This is Ozarks at Large. I'm Kyle Kellams.
There are thousands of Arkansas veterans' stories connected to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History is collecting some of them. Amy Schlesing is leading that project. When reporting for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, she covered those wars for more than a decade.
"In the last few years, I just started thinking, you know what? I don't think the story is quite done. There's more. There's more to say."
Inspired by the work of the Library of Congress to collect stories of World War II, Korean and Vietnam War veterans, she asked vets from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that she knew if they were ready to tell their stories.
"Many of them said, 'I wasn't ready to talk about this five years ago, but I'm ready now.' And I thought, OK, oral histories — how do we do this? And then I thought, the University of Arkansas has the Pryor Center for Oral and Visual History. What an amazing place it is. So I reached out to John Davis, the executive director there, and said, 'I have an idea. It might be crazy.' And we had an amazing meeting. He said, 'This is not crazy. Let's partner up and do this. We would love to do this.'
"So I am volunteering my time working with the Pryor Center. These oral interviews will live there. They will catalog them and transcribe them. And then also Sen. John Boozman's office reached out and said, how can we help get these into the Library of Congress' larger veteran history project as well —
Kellams: Which Sen. Boozman's office has done yeoman's work with the World War II stories, at least, and I'm sure Korea and Vietnam as well. Is it going to be done in phases at all?
Schlesing: It is, because this is the long game. We have thousands of veterans in Arkansas from Iraq and Afghanistan. So looking at organizing these interviews — they'll be captured by unit so that together, if we have, say, the 39th Infantry Brigade, which deployed to Iraq in 2004 — I embedded with them — doing their individual interviews, we create a collection and then we have a history of the units within the 39th and that combat deployment. So it's beyond just individual interviews. Collecting them like this and focusing on Arkansas veterans, we're going to be able to tell a larger history of the war.
I am organizing my interviews kind of geographically. And everything from active-duty veterans who served in units far away from Arkansas but are in Arkansas now or are Arkansas natives, to Little Rock Air Force Base — which is the largest active-duty C-130 base in the world — doing interviews of people who were there and deployed during those wars, to Arkansas National Guard units, reserve units, and any veteran in Arkansas from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Kellams: Let's say I lived in Laramie when I was 22 and I went to Iraq, and then in 2022 I moved to Arkansas. You want to talk to me? Even though most of my life has been somewhere else?
Schlesing: I got an email this morning from a veteran who had reached out saying he was interested, and he responded today saying, 'Well, I may not qualify. I moved to Arkansas five years ago and served.' And I said, 'You absolutely do qualify. You're an Arkansan now.' These veteran stories need to be captured. And I've had a couple of Vietnam veterans reach out, and I've connected them with some people who are doing those oral histories. So we're going to capture all of the oral histories that we can. Just because you weren't born in Arkansas doesn't mean you're not an Arkansan. The gates are open.
Kellams: More than 100 Arkansans died in Iraq and Afghanistan. So those are veteran stories you obviously can't collect in an oral history now. Any thought about whether there's a way to capture what their lives might have been like, even though they're gone?
Schlesing: The interviews that I've done so far — those veterans who were with soldiers who died in combat are opening up about those experiences and those moments. And that's an important part of this history — talking about those who we've lost, not just in that moment, but also how that resonates over the years. Never forgotten.
But a phase of this — as we talked about phases — I would like to also interview the families of the soldiers and airmen, the veterans who we lost in Iraq and Afghanistan, to tell their stories. And together with the stories of the troops that were with them when they gave the ultimate sacrifice and the families left behind, I think that'll be a powerful and important history to capture. The cost of war takes many shapes, and loss is one of them.
Kellams: You were for years a working journalist, and you covered business and other things. It's one thing to report for a newspaper article where you're not going to have room for two complete sentences at a time — you've got to get to the nut of the story. This will be different. This is letting people just talk.
Schlesing: You hit it on the head, Kyle. When I first started doing these — and we just launched this a month ago, so this is still early days — I thought, do I know how to do this? This is a totally different type of interviewing. In many ways it's easier, I think, to report on something that's happening, because you have sights and sounds and people and you are writing about what's happening. You're an observer. And this is helping someone tell their story and helping them tell it in the way that they want to and need to. So asking the right questions, listening and just trying to guide that conversation — it's a very different skill. Still learning.
Kellams: You were an embedded war correspondent, so you're going to be able to ask questions that those of us who weren't, were. And you may not even know what those questions are until you hear something from one of your interview subjects, I would imagine.
Schlesing: Yeah. I had a couple of very powerful interviews last weekend and it was a very organic conversation. Both of them just went like that. You know, it was asking questions as their story unfolded. And I thought, this is why we're doing this.
Kellams: There's also value in being able to know — for both you and the person you're talking to — that there is time. That you don't have to look at that clock, that you don't have a deadline. You mentioned people are contacting you. How does someone get in touch with this project?
Schlesing: We have an email set up just for this project. It is mystorymywar@gmail.com.
Kellams: You know, this is a project that's happening now, but the idea is it's going to be available to people 100 years from now. What's the value for someone not yet even born of hearing the stories of someone who served in wars between 2001 and 2021?
Schlesing: Wars started by policy, but war is all about people. And that's what this project is about — to bring more understanding of these historic events through the voices and the individual experiences of the men and women who were there, and also talking about the aftermath of war. War changes everyone. There are lessons that come out of war. There are struggles that come out of war. And that's part of these interviews, as much or as little as an individual veteran wants to talk about it. Some really want to talk about it. Some don't. And that is great, because this is their story.
And I think about 100 years from now and great-grandchildren being able to hear the voices and see the pictures of their great-grandparents and what they did in these wars — and the people that they were with — telling those stories of camaraderie and the stories of hard days. But also historians, I hope, will be able to glean information out of these histories as well. Researchers are going to be able to learn a lot about the impact of war, the impact of PTSD and the individual impacts of that experience. I think there will be a lot to learn from these interviews, and it'll bring more connection.
Kellams: Amy, thanks for your time.
Schlesing: Thanks, Kyle.
Amy Schlesing is leading the Arkansans at War Oral History Project in partnership with the David and Barbara Pryor Center for Arkansas Oral and Visual History. She says there is no end date for these collections. Veterans interested in participating can email mystorymywar@gmail.com. Our conversation took place in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio in late February.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
