Juno News - May 26, 2019


Make the Afghan War Memorial public

Mentioned
Ken Burns
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Episode Stats


Length

4 minutes

Words per minute

176.19

Word count

799

Sentence count

1

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the final chapter of the Ken Burns documentary on the Vietnam War, "The Vietnam War: The Final Chapter" we get to the story of the creation of the Veterans Memorial Wall in the National Mall in Washington, D.C. and the controversy surrounding the unveiling of the Afghanistan War Memorial in Canada.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 if you haven't seen it already I highly recommend checking out the Ken Burns
00:00:12.840 documentary on the Vietnam War it came out last year and it's really long it's
00:00:17.160 like 10 12 parts it's about 20 hours long and it goes into detail about the
00:00:22.020 whole saga of it both during the war what happened in the US what happened
00:00:26.520 there in Vietnam the things beforehand leading up to it and the things that
00:00:30.300 happened after in the aftermath now it's a controversial film because there are
00:00:34.620 many historians veterans they like some parts they don't like others I think
00:00:37.920 that's part and parcel whenever you do a big endeavor like this but the part that
00:00:41.820 interested me the most was my reaction not so much to the the sections on the
00:00:48.420 war when it was happening but the final chapter which is about people's lives now
00:00:53.520 and then the decades after the war and and how they came to terms or didn't
00:00:57.540 come to terms with what happened and a large part of that final part has to do
00:01:02.200 with the creation of the veterans memorial wall in the National Mall in
00:01:06.720 Washington DC and at first when I realized this would be the concluding
00:01:10.860 chapter I thought this is kind of a bit of a letdown because we've had all this
00:01:13.980 drama about the actual war on the ground back in the day and then they wrap it up
00:01:18.120 talking about the construction of this memorial I mean this isn't it kind of small
00:01:21.900 in scope by comparison I was wrong I was very wrong that was perhaps the most
00:01:28.940 moving part of the whole film you have to watch this these people who whether
00:01:33.400 they were folks who were served in the war and many people who were in the war
00:01:36.760 they came back and then they started protesting the war others who were proud 0.90
00:01:40.720 to have served in it from the beginning to the end people who were war
00:01:43.760 resistors on the ground draft dodgers all that sort of stuff and they talk
00:01:47.960 about their experiences with this memorial being created and going to visit
00:01:53.160 it and it just meant so much to so many people so many mixed emotions it was
00:02:00.420 remarkable to hear people even people who had been protesters against the
00:02:04.700 soldiers that they're weeping in this documentary about their regrets about the
00:02:09.040 awful things they said about the young American men who went to go out and fight
00:02:13.360 and put their lives on the line incredibly powerful and I tell all of this to say
00:02:18.260 it really drove home to me memorials matter war memorials matter they matter to
00:02:25.200 the people who served they matter to the people who returned they matter to the
00:02:30.040 families of the people who did not return and they matter to the whole country so
00:02:35.680 when news broke that the Afghan war memorial here in Canada was opened in
00:02:42.640 secrecy behind a security perimeter in D&D headquarters where regular Canadians
00:02:49.120 can't visit to pay their respects where servicemen can't pay their respects
00:02:54.400 where the families of the fallen cannot go to pay their respects and were not
00:03:00.220 invited to the ceremony I thought something is deeply flawed here this is
00:03:07.000 wrong there's been public outcry and a number of individuals including the
00:03:12.040 prime minister have said we're going to look at ways to make this right and I
00:03:15.700 hope they do and I want to I want to take them at their word at this because
00:03:18.580 this well there should be a nonpartisan issue the current government the
00:03:23.460 current prime minister they they have some issues when it comes to the military
00:03:27.240 and with being soft and extremism that makes you think perhaps this is actually
00:03:31.580 part of a trend but I want to take him at his word that he's going to make it
00:03:34.580 right but we have to hold him to it and we have to have a specific request and
00:03:39.640 that request is make the memorial public at one point they said okay we've
00:03:45.420 acknowledged we blundered a bit so we're going to make it easy for the
00:03:47.680 families to show up but they were going to have to call ahead and book a time and
00:03:51.420 you know maybe the department say no you can't come this day you got to come
00:03:53.940 that day no it has to be something like so many war memorials all across the
00:04:00.100 Western world all across the whole world where anybody can show up at any time for
00:04:06.060 whatever reason and pay their respects to have a moment of reflection whatever
00:04:10.380 they're doing there because this memorial created by soldiers for soldiers is now
00:04:16.340 for everybody and it's got to be made public
00:04:23.940 so
00:04:28.520 and
00:04:30.200 I