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I vividly remember the stories my grandfather told me about the carnage of the First World War, which people tend to forget was one of the worst massacres in human history.

My family kept its history to itself. On the plus side, I didn't have to hear nightmarish stories about the Holocaust, the pogroms, terrible illnesses, painful deaths. My elderly parents never even spoke about their ailments.

Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.

I think a lot of people, including me, clammed up when a civilian asked about battle, about war. It was fashionable. One of the most impressive ways to tell your war story is to refuse to tell it, you know. Civilians would then have to imagine all kinds of deeds of derring-do.

Veterans' issues are quite close to my heart. I find it quite hard to talk about, actually.

When I was building the Vietnam Memorial, I never once asked the veterans what it was like in the war, because from my point of view, you don't pry into other people's business.

I carry the memories of the ghosts of a place called Vietnam - the people of Vietnam, my fellow soldiers.

My father served as an Army doctor in West Germany in the late '50s and early '60s. As a result, he and my mother - both native southerners - were acutely aware of what had happened during the Holocaust.

We have been telling and hearing and reading war stories for millennia. Their endurance may lie in their impossibility; they can never be complete, for the tensions and the contradictions within them will never be eliminated or resolved. That challenge is essential to their power and their attraction. War stories matter.

We are so used to seeing women as victims of war to be pitied rather than survivors of war to be respected.