Showing titles in Iraq War

Lerette, a private contractor employed by the notorious Blackwater in the early days of the Iraq War, pulls no punches in calling out the incompetence of both the US military and the Department of State during the collapse of Iraq. You can decide if the insertion of private contractors in Iraq assisted or detracted from the war effort and if the costs in blood and treasure were worth the carnage.

"America had a secret weapon," writes Steve Call of the period immediately following September 11, 2001, as planners contemplated the invasion of Afghanistan. This weapon consisted of small teams of Special Forces operatives trained in close air support (CAS) who, in cooperation with the loose federation of Afghan rebels opposed to the Taliban regime, soon began achieving impressive - and unexpected - military victories over Taliban forces and the al-Qaeda terrorists they had sponsored....

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.

For soldiers in the 101st Airborne Division, the road to Baghdad began with a midnight flight out of Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in late February 2003. For Rick Atkinson, who would spend nearly two months covering the division for The Washington Post, the war in Iraq provided a unique opportunity to observe today's U.S. Army in combat.

Sure to rank as one of the greatest aviation memoirs ever written, Viper Pilot is an Air Force legend's thrilling eyewitness account of modern air warfare. From 1986 to 2006, Lt. Col. Dan Hampton was a leading member of the Wild Weasels, the elite Air Force fighter squadrons whose mission is recognized as the most dangerous job in modern air combat. Weasels are the first planes sent into a war zone, flying deep behind enemy lines purposely seeking to draw fire from surface-to-air missiles and artillery. They must skillfully evade being shot down - and then return to destroy the threats, thereby making the skies safe for everyone else to follow.

Dillard Johnson was at the forefront of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. But surviving the enemy was only the beginning. Johnson would use the intensity, focus, and humor that kept him alive on the battlefield to fight stage three Hodgkin's Lymphoma. A man determined not to die, Johnson made a miraculous recovery - and then returned to Iraq for a second combat tour as an Army sniper. Funny and exciting, Carnivore offers fresh insight into the mind and heart of a warrior and offers a look at the lives of troops on the ground not seen before.

No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel shadowed the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous surge, a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now Finkel has followed many of those same men as they’ve returned home and struggled to reintegrate - both into their family lives and into American society at large.

Over one million Americans have served in Iraq and Afghanistan in the past four years, but fewer than 500 from this group have earned a Silver Star, Navy Cross, Air Force Cross, Distinguished Service Cross, or the Medal of Honor. Those who have been awarded these distinguished honors all demonstrated an extraordinary courage under fire in the worst of circumstances.

The incredible true story of former Navy SEAL Mike Day, who survived being shot 27 times while deployed in Iraq.

At first, they were “Lucky Lima”. Infantryman Ruben Gallego and his brothers in Lima Company—3rd Battalion, 25th Marines, young men drawn from blue-collar towns, immigrant households, Navajo reservations—returned unscathed on patrol after patrol through the increasingly violent al Anbar region of Iraq, looking for weapons caches and insurgents trying to destabilize the nascent Iraqi government. After two months in Iraq, Lima didn't have a casualty, not a single Purple Heart, no injury worse than a blister. Lucky Lima.

From the former secretary of defense, a strikingly candid, vivid account of serving Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Robert M. Gates received a call from the White House, he thought he'd long left Washington politics behind: After working for six presidents in both the CIA and the National Security Council, he was happily serving as president of Texas A&M University. But when he was asked to help a nation mired in two wars and to aid the troops doing the fighting, he answered what he felt was the call of duty.

Join Air Force veteran Dr. W. Lee Warren as he chronicles his fascinating, heartbreaking, and enlightening experience as a neurosurgeon in an Iraq War combat hospital.

This is the bizarre tale of 12 young American soldiers who are deployed to Iraq in the summer of 2006. Rather than fight the enemy in combat, the men are unexpectedly assigned to guard the country's notorious leader - Saddam Hussein - in the months leading to his execution. Living alongside and caring for their "high-value detainee" in a former palace dubbed The Rock and regularly transporting him to his raucous trial, many of the men begin questioning some of their most basic assumptions.

Most Americans are now familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking new audiobook, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.

When the 2nd Battalion of the 3rd Marine Regiment ("2/3") arrived in the little-known "Haditha Triad" region of western Iraq's Al Anbar Province in September of 2006, the region exploded in a storm of terrorist violence. The most battle-hardened of Al Qaeda had fled to the Triad, and, taking their last, desperate gasps for survival after years of bloody war, lashed out at the battalion with everything they could muster.

Called “the best account of combat since Black Hawk Down” by Men’s Journal, Thunder Run is a no-holds-barred look at the sweep of Baghdad, Iraq in 2003 by U.S. armed forces. One of the boldest gambles in modern military history, the surprise attack on Baghdad by three battalions of tanks and APCs and less than 1,000 men total was the single stroke that is credited for ending the Iraqi war.

These are the combat experiences of the first Marine to command a special operations task force, recounted against a backdrop of his journey from raw Second Lieutenant to seasoned Colonel and Task Force Commander; from leading Marines through the streets of Mogadishu, Baghdad, Fallujah and Mosul to directing multi-national special operations forces in a dauntingly complex fight against a formidable foe.

Based on months spent with the battalions in Fallujah and hundreds of interviews at every level (senior policymakers, negotiators, generals, and soldiers and Marines on the front lines) No True Glory is a testament to the bravery of the American soldier and a cautionary tale about the complex, and often costly, interconnected roles of policy, politics, and battle in the twenty-first century.

In late June, 2005, media sources recounted the tragic story of 19 US special-operations personnel who died at the hands of insurgent/terrorist leader Ahmad Shah - and the lone survivor of Shah's ambush - deep in the Hindu Kush Mountains of Afghanistan. The harrowing events of Operation Red Wings marked an important - yet widely misreported - chapter in the Global War on Terror, the full details of which the public burned to learn. Victory Point reveals the complete, as-yet untold story of Operation Red Wings and the follow-on mission, Operation Whalers.

A fascinating account of an Army captain's unusual path through some of the most legendary seats of learning straight into a brutal fight with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, The Unforgiving Minute is, above all, an unforgettable portrait of a young soldier grappling with the weight of his hard-earned knowledge while coming to grips with becoming a man.