Larry Breeze is a retired history professor from Southeast Missouri State University and a World War II veteran. Originally from a small Missouri town, Breeze had rarely journeyed farther afoot than his home county before he joined the Army and wound up in Europe.

He fought the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge and then through the German countryside. "Some of it is about as close to hell on earth, I think, as you can imagine," he says.

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National Guard Sergeant Samantha Harris, stationed in Dexter, Missouri, was deployed to Iraq in 2003-2004. She left behind a husband and three young daughters.

Sergeant Harris recounts the difficulties of raising a family on the other side of the world.

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One of the responsibilities of a Marine Corps recruiter during the Vietnam War era was to inform the families of fallen soldiers.

One such "Angel of Death" was Harry Spiller. Now an author and criminal justice professor at John A. Logan Community College in Carterville, Ill., Spiller lived through the unenviable experience of recruiting high school kids in Southeast Missouri to join the Marines....and many times tell their families they had died in battle.

Spiller wrote a book about the experience entitled Vietnam: Angel of Death.

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The Stars & Stripes is known as “the soldier’s newspaper,” read by U-S servicemen and women stationed around the world.

The first Stars & Stripes was printed during the Civil War in Bloomfield, Missouri by Union soldiers from Illinois.

One would expect to find a national museum for a publication of this magnitude in Washington, DC. However, the Star & Stripes National Military Museum and Library is located in its birthplace in rural Missouri.

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Frank Nickell profiles the heroic deeds of four Southeast Missourians who won the Congressional Medal of Honor: Darrell Cole, Billie Gene Kanell, Richard Wilson, and Ken Stilson.

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