Nineteen veterans will begin roaming the halls of Congress next week, contributing to one of the biggest classes of lawmakers who served in the military in recent years.

The 118th Congress' cohort of 97 total veterans includes a couple historic firsts: Congress' first two Black West Point graduates.

Two female veterans will also be joining Congress. That's short of the record three women veterans who entered Congress in 2018. But when including incumbents, the seven total women veterans still matches the record total number set by the 116th Congress.

Sixteen of the freshman veterans are Republicans, who won a narrow majority in the House after Democrats performed better in the midterm elections than expected.

At least one of the veterans joining Congress was at the Jan. 6, 2021, rally that preceded the attack on the U.S. Capitol, though he denies ever entering the building and has not been charged with any crime.

And one of the 19 "new" veterans is actually a familiar face. Navy SEAL veteran Ryan Zinke, R-Mont., is returning to Congress after leaving in early 2019 to become the interior secretary in the Trump administration. Zinke resigned as interior secretary amid allegations, later substantiated by an inspector general, that he violated ethics rules.

While some of the most ardent 2020 election deniers lost their races this year, at least one veteran who was committed to that cause and came to Washington on Jan. 6 won.

Republican Rep.-elect Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin is a retired Navy SEAL who served for 26 years. His campaign biography says his career included a deployment to Bosnia-Herzegovina, multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan, and time in the Horn of Africa, Asia, Europe, and South and Central America.

In a 2015 book called "Book of Man: A Navy Seal's Guide to the Lost Art of Manhood," Van Orden, who has also had some minor acting roles, reportedly detailed a time he exposed a male lieutenant's enlarged scrotum to two young female officers, an incident he later claimed was part of medical training.

Van Orden, who ran an unsuccessful House race in 2020, has said he was in D.C. on Jan. 6 for "meetings and to stand for the integrity of our electoral system." He acknowledged walking down the Mall toward the Capitol, but insists he wasn't on Capitol grounds and left the area as the situation turned violent.

"When it became clear that a protest had become a mob, I left the area as to remain there could be construed as tacitly approving this unlawful conduct," Van Orden wrote in an op-ed days after Jan. 6. "At no time did I enter the grounds, let alone the building."

The Daily Beast, citing pictures and video posted to social media, reported that Van Orden was in a restricted area on Capitol grounds that would have required crossing a police barricade to get to and that live video of him there was posted after the attack started. Van Orden is not one of the more than 900 people who have been charged in connection with the attack.

After his victory this year, Van Orden espoused a unifying tone, saying that "we have to get back to the place where we represent everyone."

Some models of the F-35 Lightning II are being investigated and grounded by the military services following a crash in Texas earlier this month that forced the pilot to eject from the runway.

The F-35 Joint Program Office, or JPO, told Military.com in an emailed statement Wednesday that one-time inspections have been ordered for certain models "while the investigation into the mishap on December 15 continues" but did not disclose numbers or any other specifics.

"The affected aircraft have been identified," a statement from the JPO read. "This is a preliminary assessment of the risk, and actions are in work that we believe will lead to a refinement of this assessment in January 2023. The safety of flight crews is the JPO's primary concern."

The recent groundings are roughly two weeks removed from the Dec. 15 incident in which an F-35B Lightning II crashed during a vertical landing at Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base Fort Worth.

That crash followed a string of incidents and mishaps this year ranging from ejection seat supply issues to a high-profile recovery of an F-35 that crashed in the ocean.

But those incidents will likely not raise a lot of red flags in Congress or the Pentagon, according to Jeremiah Gertler, a senior associate with the Center for Strategic and International Studies think tank in Washington, D.C., who specializes in aviation, told Military.com.

"I think people who are experienced in military aircraft programs, as many Congress members are, will look at that and say, 'These are the things that typically kind of happen during training and early production,'' Gertler said. "We don't know yet what happened specifically with that F-35B crash. ... It's the difference between a problem with the program and problems with individual airplanes."