Veterans' Stories: Why They Must Be Told Before the Last Witnesses Are Gone

In 2025, the youngest surviving World War II veterans are in their late nineties. The youngest Korean War veterans are in their late eighties. Vietnam veterans are in their late seventies. Each year, thousands of these men and women die — and with each death, a specific, embodied, irreplaceable record of historical experience is lost.

The Library of Congress Veterans History Project has collected more than 110,000 veteran stories since 2000. The USC Shoah Foundation has collected more than 55,000 Holocaust testimonies. These are extraordinary achievements — and they represent a small fraction of the stories that existed when they began collecting.

Most veterans do not give their stories to institutions. They give them to families — or they give them to no one. Many veterans, particularly those who experienced combat, did not speak about their experiences for decades. Some never spoke about them at all. The silence was a form of protection: of themselves, and of their families, who they felt could not bear the weight of what they had seen.

But the silence is ending, one way or another. The veterans are in their final years, and many are now more willing to speak than they were at forty or fifty — because the urgency of time has finally overcome the habit of silence.

If you have a veteran in your family, now is the moment. You do not need to ask about the horrors — those may never be shareable, and that choice deserves respect. But you can ask about the before: who they were before they left, why they enlisted or were drafted, what they knew about the world at eighteen. You can ask about the after: how they came home, what they found, what the transition cost them. You can ask about what they learned — about themselves, about humanity, about what people are capable of, for better and for worse.

These are the stories that history textbooks cannot contain. They must be told by the people who lived them. And those people are, now, almost gone.