With his wife and children out of the state to participate in the horse show circuit, real estate developer Lehr Jackson was a bit bored one night at his home in Bozman and ventured up to the attic to look at old memorabilia from his time serving in the Vietnam War. The former fighter pilot had purposely avoided this sizable memory box for over forty-five years. But that night, for reasons not entirely known to him, he spent hours looking at photos and reels of film of him and his comrades flying jets during the day and coping with the absurdity of the war by starting a surfing club in their time off.
The instantaneous release of memories that evening was bittersweet. After literally being canned up for more than four decades, Jackson experienced once again the horror of war but also how he and his friends responded to this surreal experience. In fact, those years in Vietnam reminded him so much of the then popular movie, M.A.S.H., which he had first seen in London in 1970 and returned to the war zone and started documenting for himself the intense, irrational reality of battle and survival.
That evening of recollections quickly turned into a one man campaign to find an important use for these remarkable images. In his Spy interview, Lehr talks about his efforts to work with filmmakers and producers to use this footage for new documentaries on the Vietnam war as well seeking out a way for his particular story, and those of his fellow pilots, to be told.
This video is approximately four minutes in length. Additional video provided by Shawn Thompson of MO’z Art Pictures. Jerome Gary of Visionaire Media is Mr. Jackson’s collaborator. Additional video support from Cass Lubberts MICA Film School and Tim Weigard at the Avalon .