Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes

Bill Krieger's Mission to Honor Our Heroes

• Bill Krieger

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Imagine hearing the stories of our nation's veterans directly from the source, offering not only a glimpse into history but also a profound understanding of resilience and healing. Join us with Bill Krieger, the visionary founder of Veterans Archives, as he takes us on a journey inspired by his grandfather's storytelling legacy and his own military experiences. Bill passionately reveals how capturing veterans' narratives fosters connection and healing, bridging the gap between generations and bringing to life the voices of those who have served from World War II to more recent conflicts. Discover how Veterans Archives is transforming these stories into accessible treasures through podcasts and YouTube, ensuring they are never lost to time.

Explore the innovative ways technology is used to preserve and share these invaluable histories, from podcasts to QR codes at cemeteries, making it easier for future generations to engage with the past. Bill shares his personal journey of embracing new challenges after retiring from Consumers Energy, finding growth in unexpected places like substitute teaching. This episode is a celebration of resilience and continuous learning, offering insights into how every veteran's story, regardless of their service time or combat experience, contributes to a greater understanding of our collective past and present. Don't miss this heartfelt episode that honors our heroes and highlights the enduring power of storytelling.

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Speaker 1:

Thanks for having me here today and thanks for being here. I know we tried to do this last week. It was a little bit too cold out and I think I'm going to write my own bio next time, because I had somebody write that for me and it could be like two sentences and we would be done. So when you hear it out loud it's a little strange. So I've got this what I think is a pretty good presentation all set. But as I was out here talking with folks, somebody said but as I was out here talking with folks, somebody said hey, when did you start? And kind of what was you know, how did you get this idea? And so that's not in here. So I want to talk a little bit about that before I really get into the presentation. So, as you said, my name is Bill Krieger and I am a founding member and the current president of Veterans Archives. And the question came up like how did you come up with this idea? And it's a long story, but I'll give you the Reader's Digest condensed version. I hope everyone's old enough to understand that reference. A lot of people don't Love me, some Reader's Digest.

Speaker 1:

So years ago my grandfather grew up in Missouri. He was born in Kennett Missouri and I know he's born in Kennett Missouri because he was born in the back of his house. If he had been born in the front of his house, he'd have been born in Arkansas, so it was a very small house. But he had a really interesting life. He was a bootlegger and he lived on a riverboat and him and my Uncle Ray got in a bar fight one time and Uncle Ray got his ear bit off. All kinds of great stories and to hear him tell it was just amazing, because he had this Southern drawl and he just had a way of telling a story to put you in it. And every year when we get together with family we talk about these stories that my grandfather always told. But it's not the same because it's not really his words and it's not really his voice, it's just us sort of repeating his story. And I thought, well, wouldn't it be great if we could capture the stories of people in their words and in their voices and then their families can have that in perpetuity? Right, we can just pass that along to family members.

Speaker 1:

And we really took a look at how we could do this and there was lots of different thoughts behind it, but really what we landed on was that I am a veteran, I love veterans, I love to take care of veterans and veterans have a story to tell. The other side of that is when I returned from Iraq in 2007,. I really struggled with my life after combat and I had a lot of issues and I found that telling my story helped me. It was very cathartic. I could tell my story to people and I got involved with NPR, I got involved with the USA Today Storytellers Project and I would get up and I would tell my story to all of these people and I would feel good about it. But what happened was the magic. And the magic was after. I tell my story to all of these people and I would feel good about it. But what happened was the magic, and the magic was after I told my story. Inevitably, people would come up to me and say gosh. I thought I was the only one that had ever gone through that before, and so in sharing that story, I helped myself, but I was helping other people and I thought wouldn't it be great if we could do that for veterans? Because when veterans share their story, they can unload some of those things they've been carrying around with them for their whole lives. But also they can help other veterans who hear those stories and realize that, for as bad as they feel, they're perfectly normal in what they're feeling. So that's really where we came up with this idea for Veterans Archives and how it kind of formed. We started as a nonprofit in 2022, but, as I was explaining, it's been about a five-year labor of love putting this all together and then we really took off when we got our certification as a nonprofit organization.

Speaker 1:

To date, we've captured 68 stories of veterans, not just here in Michigan, but veterans all over the country. We have ways to record their stories as well. We try to get as many local veterans as we can, but we will talk to veterans anywhere that they're at. I have one other gentleman that does recordings with me and he is also a retired Army veteran. So these are all veteran to veteran conversations. So with that kind of all the background there, I'll kind of get into what we do and what our goals are.

Speaker 1:

So today I'm just going to give you an introduction to Veterans Archives. I'm going to talk about our core values Anyone who's been in the military. I'm going to talk about our core values. Anyone who's been in the military, these core values probably look very familiar to you, and then we'll close out with any questions that you might have. So, really, what our mission is is to capture the stories of our nation's heroes, military veterans, and we want to preserve them so that anyone can hear them, and I'll kind of show you how that happens.

Speaker 1:

But the stories that we have are accessible to anyone. They're on the web, they're in podcast format, they're on YouTube. Anywhere that you want to go find these stories, you can find them, and that's really the idea is not to record these stories and just put them somewhere. We want to record these stories so that people can listen to them and understand them, because it really is a way to honor those veterans who have served their country. Every veteran's story matters, and I say that because there are a lot of veterans out there who maybe served for two years and maybe they didn't go into combat. They're still veterans. They still have a story to tell.

Speaker 1:

We don't sit and just swap war stories at Veterans Archives. We actually capture the whole veteran. So what did you do before you joined the military? What did you do in the military and, to me most importantly, what did you do when you left the military? And there are some amazing stories about people who started businesses, who solved problems, who became very successful as a result of some of the things that they had learned in the military. So we try to capture all of that and then at the end of this we do some editing and then we provide that veteran with their story and I'll show you afterwards.

Speaker 1:

We give them a nice handcrafted box with their story in it on a memory stick. They get one of our challenge coins. Our display boxes are all handcrafted box with their story in it on a memory stick. They get one of our challenge coins. Our display boxes are all handcrafted by a veteran right here in Michigan. So we do a lot of veteran-to-veteran business as much as we possibly can. Our challenge coins are created by a veteran as well, who created a company to make those, and so really our core values really relate to the military. Core values honor and respect, accessibility, inclusivity, authenticity and integrity, education and inspiration, and we'll talk a little bit more about what all that means.

Speaker 1:

But as we sit down with veterans, we want to make them comfortable, we want them to understand that we respect their story. And a really important point to make when we talk about authenticity and integrity we never edit a veteran's story for content. If he has to go use the restroom or the phone rings or a kid comes in, we'll edit that. We don't ever edit a veteran's story to shape it into anything other than what it was meant to be, and that's their stories. And then also, we want this to be a resource for others. You know our stories can help future generations not make the same mistakes that we made, so we want to make sure that this is out there.

Speaker 1:

Eventually, what we would like to see is a searchable database that schools and educators and anyone who's interested in our military history can go in and find these stories. They could search by unit or by person or by year or by any sort of searchable option and find these stories and listen to them. Every picture you see here is a veteran whose story we've captured. So I love these pictures. We have pictures of almost every veteran that we've talked to. So again, in showing respect to the veteran and their stories, we want them to understand and we want others to understand that each veteran's journey is different from any other veteran, although we have this shared history with other veterans. We all have our own journey and reasons why we did this.

Speaker 1:

When we talk about accessibility and inclusivity, again, we make these stories available to everyone, and, again, every veteran story is important to us. Recently, I've talked to a lot of veterans who served in that time between Korea and Vietnam, when we still had a draft but we weren't sending anyone anywhere, and so those stories are very interesting to me, because there's always something that surprises me about that veteran that I talk to. And then again, this is an opportunity for them to share their stories with future generations. And we talk about the honest preservation of their narratives. Again, we don't ever change anything as part of their stories and we want to make sure that people understand that each individual story is their own to share.

Speaker 1:

This is actually a picture of myself with a gentleman by the name of Brandon Mickus who served with me in Iraq, and I think he was 18 or 19, and he had just gotten out of boot camp when we left, so he went to basic training for the National Guard, came home and within weeks we were deployed to Iraq, and the funny thing is like I knew him and we served together. I was his commanding officer, but that was part of his story. That I didn't know until we recorded his story. Officer, but that was part of his story. That I didn't know until we recorded his story was that he went right from basic training right into combat operations and did an amazing job. But he shares that, along with a lot of history, with his family and how he got to where he's at. This gentleman served in the United States Navy and, again, he just had a plethora of knowledge about our history and about things that had happened when he was in the military and he brought out all this. This is one of my favorite pictures of him, but he brought out all of his memorabilia and shared that with us, and as he was bringing these things out, more and more things came to mind for him and he just I think we were there for about two and a half hours getting his story together.

Speaker 1:

So we talk about community and gratitude. One of the things we're doing is building that veteran community. A lot of times, veterans will leave the military and go home, wherever that is, and they will lose contact with a lot of the people that they knew in the military, and this may be a way to reconnect folks with their community. This actually happened to me. I had a gentleman out of Florida reach out and say, hey, I want to. You know, I want to participate in Veterans Archives. And I said, great, we'll do this through Zoom. And so we did it through Zoom and his name was Mike Jalusius and you know, I felt like the name seemed familiar to me.

Speaker 1:

But we started talking and we talked about him growing up and his family and all of the things that he had done as a kid and his service in the military. He was actually in the Pentagon on 9-11 when the airplane hit the Pentagon. He was the press secretary for the Secretary of Defense. He did all kinds of really cool things. And then he started talking about his service in Iraq and how he was the military police brigade commander in northern Iraq in 2006 and 2007. And I thought, well gosh, that's when I was there and I looked behind me on my wall and I have all these awards with his signature on them. So he had been my brigade commander. And through our conversation there was a lot of people that we knew together, like my battalion commander and other folks, and so we had this whole hour-long side conversation about the friendships that we had made and he knew things about people I knew and I knew things about people people he knew and we were able to kind of bring that community back together. And it was completely by accident and if you listen to that recording I apologize in advance. There's about an hour in there where it's just him and I swapping old stories.

Speaker 1:

But that's kind of the beauty of what we do and so as a 501 nonprofit I'm preaching to the choir. We rely on grants and donations from folks. Consumers Energy has been very, very gracious and has given us grants every year to continue our work. This year we are partnering with the Michigan Veterans Homes in Chesterfield and in Grand Rapids to capture the stories of their veterans. So we will be on track to capture about 100 stories this year. Each one of these stories the cost to Veterans Archives is $250. That's the recording, the editing, the processing, the packaging, mailing. All of that stuff is covered in there and we never, ever, ever charge a veteran a single penny to record their story. That's not even talked about during that process. And my commitment to our two other board members because there's three of us, because we're a huge organization is that even if there's no money in the bank, we will find a way to fund it. We will never turn away a veteran just because we don't have the money to do it. We will find a way to help them out. So that is what we do.

Speaker 1:

I think that I'm standing in a group of people who understand the importance of our history. But if you really think about it, you can read history in a book. I can read about George Washington, I can read about any historical figure and I can read about what other people have said about that person. But imagine if you could go to a website and hear and see George Washington talk about the things that he did. I think that's much more powerful than being able to just read and see pictures of something. That's all very important because that's how our history has been captured in the past. But to be able to hear and see it from the people that actually did it, I think is very powerful.

Speaker 1:

And the things that you hear from people as they're going through this process. They will share stories and tell you things that they haven't even told their own families yet, and you can just see that weight lifted off from them when they share that story and then when they share that with their families. I've had many families call and email me and say you know, my dad never told me that, but now we've had this whole conversation about his time in Vietnam or this whole conversation about what he did during World War II. That we never had before and now they have that. And you know, our World War II veterans are disappearing at a pretty rapid pace right now, along with Korean War veterans, and our Vietnam veterans aren't getting any younger, and neither are our Iraqi Freedom and Middle Eastern veterans as well. And I know that someday someone will say we've got to get those stories of the Operation Iraqi Freedom veterans because they're disappearing at a rapid rate as well. I think that's another reason why it's so important to capture these historical stories is because when we lose those folks, we can't ever get that back.

Speaker 1:

The other thing that we're working on I don't know if you've seen this, but at the Veterans Cemeteries you can actually scan a QR code on some of the grave sites and you can see like a picture or maybe like a document about that person's history. So we're working to get these to be a part of that. So imagine if you go to Uncle Bob's grave site and you never met Uncle Bob, but you know that he served and you scan that thing and now you can see and hear Uncle Bob tell his not just his war stories, but you can hear Uncle Bob but you know that he served and you scan that thing and now you can see and hear Uncle Bob tell his not just his war stories, but you can hear Uncle Bob talk about growing up as a kid. You can hear him talk about why he joined the military and what he did after the military and all of those things. So that's, I think our shared history is so very important for our future. I think it bridges gaps between the different generations, because it's very easy to sit around and talk about the generation before us or the generation after us and how they're screwing everything up, but the truth is, when you talk to people at that basic level, what I find is that we all have some things, some common ground, some shared experiences that can bring us together and understand from each other, rather than dividing us and having us throw sticks at each other because we're from different generations. So that's what we do. That's the importance of capturing these historical moments, not just for families and not just for the veterans but for the whole community, to bring us together to understand what these folks did, what they went through and what they contributed to society once they left.

Speaker 1:

I will leave with I interviewed a gentleman at Village Manor out in Howell. They have a lot of veterans that live there. But I went to talk to this gentleman and he's not very tall, he's not very loud and we started talking and this guy spent a very short period of time in the military but when he got out he created a machine that actually wrapped pins for bowling. Right, you know how they have that plastic coating on the outside of a bowling pin. He invented the machine that picks that up, puts it in and wraps that coating on it. He invented the machine that picks that up, puts it in and wraps that coating on it. He saw a need for American cars in Europe. He created a company that took American cars and made them right-hand drive for Europe and then shipped them to Europe because GM didn't want to do it. So he did.

Speaker 1:

And you wouldn't know from just meeting this guy on the street he's the nicest guy you'll ever meet, but he was a genius and I think he learned a lot from his military experience. And I learned a lot from him about how you can do 100 things and fail, but it's that one thing where you don't fail that makes you grow and makes you who you are. I think Charles Barkley or some famous basketball player said you miss 100% of the shots you never take. But this guy was a living example of that. He would find a need and he would fix it. So it's been a very interesting ride.

Speaker 1:

I retired from Consumers Energy two years ago, so I've been doing this as full-time as I can. I do substitute teaching on the side just to get me out of the house, so my wife doesn't kill me. Substitute teaching on the side just to get me out of the house, so my wife doesn't kill me. But I've learned a lot from folks my age, from folks a lot older than me and from folks a lot younger than me. All right, there's no other questions. I'll get some handouts and stuff for you. All right, thank you.

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