Do not talk lies about the dead

We were so young. And we were so defiant.

We might have been wearing USAF uniforms, but we were still civilians at heart and full of youthful rebellion magnified in so many ways by the turbulent times we were living through.

Perhaps the most defiant act that Sergeant Charles Minx and I committed at AFTV-22 was on Memorial Day of 1969. We believed that the tribute we had prepared was inspired. We also thought it might get us in very deep and very hot water.

Very few visuals survive from my years at AFTV in Spangdahlem. I have a couple of small reels of black-and-white film and a few audiotapes. They're so old that I no longer have access to media that will play them. I thought all traces of our tribute were lost.

I was chatting last week about the Memorial Day affair via e-mail with Chuck when he surprised me by sending me an MP3 file of the music and his narration. He had kept it all these years.

I surprised him by spending about 12 hours re-creating the missing video, keeping as close as I could to the spirit of the original. I e-mailed it to Chuck.

John David Wild looked at very early edits and made sure I kept the field images to the period from World War II to Vietnam.

I had found the words Chuck speaks in the 1946 novel "Mr. Roberts" by Thomas Heggen. I saw the film with Henry Fonda and Jack Lemmon, but I had not known it was based on a book -- and a Broadway play -- until I picked it up in the base library at Bitburg in about 1967. The passage is from an interior monologue by the Mister Roberts character, contemplating the futility of war.

I found the music on an American Forces Radio and Television Service transcription. It is from the soundtrack of the 1967 Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn film, "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner." As Chuck told me recently, the music bed fit so perfectly that it sounds as though we commissioned original music.

After the piece aired in 1969 on primetime Memorial Day newscasts, I expected to be called on the carpet or worse. It never happened. I got a few comments from fellow staffers and friends, and that was it.

Chuck told me last week that he remembers being reprimanded by our station manager because the narration included the word "bastards." He was ordered not to use that word on AFTV-22 again.

Why did the brass at three U.S. air bases -- Spangdahlem, Bitburg and Hahn -- not go through the roof? Did our anti-war sentiments (coupled with visuals) not come through as defiant? Did the brass hear only what they wanted to hear -- only the words that sounded heroic? Or ... were they even watching?

As the King said to Anna, "Tis a puzzlement."