At the beginning of The Personal Experience: Helicopter Warfare in Vietnam, a documentary created by writer-producer Richard Jellerson and producer-cinematographer Jamie Thompson, the film notes that the conflict was frequently referred to as ‘the Helicopter War. Although the sobriquet did not necessarily mark the first time a war had been so closely associated with the technologies supporting it, the role played by Huey slicks and gunships grew in critical ways as the Vietnam War unfolded. Relied on at first primarily as evacuation vehicles, the medevac came of age in Vietnam. Helicopter units soon became hunter-killer teams or lift-and-assault units, crucial supplements to and protectors of the ground force.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Vietnam Magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

The Personal Experience, which debuted in June 2001, is a remarkable film, not only for its exhaustive historical and technological examination of helicopter warfare in Vietnam, but also for its thoughtful, far-reaching look at the conflict’s personal and social contexts. The filmmakers’ methods are deceptively simple: Interviews with veteran helicopter pilots were combined with stock footage, as well as home movies taken by soldiers and a voice-over narration. What raises the film above its modest methods is the quality of those ingredients and the insightful ways in which they are assembled into a narrative arc. The participants are eloquent and, at times, breathtakingly candid. In one instance, Brig. Gen. Ezell Ware, who is an African American from the South, comments that it was almost as fearful to be in Mississippi as in combat in Vietnam. The home movies offer a rare personal view into life as a soldier, from induction into the military to homecoming, from leisure time at the officer’s club to stereo wars in the barracks, to the smoking monkey that became a unit mascot.

That the film is both historically thorough and socially sensitive is no doubt due, at least in part, to the fact that Jellerson was himself a helicopter pilot who, as a W-1, then a W-2 warrant officer, flew two tours in Vietnam. In turn, the film has influenced Jellerson to pursue other Vietnam-related film projects, including a possible Personal Experience series, as well as the development of an archive for the home movies — and other artifacts — taken and saved by Vietnam veterans. Jellerson recently sat down with Hazel-Dawn Dumpert, who interviewed him for Vietnam Magazine in Los Angeles.

Vietnam: Would you begin at the beginning — where you grew up, school, going into the military, etc.?

Jellerson: I grew up in Southern California, went to college at Pasadena City College and Cal State L.A. I was drafted. I went to live in Hawaii, but forgot to tell the draft board that I had left — just slipped my mind [laughs]. I told them after I got my notice, but then they said, Okay, but now you’re on Hawaii’s draft situation, which gave me a year to go shopping to see which service would teach me to fly. The Army was the only one with just two years of college [required] at the time. I had a year of flight school and then was in Vietnam for a year, first tour, flew in combat. I extended for one tour. The second tour, I went back and flew General [Creighton W.] Abrams, the man who was in charge of the whole war. It was an amazing view, the yin and yang of the whole war — right down in there with the troops the first time, and the second time talking to four-star generals and presidents.

VN: What did you do after you got out?

Jellerson: I went to law school, decided I didn’t want to be a lawyer, went into advertising. I’d always wanted to get back to my roots, which was writing. So I wrote a book on marketing, a lot of short stories and a screenplay. Then I did a documentary film on a gentleman named Valentin Berezhkov, who was Joseph Stalin’s wartime interpreter and was actually at the Yalta Conference, at Potsdam. He lived only 20 minutes from me, in Claremont. [As for] Jamie Thompson, who’s my partner in Storyteller Films, he and I did this, but we couldn’t find a market for it. So I was meeting with a film distributor that I knew — we started talking, and he came up with the idea of doing a helicopter story.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to