Web site captures war memories

Web site captures war memories

http://www.limaohio.com/articles/war_30673___article.html/site_web.html

Travis Buettner lost his grandfather, Ernest Wolke, in April. But on a Web site, Wolke's stories from World War II and the Korean War live on forever.

And it's all because he took the time to ask his grandfather about his military service. Now the Delphos native helps others share their war stories on a Web site, MyWarHistory.com, before they're lost forever.

"A few years ago, my grandfather had a heart attack and a few other things happened to him. He eventually got a lot better," said Buettner, a 30-year-old computer programmer living near Columbus. "I thought, ‘Now is the time for me to save his story for future generations.' Especially for younger kids in our family, there was no appreciation of what he did for this country."

On the Web site, there's a video of Wolke flipping through a scrapbook, telling a story of a daring sprint across an open field.

"You could hear them shooting at us, but you kept right on running. You couldn't stop," Wolke says in the video. "There was no place to hide. You ran until you got to the edge of town."

It's a piece of first-person history that easily could've been lost.

The sad truth is World War II veterans from the United States are dying rapidly, with more than 1,000 passing away each day, according to Department of Veterans Affairs estimates. Fewer than 2.5 million veterans remain of the 16 million who came home alive after the war ended. One prediction shows all World War II veterans gone by 2020.

That made telling the story of Wolke, who was drafted into the U.S. Army out of Kalida in 1944 and later enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1950, that much more important to tell. Buettner took great pride in showing his grandfather the finished project before Wolke's death.

"There was nothing more rewarding than completing that project before he couldn't share his information," Buettner said. "After a while, he told stories his own sons had never heard. They'd never bothered to ask."

I'm envious of Buettner, who had the foresight to write things down and capture them on video for his own memories. I vaguely recall the stories of my grandfather, Ed Trinko, with the Navy's Seabees in World War II. They're limited to stories of ripping apart cigarette butts to leave no trace and his regrets of that anchor tattoo on his arm, though. Because he's been gone for more than a decade now, I'll never have the chance to ask him for more details.

Buettner's project really started back in college at Bowling Green State University. For a class, he completed a 30-minute interview with Wolke. It was several years later before Buettner realized he could combine his two loves - history and computer programming - into one place, the Web site.

Buettner authored all 20 profiles currently on MyWarHistory.com. More than detailing military service, they show a slice of life for these brave men and women not often seen or heard. A profile of Buettner's other grandfather, Thomas Buettner, includes tales of crawling under sniper fire to get two bottles of wine each. Another one of the stories of Thomas Buettner, who still lives near Delphos, talks of looking out Hitler's huge picture window at the Eagle's Nest.

Perhaps more interesting than these stories is watching the men, now mostly in their 80s, telling the stories themselves in videos on the site.

Buettner hopes the Web site will get more participation with soldiers of all generations.

Everyone has a story to tell, even if he must be prodded to tell it. He said he noticed a reluctance to tell the stories at first.

"I remember my one grandfather saying, ‘I've spent most of the last 60 years trying to forget about all of it,'" Buettner said. "Here I am trying to get him to talk about it."

The alternative is losing those stories forever.

"Ultimately my goal would be to inspire a few people to write about their service heroes, as I term them, so their stories won't be lost forever," Buettner said.