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The Veterans History Project (VHP) of the American Folklife Center collects, preserves, and makes accessible the personal accounts of American military veterans so that future generations may hear directly from veterans and better understand the realities of military service.
In addition to filtering search results using search facets, it is also possible to use the Advanced Search options to narrow the results in advance of displaying a set of results. This section of the guide offers an introduction to how to use Advanced Search limits to construct a more narrow search at the start of your research.
Using Advanced Search, you can search all of the descriptive text from a veteran's collection, including in many cases the text of transcribed interviews. Please note, however, that the descriptive information available online is heavily dependent on the level of detail provided by the veteran and/or donor when their collection was donated to the Library of Congress. For instance, not all collections will have information listed for "Battles & Campaigns" that a veteran may have participated in.
From the landing page (https://www.loc.gov/collections/veterans-history-project-collection/) for the Veterans History Project Collection, you can access Advanced Search by selecting the adjacent blue "plus sign" to open the window.
In the Advanced Search box, you will several drop-down menus for "Search Limits." Open the drop-down menu titled "Select Wars & Conflicts" and select "Vietnam War, 1961 to 1975" to limit your search to only Vietnam War veterans:
In addition to narrowing your search to Vietnam War veterans, you can use the other drop-down menus within the Advanced Search box to limit the search by Service Branch, Service Unit, Location of Service, Battles & Campaigns, Highest Rank, Prisoner of War status, Race, and Gender.
Please note that the information provided in these fields is based on information provided by veterans and donors at the time their collections are donated to the Library of Congress. Because of this, similar information may be expressed in different ways in the Service Unit, Location of Service, and Battles & Campaigns fields.
Once you have selected one or more search limits, you can now enter your search word(s) into the search box. If you enter more than one word in the box, you can further indicate the relationship between the words by selecting an option from the adjacent drop-down menu: "All of these words" indicates that all words in any order must be present in each of the search results (e.g., Boolean AND); "Any of these words" indicates that any of the words entered may be present in each of the search results (Boolean OR); "This exact phrase" indicates that all words must be present in each of the results as a phrase (the same action and putting the phrase in quotes). The search in the screenshot below been structured to look for the exact phrase "Agent Orange":
Advanced searches can be helpful in conducting topical research, but it is important to understand their limitations. Advanced searches will search only among the text included on the veteran's collection page, as well as within any transcripts that may be available.
For more tips on searching the Library's Digital Collection, you may wish to consult the Search Help page.
For assistance with more specific or focused research based on your interests we suggest you use our "Ask a Librarian" service in order to connect with one of our reference specialists.
