Viewers are perfectly safe, perched atop the woven synthetic fibers of a movie theater chair, but that’s how director Peter Berg intended the upcoming film The Mosquito Bowl to feel. The intimate violence thrusts the Marines from the 4th and 29th regiments, 6th Marine Division, as well as moviegoers, into “this barbaric madness,” said Berg.

The film, based on Buzz Bissinger’s 2022 book The Mosquito Bowl: A Game of Life and Death in World War II, follows four of America’s top college football stars who traded a pigskin for an M1 Garand and who subsequently faced off on the “gridiron” of Guadalcanal before being shipped off to Okinawa. Yet the actual football game, dubbed the Mosquito Bowl, occupies just a small portion of the movie. That too, according to Berg, was intentional.

“This is not a football movie. It’s a war movie that happens to have football players in the middle of the war,” he said in a release.

“These young men — who are just sort of blazing in the apex of their youth and their vitality and their joy — you meet them as college football stars. Then you introduce them to a hell, a flavor of which they had no idea even existed.”

“I think it would have been a tragedy if you said, ‘Oh God, it’s Hollywood. … Let’s sugarcoat it a little,” Bissinger told Military Times. “People have to know what war is. They have to know. We sanitize too much, and it’s just not the way it is. Maybe they’ll watch, and they’ll say, ‘No more wars.’ I know that’s naive, but at least you know what we’re sending our men and women into, and I think that’s really important.”

“So many people were killed in World War II. This is just a story of four of those people, and my feeling was to make it as intense and experiential as I could around those four guys,” Berg said in a release.

“Make the audience feel as though they’re actually in it and they can’t escape it and they’re not even sure what’s happening at times, which I think is very true to the experience that so many of these guys went through. … That was our strategy as we approached filming it and editing it and scoring it and sound-designing it,” he continued. “I’ve had many people who watch the film now say afterward that they literally felt like they went through something, and that was kind of what we were trying to achieve.”

Berg and Bissinger, who happen to be cousins, collaborated on Bissinger’s bestselling book Friday Night Lights over two decades ago and have once again teamed up to deliver this gut-punch of a film.

“Pete has this ability to read a 400-page book and crystallize and seize on what he thought the emotional heart was. I’ve always admired that,” Bissinger said. “He wrote the script. There were several scripts written, but Pete just hit it. When I read the script, his ability to incorporate everything into a two-hour movie was phenomenal.”

For both men, the filming of The Mosquito Bowl was personal, as both their fathers were Marines. Berg’s father served in Korea, and Bissinger’s was a Marine in the Pacific — including Okinawa.

“I knew nothing about what he did,” said Bissinger. “He wouldn’t talk about it. He would joke about it sometimes, but it was pretty clear he had put up a wall. As his son, that was his privacy. I didn’t want to violate that. But as I was doing preliminary research for the book. I finally said, ‘Well, might as well figure out what the hell he did.’

“And I’m looking up the records, and there he is. Not only was he a rifleman on the line, but he was also in one of the regiments, the Fourth Regiment that is depicted in the book. It wasn’t like I wanted to write this book as a pay-on to my father, but he was there for every scene, particularly on Okinawa.

“I just wish I had said, ‘Dad, I’m really proud of you.’ But he died 20 years ago, and maybe he’s … I don’t know where the hell he is, heaven or hell. But I hope he’s listening, and I hope he’s watching because I did want to honor not just him, but all the men who served back then.”

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

That night, snow falls in heavy, wet flakes, coating Hancock Point in a thin, white blanket — the first snow of the season. Harvard Merrill Hodgkins, a high school senior and a Boy Scout, drives home from the Wednesday night dance at the Townsend Club. It’s just after eleven, and he’s navigating the winding, unlit road back to Crabtree Neck, as snow drifts down in near-blinding sheets.

As he rounds a bend, his headlights catch two figures trudging through the snow. They’re moving slowly, heads down against the wind, dressed in long, city-style overcoats and slacks, clothes that look foreign here in the Maine woods. He slows the car, and the men turn their faces away from the light. It’s bitter cold, but they wear no hats, no boots. Hodgkins finds it suspicious. “You just don’t see folks walking without boots out here when it’s snowy . . . no one around here wears a topcoat in the winter.”

He considers offering them a ride; something about them nags at his curiosity. “Shucks, if they were crazy enough to be out on a night like this, maybe I’d let them walk,” he thinks, edging the car to the side as they pass. Their faces are unfamiliar—strangers, he realizes, and in a place where six families live year-round, everyone’s face is familiar.

Hodgkins watches them disappear around the bend, their steps trailing off toward the woods and the black sea. It’s a risky time to be out here alone, with recent whispers of spies landing on the Maine coast. He stops the car. He gets out and follows their footprints down the road, then down a little trail that veers off toward Sunset Rocks — a spot he knows well from rabbit hunting with his father, Dana Hodgkins, a deputy sheriff and local guide.

Their tracks vanish into the trees near Kent Crabtree’s house. They’d come from the shore, Hodgkins realizes. “There was no reason for them to be coming from down there,” he ponders, unease prickling as he scans the empty coastline. The cottages along Sunset Rocks are empty in the winter — no reason at all for strangers to emerge from that path.

Down the road, another local, Mary Forni, mother of three and the tax collector’s wife, is driving home from her weekly card game. It’s nearly midnight when her headlights pick up two men walking along the edge of the macadam highway, close enough that she can make out their thin, city-style coats, their shoulders hunched against the snow. She, too, feels that flash of unease. Forni tells her husband, who brushes it off with a laugh.

The encounter with those two strange men lingers in Mary Forni’s mind, keeping her awake long into the night. By morning, she can’t shake her misgivings, so she shares them with her neighbor, Harvard’s mother.

“They just weren’t like anyone you’d see here in November,” she said, the unease still fresh in her voice. “Honestly, it’s a wonder I didn’t stop and offer them a ride.” They quickly connect the dots to the two sightings.

— ✦ —

The strangers were German intelligence agents Erich Gimpel and William Colepaugh. On Nov. 29, 1944, U-1230 had delivered them to the Maine coast to gather intelligence in the United States.

Four days later, the same submarine torpedoed the Canadian freighter SS Cornwallis off the Maine coast. The ship sank in less than 10 minutes, killing 43 of the 48 people aboard. Only five survived.

Now, more than 80 years later, the Nomad Exploration Team has located the wreck nearly 400 feet beneath the Gulf of Maine. The discovery, made on July 11, 2026, followed seven years of research and expeditions to find the long-lost ship. It brings renewed attention to the lives lost and to the remarkable events ashore that wartime headlines would only partly explain.

When Harvard’s father, Deputy Sheriff Dana Hodgkins, returned from a hunting trip, Harvard told him about the strangers. Dana initially suspected burglars, but his investigation of the area’s homes revealed nothing amiss.

On Dec. 4, while in Bangor, he encountered an FBI agent he knew and mentioned Harvard’s experience. Within an hour, three agents arrived in Hancock to question the teenager.

Federal personnel had already been sent to the area following the sinking of Cornwallis. The attack established that a U-boat was operating offshore. Harvard’s account supplied the first evidence of a potential enemy landing. Investigators checked transportation connections and telephone records. But the strangers had moved on.

The decisive break eventually came from inside the operation. Colepaugh approached a friend who contacted the FBI on his behalf. Colepaugh surrendered, and the information he supplied enabled agents to arrest Gimpel.

In its Jan. 15, 1945, issue, TIME described federal agents following the spies “almost as soon as they landed.” The article reported their arrests but did not explain Colepaugh’s surrender or the roles of Hodgkins and Forni.

The effect was reassuring: enemy agents had arrived, and American authorities had been close behind. The fuller story gives civilian vigilance and a spy’s decision to surrender far greater importance. The FBI made the arrests, but that fact alone did not explain how the landing came to light or how the case broke.

Along another stretch of Maine’s coast, USS Eagle 56 offers a different example of why wartime accounts deserve careful examination. In April 1945, the patrol vessel sank after a violent explosion. Survivors reported evidence of a submarine, but the official inquiry attributed the loss to a boiler explosion. Decades later, persistent research prompted a reassessment. In 2001, the Navy recognized the sinking as a combat loss caused by a German U-boat.

The Nomad Exploration Team also located Eagle 56, finding the wreck in 2018 before its discovery was publicly announced the following year. These were separate events, with different circumstances. Together, they reveal how much the history of America’s wartime shores still rewards investigation.

They are among the stories explored in The Dangerous Shore: a war of merchant crews, intelligence officers, sailors, and ordinary Americans confronted with extraordinary responsibilities close to home.

For families of those lost aboard Cornwallis, the discovery establishes the ship’s final resting place. For the rest of us, it brings the war off America’s coast into sharper focus. These waters carried merchant crews toward home, enemy submarines within reach of shore, and secrets that would outlast the fighting.

Finding Cornwallis was no small undertaking. After years of searching, the Nomad team nearly missed the wreck entirely, finally detecting it in the last 100 yards of a sonar survey. Confirming the discovery required dives into cold, dark water nearly 400 feet deep, with strong currents and conditions that challenged even these experienced divers.

With Cornwallis and Eagle 56, the Nomad team has brought renewed attention to two ships whose histories reach well beyond the circumstances of their sinking.

In Hancock, that history also survives on an ordinary stretch of road. Before anyone knew the strangers’ names or their mission, a teenager noticed their clothes, and a mother refused to dismiss her unease. Neither knew the whole story. Both recognized something worth telling.

More than 80 years later, a team of divers has given us another reason to listen.

Sara Vladic is the New York Times bestselling co-author of INDIANAPOLIS and author of The Dangerous Shore, which explores the Americans who defended the home front during World War II.

On Friday, roughly 200 firefighters were deployed to Adolf Hitler’s notorious Bavarian retreat, dubbed the “Eagle’s Nest,” shortly after a smoke detector triggered an alarm around 9:15 p.m. local time.

Surrounded by rough mountainous terrain near the Austrian border, the infamous retreat is accessible only by a single road and a series of tunnels that lead to the base of the knoll. The historic building sits at an altitude of roughly 6,000 feet, hampering efforts to put out the blaze.

By 9:52 p.m., when firefighters arrived on the scene, the entire structure was engulfed in flames and deemed largely unsalvageable.

No one was hurt, authorities said, and their investigation into what appears to have been a deliberately set fire is ongoing.

Carved into an Alpine crag, the structure, designed by Martin Bormann, head of the Nazi Party Chancellery and Hitler’s private secretary, was intended to serve as a diplomatic reception venue rather than an operational command center. It did not, according to The Telegraph, host any of the regime’s fateful conferences, which all took place lower down at the Berghof.

“This was because the supposedly fearless Alpine Führer was really a hypochondriac crippled by acrophobia who complained the thin air at the Eagle’s Nest aggravated his stomach spasms. He was also terrified of lightning striking the complex’s lift mechanism,” writes the outlet.

Hitler himself only visited the site a handful of times.

The building, however, also holds unique lore for one unit of Army paratroopers — made famous by Stephen Ambrose’s 1992 bestseller Band of Brothers and the subsequent 2001 HBO miniseries of the same title.

In 1945, the Allied Command feared the Germans were planning a “last stand” in Berchtesgaden and, to that end, Gen. Eisenhower ordered it to be secured before German resistance could coalesce around the Nazi stronghold.

On the morning of May 5, the hard-bitten 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment of the 101st Airborne Division, which had fought near-continuously from D-Day through Operation Market Garden and the Battle of the Bulge, arrived in Berchtesgaden. While they weren’t the first — the 7th Infantry Regiment of the U.S. 3rd Infantry Division and the French 2nd Armored Division hold that distinction — they stayed the longest, culminating in some iconic photos from the end of the war — particularly that of a heavily hungover Capt. Lewis Nixon after he and his men drank their way through Hitler and Hermann Goering’s booze collection.

The structure was spared from the wrath of Allied bombing and postwar, and while plans to dynamite the Eagle’s Nest — and all remaining Nazi structures — were created, the notorious guesthouse was spared from destruction on the intervention of the district administrator, Karl Theodor Jacob.

Jacob proposed to neutralize Nazi tourism through “profanation” — namely beer.

“I always said, let’s serve Munich Hofbräu beer up there,” Jacob later recalled, “and then no reverent mood will ever take hold.”

Now, the alleged arsonist has destroyed what the Allies and postwar Germans did not.

“It is damaged to a large extent,” a police spokesperson told the German tabloid Bild. “The house is unlikely to be saved.” 

Barrett was commissioned through Navy ROTC in 2000 and spent four years leading infantry and scout sniper Marines from 2000 to 2004.

When most of his platoon headed to sniper school, he went with them.

It was a “pretty unusual” move for a Marine officer, he told Military Times.

The Marine Corps has since trained its final scout snipers and moved sniper training into reconnaissance and Raider units under Force Design 2030.

After the Marines, Barrett built a business, sold it and started farming. When a friend asked him to join an aid convoy to Ukraine, he had four kids in school and a harvest underway. His first answer was no.

That night, he read about pastors killed and churches destroyed by Russian forces. As a Christian, he wondered how he’d missed it. He made the trip, then kept going back.

Now, despite declaring that he is “not a filmmaker,” Barrett has produced two series on the war in Ukraine: A Faith Under Siege and Faith in War. Within that series is Safe Ground, the story of a Green Beret who removes landmines in Ukraine.

During those trips, Barrett heard about a sniper with the call sign of Lektor, a special forces sniper from the Department of Active Measures with Ukraine’s Defence Intelligence, who, in December 2024, hit a moving Russian soldier at 2,069 meters using a single .338 Lapua Magnum round from a Sako TRG M10. He fired standing in a trench, nearly level with his target, and hit on the first shot.

Lektor is still running missions and only reluctantly agreed to press, Barrett said. Soon, however, Barrett’s time with Lektor will become a short documentary.

Barrett’s crew spent a morning on the range with his unit testing whether American M118 ammunition could match its costly hand-loaded rounds. Lektor said there was “practically no difference,” so the unit stuck with the M118 it already had.

“I was struck by just his humility,” Barrett said.

Lektor, a former gamekeeper, waved off the praise.

“Honestly, I don’t consider myself a super expert,” he told Barrett’s crew in an interview translated from Ukrainian. “This is my job for the duration of the war.”

Before the shot, his team had spent two weeks on the zero line watching for a Russian assault, under orders not to fire. When the situation changed and the team was set to move, Lektor asked for one more chance.

“So I simply begged the commander: give us a day or two for free hunting,” he said.

He spotted a soldier whose gear set him apart from ordinary infantry. The man was walking a tree line at a steady pace and a workable angle. As Lektor prepared to fire, his partner called a wind correction in the wrong direction.

“I managed to shout: recalculate, something’s wrong,” Lektor said. They fixed it in seconds while the target was still moving.

Barrett pointed to the longest confirmed .338 Lapua kill — British Cpl. Craig Harrison’s 2,475-meter shot in Afghanistan in 2009 — which came after several sighting rounds. Shots like that, he said, are “really more like competition shooting.” Lektor is skeptical of the rankings for the same reason.

“Two shots maximum: if you didn’t hit, that’s it,” he said. “That’s how you should compare.”

Within half an hour of the shot, drones were overhead.

“The only thing that saved us was that the enemy didn’t expect a shot from such a distance,” Lektor said. The Russians shelled an area about 500 meters out. His team waited a full day in a dugout before slipping out.

Now, thermal cameras hunt for heat.

“After a shot, a simple suppressor can give you away, because it’s hot, it glows,” Lektor said.

Early in the war, Lektor said, the walk to a firing position was about a kilometer. He now walks eight.

Barrett asked him whether snipers were even relevant anymore. Lektor admitted the role is “a little outdated” but not finished.

“Snipers, in my opinion, are the neurosurgeons,” he said. A sniper team can watch a sector almost continuously, he explained. “Drones have to return to recharge, they get shot down.”

Near Bakhmut, Lektor’s team killed a Russian sniper. A neighboring unit then told them he was the fifth one killed at that position.

“They have absolutely no regard for the lives of their own men,” Lektor said.

Barrett sees Ukraine’s regard for its own people as an advantage, along with its speed in adapting to new technology. Russia, he said, treats the war like a meat grinder: “If I just put so much meat into it, that it breaks the grinder, then we’ll win.”

Lektor’s son enlisted first, and the two have served together most of the war.

“He’s my child, I have to be there,” Lektor said.

Once, while Lektor was hospitalized with wounds, his son was fighting with another team in Chasiv Yar. He was the only one of four men in his group to come out unharmed.

On his own team, Lektor keeps one rule.

“I [am] the first to go in and the last to come out,” he said. “That’s our unwritten rule.”

On March 6, 1945, the Navy found its solution in Jane Kendeigh and her 11 fellow flight nurses. For the first time in the war, the U.S. Navy began deploying combat nurses to an active battlefield. With only six weeks of training, these nurses began to instantly triage and evacuate wounded Marines, working in frigid, unpressurized aircraft amid constant enemy assaults.

Oftentimes called “mom” by their wounded comrades, these 12 women evacuated 2,393 men on 125 flights — more than 13% of everyone evacuated from Iwo Jima — and continued their bloody, lifesaving work in what was to become the largest Allied amphibious landing in the Pacific theater and the final island battle of the Pacific, Okinawa.

Author and professor at Hunter College, City University of New York, Leah Garrett, sat down with Military Times to discuss her latest work, The Flight Nurses’ War: The American Women Who Saved Thousands of Lives at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, as well as the conditions these women worked under and how researching her latest book left her with one of “the most moving moments of my life.”

Editor’s note: This interview has been edited for clarity.

Military Times: When one thinks of Iwo Jima, images come to mind of the blackened sand, brutal conditions and Mount Suribachi, but never women. How did the story of these 12 women come to your attention?

Leah Garrett: When I was writing my last book, I kept hearing these rumors that there had been women at Iwo Jima, and I thought there was no way that there were women at Iwo Jima. I reached out to the Navy, and I got military clearance and worked with an archivist there. He had written a bit about it, but there had never been a book about it — the full story of who these women were and what they were doing there.

Once I started to search about it, I found out that there had indeed been these 12 Navy flight nurses who had landed at Iwo Jima under fire, and in the worst kind of nightmare anyone can imagine, and flew out these men. Part of the reason that no one had done their stories is that these women themselves … I don’t think they realized how extraordinary it was what they had done.

I started to reach out to the families of those 12 flight nurses, and discovered that every historian wants to discover — there was a massive amount of material. Most of the story was actually in these well-cared-for boxes in basements and garages, and so the way I wrote the story was I worked with the military archivists, but then I flew around the country and met with the families themselves, interviewed the children, and went through the boxes and found just all this extraordinary first-person material: photographs, letters, memoirs.

Before we get into the nurses themselves, can you talk about the creation of flight nurses?

All of the flight nurses signed up to join the military after the attack on Pearl Harbor. For each of them, that was the watershed moment when they said, “I need to serve.”

There’s this one woman named Mary O’Connor who goes to Washington and says, “Look, we want you to set up a flight nurses program.” The reason that they wanted to set it up is that the Army had women in combat positions who were nurses, but the Navy didn’t.

As we get into 1945, the final two battles in the Pacific were really far more horrific than anyone expected them to be in the Navy, particularly at Iwo Jima. The Japanese were targeting the medical corps as well, so there was a massive attrition rate, and they did not have enough people there to take care of the men. And also, Iwo Jima is really complicated because you can’t set up field hospitals in Iwo Jima because of the landscape; it’s just too exposed. So then the question becomes: “Well, how do we get these men out?”

What happens is all these different nurses are serving in the Navy at different military hospitals, Navy hospitals around the country, and their supervisors reach out to the best one or two of each group and say, “Look, would you be interested in overseas service?” Nobody knows what it will be, but these women say yes. O’Connor gets hundreds of applications. She picks the top 24 that seem the best to her — basically smart, very capable, very brave women. So these 24 women are then sent out to Alameda, California, to do … this very intense six-week training.

The cream de la creme of the 24 were then flown to Guam, and once they’re in Guam, they’re going to be given their assignment. This had never been done before. The Navy had never put women in combat positions under direct fire, and it was a very incredibly dangerous thing to do. I mean, what if they’re killed? What if they’re captured? What if they’re used for propaganda? Like, there’s so much that could have gone wrong, and I think, much to everyone’s surprise, probably including some of the women, they were so effective in getting those men out.

On March 6, 1945, Jane Kendeigh became the first Navy flight nurse to appear on an active Pacific battlefield. Ultimately, she and 11 other nurses evacuated 2,393 men from Iwo Jima. That’s an incredible statistic, but does any story in particular stand out to you?

One of the crazy aspects of this story is that when you’re in an aircraft flying from Iwo Jima to Guam, there are no doctors on these flights. They fly over there with their corpsman and then a pilot, maybe a navigator. And when they get to Iwo Jima, it’s active fire.

Every time they’re supposed to be landing, there’s supposed to be a lull. There’s no lull because it’s such a horrific battle. They can’t turn around. They have to land. And when they land, they all talked about this visceral aspect of it. The smell of death. The sulfur smell. That the airstrip is shaking. And again, because there are no field hospitals there, they walk over to scores of extremely wounded Marines who are just lying there on stretchers on the ground in terrible, terrible shape.

It’s absolute chaos that they have to face, and then they’re on the aircraft, and they’re by themselves. One of them said, “I can’t even phone anyone to ask what I should do. I’m in the middle of the Pacific. There are these men who are dying or near death all around me, and I have to figure out what to do.” All of it was this learning curve on the plane. It’s freezing cold. There’s no air pressure.

One of the stories that moved me so much — it’s actually one of the more famous stories — but I think one of the most moving ones is about Kendeigh’s first flight. She’s actually not supposed to go on the first flight. There’s this photo a Navy photographer takes of Jane, where she gets off the plane, and she walks over to a Marine, Sgt. Bill Wyckoff, lying there. He’s got bandages all over his face. Wyckoff later said it was like an angel took my hand. He’s lying there near death, and he hears this woman whispering in his ear, “It’s going to be okay.”

Albeit brief, what kind of relationship did these Marines and nurses forge?

The men called them mom. They would say, “Mom, can you come here?”

“Mom, can you put on your lipstick?”

“Can I watch you put on your lipstick like my mom used to do?”

When the book was published, I insisted the font color on the cover be that lipstick red.

The women always said, “We were treated with the greatest respect by these men.” They never dealt with any hassling, no sexualization, none of that. It was just pure respect and love that they received and gave back.

One of my colleagues likes to talk about “research rapture.” What was the process like researching for The Flight Nurses’ War?

The families were incredible because I think that they were so glad somebody was finally telling these amazing stories of their role. And I had so many extraordinary moments. Part of the way that the unpacking of the boxes would work was that I would be with the children as we unpacked the boxes, so it was this extremely moving and rich moment that the kids would remember: “Oh wait, like there’s a shell necklace from Guam,” and then they would tell the story of how the mom got it when she was there.

I talk about this moment a lot in the book, and I always get very seriously teary when I talk about it. Another one of the flight nurses, Mary Leahy Hudnall, came from Massachusetts. She didn’t particularly want to go on planes. She joined the Navy because she thought that she would be on a ship. There you go.

She ends up on these flights, and in one instance they’re putting these men on the aircraft who are mortally wounded, right? There’s no doctor; it’s just them and the corpsman. One of the Marines on her flight out of Iwo Jima, who she knows is very, very, very wounded. He’s probably not going to make it, and he insists that she take a vial of sand from Iwo Jima that he took. She says, “No, you’re going to be fine, you’re going to be fine,” but he keeps saying, “No, can you please take this. I need you to take it because you need to tell the story of what we went through.”

So she takes the vial of sand, and then he unfortunately passes away. She gives that vial of sand to her daughter, and then when I’m in Canada visiting with her daughter, we find that vial of sand in one of the boxes. I got to hold it, and it was honestly one of the most moving moments of my life.

I took a picture of it and put it in the book because, as a historian, it’s my imperative to tell his story. I’m not only telling the story of the nurses, but I’m equally telling the story of the wounded men under their care whose stories need to be told.

Skerritt, a Detroit native whose Hollywood career spanned from the 1960s to the 2020s, died on Wednesday of natural causes, his family said in a statement.

“While the world knew Tom through his remarkable acting career, we knew him for his humor, curiosity, wisdom, generosity, and the love he brought into our lives,” they said. “He cared deeply about imagination, creativity, storytelling, service, veterans, the natural world, and helping others find and share their own voices.”

Born on August 25, 1933, in Detroit, Skerritt served in the Air Force before becoming an actor, making his film debut in 1962 alongside a young Robert Redford in War Hunt.

Tony Scott cast Skerritt in the key supporting role of naval aviation instructor Viper Metcalf in the 1986 blockbuster Top Gun that helped star Tom Cruise soar into Hollywood’s stratosphere.

“Hollywood knew him as Viper. We remember him as an American Veteran. Rest in peace, U.S. Air Force Veteran Tom Skerritt,” Department of Veterans Affairs Secretary Doug Collins wrote Friday on X.

Known for his rugged good looks and ability to shine in a variety of genres, Skerritt delivered memorable performances in leading and supporting roles in film and television.

Skerritt’s breakthrough role was a roguish U.S. Army surgeon in director Robert Altman’s 1970 Korean War black comedy M*A*S*H, a film whose ensemble cast also included Donald Sutherland, Elliott Gould and Sally Kellerman. Skerritt played Southerner Duke Forrest as the doctors at the Mobile Army Surgical Hospital who stitched up wounded troops.

The film, whose popularity coincided with American unease over the Vietnam War, was nominated for five Academy Awards.

In director Ridley Scott’s claustrophobic 1979 sci-fi horror Alien, Skerritt played Dallas, the captain of an ill-fated spacecraft whose crew encounters a deadly parasitic extraterrestrial creature with a surrealist look and a bad attitude. In the film’s famous and bloody “chestburster” scene, Skerritt’s character is seated next to cast mate John Hurt when a baby alien violently exits the torso of Hurt’s character.

Alien, an influential masterpiece whose ensemble cast also included Sigourney Weaver and Ian Holm, earned two Oscar nominations.

“It is spontaneity and impulse that make the difference, and that is what I felt we had with ‘Alien.’ Every one of us had that immediate rapport with each other — the respect that I had for the other actors and the respect that they had for me,” Skerritt told interviewer Peter Sobczynski in 2019, while also lauding Scott’s directorial brilliance.

Alien was one of several films in which Skerritt appeared that featured strong female characters, in this case Weaver’s courageous character Ripley. That was considered pioneering at the time.

“When I read the script, one of the things that I liked most about it was that the woman becomes the hero. I loved that,” Skerritt said.

“The sight of women being in positions of strength and fortitude to make the right connections and decisions was what appealed to me. I experienced that as well in ‘Steel Magnolias,’ with the women in that. I liked the idea of women being tough and strong and influential.”

In Steel Magnolias (1989), Skerritt played Drum Eatenton, husband of Sally Field’s M’Lynn Eatenton.

Skerritt also played Shirley MacLaine’s husband in director Herbert Ross’s 1977 ballet drama The Turning Point, and starred alongside another emerging star in Brad Pitt in Redford’s beautifully shot 1992 period drama A River Runs Through It.

Among other films in which he appeared were: Harold and Maude (1971), Ice Castles (1978), The Dead Zone (1983), Poltergeist III (1988), Contact (1997), Tears of the Sun (2003) and Ted (2012).

On the small screen, Skerritt starred in the offbeat CBS series Picket Fences from 1992 to 1996, playing a Wisconsin town sheriff and claiming an Emmy as outstanding lead actor in a drama series in 1993.

He was a father of five children and was married three times.

At roughly 10:13 p.m., officers with the Prince William County Police Department responded to calls about property destruction near Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia.

Miguel Alonso Maldonado Soriano, 27, was arrested at the scene and has been charged with felony destruction of property, trespass with intent to damage property, and felony injury to a monument, per the police department.

The alleged destruction via a sledgehammer has caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the historic military monument, police said.

Per the Washington Post, a second Marine from the statue is missing the bayonet from the rifle slung over his back, while a third figure’s helmet and face had been “chipped and gouged.”

The memorial was created in honor of Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal’s iconic photograph of U.S. Marines raising the flag over Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, on Feb. 23, 1945.

Austrian-born American sculptor Felix de Weldon, serving with the U.S. Navy at the time, was so moved by the image that he immediately constructed a scale model of the flag raising.

It would take him another nine and a half years to complete the full-sized model now standing in Arlington, Virginia. The smaller monument, allegedly defaced by Maldonado Soriano, stands near the National Museum of the Marine Corps.

Maldonado Soriano is being held without bond pending a court appearance.

During a review period from June 1, 2024, through May 31, 2025, the VA made at least one error in 17,900 cases, roughly 38%, regarding disability decisions for painful scars, according to a recent VA Office of Inspector General report.

920 of those decisions, per the report, led to millions in overpayment and will continue to accrue without “corrective action.”

For service-connected painful scars, as a result of burns, surgeries, shrapnel and gunshot wounds, among other sources, the VA requires a physical examination to support a veteran’s claim.

However, the OIG found that the Disability Benefits Questionnaire “does not clearly define objective versus subjective evidence.

Therefore, claims processors sometimes provided evaluations for painful scars without objective evidence to support the evaluations, which led to overpayments in disability compensation.”

In addition, the report found that physical manifestations of the disability were often evaluated under two separate diagnostic codes, often resulting in “pyramiding” and overpayment.

The report notes that more than a half-million veterans currently receive VA disability benefits for painful scarring caused or worsened by military service, but it took a random sample of 70 decisions from a review population of 47,300.

It further notes that the OIG took the findings to the VBA in February 2026 and following the briefing, “30 additional decisions completed from January 1 through January 31, 2026… identified a 43 percent error rate.”

The VBA, while agreeing with many of the OIG’s recommendations, including revising the “Scars/Disfigurement” section of the DBQ; ensuring employees understand how to accurately evaluate painful scars; and reviewing and correcting the processing errors on decisions the Office of Inspector General team identified, took issue with the statistical sample and the contextualization of those estimates.

“The OIG examined 130 decisions, representing approximately 0.27 percent of the total review population of about 47,300 decisions, and identified 60 errors, which form the basis for the projected 17,900 errors referenced throughout the report,” per VA comments in the report.

“Importantly, only seven of the 60 errors OIG found resulted in improper payments, which represents about 5.4 percent of the sample, and when viewed across the full review population, only about 0.015 percent of all decisions reviewed. The remaining 53 errors, more than 88 percent of the sample, were technical or procedural issues that did not result in improper payments.”

The VA is working to complete the OIG’s suggestions by February 2027 at the latest.

Hubbard was serving a roughly seven-year sentence after being accused by Russia in 2022 of working with Ukraine as a mercenary. American President Donald Trump announced his release from prison on social media, saying it was out of respect for the president and nothing was asked of the U.S. in return.

“This release was not part of an exchange — and we extend our thanks to President Putin for releasing him on President Trump’s request,” Special Envoy Steve Witkoff said on social media after he retrieved Hubbard in St. Petersburg.

Hubbard, 74, was an active-duty airman beginning in March 1974, an Air Force spokesperson told Military Times. He was an Airman 1st Class as an apprentice administration specialist, with his last duty station at Mather Air Force Base, California. He separated from the service in March 1978.

Mather closed as a military base in 1993 and is now operational as the Sacramento Mather Airport.

After active duty, Hubbard served in the Air National Guard, but due to the age of the records, information regarding his role as a guardsman in the force’s system is sparse, the spokesperson said.

The National Guard did not return a request for comment.

Although Trump said “no swap” was necessary for Hubbard’s release, he told reporters outside the White House and in a subsequent social media post that if he placed sanctions on Russia, Hubbard’s release would not have occurred.

He said that people who “don’t know how life works” questioned his decision to waive sanctions on Russia during the negotiations to release Hubbard.

“If I would’ve done that, you would not have Mr. Hubbard coming back,” he told reporters.

“If you would’ve put those sanctions on, or whatever you want to call them, you could forget about him, you’d never see him again,” he continued. “He’d be back in jail for 25 years.”

Hubbard’s release comes less than a week after Trump prevented new sanctions on Russia, which were intended to target the country’s largest buyers of oil and gas, drawing criticism from members of Congress who support the legislation and Ukraine.

Alongside Hubbard, the administration has negotiated the release of other Americans from Russian custody since returning to office last year, including Robert Gilman, Ksenia Karelina and Marc Fogel, Witkoff said.

On Aug. 1, 1943, Lt. Ernie Poulson co-piloted the Consolidated B-24 Liberator on a low-level bombing run of an oil refinery in Campina — part of the deadly American aerial raid of the Ploesti oil fields, codenamed Operation Tidal Wave. His aircraft was one of 53 lost that day. Paulson and his crew crash-landed on a river bank and were taken captive by the Romanian home guard.

As they awaited their fate in that dank, dark pit, the young American airmen could hear a commotion above them. Suddenly, a trap door opened and a head appeared. A woman’s voice spoke to them in heavily accented English:

“Hello, boys. There are only friends here. Now come up and let us help you.”

Poulson and the others didn’t know it at the time but they had just been saved by a guardian angel. Princess Catherine Caradja, a member of Romanian royalty, was now responsible for their lives as the hell of World War II raged around them in Europe.

That scene is a pivotal moment in Adam Makos’ new book Tidal Wave: The Pilots, the Princess, and the Enemy Ace – A True Story of Courage and Survival in WWII. The bestselling author of World War II books A Higher Call and Spearhead details an amazing account of a little-known side story of the ill-fated mission to destroy “Hitler’s gas station.”

“That’s what the brass thought in 1943 when they sent those bombers into Romania at low level: wipe out Hitler’s refineries in one great raid,” Makos told Military Times.

“They said it would shorten the war by six months. The truth was, Operation Tidal Wave was the opening salvo in a campaign that took an entire year to knock Romania out of the war and deny Hitler its oil. It took more than 67 American missions — and 237 bombers lost — to batter Romania enough to cause regime change,” he added.

At the time, Romania was a reluctant ally of Germany. Ruled by a despotic fascist, the country had joined the Axis powers to fight its archnemesis, the Soviet Union. However, many in Romania were wary of the Nazis and favored the Allies.

One of those who believed the country was on the wrong side of the war was Princess Catherine. When the Chattanooga Choo Choo crashed on her estate, she took an active interest in the welfare of its crew, rescuing them from internment in a Luftwaffe POW camp.

Instead, Poulson and his men went to a safer Romanian prison camp where Princess Catherine could protect them. She even managed to have the camp commander replaced when he became too severe in his handling of the Americans.

Makos was tipped off to the story by Frederick W. Smith, founder of FedEx, who died in 2025. Smith told the author about Poulson and how his crew was aided by the Romanian princess. As the author investigated, he learned the B-24 copilot was still alive

“We found one of the last survivors of the 1,700 men that flew that mission in 1943. I was overjoyed,” says Makos, adding, “Ernie had a sharp mind and was physically fit. At 97, as he was telling me this story, you could tell he was still a tough guy.”

As the war progressed, more and more Romanians were killed in the senseless slaughter of the Eastern Front in Russia. Support for the Nazis weakened and in 1944, the country’s monarch — Michael I, who was king in name only — led a coup against the country’s dictator and flipped sides to join the Allies.

This enabled Romania’s leading fighter ace — Prince Constantin “Buzz” Cantacuzino, who hated the Nazis — to assist Allied airmen held prisoner in his country, including Lt. Col. James Alexander Gunn, the highest-ranking U.S. officer shot down in the Ploesti Raid.

In a Messerschmitt Bf 109 painted with two large American flags on its sides, Cantacuzino flew Gunn to safety in Italy. From there, the colonel helped plan the Operation Reunion rescue of more than 1,000 captured Allied airmen, including Poulson and his crew, in Boeing B-17 bombers converted into troop transports.

Buzz flew escort for the Flying Fortresses in a North American P-51 Mustang.

Like most of Makos’ books, the narrative doesn’t end with the guns falling silent. The author writes about how Princess Catherine and Poulson meet again years later in Europe, where the American learned just how much was at stake for his benefactor if she had been caught.

After the Communists seized control in Romania, Catherine escaped to America, where she lived in Texas with one of the airmen on Poulson’s plane: Richard Britt. Following the Romanian Revolution in 1989, the princess returned to her homeland, where she died at 100 in 1993.

“This is such an amazing story,” Makos says. “We were so lucky that many of the people involved wrote memoirs, so we were able to piece it together and triangulate all the incredible events for accuracy. I interviewed Ernie Poulson in 2018 to get his side of it. He played such a movie-like role in this story.”

Poulson later headed the Atlas missile program for the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a colonel in 1961. He then became a professor of business at the University of Utah. He died in 2020.

Tapping into unreleased family archives, diaries, letters and firsthand accounts, Makos crafts a fast-paced, action-packed narrative that ties together many important individuals and historic events into a personal story about World War II. By presenting this aspect of the Ploesti Raid, he says he is focusing on the brave men who sacrificed so much to stop the Nazi war machine.

“Some 310 of them gave their lives, and they did help bring about an earlier end to the most terrible war in human history. Are we a country that remembers our heroes, those audacious young men who flew into the jaws of hell? Or will they be just a footnote in history?

“That’s why I wrote Tidal Wave: to make sure their names and their story are known.”