Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Bringing War Home: Objects, Memories, and Stories from a Public Project

2023; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5406/26428652.91.3.04

2642-8652

Susan R. Grayzel, Molly Boeka Cannon,

Communism, Protests, Social Movements

When Rachel Stenta showed up at our roadshow at the Utah State University (USU) campus in Moab, Utah, in October 2022, she was carrying a dress (fig. 1). Made with silk acquired in Vietnam by her father, the dress was something deeply meaningful to her: "I don't think I'll ever part with it," she said.1 As USU students catalogued and then digitally recorded the beautiful embroidered dress, Stenta agreed to a longer oral history. As she explained, she was "the history keeper in our family. . . . I'm all about preserving things. And so, all of the times that we would move and pack and unpack I would just sort of collect things that people were going to part with and I ended up with it when I moved out of the house." This dress, she recalled, was not something that her mother had good feelings about, and so Stenta ended up with it at age sixteen and held on to it ever since. She had a story to tell about the dress, and her story powerfully illustrates why objects of all varieties can help us better understand the history of modern war.When we asked Stenta why she wanted to talk about this dress, she elaborated: "To me, the dress just kind of represents the effects of war on women and families. And there's kind of a family story that goes along with him serving in Vietnam that actually had some developments just a couple of years ago. So, that was the story I wanted to share that was connected to the dress." Stenta doesn't remember her mother wearing the dress, but she has a vivid sense of when she first saw it when she was about eight years old. As she moved the dress from place to place, it remained a symbol of the connection between her parents before their marriage fell apart. But the dress also acquired a deeper meaning after the death of her parents.When Stenta's father went to Vietnam, her mother remained home raising four young children, including a set of twins, in a community where hostility to the war was evident. Her mother also suffered a late-term miscarriage while her father was deployed; at some point, amid this family tragedy, the silk for the dress was either brought or sent home. And then shortly after her father left the military, Stenta came along as the last, much-wanted child.But the story that Stenta wanted to tell about the dress then took a turn: "About four years ago, I took a DNA test for 23andMe that a friend gave me. I was like, oh, this will be cool . . . and in the process of that discovered that I have a half-brother, who is Vietnamese." She continued, stating that since her parents were dead, "there was no way to go back and say 'did you know?' But the fascinating part of how it [the dress] links back to the story is my half-brother, who now lives in the States, was either born three months after my brother who died, or he was born after my father left Vietnam, but the same year that I was born." Stenta was also able to meet the Vietnamese mother of her half-brother, who raised him under very difficult circumstances. This gave her a new appreciation for the hardships of this war and for this moment of connection: "It was just such a heartfelt experience to meet her and hear her story." As she summed up the dress and the ways in which it connected her family to Vietnam and to the women who gave birth to half-siblings across this huge divide, she concluded: "To me, I guess it represents how strong women have to be during marriage and family, but especially during war."Given this complex story, Stenta reflected on the meanings of the dress for her: "It was always just mixed in the beauty of it but all of the sadness that came from both the war and my parents' relationship and my family's relationship." This beautiful turquoise dress is just one of approximately two hundred objects that the Bringing War Home project has documented and preserved thus far. Its presence in our archive alongside the story that the object evoked for this one family allows all of us an opportunity to see, as Stenta explained, the effects of war on women and families—in this case, the connection between small-town America and Vietnam, between a veteran and his children, both acknowledged and hidden—and the extraordinary ways in which wars have afterlives and come home.The Bringing War Home Project came to life due to a relatively recent initiative of the National Endowment for the Humanities, its program called "Dialogues on the Experience of War." One of the aims of this NEH grant is to foster "the study and discussion of important humanities sources about war, in the belief that these sources can help U.S. military veterans and others think more deeply about the issues raised by war and military service."2 The grant has a number of parameters, including asking for a project focused on two different wars that were not connected chronologically and emphasizing outreach to veteran communities in particular. For our project, we proposed something slightly different than many of the previously funded programs. We decided that a key component of such veteran communities included the family members attached to them. And while one part of our program uses a traditional literary source—Vietnam veteran Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried—as the basis for informed community discussions, we focus on seeing how objects and object stories can themselves serve as humanities sources to prompt conversations about the effects of war on minds, memory, and community.3 Through the Bringing War Home project, we hope to preserve Utah's experiences of modern conflict by hosting "roadshows," public events where we are digitally collecting material culture and connected personal stories across the state and region.4In picking two wars (as per the grant) we initially chose the First World War, because it was a global conflict involving a huge range of Americans now relegated firmly in the past that can only live on via objects and memories. However, we knew that we also wanted to use this opportunity to capture stories and objects that relate to personal experiences that might be disappearing—those of Vietnam War–era veterans and civilians and their family members. To that end, we are trying to make outreach to those who lived through the era of the Vietnam War, the second war chosen for the grant, a priority of our work.One of the powerful things about wartime objects is that they bear memories.5 And for the Vietnam War, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall has become itself a place where tens of thousands of individuals have left objects from the moment that monument existed.6 The federal government has collected and catalogued the millions of objects left at the wall.7 However, critically for us as scholars, what we lack are the stories behind them. That is what we hope our project will do—link objects, stories, and individual memories with the next generations.In addition to centering objects (material culture) as vehicles of memory and legacy (what one might expect in a project developed by a historian and an anthropologist), we also wanted to focus on families and community. The conversation with Stenta about her mother's dress, made from the silk her father acquired in wartime, illustrates one of the core insights such conversations have given us: the ways in which the children of veterans serve as the particular guardians of the living memory of their parents' military experiences. We also hope that our students can learn from the powerful moments of connection when they help to record and thus preserve those memories.From the start, the BWH project has sought to engage multiple communities in preserving and understanding the legacies of war through centering material objects. We have put students and their education at the core of this, from the grant application to the unfolding of the Bringing War Home Project's public-facing events. As we developed the notion of hosting roadshows from our first experimental effort in fall 2018, which was focused solely on the First World War, we have involved students at every stage.In spring 2022, we cotaught an interdisciplinary class across USU's campuses on "Objects of War: The History and Material Culture of Modern Conflict"; a central component of this class was reading about public history and material objects from the perspective of anthropology as well as cultural and military history. After acquiring this background, students in the class collectively developed with us the set of questions that we needed to know about any object brought to a roadshow and then what deeper questions we could ask as part of a related object-centered oral history. Having cocreated these processes with our students, we then put our work into practice by hosting our first BWH roadshow in April at both the USU Logan campus and the Hyrum City Museum, one of several core Utah community partners.8Our roadshows as public events rely on community input. We put the word out via Utah Public Radio (another key partner), newspapers, social media posts, flyers, and word of mouth. The day of the roadshow, we set up stations—all staffed by students—to register participants, document objects, and record vital information and the stories about them.9 At our spring events in Cache Valley but also in conjunction with Hill Aerospace Museum and its team as well as the Fort Douglas Military Museum, student volunteers and interns have spoken to veterans and members of military families. We have vivid memories of watching our students reverently engage with a Second World War Navy veteran from rural Utah, who told what it was like to be on a ship just off the coast of Normandy on June 6, 1944, and of getting to see their empathy and historical awareness emerge when examining and photographing a piece of shrapnel brought back from Vietnam.In the fall of 2022, we hosted three more roadshows, two at USU campuses in Taylorsville and Moab, and one at the Historic Wendover Airfield. As of this writing, we have more scheduled for spring 2023—in the Uintah Basin and at the Prehistoric Museum in Price. What we know thus far is that word of mouth and personal invitations are by far the most important tools we have to reach our broader community. We want our living archive to show what can happen when community members get to share the things that matter to them and the stories and memories that connect us to the complex, important legacies of modern war. With the living digital archive that we will build from these records, we hope to share these stories so we can all better understand these life-altering events.At each of the roadshow events, students and project staff greet participants and sit down to collect information about the objects brought in for digitization (fig. 2). We utilize a cloud-based relational database, Airtable, to store information collected during these events. There are four related tables in our database. The registration table stores information related to the participant including basic contact information and military affiliation (veteran, active duty, family). The object documentation table stores information about the objects, where each object is given a unique identifier that is connected to the participant identifier in the participant table. The photograph table stores information about each photograph that is taken of the objects. The photograph number is connected with the object identifier. The oral history account table stores information about the collection of oral histories including the interviewer, date, and equipment used to conduct the interview. The oral history records are connected with the participant identifier in the participant table. The related tables permit us to link individual participants with their objects and also to our notes about the photographs and oral history accounts.Participants first interact with the students at the registration station. Registration includes sharing basic information about the project, explaining how they grant us permission to document the participants' objects and oral history accounts, and gathering contact information for follow-up. All participants then proceed to the object documentation station, where students meet with them to collect key information about the objects. We created a data collection spreadsheet in consultation with students in our courses in the spring of 2022 (fig. 3). This information includes basic descriptions of the object, including material type, maker, date information, and associated war. Additional fields document emotion, memory, and personal connections with the object, including how the participant acquired the object and its emotional value to them. Once students document the object information, the participant and objects proceed to the photography station. We photograph each object from different perspectives, angles, and scale using a Canon EOS Rebel digital SLR camera. We also captured photographs using built-in camera technology on smartphones.Some participants choose to record a longer oral history account with our team. Working with recording professionals and interns from Utah Public Radio, we record oral history accounts. In a quiet space with audio equipment designed to record both the interviewer and the participant, we let stories unfold and learn much more than a simple description of a dress could ever provide. After each roadshow event, we download the content from the database and the audio recordings to a cloud-based storage platform for temporary archiving until we construct the final digital archive. We have been learning by trial and error, but the process now runs smoothly, and we hope it can serve as a model for local communities elsewhere who wish to do similar digital history that includes such acts of recovery and preservation.In the photograph, a United States marine poses, with his rifle resting on his boot, in front of stacked orange and black fifty-gallon metal barrels, guarded by sandbags. He is young, very young, with a crew cut and a hint of a smile. John Mizell was seventeen when he enlisted, joining the Marine Corps; on his eighteenth birthday he traveled to Vietnam, where he would serve as Marine Corps Liaison from 1967 until 1969.10 His service called for travel across the region, travels Mizell documented through photography. When he brought his photo album to our roadshow event at the Hill Aerospace Museum, he took out the picture of the young marine and shared his experience of the war with USU students. He discussed his role training other young soldiers, his time in the hospital, and his dedication to the Disabled American Veterans (DAV). Mizell pointed out that in the photograph, he is standing near a storage facility for the herbicide known as Agent Orange, a chemical applied during the war with which many of the students were unfamiliar. While he did not handle the toxic chemical, he shared that "I know they sprayed it. You could see it, you could smell it," while they patrolled.11 Mizell had envisioned a military career for himself; however, the Navy forced his retirement after his doctors diagnosed him with a lethal nervous system condition. While he faced many health setbacks, Mizell did not die from the effects of Agent Orange. He spent decades advocating for veterans through the DAV and working with political leaders to develop legislation that addressed veterans' issues. The photograph captures Mizell's memory and serves as a conduit for our students to learn about the legacy of war through this veteran's experience.Stories like Mizell's experience in Vietnam and Stenta's memory of her parents permit us an opportunity to gain an understanding of how war impacts individuals, including those directly participating in wartime conflicts and those thousands of miles away. Often these stories represent difficult or challenging periods in their lives and communities. Taken together, we see an emerging collective history from these experiences that can educate all of us.The stories collected from the Bringing War Home Project roadshow events capture individual and family experiences of America's modern wars and wartimes. They present opportunities for military personnel and civilians alike to reflect on these pivotal historical moments. The stories provide foundational knowledge to further our collective understanding of war. Participants who attend the roadshow events want to share their experiences and contribute to something broader than one family's history. These stories deserve our stewardship and preservation so that both current and future generations can learn from these objects and what they represent.Working with USU Digital Initiatives, we are constructing a digital archive to preserve and provide access to the objects and stories. Not all objects belong in a museum. Family artifacts, items that are culturally sacred, or those that are still in practice belong with their communities and individual owners. However, the object's story—the life history of that object—holds meaning and valuable information for multiple audiences, including researchers, educators, and students. Digital history can bridge these two demands placed on the object.A digital archive utilizes technology to preserve archival information related to documents, photographs, material culture, and other art forms. In the case of the Bringing War Home digital archive, we collate the information collected at each of the roadshow events in an archiving platform. The platform affords access to the information through any web browser. Part of our grant will fund students to help us build the archive with the aim of launching it within the next year or so.We also anticipate building pedagogical tools including lesson plans and exhibition materials that utilize the archive. In that way, this Utah-centered project can not only reach communities across our state but also perhaps serve as a model for others seeking to preserve the things that war brings home and the history they contain.