War Combat

Taking its title from The Face of Battle, John Keegan's canonical book on the nature of warfare, The Other Face of Battle illuminates the American experience of fighting in "irregular" and "intercultural" wars over the centuries. Sometimes known as "forgotten" wars, in part because they lacked triumphant clarity, they are the focus of the book. War is always hell. These wars, however, profoundly undermined any sense of purpose or proportion. Nightmarish and existentially bewildering, they nonetheless characterize how Americans have experienced combat.

The four stories in this audiobook are about nine men that returned to civilian life, after combat in the Korean War. They deal with different degrees of emotional injuries (PTSD) experienced after exposure to seemingly similar combat conditions and also with traumatic brain injury (TBI). The story entitled "MacKenzie and Smith" is a sequel to the military history novel Ice, Fire, and Blood, which relates experiences of a US Army infantry unit from when Chinese troops entered the war, in November 1950, until late summer 1951.

Battle fatigue...shell shock...PTSD... terminology changes. The pain remains. Paul Eastman, a small-town Wisconsin boy turned P-40 fighter pilot, lands in the jungles of Assam and Burma in 1943. Lt. Eastman's compelling story, gleaned from his diary and letters home and illustrated with his personal photos, provides unique insights into the realities of combat life and death, punctuated by love and concern for the wife he left behind.

Following the events of the “fast, hard-hitting, and impossible to put down” (The Real Book Spy) Field of Valor, Logan West continues his mission to bring America’s traitorous vice president to justice, even as the clandestine group pulling all the strings makes one last deadly bid to...

Col. Mark James Alexander was the only airborne officer to lead three different battalions into combat in World War II, successively commanding the 2nd and 1st Battalions, 505 Parachute Infantry Regiment, and the 2nd Battalion, 508 PIR, of the 82nd Airborne Division. A legend in his own time, he fought in North Africa, Sicily, Italy, and France, and even after being seriously wounded in Normandy, insisted on playing a role in the Battle of the Bulge.

The first aircraft to appear in the skies over the battlefields of World War I showed few signs of the dominant future of airplanes in warfare. Small, fragile, and slow, they provided no hint of the sleek jet fighters that would one day slash across the skies of Earth faster than sound to unleash the lethal blast and fire of sophisticated missiles, or the bombers able to level an entire city with one nuclear bomb. That said, they did not represent a complete novelty in warfare either, at least not during the early months of World War I.

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...

The New York Times bestselling author of Fly Girls shares the riveting story of an unsung World War II hero who saved countless American lives in the Philippines. When Florence Finch died at the age of 101, few of her Ithaca, NY neighbors knew that this unassuming Filipina native was a...

On April 6, 2003, 26 Green Berets, including those of Sergeant First Class Frank Antenori's Special Forces A-Team (call sign Roughneck Nine One), fought a vastly superior force at a remote crossroads near the village of Debecka, Iraq. The enemy unit had battle tanks and 150 well-trained, well-equipped, and well-commanded soldiers. The Green Berets stopped the enemy advance, then fought them until only a handful of Iraqi survivors finally fled the battlefield.

He signed up to fight with visions of honour and glory, of fighting for king and country, of making his family proud at long last. But on a battlefield during the Great War, Robert Jones is shot, and wonders how it all went so very wrong, and how things could possibly get any worse. He'll soon...

March 1945. A handful of very young Allied operatives are parachuted into the remote jungled heart of the Japanese-occupied island of Borneo, east of Singapore, there to recruit the island's indigenous Dayak peoples to fight the Japanese. Yet most speak next to no Borneo languages and know...

There have been volumes of books written about the development of US airpower and the technological specifications of each American or Allied aircraft. This is not one of them. This book focuses on the young men who answered the call to duty and were literally transformed from “farm boys to fighter pilots.”

Is the true story of how a GySgt. Dale Simmons tried to introduce the Russian military hand-to-hand combat art SAMBO to the Marine Corps. His COUNTER-SAMBO course was in 23 instructional sections, and he trained 93 Marines up to Instructor level. It has elements of power politics, group personal inter-dynamics, physical and emotional conflict, psychological and physical violence, and real hand-to-hand combat.

Patrick Robinson, coauthor of the #1 New York Times bestseller Lone Survivor and “preeminent writer of modern naval fiction” (The Florida Times Union) shares the gripping untold story of Mohammed Gulab, the Afghani warrior who defied the Taliban and saved the life of American hero and Navy...

Stephen E. Ambrose, acclaimed author of Band of Brothers and Undaunted Courage, carries us into the skies of World War II aviation, flying aboard the crowded and dangerous B-24 bombers as their crews fought to destroy the German war machine and secured Allied victory. The young men who flew the...

How the US Army developed historical programs since World War I―sending combat historians into the fray to interview soldiers and collect documents for the benefit of history.

From Major General Jeffrey Schloesser - former commanding general of the 101st Airborne Division and Regional Command-East - comes a revealing memoir of leadership in the chaos and fog of the Afghanistan War.

John Comer kept a journal of the 25 missions he flew in 1943, when the casualty rate on his base was close to 80 percent. His book is handwritten history, recorded within hours after the battles occurred. Comer vividly creates his experiences as top-turret gunner/flight engineer in a B-17 squadron that was thrown against the best pilots the Luftwaffe could offer.

The beloved Emmy Award–winning face of ABC News and New York Times bestselling author Martha Raddatz shares ten stories of American warriors and their families, whose superhuman sacrifice and resilience—on and off the battlefield—show that true courage comes in many forms. Martha Raddatz...

Subtitled "Memoirs of a Navy Seal", Captain Robert A. Gormly tells his amazing story as the leader of the US Navy SEALs, taking us into the night, into the water and into battle on some of the most hair-raising missions ever assigned. Rising through the chain of command within the SEALs from platoon leader to commanding officer, Gormly's journey began with a chance meeting on a Virginia beach.....