Project collects Missouri veterans' stories

SPRINGFIELD, Mo. -- The stories of the heroes are finally being captured, one by one.

Manuel Freeman, a U.S. Army veteran of World War II, drove a Sherman tank into Normandy. As Germans hid behind French farm hedgerows to fire on American troops, his tank unit mowed down the barriers and took out the menace.

Eldon Warren of Polk served in Europe in World War II and operated the first radar as an air traffic controller on an emergency airfield in France.

Their stories and others from veterans across the Ozarks will soon be added to an online library accessible to everyone.

They are among the veterans slated for interviews in Springfield as part of the Missouri Veteran Stories project. The project began in 2005 as a way to honor Missouri's military veterans and to create an oral and video history.

Public collection

More than 1,000 veterans' stories are already online at the project website, www.missouriveteranstories.org. Videos are searchable by name, keyword, service branch, date of birth, years of service or city or county of residence.

Randy and Danielle Murray with Patriot Productions, a St. Louis firm, and interviewer Steve Frazier are making appointments with veterans to sit for 30-minute, one-on-one interviews about their role in the service. Interviews will be edited to five or eight minutes for the online project.

Missouri has 500,000 living military veterans, Murray said, many in the Ozarks.

He hopes World War II and Korean War veterans will make special effort to tell their stories. As those veterans age, he worries their families and the country will lose their stories.

Ozarks veterans whose stories are online now include Betty and Birl Stewart, formerly of Branson, Bob Dyer of Springfield and Taylor Hopkins of Monett.

"We are in a race against time," Murray said. "Our pure goal is to do all we can to not leave their stories behind."

Finding veterans

He's getting a lot of help from family members.

"Their kids and grandkids really get involved in ... stressing the importance of it," Murray added. "They listen to their kids and grandkids."

Groups like the Veterans of Foreign Wars and American Legion have also helped him find veteran stories.

Freeman didn't require much coaxing to talk about his service as a technical sergeant in the U.S. Army. The Springfield retiree was part of the 70th Tank Battalion, attached to the 4th Infantry Division in World War II.

"Wherever they needed us, that's where they sent us," whether it was mowing down hedgerows to chase off German shooters, or blocking a road to protect the village of Sainte-Marie-du-Mont from German invaders.

"My children kept asking me to write it, so I finally sat down and made an outline," Freeman said.

Today, he has a 33-page binder about his role in world history.

"I'm afraid our society is forgetting what freedom has cost us through the ages, and our younger generation doesn't realize what it has cost us," Freeman said. "And I'm not just talking about World War II. I'm talking World War I, the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. All of these have something to do with the freedom we enjoy."

Some Missouri veteran stories are brief recollections of a comrade's heroic act, a humorous moment or an intense battle.

They don't have to be profound, Murray said. Some talk about the food, their favorite people. "Simple things are the most interesting to people."

Yet many vets have dramatic tales, too. Murray recently interviewed and posted the online interview of St. Charles resident Frank Huelskoetter, who talks about surviving four POW camps in Germany during World War II.

Murray said he regrets not capturing his own father's World War II stories, though he grew up hearing them.

"That was lost, and our sons never got the chance to meet him," Murray said. "That's the real loss to me. They didn't get to hear him talk about it in that humble way. They're so low-key about it. ... It's reflective of that generation. For the most part that's what they did: Came back from the war, put their noses to the grindstone and built this country."