[Becker] Tonight, we take you behind the scenes
for an update on a project offering you new access
to our Service & Sacrifice series.
[Intro music]
[clattering]
[whirring]
[Becker] Tapes.
[Intro music]
Upload.
Action.
[Man] I never go by that cemetery out on Lyons View
when I drive by every morning to go into work
that I don't salute them.
[Becker] An archive of stories
profiling the lives and life challenges
of East Tennessee veterans
is seeing new life online.
[Sims] I'm Elizabeth Sims, and I'm a digital storyteller.
[Becker] Our in-studio expert walks us through new access
to old Service & Sacrifice stories now up on YouYube.
[Sims] Well, right now, we are looking at the WBIR YouTube channel...
just our homepage,
because I want to take y'all to our Service & Sacrifice playlist.
All of the Service & Sacrifices that have ever run since March 2017
and is now the home base for the new digital archive
that we're doing for every Service & Sacrifice that has ever aired and existed.
[Becker] The playlist page holds dozens of stories dating back more than a decade.
[Sims] I think close to 300 at this point.
So yeah, a lot, hundreds, hundreds of videos.
[Man] You start your roll right away
and you end up right here vertical.
[plane propeller whirring]
[Becker] This lesson in how to barrel roll an airplane
offers a glimpse into the life mission
Brandon Abrao is chasing.
[Sims] So I went ahead and just took us to the main page of the playlist.
And if you start up at the very top,
all the way up here,
so this is the most recent video.
And if you scroll
all the way back down...
But that right down there is the first Service & Sacrifice that ever aired.
[Becker] And that was in 2008?
[Sims] Yep, that's in 2008.
[Man] And this used to be a train yard, the L&N Train Depot.
And as you pan over, you will see the L&N building.
And, of course, the memorial is being built right on the very train tracks
where we had soldiers who...
disembarked from the trains.
[Sims] Just find the video that you want to watch,
click on it.
It's going to automatically start playing.
[Becker] The new online archive is still a work in progress.
[Sims] We've got about four years left.
We've gone...
let's see 2008 to 2012
and then we have a big gap.
So that, at least on the timeline that we're on right now,
will be done by the end of the year.
[Becker] The goal, full access to every Service & Sacrifice story ever produced,
as we start year 15 of our ongoing series.
[Music fades]
At the memorial site in Downtown Knoxville that helped inspire our series,
we will see the dedication of a new monument to veterans of Vietnam.
This stone memorial will be dedicated at a ceremony
in World's Fair Park in Downtown Knoxville at 9:30 Tuesday morning.
The public is welcome and encouraged to attend.
This week, we lost one of the veterans responsible for that new memorial.
82-year-old Clifford Willis died earlier this week.
He served as a river rat in the Mekong Delta aboard a Navy patrol boat.
We followed him back to Vietnam 50 years after his war service there.
Mr. Willis was part of our 2017 documentary, Facing Ghosts.
You can watch that right now on our YouTube page.
And our deepest sympathy, tonight, to the Willis family,
his friends, and fellow Vietnam veterans.