Of Those Who Served: The Veterans History Project
Collection at the Library of Congress
By Amanda M. Brown
This article originally appeared in the Winter 2003 issue
of Folklife Center News, Vol. XXV, Number 1.
Veterans History Project processing technicians (left to right)
Sandra Savage, Judy Ng, and Rachel Mears examine materials
submitted by World War II veteran Clifton Davis from Paris,
Ohio. Photo by James Hardin.
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Eighty-four years have passed since Frank Woodruff Buckles served
with the First Fort Riley [Kansas] Casual Detachment in France
and Germany, yet the World War I veteran speaks lucidly of his
experiences as a medic in the Army. Of his time in France, Buckles
recalls listening to boisterous French soldiers sing the French
national anthem "La Marseillaise" in local wine shops.
Buckles explains in an interview, "I enquired, what is the
occasion? They were going back to the front. Can you imagine
that?"
Indeed, no. Few today (and perhaps not many in 1918) can imagine
celebrating one's imminent return to the frontlines or to the
gruesome realities of trench warfare. However, one can gain a
better understanding of the multidimensional and changing character
of twentieth-century warfare by investigating the personal narratives
of those who served in the military and in homefront efforts
during wartime.
The Veterans History Project, under the umbrella of the American
Folklife Center, is providing an opportunity for veterans of
the two world wars and of the Korean, Vietnam, and Persian Gulf
Wars to share their recollections of wartime experiences. James
H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, has stressed that "the
American story can be told through a thousand different voices,
a thousand different pictures, a thousand different memories." Even
a casual study of the collections already donated to the project
reveals an amazing diversity of experiences that spans eight
decades and chronicles thousands of lives forever changed by
their participation in those wars.
Therein lies the heart of the Veterans History Project, for
no two of the more than four thousand personal testimonies that
have already been donated to the project are identical. Some
veterans share their stories with friends and family through
carefully crafted memoirs; others give interviews to nieces and
nephews, grandchildren, and students of younger generations,
who have no personal remembrances of those times and events.
Still others dust off their attic trunks and revisit their own
war years (or those of deceased family members) through personal
correspondence and photographs, compiling the mementos first
collected when they were young and sometimes held ilence for
decades.
A page from Colonel Gurfein's scrapbook with newspaper clippings,
a photograph, and Colonel Gurfien's Silver Star. Veterans History
Project Collection.
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Ronnie Sobbe chose to record his story of Vietnam through the
lens of a camera, rather than in the more traditional diary,
memoir, or interview. Two hundred sixty-nine candid snapshots,
most of which are uncaptioned, comprise the bulk of Sobbe's collection.
Vietnamese villages, Army operations, and social gatherings are
among the subjects captured in the photographs. From casual shots
of overseas living quarters to prints depicting brief, happy-go-lucky
interludes of leave at home, Sobbe's collection presents a fascinating
picture of his life in Vietnam in all its tedium, intensity,
hilarity, and horror.
In contrast to Sobbe's visual display, Vietnam veteran Rhona
Marie Knox Prescott used words as her medium for sharing her
sobering testimony of service in the Army Nurse Corps. In her
interview, Prescott recalls encountering Vietnam in its lush,
green beauty for the first time; she then explains how that first
impression of a paradise-like world faded once she alighted from
the helicopter and went to work. "When we were busy," Prescott
tearfully recounts, "we had to somehow block out the smells
and the sounds because the smells were of dirty, putrefied flesh
and blood . . . the sounds were of people crying and screaming
and praying . . . the sounds were chaotic. The smells were astounding." Prescott's
gripping account effectively captures the emotional and physical
turmoil she and others experienced in America's longest twentieth-century
war.
A quarter century earlier, Helen C. Hurst served in a similar
capacity as Prescott in a war far different from Vietnam. Compelled
by pleas for help from the Red Cross and encouraged by the patriotic
fervor of a nation in the throes of a heroic world war, Hurst
joined tens of thousands of other young people in the war effort
and served her country in the Army Nurse Corps. After training
in Sebring, Florida, the Indiana native was shipped to North
Africa and then to Italy. In an emotional interview, Hurst tells
of traveling in convoy with Army G.I.s through the African desert
shortly after the Allies had soundly defeated the Desert Fox,
Nazi General Erwin Rommel.
Hurst continues her narrative with memories of spending the
holidays in charge of a hospital ward on the island of Sardinia.
Defying orders from her commanding officer that restricted decorations
in her hospital unit, Hurst procured a "Christmas tree," recruited
her healthier patients to set it up in a prominent place in the
ward, and crowned the top with a bedpan "star." For
Hurst, this act of kindness and Christmas cheer merely reflected
the spirit that she believes accompanies service in the armed
forces. "I thought, Well, this is my country. I've
got a duty.' So I joined." She became one of sixteen million
men and women who answered the call to military service in World
War II.
Many World War II veterans found themselves serving their country
again five years later in what would become known as the "forgotten
war." Col. Joseph Gurfein, a West Point graduate and career
Army officer, served in the Korean War and fastidiously saved
photographs, ration cards, letters, telegrams, and news clippings,
which his wife Marion compiled in a scrapbook titled simply "Korea
'50-'51." Mrs. Gurfein included in the scrapbook literature
and photographs of Colonel Gurfein's participation in the Inchon
invasion, North Korean propaganda against the United Nations,
copies of Gurfein's military orders, and a Western Union telegram
sent by Marion in response to the announcement of her husband's
return from Korea: "Living for January 25 Love you deeply
Marion."
Amanda Brown sorts through the pages of a scrapbook compiled by
Marion Gurfein, the wife of Col. Joseph Gurfien, a veteran
of World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War. The individual
pages have been housed in mylar sleeves for preservation. Photo
by James Hardin.
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Other Korean veterans, however, share their memories by reflecting,
in writing, on the profound impact that the brief war had on
their lives and those of their families. Their stories are found
in memoirs with titles such as "Memories of a Non-Hero During
the Korean War" and "A G.I. Machine Gunner: From the
Seminary to Korea's Front Line: 1951-1952" and "Korea:
Frozen Hell on Earth, A Platoon Sergeant's Diary, Korean War
1951-1952."
Only eleven years removed from war in the Middle East, Persian
Gulf War veterans like Air Force Maj. James Jeffrey Webb and
Navy Boatswain's Mate Third Class Laura E. Dwyer speak passionately
about their time spent in the Middle East. Webb's collection
includes an audio interview and accompanying transcript, a photograph
of himself in that timeless military pose in uniform in front
of his aircraft, and a map called an "evasion chart" that
was distributed to those serving in the Persian Gulf. The waterproof,
flame-resistant map of areas of Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates features crucial
desert-survival material such as celestial-navigation charts,
lists and pictures of edible and inedible plants indigenous to
the region, and helpful secondary uses for the map.
For Laura E. Dwyer, deployment to the Persian Gulf evoked mixed
emotions. Aboard the USS Cape Cod, a photograph of which she
donated with her collection, Dwyer "felt part of the force
that was going to war, bound for it, destined for it like a river
that runs into the sea. My emotions oscillated between fear and
pride." Many Persian Gulf War veterans, who have participated
in the Veterans History Project, reflect upon their respective
roles in that war while contemplating the current unrest in the
Middle East and the possibility of future service there.
One is left with a sense of awe at the eloquence with which
each of these collections speaks: in a formal interview between
a World War II veteran and his granddaughter, in the letters
of an eighteen-year-old boy writing to his mother from the trenches
of World War I, in the stark black-and-white photographs of Korea
in wintertime, in the descriptions of the Saudi Arabian desert's
suffocating heat. Veterans' voices are being heard and their
stories are emerging at the prompting of student interviewers,
in the pages of diaries and logbooks, in the texts of their own
writing.
Amanda Brown, a recent graduate of Southwestern University
in Georgetown, Texas, is a former Library of Congress Junior
Fellow who has had a temporary appointment at the Veterans
History Project. Rachel Mears, processing technician at the
Veterans History Project, also contributed to this article.
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