Ideas - How overlooked veterans make history in their own words

Episode Date: November 12, 2025

There’s history, and then there’s oral history. And when it comes to the impacts of war on those who fight them — oral history opens doors to the past that would otherwise stay firmly shut. Michael Petrou, an historian with the Canadian War Museum, says oral history allows historians to broaden, even democratize, research and it gives voice to those who might not otherwise leave their mark on archived documents.

This is a CBC podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyed. As a former journalist, now historian, Michael Petru has always traded in facts. But he opened a lecture at the Canadian War Museum about the impacts of war by quoting a fictional war veteran, thinking about friends who fought alongside him during the Spanish Civil War. You know what? Since the war ended, not a single day has gone by when I haven't thought of them. They were all so young. They all died. All of them dead. None of them tasted the good things in life.

None of them knew the wonder of having a child and of their child at three or four years of age, climbing into his bed between him and his wife on a Sunday morning in a room full of sunshine. Nobody remembers them. Nobody even remembers why they died, why they didn't have a wife and children, and a sunny room. Nobody remembers least of all those they fought for. Oh, but I remember. I remember them all. I don't know why, but I do.

Not a single day goes by that I don't think of them. These words are fiction. They are taken from a character in Javier Circus' novel, Soldiers of Solomis. Just as in fiction, the impact of war extends long after the guns fall silent. And yet these experiences are not often recorded in official history books. And those impacts often appear with their greatest clarity, not in historical scholarship, but in novels, films, and poetry. The emotions and experiences that swirl around a soldier's return

are part of our oldest stories. Homer's epic poem, the Odyssey, is a rollicking adventure tale of monsters and sirens, a witch and a vengeful God. But at its heart, it's also the story of Odysseus, a war veteran, who returns home from the Trojan War to discover that everything was not as it and that even his wife and son do not recognize him because he's no longer the same man.

I cannot reflect on Odysseus' experience as imagined by Homer without thinking of another soldier's homecoming. Bruce Henwood is a Canadian veteran who, in 1995, was serving on the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Croatia. His vehicle hit a landmine and Bruce lost both his legs. Bruce was changed in all kinds of other ways, too. He changed so much, in fact, that when his wife saw him and got to know him again, she said she felt lucky that she could fall in love with him twice. She had to, because he was no longer quite the same man he was, the first time she fell in love with him.

That story isn't in a written history of Canadian peacekeeping missions in the Balkans. Bruce told it to me during an oral history interview. Michael conducted similar interviews with more than 200 Canadian veterans. The stories he heard are raw, revealing, and occasionally even implausible. Still, Michael defends oral history as a way to open doors to the past that might otherwise stay firmly shut. I'll stake out my position clearly from the outset. I believe oral history is especially valuable

when investigating topics that are neglected in other sources because they concern the most intimate of emotions and convictions. I'll go further and argue that for historians, oral history allows us to broaden, even democratize our research Oral history's 20th century revival was tied to historians' new interest in workers, women, the poor, and the marginalized. As scholars sought to research ordinary people they had previously overlooked, they had to work with raw archival material but neglected them. But, like all sources, including written ones, oral history interviews do not provide a clear and out-obstructed view into the past. Their flaws include interviewees, biases, and faulty recollections.

This danger was recognized more than 2,000 years ago by Thucydides, writing about the Peloponnesian war between Sparta and Athens. He tells his readers he describes things he saw himself or that he heard from people that were there, but then he warns, different eyewitnesses gave different accounts of the same events, speaking out of partiality from one side or the other, or else from imperfect memories. Others believe the problems posed by oral history are more fundamental. The French historian, and at Wibiorca, notes that every testimony is recorded at a precise moment in time and is therefore shaped by the context surrounding it, from the expectations

of the interviewer, which are often revealed, in the questions they ask. to prevailing narratives about the topic discussed. She says the repercussions of an event inform us about the power of that event but do not account for what the event was. Interviews with now elderly Holocaust survivors, for example, are frequently framed as a chance to create a legacy for future generations.

Some, such as those conducted for a project created by Schindler's list director, Steelevin Spielberg, may end with the interviewee's family joining her before the camera. The unstated expectation for an interview conducted in such circumstances is that the interviewee will tell a story full of catharsis and a hard-won optimism about the future. But what of that story, those expressed emotions, don't reflect how the survivor feels in the silence of her thoughts? or consider recent interviews with Second World War veterans, and I have conducted nearly 50. These men and women speak for a disappearing generation that participated in the most destructive conflict in history.

This imposes a burden of expectation on the interviewee and nudges them towards certain themes, patriotism, remembrance, hope that future generations will avoid war, revealing messier emotions such as shame or persistent anger must be a difficult choice for a veteran who assumes these aren't what an interviewer or future listeners will want to hear All these shortcomings merit caution beginning with a fallibility of memory

wartime memories may be especially fragile as recollections of violent and upsetting events are more likely to be fragmented and non-linear and subject to deliberate or unconscious repression. I've encountered this as a historian conducting oral history interviews in which a veteran tells with conviction, a story that I know cannot possibly be true.

In some cases, an interviewee might be selectively editing the version of himself he is presenting, emitting uncomfortable details and altering others to make them more palatable. In other cases, however, I don't think the individual is consciously misrepresenting anything. Their story has changed over the years until it no longer resembles what actually happened,

but it remains real to the person telling it. I know something of this process through personal experience as well. I spent many years as a foreign correspondent. I covered wars and upheavals in Afghanistan, Chad, Ukraine, and elsewhere. But in many ways, the most challenging assignment was Haiti after the 2010 earthquake. I flew into neighboring Dominican Republic two days after the quake, and late at night, I met up with a Canadian medic and aid worker named Raul Singh. Very early the next morning, Raoul and his colleagues and I drove in a convoy of pickup trucks across the border.

As we entered the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince, we started to see the first bodies. Then they were everywhere. Soon after, we saw a large and agitated crowd. Raul must have noticed something about the Jocelyn young men because he jumped off the back of the pickup truck and waited into them. I followed behind as Raoul's shoulders his way through the crowd. Now, Raul was a big man, so I couldn't see what he saw. But when we got the center of the crowd's attention, he abruptly turned around and said,

It's too late. They're already dead. Raul told me there were two men and each had been shot twice in the chest. We got back in the truck and continued driving. The bodies of those two men, teenagers really, lay in the middle of a dusty crossroads for days. There was an overwhelming amount of death in Porto-Prance then, but because I'd been present when these two were murdered, I wanted to understand more about what had happened to them. I got very close as they lay in the streets.

I saw the bullet wounds in their torsos, and I noticed that. but one of the young men was only wearing one shoe. It had orange shoelaces, and then when I looked very closely, I could see that the matching lace had been used to tie his hands behind his back. In the years since, Raoul has become a dear friend. But we never talked about that incident. And then, a year or two ago,

I reminded Raoul of everything I've just told you, The drive into the city, the crowd, the bodies left in the street, the orange shoelaces. And Raoul said, that's not what happened at all. The lynching didn't occur on a drive into the city, he told me, but days later, there were four victims, not two. It couldn't have been the ones who lay in the street, including the young man with the orange shoelaces, because his body was whole while those attacked by the crowd had been mutilated. I don't know whose memory

minor Raoul's was accurate. If an oral historian were trying to piece together what had happened to the men whose bodies lay on the crossroads, Raul and I would be unreliable witnesses. But that doesn't mean such different accounts should be dismissed. There are no perfect historical. historical sources. A memory that is committed to paper, confessed to a diary, told in a letter

to a loved one, recounted in a diplomatic cable, is no less fallible than once spoken into a digital recorder. As historians, we consider our sources flaws, we look for supporting evidence and evidence that rebuts and contradicts, and we build as accurate a picture of the past as we can with the imperfect material we are given. It's true that I can't tell you with absolute certainty how those young men at the crossroads died. I can tell you how their bodies smelled. I can tell you how that recognition came rocketing back to me

with searing clarity years later in a bombed-out village in northern Iraq. And I can tell you how, even today, in subtle but persistent ways, I've been affected by that knowledge. Our past never stands still. We re-remember and reshape it in new ways, just as our memories reshape us. And when researching the veterans' experience,

the impacts of an event matter at least as much as the original event. What we're trying to understand, in other words, are the ripples of war, not just the war itself. And those ripples, I believe, can most clearly be traced through oral histories. War diaries or film footage may offer an historian her best shot are reconstructing how far a particular unit advanced on a given day and the challenges it faced. But they can't tell us about the dreams a veteran of that engagement has decades later.

They can't tell us how he feels when he remembers it or if there's anyone he shares those memories with. To learn those answers, a historian must sit down with a veteran or someone close to him and have a conversation. That's what I've done more than 200 times over the last three years. I've learned that nearly every veteran is shaped by their service and that the transition from life in the armed forces to the civilian world is often a profound one. For veterans who survive a war, especially a cataclysmic one, such as the Second World War,

its end can bring relief, but also the emotional disruption of knowing maybe for the first time in years that you once again have your whole life ahead of you. And then there is the inner transition, a change in one sense of identity. I'll never be a civilian. Elin Le Saler, a veteran of deployments in the Balkans,

and Afghanistan told me, I was a civilian before I joined the army, but once you've joined the army, you'll never be a civilian again. Not in my case, anyway. I asked her, why not? And she said, because I am a veteran,

she had become something new. Taken together, all these transitions can feel like a physical journey. Nick Grimshaw is a veteran of the Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry who deployed to the Balkans and Afghanistan where he earned a meritorious service medal for demonstrating leadership under fire. He likened the stage of his life when he was a soldier to one bank of a river. That bank feels safe, he said. You're surrounded by colleagues and friends who know,

you and trust you, you feel, you belong there. But Nick imagined a bridge that leads to the other side of the river, where you live not as a soldier, but a civilian. And it's unfamiliar, he said. He continued, it's dark, it might be uncomfortable, but you know you need to get over there somehow. That far bank of the river can be elusive and may seem like a strange place if you reach it. Interviewees frequently brought up their feeling of dislocation upon rejoining the civilian world. I was lost, said Army veteran Dennis LeBlanc, describing his return to Canada after deployment in Afghanistan. Dennis was plagued by guilt over his fellow Canadian soldiers who died, in Afghanistan and by the deaths of the Taliban they had fought and killed. He was diagnosed with

depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, something he continued to grapple with as a civilian. Phil Hunter, a former reservist who served as a medical technician in Kandahar, faced a similarly difficult adjustment after his service. He had felt a sense of purpose in Afghanistan that he didn't in his civilian job. In his civilian job, he was a computer consultant. So he switched careers and became a flight paramedic, transporting patients in need of critical care by helicopter. This new job reminded him of the emotional intensity he felt

caring for wounded people in Afghanistan, and it fed the addiction for adrenaline that he developed serving there. But none of this shielded Phil from some of the other impacts of his service. He felt exposed in the wide open aisles of grocery stores. The smell of the butcher counter or the sight of red liquid pooling in the styrofoam trays of meat said his heart racing.

He slept fine for a few months, but then he couldn't sleep at all. Years later, Phil would break and swerve when he saw a newly repaired patch of pavement on a Canadian road, lest it conceal a buried improvised explosive device. These kinds of stories are common among veterans, and yet, by their very nature, they are foreign, incomprehensible to almost everyone else. This can make the veterans' experience in 2025 a lonely one, at least among the general public. In the course of conducting these interviews,

struck by how often the experiences of younger veterans mirror those of men and women who served during the Second World War. And yet, I do think there's a key difference between them. In 1945, some one million Canadians who served in that conflict became veterans. The war was a shared experience that touched nearly everyone. A veteran in 2025 will live his day-to-day life surrounded by far fewer people with similar histories, but that also underscores the strength of the connection, the comradeship that veterans feel for each other. Annie Taitro, a veteran of Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Haiti, said these bonds are stronger even than the ones within a family. Those of us who were there, all we need do is look at each other. She said, one look, and we

understand exactly how the other person feels. It would be misleading, however, when discussing the veterans' experience to focus only on the challenges, only on trauma, only on other harms. There is also kinship, pride, and a sense of accomplishment, and ignoring the layered and sometimes conflicting impacts of service can result in a one-dimensional portrayal of veterans as defined only by their physical or psychological damage. It's a way of looking at veterans that Carine La Chappelle finds frustrating. Carine served as an intelligence officer in Bosnia and later with the Canadian Special Operations Regiment in Afghanistan, she said, I felt that my life had been purposeful in a way that it never would have been otherwise.

But Karin's civilian friends and colleagues assumed she will judge her time in the military differently. She explained, most people expect us to say, because I am a woman, it was hell, war is dreadful, I hated what I did, I'm traumatized, etc., etc. There is some truth in that. She continued adding, but I keep telling people, you know, many of us liked what we did, we do it again, we have no regrets, and we're not broken. It must also be said that not all veterans feel the need to find deeper meaning in their service or comfort in what it accomplished.

Donald Skelly, who flew 19 missions with 4-2-8 squadron of the Royal Canadian Air Force during the Second World War, described his time in the Air Force as a brief episode in my 97 years. He downplayed and he influenced the war might have had on him and seemed at ease with leaving it in the past. No two veterans had the same post-war experiences.

Some, like Donald, move decisively on. Others, such as those who carry physical and mental scars, confront the consequences of their service every day. I've argued tonight that oral history helps us understand those consequences by revealing emotions and insights that are typically absent from written sources. They also allow us to hear from people whose voices are quiet, downplayed or ignored. By collecting and considering those voices, we can compile a fuller picture of how war shapes peoples and societies. Too often, when we think about military history,

we think of it in isolation. The battles, the campaigns, the bang bang, as some of my foreign correspondent colleagues would describe the actual shooting episodes of a war. But war and military service in the 20th and 21st century have shaped almost all aspects of Canada and Canadians. This includes, for example, the place in Canadian society of indigenous veterans who often describe enjoying something far closer to equality within the armed forces than they did before enlisting. But then they returned to a country or civilian world that once again treated them poorly,

denied them the same rewards for their service given to their non-Indigenous colleagues. Rick Bice, himself a veteran and the son of Charlie Henry Bice, who was one of the most highly decorated indigenous soldiers during the Second World War, lamented this post-war loss of comradeship between indigenous and non-indigenous veterans

that occurred because indigenous vets weren't welcome in the same social spaces as our former colleagues. We can die together, but we can't drink together, he said, it makes no sense. The role of women in Canadian society has also been upended and reshaped by war. Those who served enjoyed new freedoms,

took on new responsibilities, and too often were shunted aside when the war ended. Edith McFarlane served during the Second World War in the Canadian Women's Army Corps in England where she tracked casualties. After the war, she wasn't welcome at her local legion because she was a woman, and even when she was allowed in,

she wasn't allowed to enter the hall's main room. E.S. post-war included this discrimination but she was also shaped in ways that many of her male comrades would recognize. She was in London when it was bombarded by Germany's V1 and V2 flying bombs. The casualties she processed included her next-door neighbor from Brockville, Ontario. She said she was young and carefree when she enlisted and did so mostly for the adventure. Her wartime service, she said, taught her that, life is a lot shorter than you think it is, and anything can happen. Of course, a historian

researching the experiences of all veterans, and whether they are indigenous or women or not, should use all available methods and sources, but there are certain details and topics for which oral history is uniquely illuminating. How did it feel to walk into a Legion Hall as a woman veteran in 1963. What's it like to march in the grand entry at a prairie powwow? We learn the answers to these questions by asking those who were there. And, of course, we'll hear different answers from different veterans. The journey from military service to veteranhood is a multi-stranded path that everyone

navigates in their own fashion. But for many veterans, perhaps most, their military service marks an inflection point, a time when their life's trajectory is shifted or affected in a meaningful way. I'd like to return to the journey of Nick Grimshaw. You'll recall that he's a veteran who imagined a bridge connecting the bank of a river that was his life as a soldier with the far bank of a river. where he needed to live as a civilian now that his military career was over.

Nick left the army in 2018. A couple of years ago, I asked him where he was on that bridge. He said he had made it across, but getting there wasn't easy or quick. It had been tempting to linger on the near bank where he felt supported and understood. Then he said, But as time went on, I found that I was getting farther and farther away from the near bank and closer to the far bank.

And it was becoming more comfortable in building that resilience and still being able to reflect back on the military side of the near bank and say, yep, you're good, I'm good, but it's time for me to go and push on. and move out and keep moving forward. Thank you. Historian Michael Petcher speaking at the Canadian War Museum in October 2025.

This is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayy. Historian Michael Petru led the In Their Own Voices Oral History Project at the Canadian War Museum, in which he interviewed more than 200 veterans and family about their experiences after their wars. Michael joins me from Ottawa. I'm hazarding a guess, Michael, that very few people in this country, today at least, have spoken to as many war veterans as you have. and you've produced, as you say, a huge body of work of oral history.

That was the subject of a War Museum exhibit and some of which was featured on our program as well. Is there any sense in which a part of you feels the need to defend oral history as a legitimate means with which to help document the past? I feel an obligation to defend oral history and I also feel an obligation to be clear-eyed about its shortcomings. I don't think that oral history is a magic window into the past because no source, whether it's archival or diaries or letters, no source is flawless. Everything is shaped by the biases of the people that produced it, perhaps the expectations of the person or the people that might receive or read the document. So I'm aware of the flaws of oral history, but I'm also aware of its enormous possibility. as other historians have been as well. I mean, the earliest historians relied on oral history extensively.

And then it fell out of favor a little bit in the 19th century, partly for snobbish class reasons. As historians wanted to emphasize their professionalism and their elite status, working with archival sources, with written sources, became a sort of filter which allowed a certain class, of historians to replicate themselves, to maintain their status. And then in the 20th century, as historians broaden their focus and started to consider marginalized people, the workers, ethnic minorities, oral history was a way to access their

stories and overturn this power dynamic by giving voice to people that weren't leaving the same sort of imprint on traditional written sources. So I recognize and I celebrate oral history as a way to get at and reveal and illuminate stories that are not otherwise apparent in typical written sources. It allows us to learn about, you know, the emotions, the experiences that people might be reluctant to put to paper. They may not be literate. Their opinions may not have been sought out.

They may not be in a job where they're expected to record. their emotions or their experiences and partly because these are our deeply held thoughts and feelings that everybody for very human reasons is reluctant to put to paper. So oral history allows us to get at these these hidden stories, these hidden experiences. So that's been a wonderful, I think, element of this project is, you know, we had, we studied, for example, the post-war veterans charter, the post-second World War Veterans Charter. But to really understand the impact that had on individual people, I think we needed to talk to them.

And then to understand how it felt, that required conversations as well. So I see that just the enormous potential and benefits of oral history for getting at these sort of hidden stories. But again, I don't want to put oral history on too high a pedestal. I think it's a piece of the puzzle and good historians assemble as many pieces as they can. You make your argument for the use of oral history very early on in your lecture. And I was particularly drawn to this idea that oral history helps, quote, democratize historians' research. Can you talk some more about that?

How does oral history help democratize a historian's research? Well, for military history, for example, we are far more likely to get at the experiences of privates, of lower-ranking people, for that matter of those who are affected by war, refugees, the displaced, through oral histories, then we are the stories of generals and politicians. If we are solely interested in power dynamics,

then we can probably do that through memoirs, through letters, through battlefield diaries. I mean, these things, you know, how far unit advances or is pushed back, the decisions a general makes, after action reports, those things come through in written sources. And they're good and they're beneficial and we should use those. But I use the word democratized to cast a wider net to take in and try to understand the experiences of a wider range of people, again, of the foot soldiers, of the grunts.

And then especially to understand the long-lasting ripples when everyone else is the tension shifts when the war is over, when the battle moves on, those experiences are less likely to be recorded. And if we look ahead, you know, 20, 40, 50 years after a battle or military deployment or any sort of event, you know, archives are, they're filtering machines. We discard things, things that are deemed more important end up in official records. And others are cast aside. So inevitably, there's, there's judgments. which winnow and narrow what gets preserved and what is left for historians to research years, decades, centuries later. We can't use oral history centuries after the fact, but many decades we can use oral history as a corrective to get at some of these stories and voices that were either neglected or cast aside or overlooked the first time around.

As you've done these interviews, is there a sense in which you felt, you know, a fear of missing out, the fact that so much has, been left in people's minds, and those people are now gone. And even oral history can't capture their experiences. Absolutely. I mean, I've interviewed nearly 50 veterans of the Second World War, and so many of them have passed in the time since I've interviewed them. So I was keenly aware that I was capturing a disappearing generation. That imposed a certain burden of importance on the work I was doing. But I also think is important, and this is one of the interesting phenomena about oral history and you know what we'll talk about how a memory is flawed and changeable and we reimagine the past but part of that I think that there are times when

people are ready to talk and there's times when they're not and so yes I was aware that a chance was slipping away to interview the the Second World War veterans for example but I also know that the perspective that they might have, 75, 80 years after the war was different than it would have been 5, 10, 20 years after the war. And that applies to younger veterans as well. On numerous occasions, veterans would say something along the lines of, I wouldn't have been able to have this conversation even five years ago. It took time for memories to settle and percolate and perhaps for veterans to confront and maybe not make peace, but at least come to terms with some of what had happened and get in a place where they could talk about it.

So yes, it's absolutely getting a Second World War veteran is a valuable thing and you feel that it's slipping away. But I also think there is value in talking to people many years after the event, because then we start to, we can get at a little bit of insight or hopefully a lot of insight into the impact that those events have had on them. And that's important too. So to talk a little bit about the shortcomings of oral history, you spend some time on the fallibility of memory and also the effect of what you called, quote, the burden of expectation on the interviewees, especially those who participated in the Second World War, which you described correctly as the most destructive conflict in history. What persuaded you that there is, in fact, a burden of

expectation among these interviews, interviewees? Well, I think we've seen it in a couple of studies, and in my lecture I mentioned Rebecca Clifford, who had studied the child survivors of the Holocaust, and many of these people had been interviewed at different times of their life. And she could document how certain stories and recollections that were prominent in the early years after the war disappeared in later narratives. So we can see how the memories change. I occasionally would interview veterans who had been interviewed in the past, and I could see how certain details would change as well. But part of this is the fallibility of memory, and part of it is, I think, interviewees responding to the expectations of the interviewer. It might be the interviewee responding to the expectations of society.

I mean, there are certain things that veterans are supposed to say, and it's easier to say those things rather than perhaps say messier or more complicated things and reveal messier and more complicated emotions. So I give the example of if a veteran is interviewed and he or she is told, this is a legacy for your grandchildren, for future generations. Well, of course, that's going to shape how they respond, how they choose to emphasize certain details over others because they are imagining themselves talking to their grandchild.

They are imagining what's going to be left and who's going to judge them for what they say afterwards. And if society conceives of a certain event of having this import and meaning this to the national history, to the development of an identity or whatever, of course, an interviewee is going to respond to that, especially if they're reminded of those expectations by everything from the tone of the interviewer,

to the perhaps a place where the interview takes place, to the time. I mean, all these things are going to shape how an interviewee responds. And we can try to mitigate that as historians. We try to be as non-judgmental as possible and answer open-ended questions, and we try not to predetermine the course of the interview. But it's tough.

I mean, we're all humans, and I think the interviewees respond to some of these even unspoken signs that are just part of the society around us. So how do you practically, in the middle of an interview, if it's your sense that these themes that you mentioned are being kind of resorted to, how do you, as a historian, try to alleviate that burden of expectation to get beyond those themes? I find gentle nudging, trying to be as non-judgmental as possible, asking open-ended questions, returning to perhaps difficult subjects and asking the questions in slightly different ways.

And then being quiet. I sometimes was bothered in my journalism career at points that it would feel... exploitative that I was taking someone else's pain for the purpose of telling the story. And as time went on, and I think speaking to colleagues, which I've wrestled with similar issues, I've kind of settled on the belief that it's a very innate and human desire to want to share your story, even if it's difficult, even if it's with a stranger, maybe especially if it's with a stranger. So many times I spoke with a veteran and I would hear later from family members that they had never heard that before. They had never, might have been an anecdote, but more

likely it was, it was an emotion, it was a frankness. It's extraordinary. So, yeah, so I think getting at that innate human desire to share stories, which, you know, is why we painted on cave walls thousands of years ago, um, I think that requires. requires compassion and patience, and sometimes it just requires sitting in the silence, and then waiting for the person you're talking to get enough courage or comfort to fill that silence with their voice. You mentioned one thing that really made me think, on the fallibility of memory, You said that you have encountered instances in which a veteran, quote,

tells with conviction a story that I know cannot possibly be true. What do you do in those instances during the interview? Well, I chose not to correct or challenge beyond asking more questions because I didn't see that that's my job. And also, I'm not convinced. In fact, I doubt that the interviewee believe they were telling something that wasn't. true. I think that the incident had become true in their mind over the past 70 years. And I'm not sure exactly how other than I know when I've seen that, you know, memory can change and it can be,

it can evolve. Maybe you evolve it in your mind to protect yourself. And this happens perhaps bit by bit by bit by bit over the years until it changes. So I think that there's something, of course, people we talk to lie. We all do. But I think, Sometimes people might be telling something that isn't true that they've convinced themselves is true. And I think that's human. And if we do our research, we recognize it. And I think that we accept that that speaks to the impact of the event. Perhaps that speaks to the emotional resonance for the individual that experienced it.

And as such, you'd say, it's still valuable, even if it isn't factually correct. I do. I mean, one of the, that was one of the, at the core of this project, you know, I interviewed more than 200 veterans and their family members, and it wasn't to find out what happened in the war. Now, of course, you know, I'm, I can't help myself. If I'm interviewing somebody that was there at D-Day, I'm going to ask them about that event, but I was never expecting to find out anything new about the course of a certain battle or campaign. What I wanted to understand was what impact that campaign or battle or timing uniform has had on the individual for the rest of their life. The ripples of war. The ripples of war. I wanted to understand the ripples of war.

And some of those ripples might include faulty memories. They might include getting details wrong. But they also include powerful emotional residents. I remember interviewing Bertram McMillan, a veteran in the Second World War, and he was very close to the end of his life. And he said, you know, like, for years, I was fine, and then all of a sudden the nightmares are coming back. So if I had interviewed him at 70, as opposed to in his late 90s, the ripples would be hitting him differently. I would be getting a different story. I would be getting different insight into what it means to be a veteran.

So I suppose that what we were trying to understand in the course of this oral history project was how we imagine and were shaped by the past in different ways as time unfolds. We imagine the past, we remember the past in different ways. Maybe we reshape the past, which gets at the idea of faulty memory or we're reconstructing things in our own memory. So we're reshaping the past, just as the past continues to shape us, and it shapes us in different ways as time goes on. How somebody might remember the war, the Second World War in 1950 is different than it is in 1980, in 2022. And that could be time of life, it could be insight, it could be memories settling and reemerging, but it changes. But all those things matter. That gets at the heart, I think, of what I was trying to do in this process.

project is to understand how those ripples continue to shape us years, decades, generations later, and they shape us in different ways at different points of time. You go back as far as Thucydides and talk about his warning about conflicting versions of stories in his own history that he wrote about the Peloponnesian War. I'm wondering what the modern-day equivalent is that you might include in your own work to help the rest of us navigate these contradictions or these questions about the factual, the authenticity of the information that we're gathering or hearing. I think what I would tell people that are listening to these oral histories and listening

and seeing some of the ways that we've presented them at the War Museum is that what you are experiencing or what you are absorbing is the ripples of war and military service, the way that war and military service shapes an individual in all kinds of small and large ways from how well they sleep and what they're comfortable leading to how they spend remembrance day what they remember what they try to forget we're trying to provide insight into the human impacts of war and military service the very emotional the very profound the very deeply felt intimate ways in which people are shaped by their military experiences and by wars. We're not trying to provide new insight into what happened at Ortona in Italy during the Second World War, or on D-Day, or during the Battle of Hong Kong, during peacekeeping missions elsewhere in Cyprus, in the former Yugoslavia, in Kandahar.

we're trying to understand how it feels for the people that were involved to reflect back on those experiences now. We're trying to understand how a certain war or event or deployment continues to shape them after it's supposedly finished. After everything you have heard, so, you know, hours and hours and hours of oral history, is there a lesson or several lessons that we can draw from these experiences that could maybe change how our society deals with veterans or maybe even how we deal with war itself? Perhaps. And I should say when it comes to the transition and how profound that transition can be,

I do think that for many veterans, it's an inflection point. It's a period in their life, which is meaningful, which matters, in which something changes inside them that they'll reflect back on later on. I think it's also important to say that the impacts of military service can also be very valuable and very beneficial for many veterans. Post-traumatic stress disorder, nightmares, regrets, sadness, grief, all those things are part of the veterans' experience. So is comradeship and kinship and pride.

I think it's important for us to present the veterans' experience in its entirety. I think the biggest lesson or the biggest thing that I hope, perhaps this project might nudge us towards as a society, is eroding slightly that divide, that wall, between veterans and civilians who haven't served. And that's one of the major differences, I think, between, for example, what the situation for veterans of Afghanistan and more modern conflicts and deployments today with the Second World War, many more people served in the Second World War.

The veterans were not foreign. Everybody knew one. Many people had been involved in the war effort. But time and time again interviewing veterans, I would hear things, such as, you know, civilians can't understand what we've done, what we did. I recall Mark Belfand, served as a doctor in Kandahar, you know, describing this lack of comprehension, this divide between what civilians are capable of imagining and what people who experience some of the things that he did in Afghanistan can't not imagine and cannot

remember. That matters. And he describes veterans getting together, you know, in a bar. And, you know, the first, you know, a couple beers are jokes and fun conversations and banter. And then the deeper impacts come out as the night goes on. But accessing that conversation or being part of that conversation or understanding that conversation, he says it's hard for people that haven't experienced it. And perhaps someone that hasn't experienced it can never fully understand. I think that's a fair argument to make. But I think if civilians who have not partaken in, you know, the military experience can understand in some ways the impacts of that experience has on veterans, I think that would benefit us as a society. I think that sometimes being a veteran,

especially in 2025, can be a little bit lonely because there's a feeling that you have experienced things that other people don't. That Afghanistan, for example, means things to you that it doesn't mean to people who didn't serve there. Understanding and lending some empathy is a laudable goal in and of itself. Is there a larger sense in which there's a higher end to this goal of understanding? that would benefit not just the veterans, but all of us? Well, I think the decision, for example, to send citizens into harm's way should already be a fraught one, which is taken with reluctance and deep thought. I think we as a society need to understand that the repercussions of that decision

extend beyond the deployment that's being discussed or the action that's being discussed. that people who serve abroad will be shaped by that decision for years to come. And again, not only in negative ways, most soldiers enlist because they want to serve. And serving means serving in a harm's way. But if at the very least it's a reminder that these decisions should not be taken lightly because they will matter for the people involved and their loved ones in very profound ways, perhaps for a very long time, I think that sort of sober reflection is a useful thing to be reminded of.

Michael, thank you so much once again for being with us and for this incredible body of work. Much appreciate it. Thank you for talking to me. I really enjoyed it. I was speaking with Michael Petru, historian at the Canadian War Museum. His lecture titled Ripples of War, oral history and the Veterans Experience, was delivered at the Canadian War. Museum Conference 2025. Many thanks to Michael Petru,

to Avra Gibbs Leamy, and the staff at the Canadian War Museum for their help in making this episode possible. Thanks also to technical producer Pascal Jobin and the team at CBC Ottawa for their help in recording the lecture. This episode was produced by me, Nala Ayad, with help from Sam McNulty.

Technical production, Pascal Jobin, Orande Williams, and Sam McNulty. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyed. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca slash podcasts.