Her Mom Died of Cancer When She Was 5. She Spent 13 Years Making Sure It Didn’t Destroy Other Families. | Anisa Palmer | Vegas Veteran Voices

Her Mom Died of Cancer When She Was 5. She Spent 13 Years Making Sure It Didn’t Destroy Other Families. | Anisa Palmer | Vegas Veteran Voices

Her Mom Died of Cancer When She Was 5. She Spent 13 Years Making Sure It Didn't Destroy Other Families. She grew up on 82 square miles of ocean in St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands. Her mom was 38 years young when the diagnosis came. Anisa was five. Her youngest sister was one. Her dad raised four girls and one boy alone. Nobody showed up for their family. Nobody paid the rent. Nobody filled the fridge. Nobody walked through the door and said — we've got you while you fight this. She never forgot that. She shipped off at 21. Boot camp in South Carolina in the winter — hypothermia and pneumonia at the same time. Seven months later she was in Iraq with the 82nd Airborne. First mission she got pulled off. Everyone else died. She came home and couldn't watch fireworks for years. Opened a box of rock-hard pound cake her grandmother shipped from home just to smell it. She got out. Drank a lot. Three months alone in a tiny apartment asking one question she couldn't stop: if I don't do this — what else am I gonna do? So she built I Will Survive Inc. Not an awareness campaign. Not a camera pointed at a kid with a fly on his face. A nonprofit that pays rent, fills fridges, and walks into homes where cancer has taken everything — because she knows exactly what that costs. She was five years old when it cost her everything. Thirteen years later she's still walking through those doors. In this episode Anisa talks about the mission she got pulled off and what she carried home from Iraq. The first patient she lost who didn't want to survive. The page in her book she couldn't write for seven years. What she told her sisters before she deployed. Why she became Miss January for Pin-Ups for Vets. And why the woman who has spent 13 years showing up for everyone else is still working on showing up for herself. Not a single tear or scar is ever going to be wasted. It's going to be used to bless the world. Vegas Veteran Voices is a veteran-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit media organization based in Las Vegas, Nevada. Every veteran's story is worth telling right.

300 Pounds. Two MST Cases. Airman of the Year. This WAS the Same Person.

Senior Airman Nikki Kraus was a weather forecaster in the Air Force, embedded with Army battalions in Korea, briefing generals on fog and moon illumination while helicopters waited to fly. She graduated basic training with honors at 26. She earned Airman of the Year, two Army Achievement Medals, and three consecutive employee of the month awards in Korea. She was also, at the same time, fighting two military sexual trauma cases. Processing a marriage that was already dying. And in 2017, waking up on the floor next to a loaded gun she didn't remember putting down. Nobody at her unit knew any of it. Nikki grew up on the south side of Milwaukee, Chippewa, gang-adjacent, raised to not show weakness. The Air Force didn't change that. It reinforced it. She held it together through Korea, through the MST cases, through the Article 15 that got handed to the E7 who assaulted her, through the EPR that didn't reflect what she'd done, through moving to South Carolina and trying to act like none of it had happened. The collapse came later. When the quiet did. In this episode, Nikki talks about what it looked like to perform at the highest level while quietly unraveling, and how she eventually built her way out. She lost 100 pounds in nine months. She filed for divorce with $1,000 in her bank account and a 10-foot U-Haul. She got her life coaching certification in 2024 and turned everything she survived into a framework, the GLOW Method, for women stuck in the same patterns she couldn't escape. Her book, Glow Anyway, is out now at glowanywaybook.com. Follow her @glowwithnikki88. If you're struggling, you're not alone. Veterans Crisis Line: dial 988, then press 1. Or text 838255. ️ Vegas Veteran Voices Podcast — veteran-led, all-volunteer, nonprofit media. New episodes weekly. Subscribe so you don't miss one. #VegasVeteranVoices #veteranpodcast #AirForceveteran #MST #militarysexualtrauma #womenVeterans #veteranmentalhealth #PTSD #glowanywaybook #glowmethod #988 #veteranstories #lasvegas #nonprofit

4th of July Special: Freedom, Service & America’s 250th

Happy 250th, America. For our Fourth of July special, the table fills up: Ronnie, Ghost, Jimmy “Pew Pew” Depew, David Lonergan, and Jessica Jay Dee — all veterans, all entrepreneurs — for an unscripted conversation about what freedom actually means when you've seen the alternative. This one goes everywhere: Marine Corps ribbing and dark humor, the hard reality of veteran homelessness and the work of pulling brothers and sisters off the street, why the anthem still hits, and an honest conversation about struggle, purpose, and choosing to keep going. Featuring Jessica Jay Dee, David Lonergan (Triple Threat Transformation), and the Leatherneck Club in Las Vegas. ⚠️ This episode includes an honest discussion of suicide and mental health. If you're struggling, you're not alone. Veterans Crisis Line: dial 988, then press 1, or text 838255. New episodes of the Vegas Veteran Voices Podcast weekly.

She Donated Two Organs to Fellow Veterans.

Lindsay Gutierrez thought joining the military meant going straight to Vietnam. She was wrong about that. She was also wrong about Qatar having pyramids. But she wasn't wrong about the thing that mattered most, that service doesn't end when you take the uniform off. Lindsay served six years as a Security Forces officer in the Air Force, deployed to Qatar and Djibouti, survived a vehicle rollover in the middle of the night that left her with a TBI she wouldn't get diagnosed for years, and came home to a civilian world that had no idea what to do with her, or her. Lindsay is also featured as Miss March in the Pin-Ups for Vets 2026 calendar, a nonprofit that has visited over 20,000 hospitalized veterans across all 50 states. Then one day a magazine landed on her desk at a congressional office. An ad. A kidney. A veteran who needed one. She planned the donation around a Yankees game and scheduled it for Memorial Day weekend on purpose. That was the first one. The Vegas Veteran Voices Podcast is a veteran-led production of Vegas Veteran Voices, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit based in Las Vegas. New episodes every Friday. ️ vegasveteranvoices.com @vegasveteranvoices

You’ve Seen Her on Stranger Things. Here’s What Nobody Knew About This Navy Veteran.

She shot an entire season of Stranger Things with cancer. Nobody on set knew. Jennifer Marshall is a Navy veteran, actress, firefighter EMT, and cancer survivor who has spent her entire life showing up when every reasonable person would have stayed home. She joined the Navy at 17 out of a small mountain town in Colorado, her words: “poverty and bad decisions.” She deployed on the USS Theodore Roosevelt in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She got out, used the GI Bill, graduated Magna Cum Laude, became a licensed private investigator, moved to Los Angeles with no connections, and built a 50+ credit career in film and television including a recurring role on Netflix's Stranger Things, NCIS, Reacher, The Terminal List, and hosting Mysteries Decoded on the CW. Then in 2020 she recommissioned into the California State Guard. Then she was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. She resigned her commission, spent 14 months in treatment, and went straight back to work, including shooting an entire season of one of the most-watched shows on the planet while her hair was falling out and her body was breaking down. She told no one. Until the last day. This is the conversation Hollywood didn't let her have. No PR. No filter. No version of the story that's been approved by anyone. We talk about what it actually costs to build a career in an industry that will tell you to your face that you need a nose job, a different body, and a different personality, and why she left anyway. We talk about what it felt like to shoot through cancer, what happened when she finally told the truth, and what the silence that followed actually meant. We talk about why she walked away from red carpets to ride an ambulance for $16 an hour, and why she's never been happier. We talk about sexual assault, healing, and the unexpected place she found both. And we talk about what veterans carry out of the military that nobody in the civilian world knows how to hold. Jennifer Marshall doesn't do the polished version. She does the real one. This is it. If anything in this episode brought something up for you: Veterans Crisis Line: Dial 988, then press 1 | Text 838255 RAINN National Sexual Assault Hotline: 1-800-656-4673 | rainn.org Crisis Text Line: Text HOME to 741741 About Vegas Veteran Voices: Vegas Veteran Voices is a veteran-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit media company based in Las Vegas. We tell veteran stories, all branches, all ranks, no filter, through cinematic long-form conversations that the veteran community deserves and the world needs to hear. ️ Subscribe so you don't miss what's coming in Season 2. vegasveteranvoices.com #JenniferMarshall [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/jennifermarshall] #StrangerThings [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/strangerthings] #NavyVeteran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/navyveteran] #VegasVeteranVoices [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/vegasveteranvoices] #CancerSurvivor [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/cancersurvivor] #VeteranStories [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/veteranstories] #MilitaryVeteran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/militaryveteran] #NetflixStrangerThings [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/netflixstrangerthings] #MaxsMom [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/maxsmom] #VeteranPodcast [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/veteranpodcast] #HollywoodVeteran [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/hollywoodveteran] #FirefighterEMT [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/firefighteremt] #MelanomaAwareness [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/melanomaawareness] #VeteranWomen [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/veteranwomen] #WomenVeterans [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/womenveterans] #MilitaryWomen [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/militarywomen] #VeteranCommunity [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/veterancommunity] #PodcastForVeterans [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/podcastforveterans] #TrueStory [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/truestory] #UnfilteredConversations [https://www.youtube.com/hashtag/unfilteredconversations]