The Story

In 1945, Alfred Klinger was just 17, a first-generation American who wanted to serve his country and in the process, feel something like a hero. He fought and was wounded in World War II.

Fifty-nine years later, Alfred got the idea to return to the place where he'd lost his friends. This time, he was 78 years old, and traveled by bicycle. Alfred talks with Dick Gordon about what it was like to arrive at Remagen. He found the old bridge over the Rhine bombed and broken, but in its place was a peace museum – a moving testament to his experiences and to the friends he lost. Also: Mike Heaney fought in the Vietnam War. And like Alfred Klinger, he wondered for many years what it would be like to go back.

On Memorial Day, Al Stuart thinks of his father, an Army doctor who died just three weeks before the end of World War II. Al was young when his dad died, and he never had the chance to know him well. In 1985, he took his wife and daughter Amy to visit his dad’s grave in Belgium.

• Read about the Ardennes American Cemetery

By the time Palestinian Bassam Aramin was 17, he was in jail for planning an attack on Israeli soldiers. At the same time, Yonatan Shapira was an elite pilot in the Israeli Air Force. But somehow each man came to understand the view of the other and they began meeting secretly to find a better way. Also on the show: an inadvertant Freedom Rider.

John Caulker grew up during the war in Sierra Leone and now brings former soldiers and civilians together.