My interview with William Campbell, a 92-year-old Black Korean War veteran, changed how I see journalism. He told me about scrubbing mess halls for white officers, being banned from bus seats and “Whites Only” fountains — how the same country he fought for treated him as disposable. When someone once tried to buy his trauma as memoir material, he refused: some stories aren’t souvenirs. Yet he trusted me — a Chinese-American teen with a thrift-store recorder — to help excavate what history had buried, to dig for the raw, unpolished humanity that textbooks erase.

Library of Congress Linkage:

www.loc.gov/item/afc2001001.125329/ www.loc.gov/item/afc2001001.125330/