This photo of V Corps Future Operations section includes Lt. Col. Mike Hurst at far right, back row, who submitted it to “The Memory Project.” The staff included U.S. Army and Marine Corps officers, as well as officers from Spain and Australia. (Photo courtesy of Mike Hurst)
BAUMHOLDER, Germany — In the memories business, fresh is better.
If time heals all wounds, then time also mellows the most vivid war highlights as new memories crowd soldiers’ minds.
With the “The Memory Project,” the Heidelberg-based V Corps headquarters is reaching out to current and former soldiers as well as civilian employees, asking for anything from anecdotes to memoirs to photos, said Bill Roche, project coordinator. Roche also hopes to collect grassroots tips about lessons learned in Iraq for use in future rotations.
“In a sense, we’re trying to capture memories before they’re gone,” said Roche, who conceived the idea as V Corps’ chief of command information. “A lot of these guys are going to go … to [change stations] or leave the Army, and with them go memories and photos. It’s amazingly easy to let that stuff get away from you.”
So far the response has been “slow” to the year-old project, he said.
“We’ve had a lot more promises” than submissions, including the promise of 45,000 photos from one Army photographer alone. “We haven’t seen them yet.”
It may be difficult for people to understand that what they did in Iraq already is history worth documenting, and that they may be sitting on significant artifacts, Roche said.
Units under the corps umbrella include about 35,000 soldiers and a large number of civilians — most of whom were deployed to Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom from January 2003 through April 2004. Considering the numbers, Roche said he’s certain that there is a huge amount of history out there worth collecting.
Some of the Memory Project submissions may be used in V Corps public affairs publications or presentations, he said. Other material may be used for future exhibits. The majority will be handed over the V Corps historian to be archived.
“In 20 years, if V Corps still exists, we’ll have the documents archived. If not, they’ll go to the national archives or to the U.S. Army Center of Military History,” Roche said.
Wherever submissions end up, they go unexpunged. Corps officials will not censor or edit the submissions, preferring to preserve the individual experience, Roche said.
“We will not ask anyone to self-censor, and we won’t censor or edit,” he said. “We even want to keep misspellings” to preserve the authenticity.
That said, he added that some submissions already have proven dicey. Corps officials will not publish — though they will still archive — materials that reveal sensitive or classified operational details. All documents will be subject to legal review before being published, used on the “Memories” Web site or released publicly, Roche said.
Mike Hurst, an employee for the Hohenfels, Germany-based, Northrop Grumman Information Technology, was in Iraq from January 2003 through February 2004 as an Army Reserve lieutenant colonel with the 7th Joint Task Force Augmentation Team.
His submission captures a unique moment for a unique group wearing different uniforms, assembled from around the world in front of Saddam’s “Water Palace” near Baghdad International Airport, Hurst said. The photo, taken in October 2003, shows the future operations staff at Camp Victory, V Corps headquarters, before the joint task force staff from the United States, Spain and Australia returned home, Hurst said.
“My boss, Col. [Sean] MacFarland, the V Corps operations officer, wanted a picture of them before they all started disappearing,” he said. “Why did I decide to participate? For posterity,” he said.
Someday, Hurst said, he might be at the new Army museum, “and who knows … maybe I’ll look up and see that photo.”
