We love our parents. Our grandparents. We grow up believing (usually) that they are all knowing, tell us the truth, and were these amazing, heroic, accomplished, keep adding the words you use to describe your family, individuals. Sometimes it is difficult, if not impossible to change the perspective we have of family. To change the identity we assigned them. To see they are HUMAN and capable of embellishing stories or making them up to appear more “worthy”, feel less “shame”, or whatever energy they feel they lack. The same can be said of those listening to the stories of a veteran. We want to believe them and normally we take their word as the truth.
Often, we will fight to the death to preserve the idea we have of our veteran or any veteran, because in our minds, and what society would tell us, Why would they lie? Why would a World War II veteran lie about his service? This was the “Greatest Generation” after all.
That’s a lot to live up to, especially if you were in a support role behind the lines and were afraid to be seen as a coward because you weren’t on the front lines.
80th Anniversary of D-Day Stories Coming Out
I was contacted recently by a woman working on a D-Day Documentary for the BBC and History Channel. She wanted help in verifying a veteran’s service, particularly as it applied to his D-Day story. I connected her with my researcher and he has been verifying that the veteran’s story. This veteran gave as an interview for the WWII Museum in New Orleans which is available online. The records show his service isn’t at all what he described in his oral histroy. In fact, based on the records, he was never even in Europe during the war.
From the emails going around, it appears to me that this woman and her producer may be trying hard to prove this veteran was there rather than accept what the military records show.
You might call this cognitive dissonance. This is defined as: The psychological tension that occurs when one holds mutually exclusive beliefs or attitudes and that often motivates people to modify their thoughts or behaviors in order to reduce the tension.
We have all experienced this in our life as our strongly held beliefs are challenged by new information. Sometimes we aren’t sure what to do with the new information and we end up in denial that anything but what we believe, have been told, or learned could be true.
When we look at the lives and stories of our veteran, it may also make us question, if they embellished or lied about that, what else did they tell me that wasn’t quite true? Most of us don’t want to explore this possibility as it would likely dredge up deep seated memories, fears, traumas, wounds, shame, guilt, anger, or grief.
Why Might the Story Be Different From The Military Records?
One of the more difficult parts of the work I do with military research clients when we research a veteran, is telling them the story they grew up hearing is not accurate based on the records. People do not like to hear that their father, uncle, grandfather, brother, or whomever, embellished or lied about pieces of their service history. I understand this and only provide the information. It’s not up to me to decide how they process the data.
When I work with a client or teach a program and someone tells me a story, I take it all with a grain of salt. I know there are events which are never documented. However, when I look at a set of records and reconstruct the history in a timelime, examine the Separation and Discharge paper and see certain things are not listed, like a campaign the veteran claimed to be a part of, or a wound that doesn’t exist, I start to question. I invite the client to question and also seek additional information they may have at home to back up the story they tell me before we start research.
It’s best to not judge the veteran’s story. We weren’t there so we don’t know how it all actually played out. We don’t know why a veteran might have said this or that because we don’t know their experience or how they processed any of the propaganda, familial or societal expectations, or their emotions.
I step back, look at the story and records and then use words like “It’s possible this happened but the records don’t show this.” Sometimes it’s more of a blunt narrative of “The veteran said this but the records give no evidence this happened.” The client or individual can then decide how to process this information. Accept, deny, or be somewhere in between.
Recently I wrote an article, Reconstruction WWII Veteran History, about the military service file on my WWII Research & Writing Center website. The information in this article also applies to the Separation and Discharge paper for WWII. It’s a puzzle piece but not a veteran’s entire story. This document does contain vital information about service that may contradict a veteran’s story.
Can We Change Our Mind? Can We Accept Our Veteran Even If They Embellished or Lied?
My uncle Rich told me about my grandpa Joseph’s World War II Naval Armed Guard history with some elaborate stories. Grandpa died in 1964 in a Chicago Veteran’s Hospital where he had lived since 1946, when my dad was 16, so I never knew him. All I knew was his talked to little green men and was “crazy” thanks to the war.
As a baby genealogist in 1996, I took this as “truth” and put it into my database like a good researcher and moved on. It wasn’t until I actually received his military service file (OMPF) and some medical records that I understood what really happened to my grandpa. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia at the end of the war before being Honorably Discharged.
When I discovered this truth a few years after my uncle died, it took me a long time to make peace with these stories, how my uncle could lie to me instead of telling me the truth, and how it was a big family secret. It’s also taken me years to make peace with my grandpa’s story. I’ve written a little about this on Substack and am writing a book about this as well.
You might find it surprising I also had to change my idea of who I thought my grandma was, based on all this knowledge. As a child and teen, I assigned a certain identity to her. As an adult that changed slighty. Once I had children and then years later began to heal our family trauma that I carried based on the war experience she and grandpa shared, I again changed my mind about who she was. You know what… the world didn’t end because I learned new information and was open to changing my perspective or mind.
This is how we heal ourselves and our ancestral lineage.
What do you think about this? Have your family or military stories always aligned with your research? What did you do to make peace with the discrepancies? How did you heal and move forward?
Explore your World War I or World War II Veteran’s Story
If you’d like to learn your veteran’s history, I take research and book clients. Email me at jennifer@ancestralsouls.com and let’s set up a time to chat. I offer free consults to discuss the research strategy, fees, time, and possibilities.
I also offer the Honoring Our Heroes program consisting of six webinars with workbooks to help you research any veteran from WWI-Vietnam, even if the records burned.
You can also pick up a copy of my book Research a Veteran which will guide you through the initial information gathering.