AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal, File

This Feb. 23, 1945 file photo shows U.S. Marines of the 28th Regiment, 5th Division, raising the American flag atop Mt. Suribachi in Iwo Jima, Japan. Alan Wood, a World War II veteran who provided the flag in the famous flag-raising on Iwo Jima has died. Alan Wood was 90. Wood was in charge of communications on a landing ship on Iwo Jima's shores when a Marine asked him for the biggest flag that he could find. Wood handed him a flag he had found in Pearl Harbor.

A veteran of World War II credited with providing the flag in the famous flag-raising on Iwo Jima has died at his Los Angeles County home. Alan Wood died of natural causes April 18 at the age of 90, his son Steven Wood announced Saturday.

Wood was a 22-year-old Navy officer in charge of communications on a landing ship on Iwo Jima's shores on Feb. 23, 1945 when a Marine asked him for the biggest flag he could find.

After five days of intense fighting to capture the Japanese-held island, U.S. forces had managed to scale Mount Suribachi to hoist an American flag. Woods happened to have a 37-square-foot flag that he had found months before in a Pearl Harbor Navy depot.

Five Marines and a Navy Corpsman raised the flag in a stirring moment captured by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal. Steven Wood said his father was always humbled by his small role in the historic moment.

In a 1945 letter to a Marine general who asked for details about the flag, Alan Wood wrote: "The fact that there were men among us who were able to face a situation like Iwo where human life is so cheap, is something to make humble those of us who were so very fortunate not to be called upon to ensure such hell."

In a story on Wood's death, the Los Angeles Times reported that over the years others have claimed that they provided the famous Iwo Jima flag, but retired Marine Col. Dave Severance, who commanded the company that took Mount Suribachi, said in an interview last week that it was Wood.

"I have a file of more than 60 people who claim to have have something to do with the flags," Severance said from his home in La Jolla, Calif.

After the war, Wood went on to work as a technical artist and spokesman at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge.

His wife, Elizabeth, died in 1985. Besides his son, Wood is survived by three grandchildren.

Seth Wenig / AP file

The USS Iwo Jima passes the Statue of Liberty during Fleet Week in New York on May 25, 2011.

The annual Fleet Week in New York City may not be canceled this year, but a U.S. Navy official says it will be scaled back significantly from recent years because of sequestration.

"It's not going to look like anything we've seen in the past," the official said, adding that the Navy "is not going to be able to support it like we have in the past."

Read more at NBCNewYork.com

Department of Defense policy about spending during sequestration states that no branch of the armed forces may participate in community relations or outreach events that incur additional cost to the government or that rely on anything other than local assets and personnel.

"DoD policy is clear," the official said, adding that, "we will follow that direction, to include participation in Fleet Weeks."

The official stressed that the Navy will strive to see how it can participate in events with local assets and lower costs. "We're still looking to see what parts of the larger celebrations we can salvage."

Also as part of the cuts, this week the Navy officially canceled remaining performances in 2013 by the Blue Angels precision flying team. The Defense Department has said the budget cuts would force the military to slash ship and aircraft maintenance, curtail training, and give up to 14 days' unpaid leave to most of its 800,000 civilian employees.

Fleet Week is run by the city of New York, not the Navy. It is scheduled to begin May 22. Last year, 21 ships from the U.S. and its allies participated, but it's unclear how many would appear this time. 

The official said that city officials are disappointed, but understand the constraints.

"We are working with them to see what we can provide," the official said, adding, "but it will not be the five, six, seven big decks (aircraft carriers) and ships that we've had in the past."

NBCNewYork.com contributed to this report.

The Army and Air Force have reopened their Tuition Assistance pipelines to service members — following a Congressional mandate — yet similar funding remains stalled within the Marine Corps, a leading veterans’ advocate complained Wednesday.

The federal sequestration had previously blockaded all money that’s normally funneled to troops to help them pay for college classes in order to further their educations and their military careers. In most branches, that tab reaches $4,500 per year for each service member who takes the classes.

On March 21, Congress voted to order the Defense Department to locate the necessary funding to relaunch Tuition Assistance across the branches. That directive has now become law. Navy leaders had already opted to keep that program alive for sailors despite sequestration, “and we’re quite proud of that, too,” said Lt. Shawn Eklund, a Navy spokesman.

At midnight Tuesday, the Army turned on the web portal used by soldiers to formally ask for Tuition Assistance money.

“This will allow soldiers to request Tuition Assistance for the remainder of fiscal year 2013. For the balance of (this year), the eligibility rules for use of TA, the $250 semester-hour cap, and the annual ceiling of $4,500 remain unchanged,” said Lt. Col. S. Justin Platt, an Army spokesman.

On Wednesday, the Air Force also reinstated Tuition Assistance for its members, said Air Force spokesman Lt. Col. Laurel Tingley.

"The program is going to remain exactly the same as it was before the suspension," Tingley said. 

Marine Corps public affairs officers didn’t immediately respond to emailed questions on when that branch will again offer Tuition Assistance.

“Here’s the issue: It’s been passed by Congress and signed by the president. There’s no reason this shouldn’t (already) be reinstated at the branch level,” said Michael Dakduk, executive director of Student Veterans of America, a support network with more than 500 campus chapters.

At some military posts, including North Carolina’s Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, the attendance of Marines who once used on-base college classes has been cut by more than half since DOD halted all tuition help amid the sequestration, Dakduk said.

“It’s absolutely extreme,” he added. “And that’s exactly kind of thing we don’t want to see as far as supporting service members. Especially as our military force in total begins to draw down and we have folks exit the military.”

Related:

• It's official: Navy grounds Blue Angels for remainder of 2013
• Tens of thousands of veterans homeless despite billions in spending

Four different branches of the U.S. military are spending millions of dollars to equip troops with combat uniforms in seven different but similar camouflage patterns, says the Government Accountability Office, wasting money and potentially exposing some troops to increased risk on the battlefield.

That’s one of the findings in the GAO’s latest report on government waste, its third annual report on overlapping, redundant and/or wasteful federal government programs and spending. (GAO is the independent, nonpartisan investigative and auditing agency that works for Congress.)

The report identifies 31 new areas in the federal government "where agencies may be able to achieve greater efficiency or effectiveness" – 17 areas where the GAO found evidence of "fragmentation, overlap or duplication" and 14 where it found opportunities for significant cost savings and "revenue enhancement."

On combat uniforms, the GAO found that the military services “employ a fragmented approach” in acquiring them.

Have a look at the visual included in the report (below). It shows images of seven different camouflage patterns for uniforms separately ordered by the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines.

Government Accountability Office

Before 2002, all the military services had used only two basic camouflage patterns – one woodland pattern and one desert pattern.

Contracting separately for similar uniforms, GAO says, has resulted in “numerous inventories of similar uniforms at increased cost to the supply chain.”

GAO found that if the services partnered together in procuring uniforms, the Defense Department could save tens of millions of dollars.

Previously the Army has estimated it could save $82 million by partnering, and the Navy has estimated it could save $6 million.

Spending watchdog groups say the uniform waste is one example of a widespread problem.

“When you look at combat fatigues it's like a microcosm of the whole problem,” says Steve Ellis, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog group. “Combat fatigues are an example of how, left to its own devices, government creates more complication, and it's up to Congress to reign them in and to make them concentrate and only do one thing.”

Of the 31 new areas the GAO identified, here are a few examples of areas the GAO found with overlap and duplication:

• Drug abuse prevention and treatment programs: “Federal drug abuse prevention and treatment programs are fragmented across 15 federal agencies … in fiscal year 2012, about $4.5 billion was allocated to these 15 agencies that administer 76 programs that are, in all or in part, intended to prevent or treat illicit drug use or abuse.”
• Renewable energy initiatives: “23 agencies and their 130 sub-agencies implemented 679 renewable energy initiatives in fiscal year 2010…9 agencies implemented 82 overlapping duplicative wind-related initiatives in fiscal year 2011 … including 7 initiatives that have provided duplicative … financial support to the same recipient for a single project.”

Here are a few examples of areas GAO found with significant potential cost savings or increased revenue:

• Crop insurance subsidies: Congress could save up to $1.2 billion if it reduced or limited subsidies for individual farmers.
• Medicaid supplemental payments: by identifying improper Medicaid payments, HHS could save up to hundreds of millions of dollars.
• Tobacco taxes: the federal government lost as much as $615 million to $1 billion between 2009 and 2011 “because tobacco manufacturers and consumers substituted higher-taxed smoking tobacco products with similar lower tax products.

The entire list is in the full report, GAO-13-279SP - "2013 Annual Report: Actions Needed to Reduce Fragmentation, Overlap, and Duplication and Achieve Other Financial Benefits." The report runs 293 pages and is available here.

The GAO’s report includes recommendations for policy changes in each area. But the report includes some positive statistics about the impact of the GAO’s previous efforts.

Since its first report in 2011, the GAO found that the Obama administration’s executive branch agencies and Congress “have made progress.”

As of the latest report’s completion last month, the GAO found, a majority of the areas it identified in the first two reports in 2011 and 2012 got attention from the agencies involved: 16 of the 131 areas “were addressed”; 87 were “partially addressed”; and only 27 were “not addressed.” 

Of approximately 300 “actions needed” within these areas, more than half were addressed or partially addressed: 65 were addressed, 149 were partially addressed and 85 were not addressed.

The GAO’s recommendations to reduce waste and duplication on combat uniforms were originally provided to the Defense Department in September 2012. The department responded with a statement saying, “the DOD plans to provide joint criteria and policy guidance for camouflage uniforms to the military departments by March 2013, and plans to … provide additional oversight and further pursue active partnerships for joint development and use of uniforms.”

Logistics Spc. 2nd Class Darlene Kemble / U.S. Navy

U.S. Navy Seabees display Navy Working Uniform Type III in January 2012 in Pearl Harbor.

Contacted Tuesday by NBC News for a response, representatives of the Defense Department referred to the previous statement. 

At a hearing Tuesday afternoon before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, GAO staffers testified about the report's findings and answered committee members’ questions.

In his opening statement, U.S. Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., the committee’s chair, expressed disappointment that only 16 of the 131 areas the GAO previously reported got fixed.

“As budget pressure increases and the American taxpayer says I cannot afford to pay for the same services twice,” he said, “both Congress, including the GAO, and executive branch must find these programs, must find this waste and must do our job differently.”

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., the committee’s ranking Democrat, blamed Congress for failing to act and said he hoped that Republicans and Democrats could “join forces to reduce waste, fraud and abuse.”

“We should all be able to agree that a dollar wasted here is a dollar that is not put to better use elsewhere,” Cummings said.  “I think Republicans and Democrats will agree that we want to see taxpayers' dollars spent in an effective and efficient manner.”

U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro, who runs the GAO and was the hearing's main witness, summed up his testimony with this observation:

“My term goes to 2025.  I hope that I won’t be reporting all these same issues in that year. But I can tell you that it won’t change unless the Congress gets involved in this process with active oversight.” 

Related story: Uncloaked: How Army is testing new camo to replace flawed design

Handout / Getty Images

The Blue Angels perform their precision aerobatics over the Florida Keys during the Southernmost Air Spectacular at Naval Air Station Key West on March 24. All remaining performances for 2013 have been canceled due to budget constraints.

The high-speed, high-altitude acrobatic maneuvers and tight formations of the U.S. Navy’s Blue Angels will be missing from dozens of festivals and air shows across the country this year. All Blue Angels performances for the remainder of 2013 have been canceled, the Navy announced Tuesday.

The decision is a result of budget constraints caused by sequestration. “Recognizing budget realities, current Defense policy states that outreach events can only be supported with local assets at no cost to the government,” the Navy said in a statement.

“The squadron will continue to train to maintain flying proficiency until further notice at its home station in Pensacola, Fla,.” the Navy said.

Organizers of Seafair, an annual summer festival in Seattle, broke the news to the community, saying: “The Blue Angels have flown at Seafair for over 40 years and are an important part of our history. The team will be deeply missed by Seattleites.”

The grounding is a sentimental loss for fans but not as serious as other reductions to defense spending, which President Barack Obama said could threaten military readiness. The Defense Department said the cuts would slash ship and aircraft maintenance, curtail training and result in up to 14 days' unpaid leave for most of the Pentagon's 800,000 civilian employees.

For the Navy, programs such as the Blue Angels would take a back seat to "making sure ships are seaworthy and planes are airworthy for the war fighters who are operating overseas," Lt. John Supple, spokesman for the Chief of Naval Air Training in Corpus Christi, Texas, said last month.

The Blue Angels program began in 1946 and costs about $40 million a year. Canceling the bulk of the performing season would save about $28 million, according to Navy officials.

NBC News' Joe Myxter and Reuters contributed to this report.

Related: Military spending cuts ground Blue Angels, Thunderbirds

U.S. Navy

The Laser Weapon System (LaWS) temporarily installed aboard the guided-missile destroyer USS Dewey.

The U.S. Navy announced Monday that it is preparing to deploy a new weapon that can disable a hostile boat and even destroy a surveillance drone overhead — all without dispensing any expensive ammunition.

It is the Navy's Laser Weapons System (LaWS), a laser mounted on a ship that is so strong it can ignite a drone, sending it crashing and burning to earth in mere moments.

The USS Ponce, an amphibious transport docking ship, will be the first Navy vessel to deploy with the LaWS, officials announced Monday.

The new laser will be installed on the Ponce over the next year and operational in summer 2014. The Ponce is now based in the Fifth Fleet area, which covers the Persian Gulf and the Horn of Africa.

The LaWS will initially be used to combat small boats that pose a threat to larger U.S. Navy vessels — much like the small Iranian fast boats that pester U.S. ships in the Persian Gulf and Strait of Hormuz.

The Navy plans to use the laser to combat missiles and other threats from the air, to ward off threatening ships and to stop other foreign threats. Eventually the system will be able to stop an incoming missile.

While making the announcement in Maryland today, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Jonathan Greenert praised the LaWS ability to take out targets at a tiny fraction of the cost of other conventional weapons.

He claimed that the LaWS can shoot down a small drone for about $1 worth of electricity and, once the laser is operational, it should be able to replace a Gatling gun, whose rounds can cost several thousand dollars each.

A defense official also stressed that the laser will not have full capability to take down a larger target for a decade or so.

Despite speculation the laser is deploying to the Fifth Fleet to warn Iran, a U.S. military official says that the real reason it's going to that region is that it is "the hardest environment" the Navy has available to test the new system.

Related:

• Star Wars' of the sea: Navy wants a ship-based laser weapon 
• Ground-based laser zaps rockets in tests

U.S. Navy Historical Center

The USS Akron crashed off the coast of New Jersey on April 4, 1933 killing all but three men on board

History buffs will gather this week near the New Jersey coast to commemorate a major airship disaster.

No, not that one.

Newsreel footage and radio announcer Herbert Morrison's plaintive cry, "Oh, the humanity!" made the 1937 explosion of the Hindenburg at the Lakehurst Naval Air Station probably the best-known crash of an airship.

But just four years earlier, a U.S. Navy airship seemingly jinxed from the start and later celebrated in song crashed only about 40 miles away, claiming more than twice as many lives.

The USS Akron, a 785-foot dirigible, was in its third year of flight when a violent storm sent it plunging tail-first into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after midnight on April 4, 1933.

"No broadcasters, no photographers, no big balls of fire, so who knew?" said Nick Rakoncza, a member of the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. "Everybody thinks that the Hindenburg was the world's greatest (airship) disaster. It was not."

A ceremony to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the crash, the deadliest airship disaster on record, is being held Thursday at a veterans park where there is a tiny plaque dedicated to the victims. Below it is a small piece of metal from the airship.

Few in the area seemed to know about the disaster, let alone the memorial plaque; even a Navy officer sent on an underwater mission to explore the wreckage many years later had not heard of the Akron.

Mel Evans / AP

In this Thursday, March 21, 2013 photograph, a monument and canons are seen at a small veteran's memorial park in a neighborhood in Manchester Township, N.J. On the center column is a small plaque to the USS Akron airship that went down in a violent storm off the New Jersey coast. The disaster claimed 73 lives, more than twice as many as the crash of the Hindenburg four years later. The USS Akron, a 785-foot dirigible, was in its third year of flight when a violent storm sent it crashing tail-first into the Atlantic Ocean shortly after midnight on April 4, 1933.

"It's almost a forgotten accident," said Rick Zitarosa, historian for the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. "The Akron deserves to be remembered."

The Akron crashed off the community of Barnegat Light just a few hours after taking off from Lakehurst, killing 73 of the 76 men aboard, largely because the ship had no life vests and only one rubber raft, according to Navy records and the Navy Lakehurst Historical Society. They had been moved to another airship and were never replaced.

Lt. Cmdr. Herbert Wiley, Moody Erwin and Richard Deal were pulled from the frigid waters by a German tanker that had been nearby.

Erwin and Deal had been hanging on a fuel tank. Wiley was clinging to a board, according to an account he gave to a newspaper the next day.

In a newsreel interview, Wiley, standing next to the other survivors, said he was in the control car just before the crash. He said crew members could not see the ocean until they were about 300 feet above the water.

"The order was given to stand by for a crash," Wiley said. "The ship hit the water within 30 seconds of that order and most of us, I believe, we catapulted into the water."

Among the casualties was Rear Adm. William Moffett, the first chief of the Bureau of Navy Aeronautics.

When the wreckage was found, Zitarosa said, the airship had collapsed to about 25 feet in height. It had originally stood at about 150 feet.

"It was a catastrophic disintegration of the ship once it hit the water," Zitarosa said.

Part of the wreckage was lifted from the sea a few weeks after the accident.

The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. in Akron, Ohio, had been awarded a Navy contract in 1928 to build the Akron and a second rigid airship, the Macon. Construction of the Akron by the Goodyear-Zeppelin Corp. was completed in 1931.

It was plagued by problems from the start.

It was involved in three accidents before its final flight, including one in which its tail slammed into the ground several times. Another accident killed two sailors.

Some men who died in the Akron had survived the airship crash of the USS Shenandoah less than a year before.

A day after the Akron disaster, a blimp sent out to look for bodies malfunctioned and crashed in Barnegat Light, killing two more crew members.

A year later, Wiley was the commanding officer on the USS Macon when it was lost in a storm off of Port Sur, Calif., also killing two crew members. Wiley survived, but that was it for him and airships.

In June 2002, the Navy ordered a mission to explore the wreckage of the Akron. The NR-1 explored several hundred feet of debris 120 feet deep.

The officer of the NR-1 at the time, Dennis McKelvey, said that they could not see much of the wreckage through murky waters, but that some metal along the ocean floor resembled "ribs sticking out of the mud."

Even McKelvey, now a retired Navy captain, had not heard of the Akron disaster before he was dispatched to view the site.

"I had to go do my own research," McKelvey said. "I thought I would have learned about it at some point."

Us Navy / REUTERS

Capt. Greg McWherter, commanding officer for the flight demonstration squadron of the Blue Angels, leads a formation of F/A-18 Hornets during the Tuscaloosa Regional Air Show in Tuscaloosa, Ala., in this March 30, 2012 file photo.

With $85 billion in automatic cuts to the federal budget taking effect beginning Friday, millions of fans across the country will miss out on precision flying by the Navy's Blue Angels and the Air Force's Thunderbirds, military officials said.

Blue Angels shows scheduled in more than two dozen cities between April and September are expected to be canceled as part of the cuts, said the team's spokeswoman, Lt. Katie Kelly. The Navy intends to cancel the four shows in April -- in Tampa, Fla.; Corpus Christi, Texas; Vidalia, Ga.; and Beaufort, S.C. -- but hasn't made a decision about the rest of the year, hoping to salvage some of the season, a senior U.S. military official told NBC News.

Some shows featuring the Blue Angels already have been called off in the face of budget uncertainties.

The Thunderbirds entire 2013 season, beginning April 1, has been canceled, the Air Force said in a statement. The Air Force said that all aviation support for the public has been halted, including air shows, trade shows, flyovers and open houses.

The grounding would be a sentimental loss for fans but not as serious as other reductions to defense spending, which President Barack Obama said could threaten  military readiness. The Defense Department said the cuts would slash ship and aircraft maintenance, curtail training and result in 22 days' unpaid leave for most of the Pentagon's 800,000 civilian employees.

For the Navy, programs such as the Blue Angels would take a back seat to "making sure ships are seaworthy and planes are airworthy for the war fighters who are operating overseas," said Lt. John Supple, spokesman for the Chief of Naval Air Training in Corpus Christi, Texas.

The news has saddened longtime fans, disappointed city leaders and sparked an online petition to the White House to save the Blue Angels' season. About 1,200 people had signed as of Thursday.

"They're an American icon, and they really resonate in a military town," said Ashton Hayward, mayor of Pensacola, Florida, home to the naval air station where the Blue Angels are based.

Stelios Varias / REUTERS

Members of the Blue Angels aerobatic team perform during the Andrews Air Show at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, in 2006.

Pensacola's Blue Angels beach show each July pumps an additional $2.5 million into the local economy, according to a 2012 study.

"People plan their annual family trips around the shows and the impact on business is phenomenal," Hayward said. "If the Blue Angels end, it's going to be a sad, sad day for not just us, but for millions of people all over the country."

Shows called off
Air shows scheduled for May at Seymour Johnson Air Force Base in North Carolina, and for June in Indianapolis, already have been canceled, organizers and U.S. Air Force officials announced in recent weeks.

The budget cuts will affect cities from Seattle to North Kingstown, Rhode Island, where the Rhode Island National Guard Air Show draws thousands of visitors to the small town each year.

The city's Quonset Air Base closed in the 1970s, but a sense of military pride still runs deep. Losing the Blue Angels would deal a huge blow for the show in late June, said Elizabeth Dolan, North Kingstown's town council president.

Related story: Obama warns against military spending cuts

"Everybody looks forward to when they come," she said. "They fly right up over my house, and it's amazing and emotional to watch."

The Blue Angels program began in 1946 and costs about $40 million a year. Cancelling the bulk of the performing season would save about $28 million, according to Navy officials.

Because of the timing of the cuts, the Angels will still perform in March at the El Centro Air Show in southern California and the Southernmost Air Spectacular show in Key West, Florida.

The 130-person team, which includes seven pilots, consists of members who have served in high-level tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. Should the budget cuts go into effect, the team would be reassigned until there is enough money for them to take to the skies again, Supple said.

Pilot Dave Tickle, a 32-year-old from Birmingham, Alabama, said he was inspired to become an expert naval pilot after watching Blue Angels performances during family vacations to Pensacola when he was a child. He is now a lieutenant commander in the Navy and the Blue Angels' lead solo pilot.

"I remember looking up at these shining blue and gold precision aircraft and thinking, 'I want to do that.' It gave me a feeling of amazement and pride," he said.

NBC News Chief Pentagon Correspondent Jim Miklaszewski and producer Courtney Kube contributed to this report.

Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

Victoria Parker's tattoos honor five soldiers in her unit who were killed in Iraq during her second deployment there.

The five men are not her brothers. But that’s what she calls them.

The five initials are not for her children. But many who spot her non-sleeved left arm ask if the tight stack of black letters represents her kids. The question bothers her.

From the top of her booming bicep — where “M.G. 27 JAN 07” is positioned — to the bottom of the bulge — where “B.E.” rests — Army Reserve Drill Sgt. Victoria Parker’s limb permanently honors the five fellow soldiers in her unit who were killed in Iraq during her second deployment there. Images of those those tattoos also went on display Tuesday as part of “Vet Ink,” an exhibit at the Clark County Historical Museum in Vancouver, Wash.

“The motto is: ‘Always remember, never forgot.’ I told them I would always remember them. And by putting it on my arm, I remember them every day. I think about them every day,” said Parker, 27, who lives in Vancouver. Her largest, accompanying tattoo depicts the “fallen soldier battle cross” — a helmet poised on a standing rifle placed inside empty, unlaced boots. That was inked from a photo she snapped of the memorial shrine set up for Army Sgt. Blair Emery (“B.E.”), killed in a roadside bomb attack in 2007 in Taji, just north of Baghdad.

“The tattoos helped me cope and move on and still honor their memories,” Parker said. “It’s no longer painful.”

“Vet Ink” is the brainchild of Susan Tissot, executive director of the museum, located in a city rich with Army roots. Before the Civil War, then-Capt. Ulysses S. Grant was quartermaster at the Columbia Army Barracks in that town. Vancouver has also served as home to part of the 104th Infantry Division.

Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

Tattoos on the back of Jeremy Hubbard.

“The Army is very prevalent in everything we do — there are a lot of veterans here, a lot of Army personnel and our former mayor was a colonel in the Army. My father-in-law is a retired Naval officer,” Tissot said. “It’s a very personal exhibit.

“I knew the tattoos told a story," she added. "It’s a very touching story." 

“Vet Ink” spans military members who served from the 1950s through to today’s armed forces — 11 veterans (or active members or reserves) spanning every branch but the Coast Guard. Each panel details their time in uniform as well as when and why they decided to get tattooed.

Some of the images, like those gracing Parker’s arm, represent the “memorial” category of ink art that recall the fallen or a certain battle. Among military tattoos — a tradition that sprouted among Navy sailors generations ago but now are commonplace among post-9/11 veterans — are the other three classes: “patriotic” (flags, eagles), “spiritual” (a star, a cross, the Virgin Mary), and “identity,” (a specific unit, battalion or division), according to Kristina Wells, the museum’s collections manager.

“There’s been an interesting evolution in what tattoos the military would even accept. Our Vietnam veteran in the exhibit and one of the other 1960s service guys who took part didn’t get their tattoos until they were in their 60s. It was less accepted by the military back then,” Wells said. “If you were tattooed, you maybe wouldn’t even be accepted into the Army and Marines (during that era).”

Later, military regulations were relaxed, and banned tattoos on the neck and face.

Kate Singh / Clark County Historical Museum

Christian Nippolt-Vetter.

The ink also once carried something of a “hidden” code, especially in the Navy, according to the museum. For example, the image of a sparrow or swallow signified having traveled 5,000 or more miles. Tattoos of pigs or roosters were good-luck charms meant to prevent drowning because those animals often were carried in wooden crates, which would float if the ship ever sank.

For Parker, the tattoos also serve as a shorthand account of her combat experiences for any other veterans who spy them — an “automatic understanding” and a “unifying symbol.” She said she and fellow veterans can read one another’s service history from their ink.

But for those who haven’t served, she said, there is often misunderstanding.

“I get a lot of people asking me if they’re my kids. That’s frustrating and hurtful,” Parker said. “The female veterans, we’re so invisible. People don’t assume we’re veterans at all.”

Related: 

• Home from war, troops face 'white knuckled' first month
• Soldier Hard's hip-hop lyrics reveal PTSD's rough edges
• Hundreds of thousands of veterans spurn free benefits

Erin Trieb for NBC News

Monica Velez, pictured in Austin, Texas, had two brothers, Jose "Freddy" Velez and Andrew Velez, both of whom served the U.S. military and both are now dead -- Freddy was killed in action in Iraq, and Andrew took his own life.

Before Army Spc. Andrew Velez left Texas for the final time, he asked his fragile sister to write him a promise – a vow he could carry with him to Afghanistan.

Monica Velez knew she owed him that much. In the horrid weeks after each had lost their beloved brother, Freddy Velez, to enemy fire in Iraq, Monica tried to end her life with pills and alcohol. Now, she put pen to paper: “I will not hurt myself. I will not do anything crazy. I know that Andrew loves me. I know that Freddy loved me.” Andrew folded her note and slipped it into his pocket.

“Don’t break your word to me,” he told her before heading back to war.

Seven months later, Andrew, 22, sat alone in an Army office at a base in Afghanistan. He put a gun to his head and committed suicide. Back in Texas, word reached Monica Velez who, once again, found herself in a dangerous place. Only now, she was alone. Days of alcohol and anti-depressants. Nights of dark thoughts: “It would just be better if I was gone.”

'The storm' is coming
As the U.S. military suicide rate soared to record heights during 2012, the families of service members say they, too, are witnessing a silent wave of self-harm occurring within their civilian ranks: spouses, children, parents and siblings. 

Some suicides and suicide attempts — like those that ravaged the Velez family — are spurred by combat losses.

Others may be triggered by exhaustion and despair: As some veterans return debilitated by anxiety, many spouses realize it's now up to them — and will be for decades — to hold the family together.

Specific figures are lacking as no agency tracks civilian suicides within military families.

However, Kristina Kaufmann, a long-time Army wife, knows of three other Army wives, all friends, who took their lives in recent years.

Courtesy Kristina Kaufmann

"When you know that you are the anchor — and if you go down, the family's going down — the problem is that you can only do that for so long," said Kristina Kaufmann.

One was Faye Vick, described by Kaufmann as “the perfect picture of an Army wife — pretty, nice, always with a smile.” Vick and her family lived around the corner from Kaufmann and near Fort Bragg, N.C. In 2006, when Kaufmann’s husband was in Afghanistan and Vick’s husband was deployed overseas, the 39-year-old mother placed herself, her infant and her 2-year-old son in a car inside a closed garage and started the engine, asphyxiating all three with carbon monoxide, according to Kaufmann and to local news reports at the time.

“And I know of too many others through the grapevine,” said Kaufmann, executive director of Code of Support, an Alexandria, Va.-based nonprofit that seeks to bridge the gap between civilians and military America.

“When you know that you are the anchor — and if you go down, the family’s going down — the problem is that you can only do that for so long,” said Kaufmann. “That population (of spouses) is at the most risk. Because the storm is going to happen when everybody comes home. That’s where we are, unfortunately, going to see an uptick in lots of negative outcomes, including suicide, including suicide among the spouses.”

On Jan. 14, Department of Defense officials acknowledged that during 2012, service members committed suicide at a record pace as more than 349 people took their own lives across the four branches. The military suicide rate is slightly lower than that of the general public. However, one active-duty member died by suicide every 25 hours last year. 

The Army sustained the heaviest branch toll at 182 suicides, which — as NBC News reported Jan. 3 — meant that soldier suicides outpaced combat deaths for the first time, according to Pentagon officials.

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta informed Congress last July that American armed forces are in the grip of a suicide "epidemic." 

One of the darkest undercurrents of the glaring statistics is that one suicide in a family boosts future suicide risks for everyone else inside the home. They can be contagious, say experts like Dr. Barbara Van Dahlen, a psychologist in the Washington, D.C., area and the founder of Give an Hour, which develops networks of mental-health volunteers who respond to both acute and chronic situations.

Numerous researchers have explored the so-called contagion effect of suicides within families and “there’s no question the data supports there’s at least a doubling of risk,” among surviving family members, said Dr. Alan L. Berman, Ph.D., executive director of the American Association of Suicidology. The organization strives to better understand and prevent suicide.

“It’s understood that risk, in part, is biological," Berman said, given that disorders like depression have a genetic component. 

“But it’s also based on social modeling behavior: The suicide of a parent presents a model (for children in that family) of how to deal with problems, and that’s no less true for a spouse.”

Added Van Dahlen: "The closer that family member is to you, the greater risk you’re at. We believe, psychologically, it opens the possibility and ends a taboo."

“The thousands of service members who have killed themselves,” she added, “they leave in their wake thousands of family members who are now at risk for that same kind of decision."

'I completely lost myself'
The cascade of Velez family tragedies began with pure valor.

On Nov. 13, 2004, Army Cpl. Jose “Freddy” Velez, 23, sprayed bullets at insurgent forces — covering fire to allow other U.S. soldiers time to retreat from an enemy strong point in Fallujah, Iraq. After his ammo ran dry, Freddy Velez was shot and killed. The Army awarded him the Bronze Star and Silver Star.

Courtesy Monica Velez

"There are days I'm still overwhelmed. And if I sit and think about it, I feel like I wouldn't have to live through all this pain if I just let myself go," said Monica Velez, who shared family photos of brothers Freddy and Andrew.

Andrew, then serving with another unit in Iraq, told Monica of escorting his brother’s body home to Lubbock, Texas — a job, he said, that required unzipping his brother’s body bag at every stop to re-verify Freddy’s identity.

During the trip, Andrew called his sister repeatedly while en route home and screamed into the phone for nearly two consecutive hours, “like somebody was killing him,” she said.

“There was nothing I could do,” Monica Velez recalled. “The operator kept cutting in (to request additional payment for the call) and I just said, ‘Add it to my credit card.’ He just wailed. That travel home, I think is what eventually broke him.”

Weeks later, Monica broke.

She doesn’t know how close she came to death the first time she tried to end her life. She never was told how slow her pulse became that night. She just remembers regaining consciousness at a hospital in Killeen, Texas — home to Fort Hood, where Freddy was based. She awoke with an IV plugged into her arm. A doctor handed her a list of local psychiatrists then discharged her.

Velez tried, she said, to seek help for her deepening depression but was told that her health insurance would not cover counseling.

Her grief was rooted in a difficult childhood, she said, that forged "tighter than tight" emotional bonds between Velez and her two brothers, turning the siblings into a mutual support group.

“When Freddy passed away, I went through a really hard depression,” she said. “I went to the emergency room for anxiety attacks. I couldn’t breathe. But nobody knew how to deal with me so they just gave me Ativan (an anti-anxiety drug) and Hydrocodone (a pain killer).

“I started drinking heavily and taking the prescriptions. And one day, I just felt it would be better off if I wasn’t around and decided to take all of the pills. Grief can bring you to that breaking moment.”

Soon after, in February 2005, Andrew sent his older sister (then 25) an email: “We need to be stronger. We need to protect each other.”

Though he was the youngest of the siblings, Andrew always was “the strong one,” his sister said. “But he and Freddy were inseparable.” Near the end of 2005, Andrew told his sister he was redeploying to Afghanistan because, she said, “I think he felt closer to Freddy there.”

From March through July of 2006, the two swapped calls and emails. In Afghanistan, Andrew grew increasingly despondent, she said, over the unraveling of his marriage and family in Lubbock. He had three children. But he worried, too, about his sister’s state of mind.

“We could both hear it in each other’s voices. He was scared I was going to do something. I was scared he was going to do something.”

He did. Andrew’s suicide on July 25, 2006, drove Monica, at first, into 20-hour workdays at a domestic violence shelter. She wasn’t sleeping or eating. Eventually, she was drinking again, “from the morning until I passed out,” she said. “Then, doing it again the next day.

“I completely lost myself. I resigned my job. I stopped paying my bills. I got evicted. I was prescribed anti-depressants. I noticed taking the pills and drinking got me out of the emotions. So I found myself in a dangerous place very quickly.

“Again — several trips to the ER (for overdoses). I’m not sure why I wasn’t ever held there. In my down periods, I would tell myself it would just be better off if I was gone.”

In 2008, a friend at Fort Hood, Texas, connected Velez with the Tragedy Assistance Program For Survivors (TAPS), a resource for anyone who suffers the loss of a military loved one.

“That was the first time anybody had offered to help me with the depression and the grief.” she said.

'Family units breaking down'
Kaufmann, who lost three Army-spouse friends to suicide, argues that military-family suicides should be tracked and researched by the Department of Defense to help mental-health experts begin to slow or stop the problem. She knows, however, such an accounting is not likely. 

“I get the sense that people in the military think that by including families into this kind of discussion — particularly when you’re talking about the (broader) mental-health impacts on family members — they look at that as something that will only add to the problem. Whereas, we believe that it would prove to be a solution,” Kauffman said.

“We’ve approached this very myopically. More than half of soldiers are married. Soldiers come with families. And the military has a maddening way of both dismissing families and holding them accountable at the same time. It’s frustrating for us, not only when we’re trying to get our husbands help, but also when you have the family units breaking down,” she added. 

NBC News requested to speak with officials at the newly formed Department of Defense suicide-prevention office about the issue of suicides within military families and whether tracking is needed. A DOD spokeswoman said, however, that the office is only working to address active-duty suicides. The interview request was not granted.

Van Dahlen, meanwhile, believes that asking DOD to track military families is an unreasonable expectation to place on the agency when it already is facing budget cuts.

Even if the DOD wants to — and many of my colleagues there desperately would want to devote resources to this — those resources are not going to be there,” she said. Rather than putting "the screws to DOD" and doing "even more with even less," Van Dahlen believes public-private partnerships should be encouraged "to figure out how we can (address) this together."

'Like an airborne disease'
More than eight years after Freddy’s combat death, and more than six years removed from Andrew’s suicide, Monica Velez annually runs the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington, D.C., in honor of her fallen brothers.

Matt Slocum / AP file

Monica Velez cleans her brother's name, engraved in a memorial at Fort Hood, Texas.

But, now living in Austin, she acknowledges she still struggles with what she calls, “those thoughts.”

“There are days I’m still overwhelmed. And if I sit and think about it, I feel like I wouldn’t have to live through all this pain if I just let myself go. It doesn’t just go away. But you learn how to cope. You learn better coping skills,” she said, adding she gained those tools from TAPS.

Army officers at Fort Hood have occasionally asked her, she said, for ideas to help them prevent the rising military suicide rate. She watches that tally, too.

“The numbers take my breath away. I know it can be overwhelming for the Army generals on the other end of the table trying to figure this problem out. Because it’s like an airborne disease going through the building and you’re trying to figure out how to stop it before it gets to you," she said. 

“But it’s coming at a really fast rate, and it’s inevitable.”

Related stories:
Military suicide rate set record high in 2012
The enemy within: Soldier suicides outpace combat deaths in 2012
Some wounded vets shine on 'Alive Day,' others wear black