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StoryCorps' OutLoud initiative records stories from the LGBTQ community.

Michelle Kreifels knows she's different from her siblings. The 51-year-old is the fifth of seven children, and was born with an intellectual disability.

"You're different, too," Michelle tells her younger brother Patrick, 48, during their StoryCorps interview in Omaha, Neb. Patrick and their sister Marlene are Michelle's legal guardians.

"And how am I different?" Patrick asks.

"Gay," Michelle says.

Patrick asks her how she felt when she found out he was gay, and Michelle says she didn't want it to be true. "I just think ... wife and husband should be together," she says.

But, she tells her brother, she came to accept it.

"Just thought about it," she says. "And I thought, 'He can do whatever he wants,' " she says with a laugh.

"What made you decide that you were going to be gay?" Michelle asks her brother.

"It wasn't something that I decided. I was just kind of born that way," Patrick tells her. "And I tried to not be that way for a while and I wasn't happy. So I just accepted who I was. I'm glad I did too. I'm a happier person."

"Yes, you are," Michelle says. "Fun to be around."

"I've learned a lot from you over the years, that's for sure," her brother says. "I remember in the summer before I went to college, I did the same job that you did, at the plant, and you had to train me. "

"Yep. And you had a hard time," she says.

"I did have a hard time. Took me a while to get the hang of it — but you were a good teacher to me," he says. "You're patient and you're really good for me and I appreciate you accepting me and all my differences too. It means a lot."

"Thanks. I love you," she says.

"I love you too," Patrick says.

"Yeah."

Produced for Weekend Edition by Allison Davis.

StoryCorps is a national nonprofit that gives people the chance to interview friends and loved ones about their lives. These conversations are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, allowing participants to leave a legacy for future generations. Learn more, including how to interview someone in your life, at StoryCorps.org.

StoryCorps

On Friday, the Labor Department announced that the economy added 280,000 jobs in May — a strong figure, and a much faster rate than economists expected.

Now imagine that in your state, job creation was nearly four times that fast.

That's what GOP presidential hopeful Rick Perry can claim for Texas during his tenure as governor. Among all of the governors running for president, he can boast the best job creation numbers.

That's what NPR's analysis of state employment data from the St. Louis Federal Reserve finds (I did the same kind of analysis earlier this year, at Vox). Retooling the numbers today (and adding in the candidates who weren't around back in January), it's clear that only three candidates can claim job growth faster than the national rate, and that Perry still by far leads the pack.

First, let's look at the basics: Perry's Texas added more than 2.2 million jobs during his 14 years in office — that means that during his time in office, Texas jobs grew by more than 23 percent. By comparison, U.S. employment grew by just over 6 percent. So job growth in Perry's Texas was around 3.8 times as fast as the US as a whole.

If that doesn't astound you, consider a line from Perry's speech on Thursday, announcing his run for president:

"During my 14 years as governor, Texas companies created almost one-third of all new American jobs," he said in his speech (to be more exact, the figure is nearly 28 percent).

That puts a few governors well ahead of the rest of the pack: though Jeb Bush and Bobby Jindal both outstripped the national rate respectably, Perry comes out with job creation nearly four times the national rate.

But then there's the question of whether that job growth is those governors' doing. And the answer is that it's really hard to draw a direct line between governors and the job growth in their states.

Economist Jared Bernstein has written that in recessions, the president and Congress are the most important engines of job creation (think the recovery package passed in the wake of the financial crisis). In expansions, it's more complicated, but he believes that governors and mayors don't create jobs; they attract them:

"Do governors and mayors have more to do with job creation when the economy is growing? Not so much here either, but that doesn't mean these electeds are irrelevant to job growth," he writes. "While the aggregate quantity of job growth in a nation is largely driven by macro and global trends, there's a lot sub-national officials can do to try to encourage the jobs that are created to locate in their states and cities. They affect less the number of jobs than where those jobs end up."

So if you hear governors on the campaign trail say they "created" jobs, that's not quite the case.

And it's true that improving infrastructure and lowering taxes, for example, can help attract businesses into a state. As Bernstein writes, creating research hubs centered around universities can also attract businesses.

But those effects can easily be overshadowed by bigger forces that can affect job creation.

Texas, for example, has a massive oil industry that can drive job creation independently of whoever is in charge. Indeed, now that oil prices are down and the industry is hurting, Texas' unemployment claims have also started to climb. Not only that, but the state has enjoyed fantastically fast population growth (which could function both as a cause and effect of new jobs): the state population grew by nearly 29 percent between 2000 and 2014, compared to just 13 percent in the US as a whole.

Consider also that Texas had fast growth when Perry was in office, but it also did before he was in office. According to a 2011 analysis form Harvard economist Ed Glaeser, Perry's policies were responsible for only 0.1 percent of the state's job growth at the time, once Glaeser controlled for how quickly Texas had been adding jobs without him.

Moreover, national trends can override positive local developments — Huckabee and Bush, for example, both left office just before the financial crisis hit, tanking the national economy. Had they remained in office just a year longer, their numbers could have been much worse, meaning fewer statistics to tout on the campaign trail.

Saudi Arabia shot down a Scud missile fired by Houthi rebels in neighboring Yemen that was targeted at one of the kingdom's largest air bases.

NPR's Deborah Amos, reporting from Riyadh, said the Cold War-era Scud was taken down by the U.S.-supplied Patriot missile defense system.

The thwarted rebel attack comes after three Saudi soldiers and a border guard were killed in an earlier border skirmish, she says.

Deborah says: "Saudi Arabia's punishing war in Yemen has moved to the Saudi border with anti-government Houthi rebels launching border attacks and for the first time, firing a Scud missile early Saturday morning. The target was a southwest border city, home to the largest air force base in the Kingdom."

Saudi Arabia leads a coalition of Arab states that have conducted airstrikes against Yemen's Iranian-backed Houthi rebels since March. The foiled Scud attack marks the first time the missile has been used by the rebels against Saudi Arabia, however the Russian-built surface-to-surface rocket was used by factions in Yemen's civil war in the 1990s.

The official Saudi Press Agency says the Scud was aimed at the King Khalid Air Base, the largest air base in that part of the country. The Associated Press says Saudis on social media reported hearing air raid sirens go off around the city during the attack.

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Interview Highlights

On showing experiences both in the military and at home

One of the things I'm most interested in, not only is that specificity of a singular life and following that with the long view — I'm [also] really interested in the proximity of violence as much in the side streets and living rooms of America as in the war zone.

On what Rath calls 'the way we fetishize war suffering'

It's the 30-second clip that you're going to get that's going to get your heart rate rising. And you won't change the channel. And so what I hope what the novel does a little bit here is hold the mirror up not only in the conflict sphere but in that domestic sphere.

On choosing to write about sexual assault

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I think as a writer approaching material I want to do justice to the characters. But at the same time, there's no doubt that there were certain topics that were really important to me, and in the writing of this book, tackling the issue of sexual assault in general, and specifically in the military, was absolutely important to me. We know sexual assault is an issue in our society at large and in the military specifically.

On the civilian/military divide

There's a lot of talk about the civilian/military divide. I think veterans and active-duty service members, we want to feel connection. We want to feel like our sacrifices and our service to the country, you know, is appreciated, and I think to a large extent it is.

The problem becomes, and it's a very complex problem, but one angle of it is from the military side those who have seen combat — it's such a difficult thing ... to work through and process.

But I think at the core of it, we just want a conversation about what our country asks of us. And not just what our country asks of our service members, but what it asks of their families, of their friends and of their communities.

Read an excerpt of I'd Walk With My Friends If I Could Find Them

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Veterans

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