"When we heard the sound of a Huey chopper, we knew help was on the way. That was our mother," said Charles Hinson, a retired Columbus-area Vietnam veteran.

Hinson recalls a night when, armed only with his flashlight, he brought a beloved Huey down for a "dustoff" evacuation to save his severely wounded comrade, Robert Pryor.

In a horse pasture near Columbus this weekend, Hinson again called down a Huey, with the same flashlight hooked on his utility belt. And Pryor was with him again, after a 3,500-mile journey from Twisp, Wash.

The stories of valor lived by the men who flew the Hueys and the grunts who loved them, pilots and choppers alike, were not readily shared when the Vietnam Johnnies came home.

"The Vietnam vets have never been welcomed back; there's always been that emptiness," said the Rev. Bill McDonald, an huey crew-chief and door gunner  in Vietnam.

Now though, patriotism is an openly displayed passion, and a Texas-based documentary film company is choppering the country to allow the vets to tell their stories of Huey-related heroism.

"It's a healing mission," said McDonald, who now lives in Elk Grove, Calif., and is consulting on the film, "In the Shadow of the Blade."

The Georgia connection to the story of the Huey brought a film crew to Georgia for four days and is especially strong.

A duty to the wounded

In Columbus, there was a moving meeting between John B. Givhan, a former helicopter pilot, and the Georgia descendants of U.S. Army Maj. Charles Kelly, the man who saved Givhan's life.

A few months after he rescued Givhan, Kelly was killed at another Vietnam jungle clearing. He refused to pull out, even though the entire area was under heavy fire. "I'll leave when I have all the wounded," he said. Then he was shot and killed.

On Sunday, Givhan rolled his motorized wheelchair across the pasture to meet the Huey's special passengers, Augustan Charles Kelly Jr., his wife and their three children.

"I never had a chance to thank him [Kelly Sr.]," Givhan said.

Maj. Kelly's exploits are the stuff of Army legend, and one of the men who flew with him, Ernie Sylvester, came to Columbus to tell the story. Sylvester, now retired in Tampa, said the elder Kelly was his mentor in Vietnam and developed the "dustoff" technique, using the Huey for rapid rescues of wounded soldiers.

Kelly also pioneered the use of Hueys on night rescue missions, at a time when most thought it was too dangerous to operate at night, he said. Kelly's views were proved correct: More than 90 percent of the wounded rescued by the Hueys were saved, and most reached medical aid within about 20 minutes of the time they were wounded, he said.

"If there were wounded on the ground, we had an obligation to our mission to pick them up," Sylvester said.

In 1969, when a a grenade explosion left Pryor with wounds over nearly half his body, he didn't think anything or anybody could save him.

"I was wounded in my head, chest, arms, and back. My rifle was broke, my radio was broke, and nobody but the Communists knew where I was," he said. "I'd given up."

On Monday, the Huey touched down in a spot where anything military would have been unwelcome during the Vietnam era: the central green of a college campus -- Kennesaw State University.

One of those drawn to the chopper was Donna Rowe of Marietta, who had been a head triage nurse at an Army field hospital in Saigon during the war. She brought her scrapbook and told her stories.

A flood of emotions

Rowe said she tried not to remember the names of the wounded young men she pulled out of the Hueys. "It would be too hard," she said.

She recalled the time when Army medics brought a wounded baby girl in from a Huey, and she was still clutched in the grip of her dead mother. The baby was saved. Rowe said the child was adopted by a Navy man and is now living in Alabama.

"And to think they called us baby killers back home," Rowe said. "When we came home, there were no flags waving; there were flags burning."

Later Monday, the Huey eased down on a tiny strip of bottomland on the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River in rural Habersham County.

It was a deeply emotional experience for Larry Hancock, a former helicopter gunner. For the past eight years, he has painted his Vietnam experiences under the professional name Aurence.

"We need to memorialize, document and put these stories out there, so people can see what we went through as teenagers," Hancock said.