To date, the project has collected interviews and other materials — from photographs and letters home to military documents, diaries and drawings or poems created while deployed overseas — from more than 108,000 U.S. military veterans.

Yet only about 330 of those are stories from Montana veterans, Lloyd said. And relatively few collections detail accounts from Native Americans, despite their having the highest rate of military enlistment in the country.

The project’s curators require that oral history recordings be submitted without any editing, to assure the veteran that their words won’t be altered in the process.

Many of the oral history experiences provided by veterans detail their time deployed overseas, but Veterans History Project Liaison Specialist Lisa Taylor said they also aim to more broadly flesh out the lives of veterans profiled for the collections.

“Anything that helps tell the veteran’s story from the first-person perspective, we want the complete arc of their life,” Taylor said. “Not all of them were combat veterans, but they all have a story.”