Interviewing Veterans: A High School’s Oral History Project

 During my first year as a teacher of AP US History, I hosted what turned out to be a dismal assembly about veteran experiences. I had asked five local veterans to sit on a stage to share brief stories while one hundred students stared forward from a distance in the auditorium. Each veteran may have had twenty minutes to summarize their entire military experience. The disconnect between speakers and audience was clear, as was the lack of depth in what was being shared. There had to be a better way to connect students with the veteran community.

 In searching for a solution, I stumbled upon the Library of Congress Veterans History Project, which led me to consider how my students could use oral history to learn about the experience of war. The oral history project I eventually developed has become a rich learning experience for both participants and interviewers, but getting to that point has been a process.

 The first time I tried the assignment, I learned a valuable lesson in preparation: significant planning and clear parameters are vital for success. My students and I initially invited any veteran to participate, which led to World War II veterans and current enlistees sharing experiences with the class. With such a broad range of presentation, however, students’ lack of specific historical context proved problematic. The questions we had crafted were generic to all military veterans, leading to superficial interviews. And, because students’ knowledge about each war varied, our class’s ability to produce meaningful reflection after the fact was limited.

Moving forward, I decided to focus the assignment on veterans from particular conflicts. Usually that meant the Vietnam War, but I also used the combined 25th anniversary of the Gulf War and 15th anniversary of the War on Terror as our starting point one year. This decision allowed me to devote class time to specific events, giving students the opportunity to build more depth of knowledge. With a better understanding of the context, they were able to interact with the veterans they interviewed more deeply. Interviews became the sources of learning, not a textbook. This way of organizing the unit made the interviews a culminating experience for students, and, more importantly, provided them and the veterans with a more enriching experience.

A second hurdle that emerged was the emotional nature of the project, combined with students’ inexperience. Interviewing individuals much older than they were and about potentially discomforting topics presented students with a challenge. Therefore, we built into our unit multiple opportunities for both practice and familiarization. Students conducted sample interviews with their parents or guardians prior to speaking with veterans, who were often strangers. This practice provided them with the opportunity to become familiar with body language cues, and with using recording equipment, asking follow-up questions, and reacting to unanticipated moments. As a class, we would then reflect on these sample interviews and create a list of “best practices” and of what we wished to avoid.

The class also worked on drafting questions that evoked stories. We strove to create questions like, “Describe for me one time in Vietnam that you most experienced a bond of friendship,” as opposed to “Did you have friends that you served with?” We practiced the craft of asking follow-up questions to bring out more details. For instance, I gave students the sample response, “It was hot,” as part of a question about weather and then tasked them with drafting follow-up questions to generate greater depth. As part of this process, I hosted guest experts in class, including a qualitative researcher from a nearby university and local journalists, all of whom helped students think about quality questioning. Ultimately, my class composed collaborative question scripts along with “follow-ups” to guide their interviews.

In their training, students became adept at respectfully eliciting information and dealing with emotion the interviews sometimes aroused. I remember one instance where I watched from a distance as a student paused her recorder, allowing the gentleman she was interviewing to brush away tears from his eyes. He had choked up while sharing the story of an attack on his platoon and his regret at not knowing better the soldiers who had been killed. My student pushed a packet of tissues across the table for him and sat quietly as he composed himself. The empathy expressed in that moment was one of the best successes of this work.

Finally, we had to overcome the challenge of finding individuals willing to be interviewed and able to give enough time to the project. My classes and I worked hard to develop partnerships with local veteran organizations. Students composed written letters to groups like the Vietnam Veterans of America and the American Legion to invite veteran members to participate. Over multiple years of hosting our interviews, local chapters of these organizations enjoyed the process enough that they helped promote interview events with other chapters; we soon had volunteers traveling from several hours away to participate. After two years of running interviews, we established a presence on both Facebook and Twitter. These also built interest and often led to followers of these accounts sharing interview opportunities with friends and relatives. We then built on this enthusiasm by placing articles in the community newspaper and running events at our local library. A large component of our success in capturing so many stories stemmed from the efforts to encourage participation through multiple means.

Success also came from making veteran participants feel both welcome and appreciated. On interview days, when my school might host up to thirty veterans, we prepared hospitality rooms with food, drinks, and comfortable seating.  We all sought to make connection, both between veterans and students but also between veterans. We prepared “thank-you” gifts to present after the interview, often a framed picture with students’ messages of gratitude along the matboard. Once we processed the interviews, we also mailed digital copies to the veterans for their own keepsakes. While I try to avoid making interview days patriotic displays, out of recognition that war is horrible and not all veterans believe their service is worthy of celebration, my students and I all seek to demonstrate an appreciation for their sharing of their lived experience.

I am tremendously proud of what my students have accomplished. They have preserved over 300 different veterans’ lived experiences in a six-year period, most of which have been archived with the Veteran’s History Project at the Library of Congress. More importantly, they have made connections across generations, developed an appreciation of others’ lived experiences, and helped bridge of the civil-military gap.