Innovation & Flight

Fort Worth, TX

Fort Worth leased 100 acres on Decatur Road in 1925 for a new municipal airport, timed to the Air Mail Act that year, and by May 1926 National Air Transport — a forerunner of United Airlines — flew the field's first mail run to Chicago. Renamed Meacham Field in 1927 for a former mayor, it gained the nation's first air-conditioned passenger terminal in 1937 and, during World War II, trained U.S. Navy pilots and ferried fighters and torpedo bombers toward the Pacific. After commercial flights moved on in 1953, it became one of the world's leading centers for corporate and general aviation.

Meadville, PA

In 1788, David Mead and a small band of settlers pushed west from Pennsylvania's Wyoming Valley to plant a settlement on French Creek, in country only recently opened to American pioneers. The town they founded grew quickly enough to become the seat of Crawford County by 1800, and it went on to leave two very different marks on the nation: in 1842 it staged what is remembered as the first direct primary election in the United States, and decades later it became a cradle of the 'hookless fastener' — the humble zipper — turning a frontier outpost into an unlikely engine of American invention.

North Union Township, PA · est. 1946

Rising on a hilltop in 1802, this elegant Georgian manor announced that the western Pennsylvania frontier had grown wealthy. Its builder, Isaac Meason, was a Revolutionary War veteran turned pioneering ironmaster who helped make Fayette County an early center of American iron. In 1817 at nearby Plumsock he erected one of the country's first rolling mills, an innovation that would soon transform how the nation made its iron and steel.

Lockhart, TX

Cotton farmer Alexander Duff Mebane built this prairie-school brick house in 1918 near the fields where he did his life's work. He bred a hardy, high-yielding cotton that resisted drought, storms, and the boll weevil, and it spread worldwide under the name Mebane Triumph. The home stayed in his family until 1947.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 2015

In 1898, at the close of a century that had transformed medicine into a science, a small group of American and Canadian physicians and librarians met in Philadelphia to solve a stubborn problem: doctors could not easily reach the reliable, up-to-date medical literature their patients' lives depended on. Their answer was the Medical Library Association, the world's oldest body of its kind, dedicated to organizing and sharing trustworthy medical knowledge. Among its founders stood the celebrated physician Sir William Osler and the librarian Margaret R. Charlton, pairing clinical prestige with the emerging profession of medical librarianship.

Berkeley, CA

In 1980 this University of California, Berkeley building was named for Melvin Calvin, the chemist who won the 1961 Nobel Prize for mapping the way plants convert carbon dioxide into sugar—the reactions now known as the Calvin cycle. Working at Berkeley's radiation laboratory in the postwar years, Calvin used radioactive tracers to unlock one of the central mysteries of photosynthesis. The lab that bears his name marks a landmark in twentieth-century American science.

Brevard County, FL

Dedicated in 1964 on Florida's Space Coast, this monument honors the vast, largely anonymous workforce behind Project Mercury — the engineers, technicians, and support staff who put the first Americans into orbit. Its Latin motto, borrowed from the tomb of architect Christopher Wren, translates as 'If you seek his monument, look around you,' inviting visitors to see the launch complexes and the reach into space itself as the true memorial. It stands at the heart of the early Cold War race beyond Earth.

Brevard County, FL

This is the original site of the Mercury Mission Control Center at Cape Canaveral, the nerve center for America's first human spaceflight program. From consoles here, engineers tracked the pioneering Project Mercury flights that put the first American astronauts into space in the early 1960s, at the height of the Cold War space race. Mission control later moved to Houston, leaving this Florida site as the birthplace of American crewed spaceflight operations.

Washington, DC

In the early decades of the republic, American leaders dreamed of fixing a national prime meridian through the capital city, freeing the young nation from reliance on Britain's Greenwich line. A series of meridian markers were placed in Washington to anchor this ambition, and the small stone here—inscribed simply "US Meridian 1890"—commemorates that effort to define longitude from American soil. Though the Greenwich meridian ultimately became the world standard, these quiet markers remain reminders of the country's push for scientific and geographic independence.

El Paso, TX

Water was the promise that won Charles Morehead the El Paso mayoralty in 1903, and that year the International Water Company began tapping the Hueco Bolson Aquifer from wells on the mesa north of Fort Bliss. Demand outran the aquifer's recharge, and even after the city bought the works in 1909 the pumps struggled to keep up. In 1938 the city replaced the aging plant with the Mesa Water Boosting Station, built in a striking Pueblo Deco style that makes it the only historic municipal building of its kind in El Paso.

Lincolnton, NC

Michael Hoke (1874-1944) was a pioneering orthopedic surgeon who founded hospitals for children with disabilities and served as chief surgeon of the Warm Springs Foundation in Georgia, the polio treatment center associated with Franklin Roosevelt. His birthplace stood eighty yards east.

Charles County, MD

On a small island in the Potomac in December 1900, Reginald Fessenden and his assistant Frank Very did something no one had done before: they sent understandable human speech through the air on radio waves, from one tall mast to another. Until that moment wireless meant only the dots and dashes of Morse code; here, the spoken word itself first traveled without wires. It was the quiet beginning of everything from broadcast radio to the mobile phone.

Del Rio, TX

Just eight years after Kitty Hawk, aviation pioneer Galbraith Perry Rodgers touched down at Del Rio during the first transcontinental flight across America. The border county soon became a hub of military flying—aerial patrols in World War I, responses to Pancho Villa's raids, and a young Lt. James Doolittle flying border patrols before his World War II fame. In the 1940s the flat terrain and mild climate brought Laughlin Air Force Base, later a home to astronaut training and U-2 reconnaissance missions.

Lower Providence Township, PA · est. 1970

Built in 1762, this Montgomery County mansion became the first American home of John James Audubon (1785–1851), the artist and naturalist who would revolutionize the depiction of wildlife. It was here, as a young man, that Audubon began the close study of American birds that culminated in his vivid, lifelike paintings. The site is now owned and operated by the County of Montgomery.

Mobile, AL

This site holds much of Alabama's early aviation history, from John Fowler's flying-machine experiments and Mobile's first flying field to Bates Field, dedicated in 1929. In 1939 the War Department built a great military aviation depot here, named for aviator Wendell Brookley, that employed more than 16,000 people during World War II. After the war Brookley's giant Globemaster cargo planes flew in the Berlin Airlift, and in 2012 Airbus opened its first American aircraft plant on the site.

San Diego, CA

This San Diego memorial honors John J. Montgomery, an aviation pioneer who conducted controlled glider flights in Southern California decades before the Wright brothers' powered flight. The poetic inscription — "He opened for all mankind the great highway of the sky" — captures his place among the earliest experimenters in heavier-than-air flight. Montgomery's work made the hills above San Diego an early proving ground for American aeronautics.

Danville, PA · est. 1982

Carved from Columbia County in 1850, Montour County took its name from Madame Montour, the influential Native interpreter and diplomat who moved between Indigenous nations and colonial officials. In the industrial age its seat, Danville, became a cradle of American iron, where the first iron T-rails for the nation's booming railroads were manufactured. The county also claims Christopher Sholes, born here, whose later work produced the typewriter that transformed the modern office.

City of Ithaca, NY

In the heart of Ithaca, New York, this monument honors Ezra Cornell (1807–1874), the self-made businessman who rose from carpenter and millwright to a key figure in the telegraph industry, helping build the lines that knitted the young nation together. Having amassed a fortune through Western Union, Cornell devoted his wealth to public good, most famously by founding a university in 1865 on the hills above Cayuga Lake. His vision was a radically open institution where, in his own words, "any person can find instruction in any study."

Salem, OR

This Douglas-fir grew from a seed that orbited the Moon aboard Apollo 14 in 1971, carried by astronaut Stuart Roosa, a former smokejumper. Hundreds of these "Moon Tree" seeds were later germinated and planted across the country, and this one was set here by Oregon's governor on Arbor Day in 1976. It links a living tree to one of humanity's great journeys.

Alton, TX

Financed by the neighboring cities of Edinburg, McAllen, and Mission, Moore Field opened in 1941 as a U.S. aviation training base, named for Lt. Frank M. Moore, a pilot killed in World War I. It trained airmen throughout World War II before closing in 1945, was reactivated during the Korean War, and since 1960 has housed research offices of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Its runways trace the long shadow of three American conflicts across a single Rio Grande Valley site.

Kermit, TX

This wooden cable-tool rig was the last of its kind in the United States to retire from daily use, its bull wheels and rig irons of a type not manufactured since the 1920s. It drilled the Moorhead No. 1 well in Loving County, powered first by steam, then by a gasoline engine that ran its 'Yo-Yo' wheels and walking beam, before the well went electric in 1966. That year R. O. Moorhead gave it to Kermit as a Permian Basin oil-history exhibit, moved 35 miles fully intact.

Urbana, IL

In 1993, two developers at the University of Illinois's National Center for Supercomputing Applications released Mosaic, the first browser to weave images and text into a single point-and-click window onto the young World Wide Web. Before Mosaic, the internet was largely the domain of specialists typing commands; afterward, anyone could wander it. The graphical browser it pioneered became the template for every web experience that followed.

Washoe County, NV

On the 10,778-foot summit of Mt. Rose, Dr. James Edward Church of the University of Nevada established one of America's first high-altitude weather observatories on June 29, 1905. There he pioneered the science of snow survey, devising the "Nevada system" of measuring the water stored in mountain snowpack to forecast seasonal runoff. His method is used worldwide to this day, and the north summit was renamed Church Peak in his honor.

Sierra Madre, CA

Benjamin 'Don Benito' Wilson cut this trail up the San Gabriel Mountains in 1864 to bring down timber for his ranch. A quarter-century later, in 1889, pack burros hauled a telescope and building materials up the same path to help establish the first Mount Wilson observatory under Harvard College. What began as a logging route thus became a lifeline for early American astronomy, and it remains beloved by hikers of Sierra Madre.

Holyoke, MA

Late on the night of July 9, 1946, a B-17 Flying Fortress carrying twenty-five servicemen home crashed into the slopes of Mount Tom in poor weather, killing everyone aboard. The men had come through the Second World War only to die on a domestic flight bound for discharge and home. It remains one of the worst air disasters in the region's history, and this memorial marks the mountainside where they were lost.

Murrysville, PA · est. 1960

Drilled in 1878, the Murrysville gas well became one of the most productive in the world and a wonder of the early natural-gas age. When it caught fire in 1881 it burned for years, its roaring, brilliant flame drawing sightseers before engineers finally brought it under control and piped the gas to Pittsburgh's hungry mills and homes. The site helped prove that natural gas could be captured and moved as an industrial fuel.

Nashville, TN

Nashville's first firefighting force, a company of volunteers, formed in May 1807, and the city organized its first paid department in 1860 under Chief J.S. Dashiell, equipped with horse-drawn steam engines. A telegraph alarm system arrived in 1875, and the department entered the motor age when Chief A.A. Rozetta used the first automobile in 1910, followed by gasoline-driven engines in 1912. The marker traces a century of the city's evolving fire protection.

Corpus Christi, TX

Commissioned in March 1941 as the nation prepared for war, Naval Air Station Corpus Christi grew into one of the country's great flight schools, graduating some 35,000 aviators and earning the nickname 'the University of the Air.' Its trainees included future president George H. W. Bush and astronaut-senator John Glenn, while hundreds of WAVES served as instructors, controllers, and technicians across its many auxiliary fields.

New York, NY

Along this walk, a living memorial of trees was planted to honor the great sea fights of World War II — from the surprise blow at Pearl Harbor in December 1941 through the carrier duels at the Coral Sea and Midway in 1942, the desperate night actions off Guadalcanal at Savo Island and Cape Esperance, the far-northern clash near the Komandorski Islands, and the climactic Pacific battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf. Dedicated in the mid-1940s, the tablet turns a quiet promenade into a roll call of the naval engagements that decided the war at sea. Each named battle marks a turning point where American and Allied fleets blunted and then rolled back Axis power across two oceans.

Houston, TX

Built in 1926 in one of Houston's new planned neighborhoods, this villa-style house was an experiment in modern building materials, raised in concrete when most homes were still wood and brick. Commissioned for a concrete manufacturer, it showed off stucco finishes and a Spanish mission doorway that would not become fashionable for years. It stands as an early local test of construction methods that would soon spread across suburban America.

Nye County, NV

Chosen in 1950 as the nation's continental proving ground, the Nevada Test Site sprawls across 1,350 square miles of isolated desert flats where nuclear devices were detonated for defense and other purposes beginning with the first test on Frenchman Flat in January 1951. It became the country's principal nuclear-explosives testing laboratory and one of the most vivid landscapes of the Cold War. Beneath that atomic history lies far deeper time: archaeology reveals some 9,500 years of continuous human occupation, most recently by the Southern Paiute.

Eureka County, NV

In 1864 prospectors from Austin, Nevada found silver-lead ore on Prospect Peak, launching the Eureka Mining District, which by 1878 supported a population over 9,000 and ranked as Nevada's second-richest producer after the Comstock. Its peak came between 1870 and 1890 before shifting markets closed most mines. The nearby Fad Shaft—sunk from the 1940s toward ore believed to lie 2,500 feet down—was halted by flooding just 35 feet short, becoming the district's last, ore-less underground venture, while modern heap-leach operations later revived gold recovery from once-worthless rock.

Hoboken, NJ

This plaque marks the New Jersey Alpha chapter of Tau Beta Pi, the national engineering honor society, at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken. Founded in the late nineteenth century, Tau Beta Pi recognizes distinguished engineering students, and its chapters trace the professionalization of American engineering as it grew into a formal, credentialed discipline. Stevens, one of the country's oldest dedicated engineering schools, was an early home to that movement.

New Orleans, LA

On January 10, 1812, the steamboat New Orleans, commanded by Nicholas Roosevelt, completed the first successful steam-powered voyage down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers and tied up at this spot. The passage proved that boats could travel upstream against the current, transforming inland commerce. New Orleans would grow into one of the world's great ports on the strength of the steamboat trade.

New York, NY

This plaque marks the room in Manhattan's Hotel New Yorker where Nikola Tesla, the visionary Serbian-American inventor, spent his final years and died alone in January 1943. Decades earlier Tesla had helped win the 'War of the Currents,' championing the alternating-current systems that made it practical to transmit electricity across long distances and light entire cities. By the time he died in near-poverty, the AC power grids he pioneered had become the invisible backbone of modern life. The marker turns an ordinary hotel address into the last chapter of one of history's great inventive minds.

City of Niagara Falls, NY

This monument at Niagara Falls honors Nikola Tesla, the visionary electrical engineer whose alternating-current (AC) system powered the world's first large-scale hydroelectric plant here in the 1890s. Born in 1856 in the village of Smiljan (in present-day Croatia, then part of the Austro-Hempire and later associated with Yugoslavia) and a naturalized American, Tesla's polyphase AC designs won the famous "War of the Currents" against Thomas Edison's direct current. The Niagara Falls power project, drawing on Tesla's patents, demonstrated that electricity could be generated in bulk and transmitted over long distances to cities and factories.

New York, NY · est. 1977

On January 7, 1943, the Serbian-American inventor Nikola Tesla died in New York City at the age of eighty-six. A pioneer of alternating-current electricity, Tesla's discoveries in the field of AC power helped carry the United States and the world into the modern industrial age. This marker was placed in 1977 by the Yugoslav-American Bicentennial Committee.

Terrell, TX

Foreseeing war with Germany, Britain arranged to train pilots overseas, and in August 1941—months before the U.S. entered World War II—the Royal Air Force's No. 1 British Flying Training School opened just south of Terrell with enthusiastic local backing. Over the war civilian instructors put some 2,200 RAF cadets and 138 U.S. Army Air Forces cadets through 20 weeks of flight and ground school, and the town embraced them under the school's motto, 'the seas divide, but the skies unite.' The last cadets left Terrell's railroad station in September 1945, and a museum opened in 2002 to keep the story alive.

Clovis, NM

Norman Petty built a modern recording studio in a converted grocery store in Clovis, New Mexico, funding it with royalties from his trio's hit "Mood Indigo." There, experimenting with echo and multitrack techniques, he recorded a generation of early rock-and-roll artists—most famously Buddy Holly and the Crickets—turning a small plains town into an unlikely birthplace of hits.

San Diego, CA

The North American A-5 Vigilante was one of the fastest carrier-based aircraft of the Cold War, entering U.S. Navy service around 1961 as a supersonic bomber before being reworked into the RA-5C reconnaissance platform. From the decks of aircraft carriers it flew dangerous photo-reconnaissance missions during the Vietnam era, its sleek twin-engine design pushing the limits of naval aviation. Preserved here in San Diego, near the city's carrier-museum waterfront, it stands as a survivor of the jet age's rapid ambitions.

San Francisco, CA

The North Dutch Windmill was built in 1902 at the western edge of Golden Gate Park, where it once pumped groundwater to irrigate the sprawling greenery reclaimed from sand dunes. By the late 20th century it had fallen into disrepair, and a 1981 restoration — driven by Eleanor Rossi Crabtree's fundraising and volunteer labor from a Naval Reserve construction battalion — brought it back to life. It remains a beloved San Francisco landmark.

Town of Haverstraw, NY

On December 1, 1974, a Northwest Orient Airlines Boeing 727 came down in the wooded hills of Rockland County while flying a ferry leg between New York's Kennedy Airport and Buffalo — a repositioning flight carrying only its crew, no fare-paying passengers. The inscription points to atmospheric icing, and the accident became a lasting case study in how ice forming on an aircraft's small external sensors can feed the cockpit dangerously false airspeed readings. Investigations into disasters like this one drove changes to cold-weather flight procedures and to the warnings pilots receive when instruments disagree.

Eureka, NC

At the height of the Cold War, Strategic Air Command kept nuclear-armed bombers in the air around the clock. On a January night in 1961, one such B-52 broke apart in the skies over eastern North Carolina, releasing the two thermonuclear weapons it carried. Emergency safeguards and sheer luck kept a catastrophic detonation from ever occurring over the Carolina farmland, though three of the airmen aboard did not survive the disaster to the south.

Odessa, TX

Roughly 20,000 years ago a shower of nickel-iron meteorites slammed into the West Texas plains, the largest gouging a funnel-shaped crater some 550 feet across and 100 feet deep. Over the millennia wind and water filled the depressions until they nearly vanished, and smaller buried craters went undetected until University of Texas excavations exposed them in the early 1940s. Today the main crater survives only as a shallow, rock-rimmed dimple in the earth.

Odessa, TX

In 1946 four West Texas oilmen founded the Odessa Natural Gasoline Company to capture the natural gas being flared away as waste in the oil fields. That gas proved ideal for making butadiene and styrene—the building blocks of synthetic rubber—and through the 1950s the Odessa Chamber of Commerce helped attract a cluster of plants that grew into what was then the largest petrochemical complex in the world. Firms like Shell, Rexene, and El Paso Products anchored an industry that reshaped the town.

Odessa, TX

Odessa's telephone exchange opened around 1897 in the early years of rural Texas telephony, when connecting far-flung ranches meant improvising with whatever ran across the land. Under pioneer rancher A. Quincy Cooper, service reached the countryside by stringing calls along barbed-wire fence lines. In a remarkable coincidence, Cooper's repair work on one such line in 1915 briefly broke into the first transcontinental telephone call between Alexander Graham Bell and his assistant, and the exchange was folded into Southwestern Bell in 1928.

Columbus, OH

The Ohio Agricultural Experiment Station grew out of the great land-grant experiment of the late 1800s, when the nation decided that science, not just tradition, should guide the family farm. Tied to Ohio State University, it put chemists, botanists, and agronomists to work on the everyday problems of soil, crops, and livestock, translating laboratory findings into practical advice for working farmers. Its modern successor, the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, still carries that mission of using research to improve daily life.

Elko, NV

Across the valley south of this point lie the ruins of an oil-shale extraction plant that Robert M. Catlin, Sr. spent years developing before sinking its main shaft in 1916. Reaching peak output in the early 1920s, it was the only successful shale-oil operation in Nevada, but its "Hi-Power Catlin" oil could not compete on price with cheap conventional petroleum, and the plant closed in the fall of 1924. Catlin's dream, decades ahead of its time, gave Elko a brief oil boom in the Roaring Twenties.

Beaver Township, PA · est. 1985

In 1815, drillers here bored into the earth hunting brine to boil down into salt, a precious commodity on the frontier. When the well was deepened in 1819, they struck oil instead—an unwelcome contaminant that soon forced the salt works to close. Decades before the world thought to prize it, petroleum surfaced here as a nuisance, some forty years ahead of Drake's famous 1859 well near Titusville.

Waxahachie, TX

Completed in 1888 to relieve overcrowding, the Old Ellis County Jail was built by the Pauly Jail Building and Manufacturing Company of St. Louis, its round conical-roofed turret and corbeled brick giving it the look of a small castle. The sheriff's family lived on the first floor above twenty cramped cells, with solitary and death cells in the basement. Its rare rotary system — a rotating cylinder of ten cells with a single door, one of few in the United States — was engineered to make escape nearly impossible.

San Marcos, TX

Erected in 1894-95, this bracketed building served as the office for the San Marcos National Fish Hatchery, established in 1893 near the head of the spring-fed San Marcos River. When the hatchery closed in 1965 the site passed to Southwest Texas State University, and the old office found new life housing the school's Aquatic Biological Center before being moved to the River Walkway.

San Antonio, TX

Built about 1890 by builder T.R. Hertzberg to a design by architect M.T. Eckles, this late Victorian house was purchased in 1909 by Judge Sidney J. Brooks, first judge of the 57th District Court. His son, Sidney Brooks Jr., became one of the first U.S. cadets killed while training for World War I aviation duty in 1917. San Antonio's Brooks Air Force Base was named in the young flier's honor.

Bethlehem, PA · est. 1953

As early as 1754 the Moravians of Bethlehem engineered one of colonial America's earliest municipal water systems, pumping spring water uphill to a tower and letting gravity feed it to a network of cisterns. The pipes were bored from hollowed tree trunks, a practical marvel of frontier ingenuity that delivered running water to the community decades before most American towns had anything like it. The original engine house still stands nearby as a reminder of this early feat of engineering.

Abilene, TX

Completed in 1909, this building housed Abilene's office of the United States Weather Bureau, complete with living quarters and a rooftop observatory for the official in charge. W. H. Green ran the station for its first thirty-five years, tracking the weather of the West Texas plains before forecasting moved to the airport. Its facade blends detailing from several architectural styles.

Corsicana, TX

When the Navarro County oil fields opened in 1894, the young petroleum industry needed craftsmen who could join and repair metal in the field. H. C. Nicol answered that call around 1912, remembered as the first welder to work the county's oil patch in an era when a tradesman still had to mix his own welding chemicals by hand. He pushed the craft further, pioneering the welding of cast iron and aluminum in the area.

Cornplanter Township, PA · est. 1958

Drilled in 1861, just two years after Edwin Drake's famous well launched the modern oil age nearby, the McClintock No. 1 has produced oil continuously ever since. Sunk into the Venango County fields at the very birthplace of the petroleum industry, it stands only about 240 yards from the Drake site. Its remarkable longevity makes it a living link to the frantic first years of the American oil boom.

Philadelphia, PA · est. 1989

Only weeks after Louis Daguerre unveiled his photographic process in France, an American set out to try it for himself. Around September 25, 1839, Joseph Saxton of the U.S. Mint rigged a cigar box and a crude lens to capture an image of Philadelphia's Central High School. The small, faint picture that resulted is the earliest surviving photograph made in the United States.

Saint Louis County, MO

These interlocking rings mark St. Louis's turn as host of the Games of the III Olympiad in 1904, only the third modern Olympics and the first held in the United States. The competition unfolded alongside the sprawling Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the great World's Fair that put St. Louis on the global stage that year. The 1904 Games were long, loosely organized, and dominated by American athletes, a snapshot of a young Olympic movement still finding its footing.

Crane, TX

A discovery well completed in November 1945 opened one of the great oil fields of the Permian Basin, on University of Texas land designated the Block 31 Unit. By 1969 it had produced a hundred million barrels, and by 1987 a second hundred million, drawn from wells reaching some 8,500 feet into the ancient Devonian rock. Engineers pushed recovery far beyond the ordinary by injecting high-pressure gas to wash oil from the reservoir.

Del Rio, TX

From Laughlin Air Force Base near Del Rio, Strategic Air Command and CIA crews flew high-altitude U-2 and RB-57 aircraft on secret Cold War reconnaissance. In October 1962 their cameras captured the Soviet missile sites in Cuba that touched off the Cuban Missile Crisis, and under 'Operation Brass Knob' U-2s photographed nearly all of the island. The crisis peaked on October 27 when a surface-to-air missile downed Maj. Rudolf Anderson Jr., the confrontation's only combat death.