When a man detonated a suicide vest at the morning bazaar in Khost, Afghanistan, more than two years ago, Staff Sgt. Andrew Braxton and Sgt. Benjamin Bullard were unscathed. Their fellow North Carolina National Guard soldiers were not as lucky.

Eight members of the 3-61 would die in battle nearby at Combat Outpost Keating two weeks later in one of the most costly engagements of the Afghanistan War. What Sean T. Ambriz was about to face was a prelude.

The storm had deposited 37 inches of rain, felled trees and caused power outages on the tiny Pacific island. Now, they watched in horror as the floodwaters swirled around them, overtaking the building and rising quickly inside.

The view from the A-10 cockpits was troubling — low cloud cover and uncertain terrain below. The view from the ground was just plain grim.

The wounded U.S. servicemember was not far from Kandahar in Afghanistan. Three others were with him, but they could not get the injured man to safety because of an insurgent ambush. Nearby U.S. Army soldiers could not engage the enemy, and a close-air support coordinator on the ground was panicked and inexperienced.

Jerry Giefer doesn’t recall much about what happened Dec. 30 at his office at the Army Corps of Engineers compound in Seoul. One moment he was working and the next, everything went black.

Air Force Senior Airman Zachary Hoeh scanned the hard-packed hillsides of the Afghanistan desert on May 26, 2011, looking for enemy triggermen who had virtually wiped out a squad of U.S. Army Pathfinders with improvised explosive devices.

The eastern Afghan mountains and starry night sky were a ghostly orange in the lenses of Master Sgt. Thomas Case’s night-vision goggles.

They were among the bravest who fought the Germans in the hellish War to End All Wars in Europe, but for nearly a century their legacy has been obscured by discrimination.

Jeff Hall was in his backyard, holding a 9mm pistol to his head trying to find the courage to pull the trigger. That was in 2008, after two deployments to Iraq that left him physically and mentally wounded.