The anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor seems an appropriate time to reflect on our World War II veterans.
When I was a little girl, it was a very common project for history class to go interview a World War II veteran (or someone about their memories of World War II). As children of the Baby Boom generation, we were assumed to be grandchildren of the men in uniform of the Second World War and the women who worked in wartime industry. And twenty years ago, that wasn’t a particularly difficult project to complete. I could name for you a dozen World War II veterans that I knew, including most of my great uncles. (My grandfathers did not serve in the war – one was never enlisted and the other was given a medical discharge from the Navy without ever leaving the United States coast.)
But now we are losing the generation with concrete memories of World War II, and the knowledge they have can never be reconstructed if its not recorded.
If you are lucky enough to know someone who has lived a long time and experienced the major events of our last century – the Depression, World War II, the Cold War – talk to them. Record them. Ask them to write down their life story for you. In the last few years before she died, I interviewed my grandmother for a project in graduate school. This was a woman who I had known for my entire life, who I had had more conversations with than possibly anyone else in the world, and she still told me stories I had never heard – because I had never asked the right questions before.
A Grave Concern 