How to Interview a Veteran Who Does Not Want to Talk About Service

"That's all a long time ago." Or a shrug, or a change of subject towards the football. Families hear a version of this from a father, a stepfather, an uncle, a neighbour across the fence, and they read it as a door bolted from the inside.

Sometimes it is. More often it is less final than that: nobody has asked in a way that felt safe, and the one person who did ask went straight for the worst thing.

What follows is not a technique for making a reluctant person open up. It is a way of making the conversation possible and a refusal costless. Choose four or five questions, never the page. Record only with a yes. Abandon the plan when something unexpected appears.

Good lists exist and the better ones are linked below. Nearly all of them assume the person answering has already decided to talk. This page assumes the opposite.

The standard list is built for a different person

Most published sets run chronologically: joining, training, deployment, homecoming. Archives are built that way because historians need the sequence, and it suits a willing narrator perfectly well.

For a reluctant one it is close to the worst available order, because question three or four lands in the hardest year of his life while the two of you are still working out how to sit in a room together.

So invert it. Start where the stories are easy and well worn: the mess hall, the lorry that never started, the friend who could sleep standing up, the money wasted on first leave. That is not filler. It is what a grandchild actually wants and never gets, and it is how a conversation earns the right to go further, if it ever does.

Teaching questions suit people who dislike being the subject. The Military Voices great questions from StoryCorps include "What are some habits you developed in the service that you like?" That asks him to explain something rather than relive it, which is a different request entirely.

Making the ask small enough to accept

• Ask for very little. "Could I ask you two things about Germany, and you tell me when you have had enough?" Two questions is a favour. A project is a commitment, and commitments get declined.
• Ask while side by side. In the car, on a walk, washing up, clearing a shed. Facing someone across a table makes an interview of it. Shoulder to shoulder makes it a conversation.
• Say exactly who will hear it. "Nobody but me" and "the family, and nobody else" produce different answers, and both are better than leaving it vague.
• Offer more than one format. Some would rather write. Some send a voice message late at night. Some talk only with the recorder off. All of those are real records.
• Put an object in his hands. A cap badge, a photograph of a base, a unit newsletter. Then ask who somebody in it is, rather than asking a question about him.
• Never record without asking. Not once, not briefly, not for a good reason.

If the reluctance covers his whole past rather than his service, why a parent will not discuss the past looks at the wider pattern. If it is specifically the recorder he dislikes, recording someone who hates being recorded has the practical workarounds.

Theme one: the ordinary days

1. What woke you up in the morning, and what did you do in the first half hour?
2. What was the food actually like, and what did people trade for the good stuff?
3. What did your job involve? What did you have to learn that you had never heard of before?
4. What did a day off look like?
5. Did any of your friends play pranks on each other, and can you describe one?
6. What was the first thing you spent your pay on?
7. What did letters or parcels from home feel like when they arrived?
8. What is the thing you still do a certain way because of those years?

The follow-up worth having ready: "What did that smell like?" Sensory questions produce detail that chronology never does, and they are almost impossible to answer in one word.

Theme two: one person at a time

A single person is a safer route into a difficult period than the period itself. You can learn an entire year from a conversation about one friend.

1. Is there someone you served with that you remember fondly? Tell me about them.
2. Who knew what they were doing, and what did they teach you?
3. Who kept an eye on you when you were new?
4. Who did you end up looking after?
5. Who got the letters, and what did you tell them that you did not tell anyone else?
6. Is there anyone you lost touch with that you have wondered about since?
7. Who do you still think about?
8. What would you say to them if they walked in now?

The follow-up worth having ready: "Would I have liked him?" It invites a character sketch, which is a kind of answer people give far more freely than a narrative. More on this technique in why the second question gets the better story.

Theme three: the first year back

1. Who was at the door when you got home?
2. What was the first meal, and did it taste the way you had imagined?
3. What was strange about ordinary life that nobody warned you about?
4. Was there anything or anyone that helped you during the transition out?
5. What did people get wrong when they asked you about it?
6. What did you wish somebody had asked instead?
7. What do you miss about being in, if anything?

The follow-up worth having ready: "Is there a question you have been waiting for somebody to ask?" Some people have been waiting decades. Some genuinely have not, and will say so. Asking it honours both answers equally.

The five questions to leave at home

Wounded Warrior Project publishes a short list of what not to ask, and it is the most useful hundred words on this subject anywhere. Unless the veteran has opened the door himself, its guidance on what to avoid rules out asking whether he shot or killed anybody, whether he has PTSD, whether he regrets serving, what the worst thing that happened to him was, and how he came by an injury or a scar.

The piece quotes Danielle Green, an Army veteran, on the assumption people make when they see her missing arm: “Don’t assume that I am in a bad place mentally because my arm is missing.” Another Army veteran quoted there, Jake Norotsky, makes the point that underwrites this whole page. Building trust takes time, and a question list cannot shortcut it.

What consent means when the subject is difficult

Professional oral historians have worked on this problem for decades, and their rules are a gift to a nervous relative holding a phone. The Oral History Association's statement on ethics treats consent as a documented, knowing agreement reached before the recording starts, covering not just the conversation but what happens to it afterwards.

Two of its other provisions are worth adopting word for word in a family kitchen. The narrator should be told explicitly that he may refuse any question. And he should get to hear or read the result and then delete, restrict or redact parts of it, add corrections, or decline to release it at all, including keeping it closed until a date he chooses. The statement also asks interviewers to "attempt to minimize potential harm to the narrator".

Put practically: before you start, tell him he can have the recording deleted afterwards, entirely, without giving a reason, and mean it. Veterans who dislike talking are frequently not protecting the story but their control over where it goes. Hand that control over first and the objection sometimes dissolves.

Why "I don't talk about it" is not always a refusal

It can also describe a symptom accurately. The VA's page on how PTSD affects families lists avoidance among the symptoms and names "Feeling unable to talk about the trauma with your loved one" as one way families experience it, and it urges relatives to work on communication rather than to extract. None of which is a diagnosis, and you are in no position to make one. Take it only as a reason to stop reading his reluctance as a verdict on you, and if he seems to be struggling rather than simply private, put the questions away and ask how he is.

Three questions over three years beat forty on one Saturday

Families approach this as an event: a date in the diary, a recorder, a list, an afternoon. That shape is itself what produces the refusal, because it asks a private man to agree in advance to an unknown quantity of exposure, which is the exact thing he is careful about.

What tends to work is almost the opposite, and slower than anyone wants. One question in the car, no recorder, answered or not. A fortnight later, another. Nothing written in front of him. Across a couple of years that accumulates into something substantial, with no single moment where he has to decide whether to be interviewed.

The cost should be said plainly. Some of it will be lost, because an unrecorded answer survives only as your memory of it, and memory is worse than anyone believes. You get much more material in a far less reliable form. Write it up the same evening, label it as your recollection rather than his words, and accept the imprecision as the price of him speaking at all.

The slow approach has to give way when time is genuinely short, because of age or illness or distance. Then ask directly, once, for a proper sitting, and be specific about how long and who hears it. Our ten-minute plan for a Veterans Day sitting is designed for exactly that single, bounded request.

When the answer is nothing at all

Do not fill a silence. Count to ten, which will feel like a minute. Then offer an exit rather than a prompt: "We can leave that one." If he changes the subject, go with him.

If the answer to the whole idea is no, accept it first time, then say one sentence that leaves the door unlatched: you would love to hear it whenever he feels like it, and you will not ask again. People come back on their own terms far more often than under pressure, and that sentence only works if you keep the second half of it.

It may also hurt, and that is fair. It says nothing about how much he trusts you. Some veterans stay private for a whole life, and a few names pencilled on the back of a photograph is still a real inheritance for people not yet born.

Where the recording and the notes should go

Whatever you end up with is worth keeping properly. Duplicate it. Write down the date and the room. Mark which sentences are his and which are your recollection of them.

A private family space is what Glow is for: real audio kept as recorded, beside the photographs and whatever the family wrote down, with the family deciding who sees it. No voice is ever fabricated. Should he want the account to reach further, sending a relative's recording to the Library of Congress covers that route, which needs his signed release.

One small thing for today: pick a single easy question from the first list and ask it the next time you are both in a car. Not for the record. Just to hear the answer.

If the conversation goes somewhere heavy

Occasionally it will. Should he talk about despair, about wishing he were not alive, or about hurting himself, the project stops being a project in that instant. Switch off the recording, remain where you are, and listen instead of reassuring.

The Veterans Crisis Line is reachable three ways: 988 and then the 1 key, a text to 838255, or online chat. Its site is explicit that registration with VA health care or benefits is irrelevant, that the service is confidential, and that it runs around the clock. Crucially, it serves the people around a veteran too, which after a conversation like that includes you. The VA's notice about the 988 route lists the same options. Where somebody is in danger right now, emergency services come first.

Things families ask about a reluctant relative

Is it disrespectful to ask at all?

No, and many veterans say the silence around their service bothers them more than the questions do. What makes a question respectful is that refusing it is genuinely free of consequence.

Another relative wants me to push harder. What do I say?

That the comfort of the person answering outranks the completeness of the record. A story offered freely is worth more, to the family and to him, than one extracted on a deadline.

Can I write down my own memories instead?

Yes, and it is more valuable than people assume. Date it, label it clearly as your recollection, and keep it beside whatever he eventually gives you, or in place of it.