Iraq Memoir

This program is read by the author, and includes a bonus interview. The riveting story of how a young boy's upbringing with outlaw culture and charismatic role models forged him into an elite Marine and a decorated Pararescueman. "Absence of self is my sword" comprises the final line in "The...

A military memoir by a biracial child of refugees and survivors, Roadside is about life and death, about family lost and gained, and about America, as a dream and a reality. It’s about the roads one takes to leave home and find it again.

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR An award-winning journalist’s powerful portrait of his native Baghdad, the people of Iraq, and twenty years of war. “An essential insider account of the unravelling of Iraq…Driven by his intimate knowledge and deep personal stakes...

In a remote enemy-held valley in Afghanistan, a Special Forces team planned to scale a steep mountain to surprise and capture a terrorist leader. But before they found the target, the target found them. The team was caught in a deadly ambush that threatened not only their lives but the entire mission. The elite soldiers fought huddled for hours on a small rock ledge as rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine-gun fire rained down on them.

Now Coughlin has written a highly personal story about his deadly craft, taking readers deep inside an invisible society that is off-limits to outsiders. This is not a heroic battlefield memoir but the careful study of an exceptional man who must keep his sanity while carrying forward one of the deadliest legacies in the U.S. military today.

When SPC Kayla Williams and SGT Brian McGough met at a mountain outpost in Iraq in 2003, only their verbal sparring could have betrayed a hint of attraction. Neither could have predicted the sequence of events that would shape their lives. Brian, on his way back to base after mid-tour leave, was wounded by a roadside bomb that sent shrapnel through his brain. Kayla waited anxiously for news and, on returning home, sought out Brian. The two began a tentative romance and later married, but neither anticipated the consequences of Brian’s injury on their lives.

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.

Mark Wales thought his life would end in a cornfield in Afghanistan. Mark and his SAS troops emerged from that scorched battlefield 12 hours later, his mentor gunned down, his dream career now a nightmare. Over four deployments of intense warfighting, Mark watched the line between right and wrong become blurred. When he left the SAS he was adrift, crippled by guilt. On a mission to rebuild himself, Mark turned his life around. He fought his way into the gates of a US Ivy League business school and into the boardrooms of top-tier international corporations.

Widely-celebrated author Sinan Antoon's fourth and most sophisticated novel follows Nameer, a young Iraqi scholar earning his doctorate at Harvard, who is hired by filmmakers to help document the devastation of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. During the excursion, Nameer ventures to al-Mutanabbi street in Baghdad, famed for its bookshops, and encounters Wadood, an eccentric bookseller who is trying to catalogue everything destroyed by war, from objects, buildings, books and manuscripts, flora and fauna, to humans.

Inspiring lessons learned from a lifetime of honor, service, and leadership from Captain Brett Crozier, the former commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and renowned Navy officer. Amid one of the darkest times in American history, it was a moment that captured the...

This program includes a foreword written and read by Nicholas Irving. The thrilling combat memoir by special operations sniper Paul Martinez, who spent seven years in Special Operations and was a sniper assigned to 3rd Ranger Battalion. America has one force with the single mission of direct...

Relive six decades of flying helicopters, including an extended tour in Vietnam and the mountains of Afghanistan, with a little Iraq, Kuwait, and National Guard thrown in. This is Minuteman: Two, Three…Go! recounts Wayne Chasson’s times, from the early, young, and dumb days to becoming a more seasoned pilot of Huey and other helicopters in three American wars and the National Guard here at home. Chasson relives it all for us in this gritty and honest memoir — with humility, humor, and gratitude — as he himself is still trying to figure out how he made it through alive.

Kandahar. The ancient desert crossroads and, as of fall of 2001, ground zero for the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in southern Afghanistan. In the northern part of the country, the US-supported Northern Alliance has made progress on the battlefield, but in the south, the country is still under the Taliban's bloody hold and al-Qa'ida continues to operate there. With no "Southern Alliance" for the US to support, a new strategy is needed if victory is to be achieved. Veteran CIA officer Duane Evans is dispatched to Pakistan to "get something going in the South." Foxtrot in Kandahar is his story.

After being commissioned into the US Air Force, MJ Hegar was selected for pilot training by the Air National Guard, finished at the top of her class, then served three tours in Afghanistan flying combat search and rescue missions, culminating in a harrowing rescue attempt that would earn MJ the Purple Heart as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor Device. But it was on American soil that Hegar would embark on her greatest challenge - to eliminate the military's Ground Combat Exclusion Policy.

In 2011, following the Taliban siege on Kabul's Intercontinental Hotel, an SAS soldier identified only as Serviceman J was awarded New Zealand's second highest military honor by showing outstanding gallantry in the face of danger. After eighteen years in the New Zealand SAS, ex-commander Jamie Pennell is now ready to tell his story. From patrols across desert territories run by warlords to hostile fire and near-death combat, Serviceman J is a heart-stopping account of life inside one of the world's most elite military forces.

What is the definition of assassination? Robert B. Baer’s boss at the CIA once told him, “It’s a bullet with a man’s name on it.” Sometimes assassination is the senseless act of a psychotic, a bloodletting without social value. Other times, it can be the sanest and most humane way to...

From enduring an abusive childhood to fighting as a Special Forces Green Beret in the war in Afghanistan, Sean Rogers has come away from his hardships with the tools necessary to not only survive but thrive. He knows firsthand what it means to face your trauma and use it as a source for incredible strength.

They landed in a dust storm so thick the pilot used dead reckoning and a guess to find the ground. Welcomed by a band of heavily armed militiamen, they climbed a mountain on horseback to meet the most ferocious warlord in Asia. They plotted a war of nineteenth-century maneuvers against a twenty-first-century foe. They trekked through minefields, sometimes past the mangled bodies of local tribesmen who'd shared food with them hours before. The men they helped called them brothers. Hollywood called them the Horse Soldiers. They called themselves Green Berets—Special Forces ODA 595.

“A very funny and frequently insightful look at the world’s most combustible region.”—The New York Times Book Review NATIONAL BESTSELLER Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Tony Horwitz's 1991 classic account of his travels across the Middle East and through the Arabian Peninsula, now in...

Im August 2021 wird der junge Oberleutnant Marc Hinzmann kurzfristig mit einem zusammengewürfelten Team von Feldjägern nach Afghanistan befohlen. An den Flughafen, an dem zu diesem Zeitpunkt bereits Chaos herrscht und der als letzter Zufluchtsort gilt. Während sich tausende Menschen vor den Toren drängen, liegt es plötzlich in seiner Verantwortung zu entscheiden, wer einen Platz im Evakuierungsflieger der Bundeswehr bekommen würde und wer nicht – ohne Dolmetscher, ohne klare Vorgaben und ohne rechtlichen Beistand.