"I thought I'd seen everything about the American military experience in Vietnam, but here, 40 years later, Putzel's dramatic recounting of the exploits of Staff Sergeant Ed Keith during Operation Lam Son 719 were as riveting as anything I'd read.”
— Peter Arnett, winner of the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the Vietnam War for The Associated Press
He called himself Staff Sergeant Keith, but word around C Troop had it that the spooky guy in tiger fatigues wasn't an enlisted man, maybe not even Army. Some thought he was CiA. But the troops were told that he had their commander's blessing, so they took him along. Ed Keith thought he had a special gift for finding the enemy--until his luck ran out...
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.
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