Veterans History Project

Nov. 20, 2015. Adam Harrison Levy discusses how to transform research and interviews into compelling narratives when writing. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=7226

May 8, 2015. The Veterans History Project held its annual Congressional Staff Briefing to train those who work in the officers of Members of Congress on how to get their constituents involved with VHP, and to provide best practices for running successful, customized VHP activities through their district and state offices. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6885

Sep. 1, 2015. Haga su parte: entrevistar a un veterano de Estados Unidos en su comunidad y presentar su audio o vídeo de la entrevista a la Biblioteca del Congreso, Proyecto de Historia de Veteranos. Para la transcripción , subtítulos y más información, visite http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6863

Sep. 1, 2015. Haga su parte: entrevistar a un veterano de Estados Unidos en su comunidad y presentar su audio o vídeo de la entrevista a la Biblioteca del Congreso, Proyecto de Historia de Veteranos. Para la transcripción , subtítulos y más información, visite http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6862

Sep. 1, 2015. Do your part: interview a U.S. veteran in your community and submit their audio or video interview to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6860

Sep. 1, 2015. Do your part: interview a U.S. veteran in your community and submit their audio or video interview to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6861

June 27, 2014. This panel discussion covered Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder with veterans living with the diagnosis and experts who work directly with PTSD-diagnosed veterans. Speakers included Jason Cain, Karen Lynn Fears, Richard Tedeschi, Gala True and David Williams. For transcript, captions, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=6566

Actor Gary Sinise visits the Library of Congress and experiences the Library's Veterans History Project.

The Library's Veterans History Project commemorated Women's History Month with a landmark panel discussion on the contributions of women to the Persian Gulf War and the impact on women veterans in the more than 20 years since. Speaker Biography: One of the first female Navy diving officers, Darlene Iskra was also the first woman to command a ship in the U.S. Navy, the USS Opportune ARS-41, and took it to war during Desert Storm in January 1991. In addition to her experience as a sea-going officer, her staff work has included both enlisted personnel management at the Bureau of Naval Personnel, and civil affairs, disaster and military attache work for USCINCPAC Rep Marianas in Guam and the Marianas Islands. She retired from the U.S. Navy as a Commander in April 2000. Her story is included in the VHP collections and featured in VHP's Voices of War. Speaker Biography: Juliana Mock served in the Persian Gulf War with the US Army, 87th Medical Detachment (Dental Services) and 12th EVAC Hospital. Her unit provided dental support for the Iraqi EPWs at the 301st Military Police Camp. During the months of January, February and March 1991, the unit repeatedly experienced the loud alarms of chemical detectors and ingested expired pyrostigmine bromide tablets. Since the war she and her husband, also a Persian Gulf War veteran, experienced health complications and in 2003 she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. She is now president of Veterans of Modern Warfare and an advocate for Gulf War veterans health. Speaker Biography: An African-American woman raised in Philadelphia, Gail Shillingford joined the US Army in order to obtain money for college. She was assigned to support of the 3rd Infantry Division at Ft. Stewart, and deployed to the Persian Gulf for 10 months as a private. She recalls SCUD attacks and other perils in support of the front lines. She remains in the military, currently serving as CW4, GS assistant executive officer to the director of the Army Staff. Speaker Biography: Raised on an Indian Reservation, Juanita Mullen is a pioneer for American Indian women in the US Air Force. She served stateside during the Gulf War in support of troops overseas, watching her husband deploy and caring for her children and family while serving. She was mobilized for deployment but was called back. She retired from the Air Force after 20 years and, after a stint at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, joined the VA Center for Minority Veterans and Center for Women Veterans. She serves as the American Indian veterans liaison for both centers. For captions, transcript, and more information visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5511.

Nebraska Educational Telecommunications (NET/PBS), Senator Chuck Hagel and his brother, Professor Tom Hagel, donate hours of original interview and related materials to the Library of Congress Veterans History Project. This event kicked-off the Veterans History Project's Vietnam Veterans Collections Initiative. Charles Timothy "Chuck" Hagel served Nebraska in the U.S. Senate from 1997-2009. He currently teaches at Georgetown University in the Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is chairman of the Atlantic Council, co-chairman of the President's Intelligence Advisory Board, a member of the Secretary of Defense's Policy Board and Secretary of Energy's Blue Ribbon Commission on America's Nuclear Future, and is a member of Public Broadcasting Service board of directors. Tom Hagel is a law professor at the University of Dayton and served alongside his brother Chuck an infantryman in the U.S. Army in the jungles of Vietnam. Bob Patrick is the director of the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress. For captions, transcript, and more information, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/cyberlc/feature_wdesc.php?rec=5344.

In 1968, as the Vietnam War became a flash point of controversy for many young Americans, 23-year-old Julia Grabner enlisted in the Army simply because she saw a need for nurses. In her interview, she’s honest about the intensity of her duty experiences: treating GI casualties as well as Vietnamese villagers, and the hard partying with her “big brother” comrades that helped relieve the stress of her 72-hour work weeks. Grabner didn’t leave the lessons of her experiences behind; she has worked with veteran support groups and to educate young people about the aftershocks of war.

After a hardscrabble upbringing, Keith Little was determined to contribute to the war effort when he learned about the attack on Pearl Harbor. The problem was, he was only 15 years old at the time and had to wait two years to enlist. A stranger signed for him to become a Marine, and Little signed up for the code talker program. Little witnessed some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific Theater, while helping to maintain communications with a code that the Japanese couldn't crack.

Working in Buffalo, New York's Mercy Hospital in the fall of 1943, Marion Stenhilber was persuaded by a friend to visit the local Red Cross office one night after their shift concluded. Steinhilber wound up volunteering, while her friend decided against it. She was assigned to the women's ward of a hospital in Brooklyn, but she craved something stronger. Again, a friend intervened, signing them up for overseas duty. That put them in Calcutta, India, and from there she was off to several duty stations in the China-Burma-India Theater. She treated malaria patients, worked with soldiers who had been badly burned, and found she liked working in the operating room best of all. Most of the GIs were, if anything, overly solicitous of her needs for a touch of comfort and home.

Larry Schwab was drafted during his medical internship to serve as a medic in Vietnam, a war he personally did not approve of. But he felt it his duty to serve his country and apply his medical skills to wounded soldiers. In May 1968, Schwab's resolve was tested during an assault on his base that caused many casualties. His long and detailed description of that horrible night is testimony to the vivid memories that war inflicts on its survivors; he suffered nightmares from the experience for years. Schwab returned to Vietnam in the 1990s to provide medical treatment and advice, and he became active in the international movement to ban land mines.

It was a small moment in a brief military career in a world war filled with large and momentous events. But sixty years after it happened, Gus Prince clearly recalled his being accepted as a radar man aboard the USS Santee, knowing in retrospect what that acceptance meant to him, a young black man struggling for respect in a largely segregated Navy.

When Roger Ingvalson was shot down over North Vietnam on May 28, 1968, he was already a veteran pilot, with nearly twenty years in the Air Force and over 100 missions flown in Vietnam. He spent his 40th birthday in captivity and wound up at the notorious Hanoi Hilton. Ingvalson kept his mind busy by studying insects and by communicating with his fellow prisoners through special codes. And he kept his North Vietnamese captors at bay by feeding them false information. He attributes his ability to survive five years of deprivation and isolation to his religious faith.

Catherine Vail got her first taste for flying on a teen date with a boyfriend, who had a pilot take them for a ride in a small plane. In college at Berkeley, California, she signed up for the Civilian Pilot Training Program and obtained her pilot's license. When aviator Jacqueline Cochran began forming the group that would be come the WASP, Vail interviewed with her and was hired as her personal secretary. Cochran would make an exception for Vail and other young pilots with less than the required flying time, and Vail became a member of the second class of WASP to graduate. She flew over 1000 hours, doing ferrying work all over the U.S., while her husband, whom she married in June 1944, served as a pilot in the Pacific Theater. She admits her life's biggest disappointment came when the WASP were deactivated in December 1944, with so much experience behind them and so much still to offer to the war effort.

Paul Steppe, a Marine infantry corporal serving in Korea, saw fierce action, punctuated by long nights when he and his foxhole buddies alternated two-hour watches. Wounded by a grenade on Christmas Eve 1951, Steppe was evacuated to a hospital, narrowly escaping death when his transport plane lost its landing gear on takeoff. In his memoirs, An Everlasting Watch, Steppe notes that American troops are still "on watch" in the Korean peninsula, his war's resolution still incomplete. His mother, Meda Brendall, is featured on this site, under Hurry Up and Wait, for her service as a welder during World War II.

Three months after Cookie Avvampato, a professional nurse with two late-teen children, joined the Air Force Reserves, she was called into active duty to serve in Desert Storm as a backfill medical specialist in Kuwait. Having grown up a self-described military brat, with her father an Air Force enlisted man she had little trouble adapting to life in the military. Some fourteen years later, she volunteered to go to Iraq to serve in that conflict. Daily life in the two wars was a study in contrasts; her medical facility in Kuwait had many amenities, with little sense of danger, while conditions as her base in Balad, Iraq, were very confining and dominated by the Big Voice, a public address announcer who warned of incoming mortar attacks usually after they had started.

By the end of World War II, Donald Patrick Finn, who served in the Navy in the Pacific Theater, could say he nearly saw it all. He was stationed in Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. He would serve as an aviation machinist and a gunner in Australia, Bali, the Dutch East Indies, and in the Aleutian Islands. He kept a diary and wrote letters to his sister in which he recorded detailed descriptions of his travels as well as pointed comments about military life, his comrades, and servicemen from other countries.