(upbeat music) - Coming up next on this special Veterans Day edition of Arizona Horizon, we'll talk to a Korean War historian who's working to document what many call the Forgotten War.

Also tonight, an effort to help veterans express themselves by way of creative writing, including poetry.

And a program from the Arizona Humane Society looks to help members of the military and their pets.

Those stories and more next on this special edition of Arizona Horizon.

- [Announcer] Arizona Horizon is made possible by contributions from the Friends of Arizona PBS, members of your public television station.

- Good evening and welcome to this special Veterans Day edition of Arizona Horizon.

I'm Ted Simons.

This year marks 75 years since the start of the Korean War.

Susan Key, a local writer and historian, is working to honor and remember those who served in what's been called the Forgotten War.

We recently welcomed Susan Key to Arizona Horizon.

Let's talk about, I just mentioned this as referred by some as the Forgotten War.

Is it the Forgotten War?

- Not to the veterans who fought the war, not to the Korean people who have relatives who survived the war.

- [Ted] Yeah, why did it get that name?

- I think partly it's because President Truman didn't declare war with Congress.

So it wasn't technically a war that was declared in Congress.

It was a, he went to the United Nations and asked for a resolution to answer the invasion of North Korean communists.

So it was a United Nations action to defend South Korea against communist invasion.

- And we should mention that it is still technically a war.

I mean, this war never ended, did it?

- That's correct, because a peace treaty was never signed.

So technically they're still at war.

And all that was signed in July 27th, 1953 is an armistice agreement agreeing to stop firing on both sides.

And the DMZ was established as a buffer zone between North and South Korea.

- And it exists still to this day, and boy does it exist.

Do people know what the Korean War was all about?

- I think very little people know what it was about.

All they know is that North and South Korea are very divided and have become very different as a result of the war.

North Korea being a very closed communist regime where people do not have any freedoms whatsoever.

And South Korea developing into the flourishing economy, they're now 10th largest economy in the world and flourishing democratic government.

- Doing very well.

And again, the war was the idea of a communist takeover of the entire country.

- Yes, that was the whole point.

- [Ted] You immigrated here at the age of nine?

- Yes.

- So you have a little bit of memories of Korea, a lot of memories of America.

And you're a strong advocate now for Korean War veterans.

What sent you on that path?

- God.

I was actually working in the corporate world and I got kind of tired and burned out of my corporate job.

It was kind of meaningless.

And so I asked God, what should I do with my life?

And after a lot of soul searching and prayer, I felt God was telling me to do something about what I'm most grateful for.

And I'm most grateful that I'm alive and free and that I'm not in a place like North Korea, where people who live in North Korea have no freedoms to speak of.

So I realized, my goodness, this is the country that sent these heroes to save my parents during the war.

I need to meet them and thank them.

- Yeah, and when you first met them, and even now when you meet them, 'cause there are fewer of these people around, these folks are getting awfully old here.

What do you think?

- I'm kind of in awe when I meet them.

It's humbling because as 17, 18 year old boys, they went off to a place they didn't even know.

And to have the courage to die for someone else's freedom is beyond anything I can ever understand that kind of greatness.

- Do younger Korean Americans and Koreans, do they understand that sacrifice?

Do they understand what went on?

- I think the South Korean government does a great job of honoring veterans.

They sponsor trips for Korean War veterans from America and the other 21 United Nations to come to be honored.

And then I think the local Korean Americans that live here, for the most part, they don't know very much about the Korean War.

So when I meet with Korean communities, they don't even know their own history.

So it's very important to teach our youth so that we never forget the sacrifices that America has made for South Korea.

- And that's certainly what you have done with your life.

You have a new documentary, "Final Journey Korea."

You're also writing a book.

- I'm not writing a book, but I write a lot of short Facebook posts.

I have a Facebook page where I write veteran stories.

And I also write about different battles that happened during the war to teach people about the Korean War.

- How best to honor Korean War veterans?

- I think the best way is to document their stories.

Because as you said, they are now in their mid 90s and we're losing them day by day and the numbers get fewer.

So to document their stories, to preserve that for this generation and future is so important because it has been forgotten for so long.

We need to make it known and that future generations will appreciate what America has done for South Korea to save a country.

- Little more rewarding than that corporate gig, huh?

- A lot more.

- Yeah, yeah.

- A lot more.

- Well, congratulations.

I know the Korean War Memorial talks about those who answer the call to defend a country they never knew and a people they never met.

It doesn't get much better than that.

Congratulations on all your work and thank you for joining us and sharing your story.

- Thank you so much, Ted.

(soft music) - I really do enjoy volunteering.

I like to think that I have made a difference.

That's enough, I don't need to be patted on the back.

I've included my PBS station in my future plans.

It's not a big gift, but something that will help them.

- For more information about including Arizona PBS in your future plans, visit azpbs.org/giving.

- Every little bit helps.

If we can do a whole lot of little bits, then we've done a great service.

(upbeat music) - Nearly 5 million people a year travel to Arizona from all over the world for a chance to peer into the sublime expanse of the Grand Canyon.

It's hard to imagine that any of them noticed the giant Navajo sandstone slab jutting from the earth just outside the park's eastern entrance at milepost 268 on Highway 64.

A plaque was once affixed to this stone.

It honored the victims of one of the gravest air tragedies in American history.

On the morning of June 30th, 1956, TWA Flight 2 and United Airlines Flight 718 left Los Angeles within minutes of each other.

One was en route to Kansas City, the other for Chicago.

They would collide over the Grand Canyon.

Both airlines and the government would recover, identify, and return home as many of the victims as the rugged wilderness would yield.

67 of the TWA victims, 63 unidentified, are buried in the Citizen Cemetery in Flagstaff.

Services were performed by Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, and Mormon clergymen.

29 unidentified victims from the United flight were interred below a memorial in the Grand Canyon Cemetery on the South Rim.

Public outcry from the accident resulted in the creation of the Federal Aviation Agency and a modernization of the country's air traffic control system.

Nobody knows what happened to the plaque that once paid tribute to the victims of Flight 2 and 718.

But their deaths are honored by the safe arrival of the many tourists that fly to the Grand Canyon each and every day.

(soft music) A new program is working to help veterans communicate and connect by reading, discussing, and writing poetry about their service.

It's called Versus for Vets, and we learn more about the program from Rosemary Dombrowski.

She's the Poet Laureate of the City of Phoenix.

- I call it a poetic medicine program, which essentially means that there's a trauma-informed facilitator that is guiding veterans through the reading, discussion, and writing of their own poetry.

What's unique about this program is that we always read poems by veterans, and those poems can span from the Civil War to Afghanistan.

And the goal is, obviously, to get them to read those poems, see some connection in those poems to their own service, their own emotions, discuss that openly, and then hopefully that leads nicely into a writing exercise, which everyone has a few minutes to do in the session, and then we end with sharing.

- Yes, so basically introduce the idea, experience the idea, talk about the idea, and then why don't you go over there and try it out?

- And then create, yes.

- Yeah.

Poetry in itself, the creative process here for poetry can be unusual in that sometimes it's structured, sometimes it's not.

You have all sorts of different forms, or you have free verse, whatever.

But sometimes the structure makes things pop out that you don't necessarily expect.

Do you hear that from these guys and gals who are getting involved here?

- Absolutely.

I tell them not to worry about how it looks on the page.

We just wanna keep it short, which is why we only have about 10 or 15 minutes for writing.

So that means that they can write something that looks like a poem, or they can write something that looks like a paragraph.

The point is, when we're working in this modality, they're creating metaphors, and they're essentially recasting their narrative.

So instead of just sort of replaying the trauma loop, they're kind of looking at things through a new lens, maybe a metaphorical lens, maybe an imagistic lens.

Hopefully some new emotions are coming to the fore.

Hopefully there's some discovery happening so that they're not just reenacting trauma, but essentially moving through it within a community.

- Are you getting that response from some of these folks?

- I am.

I'm getting a lot of people in the workshops who have never written poetry before and never really read it either.

And so, you know, you always worry when you're running a new poetry program that there's not gonna be a lot of buy-in.

There's gonna be a lot of reticence in the beginning.

And so we actually talk about some of the studies in my workshops as well, the studies that have been done with veterans that show that poetic medicine is actually more effective for some people than traditional therapies.

- Well, and as much as maybe music or counseling or retreats, really?

- It can be, absolutely, because we're essentially telling them, here's a container in which you have full agency to tell the version of the story that is the story you need to tell now.

How can we overwrite that trauma, perhaps?

How can we sort of put good memories on top of bad memories?

How can we commingle those two things in a new way?

- How do you get past the idea of just being, oh, wait, it's poetry, I don't understand it.

This is way too artsy-fartsy for me.

Can you get past all of that?

- I think it's easy to get past that because every poem that I use in the workshops was penned by a veteran.

So those poems tend to resonate with everyone in the workshop.

They usually have more to say about the poems than I do.

They have more interesting interpretations of those poems than I do because they have a shared language coming in, right?

It doesn't matter if it's a Civil War veteran, a World War II veteran, or a veteran of Afghanistan.

They share a language of service and combat that the rest of us may not.

So they always find connection.

- And I would imagine the same poem, you will hear different responses and different viewpoints on the same bunch of words, huh?

- Absolutely, and so that is why I'm not the only one who reads the poetry.

I will read a poem once to them, and then I will ask someone in the audience to read the poem so that everybody can hear it in two different voices, with two different inflections, two different paces.

So I think they are always eager to respond in some way.

- Now, did I read you were a military brat?

- Yes, my dad was a Marine.

- Yeah, so this is kind of close to home to you, isn't it?

- It is close to home.

I was brought in as a fellow into the Office of Veteran and Military Academic Engagement at ASU in 2022, and they asked me to create a poetry workshop for veterans.

I created this, and then it became a whole workshop series.

So we offer a couple of these every semester.

- And last question here, for people that are just into poetry in general, the difference between poetry about service and general poetry.

- You know, poetry about service almost always tells a story.

I liken it to war reportage.

Sometimes I call it the more lyrical cousin of war reportage.

It can contain statistics, it can contain historical facts.

It can contain things that are familiar to us.

But then there's usually a layer of emotion that takes us deeper into the heart of the conflict than mere war reportage would.

And so I find that the poetry is really accessible to everyone.

- Rosemary Dombrowski, again, this is Versus for Vets.

Congratulations on this.

- Thank you so much.

We have our first workshop in September.

- All right.

- So check the website.

- Okay, where's the website?

- It's the Office of Veteran and Military Academic Engagement at ASU.

- Great, thank you.

- Thank you.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) - When London Bridge was completed in 1831, the automobile didn't even exist.

By 1968, it may not have been falling down, but the bridge was sinking under the crush of modern traffic.

So the city of London decided to sell it to a developer in Arizona.

Just off of State Route 95 in Lake Havasu City is a plaque memorializing the dedication and reopening of the bridge in October, 1971.

(upbeat funk music) The two-day gala included an elaborate dinner attended by 800 people, including then Arizona Governor Jack Williams and Sir Peter Studd, Lord Mayor of London.

Behind the fireworks and go-go girls was over three years of risk-taking and hard work.

It was the dream of C.V.

Wood and Robert McCulloch who were developing the fledgling town.

The bridge was purchased for over $2 million.

The 22-million-ton structure was dismantled, each stone numbered, and shipped 10,000 miles to Long Beach, California, and then trucked to Lake Havasu's Colorado Riverbank.

It took 40 workers three years to reconstruct the bridge.

The original 19th century construction crew of 800 took seven years, and 40 laborers died.

The bridge survived the German Blitz of London during World War II.

Its light poles are made from cannons seized from Napoleon's army at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815.

The metal melted down and forged into lamps.

Today, the London Bridge attracts over 1 1/2 million sun-seeking visitors a year, exceeded only by the Grand Canyon.

(upbeat music) (upbeat music) (soft music) ♪ Willie Bonnero heard them say ♪ ♪ In an Arizona town one day ♪ That a band of Apache Indians ♪ ♪ Over upon the train I'll stand ♪ ♪ Heard them tell of murder done ♪ ♪ Three men killed at Rocky Run ♪ ♪ They're in danger at the car end ♪ ♪ Said Vanir, oh, I'm your friend ♪ - The Arizona Humane Society's Project Active Duty Program looks to help military members who need to house their pets during deployment.

The program involves pairing these pets with locals who've agreed to foster and take care of the animals.

To learn more, we spoke to the Humane Society's foster manager, Carrie Hughes, and Sabo, a husky who was being looked after in the program while his best friend was deployed overseas.

Good to have you here.

Sabo, good to have you here as well.

That's a good looking dog.

- Oh, he's just the best dog ever.

I've never met a calm husky like he is.

- I know, he's so chill, for goodness sake.

Give me a better definition of Project Active Duty.

- Absolutely, so Project Active Duty was created by the Arizona Humane Society after 9/11.

We realized that there was a need for military members that were going to be actively deployed, and what do they do with their pets if they don't have any friends or family around to take care of them?

And so really this program was created to help pets like Sabo and owners to keep the pets reunited as our military members serve.

- So how does it work?

I mean, you find out you're deployed, what happens?

Do you go to the Humane Society and say, I need some help?

- Yes, you can go to the Humane Society website and apply to be part of the program, and we'll contact you and work through an evaluation for your pet, and really how we can help these military members.

- For the foster families, are there different qualifications for this kind of thing, or is this just another foster family and another pet looking for a home for a while?

- Well, that's a great question, because these are typically longer cases than our normal foster families would take on.

So Sabo has been in the program so far for a year, and his owner was actually redeployed, and so he'll be with us for another year.

So it's a very special commitment for a foster home to be able to take in someone's pet and really care for it and love it as their own.

- And I would imagine, and I think we have some video here of reunifications, heartwarming over the top, huh?

- Absolutely, and it's so special for our foster heroes to be able to keep in contact with the military members to tell them that their pets are okay.

- Yeah, and here we're seeing a dog that had foster care for a while, and then all of a sudden, here comes dad, I guess, in this case, and they're home.

This has to be very, very rewarding, this program.

- No greater feeling than to be able to support our military and support a pet in need at the same time.

- And this is kind of a part of Project Home Away From Home, as you kinda refer to here, which doesn't necessarily need service member involvement.

- Correct, we have additional branches for Project Home Away From Home for community members in temporary crisis, whether it's domestic violence or hospitalization, housing insecurity, we're able to support the community in many different ways.

- You need some foster volunteers, I would imagine, always, right?

- Absolutely, azhumane.org/foster is how you can go to sign up to be a foster hero for either a shelter pet or one of these special programs.

- What do you look for in a foster family and a foster home?

- Well, someone that is going to be able to care for a pet properly.

We do require that all pets are spayed and neutered in the home, and really, AHS will provide the guidance and the supplies, the medical care if needed, to support the foster hero on their journey.

But this is just one way that the community can really step forward to help the overpopulation problem in our community.

- How many people do you think use the program?

Do you have hard numbers on that?

- For Project Active Duty?

- Yeah, yeah.

- Gosh, you know, this year so far, we've probably seen 10 pets come through already.

So with various lengths of stay.

So Sabo's definitely our special kiddo.

- And you mentioned Sabo already a year, maybe another year for Sabo before the best friend comes back.

Is that the average?

What is that, like a year, two years, something along those lines?

- It really depends.

Sometimes our military members need to go for training in a different country or different state, and that's not usually as long.

- Well, this doesn't apply to Sabo, because look at him, he's just a fantastic dog.

What do you do with difficult dogs?

- Difficult dogs?

- Yeah, dogs that may not want to see their best friend leave and don't, may not wanna see a foster home or can't get along with, you know, how, what do you do with them?

- I never wanna see my best friend leave either, but we love them just as much.

And we work really hard to find a perfect member in the community that has that great environment.

That's why it's important for everyone, no matter what their lifestyle, if they're willing to help, to step on up and give us a call and see if there's a pet for them.

- So basically there's no such thing as bad dogs.

- Never.

- Never.

- Bad cats either.

- No, all right.

And with that, it looks like Sabo says, "I think I'll take a knee or maybe four."

All right, Sabo, good to have you here, a great dog.

- I know.

- And congratulations on this program and continued success.

- Thank you so much.

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- That's it for now.

I'm Ted Simons.

Thank you so much for joining us on this special Veterans Day edition of Arizona Horizon.

You have a great evening.

(upbeat music)