ABSTRACT
The Vietnam Center and Sam Johnson Vietnam Archive (VNCA) at Texas Tech University collects, preserves, and makes available to the public the documentary record of the American experience in Vietnam. Founded by Vietnam veterans in 1989, the VNCA has become the world’s largest nongovernmental archive of the Vietnam War, containing over thirty million pages of documents and hundreds of thousands of photographs, slides, audio and film collections, and artifacts. In an effort to collect and preserve the voices of those who lived through those turbulent times, the VNCA established its Oral History Project in 1999. Since that time, the Oral History Project has conducted and preserved a rich collection of full-life oral history interviews with American veterans of the Vietnam War and with veterans’ family members, war protestors, social activists, and Vietnamese from both sides of the conflict. Currently holding over 1,300 interviews, this project is a robust and ongoing effort to capture these stories before time and circumstance take them away. As with the VNCA’s more traditional archival collections, the oral history interviews are made available to the public through the VNCA’s digital online archive.
