A 28-year-old has spent the last decade driving all 50 states to track down the last World War II combat veterans and record their stories before they’re gone for good.
His name is Rishi Sharma. For 10 years, he has made WWII veteran interviews his life’s work: find a veteran, sit with him for hours, then hand the recording to the family for free. He calls the project Remember WWII. So far, he has logged more than 3,000 interviews.
Sharma’s latest stop was Yorktown, New York, where he sat across from Nils Mockler, a 100-year-old Marine. Mockler landed on Iwo Jima on the first day of one of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history.
Sharma asked him what it meant to watch the American flag go up over Mount Suribachi.
“The hair on my arms still stands up,” Mockler told CBS News.
Sharma’s own story started in 2014, when he was a junior in high school in Southern California. He skipped class to ride his bike to a local senior home, hoping someone there would talk to him.
“There are real superhero World War II vets out there,” he told CBS News in 2016.
He isn’t a veteran and doesn’t come from a military family – his parents immigrated to the U.S. from India. The mission took over anyway: first the bike, then a car, then a route that covered every state in the country. One of his earliest subjects was Marine tank commander Ernie Eisley, who described a Japanese ambush planned for nightfall.
He does it, he has said, because the clock is louder than anything else. A decade ago, roughly 700,000 World War II veterans were still alive. Today, only about 30,000 remain.
“I wake up every day to obituaries,” he told CBS News in 2018 – men he’d hoped to reach in time.
Mockler knows that math better than most. He enlisted in the Marines in 1944 at 17, after being turned away a year earlier for being underage and underweight. He served as a combat intelligence scout with the 4th Marine Division’s Tank Battalion, landing on Iwo Jima’s first day, at the start of a 36-day battle.
This spring, ahead of his 100th birthday, Rep. Mike Lawler and VA Secretary Doug Collins visited him with a congressional certificate and a challenge coin. It was a small, formal nod to a story most Americans will only ever read about.
Sharma funds the whole project through donations and sleeps in his car between stops when he has to. Every recording goes straight to the veteran’s family, and nothing is held back or edited for him to keep.
His interview with Mockler aired the same week the country marked 250 years of independence. A coincidence Sharma didn’t plan, but one that fits.
He says that when the last of this generation is gone, probably within the next decade, the country won’t just lose war stories. It will lose the people who quietly set the standard for everyone else. Until then, he isn’t stopping. There is always one more veteran he hasn’t met yet.
