VN: How did you find your subjects?

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Jellerson: That was interesting. A friend of mine joined me up, paid my dues, in an organization called the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association. I’m not a joiner, but he said, Don’t worry, this will be important to you someday. And sure enough, when this film opportunity came up, I put an ad in the newsletter and a lot of people contacted me. I also called Fort Rucker, and they were having [an annual reunion of the] W-4s — the most senior warrant officers, many of them retired. I figured that would be the time to go back and talk to the cadre, the older guys who taught us how to fly. That turned out to be really excellent….We went through California and then through Washington state, because the Washington National Guard was doing some exercises up there with the ROTC. We thought since several of the pilots in the Guard were Vietnam vets that would be a way to secure some of their stories.

VN: Can you tell me more about the found footage and the archival footage?

Jellerson: At that time we only had about seven hours of the Super-8 film. But…it was the first and last war where, legally, a soldier could take pictures — and everybody had cameras. We are continuing to collect film [from veterans]; we will archive it and I think there are productions down the road where we might represent it for the vets who send it in. I have a coffee can on my desk with nine rolls of Super-8 footage taken in Vietnam. It has been in that coffee can for the last 10-25 years. The guy [who made the film] just sent it in and said, Yeah, take good care of it. Almost nobody has a Super-8 projector anymore, and the film, of course, doesn’t last that long….So we’re going to try and collect as much of it as we can — also stills, artifacts, souvenirs, anything people are tired of hanging onto.

VN: What did you find among those home movies?

Jellerson: I had one amazing piece of footage where a helicopter pilot is coming in on final to a combat zone. The rule in everybody’s unit was that during final approach, both pilots had their hands on the controls in case one got hit. It’s time for him to put his hands on the controls, so he puts the camera down. The trigger’s stuck. What it’s showing now is the grunts in the back seat, getting ready to jump off the ship — upside down. Anyway, it lands, the camera jiggles a little bit, these guys jump off the ship, upside down, and the helicopter takes off. And, I guess, at 500, 600 or 700 feet, he reaches down and picks up the camera — it’s been on the whole time. We couldn’t use that, but there’s some amazing footage, and some that’s pretty graphic that we couldn’t use at all, even though we didn’t want to shy away from that. But there are some horrible pictures.

VN: It’s not rare for a Vietnam documentary to address political issues. It is rare for a Vietnam documentary to address economic issues. That was a really interesting aspect of the film, the economic motivations behind the war. Can you speak to that a little?

Jellerson: One of the interviews in the film did that really, really well. [He talks] about Lady Bird Johnson owning stock in Bell while her husband’s running a war that’s sending Bell helicopters into action, and they were constantly getting blown up. That was part of what we felt was an unhealthy alliance.

VN: How often do you fly now?

Jellerson: Last year I did a lot of flying because of the film, and that was the first time I’d been in a helicopter in quite a long time. Fixed-wing I flew up until about four or five years ago, and then, when I decided to become a filmmaker, I had no discretionary income to rent airplanes. Now that I’m hanging around with a bunch of guys who never gave up flying, it’s real easy. I still feel so at home in helicopters.

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