The last time the U.S. ended a controversial, lengthy war, a generation of veterans was treated to what President Obama has called “a national disgrace.”

While service members focused on the daily tasks in front of them in Iraq, others at home were trying to make sure that what happened to the veterans of the Vietnam War era didn’t happen to the men and women who would be returning from Iraq – being stereotyped, demonized and abandoned to deal with mental- and physical-health issues.

Listening to the survivors

The post-9/11 conflicts presented new challenges in how Americans see and interact with the military, said Emmy Hildebrand, Veterans History Project director for Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar’s office.

“The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are different than any other conflict we’ve been in, because we can watch them in real time,” Hildebrand said.

The Veterans History Project collects multimedia interviews of veterans sharing their stories and submits them to the Library of Congress for archival.

The project has seen huge participation from aging veterans but much less from younger ones who have served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

More than 10,000 veterans’ histories have been collected in Indiana in the past 10 years, but only about 1 percent of those interviews were with Iraq veterans. Hildebrand isn’t sure why.

Many aging veterans of the World War II and Korea generations have felt an urgency to tell their stories while they can. Hildebrand imagines that younger veterans returning to busy lives either don’t have time or don’t feel the pressure to tell their stories while they’re young.

“It’s not really a priority,” she said.

And there’s that real-time factor. Hildebrand said some veterans of the most recent conflicts may think the public already knows what they did because they’ve seen it or read about it for the past decade.

But occasionally, that can motivate, not dissuade, younger service members. They want to set the record straight, or paint a broader picture, Hildebrand said.

Memorializing the fallen

While Hildebrand has been focused on the veterans who survived, David L. Davis has been preoccupied with those who didn’t.

Next to a small cemetery in Westfield, in central Indiana, on ground where a Quaker church that was part of the Underground Railroad once stood, rows of handmade white crosses honor the fallen of the post-9/11 era.

Davis is chairman of Fallen Hoosiers, an organization begun by his stepfather, Donald E. Peed, a Vietnam War-era veteran who died in 2005.

Already, the Indiana War Memorial Museum in Indianapolis enshrines Hoosiers who participated in World War I and all Hoosiers killed or missing in action from World War II, Korea and Vietnam.

Peed felt moved to do something to honor those who were falling in Afghanistan and Iraq, so he began placing crosses in his yard. When he died in 2005, there were 66 crosses, Davis said.

Davis decided to make the memorial permanent in 2008, but he said he didn’t receive support from the state in his effort to make it an official memorial. State officials told him Indiana would wait until both conflicts, Iraq and Afghanistan, were over before creating its official memorial.

He has his own theories on the reason for the lack of support. The crosses are unapologetically Christian, and Davis is unapologetically opinionated. His memorial also includes non-combat losses and Hoosiers who died in the Pentagon attack on 9/11.

Davis found the state’s response unacceptable and secured the Westfield land on his own, dedicating the memorial to the families of the fallen in 2009.

He holds out hope that his memorial – any memorial – will be embraced and that more Vietnam War-era veterans will bridge the gap the way his stepfather did.

The end of the Iraq War, to Davis, only adds to his drive.

“It’s time to start honoring our fallen, because that part of the war is over,” he said. “If we wait any longer to honor these men and women, they will be forgotten.”

aturner@jg.net