American LibrariesSearch American Libraries  |
||
Site NavigationLeft Sidebar Items |
||
Veterans History Project Trims Questioned DataLibrary of Congress staffers have modified the biographical data accompanying interviews with 24 soldiers in the Veterans History Project after an article in the September 18 Marine Corps Times pointed out that they were not on the official list of Medal of Honor recipients. The VHP, an oral history program administered by LC’s American Folklife Center since 2000, collects and preserves the personal recollections of some 50,000 U.S. soldiers and homefront civilians from World War I to the present. LC Director of Communications Matt Raymond told American Libraries that half of the disputed Medal of Honor entries involved veterans who had been given “Vietnam Armed Forces Honor Medals” by the government of South Vietnam. “Whether it was an error by the interviewer or a database entry error,” Raymond said, “it ended up being truncated to Medal of Honor.” He added that in none of these cases did it appear that the veterans were misrepresenting their military records because “our curators have been going back and listening to all of the 24 recorded oral histories and found nothing to indicate an intent to deceive.” The Marine Corps Times article quoted military researchers Doug Sterner, a Vietnam veteran who maintains an unofficial database of valor award recipients, and Mary Schantag, who runs the POW Network website, as saying that other biographical listings in the VHP included 47 unsubstantiated lesser awards and 45 POWs who are not on Schantag’s list of Vietnam-era prisoners of war. Nonetheless, Sterner lauded the VHP’s goals, saying “the worst thing we can do because of this problem is kill the messenger.” But Raymond said that it was not the intent of the VHP to serve as an official service registry. “Someone who tells us he was detained by an enemy combatant for a couple of hours considers himself a prisoner of war, even though it doesn’t show up on someone’s list,” he explained. “Who are we to go in and strike that from his narrative? This is not a definitive record of wartime; it’s only a supplement to it.” Raymond said project staff did conduct a review of Medal of Honor claims in early 2006 and are enhancing their efforts to ensure that the record of this highest military decoration is accurate in the database. The VHP consists of 26.5 employees, of whom four are professional librarians or archivists. LC is partnering with documentary filmmaker Ken Burns and PBS stations nationwide in the September 23 broadcast debut of Burns’s 14-hour World War II documentary The War to enlist volunteers to conduct more interviews with wartime veterans. “The act of taking these oral histories,” Librarian of Congress James Billington said in the September 14 U.S. News and World Report, “is both an exercise in intergenerational bonding and collective history, with a result that’s not perishable.” Posted September 21, 2007. |
Right Sidebar
|
|
