The Green Beret Guide to Great Disasters

What Caused Them And How We Prevent Future Ones

By: Bob Mayer

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

Every disaster has seven warning signs. Learn to spot them before it's too late.

From the sinking of the Titanic to the Challenger explosion, from Pearl Harbor to the Deepwater Horizon oil spill—disasters don't just happen. They build, step by catastrophic step.

Former Green Beret and NY Times bestselling author Bob Mayer reveals the shocking truth: No disaster involving humans happens in isolation. Every tragedy requires a minimum of seven things to go wrong, and human error is always among them. That means disasters can be predicted, prevented, and survived—if you know what to look for.

The Rule of Seven will change how you see the world around you.

Drawing on his Special Forces training and decades of military planning experience, Mayer dissects over 20 major disasters—including Little Big Horn, Apollo 13, the Tenerife airport crash, and Operation Market Garden—to expose the cascade events that led to each catastrophe. More importantly, he shows you exactly where intervention could have changed the outcome.

In this book, you'll discover:

• The seven cascade events that precede every disaster
• How false assumptions and complacency create deadly blind spots
• Why "it just happened" is never true—and what that means for your safety
• Real-world survival strategies from Special Operations training
• How to identify warning signs before reaching the point of no return
• The decision-making patterns that save lives versus those that end them

Whether you're concerned about workplace safety, travel risks, personal preparedness, or simply understanding why things go catastrophically wrong, this book arms you with the knowledge to recognize danger before disaster strikes.

Because the best survival plan is the one that keeps you out of the disaster in the first place.

Needs a Real Narrator

I have listened to several books read by "Virtual Voice " and they were all right. This book includes military and aviation vocabularies, as well as acronyms, flight numbers, and non-English personal and place names; the stumbles and mispronunciations were virtually endless.
The ideas presented are interesting and useful, but the book deserves better.