For more information bout Witness to War Foundation go to www.witnesstowar.org
Clayton Byrd, 89, of Atlanta narrowly survived heavy fighting in the Battle of the Bulge and Germany at the end of World War II but came close to dying the next time he was in Germany — during the Korean conflict, while helping build a baseball field with two Army bulldozers.
The highly-decorated second lieutenant had been called up for the Korean War, but sent back to Germany. One day he was assigned to cut through a hill to put in a baseball diamond, “and there was a mine, we hit it, and three people were killed, including the man right next to me,” he says. “I was wounded and spent a year in the hospital.”
Some of Byrd’s other hair-raising recollections are posted on Atlanta businessman Tom Beaty’s remarkable Witness to War Foundation website, on which he has collected 1,300 interviews and posted 2,500 brief clips of experiences of combat veterans since 2002.
Beaty doesn’t do it for the money, his passion is to preserve history. He plans to turn over most of the clips to the Library of Congress in Washington. He tapes the interviews at his own expense, about $125,000 so far. He does many of the interviews of veterans himself, all over the country. And each veteran interviewed or a family member gets a copy of the recording.
Beaty, 46, says he feels that every time a veteran dies, a library does, too. He’s determined to document recollections of as many as possible, even up to latest conflicts. He’s concentrated on World War II veterans because one dies about every 90 seconds and there will only 100,000 left by 2024.
He and a few employees of the nonprofit foundation cut long interviews into clips that last a few minutes.
Emily Carley has conducted many as has Jon Keen, a Georgia Tech and Emory MBA grad who served two tours in Afghanistan.
“I think talking about these things helps veterans,” Keen says. “You see emotion in their faces. And they want what they felt and saw preserved. We are not psychologists, but we think their sharing experiences helps in a number of ways. What we do is high quality. It gives them a chance to get things off their shoulders.”
Dr. Barbara Rothbaum of Emory University and one of the world’s top scholars on post-traumatic stress disorder says combat vets can benefit by sharing their experiences.
“I do think it is therapeutic to say it out loud to another person,” she says. “Even if it’s painful. It’s good to revisit the experiences.”
Beaty says about half of the members of the Atlanta World War II Roundtable have been interviewed, and that he’ll send crews anywhere. He can be reached via the nonprofit’s website, witnesstowar.org.
“It’s a noble mission,” he says. “We have probably spent well over $500,000 over the last 12 years in total. There’s a lot of value for the guys.”
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