Special Programming
For the Fallen
The host is Green Beret and poet Major Robert Schaefer, US Army Special Forces. This hour-long special features the voices of veterans remembering their comrades. From Hearing Voices, the independent producers’ collective.
Part One: Host Major Robert Schaefer, U.S. Army Special Forces, a Green Beret and poet, reveals his love-hate relationship with the bugle call "Taps." We join a "Military Honor Guard" in Long Island, recorded by Charles Lane. We hear interviews with World War Two and Vietnam vets from the public radio's StoryCorps and This I Believe series. Composer Phil Kline sets to music the slogans Vietnam soldiers etched into their lighters, in Zippo Songs. And we attend the daily ceremony by Belgian veterans honoring the WWI British soldiers who died defending a small town in western Belgium (produced by Marjorie Van Halteren and Helen Engelhardt).
Part Two: We hear troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, reading their emails, poems, and journals, as part of the NEA project: "Operation Homecoming," and selections from the NEA CD Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience with well-known authors reading their poems, prose, and essays about their timer in the military. (Major Schaefer, the Host of this special, contributed the poem "Clusters" to the book.)
• More information is available at HearingVoices.com
Photo Credit: Jeff Swensen / Getty Images News