Best United States Veterans History

New York Times Bestseller A stirringly evocative, thought-provoking, and often jaw-dropping account, The Operator ranges across SEAL Team Operator Robert O’Neill’s awe-inspiring four-hundred-mission career, which included his involvement in attempts to rescue “Lone Survivor” Marcus Luttrell and abducted-by-Somali-pirates Captain Richard Phillips and which culminated in those famous three shots that dispatched the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden. In frank and vivid detail and blunt and plain language, Mr. O'Neill describes some of the 400 counterterrorism operations and close quarter combat he experienced in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere through his career as a SEAL . Fans of battlefield narratives, such as Michael Golembesky's Level Zero Heroes , will relish this gripping perspective on 21st-century warfare." O’Neill wrote himself into American history with the three shots he fired into Osama bin Laden, but if you think that operation was intense wait till you read about the ones that preceded it. What O’Neill has written is unique, surprising, a kind of counternarrative, and certainly the other half of the story of one of the world’s most famous military operations . In the larger sense, this book is about how to be alive—how to be human while in the very same moment dealing with death, destruction, combat.” —Doug Stanton, New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers Robert O’Neill was born and raised in Butte, Montana, and lived there for nineteen years until he joined the Navy in 1996. O’Neill helped cofound Your Grateful Nation, an organization committed to transitioning Special Operations veterans into their next successful career.

Even after intense training, he was shocked to be thrown into the battle of Peleliu, where “the world was a nightmare of flashes, explosions, and snapping bullets.” By the time Sledge hit the hell of Okinawa, he was a combat vet, still filled with fear but no longer with panic. Based on notes Sledge secretly kept in a copy of the New Testament, With the Old Breed captures with utter simplicity and searing honesty the experience of a soldier in the fierce Pacific Theater. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific —the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary—into terms we mortals can grasp. He became a chronicler, a historian, a storyteller who turns the extremes of the war in the Pacific - the terror, the camaraderie, the banal and the extraordinary - into terms we mortals can grasp.

Red Platoon is the riveting firsthand account of the Battle of Keating, told by Romesha, who spearheaded both the defense of the outpost and the counterattack that drove the Taliban back beyond the wire and received the Medal of Honor for his actions. “This ranks among the best combat narratives written in recent decades, revealing Romesha as a brave and skilled soldier as well as a gifted writer....Romesha remains humble and self-effacing throughout, in a contrast with many other first-person battle accounts, and his powerful, action-packed book is likely to stand as a classic of the genre.”— Publishers Weekly (starred review). “The book is riveting in its authentic detail....Romesha ably captures the daily dangers faced by these courageous American soldiers in Afghanistan.”— Kirkus Reviews. “[Romesha’s] account displays all the hallmarks of superlative wartime reporting: unflinching honesty; vivid, in-the-trenches description; and deeper reflections on the pathos of battle.”— Booklist. More important, it is something that rises to the level of literature in its portrayal of a battle most Americans probably know nothing about, as a part of a war our country still seems to be struggling to understand.”— Grand Forks Herald. “This compellingly candid detail written by Medal of Honor recipient Clinton Romesha tells of the grisly tumult of the Battle of Keating through the rawest of lenses—his own.”— Parade. “ Red Platoon by Medal of Honor recipient Clinton Romesha will probably prove to be the definitive literary contribution of the war in Afghanistan.”— Lincoln Journal Star. The assault on Camp Keating is a vitally important story that needs to be understood by the public, and I cannot imagine an account that does it better justice that Romesha's.”—Sebastian Junger, journalist and author of The Perfect Storm. Through his courageous and no doubt painful act of remembrance, Romesha has done his comrades, indeed all of us, a great service — leaving an epitaph that will live through the ages.”—Hampton Sides, author of Ghost Soldiers and In the Kingdom of Ice. Because he captures the reality of a collection of personalities as diverse as America itself, their courage is truly inspiring.”—General Stanley McChrystal, U.S. Army, Retired. “ Red Platoon celebrates the most crucial aspect of military operations: the team. Clinton Romesha and the men of Black Knight Troop faced harrowing conditions and a determined enemy during the Battle for COP Keating, and in the process discovered exactly who they are. Clint is a true brother and a man that I look up to.”—Dakota Meyer, Medal of Honor recipient and author of Into the Fire “The men of Red Platoon and their actions at COP Keating deserve to be known.

Filled with telling personal anecdotes and high adventure, with narratives from the CIA and from Air Force pilots who flew the many classified, risky missions, this book is a riveting portrait of the most spectacular aviation triumphs of the twentieth century. Under its presiding genius, Clarence "Kelly" Johnson, the Skunk Works produced America's first jet fighter, the world's most successful spy plane (U-2), the first three-times-the-speed-of-sound surveillance aircraft and the F-117A stealth fighter. In an entertaining style, the authors describe Johnson's tyrannical managerial style, his thorny but productive relationship with the Air Force and the stealth-technology breakthrough that revolutionized military aviation. He has much to say about the Defense Department bureaucracy and warns, "Everyone in the defense industry knows that bureaucratic regulations, controls, and paperwork are at critical mass... and... in danger of destroying the entire system."

New York Times Bestseller A stirringly evocative, thought-provoking, and often jaw-dropping account, The Operator ranges across SEAL Team Operator Robert O’Neill’s awe-inspiring four-hundred-mission career, which included his involvement in attempts to rescue “Lone Survivor” Marcus Luttrell and abducted-by-Somali-pirates Captain Richard Phillips and which culminated in those famous three shots that dispatched the world’s most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden. In frank and vivid detail and blunt and plain language, Mr. O'Neill describes some of the 400 counterterrorism operations and close quarter combat he experienced in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere through his career as a SEAL . Fans of battlefield narratives, such as Michael Golembesky's Level Zero Heroes , will relish this gripping perspective on 21st-century warfare." O’Neill wrote himself into American history with the three shots he fired into Osama bin Laden, but if you think that operation was intense wait till you read about the ones that preceded it. What O’Neill has written is unique, surprising, a kind of counternarrative, and certainly the other half of the story of one of the world’s most famous military operations . In the larger sense, this book is about how to be alive—how to be human while in the very same moment dealing with death, destruction, combat.” —Doug Stanton, New York Times bestselling author of In Harm’s Way and Horse Soldiers Robert O’Neill was born and raised in Butte, Montana, and lived there for nineteen years until he joined the Navy in 1996. O’Neill helped cofound Your Grateful Nation, an organization committed to transitioning Special Operations veterans into their next successful career.

This is the story of fire team leader Marcus Luttrell, the sole survivor of Operation Redwing, and the desperate battle in the mountains that led, ultimately, to the largest loss of life in Navy SEAL history.