An hour with John Musgrave

if you've been watching the pbs documentary vietnam you know baldwin city residents on the spring i'm j mcintyre and today on kbr percent we're devoting the entire hour to tell the story of his vietnam journey musgrave is featured in a new ken burns lynn novick documentary vietnam musgrave will be at liberty hall tomorrow monday october second along with clips and highlights from the documentary that event what it means to be a patriot is sponsored by casey p t and the watkins museum of history if you missed my interview with ken burns and lynn novick last month it's now archived at our website k pr that k u dot edu while they were in kansas city i asked them about john musgrave and the role he played in their documentary i've always said that if found some evil genie went and took away all of our hundreds of interviews and left us with just one eye would picture and the squid the title the film education john musgrave these incredibly brave and courageous human

being can a marine when we focus on worries wheaton times tend to forget that i'm the conflicts are not just between tribes and armies and nations but within people and the battles that we do within ourselves were a hugely important part of and consequences of war and john has been extraordinarily generous in sharing with us the whole arc of his experiences as he traveled through time and space dealing with vietnam and its members and its close and he's incredibly honest person he's incredibly good man and i've spent my entire life studying americans and many many amazing americans and i don't know anyone who's more amazing job it was eric rabe good fortune sometimes we get like the athletic like that said that this was a reality many times over that time our colleague sarah paulson is the producer of the series her ex husband works with veterans and in traveling the country to a variety of things and he met john musgrave an event that he did in two thousand and he

told his wife since then where sereno i just let the sled in the top ten and you know it doesn't i was isolated all the time jimmy lot of veterans so we took notice and i spoke with john over the phone and had a great conversation with him and thought you know the specialist i think that we should be so we had a meeting and after that meeting he agreed to be interviewed for the film and he was willing to continue working to be there because for a variety of reasons that made sense for us and it wasn't because a lot of us quite a long time ago and i mean he knows who he worries familiar with and other fellows and he knew he was getting into and of that we understood at the time how powerful this interview would be and how profound how generous he was going to be how important history is to art overall narrative of the war i don't give away too much but he's tremendously powerful voice among many in this town and down we can't really say enough about how much we are grateful to him for telling us his story for service your country for his honesty about what the war was really like

and for letting us are our window into his journey it's been a profound experience for everybody on the stone and i just we often safely you know if something terrible happened last all the material we felt for this family had one thing that was on the states it would be ok that's lynn novick and ken burns in kansas city last month to promote their documentary vietnam they were speaking of john musgrave raised in independence missouri now living in baldwin city kansas on today's kbr prisons we're devoting the entire hour two john musgrave story which he shared with us the mic at our studios pose a son of working class parents i'm much older than the teenage pilot and more to in the army air force he met my mother working in the defense plant where they were building bomb which shows both of my purse to serve their country and in the second world war ii generation was fortunate and that if we were looking for

heroes so we had to do is look across the dinner table and we saw people who help save the world and i was inspired by those people are all around my email contacts adults were veterans mostly for more war to some from korea and some of my teachers had been served the country during with the draft during the cold war but they'd all served and the baby boomer generation that's who we are with a welcome our money can't we grew up we were the first generation girl with the draft as it was an institution that was a part of your life from the time we were old enough to understand the definitions of words like duty and obligation and in evident bill adee we knew as males we owe to our country to years of church

and it didn't matter where there was war peace so we owe that to our country we had real enemies to russians in there and chinese who were terrified we did fire drills we did tornado drills and we did nuclear attack drills duck and cover our great school became the first community bomb shelter in our community so we were thinking about the bomb and the communist all of rock and in high school the cuban missile crisis where the world was literally on the brink of annihilation and i remember wondering i think i was a sophomore in high school i might've been a freshman but i remember wondering if i was going to live long enough to consider i don't remember how old i was when

i decided that i was going to be a marine back quite a while back home i was looking forward to it military service to me was going to be a shortcut to manhood it was if i was tired of not counting i've been treated yourself i have nothing positive to offer to my country or my community how my opinions were sought or listen to and i knew that i had something to give but it's seventeen year avenues are very limited in the military for me was a way to give to my country and it was something much more it was something that at that time was respectable and it was a ticket outta my neighborhood i'd been warning uniform since i was eight years old i became a cub scout and i went through a cub scouts and i one and the boy scouts and i went through

boy scouts and i was an eagle scout probably still am and throughout scouting your for being prepared for war adulthood and service to the community and tear a country show these were stepped on a journey and it wasn't out of character and it wasn't like i was stepping off a path that i've been on since childhood it was the next step to another uniform and i'm just a more serious type of church rock to my country i knew i wasn't going to be a man i knew that once i graduate from boot camp i was going to be a marine and that was enough for me i do remember worrying about what hand history was going to deal me or

fade i wondered am i going to be in the church during a time of peace where maybe i'll be at camp was your camp pendleton and i'll be bored to tears for four years or will it be a war and i'll be excited and i'll be a hero and i'll be a mayor for ever respected know i'll be like my dad i'd be like all those men that were my dad's friends that i admired finally i would step out of their shadow stand beside them i i wanted that very much in the communist where the enemy show this enemy that i had had all of my life that i had feared all of my life now wears a literal enemy in southeast asia and my president we're

selling me that we needed to fight communism in asia and while i wasn't fighting the russians i was fighting their students so again it was just another step on that path that it started first far back as i can remember from one uniform to another one constant enemy and then immediately an enemy to my family an enemy to my country and i could point when i listed a one of the room when i volunteered for the infantry and volunteered to go to vietnam i know i was going to be a hero after my first firefight with the north vietnamese army only that he was a survivor

i was just an american teenager who loved the beach boys and the beatles too love the kansas city athletics girl know i was an athlete at all but i had grown up with a sense of citizenship and are a realization that i had lived seventeen years of freedom and seventeen years of protection seventeen years of the privilege of living in a free democratic society and being asked to serve that society in a time of war did not seem like an outrageous request to make it just all makes it tiny that when you first landed in vietnam i won over a troop ship which was an exciting experience in and of itself most casual over on airliners

but the thirty three days to see a lot more work to do every chip worse living conditions ever had until i was in the jungle but it was thrilling to me because marines or soldiers of the sea and we'd always go on the war from ships and i was going to war the way in the marines have always gone to show for young kid with a sense of history it was great number of them vietnam my first experience was to be assaulted by the the physical and a sensual experience that was vietnam and that was an intense heat and smells guy things i smelled of them had never smelled before and other smells i'd never smelled as great ending concert with all these other schmelzer with vietnam just had a smell that was completely foreign to me and while i went down the nets and gotten the landing

craft just like those brave young marines headed tower was and payload you jima one of the gates dropped on their shifts and rush to shore i wasn't under fire there were people offering me coaxing and books have an explicit sexual nature that it certainly didn't seem and principles are climbed on a truck that had them my unit's number on it and started driving down these roads in the villages i mean that's changed villages and people literally relieving themselves other side of the road of both sexes people with their teeth were black and it looked like they were spitting blood and it should be to let which is a mild narcotic that that they truly an inter city black and the saliva this generated is blood red so all these things are

assaulting think you know kid from middle america and i just thought i might as well ban on the moon was so foreign to me and i remember literally thinking i kind of places for foreigners and it didn't dawn on me for a little bit the hell that he was for foreigners and i was one of them and i was a replacement that means i didn't go over with my unit for didn't arrive with my unit have my buddies all around me the guys i went over with i'd been training with some sign listed and they were as close to me as my own family but then we got separated and we went to fill the vacancies in other units and i was told that i was filling the vacancies or marine who'd been killed and i was not only judged against what he had been i

was considered a threat because i was an unknown and i was on blood is a very lonely feeling because these kids that i was joining were dealing with the ultimate realities of life and death and your future lives really depended on the man standing next year they didn't know me and murder joshua lee's feelings ever have my life how long was it before you faith you're first battle was my third night in countries we took fire my first night patrol and no it was not a big deal in retrospect but at the time that it happened to me it was the biggest thing in my life for incoming treasury should

look a whole lot different than not going through church and i discovered what it was like to be under fire and i did not i did not do well that all my dreams of glory in all my dreams of how i was going to react under fire evaporated <unk> flooded with here i suddenly became a kid a little kid i wanted to go home the tummy they experience from from there on i arrived i was in the first marine division and i'd been assigned to a military pink battalion which was us dollar to me because i was an effort a rifle

am not i don't wanna be an mp and it turned out that the unit that i was an art wasn't we were part of an old military police battalion but our company was really just reinforced rifle platoon and we were the combat reaction force for what was an area called the da nang huge compound and we ran day and night patrols a distributor true were denied patrols and ambushes and roadblocks security for high value targets and if anyone made contact anywhere in our ao or area of operation and required assistance we were the under fire brigade the reaction force we would react to there are contacting go out in the system i didn't like the job because it wasn't the role that i had imagined

myself fulfilling while i was doing infantry work i was operating in a oh that was heavily populated and we were operating under tremendous number of restrictions that for different level to our safety don't fire unless fired upon a lot of restrictions on how to deal with the civilian population it was not a role i pictured myself sailing i wanted to be in the varsity in this was not the varsity to me by then the marine corps has started moving north i'd been damning the dining area with the third marine division had gone up north of the demilitarized zone that sector is a between northam says vietnam and were fighting the north vietnamese army not viet cong that's where i wanted to be

and i was giving up till you volunteer to go out there and i did once again having no real concept i'd been under fire a few times so i thought i know what this is all about that in the third marine division we were fighting an enemy that was a conventional in division strength not just handfuls of people here and there we were fighting a conventional enemy who maneuvered in regimental in division shrink that's a whole lot of people they would make it as alicia outnumbered of and we discovered that our role was we were baked they would send us out in small patrols squad sized platoon size or even company size patrols in areas where the enemy was known to be encouraging the enemy to attack us

so when the enemy attack this weekend then i'm calling in all of our muscle and with heavy artillery and air especially here the one thing that we had that the enemy didn't wish jets and we call it god calling in god to bring help from the heavens shine saved our lives countless times so i grew up fishing and we would fish using memos from day we would stick the hook under the minnows spine so it could swim to invite the big fish to attack it hit didn't take long for us to realize that we were the meadow and we knew even when you caught the big fish the minnow gut connection now the enemy also realized what we were doing and they had a strategy to counter our

strength their strategy was exhibited by a phrase called when you fight the americans hang on to their belts that meant they wouldn't initiate contact or with us until one day vastly outnumbered us into they would initiate contact until we were very close and they would immediately try to penetrate our what we call uni of integrity try to get in a monstrous so that if we want to call in air and artillery we had to call it in ourselves and he came down to their shoe they countered are strings of territory in there by getting a magician fight and making it difficult for osha to going down that

increased the horror factor of a firefight tremendously the best way i can describe it is they were intimate reading call those firefights would call them brawls and they were the enemy was on all the manned automatic weapons and our government and foerster rightful ownership in the work there are thousands of names engraved in a black war and washed in dc who died because the rifle their government gave them to protect themselves and serve their country could not be dependent upon american fighting man children who would be executed

because their rifles were jammed and they couldn't fight if i sound better about that it's because i am i will never forgive this country from doing that to us there was no excuse for all the enemy was carrying the most dependable assault rifle on the face of this for the eye at forty seven which is still in the hands of our enemies today and still working but we couldn't come on and that was just one of a number of things that convinced me very early on that no matter what we did as the young warriors our country was determined to lose that war because a week couldn't fight it the way they were making a slide and when or if the real estate business you take property from your enemy you deny

them to be the year strategic access whatever the benefits are of that property to them militarily you're denying that the natural resources your denying that to the human resources if you're denying that to them i'm in vietnam we would fight for something and then when the enemy would leave or we kill or we leave the comeback we go back we were constantly reacting to them and it was disconcerting for me to be wounded in places that i knew that maybe i'd already fought in or i knew other american ship followed him and that's no way to win a war that's a remedy for failure to church so is young average women just looking at the profession i was a disappointment and

discouraged knowing that what we were going through i couldn't see anyway that any of our suffering would have any positive result for our country for the self image that we were supposedly defending and i was their luckily for me i was there and we were still bombing the hell out of north vietnam laos and cambodia and we knew that it was possible or theoretically possible strategic play absolutely necessary that one day they're going to give us the ordered across the dmz and invading north vietnam and that really stayed away from the communists oh i was in the hospital that right after it out of the hospital prison mixing came on tv and announced that we were going to begin a

withdrawal every american that went to vietnam or worse in vietnam after he made that speech i knew that they were fighting for a defeat that no matter what they were going to be asked to sacrifice this country had already notified the enemy that this is not worth winning the us and we're going to leave but in the meantime all those brave kitsch all of americans children all the poor and working class kids that nobody valued except her family's work in vietnam knew that if they died he was would be for anything except their buttocks and i reached the inescapable conclusion as a vietnam

veteran and as an american citizen but then i had to do something to really bring them order to close at least for my country which you mean by that i mean i am join vietnam veterans against the war and i worked actively to end the war in which i'd fall and it was the most difficult decision i remain my life i knew i was going to disappoint some people that loved me very much that we're going to find it difficult to understand i knew that there would be people that i had admired that one might consider me a traitor i knew there were marines that i loved that might think i was stabbed him in the back i knew that my president was going to treat me like i was a criminal i do

but the way i felt when i enlisted was this this was something a whole lot bigger than me and it was my duty that's why i enlisted oh now i wish wishing that or again realizing that this is a whole lot bigger than me and this now is my duty or an so i became an outspoken generally in europe twenties at the time yes i was out of the marine corps before i was old enough to vote or considered responsible enough to drink beer i can remember being told that you've been in combat it'll make a manatee did you grow up in combat but i i didn't find it to be true when i found to be true is that you grow

i remember guys saying the fridge and i showed it in in this is the way i would say well i was born in missouri but i grew up in vietnam when we were teenagers we were dealing with what most people don't deal with and teller in their late sixties and seventies and thats the deaths of friends and facing your own death and that should theoretically you don't confront those things until you're older because we live in thank god a very safe society but those of us who were in the bush we were dealing with that as horrific reality death became a constant for us a reality a real flesh and

blood literally reality we lived by brass not my days not by hours it takes a second to be disabled it takes a second to be killed and we lived there when you think of how many seconds there aren't thirteen march because the marine corps everybody else should talk much more by god that's not enough for the marine corps order serve an extra month will show those other dutch flemish a concern that extra month how many brave young marines died when they should've been all like their brothers in the air force and the navy and the army in the coast guard i love the marine corps i did vanish to do iowa the marine corps more than i could ever hope to repay

that was trista sure the other branches make sure wear worship so chronologically i was in my early twenties twenty two maybe when i joined the leader mean i felt like if you're just joining us today on k pr president the vietnam journey of john musgrave veteran poet and baldwin resident john musgrave is featured prominently in the new public television documentary vietnam by ken burns and lynn novick you were listening to k pr presents on kansas public radio from the university of kansas we're k n u n k a new hd one lawrence nine he won five k a n h n k a n h h b one emporia eighty nine seven k e n d n

k e n p h be one older junction city ninety one three and pay and touche a new ninety point three support for k pr presence on kansas public radio comes from kc p at kansas city public television presenting a behind the scenes look at kansas city's top news stories aren't kansas city week in reveal more information is available on the word at kc pt dunne oh archie casey pt is sponsoring in the evening with john musgrave tomorrow monday october second at liberty hall you can find out more at the casey pt website i'm j mcintyre now we return to my conversation which are mass grave old were you when you were wounded when i was wounded knee first and second time i was nineteen the first time was in trouble from angry me who was in a serious former state in the field with

my unit the first round it was a ricochet the chin and fractured my girl knocked me unconscious and when i regained consciousness which i think we just remember moments i was lying on my face and we were in an ambush and corny the after action report by putin made contact with the north vietnamese army battalion coley you think katherine half our fears for fraud i was one of the first people to be shot the man who shot me was a veteran and

he knew that my buddies would come for me and then that's when i became his bait another way to build it and in my first duty ran up to me and bend over and stuck his arms undermine his hands under my arm to cut my shoulders are fully up the machine gunner who was only a matter of feet away from a fired another burst into my chest thank you football said it we were traveling over twenty three hundred feet per second so the bullets actually hit me before i heard the sound of the gun going off and he was only eight ten feet away at the move comes into it they actually came former rashad marines never leave their wounded

never we would die and whoa really reward my mind couldn't keep up with my body the impact of bullets was so powerful that i thought it's put me between my shoulders and i thought my shoulder slam together and for my face impossible for spain that i'd ever felt my life and i'm trying to make sense of it and i heard this horrible human screaming and i'm trying to figure out who's screaming like a and then i realized it was me and then my body my mind and my body color performer and i thought in my mind and i've been shot the

chest i'm going to die shop was making the horror of the dish and then began a fight to rescue me and the other wounded there were nineteen wounded and one killed for forty nine years i thought my cause the deaths of two marines but i just found that it was only one only when you've been carrying the iconic guilt trip over forty nine years yet knowing something intellectually is it's different than being able to convince yourself pleading guilty as much a part of me of mine charles m a disability law but each grabbed me and they are wounded knee while being pursued by the north vietnamese they would drag us for a little ways and then dropped recently down on top of a fire back at the enemy they know every time i had a fist sized hole through my chest now my back

and i told them to leave me i gave them permission to leave me and begged them to leave me i don't want anybody else to die because i'm me and i knew that it was a done deal that they wonder and then at one point i became afraid they would and one of the guys took scaring me and was dragging me that one guy on each arm training me both mentioned your name that could put him down a lifelong done all i could do is whisper was cash and i should don't let them to be alive and in the midst of all this his nose is just about touch and miami's looked me in the eye and he just don't worry they won't be as you're a law and i knew he

would kill me president lech and the north vietnamese do what they did too much unlike course one hand i owed him as much for that as i did for him tearing me up for this sense of relief that washed over me that i could get back a praying for my family and my mom and my buddy you don't see that in the war movies but that's the way it works for me hersch trio's three times it's where they determine whether that they can work on your or you're not worship for three times i was considered expectant singer corpsman when they got back to the company said i can do anything for him the actual the company would be my former platoon commander held me in an orange helicopter came in under fire and had already been told if they didn't have to come in because

that was odd elzy schmidt we were under fire and i wish to later that day the pilot said those are marines down there a medical menu threw me on the burden and corman on the bird straddle me look down at me saul the size or my chest and look at the crew chief in jewish like he was declared me out get that from you know like an umpire to larry out at home plate and they showed me over into the theater the porch lead gunner on king and again are held my hand from the dmz to the south of the dmz to don't know every time i started to fade and if i would've gone unconscious under god he would squeeze my hand or a hard and it was like pulling me out of

friction and each time another man saving my life they had to pry my hand lotion and other countries for defiling of remember i would be able to pull out again adela minute gone the surgeon came over and looked at me and they're bringing in a helicopter loads of damage teenager in the room were still screams and i got my hopes up polygamy in america are claiming to have the chance for me and lucia so that i can do for this man looked me see what your religion marine and i told him he should get a chapel over here you know so ok chaplain came over were standing behind me in the spring and i'm ok with becoming

i knew i'd heard them another marine i as you were another navy surgeon was walking by my rack in he glanced at me and smiled and london and and he said why isn't somebody opened and in my mind i should be an ally isn't somebody helpless man in a short or a long there were no much they could do a short blunt them is good because i've just about tepco i'm a best friendship was lying on lush sources next we even shot the right side of the church see four and thirty aircraft is a four engine heavy aircraft that the military uses transport supplies troops to big airplane they put two marines who were both expectant policy one thirty at dawn hall

influence two alpha made it through by where they had jurassic surgeons weedy course because there were so many casualties don't our nation literally could not waste the time on us who had expected to die when they knew there were mean that could be shared remain prescription till i was martin with her but they did to be this whole big airplane for two enlisted marines and a corpsman for each of us was changed in the blood bags out because coaches are they going to go right back there but that was their job and they got a self amanda never surgeons with an air force and then i knew it they would purposely but i know i can fight to live anymore and isis deliver large burden the guns hansen i was amazed when i woke up and the intensive care ward by purchasing a telegram every day or every other day

high given permission update because it's touching go for a while but there was a a train or a trail and was like the stages of the crush of people that are essential to saving my life throughout that day for my buddies to that brave helicopter crew to that door a goner that held by hand to the surge in that stopped at dawn to the surge and that was waiting for me and it had flown by i don't know anybody in this world are selected winner but after i was separated from the marine corps and i was treated like i was a war criminal by my contemporaries the man that i admired and wanted to emulate calling us losers because we were planning our war was in our fault

was more my demons depression ms gaitskill posttraumatic stress is insidious it changes the meaning of words or concepts i became so consumed with what's called survivor guilt why am i alive my buddies or did you were better man than i was by far it changes the way you look at things at twist things up and instead of looking at my survival as this wonderful gift it was mint sacrificed their lives to purchase my future but i became so confused and wrapped up in the pain that i looked at it as a burden rather than this priceless gift

and i began war ii every night i was wondering if there should be the night i'd have the courage to complete the sentence that have been passed on me that day in the ambush i was supposed to type and all i want could feel was this psychic pain and the emotional pain in the physical pain that suicide suddenly look like a positive effect rather than the ultimate negative then he become convinced that the people you love would be better served by your death than by leadership on in vietnam veterans we

didn't have the va system to help us then because they didn't recognize push for many troops we didn't have a sympathetic populous to support us to care we were literally on our own and more vietnam veterans have died by suicide since the war ended them were killed in action i personally think that's an indictment in this society because they needed help and there was no help to be given it wasn't that they were seeking it it was that he was not very was nonexistent the deadliest battle i ever thought my life was in the jungles of vietnam it was in my bedroom every night for years after i came home and tell my for shelters and to me never hint that again

i didn't have a future if they did and their future was more important to me than anything on the tour and they immediately and i needed them get myself alive before that when i was in my mid thirties before i had kids are riding a motorcycle real fast i jump jet airplanes for twenty years because every time i heard the door the airplane i wanted to live forever just so i could keep going like they're in the door i was going to i'd never been in a war i never been hurt and never heard anybody else i never killed anybody i'd never been betrayed i wish it perfect peach in freefall a lot of people thought always got a death wish no no no no just the opposite as long as i could do it can't be a loner it was a refuge to what extent did writing also

helped that help keep me alive in the darkest times i did the majority of my writing in those long nights i discovered that i had to get these things out of me when i talk to students about writing a formula i tell them if it was like lansing a boil or sticking my finger down my throat i had to purge poisonous the rain my system i had to get them out of my system and i discovered that if i could get them on paper i could literally and michelle strange but i could literally physically push them away from a corset symbolic but for me it turned out to be very important symbolism and if i can get it out on paper i could step back and deal with it and also

the push every poet craves immortality and hope that maybe someday somebody might read them and would you learn something from them to be moved but from primarily huge form of them wish like taking a step in a positive direction instead of being consumed but there was a demon sure i wish that these former irish expelling them and it was just a piece of the time i would tell myself every night when i was like him up are still are holding it if i really want to do this i can do it tomorrow and i worked with that for moroccan afghanistan and as for the things i tell them i say i just put it off i'm not asking you to make the decision of your life and

all the sudden you're going to think about what i say to you and have an epiphany and then everything's ever gonna be okay that that's not realistic just put it off and put it off for a day every day to put off for one more day and let those days or commercials and endorsements and two years in jail you can stand on your own and put those where they belong put those thoughts were that long tried to turn them to your benefit or others and to your peril i literally had to make a decision whether the war was going to be one of the most negative experiences in my life one of the most positive to realize that i had to put it in its place and i got two legal parents and i start out with a negative and i started writing

i could turn the page and all these things that made it a horrible experience of highway bridge partisan i need to i need to start on the positive and i shifted over to the other parent and i wrote down my buddies and then i got it there are they were considered by the government in the united states as expendable that if america lost sixty thousand of those kids it would not be much task that's why they protected the middle class and the upper class with her college deferment i learned more about what it meant to be an american for man than i ever learned at home and i learn more about the true definition of love

from them then it everywhere now and i came from a very loving supportive extended family but this was more than that and i realized that what an inspiration to me they had been and continue to be to this day and i cannot imagine who i would be had i not have known i know i would have been the lesson of that any knowing that i would not have known them any other way but to have them in the war with him then i realized that that made it one of the most positive experiences of mine and i no longer needed to be feel victimized by that experience that because of them i feel empowered and grateful

and i feel any less than that would be to diminish them and no one has the right certainly not me high over my life so i will forever be grateful to god put them in my life and it has helped me in dealing with my experience always keeping that realization to the fore for everything that i went through was worth it to have been this on and finish it away with tenure featured quite prominently in the ken burns and lynn novick stuck in an airy vietnam late to watch that one pretty amazing because i

thought my role originally was to find veterans for them and i know a number of veteran just in this community alone whose stories haven't been torn and need to be american needs to know these men and hear their stories so i was amazed when i invited my lifeline to new york to be filmed and then i thought well i'll be like if i get a couple minutes you know maybe i'll take a certain junctures in it'll be worthy of the ocean i think i sort of honor it will be to be even have a small part in a ken burns lynn novick film to see the part of flight and that has been humbling i just hope that people will realize that i mean i would like to take myself a zero i would love to do it but it wouldn't be true what i was was a terrifying

teenager and i think that the truth is more important than my fantasies and i hope people understand that that guidance document documentary sixty three years old i was six years ago i hope that i have portrayed myself as honestly as i can so that people see that kid and not the only semi true honor don't get a part in that and they are some of the most amazing people i've ever known in my life and the service they're providing to their country is absolutely priceless and they surround himself with people like him everyone i met a debt that's associated with fourteen films have been i'm aging solutions wonderful human beings are just so lucky vietnam veteran and

poet john musgrave was in the akp our studios this past week you can hear him speak and see film clips from the new documentary vietnam tomorrow evening at liberty hall in lawrence the event is free but advanced tickets are recommended i'm kay macintyre k pr presents is a production of kansas public radio at the university of kansas dave's been this because it's been it's been

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