Military Veteran

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.

In Achilles in Vietnam, Dr. Jonathan Shay used the story of the Iliad as a prism through which to examine how ancient and modern wars have battered the psychology of the men who fight. Now he turns his attention to the Odyssey, the story of a soldier's homecoming, to illuminate the real problems faced by combat veterans reentering civilian society. The Odyssey, Shay argues, offers explicit portrayals of behavior common among returning soldiers in our own culture: danger-seeking, womanizing, explosive violence, drug abuse, visitation by the dead, obsession, vagrancy and homelessness.

A leadership book by former Navy SEAL and New York Times best-selling author Mark Divine, Staring Down the Wolf focuses on harnessing the principles of purpose and discipline in life to achieve success. What does it take to command a team of elite individuals? It requires a commitment to seven key principles: Courage, Trust, Respect, Growth, Excellence, Resiliency, and Alignment. All of these are present in an elite team which commits to them deeply in order to forge the character worthy of uncommon success.

Dale Maharidge’s father, like many World War II veterans, never talked about “the good war”. There was just one clue to his dad’s experience as a US Marine - a portrait with a close friend that hung permanently in their home. In The Dead Drink First, Dale, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, recounts his 18-year quest to find and repatriate the missing remains of his dad’s buddy, Herman Walter Mulligan, 73 years after he was killed in action.

There is no shortage of consultants, coaches, gurus, and authors who regurgitate lists of leadership principles. The deficit lies in the number of qualified leaders willing to share the truth about what it takes to lead a great team year after year. Fortunately, military veteran John Berry is one of those qualified leaders. Drawing from his experience as an army platoon leader and the CEO of Berry Law, John Berry shows mission-focused teams how simple military leadership lessons apply to any organization.

The French painter Jean Hélion’s unique and deeply moving account of his experiences in Nazi prisoner-of-war camps prefigures the even darker stories that would emerge from the concentration camps. This serious adventure tale begins with Hélion’s infantry platoon fleeing from the German army and warplanes as they advanced through France in the early days of the war. The soldiers chant as they march and run, “They shall not have me!” but are quickly captured and sent to hard labor.

Across the nation in the spring of 1966, farm boys from the Midwest, surfers from California and city-slickers from Cleveland opened their mail to find greetings from Uncle Sam. Some of these men, optimistic and looking to serve their country, joined Charlie Company and trained for service. They deployed together, experiencing the camaraderie, fear, smell, pain, violence and senseless deaths. And through it all they wrote letters back and forth with the loved ones they’d left behind. Back at home, the families of Charlie Company faced fear, loneliness and uncertainty.

When a soldier leaves for war, those left behind often wonder what their loved ones are experiencing. Letters home are always cheerful and vague - no sense in worrying the family. Then upon returning home, these young soldiers do not want to talk about their experiences. Family and friends allege they are now distant, changed, and not the same person they remember from several months earlier. What causes this? Although the backdrop for this novel is the Vietnam War, "cherries" exist in every war.

Tank Rider is the riveting memoir of Evgeni Bessonov telling of his years of service at the vanguard of the Red Army and daily encounters with the German foe. He brings large-scale battles to life, recounts the sniping and skirmishing that tried and tested soldiers on both sides, and narrates the overwhelming tragedy and horror of apocalyptic warfare on the Eastern Front. So much of the Soviet experience of World War II remains untold, but this memoir provides an important glimpse into some of the most decisive moments of this overlooked history.

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.

As the American government began a disastrous mass evacuation of its Afghan allies, a group of American veterans saw the writing on the wall—the people who had supported them on the ground over the past two decades were going to be left behind. Instead of watching on the sideline, they sprang into action. The effort became known nationally as #DigitalDunkirk, in reference to the civilian aspect of the evacuation of soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk in 1940.

In his New York Times best-selling chronicle of military life, Anthony Swofford weaves his experiences in war with vivid accounts of boot camp, reflections on the mythos of the marines, and remembrances of battles with lovers and family.

In this masterful book, renowned historian Peter Englund describes this epoch-defining event by weaving together accounts of the average man or woman who experienced it. Drawing on the diaries, journals, and letters of 20 individuals from Belgium, Denmark, France, Great Britain, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Venezuela, and the United States, Englund's collection of these varied perspectives describes not a course of events but "a world of feeling".

Mike Hayes has lived a lifetime of once-in-a-lifetime experiences. He has been held at gunpoint and threatened with execution. He’s jumped out of a building rigged to explode, helped amputate a teammate’s leg, and made countless split-second life-and-death decisions. He’s written countless emails to his family, telling them how much he loves them, just in case those were the last words of his they’d ever read. Outside of the SEALs, he’s run meetings in the White House Situation Room, negotiated international arms treaties, and developed high-impact corporate strategies.

Mansur Abdulin fought in the front ranks of the Soviet infantry against the German invaders at Stalingrad, Kursk, and on the banks of the Dnieper. This is his extraordinary story. His vivid firsthand account of a ruthless war on the Eastern Front gives rare insight into the reality of the fighting and into the tactics and mentality of the Red Army's soldiers.

August 1990: Iraqi forces under the command of Saddam Hussein invade the tiny emirate of Kuwait. Within hours, the Kuwaiti defenses collapse under the onslaught of the Iraqi Army. In response, the US military leads a coalition of 34 nations in what becomes Operation Desert Storm—a violent campaign to eject the Iraqis from Kuwait. At the tip of the spear are the men of Ghost Troop in the US Army’s Second Armored Cavalry Regiment. Based on hours of interviews and archival research by the author, this is a no-holds-barred account of modern warfare…as told by the men who lived it.

In volume eight of the Things Our Fathers Saw® series, you will return to the Pacific with our veterans as they recall the chaos in the aftermath at Pearl Harbor, the first challenges on land at Guadalcanal, island-hopping with the Marines, Navy, and Army at the Marshalls, Marianas, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. You will witness the most horrific bonzai charges of the war, accompany airmen on their B-29 missions over Japan, and lean over Navy corpsmen as they work to save the wounded.

The amazing experiences of the Queen Alexandra nurses in the World Wars is one of the greatest adventure stories of modern times, and - incredibly - remains largely untold. Thousands of middle-class girls, barely out of school, were plucked from sheltered backgrounds, subjected to training regimes unimaginably tough by today's standards, and sent forth to share the harsh conditions of the fighting services.

In this engaging audiobook, we see how an 18-year-old miner shoveling ore from deep in the ground in Utah suddenly found himself, only two years later, 30,000 feet in the air over Nazi Germany, piloting a Flying Fortress in the first wave of America's air counteroffensive in Europe. Pathfinder Pioneer gives us vivid insights into the genesis of the American air campaign, told with the humor, attention to detail, and humility that captures the heart and soul of our Greatest Generation.

Flight technician Frank Williams and Judy, a purebred pointer, met in the most unlikely of places: a World War II internment camp in the Pacific. Judy was a fiercely loyal dog, with a keen sense for who was friend and who was foe, and the pair's relationship deepened throughout their captivity. When the prisoners suffered beatings, Judy would repeatedly risk her life to intervene.