Welcome to American Veteran: Unforgettable Stories
About The Episode
In war and in peace, what veterans have done in America’s name is woven into the fabric of the American story. The PBS series, American Veteran, illuminates their service with a stunning range of veterans’ voices, presented in a 8-part podcast.
Each episode revolves around the direct testimony of a single veteran - from a Coast Guard gunner’s mate who manned a landing craft at Omaha Beach on D-Day, to an Army cook in Iraq who became the first Black American woman held as a POW; to an Army nurse in Vietnam who struggled to do her part. This collection of riveting first-person stories provides a compelling portrait of the veteran experience over multiple generations.
The series is hosted by Phil Klay, a Marine Corps veteran featured in the “American Veteran” television series and author of the National Book Award-winning collection of short stories, “Redeployment.”
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DEVITA: When we got close to the beach, there was one machine gun. He took a liking to my boat, and he was peppering the ramp. And the ramp is about two or three inches steel, so we could absorb the peppering and the sniper fire. It was very loud from the fire, and the coxswain screamed, drop the ramp, and I never heard him. Then he screamed again, drop the ramp. And I froze.
I knew when I dropped the ramp, the bullets that were hitting the ramp would come into my boat. And then he screamed at the top of his lungs, he says, “God damn Devita drop the f'ing ramp.
HOST: I'm Phil Klay. I'm a veteran and a writer and the host of American Veteran, Unforgettable Stories. Each episode of this podcast will feature one veteran, and each vet will tell us their story.
We'll hear from every generation, a World War II navigator, a nurse in Vietnam, a cook in Iraq, a sniper in Afghanistan. We'll hear what their training was like.
SCARLET: All they did was yell at me. They couldn't even swear. I remember about a week into it, I'm laying there in my bunk at night, and the girls around me are crying, going, I want to go home. And I'm laying there thinking, this is it? All they're going to do is yell at me? I can do this.
HOST: We'll hear about their time in the service.
IRVING: It wasn't until I became a sniper and had a chance to look at a person through a 10-power magnification scope and seeing everything about that person, their eyes, their nose, their mouth, you can see when they breathe, and you see exactly when the bullet impacts, you know it's very intimate.
HOST: And finally, we'll hear what happened to them after their service.
MEEKS: Nurses were coming in and saying, whatever you do, when you hit the states, take your uniform off.
HOST: “American Veteran, Unforgettable Stories. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
DEVITA: You know, for 70 years, I never talked about it. My wife died six years ago. She never knew what I went through. Now I want to talk about it.