Veterans' voices

As a New Military historian, I’m a big proponent of oral histories; they flesh out the statistics, government documents and other components of learned monographs. The Imperial War Museum in the UK has done an excellent job of interviewing survivors of the First and Second World Wars, which means we now have an invaluable repository of first-person accounts of experiences from men and women who have since died.

In the United States, we have…the Veterans’ Voices project from NPR’s StoryCorps.

I love listening to StoryCorps on Friday mornings—a couple of minutes of two people chatting about some aspect of their lives. A mother and son; two friends; survivors of a school shooting—it’s a microcosm of life. VeteransVoices is a subset of StoryCorps, focused on life filtered through military service.

One of my all-time favorites is the one from February this year (around Valentine’s Day): Vietnam vet Jerry Nadeau and WWII vet John Banvard, who were flying a little under the radar when eight years ago they moved as a couple into a veterans’ home in Chula Vista. It’s just wonderful.

On Veterans Day this year the Google Doodle connected to five #VeteransVoices stories. Turns out Google, YouTube and StoryCorps are teaming up to help expand the collection of veterans’ stories. You can download the #VeteransVoices app for iOS, Android and Kindle, and use the native prompts to guide you in your interview.

Here’s an example:

StoryCorps recordings are archived with the Library of Congress, where anyone can access them. That means that the stories of these vets are available to everyone. I hope that—as with the IWM’s archive—these interviews can help future generations understand the humanity of military services.