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TV presents Memorial Day salutes

By CHASE SQUIRES
Published May 28, 2005

Lest anyone forget, there's a reason for this three-day weekend. Television is honoring veterans with Memorial Day broadcasts that range from musical salutes to a painful account of U.S. Sen. John McCain's POW experiences.

A&E's two-hour original movie Faith of My Fathers at 8 p.m. Monday is the most noteworthy. Based on the memoirs of McCain, it's not something viewers will watch casually.

Shot down over Vietnam in 1967, McCain was held prisoner more than five years. Actor Shawn Hatosy (The Cooler, Soldier's Girl) portrays McCain with gritty determination that straddles the line between faithful and stubborn.

Faith of My Fathers moves painfully and slowly, documenting the daily hardships McCain faced in a North Vietnamese prison, punctuated by flashbacks to his childhood and days at the U.S. Naval Academy that illustrate how the values and loyalty he learned as a student served him as he resisted his captors.

It's a grueling production, exhausting to watch because of the brutality and suffering it examines. It's not light fare, but it's not meant to be.

TLC is premiering a five-episode series, Operation Homecoming, at 9 p.m. Monday that focuses on the emotional return of soldiers who have been serving in Iraq. Monday's two-hour debut (the rest of the episodes are 60 minutes long) features the homecoming of a 36-year-old soldier wounded in a firefight.

HBO debuts a new America Undercover documentary, Unknown Soldier: Searching for a Father at 6:30 p.m. Monday. The 90-minute program records director-producer John Hulme's quest to learn more about his father, a Marine killed in a 1969 missile attack in Vietnam.

And PBS is broadcasting the National Memorial Day Concert both Sunday (WEDU-Ch. 3, at 8 p.m.) and Monday (WUSF-Ch. 16, at 9 p.m.) commemorating the 60th anniversary of the battle for Iwo Jima and recognizing troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. The concert takes place Sunday, with WEDU carrying it live. It's expected to draw 300,000 spectators to the lawn at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Scheduled to appear are actor Gary Sinise, singer Vanessa Williams, actor Joe Mantegna, Gen. Colin Powell, actor Charles Durning, singer Trace Adkins, singer Harolyn Blackwell, and the National Symphony Orchestra.

Repeating a somber program he did last year, ABC's Ted Koppel on his Monday Nightline program at 11:35 p.m. on WFTS-Ch. 28 plans to read the names of 900 American service people killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, including 42 from Florida.

Filling any gaps, cable classic movie channels have lined up weekend-long war movie marathons.

Highlighting three days of patriotic presentations at American Movie Classics are, Midway (3 p.m. today) and Apocalypse Now Redux (6 p.m. Monday.)

On Turner Classic Movies, war films include Audie Murphy playing himself in To Hell and Back (3:30 p.m. today); and George C. Scott in Patton (8 p.m. Monday).

[Last modified May 28, 2005, 00:08:13]