemy and take and hold ground.”

Command and control has always been the glue that binds armies, but especially so in the pre-radio era, when commanders personally led their troops.

American Revolutionary War features historical commanders, rated from A (George Washington) to F, that form chains of command in each army. Leaders can rally broken troops and provide morale bonuses, though they can also be felled by enemy fire.

“Keeping units in range of their leader and their leader in range of the next higher echelon makes an army work well,” Cox explained. American commanders will need to stay close to their militia: “Keeping them in command and preventing their disruption and breakdown is an art.”

One fascination of playing historical wargames is seeing how they model the little things. For example, the British Army’s Scottish Highlanders are given a bonus during melee combat “to reflect their impact on the minds of American troops, and their reputation for relishing close combat,” the game manual notes.

But ultimately, the question comes down to: How accurately does the game depict the battles that determined the fate of the American Revolution? And, how well does it capture the essences of a professional army versus a more amateur — but also more inspired — citizen army?

American Revolutionary War fares well on both questions.

The unit quality, morale and command systems model the capabilities of both sides, including how the Continental Army improved over time due to combat experience, as well as the tutelage of European instructors like Baron von Steuben.

“British forces are often outnumbered,” said Cox. “They need to learn to stretch their lines or get outflanked. They will usually have some high-quality troops and have the advantage of picking the point of attack.”

“The Americans usually have a high number of units. However, quality and strength can vary wildly. The Americans need to know when to give ground and when to hit hard.”

Perhaps what is most striking is the theater of war.

WDS has published almost 120 historical wargames that cover gigantic battles, such as Waterloo, Gettysburg, Kursk and the Battle of the Bulge. In these games, the maps are packed with masses of troops.

In American Revolutionary War, the maps are often big, while the armies are small. One can begin to appreciate how British soldiers and colonial settlers must have felt about fighting in a vast, untamed land.

As Americans mark the Declaration of Independence, this is a reminder of how far our nation has come.