Recently I had the absolute pleasure to watch two women veterans, from very different eras, connect and thank each other for their service. The vets were a 92-year-old WAAC from World War II, who served stateside and also in Karachi, which was India at the time and would later become Pakistan -- and a 44-year-old Gulf War vet, who served in the Marine Corps as a combat correspondent. It was beyond heartwarming to feel the love that emanated from both of them, during this "chance" meeting in a big Midwestern VA healthcare facility, as they both exuded gratefulness and appreciation for what the other meant to them, symbolically and now in person.
If you're a woman who's served in the U.S. military, and you've been thinking about preserving your story -- or capturing someone else's before it's too late -- please do.
And especially if you know any World War II, Korean War or Vietnam-era veterans, the time is really now.
"Our elder WWII sister vets will all be gone in a few years. Whenever you have an opportunity to spend time with one or more of them, relish the moments, sear them in your memory and share their contributions. An amazing and generous generation," says longtime advocate and woman veteran, Diana Danis.
Women veterans' stories have traditionally gotten much less play, but they're just as important -- maybe even more so because they're harder to find. Even where they're collected is somewhat of a hodge-podge of locations.
Here are a few places that collect them -- although further down in this post you will see that it's probably most efficient to think of doing it through the StoryCorps "app," which will get it to the Library of Congress seamlessly. (If you have an interest in getting it somewhere else, you can check out this list below.)
"There are a number of stories that have been collected over the years. Boston University did a bunch years ago with an oral history project as did the Minerva Project under the able guidance of Dr. Linda Grant DePauw. The University of North Carolina has an archive as does the National Archive, the Library of Congress, the VA has a number through the Women Veterans Center as does the Women in Military Service to America Memorial (WIMSA), the Women's Army Corps Association (WAC), the Women's Army Corps museum, the Women Marines Association, the Women Air Force Association and a few others right off hand," says Danis.
Sylvie Lubow, program manager for the Military Voices Initiative at StoryCorps, also mentioned several other sites of potential interest:
- "Always Coming Home Always Coming Home: The American Female Veteran Experience Archive" at the University of South Carolina -- which appears to collect digital stories and is an ongoing project (there are several dozen videos available at present, appearing to represent women veterans of multiple eras as well as women veterans of color);
- The "Bras & Boots" blog of American Women Veterans, which collects women veterans' stories.
There's also a collection of women veterans' stories in a special collection for the Women's Overseas Service League (WOSL), housed at the University of Texas at San Antonio. That collection can be viewed by special permission, and is not ongoing -- the project that collected the narratives is over but the results are housed there. To learn more about the WOSL collection at UTSA, go here.
StoryCorps, familiar to many from their excellent show on NPR, or their current podcast series, are in many ways responsible for popularizing a method of capturing others' stories through conversation in a recording booth. They created a military voices initiative to capture service members and veterans' stories. And recently, they've turned the whole StoryCorps method into something available to anyone, through a smartphone app. Take advantage of this (free) opportunity to start a conversation that captures history, while you still can.
Note: If you have suggestions for other archives that collect women veterans history narratives in the first person, please advise.
(This post is inspired in part, too, by a side conversation with Kristine Hesse, the fab women veterans outreach coordinator at the National Veterans Foundation, who feels strongly that older women veterans "telling their stories" will encourage generations of younger women veterans as well.)