First hour: Local veterans honor Gold Star families
Second hour: Front Lines: A Selected Shorts Memorial Day Special
This Memorial Day, we hear from two local veterans who served our country during the Vietnam War, and who are now serving Gold Star families in Rochester. The Gold Star Families Memorial Monument honors relatives of fallen service members. Located in White Haven Memorial Park in Pittsford, the monument was dedicated in June 2016. We hear from Barry Culhane and John White about the effort to honor local Gold Star families, and about their experiences serving our country.
Then in our second hour, it's "Front Lines: A Selected Shorts Memorial Day Special" from PRI. On Memorial Day, we honor soldiers who have given their lives in battle, and remember also those who are still serving. On this special Selected Shorts program, we hear four works that look at the experience of war in different ways, from the real-life account of an officer to a futurist’s fantasy. Our first reading is from the anthology Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan, and the Home Front, in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families. “Dear Boys” was a selection of emails written by Lieutenant Colonel Chris Cohoes to his young sons while he was serving in the Middle East. One of them is read here by Matthew Modine. Our second story imagines the experience of a former slave serving in the British Army during the Revolutionary War. Charles Johnson’s “A Soldier for the Crown,” is read by Ruben Santiago-Hudson. Our third story is Robert Olen Butler’s “A Mother in the Trenches,” in which a determined woman visits her son on the front lines of France during World War I. The reader is Kathleen Chalfant. Our final story is by the late Brazilian writer Moacyr Scliar. His comically dystopian “Peace and War” imagines war as just another clock-punching job. It’s read by Michael Cristofer.
