BONUS: This edition contains excerpts from Bing West's No True Glory and The Strongest Tribe.With unprecedented access and previously unreported detail, here is a first hand account of the 22-day march to Baghdad that takes you behind the scenes and to the front line...No one reporting on the war in Iraq had the unique battlefield clearance afforded the authors of this dramatic eyewitness account. Unlike embedded journalists confined to a single unit, West...

From a universally respected combat journalist, a gripping history based on five years of front-line reporting about how the war was turned around-–and the choice now facing America.In the course of 14 extended trips over five years, West embedded with more than 60front-line units, discussing strategy with generals and tactics with corporals. He provides an expert’s account of counterinsurgency, disposing of myths. By describing the characters and combat in city after city, West gi...

This award–winning "powerful narrative history" presents a vividly detailed chronicle of grueling combat operations in Fallujah during the Iraq War ( Midwest Book Review).Few places are as closely associated with blood, sacrifice, and valor as the ancient city Fallujah, forty miles west of Baghdad. This sprawling concrete jungle was the scene of two major U.S. combat operations in 2004. The first, Operation Vigilant Resolve, was an aborted effort by U.S. Ma...

March 23, 2003: U.S. Marines from the Task Force Tarawa are caught up in one of the most unexpected battles of the Iraq War. What started off as a routine maneuver to secure two key bridges in the town of Nasiriyah in southern Iraq degenerated into a nightmarish twenty-four-hour urban clash in which eighteen young Marines lost their lives and more than thirty-five others were wounded. It was the single heaviest loss suffered by the U.S. military during the initial combat phase of the war.

“The story of what Dakota did . . . will be told for generations.”—President Barack Obama, from remarks given at Meyer’s Medal of Honor ceremonyIn the fall of 2009, Taliban insurgents ambushed a patrol of Afghan soldiers and Marine advisors in a mountain village called Ganjigal. Firing from entrenched positions, the enemy was positioned to wipe out one hundred men who were pinned down and were repeatedly refused artillery support. Ordered to remain behind with the ...

THE CLASSIC SOLDIER’S MEMOIR FROM MEDAL OF HONOR RECIPIENT STAFF SERGEANT DAVID BELLAVIA“A rare and gripping account of frontline combat.”—LTG (Ret.) H.R. McMaster, author of Dereliction of Duty“They used to say that the real war will never get in the books. Here it does, stunningly.” —Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq and Making the Corps

'I couldn't see the tank. I couldn't see it... Someone was screaming over the radio. "Scream all you want, I still can't see it," I said to my pilot. The next explosion was so close it lifted my chest armour off my body in the shock wave. The noise brought me back to my awful reality. I looked out of the sight to see the shattered cockpit glass. The next one would be it and we knew it.' Lieutenant Commander James Newton survived and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his braver...

A British Naval commander's eyewitness account of the 1982 war in the South Atlantic.Since he was in charge of the amphibious operations in the Falklands War, it goes without saying that there is no one better qualified to tell the story of that aspect of the campaign than Commodore Michael Clapp. Here he describes, with considerable candor, some of the problems met in a Navy racing to war and finding it necessary to recreate a largely abandoned operational techniq...

The most comprehensive and gripping account of the Afghan war, by a BBC journalist.The war in Afghanistan is over ten years old. It has cost countless lives and hundreds of billions of pounds. Politicians talk of progress, but the violence is worse than ever.In this powerful and shocking exposé from the front lines in Helmand province, leading journalist and documentary-maker Ben Anderson (HBO, Panorama, and Dispatches) shows just how bad it has got. Detail...

2nd Tour Afghanistan, is a sequel to BOOTPRINTS across AFGHANISTAN. Sergeant Joe Peters returns for a SECOND TOUR in Afghanistan. A few of his men that were with him on his first tour, return with him. They come back to find that the war has escalated, and that the fire fights of yesterday, have become full blown battles, conducted with larger groups of men. He will try to bring his men through it all, but knows that many of them will leave wounded, and some will make the ultimate sacrific...

'Afghanistan is just like Iraq – hot, dusty and full of people who want to kill you', SSgt Simon Fuller, Royal Engineer Search AdvisorBomb Hunters tells the story of the British army's elite bomb disposal experts, men who face death every day in the most dangerous region of the most lethal country on earth – Helmand Province, Afghanistan.Bomb Hunters are up against the Improvised Explosive Device – the IED – the deadly homemade bombs planted by the Taliban. Hard to detect a...

On April 29, 1968, the North Vietnamese Army is spotted less than four miles from the U.S. Marines’ Dong Ha Combat Base. Intense fighting develops in nearby Dai Do as the 2d Battalion, 4th Marines, known as “the Magnificent Bastards,” struggles to eject NVA forces from this strategic position.Yet the BLT 2/4Marines defy the brutal onslaught. Pressing forward, America’s finest warriors rout the NVA from their fortress-hamlets–often in deadly hand-to-hand combat.At the end of two wee...