BOOK REVIEW: Born and raised in Georgia, Max comes back from Vietnam missing three limbs and is confined for months at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Doctors don’t give him much hope of living an active life, but through the bonds he forms with other wounded soldiers, and through his own Southern grit, he learns how to be mobile and overcome his despair.
He returns home, where he pursues his passion for public service by becoming the first Vietnam veteran to serve in the Georgia state senate. Jimmy Carter then appoints him head of the Veterans Administration. From there he becomes Georgia’s youngest secretary of state and ultimately realizes his dream of becoming a U.S. Senator.
"With this deeply moving account of his extraordinary life, Max Cleland offers a painfully honest exploration of the personal cost of war and the courage that sustained his journey. A powerful source of inspiration for generations to come."— Martin Sheen
But during his reelection campaign he is singled out by Republicans, who smear him as "unpatriotic." He loses his seat and begins another steep tumble. A long-dormant case of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, awakened after 9/11 by the invasion of Iraq, pushes Max to the brink. Forty years after Vietnam, having reached — and fallen from — a pinnacle of power, Max returns to Walter Reed as a patient, surrounded by veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan. Among them, Max again finds the faith and endurance to regain control of his life.
In a memoir free of bitterness but frank about the costs of being a soldier, Max Cleland describes with love the ties America’s soldiers forge with one another, along with the disillusionment many of them experience when they come home. He spares no one his humiliations and setbacks in this gut-wrenching account of his life in the hope it will keep even one veteran from descending into darkness. Heart of a Patriot is a story about the joy of serving the country you love, no matter the cost — and how to recover from the deepest wounds of war.
"This book is Max Cleland’s tragic, gripping, uplifting, detailed personal account of how he clawed and willed his shattered body back to a useful life by ‘standing tall’ with an ever-present positive outlook…. He opens his heart so that we, too, may better understand and learn what never giving up, after life-changing physical wreckage and loss, really means."— Lt. Gen. Hal Moore (Ret.), Vietnam and Korean War and infantry combat veteran, and coauthor of We Were Soldiers Once…and Young
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