He's been back on American soil for 44 years. But, the photographs a local vet took decades ago are bringing another era to back to life.

“Leech infested streams. There we are ready to fly out. That's me 'king of the mountain,'” Harold Fredrickson describes his photographs as he scrolls through them on a computer at his home in Chetek.

Fredrickson arrived in Vietnam in 1965. He was one of few troops to arrive with a camera. He bought it for $120 in Okinawa, Japan; his marine salary overseas was $119 a month, including hazard pay.

"It kind of reminded me of a John Wayne movie,” Fredrickson says, a gleam in his eye. “We landed on watercraft and on the beaches ready for aggression."

Fredrickson's photos of war are stunning in their clarity. There are the choppers, the troops moving through the tropical countryside in grass taller than their heads, and their vehicles getting held up in the mud during the rainy season. But, it's the photographs away from combat that Fredrickson cherishes the most.

"It was hard to believe they'd been in a war for so long because it was a beautiful country," he says.

His pictures preserve the faces of the Vietnamese people he met. There’s the woman in her village, the way they irrigated their fields, and the children with their water buffalos—they were a status symbol he says.

"Basically, I ended up with about close to 1000 slides," Fredrickson says.

Those slides got packed away for years and years; Fredrickson sold his camera to another GI before he even left the country he now hopes we will all take the time to re-examine.

"The most important thing that I feel is when people look at shots of Vietnam, that they understand it's a country with a little different culture than we have, but they are their own country and it's not totally aggressive,” Fredrickson says. “It was a beautiful country; some people forget that."

Fredrickson's photos aren't going back to the attic; with the help of his daughter-in-law, they'll now be displayed at the Wisconsin Veterans Museum in Madison and at the Chetek Museum.