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Life & Times Transcript

11/07/05

Val Zavala>> Tonight on Life and Times --

Thousands of Southern Californians make the switch from civilian to military lives, but this film student put his Iraqi experience on tape.

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> "We're on lockdown right now. It's Christmas Eve. They took the entire compound down. We almost couldn't get in. Yes, it's that bad."

Val Zavala>> And then, the dean of network news talks about the state of journalism, where the country is headed and why he wouldn't have made a good president.

It's all straight ahead on tonight's Life and Times.

Announcer>> Life and Times is made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.

Val Zavala>> For many of us, the war in Iraq is a world away. Even for families with relatives and loved ones there, it's often hard to imagine what they're going through. Well, we found one soldier who brought the war home, you could say, in his helmet. Orange County reporter, Roger Cooper, has his story.

Roger Cooper>> College student Casey (Kc) Wayland wants to be a filmmaker, a goal he's been pursuing in the film school here at Chapman University in the city of Orange.

[Film Clip]

Roger Cooper>> But Casey's journey to become a filmmaker had to take a major detour when the freshman's Army Reserve unit got called up for active duty in the war in Iraq. Suddenly Casey found himself under orders to give up his life here at Chapman University, put his studies on hold for at least a year and ship out for Baghdad, a place about as different as you could imagine from this peaceful campus. Casey decided to face his concerns by thinking like a film student.

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> I was like, okay, what can I do with this situation? I'm going to be overseas. I'm a film student. I have a huge opportunity here. What I decided to do was I was going to prepare to go overseas and record every bit of the deployment.

Roger Cooper>> Casey was laying the groundwork for what would become his documentary, "365 Boots on Ground", a military expression for a year spent in the combat zone. Casey fitted his helmet with a tiny video camera and actually got Army permission to use it.

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> What I could do is, I could turn the camera on and off and record onto a tape in my canteen pouch. I designed a way to put both a camera and a microphone inside the helmet at the same time.

Roger Cooper>> Casey spent his next year taping everything that happened. Everything, including his mother's reaction to his joining the Army without telling her first.

Kathy Wayland>> I had a heart attack. I never thought he would do something like this. I tried to brainwash them as children and say, "You don't want to go in the Army. You don't want to be a Marine like daddy."

Roger Cooper>> Everything, including his last time with his grandmother who would die while he was away.

Kathy Wayland>> "The general said they're going to a safe place, if there is a safe place where they're going."

Roger Cooper>> The approach he took was not so much to capture a trip into the firefights and car bombs we see on television, but to document the mundane, the little everyday events a soldier serving in Iraq experiences. It's all here, the special training to prepare him for Iraq, the target practice in a wet foxhole, the inoculations, the night before the actual deployment.

>> "Okay, smoke a cigar once, go to war once, I'll come back and I'll smoke another."

[Film Clip]

>> "I just touched American soil for the last time in years."

>> "Yeah, welcome aboard, welcome aboard."

Roger Cooper>> Even during the gruelingly long transport plane ride to Baghdad, Casey was rolling. He takes us on his first nervous trip down the dangerous highway from Baghdad's airport to the heavily secured Green Zone where his unit would work.

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> I was one of the drivers and I had a trailer behind me, so I'm thinking, oh, great. If I get hit, I'll be dragging dead weight behind me.

>> "Car bomb?"

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> "No."

>> "Sounded like it, though, didn't it?"

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> "Yeah, it did."

>> "But they were firing before the car bomb went off."

Roger Cooper>> Then there was the day Casey's convoy encountered a potential ambush. A car had stopped at an area where roadside bombs were being planted.

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> So I started in. I saw that there was one driver and then the other guy. I popped a round into the dirt. I didn't want to skip the round off the ground. I wanted to get the sound out, so that way it would scare them. They were good to go.

Roger Cooper>> But most of his time was more routine. As a communications specialist, Casey's unit beamed military news briefings back to the Pentagon. He put a radio station on the air to entertain the troops.

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> One of the other missions we had there was, we did the Freedom Radio which was the local radio station for the entire country of Iraq. It was kind of like the "Good Morning Vietnam" of today's era.

>> "Everybody out there listening to Freedom Radio on 107.7 FM Baghdad, we are glad to have you along and help you, serve you, our customers, those with the boots on the ground every single day."

Roger Cooper>> His documentary also contains what may be the best description ever of what the one hundred ten degree desert heat is like to a soldier.

>> "Turn the oven on in the kitchen to broil, open the door, put your chair right in front of the oven, sit there for an hour in your best winter clothes, then go plug Momma's blow dryer into the outlet next to the microwave on the counter. Blow that in your face so you get the wind effect."

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> "We're on lockdown right now. It's Christmas Eve. They took the entire compound down. We almost couldn't get in. Yeah, it's that bad. Across the way, they're playing music right now.

This is my stocking. Raiders of the Lost Ark, oh, my God. Everybody sent me stuff. I'm happy. I'll be fat, but I'm happy. This is how we spend our Christmas."

Roger Cooper>> Having been through this, having documented it, having lived it, how do you feel about the war?

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> A lot of people have asked me about what I think about what we're doing over there. I think if we stay very determined over there and assist in bringing the nation up, I believe we will be successful over there.

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> "We got word that our replacements are coming and then we heard that for a month. We're thinking, oh, great. They're going to be here next week. No (laughter), they're not going to be here next week."

Kathy Wayland>> Katy and I went out and we bought all the yellow ribbons we could find and, you know, decorated the car with the paint you can write on windows. I went all the way up and down the hills and put yellow ribbons everywhere.

Roger Cooper>> At last, Casey brought his documentary full circle, arriving home at LAX on Thanksgiving Day.

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> "The plane touches down, we're all in uniform, we're coming out of the plane. In the background, people are cheering from the airport like you may have seen in some of those commercials. It was very kind of a surreal moment where you're just back home."

Roger Cooper>> Casey, what did all of this teach you?

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> There's a lot of lessons to be learned from the entire deployment process. I went out and I had a lot of experience overseas. I got to see things that a lot of people never will get to see and I hope that a lot of them don't have to see them.

Roger Cooper>> "365 Boots on Ground" won Casey Chapman's Cecil B. DeMille Award for Best Documentary. It's now entered in a lot of film festivals. Companies are talking to him about distributing it nationally. And although Casey has now returned to his studies, he is constantly aware that he could be called up again to go back to Iraq.

Casey (Kc) Wayland>> There is always going to be the possibility of going back over there and, if need be, I can go.

Roger Cooper>> And with the war in Iraq continuing to rage, it's entirely possible that "365 Boots on Ground" could be a film with a sequel. At Chapman University in Orange County, I'm Roger Cooper for Life and Times.

Announcer>> Kcet.org is the place to look for the very latest on Life and Times. You'll find previews of upcoming stories, transcripts and audio of past episodes and links to some of our most interesting features. Just go to kcet.org and click on "Life and Times".

Val Zavala>> Every journalism student will tell you that they begin with the five W's: who, what, where, why and when. But when it comes to television journalism, there should be a sixth "W" added to the list for Walter, as in Walter Cronkite.

[Film Clip]

Val Zavala>> Cronkite ushered in the golden age of network news covering all the major events of the last half of the twentieth century from World War II and Vietnam to the moon landing and Watergate. His was the voice that Americans trusted most. He retired from CBS in 1980.

Walter Cronkite>> "Congratulations to all of you."

Val Zavala>> Cronkite is still active in journalism and was at USC's Annenberg School of Communication where he honored reporters from across the country for their outstanding coverage of elections and politics. That's where I had a chance to talk with him. You've come to be known as the most trusted man in America, but who do you trust when it comes to your news sources?

Walter Cronkite>> Well, I am a devotee of the New York Times. I'm a resident of New York, and it is a local paper as well as a great international newspaper, I think. That is my principal first source of the news in print. I believe that, unfortunately, we must go to print to get the full stories of so much of our important news today. Unfortunately, we in network television at any rate do not have the time to cover the news as completely as it needs to be covered.

A half hour broadcast, when you subtract the commercials and the lead-ins and the lead-outs, there's around a sixteen minute or something that's broadcast. We are trying to cover one of the most complicated nations in the world, one of the most complicated world situations in that much time, and that is just ridiculous. We need much more time from our owners. Our evening news broadcasts should be an hour instead of a half hour and I wish we would come to that.

Val Zavala>> And what is the one thing you would like to see changed that would improve broadcast journalism?

Walter Cronkite>> It is time that is needed. We have the talent in our newsrooms. The principal networks certainly do and many of the local stations have and certainly it's there in your network. Incidentally, your evening news report is, to my mind, the way news should be done. The headline service and then going deep into the stories of importance that day with interviews and backgrounders. This is, to my mind, a perfect model. That, of course, requires an hour time. That's what we would like to see with the commercial networks.

Val Zavala>> You've covered more than five decades of presidents. How do you think our current president, George Bush, will be seen ten or even five years from now?

Walter Cronkite>> Well, you're asking me to get pretty deep in analysis at this point in the presidency of George Bush. He's got a couple more years before we close the books on his administration. Up to now, we all know that there is a great deal of controversy abroad in the land obviously among the Democrats, but also among a lot of the Republicans today in their consideration of, first of all, the financial mess we are in. We are going to end up as one of the poorer of the modern nations in the world, particularly Western nations. We're going to be actually poverty-stricken, desperately so, and we're going to have a lot of things that we need to do that we're not going to have the money to do it.

Maybe the most important of those is education. So we are right now falling way behind in our education of our young people. Our teachers today are paid so poorly that, in most of the United States, they are making less than the janitors who work in their school building. That is shameful. These are the people who are molding our future right there in those early school years. If we do not educate them, we are going to have an uneducated public. And with an uneducated public, we are going to be so handicapped that we cannot make the judgments we need to protect our democracy or our republic.

So we are in the throes right now of a seriously desperate future. Our roads have to be rebuilt. Our bridges have to be rebuilt. Our dams have to be rebuilt. As we've seen in the recent tragedies of the hurricanes, our canals have to be rebuilt. It's incredible what we have facing us in the immediate future without the money to spend on it. We are going to be one of the poorer nations and, unfortunately, poorly educated.

Val Zavala>> Now there are several times throughout your career that people have tried to talk you into running for president. Are there ever times when you wish you had?

Walter Cronkite>> No, I haven't thought of that. I don't think I would be capable of being a good president. I don't think I'm that broadly informed, to tell you the truth, in what is needed to run the country. I'm not sure I'm good at picking assistants which is part of the job of manning or "womaning" the White House staff, although I have succeeded in having a Chief of Staff for my office who is one of the most brilliant women I've known. If I could be assured of getting her as my Chief of Staff in the White House, I might run (laughter).

Val Zavala>> Who is that?

Walter Cronkite>> She's right over here (laughter). She's -- Marlene Adler is her name and she's been my Chief of Staff for well over a decade and has been of great importance to me.

Val Zavala>> So with the right woman, you could have done it, yes (laughter)?

Walter Cronkite>> Yes.

Val Zavala>> Mr. Cronkite, thank you so much for your time.

Walter Cronkite>> You're certainly welcome.

Announcer>> To send a comment or a question to our program, you can reach us by mail at this address:

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Val Zavala>> She's become the unofficial spokesperson for the less than glamorous life in Van Nuys. Sandra Tsing Loh. We've seen her go through dating, jobs and marriage. Well, now she's entered a new stage in life. Vicki Curry talked with Sandra Tsing Loh about her new one-woman show, "Mother on Fire".

Vicki Curry>> Sandra Tsing Loh, your work so often over the years has been autobiographical and now your latest show deals with motherhood. So what are you trying to do with this play?

Sandra Tsing Loh>> Well, I think with this particular piece, I think living in Los Angeles right now is a fascinating, amazing time. It really is a melting pot and not in the la-de-da. It really is. I mean, there are a lot of different tribes packed together in one city and I think that it mostly works. But the experience of living in this city is just kind of like an exploration or a journey that I don't know if the whole country is going to go through eventually for the future of it, but this is what's happening.

So I think what I found just in the process of Los Angeles is there, again, I was just trying to get my daughter into kindergarten and we live in Van Nuys which is not one of the "good" school districts. I think that once you enter the world of parenthood, there are all these secret codes and tribes and little pockets and places that people get into and you soon learn that the good school districts are in La Canada, South Pasadena, Calabasas and the real estate is high accordingly and the private schools are this, that and the other.

In Van Nuys, it's a poor school district and, like most of LAUSD, it's quite Hispanic -- Hispanic or Latino, whichever -- the faces seem to change in every piece of thing that I read. Now in the LAUSD, it's like less than one in ten of the students are white, which is quite shocking, which is true in all the big cities, it turns out. So it's a journey that I began. I think that we hesitate to speak about many of the things that are actually happening because everything is so loaded. People are so terrified about mentioning some of the basics they see in front of them when they look at schools. It's totally not discussed.

And theater is like the safe place to do it. I mean, like radio would be hard, newspapers hard. Theater is the only place where it's like a little Town Hall. I love this theater. It's a ninety-nine seat. I've played in larger theaters recently, but the larger a theater gets, then you want to not exactly trim your message, but you want to make sure that you don't alienate the Sunday matinee audience and this and that. There's a good place for that kind of theater, but I knew that in a ninety-nine seat, we could let it rip.

The thing about theater is that we're all in the room together so that we may go through a roller coaster, but at the end of my piece, we should all feel okay and hopeful that this is a place where you can speak things in the moment. People can react, they can hear each other react, they can know it's okay and then go on from there.

Sandra Tsing Loh>> "I feel a madness coming over me. Frantically, I buy the Los Angeles Guide to Private Schools. Fingers trembling, I page through every school and here's what I find. That all the good schools, all the progressive schools, all the recommended schools basically start at ten thousand dollars per year. And if the brochure says children are taught Independent Thinking, add one thousand dollars. Peaceful Conflict Resolution, add one thousand dollars. Honoring Diversity -- oh, that's a big one -- add two thousand dollars.

And then there are the extras. If the children are taught Spanish, add seven hundred fifty dollars. French, add fifteen hundred dollars. Japanese, add twenty-five hundred dollars. If children are taught music according to the Orff Schulwerk method, add two thousand dollars. If there are science labs and some vague but important connection to UCLA, add three thousand dollars. If there's an award-winning arts program with maybe some mention of trips to The Getty or Disney Hall, add four thousand dollars."

Vicki Curry>> So it sounds like your show is not as much about parenthood as it is about race issues or perhaps that you're now having to face race issues in a different way because you're a parent.

Sandra Tsing Loh>> Yeah. I mean, I think that, when you become a parent, everything comes -- your entire world view is challenged because I think I'm a democrat -- I can say that -- but you can have a very Utopian, you can have a very relaxed form of being a democrat. As soon as you become a parent and your child is actually going through a society culture, all the alarm bells go off (laughter).

I think it is something that we have to ask ourselves. We're kind of like "I would like my child to be in a school with many different tribes and peoples and whatever" and, as soon as you see your little girl growing up, you go, "No, it's a convent in Canada with nuns, with guns and a gunboat (laughter)." You start changing colors and stuff flies out of your mouth that you never thought and it's just an amazing journey.

Sandra Tsing Loh>> "But then I looked at parochial schools and a new formula emerges. Start at the same base, ten thousand dollars, but if the school is Catholic, subtract one thousand dollars. Lutheran, subtract three thousand dollars. Baptist, subtract five thousand dollars. Quaker, add five thousand dollars. I don't know why, but Quaker is a popular religion if it's taught in an old Quaker meeting house and it's really expensive. Add Shaker furniture, even more.

And then there are the religious requirements. If chapel is required, subtract fifteen hundred dollars. If chapel is optional, well, that relative religious freedom is going to cost you fifteen hundred dollars. But look at this. Classes taught from a biblical perspective, subtract three thousand dollars. That's a pretty good deal."

Vicki Curry>> So at the end of this journey through motherhood or getting your first child into school, what was your take on parenthood in Los Angeles after that?

Sandra Tsing Loh>> I think -- yeah, number one, I think it's the hysteria that I felt rising. Like driving on the freeways, looking at charts, going on the internet, talking to other parents. I think in Los Angeles, because it is a very big city, people crave community. People crave meeting with like minds. People crave those little havens which is a natural thing, but then sometimes you get into a little haven pocket at a park bench and I go, "If I don't send my child to Wonder Canyon School in Brentwood, we'll die."

Then I think the anxiety of people about schools is because they feel they've finally found a small neighborhood pocket in Los Angeles in the world and they'll be safe. But, of course, they have a waiting list of three hundred because everyone gets the same idea.

Sandra Tsing Loh>> "Through the grapevine, I'm told that the most exclusive west side school, Radcliff Holyoke for Girls, they actually teach my style of essay writing to eighth graders. The annual tuition for that school is twenty-seven thousand dollars which, yes, I know can actually feed an entire village in Rwanda. I guess that's what they mean when they say, "It takes a village", but never mind those Rwandans. I'm thinking ahead because the wait list for that school is at least five years long. Maybe our family can move up on the list, cut ahead of the competition if I start right now doing some guest lectures. I know that's a little "every child left behind" but my own, but you don't understand. I'm a parent in Los Angeles. It's a jungle out here."

Sandra Tsing Loh>> And I think it's similar with neighborhoods in Los Angeles that I have had for such a long time. It's not just my La Canada fantasy, but my South Pasadena fantasy. There's a community of people who love their community, so I think my middle-class thinking is do I have to move to South Pasadena as opposed to just start in your block where you are? I mean, the people that I meet. It is really this extraordinary melting pot and it's great. Optimism. Optimism. It's gone out of style and I must bring it back. I love the city, okay?

Vicki Curry>> Sandra Tsing Loh, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us.

Sandra Tsing Loh>> Thank you.

Val Zavala>> And that's our program. I'm Val Zavala. For everyone at Life and Times, thanks for watching. We'll see you next time.

Announcer>> Life and Times was made possible through the generous support of the L.K. Whittier Foundation dedicated to improving the quality of life by supporting innovative endeavors in the fields of medicine, health, science and education.

And by a generous grant from Jim and Anne Rothenberg.

With additional support for Life and Times from The Ralph M. Parsons Foundation.

Sponsored in part by:


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