Intercept

By the time the Americans were captured, the young soldier badly burned in the helicopter crash was struggling. His eyes were swollen shut. As the bound men marched barefoot toward Hanoi, he fell further and further behind.

"I tried to stop, and wait and the guard would push me to keep going," the surviving prisoner of war recalled. "By the  time we stopped to rest, he wasn't with us.

"He's still MIA."

The words from the taped interview with the POW hang in the KBOO radio studio air. Hosts Marvin Simmons, 63, paces and Bill Bires, 82, covers his face. On Fridays, as they have every month for 20 years, they bring listeners a war experience that argues for peace.

In Portland, where progressive politics are measured by youth and social networking, they are radical elders on the radio. They began recording Veteran's Voice on reel-to-reel tapes. The first 10 recordings are out in Simmons' barn in the Coast Range. So are dozens of white crosses they fashioned for one demonstration against the Iraq war. And the wooden coffin they draped in a flag and carried downtown in 2005 for another.

But inside a small sound studio off east Burnside, the two repeatedly agitate. They interview women veterans about military sexual trauma, dissect U.S. policy on land mines, and trace cancer and birth defects due to Agent Orange in Vietnam and in the families of Americans who fought there.

Two years ago, station managers evaluated Veteran's Voice and agreed it told a critical story and that Simmons, Bires and their friends are the storytellers.