NEH-funded “Listening to War” project: reflections and update

Shawn Vesely in uniform, 2003

This is a photo of me taken on February 10th, 2003, in Kitzingen Germany, Larson Barracks.  I am 21 years old, it is two days before my 22nd birthday, and I have been married for two months. I will arrive at Ali Al Salem Air Base in Kuwait on my 22nd birthday at 1am. I spent the preceding hours to our departure with my, then wife and now friend, Lilith. We watched Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in the community room of my barracks, trying not to talk or think about what the future held, silent but together. Waiting for our orders to roll out. The liminality still resonating in my memory.

I am captured standing here, securing my gear and weapon, maintaining a smile. We promise each other that after we say goodbye and turn to walk away, we won’t look back. The bus ride is silent and everyone is exhausted from the goodbyes that were prolonged for hours. It’s actually a relief to be moving forward, beyond the threshold of the familiar into the unknown.

I remember my grandmother telling me, “Shawn, keep a journal and write in it every day, you’re going to want it when you get older.”

I wish I listened to you Grandma. Because, for better or worse, our memories fade.

Not only our personal memories, but also the memories and feelings held in our collective consciousness that exist spatially and temporally.

The ubiquity of knowledge is one of the greatest commodities we have today.  Quantifiable data on just about anything I want to discover, a few keystrokes away.


But how do we obtain understanding of a unique time, place or event?

Of course, we listen!

And we have a lot of work to do!

I am in awe, I am inspired, I am excited about Recollection Wisconsin’s current project, Listening to War: Digitizing Wisconsin Wartime Oral Histories.

We have received so many oral histories from around the state — stories that were at risk of being lost to technological innovation; stories dating back to World War I; stories that have been inaccessible; stories of love, courage, sacrifice, loss, pain, hope, and survival.


And so, some project updates:

On September 5, 2018, we received the first material contributions to this project and by the first week of December all the physical media was received and prepared for shipping to our digitization vendor, George Blood L.P. of Fort Washington, Pennsylvania. Upon reception, initial metadata records of each resource were created, and barcodes were applied for tracking and accountability.

On December 12, we shipped out twelve boxes, for a total of 977 physical pieces of media, via UPS Ground. Over the next several months, while the physical materials are being digitized, we are collecting the remaining digital materials and continuing work on metadata creation, outreach and engagement.

This project, which is supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), includes oral histories held by 25 libraries, archives, museums and veterans centers around the state, capturing personal accounts of Wisconsin veterans and civilians during World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War and the Persian Gulf War.


National Endowment for the Humanities Listening to War: Digitizing Wisconsin’s Wartime Oral Histories is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed do not necessarily represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities. For more information about the project, visit https://recollectionwisconsin.org/wioralhistory.