28 FRONTDOORS MEDIA | NOVEMBER 2019 @TEvans927 Tom Evans CONTRIBUTING EDITOR day I was wounded was emotional, to know how close you came to not making it.” “For most of the students,” Durham said, “there’s an underlying desire to understand a bit more about the veterans’ experience, especially when they may have a family member who is a veteran. But that family member maybe doesn’t feel the innate desire to start talking about their experience. It’s a lot easier in a way to dive in and interview someone you don’t know. For something like 80 percent of the veterans in the program, it’s the first time telling their own story to their family, or even out loud in general. So it’s a special experience.” The other side effect is that these young people and veterans, once connected, often stay connected into the future. Dunham ended up doing 11 profiles — she says she tagged along on many more interviews, just to listen and learn — and still keeps in touch with many of the people she interviewed, including Frank Lambert. And the experiences they document help shape who the students become as they grow into adulthood and start their own lives and careers. Almost every student who gets involved ends up enrolling in college. “If you look at Ashley, I met her as a sophomore, and now she’s graduated from ASU,” Lambert said of Durham, who works in the healthcare field today. “I think she has advanced faster than her peers partly because of this experience — it’s really good for these high school kids.” Durham agreed. “Personal relationships are what VHP hammers in as their ‘product.’ They obviously sell the books that are done, but that’s not what they see as the final product. They see student and veteran relationship as the final product moving forward. “I have always felt that VHP has solidified the idea that people are the most important thing, and you make time for the people who are most important to you,” she said. “It’s learning that you have a limited amount of time with these veterans — sadly, they don’t live forever — but the stories can live on.” To learn more, go to veteransheritage.org . After Frank Lambert graduated from West Point in 1964, he was assigned to Vietnam. Through the Veterans Heritage Project, he talked about the injuries he sustained there as well as his subsequent rescue.

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