by Kathy Carlson, Producer and Interviewer
 

It is Veterans Day again and in the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month I take a moment to be quiet and to think about all the combatants I have been privileged to meet.
 
History made real, story after story pouring through me, beating at the doors, bending my head, stealing my breath, undercutting my assumptions and my distance.
 
James and I eating pizza while he told me he joined the National Guard so little children here don’t have to be afraid. Better able to describe war as a 26 year old than almost anyone I have listened to. Deep and thoughtful, funny, smart, tattooed and pierced, bleeding from all he witnessed and all he had to do. James gave me a heart full of broken glass.
 
Larry telling about the old man he was ordered to knock off the helicopter skids so they would be light enough to lift off the ground from the Montagnard village. Shaken, watching the man fall to his death, sharing the ride back with the man’s weeping family. Assuming they wanted to do the same thing to him. Sharing the way these events haunted him and made him wonder if there was any real reason to go on living. It had never occurred to him that telling his story would help anyone else. Wishing his family knew the truth of what he had been through, as some kind of explanation for his emotional absence. Filled with remorse, he was deeper and more complex than he appeared to be on the outside.
 
So many ordinary looking guys, nothing remarkable to look at, ordinary faces, bodies in all sizes and shapes, all ages. But underneath: cold swift rivers flashing with color smells sounds and danger.
 
As I sat and listened, these stories swept me away to other places. Huddling in the raft full of dead comrades sinking on the Rhine in the dark with the noise so loud it was pointless to talk. Hanging up in the crook of a tree in humid dead silence while the enemy stole through the jungle beneath. Slogging through snow in the middle of the night to rescue a nearly overrun outpost. Being on the 50 cal when the car full of civilians wouldn’t stop, watching the spent shells fly. Looking into the eyes of the man just killed at close quarters, watching the light leave. Watching helpless as a comrade bled out by the side of the road, far from home.
 
So I look on Veterans Day from a different perspective now. The tide and pull and the sheer weight of all those stories have left me in the in between. Not an innocent civilian anymore but certainly not a vet. I now imagine similar tales woven thick across the country, a web of mostly untold story, the counterpoint to the parades and the official day off work.
 
What’s important to say here is that these stories are not only history made real. These veterans regardless of the wars they served in, regardless of their political views, hold not only the uncensored truth about the reality of combat but also depth and insight about war in general. Sages of the abyss, they speak of things the rest of us have not touched but yearn to understand. The lessons they have to offer are not just about history but about the human spirit under pressure and what is learned there.
 
So go talk to a vet this week. And see if they will unlock the door for you a little and take you there with them.

 
Kathy Carlson

by Yovel Schwartz, Director
 

So I want to preface this entry by saying that it may seem out of place at first but I want you to know that I promise there’s a point at the end so please bear with me:
 
The other day I was on the bus.  People who know me are likely to say I made this story up because of that detail.  I’m almost never on the bus.  It does happen every once in awhile though and in this case I had lent my car to my girlfriend and was making my way home from work.   I took a bus I’d never been on before because I thought it might get me home faster.  I was reading; trying to tune out the rush hour commute crowd and rude grandmothers laden with discount packages and teeny tween laughter-gossip and the rest of the municipal unwashed. And then it happened. I knew it was going to happen; and then it did. A couple of homeless guys got on the bus and sat next to me. Right next to me. And they stank.
 
Now anybody who’s ridden a bus in a major city has had this experience. You’re trying to get home and you’re minding your own business and the bus is already sticky with end of day stink when you’re suddenly literally knocked over by the noxiously foul nasty of a human body that hasn’t bathed in months…maybe even years. It is the eye watering stench of feet and filth and shit and it made me instantly sick. The several other people that were sitting around us made eye contact to somehow share the pain by collectively expressing their shock.
 
I sat there miserable for five stops. Later I would remember that the two men looked pained. That one looked pretty bad off and that his friend was gently holding him upright and gently whispering in his ear. That they were embarrassed by the unveiled disgust around them and fought back with the pugnacious glare of the psychotic. But at that moment all I could do was try to cover my mouth. And then one guy pissed himself. Sitting right next to me he pissed himself and it spread out in a cinematic flower through his jeans and pooled around his ankles on the floor.
 
Whatever vestiges of kindness inside me (and there were very few) completely escaped me and I stood just in time to avoid being soaked by the rapidly spreading slick on the floor. I pushed my way to the door and stepped gratefully into the comparatively fresh air of the streets, dramatically taking a deep breath and whispering “Jesus” as I lit a cigarette and looked around for anybody that might have been witness to the whole sordid affair.
 
I’d gotten off the bus several stops before I intended to and was right across from the War Memorial on Van Ness Ave. The Bus was still parked. For some reason I didn’t notice it. I also didn’t notice that I’d been followed out by a young man, maybe 22 or 23 years old. And that the homeless men were being carefully escorted off the bus behind him. I kind of smiled at the young guy and rolled my eyes. He didn’t acknowledge me. Instead he turned to help the older guys get off the bus.
 
All three of them were halfway to the War Memorial Bldg before I recognized the IAVA logo on the back of the kid’s shirt. And suddenly I was very ashamed. They didn’t get on the bus together and I don’t know if the homeless guys were vets. But the young man I had thought of as a kid only moments ago made me feel like a very selfish child. One who has yet to learn that the world is vast and morally ambiguous and that our clarity of personal goodness is best left in the toy chest where it belongs.

 
Y. Schwartz

by Kathy Carlson, Producer/Interviewer
 

I can’t believe I have to write another memorial to one of our film vets. When some of the people involved in this film have been holding the stories for over 50 years, I know this is inevitable. But it hurts to say goodbye to someone with as generous a heart as Tony Yaquinto. I did not know him for decades. I suppose I could actually count my connection with him in hours. Yet sometimes it isn’t about how long you know someone; it’s about the depth of the sharing and how much your heart is impacted. Tony definitely touched mine.

Like most people, I knew next to nothing about the Korean War when I started this project. The Forgotten War, indeed. I had never heard of the Chosin Reservoir, only knew the name Pork Chop Hill from a movie title, and had no idea of the level of savagery and death that happened on the Korean peninsula. Wars of course aren’t things we like to dwell on, but when over 40,000 Americans die brutally far from home and over 90,000 are wounded, some of them many times, we ought to at least hold that somewhere in our memory. I know the death toll in WWII was astronomically higher. I know we have short focus as a people, or even as individuals. I guess this project has awakened something in me about our tendency to let all of it slip away unremarked. A dangerous practice in this small a world, even if I can understand full well the desire to avoid painful subjects.

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by Yovel Schwartz, Director/Co-Producer
 
So I have been seriously remiss in my blogging habits since we got this damn thing running. As is likely obvious, this is the first post I’ve made to the site. Forgive me my lack of attention.
 
For quite some time now I have been living without much in the way of sleep; a filthy shadow of my insomniac subconscious.
 

Many months ago I had to get a job. “Filmmaker” was no longer a way to argue against steady employment. I had a good run…from 2002-2010 I managed to eek by from contract to contract like every other struggling industry professional. I worked commercials and features; corporate videos and music videos; documentaries and short films. I whored myself to the slavish machine while all the while arguing my purity; my untainted perspective derived from refusing all opportunities to move to LA and become one of the southern unwashed.

Somewhere in the middle of all that it became my great honor and privilege to begin working on Common Sky. It has been the single most rewarding professional and creative experience of my life. Nevertheless I still had to get a job. I need to pay rent after all.

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Common Sky Post-Production Blog
by Ryan Schubert, Editor/Co-Producer

We spent more than a year creating our web presence, learning how to fund raise, and establishing our non-profit organization. Although we are still raising money to complete the project, we are finally getting back to the most important work at hand: making the film!

Our latest creative project is to release a new promotional short for the web to go with our existing short, “A Terrible Grace”, which can be viewed and shared on Vimeo. Less intense than the first, this new piece covers the ups and downs of a soldier’s diet, entitled “Ready-to-Eat.” Keep an eye out for it this summer online.

By Ryan Schubert, Editor/Co-Producer

We’ve just launched a campaign on indiegogo.com to test the so called DIWO style of online fund raising. Using the Internet as a significant venue of securing the entire budget for a motion picture is still a way off for most independent productions, but the potential for effective promotion and secondary fund raising is already here.

Thanks to indiegogo.com we now have access to the cutting edge in modern internet technology.

I give you The Widget!

Just as the name implies, the widget is a shareable graphic that can be added to blogs, postings, and emails that helps promote a developing project with images, info, and real-time fund raising information.

Feel free to sport our widget where ever you traverse the interwebs!

You can grab it on our page at indiegogo.com/common-sky where ther are detailed instructions if you find yourself as confused as our bright new future seems.

Friends of Common Sky!

We are having a summer pledge drive on indiegogo.com. We are raising funds to transfer our mini-DV footage to modern High-Definition media. We will announce our campaign publically on July 6th, members of our newsletter have already begun donating and you can too, if you are reading this blog. Until the 6th, all donations will be matched by an anonymous donor.

Donate now on our page at indiegogo.com.

Thank you for your support!
-The Filmmakers

by Kathy Carlson, Producer

Don Jardine (WWII, USMC, Pacific Theater—Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester and Peleliu), one of the veterans featured in our film, died on 4/1/10 after a long battle with illness. I was lucky enough to meet him and interview him when he was still strong and full of vitality, humor, insight and vivid recall. His passing underscores the importance of the stories carried, the need to learn from each other in a real and deep way, and the truth about how fast those stories can be gone, swept away downstream on the river of time.

My fellow filmmakers and I went to his memorial lunch at the Marines Memorial Club in San Francisco shortly after his death. We were rewarded with a rich cross section of stories about Don, all of them evidence of a long life well spent. Seeing his open young face as a teenager in one of the photos, however, brought home to me how amazingly young he was when his life collided with war. It is hard to remember this when an elderly man is telling me his stories from over 65 years earlier.
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Hi friends!

The blog for the Common Sky War Documentary is up and running!

Here you will find information, updates, and musings from the filmmakers about our progress toward completing the film!

Today our site launches with a blog from our Producer, Kathy Carlson.

Visit our site at http://www.wardoc.com