December 3, 2008
West Point Oral-History Project Will Make Soldiers' Stories Available Online
The U.S. Military Academy, in West Point, N.Y., has established a video oral-history project that will collect the stories of soldiers of all ages and make them available online for students, historians, journalists, and the public. The project, created by the academy’s history department, already has a preview site with a video explaining its goals, but the site’s formal unveiling won’t come until sometime in 2009.
“Soldiers’ personal stories are a largely untapped mine of military insight and historical testimony,” said Todd Brewster, a former journalist who is director of the project. In addition to recording battlefield stories of soldiers — including those now deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as those who served in conflicts as far back as World War II — project leaders hope to interview senior policy makers, among them former secretaries of defense and state. Besides video, the project will collect audio recordings and textual materials.
The academy said the project would be “a work in perpetual progress, continuously updated as history unfolds.” The project’s first undertakings include interviews with members of the academy’s Class of 1967 who were sent to Vietnam soon after graduating. —Lawrence Biemiller
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this is a very great idea, it gives people like me a chance to listen to the experiences of brave individuals who are risking their lives on a day to day schedule
— nathan mullins Dec 4, 01:54 PM #
It is especially important to do this today, since soldiers seldom write letters home anymore. It used to be that letters saved by families were great historical records of a perspective that couldn’t be gleaned from official documents. Email and telephones are readily available in most parts of Iraq and Afghanistan and have replaced the written word almost entirely.
— FB Dec 4, 03:53 PM #
The members of our armed forces who have served and are currently servicing in combat should have there stories told, so that futuce generations will know of their deeds.
— Bruce Burleson Dec 4, 06:11 PM #
A great way to show all the stories of our military men saving our lives in the uSA.
— myrtle coleman Dec 5, 09:42 AM #