UM
Wintersession students uncover
a wealth of war stories
(Please
click on names or photos for full stories)
Jesse
Bier, Army
His
face was shredded by a German bazooka shell, but Bier came
home with a sense of humor the war couldn’t destroy.
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Meyer
Chessin, Army Signal Corps
The
devastation he saw in Berlin after the war stunned him;
Chessin has been a peace activist ever since. |
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Lettie
Gilbert, Ground
Observer Corps
She had five
young children when her husband went to war. Troubles kept
coming,
but she still found
ways to help others. |
John
Keefe, Marine Corps
He
had the confidence of youth, and his luck held through
a war
that had gone to stalemate by the time he arrived. |
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Robert
McGiffert, Army
The
war made him lose faith in God, but when the A-bomb dropped,
he found a church and prayed.
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John Jay Ottman, Army Air Corps
He played
poker with Tyrone Power and came home safe to the woman for
whom he'd named his plane. |
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Lester
Raymond, Army Air Corps
He
fibbed about his age and joined up at 14. At 15, he was
a Japanese prisoner, eating cats to stay alive. |
Jack
Weidenfeller and Allen Houston, Navy
They
didn’t know each other when a kamikaze hit their
ship in 1945. Now they’re the best of friends. |
 |
Gilbert
Eugene Wyatt, Navy
He
watched as his brother's ship blew up in the Pacific. "War is hell," he
says. |
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Nine people
with compelling stories about life in wartime. Twelve
students to research, interview and tape those stories,
take pictures and build a Web site. And just three weeks do to
it.
Students at the University
of Montana School of Journalism who signed up for a 2004 Wintersession
course called The Veterans
History Project were not sure what lay ahead. But they plunged
in — working
as a team on tight deadlines to produce these stories, tapes
and photos. The veterans they met told them tales they had
not shared
before because no one had asked.
For the students,
the best lessons came outside the classroom.
They learned about hope, about the resiliency
of the human spirit, about loyalty and about patriotism. The
people
they met included a soldier who, at 15, became a prisoner of
the Japanese, a sailor who watched a kamikaze plane hit his
brother’s
ship, and an Army flier who played poker with Tyrone Power.
These are
their stories.
About
the Project
About 19 million war veterans live in the United States today,
but every day we lose 1,700 of them. To honor our nation's war
veterans for their service and to collect their stories while they
are still among us, the U.S. Congress created the Veterans History
Project.
The authorizing legislation, sponsored by Representatives Ron Kind, Amo Houghton,
and Steny Hoyer in the U.S. House of Representatives and Senators Max Cleland
and Chuck Hagel in the U.S. Senate, received unanimous support and was signed
into law by President Clinton on Oct. 27, 2000. Public Law 106-380 calls upon
the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress to collect and preserve
audio- and video-taped oral histories, along with documentary materials such
as letters, diaries, maps, photographs, and home movies, of America's war veterans
and those who served in support of them.
The Veterans History Project covers World War I, World War II, and the Korean,
Vietnam, and Persian Gulf wars. It includes all participants in those wars — men
and women, civilian and military. It documents the contributions of civilian
volunteers, support staff, and war industry workers as well as the experiences
of military personnel from all ranks and all branches of service — the
Air Force, Army, Marine Corps, and Navy, as well as the U.S. Coast Guard and
Merchant Marine.
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