Free Republic

FORT HUACHUCA — He was loved. He was mourned. He was buried. So it was Wednesday for Army Cpl. Casey Lee Mellen, who was killed in action in Iraq on Sept. 25. It was the last day of public remembrances for the 21-year-old Case, as his family called him. Their private grief will continue, but Wednesday his wife, father, mother, sister and nephew were surrounded by many people in a comforting embrace at the Main Post Chapel and later at the committal area of the Southern Arizona Veterans Memorial Cemetery. Led by Pastor Tommy Simpson, who read passages from the...

SIERRA VISTA — It was in December 1941 when Benjamin Franklin Williams was a private first class, serving with a New Mexico National Guard unit in the Philippines. Japan struck what was then a U.S. territory. A few months later, Williams found himself a prisoner of war. Like many captured in the Philippines, he would spend World War II in Japanese POW camps, where he was forced to work on starvation rations and abused. Some of his teeth were knocked out by a Japanese guard who used the butt of his rifle on Williams after knocking him to the ground...