Rishi Sharma & RememberWW2.org

Independent Times News
2 days ago
6 min read

The Debt We Owe, and the Young Man Paying It

A decade ago, roughly 700,000 American veterans of the Second World War were still living. Today, fewer than 30,000 remain. Nearly all of them are in their late nineties or past one hundred. That is not a statistic. That is a countdown.

When the last of them goes, America loses something no archive can replace: the living voice of the generation that fought fascism abroad so that self-government could survive at home. We will still have the textbooks. We will no longer have the men who were there.

One 28-year-old decided that was unacceptable and then spent ten years doing something about it.

Preserving the stories of the Greatest Generation, Sharma says, will inspire those who come after to live up to their standards — and to "uphold the values that over 400,000 Americans gave their entire lives up for." — Rishi Sharma, to CBS News.

Introducing Rishi Sharma

Rishi Sharma was not born into a military family. His parents immigrated to the United States from India. He had no grandfather with a footlocker in the attic, no family story to chase.

What he had was a book. In high school in Agoura Hills, California, he read about American combat veterans and did something most teenagers would never think to do: he picked up the phone and called one to say thank you. The veteran started talking. Sharma realized he was holding the man's chapter in one hand and the man himself in the other and that nobody was writing down the rest.

So he rode his bike to a retirement community down the road from his school, walked up to the front desk, and asked to meet some World War II heroes. The director introduced him to twenty-five of them.

He graduated in 2016 and hit the road that December. He has not really stopped since.

The Mission: A Race Against Time

Sharma founded a nonprofit first called Heroes of the Second World War, now Remember WWII, with a goal that sounds impossible until you look at the numbers: film an in-depth interview with every surviving World War II combat veteran of the Allied nations before there are none left.

Ten years and more than 3,000 interviews later, he has crossed all fifty states, plus Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and France. He has interviewed veterans nearly every single day of the last decade.

He takes no salary. Donations go to gas, rental cars, and camera batteries. He has lived out of vehicles for years at a stretch to stretch the money further and to spend the savings on one more veteran, in one more town, before it is too late.

https://youtu.be/5ZQSN7VaDfQ?si=XQ-ztMtMb-KGIvX0

Honoring World War II vets before it's too late |. CBS Sunday Morning | Feb 25, 2018

How It Works

The method is deliberately unglamorous.

Long-form, not soundbites. Sharma sits with each veteran for hours, not minutes. He asks about the fear, the boredom, the friendships, the nightmares, not just the dates and unit numbers.
The family gets the tape. Every veteran and their family receives a free copy of the full recording. No paywall, no licensing fee. A great-great-grandchild will one day be able to hear how their grandparent laughed.
Preserved for the public record. Interviews are archived and shared publicly, with copies contributed for long-term preservation and used by schools and universities.
Referral-driven. Anyone can submit a veteran's name. Much of Sharma's route is built from tips sent in by families, VFW posts, and neighbors.

This month, Sharma sat down in Yorktown, New York, with Nils Mockler, a 100-year-old Marine who went ashore at Iwo Jima as a combat intelligence scout. He asked Mockler what it meant to watch the American flag go up. Mockler didn't reach for an adjective. He said the hair on his arms still stands up.

Eighty-one years later, the body remembers. That is what an interview preserves and a textbook cannot. A history book can give you the date and the island; only Mockler can tell you what it did to him and only for a little while longer.

Why This Belongs in Defenders of Democracy

We usually reserve this section of our newsroom for nonprofit institutions fighting to protect our delicate democracy. Rishi Sharma is one man with a camera and a rental car. While there are hundreds of WWII museums around the world, nothing comes close to hearing the in-person experiences of a veteran of war. Democracy is not only defended at the ballot box or in the courtroom; it is also defended in our memory.

In the spring of 1777, with the Revolution's outcome still in doubt, John Adams ended a letter to his wife Abigail with a warning aimed squarely at us:

"Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it."

Adams wrote about a debt his own generation was paying in blood. It came due again in 1941. The men Sharma interviews are the ones who settled it.

Germany had been a democratic republic, and Hitler used the machinery of a constitutional system to dismantle it from the inside: elections canceled, opposition parties outlawed, courts turned into instruments of the state, the free press eliminated, dissenters imprisoned or murdered. Then it spread by force. Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France fell to the German army. Imperial Japan imposed much the same across occupied Asia. By 1941, self-government had all but vanished from continental Europe, and Britain stood nearly alone.

More than 16 million Americans served, but 407,316 never came home. The soldiers restored countries and governments they would never live under, for people they would never meet. Their tremendous heroism, sacrifice, and contributions were captured in Tom Brokaw's 1998 book, and his name for them stuck: The Greatest Generation.

The veterans Sharma is racing to record are the last living witnesses to how quickly a free country can stop being one, and to what ordinary people were willing to pay to restore freedoms for others. Adams assumed posterity could never know that cost. We can, but only for as long as someone like Sharma is still asking.

There is nothing partisan about this work. Sharma is not lobbying, not endorsing, not fundraising for a candidate. He is making sure Americans of every party can still hear, in an older man's own voice, why any of this mattered.

For Independent voters exhausted by politics as combat, that may be the most clarifying thing on this list. These men did not storm a beach for a party. They did it for a country.

https://youtu.be/5_8uCFBtWCQ?si=RtzXEFx8qwAV7GvI

Rishi Sharma interviewing WWII veterans | CBS Sunday Morning | Jul 5, 2026

How You Can Help

The window is closing, and Sharma has said the pace of interviews is already slowing, not because he is slowing down, but because there are fewer people left to interview. How can you help?

Refer a veteran. If you know a living World War II combat veteran, submit their name through Remember WWII. This is the single most valuable thing you can do.
Donate. Every dollar goes to travel and equipment. Sharma draws no salary.
Watch and share. The interviews are free to view. Send one to a young person in your life.
Do it yourself. Record your own family's veterans of any war. Ask the questions now, while there is someone to answer them.

The Last Word

In April 1945, General Dwight D. Eisenhower walked through the newly liberated camp at Ohrdruf. Three days later he wrote to General George Marshall about why he had gone in person:

"The things I saw beggar description.... I visited deliberately to be in a position to give firsthand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to 'propaganda.'"

The Supreme Allied Commander understood, in the middle of the war, what Rishi Sharma understands now: testimony is a defense. Eisenhower made himself a witness on purpose, because he knew a day would come when no one was left who had seen it.

That day is nearly here. Roughly 30,000 American witnesses remain. Sharma is driving toward as many of them as he can reach.

Learn more at Remember WWII, watch the CBS Sunday Morning profile.