About Me

My name is Patrick Reed, and I’m a historian working to record and share the stories of those who have come before us.

History, simply put, is the story of the people who have lived before us. I am captivated by this story. To me, there are few things better than sitting down with someone and hearing about their part in it.

I can always remember having been interested in World War II. I grew up going to airshows with my mother, and “playing WWII” with my friends, as many children do. I eagerly awaited our trips to the museum, or to a reenactment. In the years following the HBO Miniseries Band of Brothers, Easy Company veterans began to produce memoirs about their time in the war, and I read them eagerly. Don Malarkey’s book Easy Company Soldier became a quick favorite. His boyhood growing up in the forests of Oregon, his family experiences in the 1920s and 30s, and his time in combat fascinated me. He became a hero of mine. So at the encouragement of my mother, I wrote him a letter. I don’t remember exactly what I said, but I asked him a few questions about his experiences and thanked him for his service. Being 11 years old, I didn’t really know what to expect, but my mother wasn’t expecting much in return. He was a celebrity of sorts, well known from having been depicted in the massively successful show, and I’m sure he got all sorts of “fan mail”. At best, she was expecting a form letter back from the publisher. But he wrote me back. I remember eagerly but carefully tearing open the package, thrilled to see what was inside. Along with a t-shirt, enclosed was a letter patiently and cheerfully answering my questions, and offering advice for my future. It was signed “Sincerely, Don Malarkey.”

I had met WWII veterans in passing before, but here was a letter addressed to me, from the Don Malarkey. I was floored. It meant so much to me to be seen by one of my heroes. I can’t say at that moment that I decided that I’d start recording oral histories. But looking back, I think I can say that that’s where it began to become real to me. It would take years to develop, but I can point back to that letter as the first time I really encountered someone I considered a historical figure in this unique and personal way. That’s where I began to realize that I could engage with people who had actually been there.

In high school, I began interviewing veterans with a camcorder and little voice recorder, the same one I would use through college. I fit the interviews in where I could, still living a very active life full of extracurricular activities. Even in my early teenage awkwardness and shyness, I was welcomed by a number of truly amazing people and their families, and I was just thrilled to be able to sit down with someone who was there. I was just kind of winging it - from a historical perspective, I knew it was important to record their stories, but I was just excited to be spending time with them. I didn’t really ask deep questions, or use great equipment to record the interviews, but I got to share time with some wonderful people.

At the time, my mind couldn’t wrap itself around the horror of the war. It just went over my head completely. Re-reading books like Easy Company Soldier, and Eugene Sledge’s With the Old Breed (another favorite) as an adult, I was horrified. As a child, I understood conceptually that these people had sacrificed, but what could I possibly understand of war? I couldn’t grasp the reality of losing a best friend, sheltering from an artillery barrage, or anxiously waiting for my amtrac to complete its slow crawl to the beach, knowing full well I could be living my last moments here on earth. I still can’t fully grasp that - only those who have been there can. But this is where a firsthand account is so valuable.

From the people who have been there, I can learn something of what it was like. What it felt like, what it smelled like, what I might have seen. I can hear about what it was actually like to engage in aerial combat with the Luftwaffe, to grow up in a small town during the Great Depression, or to wonder anxiously if the Japanese military really might come closer to home than Hawaii.

From these stories, we can learn so much about the human experience. We can learn what it was like for people just like us, decades ago. And in these people, we have a nearly tangible connection to our history. These are the people who lived it. While most of my work focuses on World War II and veterans’ experiences, my underlying hope is that through my work, you can have an encounter with the people who lived at that time, and more broadly, with the human person. As I write this, World War II veterans and their contemporaries are at just about the furthest reach of humanity’s living memory. We can learn a lot from them. You’ll also see content dealing with other historical periods, both prior to and after WWII, and content that doesn’t have anything to do with war.

History, ultimately, pulls us out of ourselves. It helps us to realize that we’re a part of a story that’s much bigger than each of us individually. We begin to realize that we are the next in a very long line of people who have lived here, each of us unique and unrepeatable. It helps us learn what it means to be human. That should both inspire and ground us. It inspires us by creating a sense of awe at the human person. We see the reality that our lives are a part of this story, much bigger than ourselves. And the immensity of that story doesn’t mean our “little” lives don’t matter, on the contrary. If one “little” life can be so special, what of this whole tapestry of thousands of years of human existence? How wonderful! We also begin to realize that the big difference between “us” and “them” is just a few decades, and the contexts that shape us. In these stories we see examples of just how resilient, how selfless, and how brave people can be. History grounds us by creating roots. These roots don’t trap us, they give us a solid foundation to stand on. They give us a heritage, something to point back to and say, “I’m one of them”. And those roots inform the decisions we make, and the course our lives take. They help us to see what it means to be human. Conversely, history also shows us the very worst of the human experience. Especially in dealing with WWII, we don’t need to look far to see examples of horrible suffering, injustice, and death. But this too can work for our good. We can work to avoid these things, to prevent them from happening again.

And this doesn’t mean that the only stories worth sharing are the “exciting” ones. Every story has tremendous value because each one is coming from a person, and each one can connect us in some way with that person, and with the human experience of the past.

There was a line from Don Malarkey’s letter that I didn’t quite grasp as a child, but that deeply impacts me now. He said, “War is not something I would recommend, but at times, unfortunately, it is necessary to defend our freedoms as Americans.” There it is, simply put, from a man who knows war well. War is not good. Fundamentally, war is a tragedy for everybody involved. It brings death, destruction, and irreparable harm. I pray that we never find ourselves in a war of that magnitude again. In some small way, I hope that hearing firsthand accounts of what war is like would encourage us to strenuously avoid it. But this hope is mingled with an immense gratitude for those whose stories I share. For those who have considered the possible outcomes and personal risk, and decided that each of us were worth fighting for and dying for. Their stories inspire me, and make me so proud to know them and many who have served since then.

So then, this is an overview of what informs me and my work. Though I have my aspirations for the effects some of these stories might have (inspiring gratitude, avoiding war), my greatest hope is that you can have an encounter with the human person. That by engaging with these stories, you realize that the past isn’t all that far away, and that it was lived by people just like us. In these stories we can share in a small way in the hopes, joys, sorrows, and experiences of these people. We can find ourselves in their stories. I hope they help you understand what happened back then, and how that shapes our lives today. I hope these stories inspire you, and help you connect with those who have come before us - those people whose story history is.