Marvin Miller served with Delta Company, 2nd Battalion, 8th Cavalry Regiment, from December 1970 to December 1971. He came home, his wartime memories were filed in their respective boxes, and the subject was rarely talked about. When he died, I had photographs with people in them I didn't recognize, and a handful of sanitized stories he'd told me over the years.

What started as a family project to learn and share about his time in the military made me realize something: no single soldier's record is complete on its own. The gaps in my father's story were filled by other men's accounts — and my father's photographs filled gaps in theirs. Within his unit, there are hundreds of families who want to fill in those same blanks. The archive is not just a collection of individual records. It is a collective memory, and it gets more accurate the more people contribute to it.

That's why this exists. Not as a monument, but as a working record — one that keeps getting better.