How to Interview a Veteran About Their Service

Why Veteran Oral History Is Different — and Why It Matters Now

The “I don't want to talk about it” pattern is more common among veterans than in almost any other interview context. Understanding why matters — because the reasons are different, and the approach has to match them.

Some veterans don't talk because of combat trauma — memories they have worked hard to wall off, and that they have learned, sometimes over decades, not to revisit. Some don't talk because of unit loyalty: the ethos that what happened over there belongs to the people who were there, that civilians can't understand it and shouldn't be asked to. Some carry shame — about things they survived, about orders they followed, about being alive when others weren't. These are not small things. They are the architecture of how many veterans have organized their post-service lives, and an interview that doesn't account for them will fail before it begins.

For Black veterans, there is an additional layer that is distinct and historically significant. Many African American veterans who returned from WWII, Korea, and Vietnam came home to a country that had benefited from their service while denying them the rights they had fought for. They were met with segregation, discrimination, and in some cases open hostility. The GI Bill that built the white middle class was largely inaccessible to them. The honors that went to other veterans were withheld. Some of them stopped talking about their service not only because of what they saw in combat, but because of what they returned to — because the silence was a protection against the humiliation of having to explain what their country had done to them after they came home.

When a veteran dies without being interviewed, a firsthand account of history dies with them. The family hears the edited version — the safe stories, the ones stripped of weight. The archive gets nothing. That gap is still recoverable. But only now, while they're alive.

Before You Sit Down: Research and Preparation

Do your homework before the interview. Know their branch, theater, years of service, and major operations — not so you can quiz them, but so you don't ask questions that will insult them. Confusing the Army and Marine Corps, mispronouncing the name of a city they spent six months in, asking what unit they were with when that information is right in the program from their discharge ceremony: these are the kinds of mistakes that signal to a veteran that you didn't care enough to prepare. That impression is hard to recover from.

Research the broader context as well. What was happening in that conflict at the time they served? What was the political climate at home? If they served in Vietnam in 1968, what does that specific year mean in the history of that war? If they were stationed in Germany in 1953, what was the role of Black soldiers in a post-segregation military that was still working out its own integration? The more you know before you sit down, the more precisely you can follow the thread of what they tell you — and the more clearly they will understand that you are a serious listener.

Prepare questions in advance and then hold them lightly. The list is a scaffold, not a script. The conversation matters more than your plan for it.

One practical step worth taking before or after the interview: request their service records from the National Personnel Records Center (NPRC). Veterans and next-of-kin can often obtain these records, and they give you verifiable documentary context — dates, assignments, decorations, discharge information — that the oral account alone cannot provide. The NPRC can be reached through archives.gov. The records won't tell you what the veteran felt or saw, but they will tell you where they were and when, and that is often the frame the interview needs.

What to Ask — and How to Ask It

Start far from combat. The first questions should be about how they enlisted or were drafted, what basic training was like, where they were stationed, what the food was like, who their best friend was. These are not stalling questions. They are how you get there. You are building rapport, and you are giving the veteran practice telling the story before you get anywhere near its hardest parts.

Ask about sensory details. What did the barracks smell like? What was the temperature in the morning in the country where they served? What did they eat and what did they miss most from home? What did they hear before anything happened? These are the questions that unlock memory. The specific, sensory, mundane details are what pull a person back into the experience — and once they are back in it, the deeper material often surfaces on its own.

Questions that tend to work especially well with veterans:

• “What's something you saw over there that you've never been able to forget?”
• “Was there a moment when you felt proud of your unit?”
• “What did you think the war was about when you got there — and did that change?”
• “What was the hardest thing about coming home?”

For Black veterans, go further. Ask specifically about the treatment they experienced — from command, from fellow soldiers, from civilians when they got home. Ask what they were fighting for, in their own words. Ask whether their service was recognized the way they believed it deserved to be. Ask what they would want their grandchildren to understand about what they did and what they came back to. These answers are not supplementary. They are the part of the record that most needs to exist, and the part most at risk of never making it in.

When They Say “I Don't Want to Talk About It”

That is a complete answer. Receive it as one. Don't push, don't reframe the question hoping to get a different result, don't treat the refusal as an obstacle to route around. Move to a different period or a different question. The trust you build by honoring the no is what makes the next yes possible.

Learn to distinguish between “I don't want to talk about that specific thing” and “I don't want to talk about the war at all.” Most veterans are somewhere in between. They will talk freely about basic training, about friendships, about the funny things that happened and the strange beauty of a country they were in for the worst reasons. They may have one or two specific events they have never spoken about and do not intend to. That is a boundary, not a wall. The rest of the story is still there.

When a veteran does hesitate or decline, there is a reframe that sometimes helps — not as pressure, but as an honest reorientation of what the interview is for. You are not asking them to relive it. You are asking them to explain it to the family. So the family understands what they were part of, what it cost, and why it mattered. That framing sometimes opens a door that the idea of “talking about the war” kept closed.

Partial records are valid archives. Document what they share. Document what they decline. “He would not speak about this period” is a sentence that belongs in the record — it tells future researchers that the gap is known, that it was asked about, and that it was a deliberate choice rather than an oversight. The shaped silence of a veteran is itself historical testimony.

Some veterans open up in session two or three, after trust is established. Let that happen on its own timeline. The interview is not an event. It is a relationship. The most important things are often what gets said in the third conversation, when the veteran has decided you are worth telling.

Recording, Consent, and Access Decisions

Before you record anything, have a clear consent conversation that covers: what will be recorded and in what format; who will have access to the recording and where it will be stored; the veteran's right to review the transcript before it is archived or shared; and their right to redact specific portions after the fact. None of these are bureaucratic formalities. They are the conditions under which many veterans will agree to participate at all.

Access conditions deserve particular care in veteran oral histories. Some veterans want their account shared publicly — they want it in the library, in the archive, accessible to researchers and schoolchildren. Others want it held until after their death. Others want it available to family only, never to be heard by anyone outside. All of these are legitimate, and all of them are common. Document the veteran's preference explicitly, in writing, as part of the consent record. Then honor it — not just at the moment of collection, but in how the recording is stored, labeled, and ultimately deposited.

If the family wants the record to outlast the family archive, the Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress is worth knowing about. It accepts donated oral histories from veterans of all eras — WWII, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, post-9/11 service — and it is a permanent, publicly accessible collection. Donating a completed oral history to the VHP is one of the most meaningful things a family can do with this kind of testimony: it ensures that the veteran's account becomes part of the national record, not just the family archive. Information on submission requirements is available at loc.gov/vets.

What the Interview Gives the Family — and What It Gives History

The veterans in your family were shaped by events that most people only read about. D-Day. The Chosin Reservoir. Khe Sanh. Desert Storm. They were present for things that changed the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries — and they carry that presence in ways a textbook cannot reproduce. When they die without being interviewed, the closest the next generation gets to those events is a museum exhibit or a Wikipedia page. The interview makes it personal. And personal is what lasts.

For Black families, the stakes are higher and more specific. The oral testimonies of African American veterans are an active correction to the historical record. They document the service of soldiers who were often not acknowledged in official accounts, whose decorations were withheld and later had to be restored, whose experience of combat was inseparable from their experience of racism within the military and the country they returned to. These accounts belong in archives, in schools, and in family libraries. The work of recording them is not just personal memory. It is historical reclamation — the deliberate act of putting back into the record what was left out.

Start this work while you still can. The window is narrow and it is closing. The interview you conduct this year may be the only firsthand account of what that veteran saw and carried — and the family that has it will understand their own history in ways that families without it simply cannot.

The tools below are built to help you do this work with the rigor and care it deserves.