Preserving The Oral HistorIES of Combat Veterans
6:13 | Jerry Ellington had a lot of tense moments in Vietnam. On the ground there were rocket attacks and in the air, as a forward air controller, he had to be careful not to target his own side.
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About the time he went to Texas A&M, Jerry Ellington decided to join the Air Force. After a few years as a flight instructor, the Vietnam war was heating up and they took him out of Squadron Officers School and sent him to F-100 training. Then they decided, no, you're going to be a forward air controller.
The first mortar barrage was unsettling. Forward air controller Jerry Ellington had just arrived in Vietnam and was attached to the 101st Airborne. The old timers acted like nothing was happening. He was an Air Force officer but was in a tent in the jungle just like a grunt.
Jarry Ellington was issued an Army tent but it wasn't even waterproof which isn't going to work too well in Vietnam. He was an Air Force forward air controller attached to the 101st Airborne at their base. He found himself a nice Air Force tent which they didn't want him to keep but he did anyway.
Fire some tracers at them. Jerry Ellington was the FAC in a plane overhead and that's what he told the men on the ground who were under attack. But it was daytime and he couldn't see them. The fight went on so long he ran low of fuel and didn't have enough to make it back.
The Vietnamese were primarily agrarian so Jerry Ellington, who was a farm boy himself, felt bad for them when they were moved off their land to create free fire zones. As a professional soldier he just tried to do his job and stay away from anything political. Then he got home and experienced the nasty anti-war sentiment that was everywhere.
He had completed one tour as a FAC and thought he was now going to fly F-100s. Instead, the Air Force put Jerry Ellington in a tanker and sent him back to Vietnam twice. It got better after that when he was assigned to Strategic Air Command HQ.
