VA Presents: My Life, My Story

Not long after the "My Life, My Story" project launched in 2013, it was decided that Veterans' stories should be written in the first-person. The reason is that we wanted a veteran's voice to shine through. After all, beyond knowing the facts of a person's life, knowing how they narrate their own story can be just as enlightening. Here's an example: Instead of saying "Mr. Smith has always valued h...

A central goal of the "My Life, My Story" project is to help VA medical staff get to know their patients better. Doctors and nurses are always pressed for time, but by reading these thousand-word life histories in the medical record, our hope is that VA staff can learn a lot about a patient's life in just a matter of minutes. But aside from that goal, we think this project offers some major perks...

Almost 94,000 Americans were held as prisoners-of-war in Europe during World War II. In this episode of the "My Life, My Story" podcast, you'll hear the story of one of them, Harry, who managed to escape. Harry's run from the Reich was reason enough to pick his story to feature in our first season of this podcast. But we also chose it for another reason. During his interview, Harry did something t...

If you were asked to tell your life story, what would you talk about the most? Your family? Your career? Love? Loss? That one day in your 20s that "changed everything"? When people first hear about the "My Life, My Story" project, many assume that the stories we hear from veterans focus solely on their time in the military, or on combat and heroism in the battlefield. Not quite. We certainly hear...

A hospital room might not seem like an ideal spot for someone to tell their life story. There are all those beeping machines. Nurses are popping in and out on their rounds. And the patients themselves have to wear those silly robes and no-slip socks; often they are feeling sick or tired . . . or both. And yet, despite the interruptions and other little annoyances, most of the 5,000-plus interviews...

Imagine. You're a patient in the hospital, maybe recovering from a knee surgery or pneumonia. You're lying in bed, watching something boring on TV, when you hear a knock at the door. "Come in," you say, and a stranger walks into your room. They're carrying a notepad and a pen, and they ask if you'd like to be interviewed about your life. Believe it or not this happens every day at VA hospitals aro...