Sometimes you just get lucky.

Orlan Svingen
Orlan Svingen

Washington State University graduate students Laura Briere and Jared Chastain, along with their faculty adviser, historian Orlan Svingen, were in College Park, Maryland last spring looking for information about the storied 161st Infantry Regiment when they stepped off the elevator on the wrong floor.

It turned out to be a fortunate mistake.

They’d hoped to find old photographs and other paper documents from the Washington National Guard regiment’s World War II deployment but stumbled onto something even more dramatic. Specifically, an old film reel containing never-before-publicly viewed footage of the unit’s fierce, island-by-island march across the Pacific.

“I wasn’t expecting any video clips,” says Briere, a school teacher from Richmond, Virginia working on a history master’s at WSU in Pullman. “We had gone there hoping to find documents, paperwork and maybe some pictures.”

They came away with so much more.

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