Welcome

Welcome to Veterans’ Voices

On the second floor of the Collinsville Museum, against the back wall, you’ll find three or four fragile scrapbooks and an interesting collection of old black and white photographs. The photos capture the images of young men and a handful of young women as they left Canton or Collinsville to serve in the Armed Forces. The faces are young and expressive, strong and compelling. You’re drawn to them, because they are the faces of someone’s then son or daughter, of someone’s now husband or mother, of the grandparents of today’s young adults. They are the faces of our Veterans of Foreign Wars.

If you are a teacher, you realize that each of these faces has a story to tell if only someone would listen. This was the seed of the idea that developed first into a slim volume of 15 stories, and later into this website. As teachers at Canton High School, we knew exactly where to find the “listeners” – the talented and creative young adults in our AP Humanities class. Mrs. Helen Kilburn helped us find the “storytellers.” Her support was instrumental; she recorded the names from the museum’s wall of pictures and then photocopied articles about local servicemen from the yellowed pages of the scrapbooks. The veterans and the kids did the rest.

The results are collected here in this online anthology for you to enjoy. They represent the experiences as told by the vets and written down by the kids using their own words and imaginations. They made mistakes in the process. They sometimes missed an important detail; they sometimes turned a sunny day into a rainy one; they sometimes made assumptions based on their view of wartime experiences which has been flavored unalterably by movies and television. A perfect illustration of their innocence occurred at the student and veterans’ evening reception this past June. One of our students asked her vet, Mrs. Phyllis Berglund, if she had liked the story she had chosen to write – a story about one weekend when Mrs. Berglund had sneaked off base to go home and then spent a very uncomfortable flight with a superior officer aboard the plane. Mrs. Berglund’s reply? “I liked everything. But the officer didn’t sit in the seat behind me, honey … because the plane didn’t have seats.”

Despite these inconsistencies, this project accomplishes two important goals. First, it provides a small glimpse into the single experiences of war that, even collectively, only scratch the surface of what could be told. Our vets, for example, choose not to tell our children about dirt and heat and fear and loneliness in the words that truly do these details justice. Second, the project meaningfully and nobly bridges the “generation gap,” with one side describing events it hopes the other side will never need to experience.