In recent years, the war memory theory field has been developing enormously, and oral history has been one of its most powerful tools for accessing personal and collective memories. This methodology has been instrumental in recovering and/or collecting experiences of war, violence and trauma. For some individuals, war is ever present, it is a constant, indelible memory visible in one's body: when an ex-combatant is disabled for life, he has to live with war permanently and his past experience is necessarily life shaping. This paper is based on the testimony of Mr. A. Fortuna, a lived example of this reality, one of the estimated 30,000 disabled war veterans (Ribeiro, 1999) of the Portuguese Colonial War (1961-1974), who was interviewed for a DPhil research project on the memories of its ex-combatants. In 1971, A. Fortuna, now aged 59, lost his eyesight and both arms in Guinea-Bissau, something which subsequently meant a life entirely shaped by the war and his disability. This conflict's memory - notwithstanding the fact that this is a major event in 20th century Portuguese history - remains largely unexplored. Some authors point out that 'the shame reached such an extent that after 1974 the colonial war was cautiously swept away from the collective memory' (Ribeiro, 1999) and its ex-combatants are covered by 'a suffocating veil of silence and neglect' (Gomes, 2004), especially the war disabled, uncomfortable reminders of a war the nation is not willing to remember. Taking Mr. Fortuna's interview as a starting point, this paper reflects on some of the challenges an oral historian has to face when interviewing disabled war veterans. It aims at presenting an example of how oral history can shed some light on a less visible topic of Portuguese contemporary history.
war memory; oral history; Portuguese Colonial War