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Memorial Day Reflections from a Vietnam War US Medic Veteran: Release Lira! P2 (05/29/23)(Part 1/2)

·26 min·1 clip

Pogue says the phrase “they gave their lives” insults the people who were killed in Vietnam.

Pedro Gatos opens from 91.7 KOOP Community Radio in Austin, presenting the show as news and analysis for alternative listeners. He says the broadcast will be rebroadcast on Monday, May 29, 2023, Memorial Day, from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. Central Standard Time. He reminds listeners that the opinions are his and those of his guests, not necessarily those of Co-op Radio. He also directs listeners to koop.org for comments and to pedrogatos.org for archives. He describes the program as the 160th post-COVID show and calls it a new world, but the same place. From there, he invites listeners into what he frames as a battle of ideas and a documented dialogue. The episode then moves into a long conversation with Alan, who is presented as a member of the Co-op Community Council and a representative of Veterans for Peace. Alan says he returned from Vietnam and came to Austin, where he enrolled at the University of Texas and took philosophy courses. He joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War as soon as he learned about the group. He then describes the early 1990s, when he and others saw the Iraq war coming and looked for a new organization to join. That search led them to Veterans for Peace, founded in 1986 by a U.S. Marine who opposed the war in Nicaragua. The Austin chapter became Chapter 66, the Neil Bischoff chapter, named for an Army intelligence colleague and friend. Alan explains that Bischoff died of Agent Orange poisoning. He connects that death to the dumping of dioxin in Vietnam and to the lasting damage of military herbicide policy. He says Bischoff was assigned to monitor troop movements from an air-conditioned trailer filled with electronics, and was told to use Agent Orange simply to kill weeds around it. He says the agent later caused the liver cancer that killed him. Alan then ties his opposition to the Iraq war to oil and to the logic of a war fought for another country's resources. The broadcast later shifts to a separate discussion about Gonzalo O'Leary. The host considers a private suggestion that O'Leary's arrest could be intended as part of an exchange involving Americans held in Russia. He rejects that logic as wrong and illogical, and says the program will return after a short pause.

As heard by us

Memorial Day becomes a firm anti-war argument grounded in veteran testimony and documented political context.

Pedro Gatos treats Memorial Day as more than a calendar marker, tying war, memory, and official silence into a single moral frame. The episode then shifts into a conversation with Alan, a Vietnam veteran and Veterans for Peace organizer, and his remarks on Vietnam, Iraq, and…

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Why you'd press play

For a Memorial Day listen anchored in a Veterans for Peace perspective, not ceremony.

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