How to Participate

As a potential participant in the Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, you are probably curious about what is involved with being interviewed. The following is a brief synopsis of the various activities and procedures involved in the interview process. If you have any additional questions or concerns after reading this, please feel free to contact us at 806-742-9010 or to send us an email message.

Some oral historians shy away from submitting lists of questions to the people they want to interview. We chose this approach because we want veterans and other people who participate in our project to know up front the types of questions we want to ask. We leave it up to you how much or how little detail you provide, and participation in our project is not contingent upon completion of the questionnaires. Also, we only use the questionnaires as a guide during the actual interview and allow for spontaneity and more detailed and clarifying questioning during the interview. We do ask some rather personal questions on the questionnaires, including personal contact information. We promise to keep this information in the strictest confidence, as described in our privacy policy.

Once we receive your questionnaires, we will review them, conduct additional research if necessary, and contact you about an interview date and time. Depending on your location, we can conduct interviews in person, over the phone, or over the Internet using Instant Messenger. We can meet in person if you are near Lubbock, Texas, are planning to visit Lubbock sometime in the not too distant future, or are in a location where we might be attending a reunion or other function. Otherwise, for people who live in the United States, we can conduct a telephone interview. And for people outside the U.S., we can utilize the Internet.

The purpose for conducting the interview is to preserve an historical record of your experiences with regard to the wars in Southeast Asia. All interviews are recorded on tape and/or minidisk and sometimes on video. Recordings are transcribed and both recordings and transcripts will be made available to students, scholars, and the general public.  Dissemination will eventually include the Internet. Given the large number of people who are willing to allow their interviews to be recorded and made available, we will prioritize our interviews with individuals who will agree to this policy. People who do not agree with this policy can still participate in our project but may not be interviewed in as timely a manner.

After the interview, we will ask that you sign an Interview Agreement. The act of creating an Oral History Interview automatically creates complimentary copyright. As a result, both the interviewer and the interviewee/narrator must sign an agreement releasing their copyright control of the interview to the Vietnam Archive at Texas Tech University. If an agreement is not signed, the Vietnam Archive cannot make the interview recordings or transcripts available to students, scholars, and the general public. The Interview Agreement is not intended to restrict your rights to your own story and is not designed to prevent you from selling books, articles, or the movie rights to your story if you so desire.

After conducting the interview, we will create a transcript of the interview, which will be sent to you to review. The purpose for your review of the transcript is to allow you the opportunity to correct names of people and places, and to correct dates and other factual information as necessary. Since the purpose of the transcript is to convey as closely as possible the tone, nature, and content of the oral interview, we shy away from editing transcripts for grammar, syntax, or other esthetic reasons.

Questionnaires

Anyone from any country is welcome to participate in the Vietnam Archive Oral History Project. We are committed to preserving the history of the Wars in Southeast Asia from the perspective of all participants, regardless of country of service. Currently, the Archive has interviewed men and women from the US, South Vietnam (RVN and NLF), North Vietnam (PAVN), Australia, and New Zealand. We hope to include participants from all of the participant countries who sent men and women to Southeast Asia.

If you would like to participate in the Vietnam Archive Oral History Project, please select the status below that most reflects your service, complete the questionnaires, and send them to the Vietnam Archive. Wherever possible, we have designed the following questionnaires as both online forms and downloadable documents. If you download the files, please feel free to send them as email attachments to vaoralhistory@ttu.edu, or by regular mail to:

Oral History Project
The Vietnam Archive
Special Collections Library Room 108
Texas Tech University
Lubbock, TX 79409