When War Comes Home: A Humanistic Archive for Veterans, Families, and the Long-Term Consequences of War

Abstract

War-related environmental contamination leaves two parallel records: scientific evidence and lived experience. The latter is often dispersed across veterans, civilians, families, caregivers, photographs, medical files, correspondence, and memory, and may disappear before it can inform research. This conceptual paper proposes the PD Human Experience Archive: an independent, multilingual digital repository for personal and family materials concerning war, toxic exposure, delayed illness, caregiving, loss, and changing interpretation over time. Contributors would retain control over language, content, and access, while the system would provide permanent identifiers, provenance, version history, protected originals, structured metadata, links. Accepted records would not be silently overwritten or deleted; corrections and later reflections would be preserved as versions. Artificial intelligence could support transcription, optical character recognition, translation, indexing, semantic search, and identification of possible connections, but every derived output would remain labeled and separate from the original testimony. Annual ISBN-bearing guides would map the continuously growing archive without replacing it. Beginning with a United States–Vietnam pilot, the project would preserve differing and sometimes incompatible perspectives under one humanistic and technical standard. Its purpose is not to treat testimony as causal proof, but to prevent irreplaceable human evidence from being lost and to make permitted materials available for analysis.