Brendan Hart took a few community college courses before joining the Marine Corps in 2003 and always planned to go back to school to study history. Assigned to one of the Corps’s elite fleet antiterrorism security teams, Hart, 25, was stationed in Bahrain in May 2005 when something went wrong: His body reacted unexpectedly to a smallpox vaccination, and Hart slipped into anaphylactic shock. “Then my condition got drastically worse,” he says. The Marines shipped him to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for treatment, but a series of complications confined Hart to crutches or a wheelchair. The war was over for Hart, so he turned his attention back to dreams of a college sheepskin. Read the rest of this entry »

It was 1943, and Bernard Moulton was on the USS Herndon, a ship escorting a friendly fuel tanker through enemy-infested waters near Gibraltar. A German U-boat attacked, firing a torpedo strike that was as sudden as it was terrifying. “We saw [the torpedo] coming; there was no way we could do anything … it was coming too fast,” says Moulton, as he watches the spinning reels of the tape recorder in the living room of his Annapolis, Md., home. “Very fortunately, it was set for a deep-draft ship, and it went under us. That’s why we’re alive.” And that’s how his ship earned the nickname “Lucky Herndon.” Read the rest of this entry »

Technology has made recording oral histories cheaper and the results more engaging. Here is some advice for getting started.

Preparation. Senate oral historian Donald Ritchie spends several hours preparing for each hour of oral history he collects. He reads books, consults records, and conducts auxiliary interviews to prepare questions for his primary subjects. Preparation for an oral history with a family member is no less important. Head to your local library and dig up newspapers from pivotal dates in your subject’s life (i.e., wedding, first day on the job, death of a parent). By reading not only the headlines but also the advertisements, sports scores, and entertainment pages, you might be able to take the subject back to the old days and prompt unusual responses. Read the rest of this entry »

The longest film shown at the Cannes Film Festival this year was the 14-hour PBS documentary The War by filmmaker Ken Burns, who revisits combat for the first time since his breakout classic The Civil War aired 17 years ago. The War–which begins airing September 23–is a sprawling film that covers the years of American involvement in World War II through the eyes of ordinary citizens caught up in the global bloodletting. Burns spoke with U.S. News about his new film and the memories of veterans. Read the rest of this entry »

U.S. News Associate Editor Alex Kingsbury looks at a new push to record first-person combat experiences before it is too late. (Sept. 13)