RAEFORD, N.C. — Joann Yost still feels the stares of the other military wives five years after her husband was killed in Iraq: It happens at ceremonies honoring fallen soldiers or when she's grocery shopping with her son.

The federal government plans to spend several million dollars restoring a historic seaplane hangar that played a key role in the Battle of Midway during World War II. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which today runs a nature reserve at the remote atoll of Midway 1,300 miles northwest of Honolulu, announced the plan Thursday on the 68th anniversary of the battle.

When the late Russell Wiggins was editor of the Washington Post in the 1960s, he liked to say that in American foreign and security policy, "the stockade comes first." He was referring to the Old West when the cavalry rode out from the stockade, or fort, to protect settlers from marauding outlaws or Indians on the warpath.