November/December 2004

Before They’re Gone

Preserving the stories of America’s military veterans, and civilians involved on the home front, is the gigantic task of the Veterans History Project

by Montague Gammon III

File this under Endangered Species, file it under Dwindling Natural Resources. File it under oral history and literature, and maybe under folklore too, because the Veterans History Project is part of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress. Above all, file it as something really important, especially for Hampton Roads.

Year 2000 census figures tell us that Hampton Roads is home to better than 200,000 veterans. According to the stats one hears most, there are 19 million veterans in the nation, of whom 1,500 die daily. By conventional reckoning, this means that, nationwide, about one veteran leaves us every minute. With each death, irreplaceable and unique bits of American history are lost.

Unless, of course, someone takes the time and trouble to record them, and to place those records in the public view. That’s where the Veterans History Project, “committed to honoring veterans and collecting their stories,” comes in. The Project, in the words of its website, “collects and preserves the extraordinary wartime stories of ordinary people.” Established by an act of Congress in 2000, it provides an ever-growing archive of memoirs, preserved as written narratives, interviews, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, drawings, correspondence and video and audio tapes from veterans of America’s 20th-century wars and from “citizen civilians who were actively involved in supporting war efforts (such as war industry workers, USO workers, flight instructors, medical volunteers, etc.).”

Those records, collected by volunteers or submitted by the veterans themselves, are organized and preserved by the Library of Congress and made available to researchers and members of the public, with many safeguards of the individuals’ privacy. Veterans retain the copyright to their submitted material.

So far, the Project has 21,550 submissions on hand, which adds up to an impressive stash. Yet those 21,000 are barely a drop in the buckets full of tales that are out there, so the Project’s small staff are always recruiting folks who can bring in just one more interview. People who contact the Project through its website can get their Project Kit, a small set of forms that will help their catalog their submission and may also serve to jog the memory of a veteran who is telling his or her story.

“What we really want is their interviews,” says Anneliesa Clump Behrend, Public Affairs Specialist for the Project. The kit they send out does include guidelines and hints for interviewing, but generally “the veteran will lead” the volunteer where the story ought to go, Mrs. Behrend notes.

Individuals may want only to record the story of someone special to themselves, or may set a goal of interviewing a particular group of veterans. Schools have made themselves partners of the History Project with classroom projects that gather submissions. Civic groups or social organizations can do the same sort of thing. The frailty of human memory, as well as the simple fact of mortality, gives a hint of urgency to these efforts.

Mrs. Behrend adds about the interviewing process, “The surprising benefit [of the Project] is that the veterans are really honored in a way they have never been honored before.” Knowing that someone cares enough to record for posterity this so-significant part of the vet’s life really means something special to the person who is being interviewed. After all, it’s not just the heroes or the currently prominent whom Project seeks out. “VHP collects and preserves the extraordinary wartime stories of ordinary people . . . not a formal history of war, but a treasure trove of individual feeling and personal recollections,” says the website.

By the way, the Project had a cadre of volunteers interviewing people who convened on the Mall in Washington, D.C., for the dedication of the World War II Memorial; a special section of their website is devoted to webcasts and recordings of interviews from that occasion.

There’s a book out too, hitting the shelves this Veteran’s Day. It’s called Voices of War: Stories of Service from the Home Front and the Front Lines, a joint venture with National Geographic that has 336 pages worth of stories from World War I through the Persian Gulf War, coupled with 175 illustrations in the form of photographs, sketches, notes and other memorabilia from the veterans and their home folks.

The book offers photos of aging veterans being interviewed, and of young men and women in uniform, sketches by art students turned sailor, and notes dashed off quickly. In the book and on the website, there is a wonderful series of homemade, illustrated family newsletters that Marion Gurfein created for husband Joe, serving in African and Europe during World War II. There is the calmly told, fiercely ironic tale of Maryland resident Warren Harding Tsuneishi, a Japanese American born in this country on July 4, who served in the Pacific Theater of World War II as a translator while his parents were interned by their adopted homeland. Poignant accounts and funny stories, tales of imprisonment and injuries, of narrow escapes and heroism and grinding routines—all make up this first most tangible product of the Project.

There’s more to come in other books, of course, but even more vital is the matter of where that “more” is to be found. Turn around twice in Hampton Roads and you will see enough war veterans to fill a fair sized paperback with stories. Why not ask them what they have to say?

The Veterans History Project web address is http://www.loc.gov/folklife/vets/. They get email at vohp@loc.gov. Phone calls to (202) 707-4916 or 1-888-371-5848 will reach them.