Boise Unfiltered: Our Media Team’s Journey

By Matt Sabo
Manager, Human Experience

The sun was still a long way off from shouldering its way over the pine-topped mountains east of Boise, Idaho, when we hit the road at 5:30 a.m. We pointed our Toyota Sienna rental van west from the Holiday Inn Express parking lot toward the Oregon border, some of us shivering in the 47-degree chill of a late August morning.

Our Aptive team included Videographer Sean McCoy, Photographer Igor Nedvalyuk, Communications Specialist Claudia Nogueira, Producer Emily Stinson and me, affectionately (I presume) known as “Boss Man” by the team because I reckon I’m supposed to be the one in charge.

We were in Boise for the week to interview Veterans and Boise VA Medical Center staff for videos and photographs for VA’s Office of Patient Advocacy. It’s a marketing and branding effort to highlight the work of VA’s patient advocates and how they can help Veterans. In the big picture we’re here for stories. To find them, make them, tell them.

In the pre-dawn hours of August 29, we drove an hour to the outskirts of Fruitland, Idaho, to interview Vietnam Veteran Jim Klassen. We got to Jim’s gravel driveway 40 minutes before sunrise. His two-story home sits along a lightly traveled country road ringed by irrigated fields of sugar beets, corn, yellow onions and peach orchards.

Jim and his daughter Charity Harper, who lives just down the road from him, left the door open for us – literally. We walked into the kitchen to charcuterie boards piled with sweet peaches from the neighboring orchard and sliced cantaloupes, grapes, sliced tomatoes and fragrant basil from the garden.

Shortly after we arrived, we filmed and photographed Jim in the open space of the road as the warming sun eased over the distant barren hills. Hefty hay bales sat high off the road next to us. Not one car or pickup interrupted us.

Jim, 75, is tall, lean and strong, favoring blue jeans and flannel shirts. His leathery hands, which made custom boots for 20 years at a shop in an eastern Oregon town that was once a stop on the Oregon Trail, swallows anything in their grip. His thick gray mustache evokes a bigger, more gregarious Sam Elliott.

Light, Shadows, Contrast

Out in the middle of the road, Jim stands tall, facing south. Sean’s right shoulder is the tripod for his Canon C500. He never stops moving, contorting his limbs and neck for just the right angle. Sometimes I call him Gumby. Sean looked for Jim’s body to break through the light that filtered in from his left. Sean often filmed him from a low crouch and pointed his camera up, lending Jim a sense of power. Think David versus Goliath.

Igor paced in the road around Sean and Jim, camera slung over his shoulder, his left hand cradling his Sony A7R3. Stalked might be a better description for Igor’s movement. Igor hunts the optimum angle for the mood he wants to capture, seeking hard light and deep shadows for contrast and emphasis. Like Sean, he is after low angles and a grand background to fill the frame behind Jim. As the sun peeks over the horizon, he wants a splash of sunrise on Jim’s face to evoke a sense of hope.

Knowing and Not Knowing

We first met Jim and Charity in a pre-interview Teams call earlier in August. Jim is authentic. You get what you see. Raw, unfiltered, plain spoken, occasionally referencing verses from the Bible. If you connect with him, you have a friend for life.

The pain and tears of Jim’s life are never far from the surface. He’s a combat war Veteran who struggles with the idea that he came back when some of his friends didn’t. He suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) when he hurtled through the windshield of a 1965 Ford Mustang in California after the war. The accident left him with no memories of Vietnam, his knowledge of his time there supplied by his friends.

But he still feels Vietnam, if that makes sense. Especially as his soldier friends from Vietnam pass away and he reconnects at their funerals with the old men of his youth, their lives scarred by the agony and violence of distant battlefields.

We sat with Jim in a spacious upstairs room in the house he built. The room feels like the American West. Open, airy, full of light, with the wood and walls the color of the muted hues of the distant arid hills and rolling fields of brittle grass and sagebrush along Interstate 84.

Jim struggled with his thoughts. At times, the TBI steals his ability to weave together what he wants to say and how he wants to say it. Charity, seated to his left and off camera, patiently guided him to keep him on track and help him with prompts. She reminded him that “hope” is a theme of his life now. His story entails serving his country with honor, but he feels he has struggled to get that respect back from VA, even having to prove he served in Vietnam with a letter from a commanding officer.

He recounted his story, sometimes in fits and starts. For two hours we traded laughs, smiles and tears. But if the pain of his story is never far from the surface, neither is joy. He smiles easily, grins largely, laughs loudly. We later take turns melting into one of his big flannel hugs.

After the interview, Jim treated us to burgers from his grill. He tells us how he drove to a nearby slaughterhouse for the ground beef. When he and Charity find out Sean is a vegetarian, Jim plops thick slices of garden-fresh zucchini on the grill. His big grin never fades.

Before we leave, we all get one of those long, almost hard to breathe, flannel hugs from Jim. He pulls me close, the whiskers of his mustache on my cheek. “I love you,” he whispers into my ear through a big smile.