My name is Tom O’Shields and I am a graduate student in the Public History program. My interests lie in military and diplomatic history with an emphasis on the Vietnam Era.
I just completed a summer internship with Dr. Barbara Gannon and will be working under her again this semester in an oral history project with black Vietnam veterans from Williamsburg County, S.C. where I grew up.
My initial project was interviewing Vietnam veterans I grew up with in S.C., but as I began to delve deeper into who served in Vietnam from my community I realized there were many young black Americans, both draftees and enlisted, whose story had never been told. My new project is to address this problem by reaching out to the black community in order to interview as many of these veterans as possible.
I hope to gain some insight into their thoughts on the Vietnam War, how they were accepted into the community upon there return from the war, and how their service affected them later in life.
Although this will be a very daunting task, I am looking forward to the challenges as well as meeting fellow veterans from that era whom I never really knew due to growing up in an era of segregation. No matter the outcome, I know this will be a very enlightening project on a personal level for me.
Shadow Soldiers 