Last Thursday, StoryCorps, the oral-history organization, held a gala hosted by Stephen Colbert onboard the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, in the massive 1943 aircraft carrier docked in the Hudson River, at Forty-sixth Street. The event celebrated the Military Voices Initiative, which focusses on collecting the stories of post-9/11 service members, veterans, and their families. StoryCorps, founded in 2003 by Dave Isay, has recorded and archived more than fifty thousand interviews of all kinds from participants in locations across the country. The stories, which are recorded in a soundproof booth with the help of a producer, are intimate and straightforward accounts of people’s lives, descriptions of pivotal moments and everyday memories. All of them are archived at the Library of Congress. People say things in the booth that they’ve never said before, and the simplicity and power of having an honest, meaningful conversation about something of personal significance seems to deeply affect everyone who participates. As Isay put it, “Everybody cries in the booth.” Everybody cries outside it, too: we’d be listening to some of the stories that night, and the gala had provided StoryCorps Kleenex as party favors.

In the main hangar, beyond a gallery of exhibits like the Grumman Ball Turret, the FJ3 Fury, and “Kamikaze Attacks on the Intrepid,” was a vast dining space. I was seated with several veterans whose stories would be featured. Justin Cliburn, a veteran of the Oklahoma Army National Guard, was at Camp Liberty, in Baghdad, from 2005 to 2006. I had listened to his story, about his friendship with two boys in Baghdad, Ali and Ahmed. “I was a Humvee gunner, so I stood out the top and pointed guns at people,” he told me. “And that’s part of the reason that I loved visiting with these children. It made me feel like I was actually helping someone and not just pointing a gun in people’s faces.” Also, he said, “Because of my experience with StoryCorps, I started an oral-history project for my guys that were in the unit together. It’s two hundred pages long at this point.”

Another pair came to the table and sat down—Mary Dague and her friend Charles Cossette. “I was her husband’s platoon sergeant,” Cossette told me. “He’s currently deployed in Afghanistan. I officiated their wedding.”

“Hello!” Dague said, smiling. She looked happy and festive—her short dark hair has long bangs with crimson streaks, and she wore a strapless dress made of black lace with crimson underneath it. Dague, who was an E.O.D. tech—an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician—lost her lower arms in an explosion in Iraq in 2007. Her left arm ends just above where her elbow would be, and her right arm is about the length of a short sleeve. Her husband is an E.O.D. tech too. They married last year. “I’m going to do a total girl thing—here’s a picture of him,” she said. She picked up her iPhone with her arms, brought up a photograph of him, and presented it to me, beaming. Her husband, James Cribbett, is handsome, and has a kind face like Dague’s.

“I got blown up on November 4, 2007,” Dague said. “We got called out for an I.E.D. that the Iraqi army found. They put it in between a children’s school and a housing project, so we couldn’t blow it up where it was. Morally, we couldn’t blow it up where it was. Legally, we could, but we’re not going to do that shit. And after disarming it and packing all the explosives and everything for transport, I was carrying it back to the truck. I laid it in there and it started to rock, so I grabbed it and it detonated,” she said. “Luck of the draw. But it was O.K., because where I was positioned it shielded everybody else from the blast and frag except me. My teammate took bits of my arm in his butt,” she said. She and Cossette laughed. “But it’s cool! We’ll be together forever.”

After several short speeches, Stephen Colbert jogged onstage. He said, “This is the second time that I have hosted, so clearly the story of last year’s gala was, Stephen Colbert did a damn fine job.” He said that we would be hearing stories from StoryCorps’s collection. “So brace yourselves, because this is the only moment of the entire evening that you won’t be openly weeping in joy and/or shared sorrow,” he said. The first story was from the Army captain Drew Pham.

StoryCorps’s stories for the public, edited to be shared on NPR and online, tend to be gentle in tone. People get emotional but not overwrought. The pieces are human in scale, length, and approach. Pham’s story played, accompanied by photographs of him and his wife. He was twenty-four when he went to Afghanistan. “I did a lot of bad things,” Pham said. He’s struggled with readjusting to civilian life. When he came home, he said, “Here in the States I don’t know even how to talk to people. Like I don’t think that anything that anyone says anymore is important—what they think or what they feel.” His wife, Molly Pearl, was helping him through it.

Anthony Villareal, a marine corporal, was injured when a roadside bomb struck his vehicle in Afghanistan in 2008. “I remember trying to breathe, and I just felt like real hot, like I was on fire. It hurt, but I couldn’t scream,” he said. His wife said that when she first saw him after the accident, his whole face was covered in bandages. Villareal said, “When I woke up, I didn’t even recognize myself. When I looked in the mirror I just broke down.” Villareal had third-degree burns on his face and body, and his right arm and left-hand fingers had to be amputated. “I literally thought my life was over,” he said. His wife said, “I didn’t ever think that I’d be as strong as I am today, and most of it is from you.” They said that only death could separate them.

StoryCorps has animated several stories, including Cliburn’s, which played next. He said that Ali was shy and that Ahmed, his best friend, was outgoing. “We would play rock-paper-scissors, we would kick around a soccer ball. We were about as close as people who don’t speak the same language can be,” Cliburn said. “One day, Ali showed up, and I could tell something wasn’t right.” Ahmed’s mother had been killed by a suicide bomber, and Ahmed had been badly injured. Later, Ali returned and dug a hole and buried a rock in it. “Ahmed,” he said. They sat together on a curb and cried. Whenever he sees footage of Baghdad on TV now, Cliburn said, he always looks around, hoping to see Ali in the frame.

When the story ended, Colbert thanked Cliburn and then introduced Isay. “Before he came along, this type of glimpse into other people’s lives—to get that, you needed a pair of binoculars, a strong tree branch, and a good defense attorney,” Colbert said. “Here he is, the founder of StoryCorps and NPR shock jock Dave Isay.” Isay thanked several storytellers who were present: Zachariah Fike, an Army National Guard captain, who finds and returns lost or stolen military medals; Tracy Johnson, the first married gay spouse ever to lose a husband or wife, and her mother-in-law, Sandra Johnson. “What’s important about the Military Voices Initiative is that it enables us to hear the stories that would otherwise go unheard,” Colbert said. “The fact is, two million Americans were sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Twenty-five per cent of them have P.T.S.D. or Traumatic Brain Injury. Which makes for half a million mentally wounded American veterans.” He quoted the journalist David Finkel, who wrote of a group of veterans that “every one of them came home broken in various degrees, even the ones who are fine.”