VN: These sound like two wildly different experiences.

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Jellerson: I’ll tell you, I think all the militaries on the planet count on this: Once you get into the situation of being in combat, the politics go away and it becomes personal. The first time you see a friend of yours shot or they start shooting at you, it is no longer a political war. You lose sight of what’s going on and why you’re doing certain things. Like you fly guys into an area, and they would secure that area. We’d go pick ‘em up, take ‘em back, give it back to the enemy, and go in to get it back three days later, a week later. Those things made no sense. But keep in mind, I had my 20th birthday during my first tour. [At that age] you don’t go into depth that much. But the second tour, while I was flying Abrams — many of the missions I flew were just picking him up at his headquarters and flying him to the roof of the embassy in downtown Saigon.

VN: What do you remember most about being General Abrams’ pilot?

Jellerson: He would go down and see Ambassador [Ellsworth] Bunker to get his orders from the United States. And every time, without fail, he came back up and would strap in, fasten his seat belt, hook up his intercom and tell me where he wanted to go. And his next comment, every time, was, The blankety-blank politicians got my hands tied. Without fail, every time he got in the ship. At that point, I’m a little older, been around, had a chance to go back home, see what’s going on, came back, and I’m privy to this. And I’m thinking: You know what? I was right the first time; they aren’t trying to win this war. Here’s proof. The man in charge of the war is not allowed to fight it. So that bothered me a lot.

VN: What helicopters did you fly?

Jellerson: I was trained on, and then flew in Vietnam, the UH-1 Huey, the workhorse of that war. When you see pictures of Vietnam, normally what you’re looking at is the Huey. They’re in every war movie about that era, and they’re still common today over L.A. It’s the noisy one; it’s the one that really, really hacks into the air and makes that whomp noise. It was an amazing machine. We had 18-, 19-year-old kids that kept them together, working all night on them. It was like a truck; it was easy to fix and could take any amount of punishment. Some of them came back with so many holes, you just wouldn’t believe they’d ever fly again [laughs]. As a matter of fact, some of them didn’t fly again — but they did land, and the crew walked away. Holes everywhere, in the rotor blades, just amazing how much damage they could take. Hueys, the first ones, were a little underpowered, which made you really have to learn how to fly, cause if you were hauling American troops, they would have 40 or 50 pounds on their backs, and they each weighed 180 to 200 pounds — and the temperatures were very hot, very humid — which are two factors that make an aircraft very difficult to fly. So you really had to get some finesse in order to keep those things going; it was quite an education to figure out how to fly them.

VN: Your film really integrates historical and technical material into a social and personal context. In a very steady narrative, too — you went from getting into the military to homecoming. Tell me about writing it.

Jellerson: I think for a writing assignment, this was probably one of the easiest and toughest at the same time. Even the History Channel at one time said, Maybe you’re too close to this. And maybe I was. But [they] did feel that the best way to start it was to write my experience. We interviewed some heroes, a couple of Medal of Honor winners, but basically I always felt that the story was the boy next door who grew up watching Vietnam on television and realizing he’d have to go, wanting to learn how to fly. You saw five or six guys in the film, but we interviewed about 35 or 40. The story was so consistent, it was amazing. The only separation was between the guys who were kids coming in and the elders who were already seasoned Army aviators who broke us in. It was very much a father-son type of relationship. It’s like a guild, where the elder passes down his craft, if you will — not just flying, but flying in combat.

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