With more than 100,000 American veterans incarcerated in the United States, advocates say more investment is needed for the transition from military to civilian life and services for those who have run afoul of the law. Representatives from specialty courts and veterans’ legal organizations pressed Congress Wednesday for expansion of the Veterans Treatment Courts system and reinstatement of some Veterans Affairs benefits for imprisoned former service members. They argued that while not all veterans convicted of serious crimes would benefit, those with other-than-honorable discharges or service-connected mental health or substance use disorders should have opportunities to change their lives. Corey Schramm, an Army veteran who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after three deployments to Iraq and later was arrested following a blackout that involved a weapon, said a Kansas Veterans Treatment Court, where he underwent two years of treatment and mentorship, saved his family. “I was on and off probation before I went to Veterans Treatment Court, and when I showed up, I thought I was going to play the system, go through the motions. Boy was I ever wrong. … VTC is not a shortcut,” Schramm said during a hearing Wednesday before the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. The first Veteran Treatment Court was established in 2008 in Buffalo, New York, to provide medical treatment, supervision and mentorship to former service members with non-violent criminal convictions related to service-connected addiction or mental health conditions. Today there are more than 600, and the Department of Veterans Affairs employs hundreds of Veterans Justice Officers to support veterans in jails or who are on parole, probation or in the court system. But many veterans remain unaware of programs tailored to them or lack access to available services because they were discharged from the military with general or other than honorable discharges, rendering them ineligible for many Veterans Affairs programs and benefits. Others may have lost access to their VA benefits when they were sentenced, since disability compensation is reduced when a veteran is convicted of a felony and incarcerated for more than 60 days and VA health care benefits stop when they enter a prison health system. Rose Carmen Goldberg, director of the Veterans Clinic at the University of Washington School of Law, argued that incarcerated veterans should have access to VA behavioral health care, which provides expertise in combat-related mental health issues, sexual trauma or other service-specific concerns. “Access to VA mental healthcare can literally be lifesaving. Veterans with a less-than-honorable discharge who are unable to access VA mental healthcare have a significantly elevated risk of suicide, a difference that disappears if they gain access,” she said. Goldberg proposed that imprisoned veterans have access to VA services through telehealth and she supports a bill, the “Get Justice-Involved Veterans Behavioral Assistance and Care for Key Health Outcomes to Maintain Empowerment Act,” sponsored by Sen. Angus King, I-Maine, and Sen. Pete Ricketts, R-Neb., that would do that. “VA-furnished mental healthcare is critical because it is more effective than private sector care,” Goldberg said. Another key to improving outcomes for veterans who leave the service is reforming the Defense Department’s Transition Assistance Program, which several panelists argued was ineffective for preparing service members for non-military life, the panelists said. According to retired Army Brig. Gen. David “Mac” MacEwen, director of the Veterans Justice Commission at the Council on Criminal Justice, the Defense Department spends billions on recruiting and training but just millions per year on TAP. A commission found that TAP did not prepare 44% of its attendees for transition and 22% of transitioning service members never attended. “The result is a fragmented and under-resourced system that leaves too many service members ill-prepared for civilian life. This lack of preparation increases their vulnerability to involvement in the criminal justice system,” MacEwen said. Committee Chairman Sen. Jerry Moran, R-Kan., conducted the hearing to better understand how to help veterans in judicial system and prevent them from entering it in the first place. Moran sponsored a bill that was approved in January to fully fund Veterans Treatment Courts and provided $4 million to establish a National Center for Veterans Justice. “We need to make sure that veterans who carry scars, with wounds — visible and invisible — are not forgotten,” Moran said. Yet many jurisdictions do not have a veterans treatment court or those in law enforcement or the court system aren’t aware of these programs. Former Kansas Supreme Court Chief Justice Lawton Nuss, a former Marine, said more courts are needed, noting that in Kansas, of the 89 veterans who have graduated in the past decade from the VTC program, just five have later been arrested, a 95% success rate. According to Nuss, one of the first graduates from the Johnson County VTC was a combat veteran who told him he would “have been better off being killed in Afghanistan instead of coming home and being arrested for committing a violent crime.” “He described his shame to me [as], ‘I went from hero to villain,’” Nuss said. “This justice-involved veteran suffered from unhealed PTSD. As has been said about such veterans, the painful paradox is that fighting for one’s country can render one unfit to be its citizen.” The panelists also pressed for changes to the GI Bill that allow more veterans to access education benefits. According to MacEwen, the original GI Bill called for all veterans except those who received dishonorable discharges to receive education benefits. MacEwen said that since the original language for the GI Bill was written in 1944, the VA has changed eligibility requirements. “Congress explicitly wrote that individuals who were not discharged under dishonorable conditions should be eligible for VA care and benefits. However, the VA’s implementation has not aligned with this plain text, resulting in the unlawful denial of services to hundreds of thousands of veterans with other than honorable discharges,” MacEwen said. Moran said he believes the VA and Defense Department must improve services for transitioning veterans but community organizations are vital to supporting veterans as well. “All of our witnesses provide examples of why we work to support veterans when they transition out of the military, and the value they add to our communities and our country after their service when that transition goes well,” Moran said.

It was supposed to be a routine flight, nothing out of the ordinary.The SA-16 Albatross was scheduled to leave Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho on January 24, 1952, and fly approximately 700 miles before returning. The Air Force plane never made it back, crashing into a mountain in Death Valley, California.Also Read: How Eisenhower’s ‘Atoms for Peace’ initiative started Iran’s nuclear programThankfully, the six airmen onboard, including a former World War II pilot, parachuted out of the aircraft’s back door before the moment of impact. Two men sustained non-life-threatening injuries upon landing, so they stayed behind while the others departed in search of help.When they found it, a secret that the United States military and government guarded closely was revealed. A Joint Air Force-CIA Operation At the time of the crash, Cold War tensions had built steadily since the end of WWII. Concerns about the spread of Communism were real, and the upper echelons of American government strived to thwart it.One way in which they responded was creating the Air Resupply and Communications (ARC) Service, a joint operation between the Air Force and CIA, in 1951. Under the arrangement, the military service provided aircraft and personnel that the CIA used for “unconventional warfare support” to thwart Communist influences worldwide. The mission did this through various methods, including inserting and extracting special operators into enemy territory.The Air Force established three main ARC Wings: the 580th, 581st, and 582nd. The doomed SA-16 Albatross belonged to the 580th. The purpose of its final flight was to practice maneuvering the aircraft at night. The Albatross was over Death Valley when one of its two engines malfunctioned, according to a 2024 article from SFGATE, a digital news website based in northern California.At the time, the plane was 11,000 feet in the air. The crew tried to rely on its only remaining workable engine, but the Albatross struggled to maintain altitude. With a mountain lurking straight ahead, the airmen determined they had no chance to avoid the impending peaks.So they bailed. As the men descended out of harm’s way, the plane scraped a summit, clipped a ridge, and came to rest on a mountain in the western part of Death Valley. A Perilous Nighttime Hike A Grumman HU-16B Albatross at the National Museum of the United States Air Force. (U.S. Air Force) The crash occurred at 9 p.m. local time, so nearly complete darkness shrouded the four airmen as they left their landing spot. The only light they noticed was 14 miles away at a place called Furnace Creek, SFGATE reported.The temperature that night was approximately 40 degrees, meaning the airmen avoided the suffocating heat that is synonymous with Death Valley. There were other obstacles, though. They lacked knowledge about hiking in that area, and doing so in low visibility increased the chances of something going wrong.What’s more, the valley contained marshy areas. Airmen had to be careful in some areas where a thin layer of salt covered pools of mud. If a service member broke through the salt, he risked sinking knee deep into the muck.Undoubtedly in shape, the Albatross’ crew forged ahead. The SFGATE article did not mention whether they encountered dangerous situations along the way, but they reached Furnace Creek at about midnight.They alerted park rangers, who went back to retrieve the two injured service members. ‘Bizarre in a Post-Apocalyptic Way’ The tail section of an Air Force plane, which crashed into Death Valley on January 24, 1952, remains high in the mountains. (National Park Service) Because there were no casualties, the accident could have been much worse. If it had not happened, however, the existence of ARC Wings (or how the Air Force and CIA were involved) might never have come to light. The Air Force began to dismantle the Air Resupply and Communications Service in late 1953. One tangible reminder of ARC Wings remains there in plain sight. When the Air Force dispatched a three-person investigative team to the crash site 6,500 feet up in the mountains, only one of them made it there. The stamina required to complete a hike to such elevation is next level, even for physically fit individuals. The service left the wreckage there, possibly because “there was nothing left worth salvaging,” Death Valley historian Kimberly Selinske told SFGATE. In 2026, the fuselage remains as much a curiosity as it is a relic from our nation’s Cold War past. “The whole setting for it is just bizarre in a post-apocalyptic way,” Abby Wines of Death Valley National Park told SFGATE. “It’s kind of on its side on a slope. It’s extremely steep.… When you’re looking through and over the plane, there’s this desolate, open space where there’s nothing but the valley and mountains as far as the eye can see.” Don’t Miss the Best of We Are The Mighty • The 1952 UFO Washington sighting that upended decades of denial• Aldrich Ames, the Cold War’s deadliest CIA mole, completes life sentence• Two veterans shaped the UFO phenomenon from a joke into real federal policy Featured Cold War An Air Force plane crashed in Death Valley during the Cold War (and is still there) By Stephen Ruiz Army The Army’s latest helicopter has its official name: Cheyenne II By Miguel Ortiz History The Pinkertons were America’s most powerful private army, then Congress banned them By Daniel Tobias Flint Finance How to dispute a VA debt you don’t really owe By Veteran Debt Assistance Weapons Ukraine’s JEDI drone hunts Shaheds so your Patriot missiles don’t have to By Adam Gramegna The post An Air Force plane crashed in Death Valley during the Cold War (and is still there) appeared first on We Are The Mighty.

Congress on Tuesday posthumously awarded American prosecutor Benjamin Ferencz with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest U.S. honor bestowed on civilians, for his work taking on Nazi death squads during the Nuremberg Trials.Ferencz, who died in 2023 at the age of 103, was just 27 with no previous trial experience when he became chief prosecutor in one of the most significant murder trials in history.While Congress voted to bestow the medal to Ferencz in 2022, his family members were on hand to posthumously receive the honor this week during the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s annual Days of Remembrance commemoration at the U.S. Capitol. “Mr. Ferencz was a tremendous force for good, a fierce New Yorker with a heart of gold and a backbone of steel, a man who saw the worst of humanity and spent the better part of a century fighting for the best of it,” said Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., during the ceremony. “He came face-to-face with evil, recalling the fact that he had quote, peered ‘into hell,’” Gillibrand continued. “A lesser person might have looked away. But Ben Ferencz looked harder.”Born in Transylvania in 1920, Ferencz, who was the last surviving prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, emigrated with his family to the United States when he was an infant to escape anti-Jewish pogroms.After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1943, Ferencz enlisted in the U.S. Army and was given the job of anti-aircraft artillery gunner.“In their typical [Army] brilliance, being a Harvard Law School graduate and an expert on war crimes, they assigned me to clean the latrines in the artillery and do every other filthy thing they could give me,” Ferencz reminisced about the Army’s odd job placement in a 2016 interview with The Washington Post.The outspoken Ferencz, who barely registered over five feet tall, eventually rose to the rank of sergeant as a member of Gen. George Patton’s Third Army. Action during the Normandy invasion followed, as did breaking through the Maginot and Siegfried lines, crossing the Rhine and bitter fighting in the Battle of the Bulge.After Ferencz’s honorable discharge in 1945, Gen. Telford Taylor, then the chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg Trials, recruited Ferencz to return to Germany and work with a team of investigators tasked with uncovering the horrors of the Nazi regime.Tasked with gathering credible evidence of Nazi war crimes for the Army’s War Crimes Branch, Ferencz encountered the depths of human depravity. The Germans maintained meticulous death registries at the camps of Buchenwald, Mauthausen, Flossenbürg and Ebensee. These registries, which Ferencz was ordered to collect, contained the names of millions of victims. “When I passed the figure of one million, I stopped adding,” he recalled in an interview with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “That was quite enough for me.”It was there that Ferencz and his colleagues discovered the dossiers of the Nazi mobile death squads, the Einsatzgruppen — roving extermination squads that targeted Jews, Roma, homosexuals and political dissidents in Eastern Europe. In the subsequent trial, the International Military Tribunal determined that nearly two million Jews were murdered by the Einsatzgruppen.“Death was their tool and life their toy,” Ferencz told the judge during the opening statement of United States of America v. Otto Ohlendorf et. al. “If these men be immune, then law has lost its meaning, and man must live in fear.”All 22 men prosecuted by Ferencz were convicted. Most were sentenced to death.

When you volunteer with Soldiers’ Angels, you may never fully see the impact of your support. A letter tucked into a care package.A few thoughtful items sent across the world.A reminder to a deployed Service Member that someone back home is thinking of them. These small acts of kindness can carry extraordinary weight. At Soldiers’ Angels, we often talk about connection, about making sure no Service Member feels alone. And while every volunteer experience is different, one thing remains true: your support matters more than you may ever know. And sometimes, the connections formed through genuine care and shared humanity can last far beyond a deployment. This is one of those stories. A Care Package That Started It All “In late 2003, I received orders for Korea with a report date of January 2004. Thanks to your organization, I received a few care packages while deployed and away from home. One package in particular really resonated with me, because it gave me some items that I needed along with a very nice letter from a girl named Corie. Corie and I began to correspond through AOL, Yahoo messenger and snail mail. We and even connected so much so that she and my wife became great friends. We stayed in contact throughout the rest of my Army career until I retired in January of 2013. Between several moves to different houses along the way after I retired, we lost contact somewhere around 2015. Finding Each Other Again Fast forward nine years to Aug 2024. My wife Michelle started to get sick so I thought it was important to let Corie know. I was able to eventually find her through several different services and left her several messages to contact me. On April 18, 2025, I lost my beloved wife of 25 years Michelle, after a long battle with several different illnesses. I continued to message Corie to let her know, but with no response. In October of 2025, Corie’s daughter told her that she had some messages on Instagram which she didn’t realize. She checked them and found out that I had been messaging her for months. She was heartbroken at the loss of Michelle. A Connection That Endured Corie has helped to get me through so much and helped to pull me through the loss as well as me being able to help her through some issues that she was dealing with at the time. Through several deep conversations, we realized that we have so much in common and we pretty much picked up where we left off when we last talked all those years ago. I arranged to meet her for the first time ever on Valentines Day of this year. I surprised her with a proposal and she said “YES”! We are currently engaged to be married in the near future. It was because of Soldiers’ Angels that we met 22 years ago and we couldn’t be happier. This goes to show that you never know the impact that a care package can have on a deployed soldier. It can literally change your entire life for the better. The Power of Showing Up Kenneth and Corie’s story is remarkable because it highlights the depth of human connection that can begin with something as simple as a care package. Most Angels will never see the full ripple effect of their support. But every care package, every note, every act of kindness contributes to something bigger: A moment of comfort during deployment A reminder that someone cares A connection to home when it’s needed most That is the heart of Soldiers’ Angels. Be the Connection Someone Needs You may never know the full story behind the Service Member you support, but you can be part of it. Whether you’re writing letters, sending care packages, or participating in volunteer opportunities, your time and compassion make a real difference. Join Soldiers’ Angels as an Angel volunteer and help ensure no Service Member feels alone. About the Author Ashley Ray has been a member of the Soldiers’ Angels communications team since 2013. She supports blog writing and social media and loves telling stories of Angel volunteers, Service Members, and Veterans. The post A Connection That Lasts: How One Care Package Changed Two Lives appeared first on Soldiers' Angels.

On Apr. 15, 2026, at the Army Aviation Warfighting Summit, the U.S. Army officially named its Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft the MV-75 Cheyenne II. Yes, the Army has decided that it ran out of Native American tribes to name its aircraft after and circled back to a canceled attack helicopter from the 1960s. Or, maybe they felt bad about shorting the Cheyenne tribe with the AH-56 and decided to try again with the MV-75. Regardless, the name is back.Also Read: Why Army helicopters are named after Native tribesFor 79 years, the Army has named its aircraft after Native American tribes. Originally, the tribal names only applied to transport helicopters like the UH-1 Iroquois and the CH-47 Chinook; the AH-1 Cobra was named after the venomous snake to reflect its role as an attack aircraft. The Army has since applied the tradition of honoring Native American tribes with aircraft names across its fleet, to include the AH-64 Apache gunship and the C-12 Huron airplane. Only 10 AH-56 Cheyenne attack helicopters were built. (U.S. Army) According to the MV-75 Nominee Project Office, the Cheyenne name was revived based on the tribes’ historical displays of the aircraft’s key attributes. Army officials report that over 500 tribes were considered. During the naming process, feedback was provided by organizations responsible for the aircraft’s development and delivery. In the end, the Army decided that the MV-75’s speed, range, and adaptability mirrored the historical strengths of the Cheyenne tribes.“With the MV-75 we honor a legacy, forged by conflict, proven in battle, originally known to the U.S. Army as some of the most formidable and disciplined adversaries on the battlefield,” said Under Secretary of the Army Mike Obadal at the naming ceremony. Members of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribe were present for the announcement. “The relationship evolved through warfare to mutual respect and finally into an unbroken legacy of patriotic service, with members serving in every major American conflict. The United States Army is proud to honor this history and pace the expectations of this warrior spirit on our aviators who operate the MV-75 Cheyenne.” A scale model of the MV-75 is unveiled at Fort Campbell. (U.S. Army) The “MV” designation denotes the Cheyenne II’s Multi-Mission and Vertical takeoff capabilities. To honor the Army’s founding in 1775, the aircraft received the numerical designation of 75. The MV-75 Cheyenne II is the Army’s first conventional tilt-rotor aircraft, while the Marine Corps, Air Force, and Navy have used the tilt-rotor V-22 Osprey and its variants since 2007. Designed to replace the UH-60 Black Hawk, the Cheyenne II can transport up to 14 soldiers, lift an external load of up to 10,000 pounds, and fly in excess of 300 mph. The 101st Combat Aviation Brigade at Fort Campbell, Kentucky will be the first unit to receive the MV-75 with deliveries expected in 2027. Fingers crossed for a smoother introduction (and service life) than the Osprey… Don’t Miss the Best of We Are The Mighty • New Army contract will turn Black Hawk helicopters into drone-launching motherships• 5 Native American tribes most feared by the US Army • An Army pilot shot three times during the Maduro Raid received the Medal of Honor Aircraft Army The Army’s latest helicopter has its official name: Cheyenne II By Miguel Ortiz Aviation The F-35 made historic air-to-air kills against Iran By Miguel Ortiz Air Force How Kuwait’s air defenses downed three American F-15 Strike Eagles By Adam Gramegna World War II This plane survived Pearl Harbor and struck back at Midway By Miguel Ortiz Aviation 4 things that made the F-16 Fighting Falcon years ahead of its time By Ward Carroll The post The Army’s latest helicopter has its official name: Cheyenne II appeared first on We Are The Mighty.