Fred Kirkpatrick
served with the famed First Infantry's Black Lions, as a combat infantryman in Vietnam 1967. He was exposed to Agent Orange and struggled to try and understand what PTSD was doing to his life and writes about those struggles as a new author in his memoir of PTSD,
"Why Didn't I Die."
In a strange twist of irony, his father, nearly fifty years earlier, was exposed to Lethal Gas in World War I as a combat infantryman with the 4th Division in France. His father would later be found to be suffering with "Shell Shock", that would now be regarded as a form of PTSD.And Fred has been using his considerable investigative skills, to write a 2
nd
book about his Ancestors called
"My Great, Great, Aunt (s)."
Even though he was red-lined as a C- student in grade school by Catholic nuns and graduated at the bottom of his high school class, he was able to focus his PTSD struggles on studying and in later years was able to earn two undergraduate college degrees and a master's degree.