10/12/2026
I had never been through the museum before, and I think I went in expecting something closer to a traditional military museum. Uniforms, equipment, memorabilia, etc. That really isn’t what this place is. The focus is the veteran.
Friday, I spent the afternoon at the National Veterans Memorial and Museum meeting with Mason Farr and Marnie Holder and getting a much better look at what this place actually is.
Veteran faces, stories, and their families. What they did in the military, but also who they became afterward. That stood out because it is so close to what I’ve been focused on with Rising Valor. I’ve never been interested in only asking somebody where they deployed or what unit they served with. Military service matters, but there is always a much larger story surrounding it.
We spent a lot of time talking about storytelling, education, preserving veteran history, and ways organizations doing this work can support each other instead of recreating the same thing over and over.
A lot of our conversation centered around what happens after a story is captured.
How does it get preserved?
How do you turn it into something students can learn from?
How do you make sure somebody’s story continues to matter after the interview is over?
Those are questions I’ve been thinking about quite a bit since I left.
The museum itself was also just fascinating.
I got to see Portraits of Courage, the collection of paintings by President George W. Bush honoring veterans he has come to know.
One of my favorite parts was the Full Metal Jacket exhibit. Matthew Modine (Joker) kept a diary and took photographs while they were making the movie. Seeing those pictures, and hearing him talk about being there is really really cool.
If you’re a veteran, what part of your story do you wish people asked about more?
If you’ve visited the National Veterans Memorial and Museum, what story or exhibit stuck with you?
And if you had one veteran’s story you wanted preserved for the next generation, whose would it be?
