The Legacies Project - Origins Pt. 2

My previous post was about getting to know Dad when he was dying by asking about his life in a deeper way. My efforts were rewarded with some awesome stories.

Dad had gone into the army after serving an apprenticeship (amazing in itself; who serves apprenticeships anymore?) to be a dental technician -- basically the guys who make oral hardware for dentists: crowns, bridges, dentures, etc. The army wasn't big on nuance. Even though Dad didn't go to college, they told him that in the Army, he was a dentist.

Dad wound up in New Guinea doing dentistry, including oral surgeries. As the situation worsened, his superiors figured oral surgery was close enough to regular surgery, and had Dad doing procedures like removing shrapnel and closing up for other doctors. A young guy trained to make dentures working in wounded soldiers' torsos! Unreal.

I asked him if he ever lost a patient. He said he lost a young man, and was distraught. His commanding officer gave him the rest of the day off and a fifth of gin. He told Dad to go get drunk and report for duty in the morning. And that's what he did.

Usually medical outfits were left alone, but one night Dad's camp was overrun. The medics scattered. Dad hopped onto the back of a passing jeep, and jumped into some bushes at the top of a hill overlooking the camp. He watched all night. Finally, at dawn, reinforcements came to restore order.

Dad said that as he made his way down the hill, he saw all his buddies from the camp emerging from bushes, climbing down trees, popping out from behind rocks. They had all done what he did -- scrambled for cover and watched all night.

That's when it hit me: What if, in addition to Dad's account of this night in New Guinea, I could find two or three -- or even ten or twelve -- other men who had witnessed the same event? You could really shake out something close to the truth of what happened. But how could you ever cast a wide enough net that, over time, you could achieve that kind of valuable content overlap? The gears had started turning.

Half of the answer came to me when my favorite aunt died just a few years after Dad did. I'll tell you about that next time. Meanwhile, in the comments below, I'd love to hear other people's stories, and whether or not anyone has ever sought out multiple accounts of a single event from long ago. Did you get a group together, or talk to people individually? How similar -- or different -- were the various stories?

Thanks for sharing,

Jimmy Rhoades
Co-Founder, The Legacies Project