A Big Story for a Small Station

But it’s written in the starlight

And every line on your palm

We’re fools to make war

On our brothers in arms

--”Brothers in Arms”

by Mark Knopfler of Dire Straits

KEYT goes to the Kremlin.

The shivery figure on the screen, battling minus-30-degree cold in a heavy jacket and stocking cap, is King Harris.

Harris, the news director for KEYT-TV.

KEYT, in Santa Barbara.

Santa Barbara, the nation’s 112th-largest television market, a mere speck on the broadcasting map.

“Hello,” the frozen man says. “I’m King Harris, speaking to you from the heart of the Soviet Union.” Thus begins “Brothers in Arms,” a KEYT-produced special airing at 9 tonight on Channel 3 here, preempting ABC’s “Mr. Belvedere” and “Just the Ten of Us.”

With good reason. This unique, deeply moving and rewarding program affirms the capacity of small stations to do big work, and in this case also important work superseding that even of giant networks with vaster resources.

Giant networks that may not appreciate what they’ve missed, that is. Because KEYT is an ABC affiliate, Harris tried to interest “Good Morning America,” “Nightline” and “20/20” in the station’s highly worthy and unusual Soviet material, but it was rejected--sight unseen.

Whatever happened to brothers in broadcasting?

“I was outraged,” Harris said in his office here. “You have a news organization and you turn down things without even seeing them? What is that?”

As it turns out, Alma-Ata, not Moscow, is the principal setting for this hour that so clearly and poignantly defines war and its ugly residue of wounds as common denominators for all peoples.

It is to this large city, capital of Soviet Kazakh, that Harris and KEYT cameraman Dave Cronshaw ultimately traveled with 19 American veterans of Vietnam in early December. The group was on a mission of bonding with Soviet veterans of Afghanistan sponsored by a Seattle organization named Earthstewards. The scheduling and interview subjects were supplied by a Soviet director who, Harris acknowledges, is making his own film about the trip, possibly for propaganda purposes.

“But I felt this was not a political thing,” Harris said. “It was simply an exchange of citizens on a human level that dealt heavily in the healing process.”

Vietnam and Afghanistan. Two disastrous wars, both unpopular on the home front.

Unlike World War II, in which the Soviets suffered terribly while heroically defending their homeland, Afghanistan has been a Soviet blemish that only now is beginning to fade with the recent Soviet troop withdrawal.

Reflecting the freer environment of glasnost in the Gorbachev era, a citizen of Alma-Ata tells the camera that the Afghanistan invasion was “a mistake of our government.”

Although not exact in political terms, parallels between the Vietnam and Afghan conflicts are much closer on a human level.

Expecting a hero’s welcome, many Vietnam veterans instead were greeted by anger and occasionally even spat upon by those who felt America’s involvement was unjust. Reaction in the Soviet Union to Afghanistan has been less intense. Yet there, too, returning veterans have been met by indifference and suspicion.

One speaks to Harris about the “feeling of mistrust” he encountered upon returning, forcing him to seek comfort in the company of fellow veterans. “You feel at home with them.”

We hear of difficult readjustments, of mingling feelings of joy and guilt upon surviving. And a veteran talks of “having recurring nightmares of blood” on his hands.

Harris also interviews parents of soldiers who fell in battle. How secret was the war in some instances? A mother recalls learning her son had died in Afghanistan. She had not even known he had been transfered there.

“Brothers in Arms” is beautifully made. Most remarkably, though, you find yourself sharing the grief of persons whose nation in recent times has been the enemy of the United States. Old barriers fall. It’s uplifting and cleansing.

A Navy veteran of Vietnam himself, Harris learned of the Earthstewards trip through Walter Capps, a religious studies professor at UC Santa Barbara, where he also teaches a course on the causes and impact of the Vietnam War.

The cost of sending Harris and Cronshaw was $4,000--a substantial investment for a small station like KEYT, which is owned by Smith Broadcasting Inc. “This is very major for us,” said Harris, who added that if Smith hadn’t paid, Sandra Benton, KEYT president and general manager, had promised to do so out of her own pocket.

Harris didn’t see active combat during his 1969-70 tour in Saigon. “I never got to the point of seeing death,” he said. “I never experienced that rush, which is like a drug. What do you do after you experience that? As for me, I came home and put Vietnam away.”

For others on the trip--including former Marine Capt. Jack Lyon, whom Harris befriended--Vietnam was not so easily erased. While the group was in a Moscow hotel waiting to travel to Alma-Ata, Harris encountered Lyon, who had just come across perhaps 150 Vietnamese students asleep in the lobby. He was shaking.

“Jack was much different from the guys I had known,” Harris said. “He told me that this was something he had always dreamed of when he was in Vietnam, coming across a bunch of Vietnamese sleeping, and then shooting them.”

In Alma-Ata, however, lingering trauma was eased by new friendships. It was this same Lyon who gave the father of a slain Soviet veteran his own purple heart, said Harris, and received from the grieving mother of a dead veteran the shawl of her great-grandmother.

To say that Harris was personally moved by the trip is almost an understatement. So angry was he at being turned down by elements of ABC News, which hadn’t even seen the KEYT material, that he personally complained to Robert Murphy, vice president in charge of ABC News coverage. The result was San Francisco bureau chief Lynn Jones being dispatched to Santa Barbara to view the KEYT material.

Afterward, Jones lauded KEYT in a memo to Murphy, copied to Harris, saying: “It would be hard to beat what KEYT has, even if we did the story ourselves the next time a group of Americans go.” That was two weeks ago, and Harris has heard nothing further.

“We are still taking a look at it and hope to find a way to use it,” an ABC News spokeswoman said.

Meanwhile, not everyone endorses KEYT’s coverage, and one person recently issued this challenge to Harris: “How can you show Russians as good guys after they went over to Afghanistan and chopped off people’s hands?”

But Harris sees the story differently, as something giving intimate new meaning to glasnost . He recalls what a Soviet veteran told Jack Lyon: “If they ask me to shoot you, I’ll throw down my gun. I won’t do it.”

Brothers in arms.