Veterans Facts

As she tells it, Catherine Roberts dreamed her son Nat, deployed to Iraq, was wrapped in a quilt. She woke up in her Delaware sewing room and made one, then sent it to a wounded stranger at Walter Reed. Volunteers have since hand-sewn over 454,000 Quilts of Valor for veterans touched by war, about 3,000 a month. The 450,000th went out in July 2026. They are still sewing.

A small group of retirees in Bangor, Maine has met every troop flight through the airport since 1991. It started with one homecoming during Desert Storm. Volunteers give each soldier a handshake, a cookie, and a free phone call home. Some flights land in the middle of the night. Someone is always there. More than a million troops have walked through that line. Thirty-five years on, they are still waiting at the gate.

A former Marine pilot in Peru, Indiana, bought a Vietnam-era Army Huey on eBay. The listing said it was not flyable. It was trailered 1,300 miles home from Maine, volunteers rebuilt it, and in 2007 it flew again. The nonprofit he and his brother started now flies three Hueys and has given more than 23,000 rides. The crew says a veteran is reunited with a Huey at every event.

During World War II, dog lovers asked American families to lend their pets to the military. Owners signed up more than 40,000 dogs. Over 10,000 of them served as sentries, scouts and messengers. When the war ended, the military retrained the survivors to be family pets again. Many came home with honorable discharge papers.

Sergeant Alvin York came home from World War I as a national hero. Hollywood wanted his story, and he said no for over 20 years. With only nine months of schooling himself, he raised money for a high school in his Tennessee mountain county and mortgaged his home twice to pay its teachers. A century after he broke ground, it still teaches the county's kids.

Since 2005, the Honor Flight Network has flown over 300,000 veterans to Washington for free, to see the memorials built for them. About 22,000 fly every year through 130-plus hubs, with nearly 40,000 still waiting. Every flight still lands to strangers at the gate, clapping and waving flags. Houston's Hobby Airport welcomes its next flight home September 19, 2026. Anyone can stand in that crowd.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall gets washed by hand. Vietnam veterans get down on the granite and scrub it themselves, with buckets, soft brushes and a hose. Their group, Chapter 641, started the ritual in 1996, and through 2026 that is 31 seasons of vets and volunteer groups washing the stone together. The wall carries 58,281 names. They are still out there scrubbing it, every warm season.

More than 800 C-47 transport planes carried over 13,000 paratroopers across the Channel before dawn on D-Day. One flew at the front. After the war it hauled freight for decades. Then it sat in a Wisconsin boneyard, next in line to be cut up and modernized. An Air Force historian chasing a serial number found it there. Passengers still board through the door the paratroopers jumped from.

Joe Walsh of the Eagles was 20 months old when his father, an Air Force jet instructor, died in a 1949 collision over Okinawa. There was no support system for families like his. In 2017 Walsh started VetsAid, a benefit concert he plays himself, with the proceeds going to veterans' groups in that year's host city. Eight shows in, he is still showing up.

A World War II bomber named Doc sat in the Mojave for 42 years as a Navy target. An Air Force veteran spent more than eleven of those years talking the Navy into letting it go. It went home to Wichita, where 1,644 B-29s were built, and retirees from those lines helped rebuild it. Doc is one of two B-29s still flying, and it lands at airports every year so people can climb inside.

Rishi Sharma has filmed more than 3,000 World War II combat veterans. He started as a Southern California high schooler with no military family, biking to retirement homes and often skipping class to film the men. For ten years, funded by donations, he has crisscrossed the country, and he is still going. Every recording still goes to the veteran's family.

On the eve of Thanksgiving 1997, a New York woman brought five puppies into a maximum-security women's prison and taught a group of inmates to raise them. Today her prison-raised service dogs go home free of charge with wounded war veterans, each one spending two years with someone serving time and learning more than 70 commands. The puppies still grow up behind bars.

George Strait stops his sold-out concerts to honor a combat-wounded veteran, who is brought on stage and given the key to a mortgage-free home as thousands watch. Banks donate the homes through the Military Warriors Support Foundation, and the count has passed 120 in over a decade. Strait served in the Army from 1971 to 1975, and the foundation says the partnership is still strong.

Wounded World War II veteran Bob Dole was raising money for a memorial that much of America did not know was planned. He went to Tom Hanks with a long list of reasons to help. Within ten seconds, Hanks said, "I'm your man." He became the campaign's national spokesman, and more than 600,000 donations came in. It opened in 2004, and about four million people visit every year.

Bill Broadie came home from Vietnam a wounded 19-year-old Marine and met anti-war protesters. In April 2008 volunteers he gathered from the cattle business cooked ribeyes for Kansas National Guardsmen leaving for Iraq. Broadie died in 2021, and his All American Beef Battalion kept hauling its cookers from base to base. By late 2025 it had fed 457,500 troops and family members in 29 states.

In 1982 Vietnam veteran John Devitt went to the dedication of the Wall in Washington and wanted people who could never make the trip to feel what he felt. With other veterans he built a half-size copy carrying the same names and first set it up in Tyler, Texas in 1984. Two copies of The Moving Wall still travel the country, about a week in each town, from April to November.

Brittany Bergquist and her 12-year-old brother Robbie saw a news report about a soldier's $7,600 phone bill from calling home. They started with $21 to help, then found a way to recycle old phones into calling cards. Their charity now reports more than 400 million minutes provided to deployed troops, and over 3,000 drop-off sites still collect old phones.

In a single day in 1952, the people of Moses Lake, Washington, built a whole farm for a stranger. From one minute past midnight, more than 50 tradesmen raised a seven-room house by floodlight while about 100 men on 25 tractors leveled and planted 63.5 acres. By day's end it belonged to Donald Dunn, a WWII tank driver whose Kansas farm a flood had wiped out.

The gaunt face on the POW/MIA flag is a real person. When designer Newt Heisley needed a model for the silhouette, his son Jeffrey had just come home from Marine training, sick and hollow-cheeked, so Heisley sketched his own son onto the flag and never copyrighted it. It is the only flag permanently installed in the Capitol Rotunda, and it still flies at post offices across the country.

More than 420 severely injured veterans have been handed the keys to mortgage-free houses built around their injuries. It started when a Massachusetts construction supervisor saw a news story about a soldier who lost both legs in Iraq, found no group building homes for men like him, and started one in 2004. New houses are still being handed over.

When a gray SUV was T-boned and flipped onto its side at a busy Daytona Beach intersection in March 2024, eight strangers - including Army Iraq war veteran Amy Ridgely - ran over and rocked it back onto its wheels in under 60 seconds. The whole rescue was caught on a traffic camera, and Daytona Beach Police called it the spirit of Daytona Beach.

Vietnam veterans got no parade when the war ended in 1975. Many came home to silence. Chicago decided eleven years was long enough. On June 13, 1986, nearly 200,000 veterans marched through downtown Chicago. More than half a million people came out to cheer them. One marcher, a paraplegic veteran, had days earlier saved a drowning toddler. He rode the route as an honorary marshal. Chicago was finally saying thank you.

Allen Parton came home from the Gulf War in 1991 unable to walk, talk, or remember his wife and children. Doctors told Sandra to leave him. A Labrador named Endal - rejected from service training - learned 200 commands from Allen's gestures and rebuilt his capacity to feel. When a car knocked Allen out in 2001, Endal put him in the recovery position, retrieved his phone, and ran to a hotel for help. Endal was best man when they remarried.

Operation Magic Carpet turned Navy warships into giant floating dorms. The mission: bring 8 million WWII troops home. Nearly 370 Navy ships took part in the Pacific, with bunks stacked up to five tiers high on hangar decks. USS Saratoga alone carried more troops than any other ship in the fleet: 29,204 men. Flight decks built for fighter planes were packed wall to wall with veterans, finally sailing home.