About the project

The Human Cost of History makes character-driven animated documentaries about war, disaster and survival, told through the people who lived them. Not the generals and the maps, though those matter. The medics and surgeons. The refugees on the quay. The porters who carried the loads, the interpreters who carried the words, the families who waited for a letter that came back unopened.

Each documentary follows a few documented people through one event. This site is where the research lives: who those people were, what they faced, what the sources say, and where the sources disagree.

Why it exists

I served as a U.S. Navy Hospital Corpsman, and as a Fleet Marine Force corpsman alongside Marines, from 2002 to 2010. That work changes how you read military history.

A history book might say:

I read that sentence and want to know what it means.

• What injuries?
• Who treated them?
• What equipment did they have?
• How were the wounded evacuated, and how long did it take?
• What happened when the medical supplies ran out?
• What did hunger, cold, infection, exhaustion or fear do to the people involved?
• What happened to the survivors after the event disappeared from the history books?

Those questions are the project. Every episode tries to answer them for one event, from the ground.

What my background does and doesn't do

Medical experience in a modern war shapes which questions I ask. It does not make me an authority on Roman surgery, sixteenth-century Mexico or ophthalmology in 1917. Historical claims on this site stand on documented evidence, not on my service. Where I explain an injury in modern terms, the page says that the explanation is modern. How we research sets out the standard.

What you will not find here

War as entertainment. Gore for effect. Deaths with music under them. Numbers counting up like a scoreboard. The people in these stories were not characters in a game, and the documentaries treat them as people.

That's what it cost.