Every year, Veterans Day is a chance to honor those individuals who have served their country to promote and defend liberty and freedom.  This year marked the sixth year of the conflict in Iraq and the eighth in Afghanistan.  With thousands of our young men and women having served in these conflicts, this year’s Veterans Day provides much to be reflected on: the soldiers of wars past and present.     

Veterans Day it is a great opportunity for Americans to encourage veterans they know to share their brave stories.  I have always thought it important for us to honor the heroic, selfless work of our men and women in uniform.  What better way to honor our veterans than to preserve their stories for future generations. By having veterans share their experiences, they leave behind tangible accounts of the service, sacrifice, and courage they gave on behalf of the country and their fellow Americans.  

To preserve the experiences of our country’s veterans, in 2000 I authored legislation creating the Veteran’s History Project (VHP).  The Veteran’s History Project uses volunteer interviews to record the experiences of veterans and their families.  These stories are recorded and entered into the permanent collection of the Library of Congress’s American Folklife Center.  It is these living testaments that provide the most powerful record of the sacrifice and hardship of our nation at peace and at war.    

Today, the VHP is the largest oral history collection in the world, but there are still millions of stories that can and should be told.  Time is short however.  We are losing more than 1,700 veterans every day.  At the same time that we lose the veterans of wars past, new veterans are also returning every day from the conflicts in the Middle East.

The opportunity to record these stories and memorialize the heroic efforts of our nation’s veterans doesn’t last forever.  I urge you to take the time on Veterans Day to not only honor this country’s veterans, but to ask the veterans in your life to record their stories.   They serve as the most significant memorial we can possibly give to our nation’s fallen and living veterans.

Those interested in becoming involved in the VHP are encouraged to contact my office, send an e-mail to vohp@loc.gov or call the toll-free message line at (888) 371-5848 to request a project kit. The kit is also available on the VHP website .