Veteran Interview Questions: One Ten-Minute Sitting for Veterans Day

You set the phone down between the two mugs and press the red circle. He glances at it, then at the window. Nobody has asked him about any of this since 1974, and he is not sure whether you want the official version or the real one. The first ninety seconds decide which one you get.

This page is one sitting, not a project. Ten minutes, planned, with the questions written out so you are not inventing them in front of him. It works for a school assignment, a community recording or a family keepsake, and the eleventh of November falls on a Wednesday in 2026, so there is time to arrange a quiet half hour.

Ask before you record. Stop before he is tired. A second sitting can always happen, and it will go better than the first.

The five minutes before you start

• Say what it is for, and who will hear it. Something like: "It is for a Veterans Day project at school. Could I record about ten minutes? Only my class would hear it." If he would rather not, thank him and mean it. Ask whether you may take notes instead.
• Hand him something. A photograph, a cap badge, a letter. People talk more easily with an object in their hands than with a microphone in front of them.
• Kill the noise. Television off, kettle already boiled, phone switched to airplane mode so an incoming call cannot stop the recording mid-sentence.
• Offer the exit, out loud, before the first question. "Skip anything you like. Say stop and I will stop." Said once at the start, it changes the whole conversation.
• Do not arrive with an assumption about which war. More on this below, and it is the mistake most interviewers make in their opening sentence.

Ten minutes, with a clock on each question

Begin a long way from the uniform. Someone who has already answered three easy questions about his own childhood answers a difficult one far more readily, and every serious interview guide starts in the same place. StoryCorps opens its Military Voices question list with general questions for anybody, including "What are some memories that stand out from your childhood?" The questions quoted below all come from that list.

1. 0:00, the slate. Say the date, your name, where you are sitting, and his name. Ask him to say his own name and his branch. That ten seconds is what makes the file findable in forty years.
2. 0:30, the easy one. "What are some memories that stand out from your childhood?" Let it run. Do not interrupt to get back on schedule.
3. 2:30, the decision. "How did you choose your branch of service?" Then: "How did you tell your family and friends that you were joining the military?"
4. 5:00, the ordinary days. "What are some fun things you and your friends did together while you were deployed?" This is the question families treasure later, and the one almost nobody thinks to ask.
5. 7:30, the one that lands. Ask it slowly, then stop talking. "What did you learn about yourself?" Count silently to eight before you say anything else.
6. 9:30, the close. "What are your hopes for the future?" Then thank him by name, and tell him when you will press stop. Do not stop mid-breath.

Abandon the running order the moment something better appears. If he starts a story at minute three about a lorry that broke down outside Naples, follow it all the way. The timings are a handrail for the nervous interviewer, not an instruction to the person answering.

What to say when the room goes still

• He stops and says nothing. Say nothing back. Silence is where the second half of an answer lives. If it stretches past ten seconds, offer a door rather than a nudge: "We can leave that one."
• "There's nothing to tell." Go smaller and more physical. What did breakfast taste like. Who snored. What the heat was like at four in the afternoon. Specifics unlock what summaries cannot.
• He answers in single words. Switch from questions that have answers to questions that have shapes. "What was that like" and "who else was there" work when "did you" does not. Put the photograph back in his hands.
• He moves towards the fighting himself. Follow, do not pull. Ask who was beside him rather than what he saw. StoryCorps lists "Can you describe how you felt coming home from combat?" and that is a question to use only if he has opened the door first.
• He becomes upset. Stop the recording without being asked. Put the phone face down. Stay in the room. The interview is over and that is entirely fine.

Who you are most likely to be sitting with

Interviewers picture a man in his nineties and a landing craft. That picture is now wrong almost every time, and arriving with it makes the first question land badly.

The Census Bureau's Veterans Day facts for 2025 put the United States veteran population at 15.7 million in 2024, and the breakdown by period of service is the part worth reading before you knock on a door. Veterans of the Second World War made up 0.4% of that total. Vietnam-era veterans made up 31.3%, Gulf War veterans 25.5%, and those who served from September 2001 onwards 29.9%. People can serve across more than one period, so the shares are not meant to be added up.

Read practically, that means the person across the table is most likely to have served in Vietnam or after 2001, may well be younger than you expected, and had an experience that looks nothing like a documentary. The same release reports that 11.1% of veterans are women, which is 1.7 million people, so "he" is not a safe default either.

Knowing this matters for a second reason. Many veterans served in peacetime, in logistics, in signals, in a hospital, or on a base three thousand miles from anything dangerous. An opening question that assumes combat quietly tells them their service does not count. Ask where they served and let them tell you what kind of service it was.

Ask about the laundry before you ask about the war

The standard veteran question list moves in chronological order: enlistment, training, deployment, homecoming. It is tidy, it is how every archive organises its material, and it puts the hardest chapter in the middle of a ten-minute conversation with someone who has not agreed to go there.

A better order, we would argue, is the boring one. The food. The friend who could not be woken. The two hours a day spent waiting for a lorry. Not because the hard chapter does not matter, but because the ordinary material does two things at once: it is genuinely what grandchildren want and never get, and it builds the trust that makes the harder chapter possible later, if the veteran decides to go there.

Interviewers resist this, because asking about laundry feels like wasting the ten minutes. It is the opposite. A veteran who has just described a prank in a mess hall is talking to a person. A veteran who has just been asked about casualties in minute two is talking to a project.

Where the argument flips: if he opens with the hard thing himself, go where he goes. Some people have waited decades to be asked directly and find the gentle warm-up patronising. Read the room rather than the plan. And if your relative has already made it clear he does not discuss any of it, the approach changes entirely, which is what interviewing a veteran who will not talk about service is for.

Questions to hold back for a second sitting

1. What was the first thing you ate that tasted like home again?
2. Who wrote to you, and what did you do with the letters?
3. What did you keep in your pocket that you never told anyone about?
4. What were the first few months as a civilian like?
5. What would you want a grandchild to understand about this part of your life?

If the veteran is your own father or grandfather, there is a longer set in questions for a veteran parent or grandparent. If a recorder makes him visibly uncomfortable, recording someone who dislikes being recorded is the better preparation.

The file, the name and one page of notes

1. Two copies, in two places. One stays on the phone. One goes somewhere the phone cannot take it with it when it is lost.
2. A filename a stranger could read. Date first, then surname, branch and era: 2026-11-11-Okonkwo-Army-1968.m4a. Our guide to recording on a phone, from consent to file names has the rest of the housekeeping.
3. One page, written the same evening. Full name, branch, years served, where the interview happened, and three place names he mentioned that you will not remember next week. Archives ask for exactly this, and so does your own memory.
4. Something back. A copy if he wants one, or a short note. He gave you ten minutes of his life and it cost him more than it cost you.

Researchers who study family narrative keep arriving at the same conclusion: the value is in the telling rather than the artefact. Writing in Psychology Today about the "Do You Know?" questions, Robyn Fivush argues that what matters is the process of families sharing stories about their lives. A ten-minute sitting is that process, started. Afterwards Glow can hold the recording, the photograph he was holding and the family's notes together in one private place, with the real audio kept as it was and nothing invented.

If the recording turns out well and he is willing, it can go further than the family. The Library of Congress accepts interviews from relatives, and submitting a family interview to the Veterans History Project explains the forms and the limits.

If the conversation turns towards something hard

Occasionally it does. If he talks about despair, about not wanting to be here, or about harming himself, that is the moment the project stops mattering. Switch the recording off, stay where you are, and listen without trying to fix it.

Help exists and it is free. The Veterans Crisis Line can be reached by dialling 988 and pressing 1, by texting 838255, or by online chat, and its own page states that enrolment in VA benefits or health care is not required to connect, and that the service is confidential and available at any hour. It serves serving members, Guard and Reserve members and veterans, and also the family and friends around them, which includes you. The VA has published the same routes in its announcement of the 988 route. If anyone is in immediate danger, call your local emergency number first.

Four things people ask before a Veterans Day sitting

Is ten minutes really long enough?

It is a real record, and it is far better than the ninety-minute interview that never gets arranged. If you intend to submit the recording to an archive, plan a longer and more formal session separately.

Can a child do the interviewing?

Yes, and the answers are often warmer. Write five questions on a card, have an adult sitting nearby, and let the veteran set the pace.

Do we need anything in writing?

For a recording that stays inside the family, a clear spoken agreement, captured at the start of the audio, is enough. Anything that will be published, submitted or played to strangers needs a signed release.