How Mended Wings Came About
I came up with the idea of writing a book to honor Vietnam War helicopter pilots in 1984 while attending Army flight school at Fort Rucker, Alabama. I go into my reasons in more detail in the Prologue to Mended Wings, which you can link here if you are interested. In 2017, after the successful release of my first book, The Man with the Black Box, and while writing my second book, Charlie Calling, I decided I need to get off my duff and write such a book before I and the vets I would be writing about got much older.
I initially named the endeavor the Purple Heart Project. I figured a book title would come to me later. The book would feature ten or so vets with a chapter dedicated to each vet, telling their story from childhood to today. Step one involved recruiting good candidates to write about. To do this, I produced a recruiting video of sorts and put it on my website.
I then placed an ad in the Vietnam Helicopter Pilots Association (VHPA) magazine to see who might be interested in participating in the Purple Heart Project.
Any vet interested was directed to my website where they could fill out an application form. I had about 20 vets send in applications, 10 of which, through the process of initial interviews, eventual became the subjects of the book.
Then came the heavy lifting. I interviewed (recorded) each of the vets for between 6 to 12 hours each and researched their stories through every source I could get my hands on. Writing a single chapter involved listening to those interviews several times to make sure I got details correct. Once a draft chapter was completed, I then worked with the vet featured in the chapter to make sure he was comfortable with what I had written. That part was hard on many of the vets who were reading some of their most secret and painful thoughts for the first time presented in the context of their life story. About halfway through the project my agent suggested that the chapters should be organized in chronological order with historical bridges introducing each one, making the book a good primer for the Vietnam War experience. Of course, the story of how Mended Wings evolved is not complete without my amazing trip to Vietnam and how that came about. That’s a story in itself, which you can read about by clicking HERE.
