For the past year and a half, Rishi Sharma has been travelling across the U.S. The reason for the 20-year-old’s travels is not wanderlust, nor is it a thirst for adventure. The driving force behind Sharma’s journey is a desire to interview every Second World War combat veteran that he can before time runs out.
In 2016, Sharma founded Heroes of the Second World War, a non-profit organization seeking to meet and film interviews with as many surviving --combat veterans as possible. So far, he has conducted 849 interviews across 45 states, even heading north to meet with Canadian veterans.
Sharma has been interested in Second World War stories since he was a kid, but it wasn’t until high school that he got the idea to start calling some of the veterans he was reading about.
In an interview with CTV’s Your Morning, Sharma said that it was surprisingly easy to get in contact with his war heroes. He simply had to crack open the phone book.
“If I wanted to get in touch with some sort of useless celebrity like the Kardashians, I’d have to go through a thousand people. To talk to a veteran, I could just call him,” he said.
After realizing that he could connect with his personal heroes directly, Sharma got even more proactive by biking to his local retirement community to interview the veterans living there.
As more people became aware of his initiative, he started getting requests to interview peoples’ parents and grandparents who were also veterans. What started as a young boy’s interest in the Second World War, quickly developed into a long-term pledge.
“I made it my mission to meet and interview two to three Second World War veterans every day until the last one passes away.”
Sharma recognizes that his mission is time-sensitive. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs reports that 372 Second World War veterans die each day, with 558, 000 still alive in 2017 of the 16 million who served. Veterans Affairs Canada estimated that as of March 2017, 50, 300 Second World War veterans were still alive, an even smaller fraction of which are the combat veterans that Sharma hopes to interview.
“My end goal is just to meet and interview as many Second World War veterans as possible, and to inspire other people and their communities to go visit the veterans in their local retirement homes and get their stories documented.”
It isn’t lost on Sharma that he’s the same age that these veterans were when they were in combat. While he’s honoured to hear their stories, he thinks they also benefit from sharing experiences that they’ve been struggling with for so long in a censor-free and non-judgmental environment.
“They can talk to me like I’m one of the guys. It’s really cathartic because they can really get some things out of their system before they pass.”
Sharma hopes that others will follow his lead and start a dialogue with their local veterans. He says it’s the least we can do for the people who “went through hell” so that we could have a chance at life.
“It’s a very lonely feeling when you’re the only person in the world who knows what it’s like to see your best friend killed, or what you felt when you had to shoot different people. But to know that there’s someone out there who understands, even a little bit, what you went through – that’s comforting.”
