PROJECT: The US Army's Soldier-Historians + The Center of Military History

[Ryan Goble]

Wild story "A History of Violence" in The Atlantic on how the Army has deploys soldier-historians...

Two highlights...

Soldier-historians interviewed troops and collected documents during the Vietnam and Gulf wars, and their appetites have since become voracious. Over the past decade, the U.S. Army Center of Military History has gathered 30 terabytes of interviews, briefings, photos, and maps—roughly equal, by some estimates, to the printed contents of the Library of Congress. Ishmael’s team, at Bagram Airfield, just outside Kabul, collected more than two terabytes during its deployment, which ended in January. “Hopefully by doing this we won’t be unprepared again,” says the 135th’s commander, Major Donald Loethen. At home, he works in marketing at Michelin, but he studied history (the European Reformation) at Lincoln University in Jefferson City, Missouri. “People will know what happened when they’re planning for the next Afghanistan,” he says. “And there will be a next Afghanistan.”

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Ishmael, who works as a financial adviser in Maryland Heights, Missouri, but dreams of teaching history, knows that the terabytes of documents and interviews will likely sit in a digital warehouse for years. Though Army historians have used the materials to write two books on Iraq—one on several small battles and the other on the 2007 troop surge—The Center of Military History is two or three years behind in reviewing the teams’ data, and doesn’t yet have a robust search engine; moreover, civilian historians and journalists can’t access the materials, because they’re still classified. But the reports will eventually be made public, and someone, someday, will use his work, Ishmael says. “All this joy I’ve gotten out of the books I’ve read—I get to provide future historians with the meat of their books. I’m providing my kids and my children’s children with the context of what we’ve done,” he says. “We’ve been here for 10 years. That’s a big part of America.” As he points out to me, his 11-year-old son has never known the United States not being at war.

For the full, short article click here.