Photo Courtesy Keith Ewing, Flickr CC
The ranks of World War II veterans are thinning, as are veterans from the Korean War. With these statistics in mind, Milwaukee’s War Memorial Center launched the Veteran’s Story Project, a campaign to record stories from service people who fought in those conflicts as well as more recent wars in Vietnam and the Middle East. Veteran local television newscaster Mark Concannon was commissioned to record the interviews on camera. Culling material from those interviews, Concannon directed a one-hour special for Milwaukee Public Television, “Mettle and Honor,” to be aired next week.
“I met with Renee Riddle, who works with the War Memorial on their marketing and public relations. Our video company was hired to shoot and produce these incredible stories,” Concannon says. “One Vietnam veteran tells the story of how he shot at and nearly hit some Vietnamese kids who were sneaking under the wire to steal some mines, Usually Americans fired warning shots over their heads but in this case the shots were very close. The vet said that one of the reasons he never had kids was because he questioned what kind of father he would be after that incident.”
“Mettle and Honor” will premiere at 8 p.m., Nov. 3 on MPTV 10.
