Blog
A Sobering Surprise
Posted by Michael Putzel • April 06, 2024
BAYEUX, France—On a trip with our granddaughters to the Normandy beaches where Allied forces landed on D-Day, 1944, our guide surprised us with a detour to a secluded park in the nearby town of Bayeux, where we walked, practically alone, through a touching monument to our colleagues killed in war.
Memorial to fallen journalists in Normandy Photo by Nigel Stewart
On rectangular slabs of white marble standing tall along both sides of a winding path, still muddy from overnight rain, were carved the names of journalists. Some, like Ernie Pyle, were familiar from World War II history. Our guide, Nigel Stewart, pointed us to the name of another, a photographer for The Associated Press, where Ann and I both worked for many […] READ MORE
American filmmaker killed in Ukraine
Posted by Michael Putzel • March 21, 2022
Brent Renaud, an award-winning documentary filmmaker was killed March 13, 2022, by Russian forces who fired on his car at a checkpoint outside the capital city of Kyiv. He was the first foreign journalist killed reporting the war that has devastated Ukrainian cities.
51 Years
Posted by Michael Putzel • February 10, 2022
More than a half-century ago, on February 10, 1971, I lost a dear friend, and the world lost a great photographer of war. He wasn’t alone. Three other photographers for Western publications and Sergeant Tu Vu, a South Vietnamese army combat photographer, went down, too, along with the crew of their South Vietnamese air force helicopter and two senior officers. The chopper apparently got lost and flew over a known enemy machine-gun position during the invasion of Laos, the most intensive helicopter combat ever.
This reminiscence of my friend and colleague, Henri Huet, was included in the book Henri Huet: J’etais Photographe de Guerre au Vietnam by Horst Faas and Hélène Gédouin. Published in French in 2006, the book contains many of Henri’s greatest photos, an enduring record of the brutality, […] READ MORE
“You Don’t Belong Here”
Posted by Michael Putzel • March 22, 2021
I spent 2 1/2 years covering the war in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, and I am astonished how little I knew about the female photojournalists and correspondents who got there before I did.
It may not be so unusual to drop into a big story ignorant of some who had already left. I had read books about Vietnam and the French colonization of Indochina long before I got there, and I knew several of the legendary journalists who were still there when I arrived in 1969.
But French photographer Catherine Leroy and American writer Frances FitzGerald had been and gone by then and weren’t often talked about in our circles. I knew only Kate Webb, the third of the three women whose lives and work are the subject of Elizabeth Becker’s new […] READ MORE
Rogue Soldier: One Man’s War, a new, short book
Posted by Michael Putzel • February 16, 2021
“HE WASN’T ONE OF THEIR OWN, but the Condors of C Troop understood the guy in the black-and-drab tiger-suit fatigues favored by the Special Forces had their commanding officer’s approval to fly with them, so they took him along… Word had it the slim, dark-haired young man with spectacles as thick as Coke-bottle bottoms wasn’t really an enlisted man at all, maybe not even Army.”
So begins the unusual story of Staff Sergeant Ed Keith, who left his post as a top-secret intelligence analyst in Vietnam to fly with the Condors, C Troop, 2/17th Cavalry, 101st Airborne Division, into the most intensive helicopter warfare ever.
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“I thought I’d seen everything about the American military experience in Vietnam, but here, 40 years later, [Michael] Putzel’s dramatic […] READ MORE
A sad anniversary, a memorable portrait
Posted by Michael Putzel • February 10, 2021
A half-century ago, on February 10, 1971, a South Vietnamese military helicopter was shot down over Laos three days after U. S. and South Vietnamese forces invaded that neighboring neutral country in an audacious attempt to cut the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The network of dirt roads and footpaths was used by the North Vietnamese enemy to move troops and supplies from the North through mountainous terrain into the populous coastal region of South Vietnam. Aboard that helicopter were five seasoned combat photographers, one of them a colleague and close friend in The Associated Press Saigon bureau, from which we covered the war.
His name was Henri Huet, and he was regarded as one of the finest photojournalists of any war. His photographs include many that are familiar to anyone who […] READ MORE
A soldier who “went rogue” in Vietnam
Posted by Michael Putzel • November 27, 2020
Army Staff Sergeant Ed Keith was supposed to be tending a secure, intelligence communications link during the U.S. and South Vietnamese invasion of Laos in 1971. Instead, he managed to get himself aboard a legendary cavalry commander’s helicopter and flew numerous dangerous reconnaissance missions until a 51-caliber machine gun bullet pierced the chopper’s skin and tore off his leg.
Keith suffered for decades from “phantom limb pain,” the sensation that the lost limb still hurt, sometimes severely and indefinitely. Ed never expressed regret about his ill-fated mission, but the drugs he was given for his pain took their own toll. My story about Ed Keith’s war and lifelong struggle is told in “Going Rogue“ in the December issue of Vietnam magazine published by Historynet.com.
Not just Vietnam, not just troops
Posted by Michael Putzel • May 25, 2020
When the Covid-19 body count passed 58,276, countless media reports compared the death toll of the virus to that number of Americans killed in the Vietnam War. There are, of course, many ways to show statistics, but the comparison was an easy way to portray the enormity of loss to a familiar casualty count that has left an enduring scar on the nation’s psyche for decades.
On Sunday, The New York Times shocked its readers by devoting its entire front page and three pages inside to the names and brief descriptions of 1,000 victims of the novel coronavirus in the United States alone. And, the newspaper acknowledged, its printed list was a mere 1 percent of the actual number that is certain to surpass the 100,000 mark any […] READ MORE
John Prine saw PTSD coming before most of us
Posted by Michael Putzel • April 14, 2020
When singer-songwriter John Prine died of complications from Covid-19 this month, I was moved to go back and listen to some of his music I hadn’t heard in years. His raspy, country voice and clever—sometimes searing—stories and his frequently humorous lyrics earned him a phalanx of devoted followers who stuck with him long after the decline of the folk revival he helped fuel.
John Prine 1946-2020
I can’t remember when I learned of him, but it was certainly after the release of his first album in 1971. I was in Vietnam at that time, covering the war, and not listening to much new music. It was probably two or three years later that I was introduced to his work. But it wasn’t until last week, when his death was widely reported […] READ MORE
Want to change your life? This man did.
Posted by Michael Putzel • February 18, 2020
From the Lincoln County News of Maine 1/27/20
Brad Kerr, age 39, formerly of New York City, now resides in Hamilton, N,Y. Several years ago, he experienced some profound changes that prompted him to step back and take a good hard look at where he was in his life. What Kerr saw motivated him to contemplate taking a year off, sort of a gap year, to reevaluate exactly what he wanted and needed.
In researching how he might spend this year, Kerr recalled that a friend had spoken highly of an apprentice woodworking program in Maine. While that program was no longer available, he came upon the apprentice program at The Carpenter’s Boat Shop and liked what he read. However, the deadline for applications was the next day. Kerr immediately completed and […] READ MORE
