Curry reunites Vietnam vets with rescuers
As PBS’ “We’ll Meet Again” returns for its second season in this week of Veterans Day, host Ann Curry kicks things off appropriately enough with a tale of two Vietnam vets searching for the men who saved them five decades ago. Premiering Tuesday at 8 p.m., the opener of the nine-episode sophomore round of this series, which brings together people whose lives intersected at pivotal moments in history, introduces viewers to Dave Johnson, a U.S. Army colonel seeking the helicopter pilot who risked his own life to save Dave after a crash in Cambodia; and Roger Wagner, an Army finance clerk who looks to reunite with the surgeon who saved his leg after he was hit by enemy fire. Curry, who with her team helped effect the reunions, said she’s honored and sometimes a little embarrassed when people come to her with details of their most intense and often traumatic experiences. “One of those men has been to Vietnam three times. ... This is Dave,” Curry said. “And you’re sitting and you’re talking to this guy and you’re trying to get him to talk to you about what his experience was like. “And then he gives it up for you,” she continued, “and then he tells you in a way that you would never get from a history book, you’d never get otherwise what it really was like walking through the jungle and trying to keep your men alive. And then this moment that happens. In all these stories there are these moments that happen and they’re live-or-die moments, not always physically die but emotionally die because of the pain of the moments.” And that’s where Curry must walk a fine line as an interviewer, as she must get her subject to talk but she must also be mindful of causing further pain. “These guys still have nightmares, so that is a heavy responsibility,” she said. “When you’re interviewing somebody telling you about a traumatic event that they don’t want to remember — they don’t want to go there, they don’t want to talk about it — there’s a responsibility not to cause any damage, any further damage. But on the other hand, giving them an ear so that they can actually tell someone they barely know something and maybe never see that person again, maybe that’s also a benefit. So the question is, when you go in, where are they on that spectrum?” Other stories in season two include Holocaust survivors searching for those who gave them hope in the darkest days; people whose lives crossed after the devastating 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens; reunions of people separated after the Vietnam War and during World War II; and survivors of the great Alaska earthquake of 1964.