The process of selecting one movie to feature this month feels like an impossible task - November boasts a particularly emotional slate of programming - so I'm not going to do it.

On Veterans Day, Saturday, November 11, and then again on Sunday, we'll feature movies selected by eight different military vets. They each sat down with me to discuss their service in war zones as well as their love of the movies.

They served in different conflicts: Vietnam, the first Gulf War, Afghanistan and Iraq. They are women and men. And each of them has been profoundly affected by their experience in harm's way. Eric Hunter, now a father of three, lost his right leg in Afghanistan in 2012. Brian Delate came home from Vietnam feeling isolated and enraged. Today he's an actor and a playwright. He's taken his play, Memorial Day, to Vietnam where he cast a Vietnamese actress opposite him. Jenny Pacanowski, a medic in Iraq, came home to Pennsylvania so affected by her experience that she insisted on driving in the middle of the road. The key to combating her PTSD? Writing, performing...and dogs.

Each of the eight veterans tell a compelling story. On top of that, their movie picks are eclectic: from John Wayne in The Green Berets and Jimmy Stewart in Strategic Air Command to Elizabeth Taylor in National Velvet and Abbott and Costello in Lost in a Harem; from Casablanca and The Best Years of Our Lives to Where Eagles Dare and Bullitt.

No matter your thoughts on the righteousness of the conflicts, I'm certain these conversations will have the same effect on you as they did on me. You'll be left with a profound sense of appreciation for the sacrifice made by these men and women. I'm enormously grateful to Ed, Eric, Brian, Paul, Maggie, Don, Jenny and Yonel for taking the time to bring us their stories.

Remarkably, just a few days after the veterans left town, TCM afforded me an equally powerful experience when Lee Grant came in to discuss her 12 years as an actress blacklisted in Hollywood.

Grant was just 24, an Academy Award® nominee for Detective Story, and entirely non-political, for whatever that's worth, when a menacing fusion of events sidetracked her career. First, she spoke at the funeral of a friend, J. Edward Bromberg, a fellow actor. He'd been identified in Red Channels, a paranoid anti-communist "book" that identified 151 people as subversives in the entertainment industry - journalists included - part of Red Channels' self-proclaimed "report of communist influence in radio and television."

At Bromberg's funeral, Grant quoted what Bromberg had told her a month earlier when they appeared in a play together: that he had a bad heart and he'd just been called to testify for a second time before the House Un-American Activities Committee. This time, he feared it would kill him. He died of a heart attack. Then later, she had the temerity to refuse to name her husband, screenwriter Arnold Manoff, as a communist. Never mind that the committee already had Manoff's name. They were testing Grant's loyalty.

As you'll hear from Grant, she came back with a vengeance 12 years later, even though she was then 36, not exactly an ideal age for an actress to re-introduce herself to Hollywood in 1964. She starred in Peyton Place on TV, earning an Emmy, then had a series of memorable movie roles, including In the Heat of the Night; Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell and Plaza Suite. She earned Oscar nominations for The Landlord and Voyage of the Damned and won an Academy Award for Shampoo.

On Monday, November 27 and Tuesday the 28, Grant will co-host a series of blacklist comeback films as she shares intimate memories of her own comeback.

As November commemorates the 70th anniversary of the conviction of the Hollywood Ten, which touched off the Blacklist, Grant's appearance is a fitting conclusion to an emotionally satisfying month of programming.

By Ben Mankiewicz