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A great deal of work remains to be done to historicize the formation and evolution of armies in the Sahel whilst focusing on the experiences of these men in uniform. Hoping to stimulate further research, the overview we present in this article seeks to build bridges between both the institutional dimension and the personal aspects of everyday life when studying the history of the military in Mauritania, Mali, and Niger after 1960. This article presents a variety of sources that shed light on the issues at stake during this period, and examines the imbalance caused by the ease of access to French archives as opposed to African archives. The challenge is to achieve this combination with an extremely sparse documentation which is, in the current political context, embedded in very active spheres of memory.