KSV News: Short Round 031
Red Clay Paper Magazines Get A Home
In the prior Short Round newsletter, we discussed how LtGen Charles Chiarotti and the Marine Corps Association (MCA) pointed us in the right direction for a permanent home for our Red Clay magazine collection.
It turns out that the BGen Edwin H. Simmons History Center, which is housed in the Marine Corps History Division of the Gen Alfred Gray Marine Corps University, is the perfect home for our Red Clay Magazines. Their particulars here: https://www.usmcu.edu/Research/History-Division/.
My telcons about preserving the Red Clay paper magazines with Shawn Callihan, who is the Director of the History Division, are encouraging!! He arranges a meeting for me with John Lyles, who is the Chief Archivist. Getting closer to the “seat of power”.
So…. back down Route 95 to Quantico (always a challenge) with two boxes containing our paper Red Clay Magazine Collection in new plastic covers. Surprisingly, John meets me in the parking lot across the street with a cart for the boxes- things are most definitely looking up! Guessing LtGen Chiarotti and Director Callihan have opened the proverbial doors to the kingdom for us.
John is great. He explains that there is a committee which actually “accepts” donations like our magazines. That process can take up to a year. But, as an aside, he assures me that we are pretty much a lock for getting accepted. Coming from the Chief Archivist, I take that as a pretty good sign.
I look around at the History Division receiving room at other donations. It is just remarkable the depth and breath of materials that have been offered to the collection. I think I saw the surrender documents from the Japanese, alongside some sort of a Japanese sword. And this temporary holding area contains many dozens of additional documents and memorabilia. It is like being in the basement of The Smithsonian, only all USMC related stuff. Who Knew!!~
They also have a computer website digitally housing much of their collection. I give John our thumb drive with all of the scans of our Red Clay magazines so that they can eventually be accessible on the History Division website. However, there is of course, a challenge imposed by the federal government. All their web site postings have to go through some sort of scrubbing process to make sure that there are no privacy violations in any of our documents. That sounds to me like a decade or more of analysis, even if they can unleash AI on it.
My conclusion is that we are far better off having all of our Red Clay collection safely digitally housed and easily accessible on our new website khesanh.vet
So, there it is. Decades of photos, first person accounts, and all sorts of materials related to the battle of Khe Sanh. When explored in its full depth, ours will be the defining first person historical collection of the battle. Everything to follow has been and will be analyzing much of the same source information. We have made history.
SF
Bob Koury: Website & Digital Manager