James Smither is Professor of History at Grand Valley State University (PhD Brown University, 1989), and Director of Grand Valley State University Veterans History Project. He has conducted over 1,000 oral history interviews with military veterans, including over one hundred with veterans of the Ripcord campaign. He is co-editor of A Surgeon’s Civil War: The Civil War Letters of Daniel M. Holt, M.D. and editor of Death and Life in the Big Red One