This Week on Bill Moyers Journal

Friday, May 25, 2007
"No one I know personally has done more to help veterans themselves bear witness to unspeakable experience than Maxine Hong Kingston."- Bill Moyers

This week on Bill Moyers Journal (check local listings) For all the words she's poured on the page, for the last 15 years, award-winning author Maxine Hong Kingston has been coaxing words from a very different source. In the hills of Northern California, she's been working with veterans - soldiers from World War II, from Vietnam, and now, from Iraq - helping the men and women who come here convert the ghosts of war into the words Kingston believes will help them survive. Their words can now be found in her latest book: Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace.

"My hope is that through art, through telling their stories, by having people hear what they went through, it changes them again," Kingston tells Bill Moyers. "There's the coming home from war, being broken, feeling losses, but then there is a wholeness that takes place if the person were able to write their story, to write their poem, to have people hear them and listen and understand. Then they are changed again."

On a special Memorial Day weekend episode of Bill Moyers Journal (check local listings) As America honors heroes who have fought and fallen for their nation, Bill Moyers Journal presents "D-Day Revisited," a special one-hour broadcast which follows a group of World War II veterans back to Europe to speak about their wartime experiences - some of them unlocking memories they had been keeping inside for nearly 50 years. Featuring excerpts from Bill Moyers' 1990 documentary From D-Day to the Rhine, "D-Day Revisited" includes the latest information about the veterans featured in the film who talked with Bill Moyers about their memories, their values, and their commitment to America. Check local listings for this special edition of the Journal "D-Day Revisited."

On The Moyers Blog
Read and respond to poems from Maxine Hong Kingston's Veterans of War, Veterans of Peace.

After watching "D-Day Revisited," share your story and read those from other viewers.

For those following the McClatchy DC bureau reporters featured in "Buying the War," log on for an update. Each week, video, transcripts, and further resources and investigations from Bill Moyers Journal are available online at www.pbs.org/moyers.

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