Master Sgt. Joshua Lloyd Wheeler Master Sgt. Joshua Lloyd Wheeler died on October 22, 2015, at age 39 from small-arms fire during a predawn raid on an Islamic State prison compound near Hawija in Iraq’s Kirkuk Province. Assigned to the Army’s Delta Force, he became the first American service member killed in combat against ISIS and the first U.S. combat fatality in Iraq since 2011. The operation freed about 70 Iraqi hostages who faced imminent execution, with graves already d

Elbert Carter Markham Elbert Carter Markham spent his sixty-three years in the shadowed folds of the Ouachita Mountains where the Caddo River cuts through pine and oak. He was born in 1849 in Colbath Township of Clark County, a place that would later split into pieces of Montgomery and Pike counties. His father Carter Markham had arrived in the region as a young man from Alabama and built a life there as a Baptist preacher. The family story that passed down through generati