Hello and welcome to the bookmark.

I'm Christine Brown, your host.

Today.

My guest is Sherri Steward, author of Bringing Davy Home in the Shadow of War A Soldier's Daughter Remembers.

Sherry, thank you so much for being here today.

Well, thank you, Christine, and, thanks to PBS and everyone else who made this possible to share this story of American sacrifice.

And I will tell you that more than anything, that's what this book is about American sacrifice.

It is a true story of American sacrifice.

And it has a little bit of a twist, from a typical war book, because it is told through the eyes of a soldier's daughter.

And I can tell you that I lived this story for the entirety of my life.

It recounts the, experiences of two small town Texas boys, one a combat, actually a decorated combat veteran of World War two and the Korean War.

Who happened to be my father and the other, his baby brother, who was an underage soldier, as many were, a 16 year old who, unfortunately, was reported as missing in action only 21 days after first touching Korean soil.

It was later, of course, pronounced killed in action.

And at that time his mother, a gold star mother, the mother of the boys.

Requested, and I probably should stop there and say no, she demanded, because she was a formidable piece of work, and she demanded that her eldest son, be able to come off of the front line.

Now she's demanding this off in the middle of a war and, demanded that her eldest son come off the front line and be able to escort the remains of his baby brother back home to the tiny East Texas town of Atlanta, Texas.

Probably 3000 at that time.

And, that is exactly how I get the title of the book, Bringing Davey Home.

I do I would like if I could to emphasize, that the book is not just about David and my father.

They were really the embodiment of every young man and woman who has answered the call of this nation to defend freedom and liberty.

So the book is really about all of them.

And I would like to include in there for anyone listening that the book is also about the families.

And I was very emphatic about including the families of our warriors in this book.

Yeah, I was going to say this book does a really excellent and interesting job of weaving together a lot of these different, threads.

So there's the story, your story of of the daughter and the niece of these veterans.

There's their stories, of course, there's the families.

But then you also you, as you say, you use their experiences to kind of teach the reader or show the reader, aspects maybe that aren't always thought about or aren't taught as as much as they should be.

Like, for example, the plight of the underage soldier and how they have the kind of the history of how underage soldiers existed and why, and what are those circumstances, or about the Korean War in general, which is not as well studied or talked about or remembered as some of the other American wars?

So as you, as you as a reader, the reading experiences you're kind of going through and reading the story, but then you kind of zoom out and kind of teach us about these, these aspects of their lives that affect so much more than just your family.

Well, and that was very important to me because I wanted to, you know, I wanted to tell the story truthfully.

But I wanted to do a different kind of war book.

War books can.

I'm a big fan of war books.

But, I wanted to tell a different kind of war story.

One that was well documented, scholarly, authentic, but also had a personal touch.

So the average American reader could understand it.

Many war books are very difficult to understand.

You know, this unit went here, this unit went here.

This is what happened to them.

And I wanted to make sure that young people could, could read this book and understand it.

And, but I was definitely adamant that it, it was scholarly and that it was well documented and authentic.

And I think by melding the historical context of these wars and battles with personal sacrifices, I was able to reach a broader, reader audience because war books, as I said, can be really, really difficult to understand.

I will, I will tell you that, it was it was really a chore to tell this story truthfully because, you know, I, I was constantly thinking, how can I tell this story and not just make everybody sad?

Because you absolutely cannot sugarcoat what happened in any war, for that matter, but in particular, you simply cannot sugarcoat what happened in the Korean War.

And there were some wonderful, positive things that took place, that surprised me during the writing of this book.

One of them was the fact that, I met a man, a great Korean War hero named Larry Kinard, who, by the way, wrote the foreword for the book.

And Mr. Kinard invited my sister, my son and I to travel with him to Korea on a trip where there were, fallen family members and there were, veterans who fought in the Korean War, combat veterans.

You know, there's not many left.

But I was so thrilled to go with Mr. Kinard, and he taught me something that is so positive, and I hope I conveyed this in the book.

You know, he he told me, Sherry, don't ever call it the forgotten war again.

It's the forgotten victory.

And I didn't fully realize that.

I was like, yeah, yeah, until I got to Korea.

And when I got to Korea, I saw this huge population of people in the Republic of Korea who were so grateful.

They're free and prosperous.

They're the 11th largest economy in the world, thanks to the young men, young Americans and others who fought there.

And that did wonders for me.

It it it made this a little more positive.

And, I encourage the readers to think in that manner, too.

If you look at the Korean Peninsula on satellite imagery, you will see that I mean, just Google satellite image of of Korean Peninsula.

You will see that anything North of the 38th parallel, with the exception maybe of Pyongyang, their capital city, is in total darkness.

And I say that literally and metaphorically.

Anything south of the 38th parallel looks like New York City from space.

And those people are free and prosperous.

And when one last thing about that, trip to Korea with this great, Korean War hero was that I was invited to speak to 400 or so.

I don't know the exact number, but a large group of high school students in Seoul at a school in Seoul and, I think there were somewhere around 350, 400 kids.

And of course, I've been a teacher for 30 years, and this is just amazing to me.

What really amazed me was as a teacher was how brilliant these kids were and how polite they were, but they not only knew about the Korean War, which one would expect, they knew about World War Two.

They knew about the war on terror.

They knew about Vietnam.

I mean, these kids were the bomb.

They were awesome.

And and when I looked out and I saw these beautiful faces of young people who were the same age as David, Daniel Stuart, my young uncle who gave his life for their freedom, it changed my life because, believe me, I wasn't always a fan of the Korean Peninsula.

But when I looked out there and I saw those faces of those wonderful kids, it totally changed my life.

I realized that my father's suffering was not in vain, and that little David's death was not in vain, and everything changed from that day forward.

I can only imagine how powerful that must have felt.

That's such a wonderful experience.

Thank you for sharing that.

Wow.

I did want to ask about the research that you did, which I guess which may have been part of it, but, you know, you did some family research, of course, because your family's involved.

But as we said, you you did much more research because this also has a significant scholarly element to it.

What what kind of work.

And did you do travel and how did you how did you put all this together?

Well, thank you for asking that.

And, you know, just like the book, I'm not going to sugarcoat it.

As I've said all along, it took me since 1999 to collect all of this documentation.

And, you know, I cut my teeth in science and without documentation.

Forget it.

You know?

So I knew this book had to be well documented.

So in 1999, as my father aged and we all knew that, you know, his death was imminent as as he aged and his health faltered.

Christine, I just felt the sense of urgency to tell the story.

I just, I guess, I mean, I guess you could say it was obsessed.

I, I felt a sense of urgency and this sense of duty to tell this story, because it's not just a story about David and Dad.

It's a story, as I said, about every American who sacrificed, every mother who lost their son, you know, every sister and, yes, every niece and nephew.

And that's hard to articulate to a person who didn't live in a military family.

But I started collecting.

A document that was more than I bargained for called the individual deceased personnel file.

I knew I was pretty sure my dad was not going to make it, and I was daddy's girl from the get go.

I mean, since I was a little girl, those fading blue eyes were, you know, I was just a daddy's girl.

And I hung on every word.

And I, I seemed to more than anyone.

I don't know why I was the one.

I was the chosen one that he could talk to.

I was safe, and so my son David, who's named after his uncle David, did interviews with my dad, and we had them on old, you know, VHS tapes, and they're just unbelievable.

They were combat in World War Two and Korea and, I started collecting all of that, but I collected this individual deceased personnel file because I was afraid that if pop died and we all called him pop, if he died, what would happen to little David's story?

He would just fade into oblivion.

The 16 year old boy.

And by the way, have every letter he ever wrote from the theater of war and the letters were just gripping.

I can't even I mean, it's very hard to describe these letters when I first read them.

Oh my gosh, I would have to read one and put it down and, you know, rest a while and think on it.

But the individual deceased personnel file was amazing.

It was probably five inches thick.

It took a year to get to me and it had everything, as I said, more than I bargained for.

Field autopsy report, which I can never unsee.

It had the most amazing thing, you know, grave, grave registrations, reports, you know, typed out on these old fashioned typewriters in the on the battlefield.

But most importantly, it had another positive outcome of this book, something that was completely unexpected.

It had it seemed like every photocopied letter that my grandmother, old Texas Ringtail Tudor, had ever written to the War Department and to, you know, Colonel Clearwater and to to everybody who had anything to do with the Korean War because she was prolific.

And she told them at one point in a letter when she thought she didn't get a response back in time about, where is my son?

Well, you know, the battle is raging where he was killed.

You know, they couldn't really get in there.

And she didn't think she got a response back in time.

And she said, I never forgot her words.

Do not underestimate the power of a grieving mother at whose side stands the Almighty himself.

This this sort of wonderful experience of learning more about my grandmother was.

And she became she became the heroine of this book, really this gold star mother.

But I think she was just the embodiment of all gold star mother.

She wanted her baby back and she was going to get him back.

And she did, you know.

So I have to say, there's that section of the book reading her letters.

I probably would have made the book wait too long, but I wanted to read more of her words because, as you say, she was determined.

She was an unstoppable force because she got her way in the end.

But it was that, as you say, was one of the most inspiring pieces of the book is that you cannot underestimate a mother who needs her son back.

I mean, it was it was inspiring.

It was upsetting.

It was power.

It was so much that was and and to learn that about your grandmother and to see that tenacity and to know that maybe lives inside you too, that that just must be an it wasn't easy to live with.

I will tell you this.

I lived with her my junior and senior year in, in in high school because my father, you know, this really, really had problems with PTSD.

You know, all his life.

And they had moved to Houston.

They wanted to move to Houston while I was a cheerleader, Atlanta high school, I didn't want to move.

And so I stayed with grandmother, and they went off to Houston so he could get better care at the Houston VA. And you could get a job and, you know, hopefully do better.

And oh, she was a piece of work and she was not ashamed to tell me, you know, admonish me.

You know, you'll soon be drinking the wrath of God's wine.

You know, if you don't straighten up and fly.

Right, sister?

And so I loved her because she was my grandmother.

But I didn't have that that knowledge about her that I gained in writing this book.

I was reading her letters and I'm like, are you kidding me?

This lady is amazing.

She's to manding of everybody.

At one point she said, I will write every politician, I will write every congressman, every senator, I will write every newspaper until you bring my son home.

And she did.

She was.

She was.

Yes.

She was amazing and wonderful.

I want to touch on something that you mentioned just now, because it's a big part of the book, and I want to make sure we cover it here.

The, the, the treatment of your father's PTSD, which again, and as you, as you do so many times in the book as you kind of zoom out and take us through the history of that term.

Before it was that term, you know, there were other words for this.

This has always been an issue.

This has always been a struggle for soldiers who come back from war.

Can you talk about why that was so important to feature so heavily in the book?

Will it?

This is really one of the goals of the book.

You know, we see young men coming back even now from Afghanistan that have come back from Afghanistan.

You know, with limbs missing.

And, you know, you can clearly see their suffering.

But so many men came and and by the way, this has happened since the Spartans time, you know, of course, there's always been PTSD.

There's always been different names for it.

You know, whether it was shellshock in World War One or combat fatigue and World War two, you know, it's always been around, but nobody knew how to treat it until until after the scarred generation returned from Vietnam.

And, you know, our technology or or scientific technology got better, but I, I just want to point out that it's not over, that, you know, I'm, I'm firmly immersed now in veterans events.

I see veterans all the time.

And, you know, I can spot a Special Forces guy that's coming back on an airplane.

I did a lot of air travel, in my, recent job.

And, you know, I would see a Special Forces guy and I'd go, oh, I wonder if he's coming back, you know, from Afghanistan or Iraq, you know, back all the way to the war on terror.

And, we're still dealing with this now.

We're much better off.

But my father's treatment was no different, really, than so many others.

Except there was just no no understanding of.

What do you do with a man who has come back from the battlefields of Europe in some of the worst fighting in World War Two, already has PTSD.

And, you know, he's told, son, get a job, you know, get a wife.

You'll you'll be okay.

No treatment, no treatment at all.

And, I fear that while we are, technology has done much better recently, our young men have still come back.

I occasionally run across some some veterans of Afghanistan, recently, you know, while we were still in Afghanistan, ran across one in the airport, and I said, well, son, are you going or coming?

And he said, I'm coming back for a short leave.

And I could tell he was just shaking.

And I pulled out my card that had my dad's picture right there.

And the, you know, combat picture on the Korean War that's on the front of bringing Baby home.

And all of all of a sudden I became safe and we began to talk.

Our flight was delayed for a couple of hours, and this young man clearly had the worst PTSD, you know, and he had been deployed five times, and he unzipped his duffle bag and he said, Miss Sherry, this is how they treat us now.

There must have been 100 bottles of pills in there.

And so my point being, it hasn't ended.

But I hope that answered your question.

I mean, I know it absolutely did.

I just there is no answer really a no, but it's just such an important piece of this story.

And as you say, it continues to be anybody who's known people who have fought in wars has seen the effects of them, whether it's actual PTSD or something else.

You see it in their faces when they come home.

It's different.

They are different when they return.

And I'm glad that we're talking about it now.

I'm glad we have a better name for it now and maybe some better treatments for it.

But as you say here and in the book, the work is not done.

We need to continue to, be understanding and yes, for these people, to these men and now women, who come back with, with difficulties and we need to support them and uplift them and help them because they've, they've made a huge sacrifice for us as well.

And let's not forget, clinical evidence we know now from the war on terror.

And, you know, as I said, I cut my teeth in science, and I read those journals all the time with the studies of our veterans who have been deployed multiple times on the frontlines of the battlefield of Iraq and Afghanistan, dangerous places you live in fear of death or maiming every single day of your life.

And we forget about.

They have little children back home.

They have a wife back home.

And we now know, thanks to many great studies that this war trauma affects these families as well.

And, we're we're just on the cusp of that right now.

But, you know, there's, I'll just say this about that.

There was a large study in California during the war on terror, a huge study with a Big Ten, 30,000 high school students.

And I'll just sum it up, they had those who were the children of combat veterans.

Now there's a big difference.

They were deployed to the front lines.

Who were deployed four, five, six times, had a 25% higher incidence of suicidal ideation.

The children and that staggered me.

You know, it's just staggering.

And we've just got to do better.

And the good here's the positive news.

Now we can look at Pet scans.

Of of young men who have and women who have PTSD.

We we yes, we are in a better place now more than ever to treat this.

And as as you say.

And in the book, you say this too, that.

Well, I'm going to say this.

You may be the perfect person to bring that story of the children to the forefront and to highlight that because you understand that, again, you had that you had that understanding before we had the word, you know, for contact PTSD or secondary PE or whatever they're going to settle on the name for that is.

But it it is a different experience for the child of someone who is suffering with this.

And you are, and this book is a wonderful way to get that conversation started.

I think about how we can help.

Well, I definitely felt it, and I didn't know what it was.

Feels, feeling because I was a little child, I didn't I looked at a picture every day, you know, that always magically appeared on a wall of this young boy and made it worse when I had a son named him after his Uncle Dave, and he looked like my Uncle David and that just reminded me of the grievous burden on his mother, you know.

And but I didn't know, I didn't understand.

Why do I feel like this?

You know, why?

Why am I so obsessed with this?

And why do I just seem to hang on, pop, and want to know more?

And and, you know, I just didn't understand it.

But in writing this book, I've come to, a greater understanding of that.

And I can clearly, clearly empathize with these families, these modern families who are enduring this.

Well, unfortunately, we are running a little short on time here.

So in our final two minutes, can you just say what you'd like for everyone to take away from this book and your story?

Yes, I would like for everyone who reads Bring It Home and Beyond.

I would like for them to understand the demands that we place upon our warriors and their families, and I would like for them to fully understand the the psychological trauma that is heaped upon our warriors and their families when we send them off to battle.

This is so important.

We've got to get a grip on this.

You know, this understanding can only help us.

And lastly, I would say, we need to to look at a situation when politicians decide to send our young men and women into battle, we need to demand that only be.

They only be sent with the full measure of our government support the American people support and the full arsenal of democracy at their back.

In other words, they have the best supplies, the best training, the best equipment, which absolutely was a failure in the outset of the Korean War.

And when we fail, the cost of war is not measured in dollars and cents.

As one Korean War hero said, it is measured in the lives of our young people.

So I think all of this understanding can make things better for us.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you so much for being here, for writing this book.

I can't say enough about how important and impactful this book you've written is, so thank you.

Well, it's my honor.

It's truly my honor.

Thank you so much.

Unfortunately, that's all the time we have for today.

The book, again, is Bringing Davey Home by Sherri Steward.

This is it for the bookmark.

I will see you again soon.