In 1866, four women placing spring flowers on the graves of Confederate soldiers at Friendship Cemetery in Columbus, Miss., noticed that the nearby graves of Union soldiers were barren. They took it upon themselves to decorate those, too.…
The remainder of this commentary is available at nytimes.com.
Kayla M. Williams, a senior policy researcher at the nonprofit, nonpartisan RAND Corporation, served in the United States Army as an Arabic linguist and was deployed to Iraq in 2003 for a year. She was an assistant secretary in the Department of Veterans Affairs during the Biden administration and is the author of “Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army.”
This commentary originally appeared on New York Times on May 28, 2023. Commentary gives RAND researchers a platform to convey insights based on their professional expertise and often on their peer-reviewed research and analysis.
