Mikael Cook served as a U.S. Army engineer in the reserves. He was sent to Afghanistan in 2019 helping to build out infrastructure for U.S. military camps, working with local translators and other workers. He befriended his Afghan co-workers, especially an interpreter, Muhammad, and his brother Abdul.

Following the Trump administration’s decision in 2020 to withdraw from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years, it fell to the Biden administration to execute the withdrawal which they did very abruptly in August 2021, creating administrative and civil chaos and abandoning our allies and billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment.

The scene at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport were horrific with thousands of Afghans, who had worked for the U.S. and feared Taliban reprisals, desperate to escape. With no helping coming from the Biden administration, it fell to an ad hoc coalition of U.S. civilians and military members ­­– later dubbed “Digital Dunkirk’ – to help rescue as many Afghans as they could. On August 26, 2021, in the midst of the chaos at the airport, an ISIS-K terrorist suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt that killed 13 U.S. servicemen and over 169 Afghan civilians.

Mikael Cook tells this tragic and dramatic story from various perspectives in his riveting book, “Life and Death at Abbey Gate: The Fall of Afghanistan and the Operation to Save Our Allies.”

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Former Florida police investigator James Byrd-Williams, Sr. recounts the story of his son's murder in 2020. 44-year-old Michael Williams was an African-American man living in the mostly White college town of Grinnell, Iowa, to be near his ex-wife and kids. Occurring just weeks after the George Floyd incident, Michael Williams’ body was found strangled and burned in a ditch outside of town. Three people were later convicted.

J.B. expresses his frustration with the thoroughness of the investigation and the fact that officials and the NAACP—eager to avoid any media attention of the type recently seen in Minneapolis—denied it was a hate crime, and avoided the word 'lynching' in describing the homicide. UK newspaper The Guardian asked, “When is a lynching a lynching?”

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Becky Ellis was one of her father’s eight children by four wives, and the chaos of her childhood, dominated by a haunted and difficult father, marked her and all her siblings. As a child, she suffered through her father’s paranoia about Nazis attacking them; trips to the dentist without anesthesia; and other irrational behaviors.

Only at age 89, when Becky was a grown wife and mother, did her father Staff Sgt. Louis K. Boswell finally share his wartime recollections as part of the legendary ‘Timberwolves’ – the nickname for the 104th infantry division. The ‘Timberwolves’ were deployed in northwestern Europe and saw almost 200 straight days of brutal fighting through France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and western Germany, including participating in the Battle of the Bulge. The group saw an extreme level of casualties, and Becky’s father described how he survived and how it felt when he returned stateside, with what was then an undiagnosed case of severe PTSD.

This compelling account is a glimpse inside military families who must welcome home a traumatized parent. Personally liberated by finally solving the mystery of her father, Becky shared her story in her book, “Little Avalanches,” and continues to work with military families coping with PTSD.

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com