Veterans of the small screen

Published 3:00 pm Wednesday, July 26, 2006

A Port Orchard woman helps local vets discuss their experiences.

In an era of reality television, the story of P.J. Scott deserves a television miniseries.

Her witticisms alone justify her as a tube-worthy character, but she has depth as well.

Having endured blindness, diabetes, divorce and the near-loss of her son to lymphatic cancer, her plucky mannerisms belie the trauma of her past.

Fittingly, Scott is a television personality. But rather than focusing the camera on herself, she turns the lens outward, toward local military veterans like herself, in an effort to educate, enlighten and entertain.

“We’re like (talk show host) Charlie Rose here – we’re professionals,” she joked last week to three Korean War veterans assembled around a circular table at Bainbridge Island Television.

Then, after a nanosecond’s reflection, she added quizzically: “Do you think I can get as good- looking as Charlie Rose?”

The group was shooting the August installment of Scott’s “Veteran’s Forum,” an aptly named program that airs six times each month on BITV.

Scott, who lives in Port Orchard, began shooting her show on Bainbridge Island last November, after spending the four years prior filming in Bremerton.

The goal of Veterans Forum, she said, is threefold: To inform veterans about their benefits, to encourage them to join veteran service organizations and, just as importantly, to take a few “trips down memory lane.”

The show, spliced with nostalgia, intentionally avoids the horror stories of combat.

“Everyone knows how terrible war is,” she said. “I’ll let (film director) Ollie Stone deal with that.”

Instead, Scott focuses on the personalities of her guests.

Joining her for August’s show – the follow-up to a July interview with the same three men – were Dick Burkholder, Birger Sather and Robert Medley, all of whom did combat tours in Korea.

At one point, Scott asked the panel about the concern shown for them by loved ones while they were away at war.

“My mother was convinced I would never come back,” Burkholder told the group.

Asked how the war impacted them, all three men said their experiences had little effect on their lives once they returned home.

Even after the cameras stopped rolling, the group continued chatting while they perused some old black-and-white photographs.

Medley read a yellowing letter he’d saved from a former bunkmate about the nearly inedible chow choked down by soldiers at the time, to which his fellow panelists nodded in understanding.

It’s this type of casual discourse, Scott said, that she hopes to provide her viewers.

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For Scott, a native Californian who enlisted in the Navy voluntarily in 1971 during the Vietnam War, the military was a mixed-blessing.

She joined as a patriot, but also as a student, eventually earning degrees in history and geography, with a minor in political science, from a college in Fresno, Calif.

Her plan was to become a teacher, but that path was obstructed by a series of misfortunes.

At birth, her first-born child weighed 10 pounds, 6 ounces; her second outweighed the first. When her third child weighed in at a whopping 14 pounds, Scott was convinced there was a problem.

All three children were healthy, but despite the warning signs – the links between weight and diabetes are well-documented –doctors failed to realize that Scott was diabetic.

She had long complained about continued bouts with fatigue. Finally Scott was asked if she’d ever been exposed to hazardous materials.

Having worked as a yeoman at a nuclear weapons facility during her time with the Navy, she answered yes.

“I never handled any bombs,” she said. “I filed and typed because that was what women in the Navy did back then, but I must have been exposed to something.”

Scott – who said the military lost much of her personal file, but acknowledges the connection between her service and her disability – began taking insulin to treat her diabetes.

Following a stressful divorce, her condition worsened. Her eyes began hemorrhaging 11 years ago, causing her vision to deteriorate rapidly. She has since had 20 laser eye surgeries, but her sight remains heavily impaired.

“I see things like I’m looking through a periscope,” she said, referring to a field of vision restricted to what’s directly in front of her. “And at certain distances the world begins to look like a Monet painting.”

She wears sunglasses in the television studio to shield her sensitive eyes from the bright overhead lights.

Until six years ago, she remained in California, where she had debuted on the small-screen as co-host of a family values program produced by the pastor of her church.

But the script changed the day she got a call from her son, who was at the time a sailor stationed at Bangor.

Hearing he’d been stricken by cancer, Scott moved to Silverdale while he underwent treatment. He is now cancer-free.

Scott eventually bought a home in Port Orchard, where she is commander of the local American Legion post. She has earned several awards along the way, both for her television show and for her involvement with veteran service organizations.

She was honored recently as Woman Veteran of the Year for the state of Washington.

Her plan is to forge ahead at BITV with monthly editions of Veterans Forum, though she would eventually like to start a monthly or weekly news program that would deal with veterans issues in greater detail.

“Bad things happen, but you can’t stay there,” she said, gesturing to a place in the room where negativity, if it were to take up a physical space, might reside. “I can’t sit here and ‘boo hoo hoo’ about things. I’m not going to stop breathing because I’m legally blind. I want to feel like I’m productive – and I believe I am.”