Women have stepped up, taken risks and died in war after war. 

Eight U.S. military women were killed during the Vietnam war. By 2013, when then Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced women would no longer be barred from direct ground combat roles, more than 150 American women had died serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Toward the end of 2015, Defense Secretary Ash Carter made an announcement that was historic if long-expected given what Panetta had said two years earlier: The U.S. military would allow women to serve in all combat roles, even as Army Rangers, Green Berets, Navy SEALS, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers.

Army Sgt. Wakkuna A. Jackson, a 21-year-old from Jacksonville, Florida who was assigned to a support unit of Fort Drum’s 10th Mountain Division, was killed August 19, 2006 when an improvised explosive device detonated near the vehicle in which she was riding in a convoy vehicle in Kunar, Afghanistan. As the death of Jackson and others make clear, years before the way was cleared for women in combat, many had already been in harm’s way.

Emily Smith, who directed a project to help military veterans re-connect with civilian life, told me: “A lot of these guys feel they don’t fit into society anymore.”

For some veterans, it may be because they find it difficult to reconcile themselves to the violence they committed on their nation’s behalf. Others feel civilians cannot or do not want to understand them. 

The past is not past. In addition to living in the shadow of racism and prejudice, we live with the light of the example of people like Minoru Yasui. Yasui was a young lawyer in 1940s Oregon when wartime hysteria was fueling racism. In an act of civil disobedience that presaged 1960s civil rights activism, Yasui went out after a curfew that had been imposed on Americans of Japanese descent and demanded to be arrested. 

Yasui said later: “This is the United States of America, founded in liberty, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. As an American citizen, as a lawyer, I felt that we owed at least the obligation as a citizen to tell our government they are wrong! That is the sacred duty of every citizen, because what is done to the least of us can be done to all of us.”
 

My friend Latha Anantharaman was kind enough to send me her new book “Three Seasons.” I read it in one tranquil wintry afternoon, sitting on our living room couch with a silvery Colorado sun flooding in through a window to contrast with Latha’s images of South India’s monsoons.

Students and staff across the campus of the Community College of Aurora are reading “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” by the science journalist Rebecca Skloot.

I was asked to join a panel of journalists at the college today to discuss our industry with the book as a starting point.  That led me to finally read Skloot's book, which has been on my to-do list for too long. “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks” led me to another book I’d been meaning to tackle, “Medical Apartheid” by another science journalist, Harriet A. Washington. Skloot references “Medical Apartheid”, which my father had given me months ago.

It was enlightening to read the two together.
 

Margaret Mead begins her tango of a conversation with James Baldwin by launching into an extraordinarily self-congratulatory solo about what she calls the “romantic, good Northern behavior” that defines her beliefs about race relations in America and how she acts on those beliefs.

Baldwin listens patiently and encouragingly. And he grabs onto her word “romantic” like Itzhak Perlman or Charlie Parker, returning to the theme and improvising on it for the rest of the dialogue, which took place in 1970.

Launch day has come! Today is the official release of my new book, “Home of the Brave.” Get your copy here: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1785356364

In the book I describe the leadership style of Melanie Kline, who founded a grassroots project for vets in Montrose, Colorado.

Kline was able to accomplish so much to help veterans and her community because she not only welcomed other ideas, she pestered people to bring their initiatives to Welcome Home and made sure those people felt welcome to stick around to see their pet projects realized.