I am grateful to the Friends of Army Aviation for their kindness.

There are machines you admire from a distance… and then there are machines that reach into your chest and rearrange something you didn’t realize had settled the wrong way.

The UH-1H Huey is one of those machines.

I knew the history. I knew the sound — that unmistakable whomp-whomp-whomp that every Vietnam veteran can hear in their sleep.

A UH-1 Huey and its pilots power it up for flight at the Wings Over North Georgia Airshow where I filmed an episode of Uncovering American

But I wasn’t prepared for what it felt like to fly in one with the men who had flown them for real, under fire, half a world away, decades before I was born.

Let me tell you: the Huey doesn’t ease you into anything. It lifts off like it’s still got a job to do — every medevac, every time someone's life depended on it doing exactly what it was built for.

There’s honesty in a machine that old.

No pretense. No ego. Just purpose.

The pilots — Vietnam-era flyers with more hours in the sky than some people have spent thinking — didn’t give speeches. They didn’t try to impress me. They didn’t dramatize anything. They just flew.

And when a man who’s faced down the worst of humanity flies a machine built for war with the steadiness of someone tying his shoes, you shut up and pay attention.

Up in that helicopter, staring down at the trees ripping beneath us, I felt two things at the same time:

• how beautiful this country is

• and how fragile it is

There’s something about being in the air with people who carried the weight of conflict that makes you rethink the luxury of complaining.

It makes you more grateful than you want to admit.It reminds you that freedom — real freedom — was bought by people you’ll never meet, in places you’ll never see.

And as a veteran myself, it hit deeper than I expected.

Flying in that Huey changed me. Not because it was thrilling, though it absolutely was. Not because it was rare, though it was one of only six left flying in the whole country.

It changed me because it reminded me that stories don’t live in textbooks. They live in people. They live in machines that refuse to die. They live in the hands of men who kept going long after the world stopped asking them to.

That flight became the heart of my first episode of Uncovering American because I like telling good stories, and so I told it.