Happy Memorial Day! Tune in today during the 10 AM hour for a Memorial Day Special from Hearing Voices. Green Beret and poet, Major Robert Schaefer, US Army, hosts the voices of veterans remembering their comrades. Hear conversations with troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, reading their emails, poems, and journals, as part of the NEA project: "Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience." The piece also includes interviews from StoryCorps, an essay from This I Believe, and the sounds of a Military Honor Guard, recorded by Charles Lane. And we attend the daily "Last Post" ceremony by Belgian veterans honoring the WWI British soldiers who died defending a small town in western Belgium. This piece is produced by Marjorie Van Halteren.
And at 6:30 PM, The Vietnam Tapes of Michael A. Baronowski, an award-winning documentary from Lost and Found Sound. In 1966, a young marine took a reel-to reel tape recorder with him into the Vietnam War. For two months, until he was killed in action, Michael Baronowski made tapes of his friends, of life in fighting holes, of combat. 34 years later, his comrade Tim Duffie brought Baronowski's three-inch reels to Lost & Found Sound. The Vietnam Tapes of Lance Corporal Michael A. Baronowski aired on NPR's All Things Considered on the 25th anniversary of America's withdrawal from the Vietnam.