Did you ever wonder, 'How did I get here?' It's a question most people have asked themselves and usually ask when they wish they weren't there. Life led Michael Secli to the Battle of Khe Sanh in Viet Nam, 1968. History tells us a small band of Marines, seven miles from the Laotian border, along Route 9, the northern most road across Vietnam between the north and the south were outmanned yet were responsible for preventing the enemy from advancing. Did anybody really want to be there? The ...

America’s most elite commando unit, the US Navy SEAL Team Six pulled off one of the most remarkable covert operations in military history when they infiltrated the secret hideout of Osama Bin Laden in Pakistan in the dead of night and killed the hated terrorist mastermind. Dennis Chalker was an original “plankowner” (founding member) of SEAL Team Six, and in One Perfect Op, he takes readers deep inside the remarkable world of America’s Special Forces operatives. With an introduction by Ric...

As a young enlisted man, Randy Kington served on the front line with some of the first Marine combat units in Vietnam in 1965 and 1966. Kington describes his transformation from boy to man and the training that allowed him to survive nine months of some of the fiercest fighting of the Vietnam War. The good times of comradeship and of helping the underprivileged are contrasted with the life and death experiences that involved three major battles, countless ambushes, and search and destroy m...

“No matter how skilled the writer of nonfiction, you are always getting the story secondhand. Here’s a chance to go right to the source. . . . These men were there.”–MARK BOWDEN (from the Foreword)It started as a mission to capture a Somali warlord. It turned into a disastrous urban firefight and death-defying rescue operation that shocked the world and rattled a great nation. Now the 1993 battle for Mogadishu, Somalia–the incident that was the basis of the book and film

Captain William Van Zanten was one of the “Magnificent Bastards” of the 2nd Battalion, 4th Marines, in 1966–a year when any day could bring death or dismemberment from a Bouncing Betty or a punji stake, a firefight or a sniper bullet. He and his men faced B-52-sized mosquitoes, rain, heat, disease, and a determined and elusive enemy who kept the Marines off-balance, edgy, and sleepless.Yet Van Zanten persevered with a soldierly professionalism built on rigorous training. Dedication...

“Kids like me didn’t go to Vietnam,” writes Jack McLean in his compulsively readable memoir. Raised in suburban New Jersey, he attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, but decided to put college on hold. After graduation in the spring of 1966, faced with the mandatory military draft, he enlisted in the United States Marine Corps for a two-year stint. “Vietnam at the time was a country, and not yet a war,” he writes. It didn’t remain that way for long.A year later, after boot c...

"Throughout training I kept having the thought,WELL, ALL THEY CAN DO IS KILL ME.It seemed to help."SEALs are the world's toughest soldiers. Working in squads and platoons that make up SEAL teams, they are trained in everything from underwater demolition to high-altitude parachute drops. Now John Carl Roat, graduate of Class-29, one of the earliest SEAL training classes, has written the only book devoted to the training of that exclusive warrior force. With unflinching...

In 1945 Second Lieutenant Jack Broughton graduated from West Point with the silver pilot wings of a newly commissioned member of the Army Air Corps. Nearly thirty years later, he retired as a full colonel in the United States Air Force, an entity that didn't even exist when he first learned to fly. Along the way Colonel Broughton saw duty in virtually every fighter aircraft the Air Corps and then Air Force had to offer. He experienced the birth and coming of age of the U.S. Air Force and i...

From the New York Times bestselling authors of In the Company of Heroes comes a thrilling account of military aviation for history buffs and “for those who love vivid tales of battlefield heroics” (Publishers Weekly).In the world of covert warfare, Special Operations pilots are notoriously close-lipped about what they do. They don’t talk about their missions to anyone outside their small community. But now, Michael J. Durant and Steven Ha...

Five months after being drafted into the United States Army, I found myself in the middle of South Vietnam and wondering if I was ever going to go home again. This book will give the reader a view of what the Vietnam War was like for me. It has over 50 true stories and events that show different obstacles the soldiers faced and bizarre ways they died while in Vietnam.

The first combat memoir of the War on Terrorism: the gripping story of a young man’s transformation into a twenty-first-century warrior.Born into a family with a long history of military service dating back to the Revolutionary War, Andrew Exum enrolled in Army ROTC to pay for his Ivy League education. Shortly after graduation in 2000, he joined the infantry, then endured the grueling rigors of Ranger School before becoming a platoon leader with the storied 10th Mo...

"The Mad Fragger and Me: Leading an Infantry Rifle Platoon in Vietnam" descibes the true experiences of a U.S. soldier, through his military training and troop duty, culminating in a 1970-1971 tour as an Infantry Platoon Leader in Vietnam.Former 1st Lieutenant Tom Dolan takes the reader on a vivid armchair tour of sometimes grueling 1969 Army training. He includes numerous character sketches and anecdotes, with an emphasis on the leadership insights provided by his military mentors...