"War is hell," said Civil War general William Sherman. We can begin to understand a fraction of its truth only through stories, which makes the Veterans History Project, a repository of more than 80,000 firsthand accounts of servicemen and women from World War I through today's wars in Iraq and Afghanistan collected by the Library of Congress, an especially invaluable resource as we celebrate Memorial Day.

Stories of war, from combat in the Argonne Forest to the perils of convoy transport in Iraq nearly a century later, give voice to the millions of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines who've shouldered arms in defense of the United States.

The collection's interviews, letters, videos and photographs have reached the Library through veterans' families, friends or comrades in arms, says Robert Patrick, director of the project, an extension of the American Folklife Center in Washington, D.C. “It's history as a collection of stories, put together to tell the story from the ground up,” says Patrick. “You’ve got generals and statesmen who’ve written their memoirs and described their grand strategies, but these are people who turned wrenches, ran hospitals and marched on the ground.”

There are extraordinary tales, from Lt. Roland Neel's gripping account of his pilot pulling control wires by hand to keep his wood and canvas biplane from crashing on the battlefields of the Western Front in 1918 to Col. Rebecca Winter's description of her convoy coming under enemy fire in the Iraqi desert in 2003.

Veterans who've seen action frequently say it's something that can't truly be described, that it's terrifying and exhilarating all at once. Scanning these accounts offers some hint to other readers, even if the stories themselves are sometimes told with great difficulty. A 98-year-old veteran of bitter battles in Italy in 1945 once quipped that "combat concentrates the mind wonderfully” while it's happening, but that it's often difficult to recall the details of war.

The very accessible submission process gives anyone a chance to preserve a wartime story. “If you want to do something important this Memorial Day, sit down with a veteran,” Patrick says. “You’re capturing a part of history by keeping these stories with us, even after many of these veterans are gone.”

The trove includes recollections from Frank Buckles, who died in 2011 at age 110, the last American survivor of the Great War. He brought history to life -- in one of his last interviews he noted that two years as an ambulance driver with the American Expeditionary Force earned him the princely sum of $143.90, including a $60 bonus.

The ordinary concerns that arise even in extraordinary situations are a constant presence. Bill Washington, an army sergeant whose military service took him out of the Baltimore ghetto, relates both the racial tensions of the military during the Vietnam War and the mundane frustrations of having only ham and lima beans rations to eat during the harrowing 1968 siege of Khe Sanh.

An examination of the archives hints at larger lessons to be learned from listening to veterans. In discussing his 1996 memoir, “Doing Battle:The Making of a Skeptic," the late scholar and critic Paul Fussell, known best for chronicling war's horrors and their profound influence on culture in “The Great War and Modern Memory,” described the lasting impact of his own experiences as a young infantryman fighting in southern France in 1944. “You learn that you have much wider dimensions than you had imagined before you had to fight a war. That’s salutary. It’s well to know exactly who you are, so you can conduct the rest of your life properly.”

Charles Barkley famously admonished fans that "I am not a role model" in an iconic 1990s commercial. Ohio State basketball benchwarmer Mark Titus took a whole book to make the same point, often hilariously. Titus, an Indiana high school standout who played on traveling teams laden with future NBA talent, soon realized the limitations of his abilities as a walk-on at a top-tier Division I basketball program -- "they were bigger, faster and more athletic than I was." -- and embraced his status as college scrub, earning a quirky measure of fame in the process.

His blog, ClubTrillion.com, named after a basketball box score that shows one minute played and a string of zeros for all other statistical categories, attracted a following, and his best posts formed the backbone of “Don’t Put Me In, Coach,” which offers basketball fans an inside look at jock culture, laced with irreverent, often sophomoric humor. Titus lives in Columbus, Ohio, and writes about basketball for the web site Grantland.com.

Will Swarts: You've given people a pretty free-wheeling, jokey look what it's like inside big college basketball, but it's not critical or anything like a takedown of Division I sports.

Mark Titus: The concept of the book was to give people some idea of a behind the scenes look at one of the best basketball programs in the country. I think the fact that we're in the Final Four again reaffirms that. And it's good timing for me and makes the book that much more relevant.

Mark Titus: It's not about inspiring stuff or beating huge odds. I was in a lucky position to be on the team at all, so my philosophy was to have as much fun as I could. Rather than striving for an inspirational tone, or focusing on a moment when I cracked the lineup and broke through, I was just striving to have as much fun as I could, and that seemed to work out well for me.

Will Swarts: Still, "Don't Put Me In" probably won't be used to motivate underdog athletes in any sport, unless they're looking for pointers on locker room pranks or advanced trash-talking.

Mark Titus: I don't know that you should have your kids necessarily look up to me. I may not have that "strive for your best and get over the hump" attitude. But did the best I could with what I have.

Will Swarts: At the same time, you were good enough to play for Ohio State and were a part of a Final Four team in 2007. That's not something the average scrub gets to say, and you really play it off through the book.

Mark Titus: Yeah, there is a lot of self-deprecation in the book. I was a decent player, and I was so used to being good. When I started playing at Ohio State, it was like discovering that everyone else was so much better, and my way of coping was to make fun of myself. I wanted to get out in front of the people that I thought were making fun of me, and that why I started my blog. I was pretty insecure, and this was kind of my security blanket. I enjoy making fun of myself, and I've made fun of pretty much everybody I've ever played with.

Will Swarts: But, still, you got there, and that did take a lot of work.

Mark Titus: When you're on a team the only way you get respect is what you do on the court. The guys I played with liked me, but I had to prove myself on the court. I had the deck stacked against me. I'm not quite as big as those guys and I'm not quite as athletic. But all through high school, I played summer basketball and I kind of found ways to hide my weaknesses. I found a way to become good enough that you couldn't tell I was awful.

They were better shooters than me, faster than me, had more range than me. Again, it's almost an anti-inspirational approach. If I was playing defense, for example, the guy with the ball would be able to dribble around me pretty easily, but I did learn to be as crafty as possible. I understood I was slow and I'm not that athletic, and I needed to embrace that.

Will Swarts: So now you're a working writer, and your basketball career is over, despite your amusing attempt to enter the 2009 NBA draft with fewer than 20 total points to your name over a four-year career. What's your relationship to the sport now?

Mark Titus: I still play for fun. I'm really watching more closely than the average fan. I'm still a basketball fanatic, a basketball junkie. But I don't play seriously, I don't coach. Once I graduated, I needed a bit of break. Basketball had been a huge part of my life, a huge thing, but also a bit of a burden. I got up every morning to go to the gym, there was all that time at practice and in the weight room, and it was really a job. Now that I've been away from it for a while, I miss it and would like to start playing more.

Will Swarts: Any thoughts about this year's NCAA tournament as it gets near the end?

Mark Titus: It hasn't been as exciting as in previous years, since there haven't been a lot of upsets getting to the Final Four. But even for an average fan, this is a good Final Four. People always enjoy a Cinderella story, and you don't have that with Ohio State, Kansas, Louisville and Kentucky in the Final Four. But if you have a No 10, No. 11 seed in the Final Four, it kind of destroys the credibility of the process. It's great we've got four really good teams. I'd say Kentucky is obviously the team to beat, and that will be a rivalry game with Louisville, so it'll be fun to watch. As for Ohio State, I like our chances, we have (forward) Jared Sullinger, and especially in the tournament, anyone can beat anyone on a given night. But even if Ohio State wasn't in it, I'd be pretty excited. Anything can happen.

Will Swarts: Well, the transition of you from the most famous bench-warmer in the Big Ten Athletic Conference to a basketball antihero is pretty much proof of that.

Mark Titus: Well, selfishly I wrote the book so 50 years from now I can look back on it and reminisce about this stuff. What was always important to me was the relationships I had with my teammates. Pretty much every guy I played with, I loved 'em to death. The average fan might look at my situation and think it would be great to be on a team and be playing, and then be able remember "I scored this many points when I was on that court that time." But even in high school, when I was the best player on my team, it was always the bus rides, the jokes in practices and the time with the teammates. When I get together with my teammates, and we still see each other, nobody says "Remember when we beat Michigan State and I had 20 points and you had 17 points?" It's always about things like pranks in the locker room or joking around that makes up the memories.

Will Swarts: That almost sounds like a sensitive side to this pretty funny and sometimes crude book. Are you talking about...feelings?

Mark Titus: I have an older brother, he's three years older, and when we were playing together on the team in high school, I saw him realize that he wasn't ever going to be good enough to play in college. I saw him go through that process, right around December or January of his senior year, where he realized, "I have two or three months left in my career." He kind of flipped a switch and said "I need to have as much fun as I can." I saw that as a 14-year-old and I kind of adopted that attitude in college. I tell a lot of immature jokes and have a very crude sense of humor, but I'd been able to see the end with a little more foresight. I was able to see that relationships are the most important thing. That camaraderie really mattered to me. I was sarcastic a lot of the time, but my teammates really mattered to me.

"Et tu, Brute?" is the ultimate epitaph of betrayal, but few remember that Brutus and his buddies meant well. Sure, the disgruntled senators who gutted Caesar were settling scores, personal and political, but they were also trying to save democracy. In the age of spin, memoirs allow politicians on each side of a double-cross to unsheathe their rhetorical knives and let readers judge for themselves.

"Going Rogue" by Sarah Palin

The former Vice Presidential candidate's account of the 2008 presidential campaign, "Going Rogue," is a stark example of both hubris and score-settling. In the memoir, "Sarah Barracuda" takes a knife to virtually everyone in the McCain campaign, yet somehow her naivete shines through. In one egregious example, Palin rails against the McCain camp's decision to "keep me, my family and friends back home and my governor's staff all bottled up," yet the author barely seems to recognize that her great media coming-out moment was the famously disastrous interview with Katie Couric -- an unbottling which may have sunk the Republican ticket.

"In My Time" by Dick Cheney

Dick Cheney swings in all directions in his Bush administration memoir "In My Time." He accuses Condeleeza Rice of being naive and obstructionist. He attacks Colin Powell for expressing concern about the Iraq war and admits to trying to get Powell ousted from the Cabinet. Cheney also accuses the head of the CIA, George Tenet, of weakness for resigning "when the going got tough," even though he claims to have offered his own resignation several times. Of John McCain, Cheney is equally dismissive: "McCain added nothing of substance...I left the Cabinet Room when the meeting was over thinking the Republican presidential ticket was in trouble." And even hi boss George W. Bush, does not escape unscathed. Cheney calls Bush out on his decisions regarding Syria (Cheney wanted to bomb) and Lewis "Scooter" Libby (Cheney wanted a pardon) and General Motors (Cheney wanted to pull the plug).

"Rewriting History" by Dick Morris

It's not just the Republicans whose political memoirs are filled with self-justifying attacks on friends, co-workers and former bosses. Clinton campaign operative Dick Morris holds nothing back in his full-throated denunciation of the Clintons, particularly the former First Lady. In his rebuttal of Hillary Clinton's "Living History," the disgraced political consultant accuses her of having a "dark" and "hidden side," which he says is "integral to her political essence." Likening her political duplicity to Richard Nixon, Morris wields savage rhetoric like a blade, saying that "Hillary must fabricate stories from her past, adopt myths about the present, and cloak her ambitions and insecurities behind a righteous facade in order to accomplish her political goals."

"Locked in the Cabinet" by Robert Reich

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich left his post in the Clinton Administration disillusioned by President's stark centrist-minded pragmatism. This was due in no small part to Morris' counsel, which Reich dismisses as a "betrayal of ideals" and describes Morris as a Mephistophelean "corrupter of all means to an end that is never fully realized." When it comes to his patrons and bosses, the progressive liberal's diary-format critique is more muted: "It was probably a mistake" for Hillary Clinton to have been in charge of health care reform, he wrote of the disastrous initiative that tarred the administration as bureaucratic bunglers.

"Overhaul" by Steven Rattner

More recently, Steven Rattner's six-month stint in the Obama administration trying to resuscitate U.S. auto industry didn't stop a double-barreled critique of Obama's key advisers. Rahm Emanuel, Tim Geithner, Larry Summers and Sheila Bair all come in for scorn and disdain, with Bair, the former head of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation dismissed as a "sharp-elbowed, sometimes disingenuous self-promoter" and Summers described as both imperious and an occasional butt of jokes made by younger White House staffers. While he's less scorched-earth about Obama, he makes the point that had the incoming administration been more decisive and fast-moving, it could have saved billions of dollars while still pulling Detroit back from the brink.