VN: What’s next?

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Jellerson: Well, we are currently talking to the National Guard about doing their entire history. We flew with the Guard last year, and Jamie, who is Australian, kept asking, Who are these guys? And I couldn’t tell him. They have a history going back all the way to 1636, they are so thoroughly entwined with the growth of this country. We are also presenting several different broadcast outlets with a series called The Personal Experience, but on other missions — the long-range patrol mission, what the grunts did, what the medics did, what the Red Cross did, all of that. But we would do it in the same way, get past the faade of what a lot of media people go after, to tell a more salient story of what really took place over there.

VN: Do you think that this film is so different because it’s made by someone who lived it?

Jellerson: I think to a degree, but I have to say that it also has a great deal to do with Jamie’s sensibilities. He absolutely refused to do this like everybody else, and he stuck to his guns and made me pay attention. I’ve had a lot of compliments about the film from people who haven’t talked to their families about [their Vietnam experience], and it touched them somehow or allowed them to talk to them. Maybe it’s because it’s 30 years later, but there was a dynamic that took place during the film process — I think guys are starting to finally see that we can talk about it, that it’s okay to talk about it. One of the gentlemen we interviewed said, You know, I don’t even care if you use this, it just felt good to talk about it. Oddly enough, his brother had been a grunt in Vietnam and — this is still startling to me — he said, My brother and I only started talking about this war two years ago — and they were both there at the same time. I had one very touching e-mail from a guy who never even knew his dad. He said he just wanted to thank me for letting him understand what the last few months [of his dad's life] were probably like. The things that have been happening because of the film, the way people have responded to it and said thank you for telling the story as it really happened — maybe that was because, yeah, I was there, so nobody could snow me on what it was like, and also because of Jamie’s conviction that it had to be done better and different. At one point he said, You know, what we need to do is to get out of the way of this story, let the story tell itself. It’s such a powerful story. We did ask them, What was it like to go in? Why did you go in? What was it like coming back? And what they said was amazing.

This article was written by Hazel-Dawn Dumpert and originally published in the August 2002 issue of Vietnam Magazine.

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