October is American Archives Month, and to celebrate, Stars and Stripes Archives and Library is sharing some “behind the scenes” images of Stripes’ operations, its staff and its archives throughout the paper’s eight decades of existence.

Stars and Stripes, Saigon bureau, Vietnam, December 1964: A photo of a Stars and Stripes circulation vehicle was published in the April 1965 issue of SandS, the Pacific Stars and Stripes employee newsletter. The van, used to distribute newspapers around Saigon, was heavily damaged parked close to Hotel Brink when a bomb exploded there Christmas Eve, 1964. Two Americans were killed and over a hundred wounded at the hotel — the main officers billet in downtown Saigon. Among the injured were also two Stars and Stripes circulation employees. Luckily, both employees, a Vietnamese driver and a newsboy, escaped serious injury. Another vehicle was flown in from Tokyo to keep up distribution to the troops.

Since 2004 the archives staff has worked to make more of our historic content available online. We have digitized our 1948-1999 European and Pacific editions, as well as several of our WWII editions and made them available online through http://starsandstripes.newspaperarchive.com/

In 2014 we focused our efforts on the preservation and digitization of our vast photo archives and have been slowly but steadily digitizing negatives, slides and prints — mainly concentrating on those with preservation issues. Some of the images in our archives show the perils of not just news gathering in a combat zone, but also news delivery.