Welcome to Home of the Brave. I'm Scott Carrier. I've been working on a story for the past couple of weeks, but last night the whole thing collapsed like a house of cards.

It was an anti-war story brought on by Trump threatening to go to war with Iran.

His tweets were deeply troubling to me because I'm afraid once the war drums start beating everything escalates and then it happens.

The war comes and there's no way to stop it. There is no anti-war movement in the

United States. Protest at this point seems futile, if not dangerous. My idea for this story was to use interviews I recorded years ago, people talking about violence and

loneliness and then write narration, hopefully conveying a sense of dread that would make people want to never

go to war again. But then last night, as I was writing the ending, I realized I'd done this story before. Two years ago, and played it on this

show and it didn't work. It was a failure both as a story and in stopping the violence.

Somehow I forgot or I'm stuck in a loop, a twilight zone,

or maybe it's just a sign of the times.

We keep repeating this cycle, the threat of war, the fear of war, never ending war.

So last night was rough.

I felt like all was lost. This morning, however, I realized I have a story by

the master, Joe Frank, that could be like a Phoenix rising from the ashes. It's Joe's anti-war story, originally broadcast

in 2014 on Unfictional, a program from KCRW in Santa Monica.

The story is called Dreamers,

and it has the structure of a drawing by MS Escher. He lived in a poor Arab village. The main street was an unpaved dirt road. Water was

brought in by truck three times a week from which his family filled their plastic jugs.

And the electricity, which ran the TVs, the lights, and the fans,

was provided by local generators, powered by gasoline.

His father had lost both legs to an artillery shell in the 1967 war.

Now confined to a wheelchair, he was a devout Muslim who decried the existence of Israel.

...