PRESS RELEASE

Press Contacts: Mary Dickson
(801) 581-3263
www.kued.org
Wednesday, August 1st, 2012

Last March, KUED aired the first episode of Utah Vietnam War Stories, a powerful documentary tribute to the men and women of Utah who served during the Vietnam conflict. The second gripping segment, built upon dozens of interviews with soldiers, sailors, airmen and medical personnel, Turning Point is a compelling oral history of the pivotal months in Vietnam during and immediately after the Tet Offensive of 1968. Turning Point will debut September 10th at 7:00pm, featuring interviews with Provo’s Russell Elder, Jack Rhodes and Andrew Wilson, Lehi’s Len Moon and Alpine’s Tom Miner.

Russell Elder got into photography in high school. After graduating from high school in 1954, he continued the trade in the U.S. Navy, becoming a combat photographer. On his first day of photojournalism in the Vietnam conflict, Elder discovered a sense of security behind the camera lens, a feeling that he was removed from the events he captured on film. Looking through “a camera lens you are recording history; a gun sight you are in it,” he explains. “Big difference.”

Outside of combat, Elder photographed people. He recalls taking pictures of soldiers whose expressions became withdrawn and hardened when separated from their combat brothers; civilian children who were forced to man shops without their father; a soldier who used to walk around his ship with both a figurative and literal monkey on his back. “I'll photograph people every time, given the chance, because they're the real story,” says Elder.

Jack Rhodes was an Army aviation pilot who flew gunships (helicopters outfitted with heavy artillery) to cover the transport of troops and medical evacuations. After flying over 75 missions just above the tree line (to keep target exposure down), to this day, when he hears a Huey helicopter flying overhead, his first thought is, “I wonder why he's flying so high." Talking about his experiences flying in Vietnam, Rhodes recalls the constant radio chatter and his appreciation for the crews he flew with.

Moving beyond the interior of the helicopter, he recounts missions, both wonderful and terrible, that he flew in combat. On one mission, Rhodes and his crew successfully freed an orphanage housing around 100 local children from a hostage situation; on another they carried out orders to bomb a mountain farm only to realize that the victims of the bombing were women and children. He has found that telling his story has helped to ease the much of the trauma he felt from the war. “It’s good therapy at an old age.”

After requesting to be stationed at Nha Trang, Andrew Wilson took a guitar with him to Vietnam, assuming he would be spending plenty of time on the beach. When he got there, however, he found himself a helicopter repair specialist for a highly-trained, highly-motivated Army division. “There I am, this hippie weirdo freak right in the middle of the Special Forces, and it was quite a culture shock,” recalls Wilson. Despite his feelings about the war, he realized in Vietnam that his work was indispensable to saving the lives of his fellow soldiers. He would do whatever it took to keep his helicopters flying, including stealing parts from other military divisions.

Through all this nefarious heroism, Wilson never lost his love for music, burying and sandbagging his guitar to protect it before attacks. He also had the opportunity to play in a band of musically talented servicemen who traveled to places civilian entertainers would never go to build morale. When performing in Dong Ha, just miles from the DMZ, where enemy attacks were a nightly affair, “So we took all of our amplifiers and pointed them toward North Vietnam and said, ‘We’re playing this concert for you, you North Vietnamese guys. Don’t hit us.’ And we played so loud we blew up one of the amplifiers.”

Len Moon went into the Air Force looking for adventure, and he found plenty as a fighter pilot, in spite of the fact that his cousin, J.C. Hess, had been shot down in the same capacity a few years earlier, spending the entire time that Moon was in Vietnam in a POW camp. During the time he spent flying in Vietnam, Moon felt frustration with the restrictions he faced from higher command. “As far as I'm concerned, if you're going to war, you don't have rules. You go to win,” he declares.

Many soldiers in Vietnam became nervous towards the end of their time in-country, or when they were “short.” Nobody wanted to have survived 11 months only to die so close to freedom. Most soldiers who were almost done with their tours were allowed safer missions, out of sympathy to this sentiment. In spite of this, in 434 combat missions over two tours, Moon was only hit once – on his next-to-last mission, about a day before he was to leave Vietnam for the last time.

Amid testimonials from American military personnel, Tom Miner provides an alternative viewpoint. After growing up in Saigon, he came to the United States as a refugee when he was a young man. During the ten years that the American military occupied Vietnam, his mother married an American man, and the family became involved in the LDS church. He was very grateful to the American presence in his home country. “Americans, it's a symbol of hope for us. I know that there is a lot of bad things happened because of the presence of Americans in Vietnam, but there was a lot of good things that happened because of the presence of the Americans…It provided us kind of a respite for a time, that we can survive.”

“We loved to see American convoy. Every time there was a convoy going down our street…all the kids would run out there,” Miner describes his memories of American soldiers as a young boy. “And the fun part was, the American soldier would toss out their ration food that they didn't use, and we just loved those, 'cause those are new tastes to us; the peaches, the crackers.” Veteran American soldiers also remember their interactions with Vietnamese children, giving them food and playing with them, but also keeping a wary eye out for children recruited and armed by the Viet Cong.

The second episode of a projected three-part documentary series, Utah Vietnam War Stories: Turning Point provides a sense of the wide scope of human experience that took place during the Vietnam War. Additional episodes of Utah Vietnam War Stories will debut in early 2013.

Utah Vietnam War Stories is made possible by The Katherine W. Dumke and Ezekiel R. Dumke, Jr. Foundation, The George S. and Delores Doré Eccles Foundation and the contributing members of KUED.

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