The Revolution remembered : eyewitness accounts of the war for independence / edited by John C. Dann. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1980. Main Library, E275.A2 R48 First-hand accounts taken from pension applications in the National Archives. While most veterans were content to just fill in the application, there were others who wanted to describe the actions they were in or other events, o r to comment on certain commanders and buddies, and they wrote page after page of their military experiences and appended them to their pension applications. Most diaries and memoirs of veterans of the Revolution are by officers, but most of these are by privates and convey a real sense of what it meant to be a soldier and see camp life and battle at close range.