History Project

For 390 years, the National Guard has answered the call at home and abroad.

But much of its history still lives in fragments — scattered across the country in uneven records, partial archives and fading memories.

“It’s like a patchwork across the 54,” says William Roulett, deputy director of the National Guard Education Foundation, referring to the states and territories that make up the community-based force.

At the University of Southern Mississippi, two history professors and a Guard veteran are trying to change that — building what they want to become a national repository for Guard oral histories and historical documentation.

The idea for the Center for the Study of the National Guard took shape about eight years ago, after professors Kevin Greene and Andrew Wiest struggled to find documentation for a book on a Mississippi Army Guard unit’s 2005 deployment to Iraq.

So, they began conducting their own oral histories and building relationships with members of the 150th Combat Engineer Battalion.

Retired Brig. Gen. Roy Robinson, then the NGAUS president who commanded the battalion in Iraq, and Rep. Trent Kelly, R-Miss., who was a member of the unit, took notice and soon had interest in expanding the project to more states.

The National Guard Bureau, the association and NGEF then each entered into separate agreements with Southern Miss to establish the center. The Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force already have such resources.

For Roulett, the effort is overdue. The Guard, he says, needs a coordinated way to capture its own history while those who lived it are still able to tell it. “Those oral histories, they add color,” he says. “They add context to the history that the raw data in documents alone can’t provide.”

But documents remain important to the center’s work. The NGEF recently provided the first 100 years of NGAUS conference proceedings and reports for digitization and inclusion in the repository.

As word spread about the center, Greene and Wiest built relationships with the adjutants general nationwide and brought on Mississippi Guard veteran Paul Lyon as managing director.

Lyon served three years in the active Army then joined the Guard, holding various roles, including as a company commander in Iraq with the 150th, a staff officer in Afghanistan in 2009 and a battalion commander elsewhere in the Middle East in 2017. Through it all, Lyon saw what Guardsmen can accomplish.

But he says it’s difficult for the Guard to collect and preserve operational history due to the force’s decentralized structure, its reliance on part-time personnel who disperse after missions and the underfunding of archival programs.

Oral histories do more than preserve memories. They capture the Guard’s distinctive service across overseas deployments, state active duty and Title 32 missions — adding context, perspective and lessons learned that official records alone cannot provide.

“The next time a CAT 5 [hurricane] rolls up in here, the Guard is going to dig us out like they always have,” Greene says, “and I see it as an incredible opportunity to generate data about all of that. Not just the kinetics on overseas deployments but what goes on here.”

The goal is a national network across the 54, tied to a single resource that protects the Guard’s legacy in perpetuity.

—Kevin Greene, the co-founder & co-director of the Center for the Study of the National Guard

‘Cathartic’ experience

Lyon also sat in on oral history interviews while Wiest was working on his book about the 150th Combat Engineers, Dogwood. In those conversations, he began to understand how many of his Soldiers were carrying the weight of post-traumatic stress — and how powerful it could be simply to let them talk.

“They were dying to talk to somebody about what happened to them,” Lyon said. “And I think not only is it good for history, it has a benefit to our Soldiers — for letting them be able to tell their side of the story and be able to see that written and in the light it should be.”

Laura Cooley, the wife of Sgt. 1st Class Sean Cooley who was killed in action in 2005, was among those who shared her story.

“I think it’ll be a great asset to have the spouse or the family share their experience,” she says. “There’s so much that I learned from the book, [things that] the members don’t talk and tell their family about. And there are things when they’re deployed, we don’t share with them … Having people understand the relationship of deployed family members is kind of really special and not something people talk about.”

Veteran Rosalyn Morris, a mental health specialist assigned to Forward Operating Base Dogwood alongside the Mississippi Guard unit in 2005, contributed an oral history after Lyon contacted her in 2023.

Having spent so many years working in the mental-health space, sharing her story was a “cathartic experience.”

To this day, Morris said, she has “so much respect” for the Guard and what its members are able to accomplish, noting negative connotations that have been associated with the service over the years.

“The weekend warriors, they’re all not fit. That kind of myth,” she recounts. “That’s not what I experienced, and I think it’s important for those Guard stories to be told.”

‘Generate dialogue among the 54’

Greene says the center’s goal is to “generate dialogue among the 54” and become a hub for command historians and institutions studying Guard history.

Lyon said the aim is for each state to develop a partnership between the Guard and a university, mirroring the Mississippi model, with the center helping states launch and sustain those efforts.

For example, Maj. Gen. Paul Rogers, the adjutant general of Michigan, invited center staff to help conduct oral histories related to “unprecedented challenges and accomplishments” from the past eight years.

In that period, the Michigan Guard responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, a 500-year flood, a massive ice storm, and protests and civil unrest in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder.

“We were doing all of that while still maintaining readiness for national defense,” says Rogers, who is also the NGAUS chairman of the board.

Their goal, according to Rogers, is to obtain oral histories from about 40 Guardsmen ranging from those in leadership and planning positions all the way down to boots on the ground.

Rogers said that working with Southern Miss will give Michigan the knowledge, skills, and experience to start building his state’s living history in parallel with Mississippi.

“If we can be successful working with Mississippi, then I’m hoping it catches on with other states, and pretty soon we create this network that ties to a national resource,” he says.

Providing that unified space for Guard history, according to Greene, also is a “service to the country.”

“It’s something that needs to be done,” he says. “The Guard men and women who have served deserve it — not only so their stories can be researched and taught, but so they are preserved for future generations. In time, the goal is a national network across the 54, tied to a single resource that protects the Guard’s legacy in perpetuity.”

For all the momentum behind the project, Lyon says its long-term future still depends on one thing: codification in law in the National Defense Authorization Act, which will make possible a steady source of federal funding. That may soon happen. Both the House Armed Services and Senate Armed Services committees have included language in their versions of fiscal 2027 NDAA to  “establish and maintain the Center for the Study of the National Guard as a public-private partnership to minimize costs to the Federal Government.”

The center currently relies on private donations, with the Armed Forces Benefit Association serving as its founding sponsor and largest donor. Southern Miss supports the work through in-kind contributions, including staff salaries, travel expenses and office space.

If Congress acts, the Guard’s story may finally have a permanent home equal to its reach. 

The author is a freelance writer based in Maryville, Illinois, who specializes in military matters. She can be reached via [email protected].

The Center for the Study of the National Guard is located on the campus of the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Its motto is Guarding History. More information is available at www.csnguard.org.