“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 recounting of the exploits of Staff Sergeant Ed Keith…was as riveting as anything I’d read,” says Peter Arnett, the legendary war correspondent and Pulitzer-Prize winner for his coverage of the Vietnam War for The Associated Press.
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The Ed Keith story is now a book entitled Rogue Soldier: One Man’s War by Michael Putzel, author of the award-winning true story The Price They Paid: Enduring Wounds of War. Putzel covered and flew with the Condors as an AP war correspondent in Vietnam but only learned about Keith decades later when writing The Price They Paid. After that book was published, a reader steered him to Keith, who was alive but largely incapacitated by his war wounds. By then, the one-time spook, who rarely even gave his full name to others, was ready to open up.
The 56-page book is available as a paperback on Amazon.com and as an ebook in Amazon’s Kindle Store. An audiobook will be released soon and will be available on Audible.com and iTunes. A sample of the one-hour audiobook is available on the michaelputzel.com website. |
