Music Credits: “NY” from the cd Soul Sand composed and performed by Kosta T. Used courtesy of the Free Music Archive.

“Battle Hymn of the Republic” from Modern Warrior LIVE, performed by Dominick Farinacci on trumpet, pianist Lafayette Carthon, bassist Walter Barnes, Jr., drummer Gabe Jones, and vocalist Will Blaze.

 

Jo Reed:  From the National Endowment for the Arts, this is Art Works, I’m Josephine Reed.

Jaymes Poling: I’m Jaymes Poling and I’m the creator of Modern Warrior Live with Dominick Farinacci. I spent eight years in the 82nd Airborne Division, three years in Afghanistan with them before coming back to Ohio.

Dominick Farinacci: And I’m Dominick Farinacci. I’m a trumpet player. I’m a jazz musician, co-creator of Modern Warrior Live, and glad to be here.

Jo Reed:  Begun in 2017, Modern Warrior LIVE –which has received support from Arts Endowment—is a theatrical experience that mixes first-person narrative with music and multimedia to chronicle US Army Veteran Jaymes Poling’s story of his three deployments in Afghanistan and subsequent transition back home.  Its aim is to break down societal barriers that leave veterans feeling isolated and to begin to build bridges between veteran and civilian communities. Written by Jaymes with music by Dominick and performed by both under the direction of Emmet Murphy, Modern Warrior LIVE has presented over 120 shows around the country with talk-backs and conversations after each performance. What Modern Warrior LIVE has discovered is that while Jaymes' story may be his own, veterans and civilians alike are finding deep connection with the experiences he relates. Right now, we’re going to hear an excerpt of Modern Warrior Live. It’s a clip from the film that they made of the show during the covid lockdown. Here’s Jaymes Poling with Dominick Farinacci on trumpet.

Jaymes Poling: If I could give anything to the ones that are hurting, it would be peace. For some, I know things might not get better, but I can't help but think that there's individuals out there that need to know that growth is possible. They need to know society can be wrong when it assigns labels to survivors based on the trauma they survive. Why is it the case that someone that survives cancer is considered stronger while someone that survives combat is considered damaged or a liability. Forged in combat is a saying we rarely hear now. Why? We don't feel like victims. I'm not saying the road is easy. It’s littered with, overdoses, and suicides, and each time the dull pain that comforts me is transformed into a searing, pain that leaves me once again looking forward to just the familiar ache of loss. But if I could go back… I would keep the violence and the gratitude, my tribe and my isolation, my memories and grief. I think most of us would. Because that journey has forged who we are.

Jo Reed:  You just heard an excerpt of Modern Warrior LIVE.  Jaymes, Modern Warrior LIVE is based on your experiences.  I’m curious about what you wanted to convey.  What did you want the audience to come away with?

Jaymes Poling:  When I got out of the military, I came to Cleveland in 2013 and I was trying to find my place and I joined the Army when I was 17. I became an adult there. Of course, having no shortage of formidable experiences there, but when I came out, I couldn’t really find my place and I knew that I had these issues I was dealing with and as I looked around for that narrative of individuals dealing with similar issues and where they were going, all I could find is vets kind of portrayed in three different ways. One way is the hero and that’s easy enough to throw out and so, then we’re left with two buckets and that’s the liability bucket and the damaged bucket and those are the only two that I could find. For about a year and a half, I just kind of lived with that. Luckily, that year and a half also allowed me to grieve and put me in a position to start to build back from that. Once I started going back to school, putting things back together, I realized that there is this whole concept of post-traumatic growth that’s not discussed and I realized that if we could discuss it, we could balance that narrative so when other vets come home and we’re looking for “Okay, what’s next? What group do I belong to?” They’re provided some hope. I think one of the side effects of the awareness of post-traumatic stress that we’ve done a great job of creating as a society was that it can kind of feel like a life sentence when you have that diagnosis. So, we want to make sure that we address that, we talk about those issues, but we also provide that hope and that way out of it and we try to break it down into categories that seem much more manageable for the individual.

Jo Reed: You certainly do talk about post-traumatic stress in the show and you’re very cognizant of the fact that some veterans don’t make it through that, but there is a really rich life on the other side of that.

Jaymes Poling: Yeah, definitely. I can say I’m now happier than I’ve been at any point in my life, prior to the military included and there are still issues that I deal with, but I think that there’s no reason that we can’t get to that place for a lot of the members in our group. At the same time, though, like you mentioned, we do recognize that some people do have a much harder time with that. The majority of vets that see the show come up and tell me that they feel inspired and they’re looking for that life on the other side of it. At the same time, I’ve had conversations with vets that say they appreciate the message, but they feel like it doesn’t really relate to where they are right now and that they feel like they’ve loaned themselves out and they came back broken and so, we want to make sure that we’re aware of those people. We’re still talking to them. We’re including them in this and we want to make sure that we’re connecting them to the right resources as we connect everyone else to them.

Jo Reed: Dominick, as we said, Jaymes’ words are very, very powerful and they’re underscored by the music that’s put together by you, Dominick. What is it that you wanted the music to convey?

Dominick Farinacci: When we first started talking about this, the most important thing was to amplify the exact story that he’s telling. I remember when we met at a bar for the first time, we talked for seven hours and I  just listened to his story. I realized from my perspective, a civilian perspective, somebody who really never thought that deeply about veterans, doesn’t have any deep connection to the veteran community, when I heard his story, it wasn’t fitting in like the snapshot soundbites that I’ve heard in the media in terms of that damaged veteran or the liability. It was a much deeper story, just really rooted in the human experience, so much humanity around it in a way that although I could never picture myself in his shoes and to see the things that he went through, the way he was telling it and the stories, it created a real relatable kind of impactful moment for me to be able to look at certain things in my life. And so, that was really the core of it:  how can we take this story and how can we reach folks of all different walks of life. Of course, the veteran community and their family members and caregivers, but also people like me who don’t have a deep connection to the veteran community and everyone else in between. So, our goal was how can we create this using his story and the power of the arts and the unifying elements of the arts to be able to bring this to every corner of the country to have everybody who sees it, regardless of their background have an incredibly impactful experience. That’s kind of where we started out.

Jo Reed: God knows you have a range of music in the show. It’s extraordinary. You have jazz, blues, R&B, hip-hop, traditional. It’s really something.

Dominick Farinacci: Yeah. Thank you. When we were creating the musical landscape, one of my buddies and dear friends who’s been really instrumental in helping to collaborate on this, his name is Christian Tamburr. We connected and talked about the music, the right artist, every aspect of the musicality of this and he really got really deeply impacted by Jaymes’ story. Certainly, Jaymes’ story just provides an incredible musical inspiration. We wrote certain songs, certain songs come from the 82nd Airborne and other military-specific songs and others are more popular songs that most people in the country have heard before, but hearing it through this lens and this context, I know for me, the lyrics of some of these great songs really just take on a whole new meaning. So, yeah, we love exploring that side of it and really kind of following his story to bring all of these different musical worlds together through this unifying element of his story.

Jo Reed: How did you two start working together?

Dominick Farinacci: For me-- maybe I’ll start briefly and then...

Jaymes Poling: Yeah. Sounds great.

Dominick Farinacci: I know there was kind of three core parts to it. I was in Cleveland getting ready to record my latest album. My wonderful producer, the late legendary Tommy LiPuma was also from Cleveland. We decided to bring the album, the recording process back to our hometown and he introduced the song to me by Tom Waits from a great album, Swordfish Trombones. It’s called “Soldier’s Things” and I was getting ready to perform it and even though I’m an instrumentalist, I love to know the lyrics and the meaning of the song. Lyrically, it’s about a soldier coming back from war and kind of reacclimating and finding his or her own way and I thought to deepen that experience and my understanding of it, I’d like to meet somebody who’s fought overseas and so, through a mutual friend, I met Jaymes.

Jaymes Poling: Yeah. For me, I had mentioned I came home, spent about a year and a half in kind of a rough spot. But when I did start putting things together and I went back to school, I signed up for two classes initially. I wanted to feel it out and one of those two classes was like an English 101 class and my English professor, Trista Powers, who’s amazing, one of the first assignments she gave us was a memoir and so, I kind of talked to her offline and said “Hey, I really kind of want to put something real down here. I think I’m going to blow the length requirement out of the water and I just want to let you know I’m okay. If I do this, you’re not going to like turn me into anybody or anything because I want to be honest here,” and she was great and she encouraged me to do it. So, I wrote this little memoir piece, which it’s been cut up and parts of it are in the show today still and when she read it, she asked to share it with the veterans’ community on campus and they read it. They asked me to be the guest speaker for Veterans Day and then I started getting asked to sit on panels and stuff like that. When I got out of the military, I really was looking to transition from the veteran space. I didn’t see myself as an artist. I didn’t see myself as a writer. That was the first thing I’d written and since meeting Dominick through that mutual friend, initially, this almost felt like an obligation. My first meeting with Dominick, I wanted to convey that I was concerned that he might make something else where it’s another one of those products where it’s a vet in the bathroom with a gun to their head and we know how powerful that is and I think that it did have a role to play, but we want to make sure, again, like I’d mentioned, that we’re balancing that narrative and so, I asked him to make sure he was balancing that narrative and that night, he told me if I was willing to do it with him, I would have final edit on anything we did together and that was the beginning of it and it quickly became a passion for me as well and now, I couldn’t imagine doing anything else.

Jo Reed: What was the process of creating Modern Warrior Live? Would you go back and forth. Would you comment on the writing, Dominick? And did you weigh in on the music, Jaymes? How did you work on it?

Jaymes Poling: From the beginning, we were working together. From the time that we started talking about these experiences, Dominick was thinking about music and working on it and when it came time for me to actually put it on paper, I flipped my sleep schedule. I stayed up every night. I wrote through the night. I kind of intentionally tried to let myself slip back into that kind of earlier, almost more depressed state and I was confident that I’d be able to work through it again on the other side, but as I would write pieces, I would kick them to Dominick and Dominick, again, with me having no artistic background at all, Dominick would kick some music back to me and when I listened to it, I could recognize that the music did reflect what I’d written, but then it sent me back to the writing  And so, that way, Dominick’s music continued to shape my writing in the same way that my writing was driving some of the music.

Dominick Farinacci: On the musical front and just thinking about the overall production, all the team players, from the performers to the director and every aspect of this production, when we were creating it, we piloted the first 20 minutes at Cuyahoga Community College in Cleveland and then we created the rest of the show at Playhouse Square in Cleveland. And as it organically built, we found that every artist, everybody in the production just really got behind Jaymes’ story and that was really and continues to be the number one inspiration for the output of everything else that comes around it and as musicians, we are storytellers and there’s incredible inspiration in just hearing first person stories, especially of this level and of this dynamic and of this complexity and so, it just provides an endless journey of creative capacity to really kind of dig into and I know we were just talking the other day saying “This show, as it stands, it’s about an hour and a half. We’ve only dug into about 2% of your story, Jaymes,” right? So, we look forward to, I think, the years ahead, further creatively developing this piece and also bringing in other folks into our kind of method of storytelling.

Jo Reed: I really want to give a shoutout to the musicians and the singers who I saw in the video. They are extraordinary, just extraordinary. Are they part of a regular company that works with you all the time?

Dominick Farinacci: We have about three different core groups that travel with us depending on where we’re at, but I just want to mention on that film, it’s kind of a deep connection to a lot of those players is they’re from my hometown in Cleveland and just mention that the drummer, his name is Gabe Jones, he was 17 at the time when he took on this show, but he was one of my students in the Tri-C JazzFest Academy, this pre-college program here and I saw his capacity to really internalize a lot of different kind of styles and he did a great job of holding it together. And all the other vocalists and musicians, they’re all really kind of cast in a very specific role with very specific intentions.

Jo Reed:  Did you find the process of writing healing for you, Jaymes? Did you find that it actually enabled you to work through stuff and help you get to that other side?

Jaymes Poling: Yeah. It did and I was kind of surprised by how it affected me a little. When I’d started writing, I thought I was in a pretty good place and I thought that I could get through that stuff without it physically affecting me at that point. Early on, after my first deployment when I had those physical posttraumatic stress reactions to things. I was trying to figure it out and I was still in the military at the time and so, there, you feel this obligation to not seek any professional mental help because you’re worried you’re going to lose your guys and you won’t be able to redeploy with them. So, you try and find ways to deal with stuff yourself and I would sit on my couch. I would think about the fights and I would have that physical reaction again and the more I did that, the less that physical reaction was until I could actually sit on the couch, think about those fights, and that physical reaction wasn’t there and I find it requires maintenance to keep that. At the time, I knew nothing of parallels to exposure therapy, cognitive processing therapy, those things, but when it came time to write, I thought that I was still in that place, where I could jump into those things and I wouldn’t have those physical reactions and I was surprised that for some of it, I did have those reactions and that’s what really highlighted how important maintenance was for me. I still see that today. With COVID, we weren’t out doing the show and I started to feel some symptoms creeping back in because, again, I wasn’t working on maintaining my physical reaction to them.

Jo Reed: It’s such a powerful show and I just wonder how it is for you doing performance after performance, Jaymes. I mean, these are your memories and how do you avoid losing yourself in them again and how do you decompress?

Jaymes Poling: Yeah. If we didn’t have the conversations after the shows, it would be much harder. Usually by the end of the show, I feel pretty spent, but then I have the conversations with the people that came to the show. We have the conversation where we pass microphones around the audience and then when that’s done, there’s always a group of individuals that come up to the stage and we kind of start a second, more intimate conversation until the theater or staff generally kicks us out, but it’s those conversations that it really just winds me up for the next one and seeing that impact makes it worth it 100 times over.

Dominick Farinacci: I’d just like to add-- before we started this, you had no theater background...

Jaymes Poling: No.

Dominick Farinacci: Or anything remotely related. The thing that was so incredibly compelling-- we created the idea for this and then brought in the right team members and the first day in production, it dawned on me, I’m like “Wait a minute, Jaymes has never done this kind of thing before,” and for a moment, I freaked out, but then talk about like adaptability of skillsets of what you learned in the military and that kind of discipline-- like Jaymes showed up earlier than everyone else, by the way, to begin with and his level of preparedness, I mean, he had this entire thing completely memorized and internalized and we did take after take and this is just creating the first 20 minutes. You did take after take and just continually delivered an incredibly impactful take. You know, at the beginning, when we started the create this, a few folks had come in and said “That’s great. It's Jaymes’ story, but maybe you should have like an actor,” and a lot of them were really adamant about that. We’ve actually like never even considered that because it kind of defeats the purpose of what we’re doing. So, fast forward, it’s great to see Jaymes like quickly grow through the filming of it, but then through the live performances and I remember one show in particular in Washington DC at the National Council for Behavioral Health, and there were 5,000 people there and Jaymes went on stage and just did his thing without second-guessing anything. Us artists, this takes us years to be able to be that comfortable in just playing our instrument, let alone telling about our personal life. So, I always forget to mention that, actually, to you, but I’m always in awe of how you’ve quickly adapted that. It’s a special thing and it’s nothing that we could have planned. It just happened so organically and sometimes that’s the best way for the most special things in our lives to kind of come together.

Jaymes Poling: Thanks, man. I appreciate that.

Jo Reed: When I was watching the film of the show, there were things  that I marked down that just seemed so true for you in the military from what you said and one, you said it’s uncompromisingly violent. Put that to one side for now. But the other two, shared purpose and clarity in your mission, and of course, theater does that too. I mean, it is very clear what you need to do and it is a shared purpose. It’s so collaborative. You’re a team. You’re working together as a team and that’s something that you’re used to Jaymes and of course, you are too, Dominick, but where you can just tap into what was so central in the military.

Jaymes Poling: Yeah. It feels pretty easy to do on stage when I’m up there and I’m looking at the audience. I’m thinking about what I want to share with my friends that are still struggling, those I served with, their loved ones, and it really just kind of feels organic with that in mind.

Jo Reed: One thing that really struck me that was so important about the show was the tone that you use. There are things that you say that are very stark, shocking even, for example in the show you talk what it’s like to kill somebody.  But the way you convey that experience, the tone of voice that you use is so important. It doesn’t come off as arrogant or cocky or like you’re being a tough guy. You describing a circumstance, a normalized experience for someone in combat.

Jaymes Poling: Yeah. Thank you for that. I feel like so many times people try to share a message and kind of that cockiness or ego can get involved and a lot of that message can be missed. At the same time, I wanted to answer the questions that we often tell people not to ask veterans. I wanted to put those answers directly in the script. So, that’s why when I do talk about shooting individuals, A lot of vets are asked if they killed somebody if they’d been in combat. It’s hard to know. It’s hard to answer that question. I mentioned you start getting shot at by some bushes, you start shooting the bushes. Your guys are shooting the bushes and then if you find that you have killed a fighter behind those bushes later, did you kill somebody? Who knows? It was a collective action. Those are the things that I feel like aren’t normally discussed. I don’t think civilians think about it that way and so, we wanted to make sure that we touched on those topics in the most responsible way possible and in a way that allows people to build their conversations and share their experiences without having to focus on mine specifically.

Jo Reed: I thought the way you told your story, the tone you had throughout that show enabled people to hear what you were saying.

Jaymes Poling: Thank you for that. Yeah. We really wanted to make sure that we were doing everything we could to help bring the veteran and civilian communities together so that veterans can feel that support. I know that there’s a lot of vets that they’ll say things like civilians will never get it and to some extent, I think there’s a bit of truth in that, but I always thought that that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try and so, I wanted to make sure that we did the best we could to convey that in the show and that’s why we do things like when I’m talking about deploying, I’m talking about seeing my dad cry and having to walk out of the room because I feel like that’s something that civilians and veterans alike can get behind and that’s the tone that we try to maintain through the show.

Jo Reed: You talk in the show about finding strength in vulnerability and I’d like you to say more about that because that seems really key to what you’re exploring in the show.

Jaymes Poling: Yeah. It’s something that when I was younger, I never would have said anything like that and honestly, when I was younger, if I would have seen the show, I don't know that I would have liked it. But I think that after watching so many amazing people in combat-- they’re the ones you want leading you, they’re the ones you want next to you, they’re the ones you want following you. There are people that they’re just great in that place. A lot of it is selflessness, courage, of course, a multitude of other attributes, but then I would watch some of those individuals and myself included, struggling with some of our personal relationships at home. And I know when I looked at myself, I kind of felt like two different people and I felt like I was doing a good job at being one of those people and a horrible job at being the other. And when I looked at what each spot required, I realize they had two completely different approaches and so, if I was going to be as good at one as I thought I was at the other, I really did have to look at things like vulnerability, like the effort put into relationships because when you get to the point where everything feels numb, it gets hard to come home and listen to the person you’re with talk about the challenges of their day. And so, I think you really have to make it a point to tackle those things and in tackling those things, that’s where I see that strength in vulnerability that I talk about in the show.

Jo Reed: You’ve mentioned the talkbacks and I’m really interested in those. Did you have those from the very beginning of the show or is it something that you added? Tell me why it’s such a key component for this show.

Jaymes Poling: The first time I’d ever read the script with the band, we were doing-- essentially, it was a crowdfunding campaign early on and we were kind of testing the viability of the show there as well and the first time I read through the script, the local VA, they’ve been amazing in Cleveland, but they brought a bunch of vets in. I was reading through the script. Ten feet in front of me, there were two World War II vets and then Korean vets and then Vietnam vets and then younger vets and as I started reading through it, it was challenging for me just to get through it while hearing the music. And I realized how much them being in the room impacted me, but I saw how much what I was saying impacted them and from that moment, I couldn’t imagine separating those two.

Jo Reed: Dominick, you contributed to the talkbacks too, I’m assuming.

Dominick Farinacci: Yes. Absolutely. Sometimes the talkbacks are more structured, where we have a panel of local mental health and/or veteran advisors in each community. Sometimes it’s just the two of us, but the reason why it’s essential for every show that we do is because of the level of emotion that this show kind of produces from an audience. The comments we get afterwards-- I remember after the first show and the comments we got, saying “We really have a deep responsibility to make this bigger than just this show itself.” That’s why we started our nonprofit Modern Warrior Live Foundation so we can help to build out the scope of all of the dialogue that this show is creating. And it’s not just within the veteran community. I know we’re the creators, and we’re always like kind of biased or something, but the impact of the kinds of comments that we get across the board are just mind-blowing and during the talkback, just to see a Vietnam vet stand up-- I remember one time in the audience, he says “What I’m about to say I’ve never even shared with my wife,” who’s sitting right next to him. So, talk about that vulnerability that you mentioned earlier, it really creates vulnerability within the audiences that experience the show. So, we look at that as a real big responsibility to make sure we’re partnered with the right veteran and mental health organizations and that we’re being able to reach the right communities, both in major cities and also, in rural, underserved communities. It’s really an important part of our mission. So, yes, the talkbacks are probably as important as the actual show itself.

Jo Reed: You mentioned earlier, Jaymes, COVID was a difficult time as you were in isolation. What about for the organization, for Modern Warrior Live, how did you guys deal with COVID? Obviously, you couldn’t do performances. Did you take a sabbatical? What did you do?

Jaymes Poling: We did what we had to do to get through it and we were looking for ways to continue to engage the community during it and that’s why we created the film. Without COVID, I don’t think we would have the film. Yes. I mentioned too that isolation did really started to mess with me a little bit physically, but once I noticed that it was messing with me a little bit physically, I started trying to engage those things more, but it served as a great reminder that that maintenance period is continuous.

Dominick Farinacci: And regarding the COVID period, it’s funny, I know for so many artists and organizations can probably relate in that we spent four years building up the organization and 2020… That was like our coming out year. We had an entire year booked with incredible engagements and so, we were kind of waiting for that and that all came tumbling down in a matter of a couple of days as we all know. But the most special thing that came out of it is this film. Under the guidance of our director, Emmett Murphy, he really came up with the whole conception of how to film this, with two cameras only and with one artist on stage at a time. So, you’ll never see more than one artist on stage. And as we started doing it, I guess we forgot to realize that that requires each artists to like do the same thing like eight to ten times over for editing and all that stuff. So, it became a laborious, giant, complicated process, but we’re just so grateful to have had that opportunity to do that film because it was really a game changer to us. The film has really been an important steppingstone for us and our organization.

 

Jo Reed: I know Modern Warrior Live has received support from the Arts Endowment and I’m very curious what that support has allowed you to do.

Jaymes Poling: Yeah. The NEA has been great. Initially, we received a grant in partnership with the Fine Arts Association in Ohio and that allowed us to show our screening and it was the first time we were able to show that and we spent a weekend doing that and we continue to receive support from the NEA, directly and through partnerships.

Jo Reed: What’s next for Modern Warrior Live? I’m assuming you’ll be touring once again.

Dominick Farinacci: Yes. Absolutely. We have quite a few tour dates this year coming up and it’s interesting. When we first created it, we thought “This would be perfect for primarily performing arts center series” So, we pitched it to a lot of them and we found like two interesting comments. One said “Well, this might be good for Veterans Day, but we can’t really use it anywhere else,” and another consistent comment was “These stories, sometimes they’re pretty dark and we’re kind of concerned about presenting this kind of thing.” And it just so happened that we had a great opportunity to present this at the National Council for Behavioral Health for their main conference in DC for 5,000 healthcare providers. Our healthcare consultant advisor for our foundation is Dr. Patrick Palmieri, who’s also based around the Cleveland/Akron area and so, he had recommended us for that. That was a game-changer for us in terms of finding out that we actually created a mental health show without knowing it. So, the mental health conferences and veteran conferences and galas and things like that has been kind of our home for mainly performances, but certainly, especially with the grant from the NEA, we really want to try to bring this to more theaters around the country. It was designed for theater, originally, and just a matter of you’ve got to have the right partners and the right outreach in place because we know this is a different show than most are used to presenting. So, our goal, I think, over the next couple of years is to get back into the recording studio, do an album to document more of this show and ultimately, to be able to do a national tour. We want to be in every single city big and small around the country with this show.

Jo Reed: And Jaymes, do you see yourself growing your story in the show and do you still work on the script or are you just happy with the way it is, as I would be, and just leave it as it is?

Jaymes Poling: Thank you. No, it’s something that we continue to work on, specifically I think about these conversations we’ve had after the shows. We’ve done over 120 shows around the country and we’ve had conversations everywhere, from Amazon Headquarters to Rikers Island. Those conversations have really let me dig more into the content and better understand my experiences and really, my path to the better place that I found myself in and so, as we look to continue to build content, we look to continue to build content specifically in the area of what does that path look like? How are you addressing these individual symptoms and there’s definitely some conversations to be had there and I think we’re ready for that. So, that will be our next step.

Jo Reed: Okay. That’s a good place to leave it. Thank you for giving me your time and thank you for the work that do. And thank you for sharing the video with me. I’m so glad I got a chance to see it. And I look forward to seeing the show live when you bring to DC.

Dominick Farinacci: Thank you very much.

Jaymes Poling: Thank you, Jo. We look forward to seeing you in DC.

Jo Reed: That was US Army veteran Jaymes Poling and jazz trumpeter Dominick Farinacci. They are the co-creators of Modern Warrior Live. You can keep up with them and their tour at modernwarriorlive.org. You’ve been listening to Art Works produced at the National Endowment for the Arts. Follow us on Apple Podcasts or Google Play and leave us a rating. It helps people to find us. For the National Endowment for the Arts, I’m Josephine Reed. Stay safe and thanks for listening.