Like old soldiers around the country, a group of former service members gathered in Crest Hill, Illinois, to remember fallen comrades on Memorial Day, 2024. Several months later, the Veteran, a newspaper published by Vietnam Veterans Against the War, ran a photo of the event they attended. It shows a multigenerational group of men — white, black, and Latino — lined up proudly between two flags.

In his dispatch to the newspaper, African American Navy veteran Robert Maury explained why everyone in the Stateville Veterans Group was wearing government-issued clothing of a nonmilitary sort. As Maury wrote, “This was the first time in the history of Stateville, if not the first time in the history of the state of Illinois, that incarcerated veterans were allowed to organize a Memorial Day ceremony in a maximum-security prison.”

There would not be another such event because, late last year, the Illinois Department of Corrections closed this century-old facility. The Veterans Group there was forced to disband; its members dispersed to other prisons around the state, where some hoped to plant seeds for future veteran-initiated programs at their new addresses.