Blog
Alive Day–the day he almost died
Posted by • April 07, 2016
On Friday, April 8, Max Cleland will celebrate the 48th anniversary of the day he got blown up in Vietnam.
“I should be dead,” he told me this week. He is anything but. Cleland has made another astonishing recovery, less dramatic than that day he lost three limbs and 42 pints of blood in Vietnam, but he is back once again, this time from years of severe depression and a bout with long-dormant post traumatic stress disorder.
Cleland was a freshly promoted captain in the Army Signal Corps when the thousands of men and dozens of helicopters of the 1st Air Cavalry Division were ordered to relieve the beleaguered Marines at Khe Sanh, a mountain combat base in the northwest corner of South Vietnam. The Marines had been under siege for 77 […] READ MORE
Talk with Haunting Legacy author
Posted by • March 27, 2016
Deborah Kalb, co-author of Haunting Legacy that she wrote with her father Marvin Kalb, interviewed me about my book as part of her “Q&As with Experts” project. Haunting Legacy traces the impact of the Vietnam War on all American presidents since the war ended.
The Price They Paid: Enduring Wounds of War deals not so much with the politics and military strategy of the post-war years but with the impact the war has had on one air cavalry troop that fought it. It traces the actions of the troop commander and those who flew with him into the most intensive helicopter warfare ever–and returns to them 40 years after the war ended to gauge how they were affected by their combat experience. Almost without exception, the men who survived have struggled with physical and […] READ MORE
‘Price’ a Finalist for Book of the Year
Posted by • March 13, 2016
Foreword Reviews named Michael Putzel’s book, The Price They Paid: Enduring Wounds of War, a finalist for Indiefab Book of the Year, the award sponsor announced.
Foreword, which focuses on books published by independent publishing houses and university presses, uses a panel of booksellers and librarians to choose the top fiction and nonfiction published outside the “big five” publishers that once dominated nearly all book sales in the United States.
The Price They Paid, released in 2015 by Trysail Publishing of Washington, follows the lives of pilots and crews in one air cavalry unit that flew through the most intensive helicopter warfare ever and explores how that experience changed their lives. The author flew with the unit as a war correspondent in Vietnam and […] READ MORE
Book Forum at Washington’s historic Army and Navy Club
Posted by • February 29, 2016
Author’s book talk and audience discussion of The Price They Paid by Michael Putzel
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
Wine and Cheese Reception – 6:30 p.m. | Speaker – 7 p.m. | $12 per person
The Price They Paid: Enduring Wounds of War is the stunning and dramatic true story of a legendary helicopter commander in Vietnam and the troops who followed him into the most intensive helicopter warfare ever. Michael Putzel, a distinguished American journalist who covered the war for 2 ½ years, recounts how that brutal experience has changed their lives in the forty years since the war ended.
Tickets available by calling Stephanie at (202) 355-0496 or for purchase at the door.
A fateful day
Posted by • February 10, 2016
Forty-five years ago today, February 10, 1971, I lost a dear friend and mentor. Our journalism profession lost not only my friend, Henri Huet of The Associated Press, but three other esteemed comrades when their helicopter was shot down over Laos.
By the time he died at 43, Henri had already shot some of the most remarkable and memorable war photographs of his time. Among those killed with him, Larry Burrows of LIFE magazine had similarly captured images that spoke volumes about the agony and devastation of war. Two younger, but also gifted photographers, Keisaburo Shimamoto of Newsweek and Kent Potter of UPI, went down with them. Hardly noticed was another young photographer, a gentle South Vietnamese army sergeant named Tu Vu, who sold some of his best work to […] READ MORE
A documentary portrays the pain of PTSD
Posted by • February 05, 2016
A young woman who grew up with her father’s PTSD has tracked down some of his fellow soldiers for a short documentary that captures the agony of wartime injuries that won’t go away.
Kara Frame, a multimedia intern at National Public Radio (NPR), produced and directed I Will Go Back Tonight, a 20-minute video that combines images of young infantrymen whose company was overwhelmed by an enemy force in Vietnam with present-day interviews of some of the survivors and their families.
The 90 men of Charlie Company, 1st Mechanized Battalion, 5th Infantry, accompanied by armored personnel carriers, their “tracks,” entered the Ben Cui rubber plantation the morning of August 21, 1968, knowing they were in for a fight. They didn’t know the force awaiting them about 40 miles north of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, was perhaps […] READ MORE
The Price They Paid named among “the best of the best”
Posted by • December 28, 2015
Foreward Reviews, a quarterly magazine that reviews books published by independent publishing houses, selected The Price They Paid: Enduring Wounds of War by Michael Putzel as one of only four works of nonfiction favored by its reviewers as the best books of 2015.
The book, published by Trysail Publishing, is among “the best of the best: the books our reviewers loved most in 2015,” Foreward said.
“This vivid account of Vietnam War helicopter battles reveals bravery of allied forces who encountered insurmountable odds during a time when American political and public support for the war all but ended,” wrote reviewer Karl Helicher: He called the book “a haunting portrayal of how PTSD affected men then and now, decades after the war.”
The Price They Paid: Enduring Wounds of War is the dramatic, true story of one […] READ MORE
When trauma comes home
Posted by • December 18, 2015
A story by Eli Saslow in The Washington Post starkly illustrates how trauma can devastate victims and their families far from any battlefield.
A survivor’s life
Two Condor pilots killed in crash
Posted by • December 06, 2015
C Troop, 2/17 Cavalry, has lost few pilots since the Vietnam War, when it endured the most intensive helicopter warfare ever. One pilot was killed in Afghanistan but none during multiple tours of duty in Iraq. Then came the sad announcement on Friday, identifying the two crewman flying an AH64 Apache attack helicopter that crashed on a training mission near Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where the Condors of C Troop are based.
The cause of the fatal crash of the most advanced fighting machine the Condors have ever flown is under investigation.
From: Ernesto, Andrew C CPT USARMY 101 CAVN BDE (US)
[mailto:andrew.c.ernesto.mil@mail.mil]
Sent: Friday, December 4, 2015 3:42 PM
To: kensmith150 <kensmith150@gmail.com>
Subject: Loss of 2 Condor Pilots
Condor Alumni,
It is with a heavy heart that I inform you of the loss of two of […] READ MORE
A cure for PTSD?
Posted by • November 10, 2015
Among the most frustrating aspects of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the poor recovery rate of those who suffer, often for years or even decades.
The Department of Veterans Affairs–VA–has approved several methods of treating the stubborn, disabling psychological and physiological symptoms of the usually invisible war wound, but none of the various tactics has proven particularly effective.
The journal Pharmacy & Therapeutics has reported that nearly nine out of ten veterans treated for PTSD are given one or more drugs in a class known as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, better known by brand names such as Prozac, Paxil or Zoloft.
A wide array of those and other prescription drugs are frequently tried in combination “cocktails” because symptoms and results vary widely. Antidepressants and antianxiety medications may be used along with antipsychotics, painkillers, sleeping pills, stimulants […] READ MORE
