One Man, 3,000 Veterans, a Decade of Living History

When 28-year-old Rishi Sharma started driving around Southern California a decade ago with a camera and a question, he probably didn’t realize he was launching a one-man mission to rescue the stories of an entire generation. But that’s exactly what happened. Over the last ten years, Sharma has conducted 3,000 interviews with World War II combat veterans—a staggering archive that’s become, in the words of CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman, something of a national treasure.

The stakes were always ticking. When Hartman first met Sharma in 2016, there were roughly 700,000 WWII veterans still alive. Today, that number has plummeted to 30,000. Sharma understood the urgency instinctively. Every veteran he interviewed represented irreplaceable firsthand testimony to one of history’s defining conflicts—not just the tactical details, but the moral weight, the human cost, the quiet wisdom that only those who lived through it can carry. He’s recently wrapped a conversation with a 100-year-old Iwo Jima survivor, and the hard drives and SD cards stacked with those 3,000 interviews now form an archive that future historians will treasure.

What makes this work remarkable isn’t just the sheer number of voices preserved. It’s that Sharma recognized something essential: the living link to our past is disappearing. These veterans aren’t just subjects to be catalogued—they’re what Sharma calls the“moral compass”of our society. Their stories, their presence, their quiet counsel has shaped the country in ways we’re only beginning to understand. As Sharma himself reflected, the advice these men and women impart, often without saying it explicitly,“silently steers the ship of this country.”

This is archival work that no institution alone could accomplish. One person, driven by curiosity and an almost spiritual commitment to preservation, has done what seemed impossible: captured a window into history before it closed forever. And he did it by simply showing up, day after day, with respect and a recorder.

What Sharma’s ten-year project reminds us is that history isn’t something that happens in textbooks. It lives in the voices of people still among us—until it doesn’t. His work is both a gift and a warning: there’s a limited window to hear from those who were there.