I have been the director since 2015, january. What is the value of an oral history . Well, for us we try to make it accessible to the cadets so they can use it for their research but all of our videos and interviews are open source so anyone in america can get online and look at our interviews and hopefully learn something about our history from them. As an historian what is the place oral history holds in the overall study of history . Oral historyies help add detail. If you are writing a paper or book about something and you find oral histories you can pull information from that to add a little bit of color or nuance to what you are writing about. It gives you have the experience of the people that lived through it. It is interesting because memories are different. People remember things differently and they change a little bit over time. So, it is good to add to some of the research you are doing but of course you want to back it up with good primary source documents. Who are you capturing in your collection . We interview a wide variety of people. For example, today we are going out to interview the oldest graduate from west point. He is currently 103 years old. We also interview cadets. Everything in between. It isnt just west point graduates. We interview enlisted soldiers that fought in any war world war ii korea, vietnam, even the current wars. And we also interview spouses. We interview politicians or other people in the public sphere that do things with the military. So, anybody who is related to the military we try to capture story so we have a very broad holding. Does anyone say no . Not yet. Well some people we had one or two say no. We respect that. But we always try to encourage them to tell their story, because each story is a piece of a mosaic. For example, our vietnam archives that has 130 interviews, each story is a piece of the vietnam war story. One of the things we tell prospective interviewees is if you dont want to talk about yourself, talk about some of the soldiers you served with. Sometimes that encourages them. They dont want to talk about things they have done. They want to talk about the great things that people they served with did. Do you do the interviews yourself . I do a lot of them. We have a few other interviewers. We also try to get other instructors to do interviews. If a instructor says i know somebody that would be a great interview you say great, bring him in and you do the interview and that gives them experience and they probably know the story better than i do. They have experience with the person, so they can pull out more of the details than i could. We try to gietka deaths involved. Get in cadets involved. If they are working on a promise for example senior thesis we encourage them to get oral history. Bring in people and talk to them. We had two different cadets the past few years interview three people and used them in the senior thesis. That makes us happy. Once you have this broad number of interview subjects how do you categorize it so it is accessible to the people who want to reach into it . A lot of times we categorize them by location theme. For example, if it is a prisoner of war story or it is military families families, if military families are mentioned or military techniques, army athletics. We categorize it so people can get on our website and look at the different categories and narrow down what they are interested in seeing. We also have five archives and they are sponsored by either individuals or different year groups, different casts of west point. For example the vietnam war archive is sponsored by the class of 1965. That is a broad archive and then we collect the interviews under that heading. If you want to watch vietnam war interviews, go to the Archives Section and find that. If you want to watch interviews from west point leaders through history, click on that archive. You also have diplomats and people who are deciding war policy. What is the scope of that . We try to get as many of them as we can. Sometimes we have different interviewers that we hire that work on different projects. For example, Brent Scowcroft donated money to have a collection of 10 videos dealing with certain current issues. So, we had an interviewer go out and try to interview as many different people that were related to, say, drones issue. Are drones good or bad . It looks at the problems from both sides and in a very openended sort of way addresses the issue. Those are designed to be used in the classroom two get the cadets talking about it. We dont want to tell them what to think but we want to give them ideas and let them wrestle with it. You have seen the scope from the oldest living 103 you are about to do to ka dealt. Is there a commonality in the military experience you are seeing across generations . A lot of times people talk about what does your service mean to you. At the end. If it is somebody who didnt go to west point what does your service mean to you. If it is a west upon the graduate what does west point mean to you. A lot of people talk about honor, honorable service. A lot of people talk about things they learned in the military. We had one hugengarian refugee who was drafted into the army and served in vietnam and said the military matured him and exposed him to a lot of different types of people he would not have met otherwise and it taught him to appreciate the differences in people. Who are your most memorable interviews . People ask me that all the time. Well, there are a lot of ways to answer that question. One of the things we like to do is if we find out somebody has recently passed to be interviewed we try to republish their interview. General round y roun kwrfrpby died. He fought in world war ii. Served under eisenhower and macarthur. He was in vietnam. He just passed away. We republished his interview. Interesting story about general rouny we had a visiting proffer at west point who was working on a book on ataturk. I interviewed rouny and he said he met ataturk when he was a college student. He met him in turkey and wanted to interview him and he said ataturk spent an hour and a half asking him questions. So i got general rounys phone number and passed it on to the proffer and the professor who was researching ataturk got to talk to general rouny about his personal experience meeting him. That was fabulous. We interviewed this woman, sun moon born as the korean war started. Her parents were separated by war. Her father was in a sell knar in south korea and her mother in northern korea. And the family was separated and there was a 4yearold girl. And when sun moom turned four the mother decided to carry her two children south out of north korea and try to find her husband. Middle of winter she had to cross a frozen river and try to find food and sold her wedding ring to get food for one of the girls. So sun moon who was four at the time was retelling her mothers story and when we finished we said this is a fabulous story. Whatever happened to your parents . She said they are living in brooklyn. We said we have to interview your parents. We went down there and we interviewed the mother and father and we got their story and they spoke in their native language and their son did the translating for me. It was so wonderful because i would ask him a question and he would turn and either ask his mother or father. He would hold their hand as he was asking the question. And it was a fabulous interview because we got their perspective, what it was like to be in south korea, what it was like to be in northern korea and how they were reunited. Then they came to america and established a church. The he wouldelderly reverend park passed away yesterday and we republished his interview. That was memorable because so many different stories tied together with that one. You mentioned the sraoeud grants. Overall how is it funded . All donateor money. Now have you gotten how have you gotten people interested . Being in the military i cant raise money but the association of graduates, west Point Association of graduates handles that and do the outreach. What is the farthest you have had to travel for an interview . Campbell. Wouldnt to the Oral History Association conference last year and we went out to california and we managed to get three interviews while out there. An actor Patrick Gorman who was in the movie gettysburg and he had been in the navy reserve and got drafted into the army and served in the army and navy. We reached out to him and got his interview. Then we interviewed two vietnamese veterans that were in california. One was a pilot who flew propeller planes and jet planes. The other was a nurse. The nurse served both and we said why did you serve the vee street minute. They hated the french because of how they treated him. Then he loved his country and he loved working with americans. He had a very large family. And as things were going bad for south vietnam, he had to figure out what to do with his children. One of his sons, he gave to an american who was serving with Doctors Without Borders over in vietnam, gave him to this american and the american brought him home, raised him. The son graduated from west point in 1985. That is the year his vietnamese parents got out of vietnam and came to america. We interviewed his vietnamese father about what it was like to be a nurse serving in vietnam. That was fab lugsulousfabulous. It sounds like theres a great deal of breadth. How are you planning to market it . What are your goals at the american History Association conference . We are doing an oral history panel. We submitted two different clips for the oral history jukebox and we will be in a Panel Discussion about that. One clip is about one of the first three women to graduate from ranger school. We picked that because it is such a touching story. We said what was your most difficult time in ranger school. She said it was missing her kids. At night she would cuddle her blanket and imagine it was her kids. That was a fabulous story. It brought everybody in the interview session to tears. We had to stop the film and we all cried and everybody got their composure back and started the film and continued the interview. The other clip we submitted was a groupers a family, a mother and her five children who the father was killed at the ends fr tof the end of the vietnam war and they were refugees coming to america. The first group was a 14yearold girl and her 11yearold brother. She was on her own coming to first the philippines then to america. She reestablished the family and eventually everybody got back together in seattle. So, it was a story from the brother who was 11 years old being on the boat going to the philippines and having the threat of being thrown overboard if the rations ran too low. So, that is what we are diagnose here at the Oral History Association. I ptwant anyone who access our interviews. We are on line west poeupbtint coh. Org coh. Org. When i get new interviews i advertise them on twitter and facebook. It is either west point coh or center for oral history. We try two get photographs from the folks we interview so we can show what they look like at the time we are looking. For example, if it is a vietnam interview we want pictures of them overseas. Or if it is a west poeupbt point grad, a cadet picture. We put them up. Hopefully we have interested a few more. Thanks you for your time. It was a pleasure. Thank you. Now courtesy of the west point center for oral history an interview with military Academy GraduateStephen Darrah who was a helicopter pirate during the vietnam war. This is about 50 minutes. April 11, 2016. Im in savannah, georgia, with