TL;DR: I’ve helped veterans write their memoirs, and I’ve watched others wait until they ran out of time. For Vietnam-era and Korea-era veterans the window is closing fast. Once you’re gone, your children get fragments, and a memoir keeps the details only you carry, in your own voice. More on my memoir process. I’ve also written about a memoir built from family memory.
When a veteran asks me whether to start, I say yes, and the reasons to wait don’t hold up. I want to talk to the veterans in particular, because the conversation I have with veterans about writing their memoirs is different from the conversation I have with anyone else.
My grandfather was a World War Two veteran and a prisoner of the Japanese. I heard his stories when I was seventeen. He also wrote a journal after the war, and last year, decades after he died, I turned that journal into a book called Behind the Wire. The book is good. I’m proud of it.
It’s also, and there’s no getting around this, a thinner book than the one we could have made together if I’d sat down with him and asked my questions while he was still here.
My father served at Norton Air Force Base. He died of COVID in 2020. I have many of his stories. I don’t have all of them. I’ll never have all of them now.
This article is for the veteran who has spent years thinking they should write down what happened, in the service or before or after it. That thinking-about-it phase is the dangerous phase.
Why is there urgency for veterans to record their stories?
Veterans, especially Vietnam-era and Korea-era veterans, are at the age where the people in your unit are leaving. You know this.
You go to fewer reunions because there are fewer people to reunion with. The annual list of names you remember saying goodbye to gets longer. For more, see the revenge memoir and your story dies when you do.
Your grandchildren get a third-generation retelling of fragments.Share on X
The memoir is the thing that requires you to be lucid, healthy enough to do the interviews, and present in the room with the people helping you write it. The day you can’t do those things is closer than it feels right now. Most veterans assume they have more time than they have. Most veterans are wrong about this in the same direction, and the wrongness is, by definition, not visible from inside.
The work of a memoir is several months of focused interviews, then several more months of writing and review, so it has to be in motion well before the change comes. Memoir clients in their nineties are fairly common for me, and a book at ninety is entirely possible when the person is still lucid and willing to talk. The veterans I’ve worked with who finished theirs were the ones who started while they were still strong. The ones I’ve known who didn’t finish theirs were the ones who waited until they weren’t.
What dies with you if you don’t write your story?
Your children know fragments. They know the stories you’ve told over the years. The ones that came up at holidays. The ones that came out unexpectedly during a movie, or a news story, or a conversation about something else. They know less than you think they know.
Your grandchildren know much less. Your children filter the stories they tell their children through their own understanding of what mattered. The version of you they knew shaped that understanding. That was a partial version. Your grandchildren get a third-generation retelling of fragments. By the fourth generation, the story is mostly gone.
Jay Stifflemire spent twenty years in the Navy, fourteen of them deployed or in deployed status, and he wrote his memoir for his own kids. “I have been to twenty four countries and sailed six of the seven seas, and parenthood is the most challenging thing I have done,” he told me on Leaders and Their Stories. His children will know both halves of that sentence because he wrote it down.
Your memoir is the thing that survives intact. It’s the version of your story in your own voice, with the details only you carry, with the meaning you yourself put on the events instead of the meaning your descendants might guess at. Without the memoir, people who weren’t there reconstruct the story, and the reconstruction is always worse than the original.
What I tell veterans who say their story doesn’t matter
From Conversations With Influencers
Antonio Johnson is a former Navy hospital corpsman who rose from scheduling assistant to scheduling manager and founded a veteran nonprofit. He told the story on Conversations With Influencers.
Many veterans say a version of this when I first talk to them. “I didn’t do anything important. The guys who did important things should write the books. I just did my job.”
I hear this from veterans constantly, and it’s wrong in a way that’s worth naming.
Without the memoir, people who weren’t there reconstruct the story, and the reconstruction is always worse than the original.
The story you think doesn’t matter is the story your family will spend their lives wishing they had. The day-to-day of military service, the people, the places, the smells, the sounds, the food, the boredom, the friends, the moments that didn’t make the history books, those are the things your descendants will most want to know. The big-picture history is in the history books.
Your particular version of being there exists nowhere but in you, and I hate hearing a veteran talk themselves out of the book with that line.
A memoir doesn’t have to be about heroism.
The memoir can skip combat and importance. What it needs is to say what your time in service was like, in your particular case, with your particular eye for what mattered. Your family needs that, the historians will eventually need it, and nobody but you can produce it.
What if a veteran doesn’t want to talk about some experiences?
Most veterans have at least one thing they’ve never told the family. Sometimes more than one. The memoir question runs into this immediately and most veterans assume the only options are tell everything or write a sanitized version that leaves out the hard parts.
There’s a third option, and most published veteran memoirs take it.
You write what you’re willing to write, in the level of detail you’re willing to write it. You name the existence of the things you’re not going to describe, so the reader knows they happened, without describing them in detail. You let the silences be what they are instead of pretending they don’t exist.
This is harder than it sounds, but it’s the move that lets the memoir be both honest and survivable for the writer. A ghostwriter who has worked with veterans before will know how to handle this. The conversation about what stays in and what stays out happens before the writing begins. The memoir doesn’t ambush you. You set the boundaries. The book stays inside them.
The work is easier than you think
Most veterans assume writing a memoir means sitting down with a blank page and trying to remember things. That’s one way to do it, and it’s the hardest way. The way that works for most veterans is interview-based ghostwriting.
You talk. The ghostwriter records the interviews and asks questions. Across several months of working sessions, the story comes out. The ghostwriter then turns the transcripts into prose in your voice, with your specific details, and brings it back to you for review.
You catch the things that need correcting. You add the things you remembered after the interview was over. The book takes shape across the back-and-forth.
The interviews themselves are easier than veterans expect. The questions you most need answered are the small, specific, present-tense questions about what the day-to-day was like. The food. The barracks. The friend you sat next to in the truck. The first night you couldn’t sleep. The smells. The sounds. Those are the questions a good interviewer asks, and they’re the questions most veterans have been waiting to be asked. For more on hiring and vetting a ghostwriter, hear this conversation.
You talk, the ghostwriter writes, and you correct the draft, with boundaries agreed before a word is written.
A ghostwriter who shows up with a list of big questions about medals and battles is wasting a veteran’s time. I’d much sooner hear about the truck and the food, because those details bring the person in the old photograph back to life for the grandkids.
What does waiting to write a veteran memoir cost?
The veterans I know who waited and didn’t finish their memoirs left their families a hole that can’t be filled, the named absence of the story their father or grandfather almost wrote and didn’t, and the family talks about it for years. The wait is rarely a single decision. It’s a series of small postponements, each one reasonable in the moment. After this medical appointment. After the next family event. When things calm down. When I feel a little stronger. Each postponement is small. The accumulation runs out the clock. The veterans who finished theirs started before things calmed down, because things were never going to calm down, and they knew it. Those who waited for the right moment didn’t get one.
My take
Start now. Things aren’t going to calm down, and every small postponement eats time you don’t have. You don’t need a blank page. Talk to a ghostwriter who’ll ask about the truck, the food and the first night you couldn’t sleep, and skip the one who wants to hear about medals. You set the boundaries on what stays out. The details only you carry are what your grandkids will want, and they disappear with you.
What to do this week
If you’re a veteran reading this, the conversation to have, this week, is about whether the memoir is possible. Not whether it’s a good idea. Not whether you’re the right kind of person. Whether the practical and logistical setup of doing it makes sense for your situation, your health, your family, your timeline.
The Book Discovery Intensive is the conversation. We work out what the memoir is, what it covers and doesn’t cover, what your family needs from it, and what the realistic timeline looks like. Book the call if you want to have that conversation. The case studies page has examples of veteran memoirs and other family-legacy projects.
I wrote my grandfather’s book from his journal, decades after he was gone. The book is good. It would have been better if he had been there to help me write it. The veterans whose memoirs sit on their families’ shelves now, in their own voices, with their own details, are the ones who started early enough. The choice this week, if you’re a veteran, is whether your memoir is going to be the one on the shelf or the one your family wishes you’d written.
Behind the Wire is the true story of my grandfather, a prisoner of war, told from the journal he wrote after the war. It shows what one family can keep when someone writes it down.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Aging Veterans: America’s Veteran Population in Later Life, U.S. Census Bureau
- Norton, Air Force Civil Engineer Center
