Military

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, speaking from home after his latest hospitalization, opened a meeting of US allies with a never-surrender message aimed at reassuring Ukraine almost two years after Russia’s invasion.

U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was admitted into critical care late Sunday with an apparent bladder issue, after being hospitalized for the second time in a month.

A 27-year-old Emmett man has been identified as one of five U.S. Marine Corps members killed in a helicopter crash in California earlier this week.  

The five U.S. Marines whose helicopter crashed in a remote area of California during a training flight have been found dead.

A search and rescue operation located a Marine Corps military helicopter Wednesday that went missing in a snowy and mountainous area east of San Diego, but authorities said they were still looking for five Marines who were on board the aircraft.

The tail of a KC-135 aircraft at Fairchild Air Force Base is now rich with color and history.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Thursday that his recent cancer diagnosis was a “gut punch” that left him shaken, disclosing new details about his ensuing medical crisis and asserting that he did not direct his staff to withhold the situation from the White House.

US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin returned to work at the Pentagon for the first time in almost a month, as he continues to recover from complications linked to prostate-cancer surgery that left him hospitalized for two weeks and provoked a furor over delays in declaring his illness.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signaled on Thursday an openness to reducing the U.S. military presence in Iraq, saying meetings set to begin soon between leaders from the two countries will enable a “transition to an enduring bilateral security partnership" that builds on years of joint operations against the Islamic State.

Nearly 50,000 veterans and former service members received free emergency suicide prevention care in 2023 in the first year of a new Department of Veterans Affairs program, the department announced Wednesday.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was released from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center on Monday, the Pentagon said, ending a two-week hospitalization that he kept secret at first after developing serious complications from a surgery to treat prostate cancer.

The Pentagon’s internal watchdog announced it will probe the circumstances around Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s hospitalization, after he suffered complications from prostate surgery but didn’t tell the White House for days.

An employee at the Spokane Valley Library received a certificate of appreciation Friday for his role in helping record stories from local veterans to be submitted to the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress.

Washington state Rep. Leonard Christian fought back tears Thursday while describing the financial hardship he faced as a young husband and father serving in the Air Force while working other jobs to support his family.

As the U.S. careened into World War II, the battle cry to “Remember Pearl Harbor!” was plastered on recruitment posters, titling both a film and song produced in the immediate aftermath of the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on a U.S. Navy base on Oahu that killed 2,403 Americans.

Blaine Bart knew he needed help. The edges formed by active duty wouldn’t round out. During his time in the Army, from 1999 to 2006, he was wounded in the second battle of Fallujah and “blown up countless times” – twice by grenades and once by a shotgun, he says.

Christian Beyer worked around the ground-shaking blasts of one of the Army's most powerful weapons -- the M1 Abrams tank -- for 23 years. And for nearly all that time, he was a model soldier, given awards for meritorious service and promoted all the way up to master sergeant in charge of training young tank crews. Then in 2020, at age 38, he started to fall apart.

Yemen's Houthi militants said Tuesday they will not stop their "military operations" in the Red Sea, hours after the United States announced the formation of a multinational naval coalition to protect commercial shipping there.

Jay Tenison's grim diagnosis came in early 2022. The abdominal pains he had experienced over the previous year were signs of terminal stomach cancer. When the shock subsided, the 40-year-old Army veteran planned out a bucket list. It covered some conventional thrills and experiences: skydiving, vacations to the beach and trips to Disney World. But there was something else Tenison decided he wanted to do. Something only a fellow tanker would understand.