Volunteers
Growing Up in the Forever War
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Narrated by:
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Jerad W. Alexander
About this listen
“Riveting and morally complex, Volunteers is not only an insider’s account of war. It takes you inside the increasingly closed culture that creates our warriors.”—Elliot Ackerman, author of the National Book Award finalist Dark at the Crossing
As a child, Jerad Alexander lay in bed listening to the fighter jets take off outside his window and was desperate to be airborne. As a teenager at an American base in Japan, he immersed himself in war games, war movies, and pulpy novels about Vietnam. Obsessed with all things military, he grew up playing with guns, joined the Civil Air Patrol for the uniform, and reveled in the closed and safe life “inside the castle,” within the embrace of the armed forces, the only world he knew or could imagine. Most of all, he dreamed of enlisting—like his mother, father, stepfather, and grandfather before him—and playing his part in the Great American War Story.
He joined the US Marines straight out of high school, eager for action. Once in Iraq, however, he came to realize he was fighting a lost cause, enmeshed in the ongoing War on Terror that was really just a fruitless display of American might. The myths of war, the stories of violence and masculinity and heroism, the legacy of his family—everything Alexander had planned his life around—was a mirage.
Alternating scenes from childhood with skirmishes in the Iraqi desert, this original, searing, and propulsive memoir introduces a powerful new voice in the literature of war. Jerad W. Alexander—not some elite warrior, but a simple volunteer—delivers a passionate and timely reckoning with the troubled and cyclical truths of the American war machine.
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Critic reviews
“Riveting and morally complex, Volunteers is not only an insider’s account of war. It takes you inside the increasingly closed culture that creates our warriors. In the case of Jerad W. Alexander, that culture has also created a writer of remarkable talent.”—Elliot Ackerman, author of the National Book Award finalist Dark at the Crossing
“A beautiful and powerfully affecting portrait of a boyhood in a military family, in which contrasting and ever more complex views of America, of war, and of what it means to be a soldier lead to the decision to join the military and serve in Iraq. In that way, it’s also a portrait of the stories we tell ourselves, and how those stories fare when our children grow up and try to live them.”—Phil Klay, author of Redeployment (winner of the National Book Award) and Missionaries
“With this work, Jerad W. Alexander has staked his claim as one of the most necessary voices while contributing to a necessary and overdue examination of our military culture and what it means to be an American. An absolute triumph.”—Jared Yates Sexton, author of American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People
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Story
For the first time, Army Ranger hero Nate Self tells his story. Self recounts the Roberts Ridge Rescue mission, the ferocious battles in Afghanistan, and the lone war of attrition that Nate Self has waged against post-traumatic stress disorder. This audio will become a go-to work for understanding the long-term effects of the war on terror. Thousands of families are fighting this battle, and Nate Self opens up his whole life - tragedies, successes, failures, and a struggle with suicidal thoughts - to share the facts.
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Story of a Young Warrior
- By Becky Lea on 09-15-24
By: Nate Self
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One Bullet Away
- The Making of Marine Officer
- By: Nathaniel Fick
- Narrated by: Nathaniel Fick
- Length: 6 hrs and 5 mins
- Abridged
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A former captain in the Marines' First Recon Battalion, who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, reveals how the Corps trains its elite and offers a point-blank account of twenty-first-century battle. Fick's training begins with a hellish summer at Quantico, after his junior year at Dartmouth, and advances to the pinnacle, Recon, four years later, on the eve of war with Iraq.
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Book incomplete.
- By Amazon Customer on 08-06-17
By: Nathaniel Fick
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Back in the Fight
- The Explosive Memoir of a Special Operator Who Never Gave Up
- By: Joseph Kapacziewski, Charles W. Sasser
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller, Jo Anna Perrin
- Length: 9 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
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On October 3, 2005, Kapacziewski and his soldiers were coming to the end of their tour in Northern Iraq when their convoy was attacked by enemy fighters. A grenade fell through the gunner’s hatch and exploded, shattering Kapacziewski’s right leg below the knee, damaging his right hip, and severing a nerve and artery in his right arm. He endured more than forty surgeries, but his right leg still wasn’t healing as he had hoped, so in March 2007, Kapacziewski chose to have it amputated.
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A true hero.
- By Anonymous User on 01-28-21
By: Joseph Kapacziewski, and others
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The Good Soldiers
- By: David Finkel
- Narrated by: Mark Boyett
- Length: 10 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it "the surge". "Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences," he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic Army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers.
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Honest opinion folks
- By james on 11-06-11
By: David Finkel
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Eat the Apple
- A Memoir
- By: Matt Young
- Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
- Length: 5 hrs
- Unabridged
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A gut-wrenching, beautiful memoir which explores toxic masculinity and the devastating consequences of war on one impressionable young soldier Matt Young joined the Marine Corps aged 18, after a drunken night that culminated in him crashing his car into a fire hydrant. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases of California. Young survived training and then three deployments to Iraq as an infantryman.
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Annoying and smug
- By Charlie on 01-03-19
By: Matt Young
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The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell
- An Accidental Soldier's Account of the War in Iraq
- By: John Crawford
- Narrated by: Patrick Lawlor
- Length: 5 hrs and 26 mins
- Unabridged
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John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition; it had seemed a small sacrifice to give up one weekend a month and two weeks a year in exchange for a free education. But one semester short of graduating, and newly married, he was called to active duty, to serve in Kuwait, then on the front lines of the invasion of Iraq, and ultimately in Baghdad. While serving in Iraq, Crawford began writing short nonfiction stories, his account of what he and his fellow soldiers experienced.
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An honest, real account of the Iraq War
- By Michael J. Mountain on 09-07-05
By: John Crawford
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Love, Africa
- A Memoir of Romance, War, and Survival
- By: Jeffrey Gettleman
- Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
- Length: 11 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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A seasoned war correspondent, Jeffrey Gettleman has covered every major conflict over the past 20 years, from Afghanistan to Iraq to the Congo. For the past decade, he has served as the East Africa bureau chief for the New York Times, fulfilling his teenage dream of living in Africa. Love, Africa is the story of how he got there - and of his difficult, winding path toward becoming a good reporter and a better man.
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Loved this book!!!
- By Benjamin on 05-26-17
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Silent Warrior
- The Marine Sniper's Vietnam Story Continues
- By: Charles Henderson
- Narrated by: Corey M. Snow
- Length: 9 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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In the U.S. Marine Corps, the most dangerous job in combat is that of the sniper. With no backup and little communication with the outside world, these men disappear for weeks on end in the wilderness with nothing but intellect and iron will to protect them - as they watch, wait, and finally strike. But of all of the snipers who ever hunted human prey, one man stands above the rest as the most legendary fighting man to ever pull a trigger. That man is Carlos Hathcock.
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Just like Marine stories should be told
- By James A. on 04-16-15
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Policing Saigon
- By: Loren W. Christensen
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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Policing Saigon isn't Platoon or Apocalypse Now, but the story of Loren W. Christensen's experience as a military policeman (MP) in a city of millions at a time when chaos and fear reigned. As a 23-year-old from a small town in Washington State, the author was plunged into a chaotic city of brawling servicemen, prostitutes, racial violence, enemy rockets, riots, and death. It was a place that would give him a unique opportunity to see up close a different side of the Vietnam War and its effect on the human condition.
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Forget about it.
- By Amazon Customer on 07-22-21
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My War Gone By, I Miss It So
- By: Anthony Loyd
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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With elegance and unsparing honesty, special correspondent for The Times of London, Anthony Loyd records this harrowing account of modern war. My War Gone By, I Miss It So exposes the unspeakable terror, visceral thrill of combat, and countless lives laid waste in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. Unsatisfied by a brief stint in the British army and driven by the despair of drug dependence, the author was searching for excitement when he set out for Bosnia in 1993.
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Fun book. Low anti Serb bias for an Anglo
- By Paul on 09-14-17
By: Anthony Loyd
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Loon
- A Marine Story
- By: Jack McLean
- Narrated by: Chris Andrew Ciulla
- Length: 7 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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"Kids like me didn't go to Vietnam", writes Jack McLean in his must-listen memoir. Raised in suburban New Jersey, he attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, but decided to put college on hold. After graduation in the spring of 1966, faced with the mandatory military draft, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps for a two-year stint. "Vietnam at the time was a country, and not yet a war", he writes. It didn't remain that way for long.
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Besides a production issue, excellent.
- By LEE on 05-02-19
By: Jack McLean
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In the Company of Heroes
- The True Story of Black Hawk Pilot Michael Durant and the Men Who Fought and Fell at Mogadishu
- By: Michael Durant, Steven Hartov
- Narrated by: Michael Durant
- Length: 5 hrs and 31 mins
- Abridged
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Durant's experience as a prisoner in Somalia grew increasingly bizarre, crystallizing a clash of cultures by turns frightening, melancholy, hilarious, and strangely familiar. Revealing never-before-told stories with the incisive thought and emotion of one who was there, In the Company of Heroes is one man's unforgettable, true story of going to hell and making it back alive.
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27 years after the fact, I finally listened.
- By Michael on 06-30-21
By: Michael Durant, and others
What listeners say about Volunteers
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- K. Young
- 04-16-23
Not your typical chest thumping war story
Jerad gets to heart heart of how and why young men and women find themselves at war - voluntarily. Looking forward to more works from this author!
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