Showing titles in Military & War

For the first time, Army Ranger hero Nate Self tells his story. Self recounts the Roberts Ridge Rescue mission, the ferocious battles in Afghanistan, and the lone war of attrition that Nate Self has waged against post-traumatic stress disorder. This audio will become a go-to work for understanding the long-term effects of the war on terror. Thousands of families are fighting this battle, and Nate Self opens up his whole life - tragedies, successes, failures, and a struggle with suicidal thoughts - to share the facts.

An inspiring and astounding look at the extraordinary courage and contribution of Australian nurses and medics during the Vietnam War. From the best-selling author of Bush Nurses and Nurses of the Outback comes this collection of compelling and moving stories of our heroic nurses in the Vietnam War. Being a nurse always requires a cool head, a steady hand and an open heart. But if you're working in a war zone, the challenges are much harder.

George S. Patton was a general who achieved greatness in his field by contradicting his own nature. A cavalryman steeped in romantic military tradition, he nevertheless pulled a reluctant American military into the most advanced realms of highly mobile armored warfare. An autocratic snob, Patton created unparalleled rapport and loyalty with the lowliest private in his command.

They are the most famous and controversial directors the CIA has ever had - Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, William Colby, and William Casey. Disciples is the story of these dynamic agents and their daring espionage and sabotage in wartime Europe under OSS Director Bill Donovan.

Civil War historian Earl J. Hess presents a compelling biography of Braxton Bragg, the commander of the Confederate Army of Tennessee from the summer of 1862 to the end of 1863.

Former SAS soldier Big Phil Campion tells it like is in this brutally honest account of his insanely dangerous life as a private military operator. From playing chicken with a suicide bomber in backstreet Kabul to taking on pirates with his bare hands, this is true-life action-packed drama at its best.

Want to know what Vietnam was really like? From a Marine sniper in Hue, to a medevac dust-off pilot going into a hot LZ, Navy Corpsmen, A-6 pilots taking out bridges and SAM sites in North Vietnam, a nurse on the USS Repose, combat medics deep in the jungle, machine gunners in I-Corps, mechanics working on the rolling deck of a big carrier on Yankee Station, squad leaders on infantry sweeps in “the Arizona Territory”, truck convoys under fire, riverine patrol boats in the Delta, and much more....

At the height of the Vietnam conflict, a complex system of secret underground tunnels sprawled from Cu Chi Province to the edge of Saigon. In these burrows, the Viet Cong cached their weapons, tended their wounded, and prepared to strike. They had only one enemy: US soldiers small and wiry enough to maneuver through the guerrillas’ narrow domain. The brave souls who descended into these hellholes were known as “tunnel rats”. Armed with only pistols and K-bar knives, these men inched their way through the steamy darkness where any number of horrors could be awaiting them.

In the boot were six homemade pipe bombs, all linked to detonate at the same time from a single call on a brand-new pay-as-you-go phone found on the target. Special Branch also found Chinese Type 56 assault rifles with eight full magazines of ammunition. His target was a local school. He planned to attack two coaches of teenagers returning home after a school trip to France. Approximately 60 children, their accompanying teachers and their waiting parents. He was going to kill them all.

The first emperor of France and one of the shrewdest military leaders of all time, Napoleon Bonaparte (1769 - 1821) eventually came to control much of Europe. In Simply Napoleon, authors J. David Markham and Matthew Zarzeczny tell Napoleon's story, from his birth on the island of Corsica to his eventual imprisonment and death on the island of Saint Helena. They explain how the famed military commander's unique combination of determination, intellect, and personal charisma allowed him to rise from a provincial village to become a powerful and authoritative ruler. While taking an overall positive view of Napoleon, Markham and Zarzeczny also make it a point to draw attention to his mistakes and their consequences, providing a balanced picture of this complicated figure who was both a product of his times and a man pointing the way to the future.

Born to a well-to-do, connected family in 1816, Montgomery C. Meigs graduated from West Point as an engineer. He helped build America's forts and served under Lt. Robert E. Lee to make navigation improvements on the Mississippi River. As a young man, he designed the Washington aqueducts in a city where people were dying from contaminated water. He built the spectacular wings and the massive dome of the brand-new US Capitol.

The incredible account of Sister Betty Jeffrey OAM and the Australian war nurses who survived the bombing of evacuation ship SS Vyner Brooke in February 1942, and subsequently spent three years in Japanese prison camps in Sumatra. During those perilous years surviving in squalid conditions, Sister Jeffrey kept a secret diary of day-to-day events which, after the war, was turned into a hugely successful book and radio serial: White Coolies. Sisters in Captivity builds on those diaries.

With elegance and unsparing honesty, special correspondent for The Times of London, Anthony Loyd records this harrowing account of modern war. My War Gone By, I Miss It So exposes the unspeakable terror, visceral thrill of combat, and countless lives laid waste in Europe’s bloodiest conflict since World War II. Unsatisfied by a brief stint in the British army and driven by the despair of drug dependence, the author was searching for excitement when he set out for Bosnia in 1993.

How did the US Navy - the branch of the US military tasked with patrolling the oceans - ever manage to produce a unit of raiders trained to operate on land? And how, against all odds, did that unit become one of the world’s most elite commando forces, routinely striking thousands of miles from the water on the battlefields of Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, even Central Africa?

A larger-than-life hero with a towering personality, Robin Olds was a graduate of West Point and an inductee in the National College Football Hall of Fame for his All-American performance for Army. In World War II, Olds quickly became a top fighter pilot and squadron commander by the age of 22—a double ace with twelve aerial victories. But it was in Vietnam where the man became a legend.

For the first four months of 1942, U.S., Filipino, and Japanese soldiers fought what was America's first major land battle of World War II, the battle for the tiny Philippine peninsula of Bataan. It ended with the surrender of 76,000 Filipinos and Americans, the single largest defeat in American military history. The defeat, though, was only the beginning, as Michael and Elizabeth M. Norman make dramatically clear in this powerfully original book.

His name wasn’t Chester Nez. That was the English name he was assigned in kindergarten. And in boarding school at Fort Defiance, he was punished for speaking his native language, as the teachers sought to rid him of his culture and traditions. But discrimination didn’t stop Chester from answering the call to defend his country after Pearl Harbor, for the Navajo have always been warriors, and his upbringing on a New Mexico reservation gave him the strength to excel as a marine. This is the first and only memoir by one of the original Navajo code talkers of WWII.

When Green Beret Bryan Black was killed in an ambush in Niger in 2017, his wife, Michelle, saw her worst nightmare become a reality. She was left alone with her grief and with two young sons to raise. But what followed Bryan's death was an even more difficult journey for the young widow. After receiving very few details about the attack that took her husband's life, it was up to Michelle to find answers. It became her mission to learn the truth about that day in Niger - and Sacrifice is the result of that mission.

Bold, brash, and brimming with courage, Chuck Yeager burst onto the scene as a national hero in 1947, when he became the first to fly an airplane faster than the speed of sound. Yet even before his days as America’s most famous test pilot, Yeager was a young fighter ace in the US Army Air Force, flying a P-51 Mustang over Nazi-occupied Europe. His exploits are the stuff of legend.

He was called the Hangman of the Gestapo, the "butcher of Prague", with a reputation as a ruthlessly efficient killer. He was the head of the SS, and the Gestapo, second-in-command to Heinrich Himmler. His orders set in motion the Kristallnacht pogrom of 1938 and, as the lead planner of Hitler's Final Solution, he chaired the Wannsee Conference, at which details of the murder of millions of Jews across Nazi-occupied Europe were toasted with cognac.