The duties of those in the military sometimes require secret missions but as Army Major Monroe Ginsburg and a rabbi friend of his snuck palm leaves back from the desert taking care to avoid notice by the national religious police, the mission seemed a somewhat more personal one.

However, the duty was no less important.

“We did build the only sukkah in Saudi Arabia at the time,” said Ginsburg, 57, noting that American personnel from as far away as Riyadh came to attend services atop the Dhahran apartment building. “Singing Jewish songs and in the background hearing the Muslim calls to worship was a very cool religious experience.”

Ginsburg, a congregant at Shaare Zedek, is among those veterans relating a number of their past experiences in uniform as part of the Missouri Veterans History Project, a private effort to chronicle the memories of vets on video for storage in the Library of Congress.

The effort began when state Rep. Jill Schupp, D-Creve Coeur,  found herself taking a difficult vote on funding for a veterans’ oral history project during a time of increasing fiscal austerity.

“We decided to cut those dollars out of the budget, which I thought was the right move,” she said, “but at the same time I felt it was important to continue to capture our veterans’ stories.”

Schupp decided to help spearhead an initiative that would accomplish the same goal without taxpayer funding.

In fact, she said the effort hardly relies on funding at all. Much of the project, which consists of videotaping the recollections of state residents who have served in the military, has utilized in-kind donations from various groups and private concerns, such as the videography and transcription, which are being provided by Midwest Litigation Services. Various veterans groups have also been a part of the program. Money has played little role in the equation.

“I think that I’m the only contributor so far,” Schupp said. “Everybody involved has volunteered their time and services.”

The group is on a pace to meet their goal of recording the stories of at least 111 veterans by 11/11/11—Veterans Day. The initiative is open to all Missouri veterans who served in any capacity. Stories run from the Greatest Generation right up through present-day conflicts in Iraq.

But Schupp said that initial milestone of 111 is only the beginning of a program she hopes will tell many more stories.

The Creve Coeur Democrat noted that it’s particularly important to speak to WWII vets, whose numbers are shrinking daily.

“That’s a priority because these people are getting older and we want to make sure that while their health and memories are intact that we record these,” she said.

But other eras in history are represented as well. Steve Keyser, 60, is one veteran who will be featured. Having joined the Air Force during the 1970s in the midst of the Cold War, he can recall well the day he was working underground in the launch control center when it appeared that the Soviet Union might have begun a nuclear strike at the United States.

The alert, the result of an apparent communications snafu between the two superpowers over an exercise of some type, didn’t last long, probably only a matter of 10 or 15 minutes.

“It seemed much longer at the time,” chuckled the Shaare Zedek congregant.

Keyser, a native of East St. Louis who now resides in Creve Coeur, said he feels the project is important to maintain a sense of interplay between civilians and the soldiers who protect them.

“I don’t know the demographics today but they say that the middle-and-upper class people don’t have the same relationship with the military because they don’t always have people that they know who are serving as much as when you go back to the era of WWII, Korea and Vietnam,” said Keyser, who spent four years on active duty and 26 years in the reserves, eventually rising to the rank of colonel. “At that time I think there was much more of a connection between everyday citizens and the military.”

Joseph Iken, 88, is another participant in the project. The St. Louis native was going to pharmacy school when he enlisted in the military where he started taking engineering classes. After a reshuffling of military priorities he was yanked back from school and transferred from the medical corps to the signal corps where the aspiring pharmacist found himself climbing telephone poles and soldering wires, a situation he hardly could have imagined two years earlier.

“That’s the way the Army works,” he laughed.

Iken was about to ship out to the South Pacific in 1944 but the night before he left, doctors discovered a lung infection that would keep him from combat and leave him in a veterans’ hospital for two years.

The University City resident, who attends Shaare Zedek, said the program is a valuable one and he hopes future generations will benefit from it.

“I have 19 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren and I think it might be interesting to one of them in the future,” he said. “The record will be permanent.”

Ginsburg agrees. Though he served in two conflicts – Grenada and Desert Storm – he thinks it’s vital for the nation to understand the stories of those who have made far greater sacrifices than he. A dentist now practicing in St. Peters, he remembers listening to the experiences of one of his patients who stormed Omaha Beach on D-Day in 1944.

“A lot of Americans have no idea what our veterans have done. Many folks take our freedoms for granted,” said the Creve Coeur resident. “It’s important to tell the story because the younger generation doesn’t really know and as the older generations fade away some of these stories are lost.”

The Missouri Veterans History Project continues to seek volunteers to help contact and record participants. To speak about volunteer opportunities or to give testimony as a veteran, phone 314-616-5009 or 573-522-4220 or visit www.mvhp.net.