My name is Ruwaida Alansary, but people call me Roxy. I was born in Saudi Arabia in 1988 and my parents divorced in 1995. My father remarried in 1996 and moved my stepmother and me to the United States in January 2001 in search of education and a chance at a relationship with our ailing grandmother.

“In the fighting in the Pacific, like at night when we were in the jungle, it was so dark you couldn’t see anything, from here to you. So the Japanese would sneak right up and stab you in the back right in your own foxhole…”