First Person War Stories
Remarkable stories of war told by those who fought for a proud nation. Their words. Their voices. Our first episodes tell riveting stories from World War II, then we move on to the Vietnam War and other dramatic conflicts.
Latest Episode
In this special episode, Captain Torres explains how landfill-like burn pits in Iraq gave him a chronic lung injury and a toxic brain injury.
Captain Le Roy Torres served in the U.S. Army Reserve for 24 years, and spent a year on duty in Balad, Iraq. While there, Torres lived and worked in close proximity to a burn pit. These burn pits act as landfills, where everything from trash, to jet fuel, to medical waste was burned. They were extremely large, and the one near CPT Torres was approximately 10 acres in diameter. It burned 24/7, pumping toxic chemicals and smoke into the air, and into the lungs of soldiers.
As a result of breathing in these fumes, CPT Torres developed chronic lung and brain injuries, which forced him to visit the hospital over 400 times in 10 years.
Burn Pits 360 was founded by Torres and his wife in an attempt to improve post-deployment health outcomes for veterans, especially those caused by the burn pits. Recently, they helped pass the PACT Act, which expands benefits for veterans who were exposed to the burn pits.
You can find CPT Torres on Twitter at @leroytorres01
More About Warriors In Their Own Words and The HONOR Project
Warriors In Their Own Words brings to life the stories of those who have defended this nation. Using archival interviews going back to WWI, as well as current conversations about more recent conflicts, we hear remarkable accounts of service and sacrifice from those who lived them. These podcasts are a production of The HONOR Project: Heroes of Our Nation On Record.
Since 1991, award-winning documentarians Rob Kirk, Rob Lihani and Donna Lusitana have been recording and archiving the remarkable and very personal stories of veterans from World War I through modern conflicts. To provide an ongoing structure for the preservation of these stories, recounted by those who lived them, Kirk, Lihani and Lusitana joined with digital media pioneer, Marc Honorof, to create The HONOR Project.
“We are in the business of reporting history,” said Kirk, “Right now, these incredibly candid stories from a passing generation are what America wants to hear. We didn’t just sit these men down with a list of questions and ask them to reel off facts. We let them speak from the heart and captured all the emotion of their experiences.”
"By wrapping contextual narration around these astonishing stories and adding high quality production values,” said Lihani, “we have produced podcasts which are not only educational, but fascinating as well, along the lines of Tom Brokaw’s The Greatest Generation, or HBO’s Band of Brothers. Many of these veterans are no longer with us, so their accounts need to be remembered and archived. There simply is no substitute for listening to these men tell us their own experiences, in their own words and voices."
If you enjoy hearing these stories directly from those who lived them, please give us a 5-star review on iTunes or wherever you found us. Thank you.
The Team
Ken Harbaugh
Declan Rohrs
Sean Rule Hoffman
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