There are testimonies of the Algerian war seen and experienced by the contingent soldiers: novels, memories, films, photographic reports, comic strips. Are these various documents self-explanatory or not? In most cases, they are not in the strict sense [...]. Moreover, it is likely that they will have personal memories, but it is difficult to disentangle the part of historical reality and fiction, like, on the other hand, the share of personal experiences and impersonal information. Hence, the idea of ‘making’ conscripts of the contingent, men who mostly never wrote their testimony, apart from letters to their families, and sometimes had never talked about them, as several of them acknowledge. They were not offered a questionnaire, but a very open instruction: tell in their way their military service in Algeria. [...] The sound archives on which this article is based have been deposited at the phonlibrary of the Mediterranean House of Human Sciences (MMSH) and can be listened to online: http://phonotheque.mmsh.huma-num.fr/dyn/portal/index.seam?page=alo&aloId=3752&fonds=&cid=16