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Reflections November 2012

Health, Wellness & the Good Life

What They Went Through: Preserving Veterans' Voices

By Lynn Pribus

The VHP is the nation's largest veterans' project, charged by Congress in 2000 with chronicling veterans from World War I to today. A "collection" is created for each participating individual (living or deceased) and may include interviews, letters, diaries, photos, drawings, scrapbooks and similar items.

"Personal histories are the only way to hand this down to our younger people," declared WWII Navy veteran Tom Camarda of Silver Spring, Md. While volunteering at the Navy Memorial in Washington, he often encountered visitors wondering about a deceased family member. "That individual did not talk to them about the war," he said sadly, "so they come here to learn."

"Collecting and preserving veterans' stories tells the human experience of war," agreed Col. Bob Patrick, USA-Ret., a Military Officers Association of America member and director of the Veterans History Project (VHP) at the Library of Congress American Folklife Center, one of many oral history projects across the country. "It's not about what the generals and historians and scholars have said, but about the individual experience."

The VHP is the nation's largest veterans' project, charged by Congress in 2000 with chronicling veterans from World War I to today. A "collection" is created for each participating individual (living or deceased) and may include interviews, letters, diaries, photos, drawings, scrapbooks and similar items. Today there are many thousands of collections with many available to the public on the Internet. While many of the collections date back to WWII, some are as recent as stories from Korea, Iraq and Afghanistan.

The VHP is not the only such project. Others deal with specific populations, such as residents of an individual state, women, Latinos or a particular era. Another project is Stories of Service which operates nationwide. It involves young people who create videos about individual veterans. The website offers a curriculum relating to the project with a free Educator's Guide and a digital story toolkit.

Camarda, the retired sailor, was the subject of such a video created by Steve Shade, then a high school junior in Vienna, Va. "We gather information," explained Shade. "Then we write a script and when the veteran approves it, he reads it as we record." Personal photos and video clips are typically part of the final video.

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"It feels like you are honoring the person by sharing the story," Shade said solemnly, then enthusiastically continued, "Can I tell you about Tom? He and five friends enlisted right after Pearl Harbor." Camarda served as a Navy gunner on the tanker SS Virginia, which was in a convoy set upon by a German wolf pack in 1943.

Camarda took up the story. "I was on watch at 2 a.m. and saw an ammo ship right in front of us just blow up in a humongous ball of fire," he recalled. "It started raining debris on us -- clothes and letters and pieces of the bulkhead. There was nothing left of the ship. Nothing."

What can people learn from these oral histories? "There's a big lesson for everybody about what we went through," says Camarda. "We were on the brink back then. Young men even lied about their age to get with the program." He pauses thoughtfully. "People will know this was not easy."

 

How to Get Started

Once those veterans are gone, their stories are lost forever. If you or a family member has history to recount, there is no time like today to start.

StoryCorps, an independent nonprofit, provides all Americans with the opportunity to record, share and preserve the stories of our lives. Since 2003, StoryCorps has archived more than 40,000 interviews-not only from veterans-at the American Folklife Center. You can hear weekly broadcasts on NPR, listen online and read interviews in several inspiring books.

StoryCorps has designated the day after Thanksgiving each year as a National Day of Listening. This is an opportunity to record interviews in veterans' hospitals, senior centers or your own living room. Step-by-step suggestions, advice on equipment and a list of questions to enhance your interview are included.

VHP offers a field kit to interview the veteran in your life, providing a vehicle to initiate conversations about war experiences. "It's a chapter in a family's history," said VHP's Patrick. "Some veterans say, 'This is the first time I've ever told this.'"

 

SIDEBAR: For More Information

For information on the Veterans History Project, to see sample collections or to obtain an interview kit: Call 888-371-5848 or 202-707-4916 or visit www.loc.gov/vets.

Stories of Service: To view videos and learn more about classroom projects, visit www.digiclub.org/sofs

For information on StoryCorps, visit www.StoryCorps.org. For more about creating your own interview visit: www.NationalDayOfListening.org. To find a project close to you, visit your local library or enter "oral history military veteran [your state]" in your search engine.

 

Lynn Pribus and her retired Air Force husband make their home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

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