Founder, host of Minnesota Military Radio urges all to connect with vets in their lives
MINNEAPOLIS — Veterans Day is a day to remember and recognize the people in our community who have served. There are projects both locally and nationally aimed to share the important firsthand accounts of the veterans in our lives.
Veteran Tom Lyons has his own war stories to tell.
"It's a defining moment in your life, I can tell you. When I was a very young man and they sent me over to Vietnam, I didn't realize how impactful that was going to be on my life. But I got over there, war zone, survived a year and came home, and it's changed everything in my life," he said. "My generation when we served in Vietnam were exposed to Agent Orange, a herbicide, and it's affected everybody that was on the ground over there. It's affected me. I've got some issues from it, Type 2 diabetes. Everybody who's been there has some issues, and a lot of folks have died from that."
For more than a decade now he's been sharing the stories of other veterans as the founder and host of Minnesota Military Radio.
"We had the opportunity to talk to three Tuskegee airmen," he said. "We've had on several folks who were POWs in Vietnam."
He says it's also given him the opportunity to tell people where they can get help.
"It's almost a calling for me to tell those stories, make sure people are aware of what our veterans have done when they served our country," he said. "I'm a flag waver. This is a great country. It's still the best country on the face of the earth, and our veterans have served and protected that for a couple hundred years. And without them, where would we be?"
Recognizing and remembering that service is also the aim of the Veteran's History Project at the Library of Congress. The digital archive of veteran stories in their own words has been around for nearly 20 years and holds nearly 120,000 individual collections, each one a story of service to this country. Wou can view and interact with thousands of hours of audio and video of veterans from WWI through recent conflicts, sharing in their own voice their own experiences.
"I would just urge people to think about who is a veteran in their life and connect with them this season," Lyons said. "They would tell you we didn't do anything extraordinary, we just did our jobs."
You can upload your own veteran story or that of a friend, family or community member. It's something you can record on a cell phone.