(This article originally appeared in the March 2026 issue of Military Officer, a magazine available to all MOAA Premium and Life members who can log in to access our digital version and archive. Basic members can save on a membership upgrade and access the magazine.)

In 2019, the Atlanta Vietnam Veterans Business Association (AVVBA) hosted Vietnam War Symposium: Truths and Factual History to a full auditorium at the Atlanta History Center, inviting historians to unpack misconceptions about the public’s understanding of the war.

MOAA member Alan Gravel, a former Air Force captain who flew C-7A Caribous and KC-135s during the war, said he and fellow AVVBA members had mixed feelings following the event: happy they held the symposium but frustrated that aside from a 4½-hour-long recording, they didn’t have anything students could easily digest.

“We wanted something that was under an hour long and could be shown in a classroom,” said retired Army Col. Carl “Skip” Bell, a MOAA Life member and a member of AVVBA.

So the group decided to produce a documentary. That 47-minute film, Truths and Myths About the Vietnam War, focuses on five misconceptions about the war. The video has garnered over 1 million views on YouTube and has been shown on television stations across the country.

Gravel said he’s often asked why the AVVBA is doing this now, 50 years after the end of the war.

“Two reasons,” said Gravel. Due to newly available Vietnamese records and accounts, “we know things now for sure that we didn’t know back then. Now we know what the North Vietnamese were thinking and what they were doing. Second, some of the themes here about how the government mismanaged and misrepresented this thing, a lot of these things are going on now.”

Former Navy Lt. j.g. James Dickson, who served aboard USS Ticonderoga during the war and is chairman of the AVVBA’s film committee, stresses the AVVBA makes no money from the project and the participants accepted no payment, including actor Sam Elliott, who provided a voiceover for the film.

“We consider it to be our enduring legacy,” said Dickson, a Premium MOAA member. “We don’t get a penny. All we’re trying to do is get people to see the information.”

[MOAA PRESENTS: Vietnam Unchronicled]

Bell added: “It was done from the heart — none of us get paid for this. It was a labor of love. We’re at a stage in life where we’re looking at legacy. At AVVBA, that film and our scholarships are part of our legacy.”