American Veteran

General Gustave Perna U.S. Army Retired, Operation Warp Speed Commander "Lt. Col. John McBrearty, a natural leader, combat Veteran, and family man, shares his unique perspective on history through his essays, reflections, and reviews. His personalized style provides the reader with a kaleidoscope of American history, in which he cleverly weaves his own military story within. This is a must-read for all Veterans and American history buffs alike." Having risen from the rank of Private to Lieutenant Colonel, combat veteran John J. McBrearty shares his unique insight of American History through...

David Kenyon Webster's memoir is a clear-eyed, emotionally charged chronicle of youth, camaraderie, and the chaos of war. Relying on his own letters home and recollections he penned just after his discharge, Webster gives a firsthand account of life in E Company, 101st Airborne Division, crafting a memoir that resonates with the immediacy of a gripping novel.

Chief Warrant Officer Gary O'Neal is no ordinary soldier. For nearly 40 years, he has fought America's enemies, becoming one of the greatest Warriors this nation has ever known. Part Native American, O'Neal was trained in both military combat and the ways of his Native people, combining his commitment to freedom with his respect for the enemy, his technical fighting skills with his fierce warrior spirit.

Harney County, Oregon, 1968: Nick Drake has a chest full of medals and enough demons to fill a duffel bag. He's been trained to kill but was never retrained to rejoin society. Drake flees to the lonesome high desert in search of redemption and takes a job patrolling wildlife refuges where the only conflicts are keeping out stray cows and ticketing poachers. But then he stumbles across a girl's body ritually placed in a gully. Her murder is only the beginning, and Drake must face humanity's heart of darkness once again if he's to stop a killer from turning even more gullies into graves.

Stirringly evocative, thought provoking, and often jaw dropping, The Operator ranges across SEAL Team Operator Robert O'Neill's awe-inspiring 400-mission career that included his involvement in attempts to rescue "Lone Survivor" Marcus Luttrell and abducted-by-Somali-pirates Captain Richard Phillips and culminated in those famous three shots that dispatched the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden.

In 2009 Clinton Romesha of Red Platoon and the rest of the Black Knight Troop were preparing to shut down Command Outpost Keating, the most remote and inaccessible in a string of bases built by the US military in Nuristan and Kunar in the hope of preventing Taliban insurgents from moving freely back and forth between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Three years after Keating's construction, the army was finally ready to concede what the men on the ground had known immediately: It was simply too isolated and too dangerous to defend.

John Crawford joined the Florida National Guard to pay for his college tuition; it had seemed a small sacrifice to give up one weekend a month and two weeks a year in exchange for a free education. But one semester short of graduating, and newly married, he was called to active duty, to serve in Kuwait, then on the front lines of the invasion of Iraq, and ultimately in Baghdad. While serving in Iraq, Crawford began writing short nonfiction stories, his account of what he and his fellow soldiers experienced.

When the United States declared war against Spain in 1898, Theodore Roosevelt resigned his post as Assistant Secretary of the Navy and was commissioned Lieutenant Colonel of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry - dubbed by an adoring public as "the Rough Riders." It was his recruitment and leadership of this unorthodox military unit that made "Teddy" a household name - and eventually president. The Rough Riders is Roosevelt's firsthand account of his adventures.

For well over a century, traditional Civil War histories have concluded in 1865, with a bitterly won peace and Union soldiers returning triumphantly home. In a landmark work that challenges sterilized portraits accepted for generations, Civil War historian Brian Matthew Jordan creates an entirely new narrative.

Dale Maharidge’s father, like many World War II veterans, never talked about “the good war”. There was just one clue to his dad’s experience as a US Marine - a portrait with a close friend that hung permanently in their home. In The Dead Drink First, Dale, now a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, recounts his 18-year quest to find and repatriate the missing remains of his dad’s buddy, Herman Walter Mulligan, 73 years after he was killed in action.

The Civil War ended more than 150 years ago, yet our nation remains fiercely divided over its enduring legacies. In A Thousand May Fall, Pulitzer Prize finalist Brian Matthew Jordan returns us to the war itself. Creating an intimate, absorbing chronicle from the ordinary soldier's perspective, he allows us to see the Civil War anew - and through unexpected eyes.

General Gustave Perna U. S. Army, Retired, Operation Warp Speed Lt. Col. John McBrearty, a natural leader, combat Veteran, and family man, shares his unique perspective on history. In Volume II, Lt. Colonel John J. McBrearty chronicles his unit's triumphs and failures in the combat zone of Iraq through a selection of essays and letters written home. With his insight, candor, and love for history, Colonel Mack provides the reader with a rare inside view of this microcosm of American military history. I want to shed light on military operations in Iraq that are far less known to the general ...

At 6:00 a.m. on the morning of October 3, 2009, Combat Outpost Keating was viciously attacked by Taliban insurgents. The 53 U.S. troops, having been stationed at the bottom of three steep mountains, were severely outmanned by nearly 400 Taliban fighters. Though the Americans ultimately prevailed, their casualties made it one of the war's deadliest battles for U.S. forces. And after more than three years in that dangerous and vulnerable valley a mere 14 miles from the Pakistan border, the U.S. abandoned and bombed the camp.

Frank Money is an angry, self-loathing veteran of the Korean War who, after traumatic experiences on the front lines, finds himself back in racist America with more than just physical scars. His home may seem alien to him, but he is shocked out of his crippling apathy by the need to rescue his medically abused younger sister and take her back to the small Georgia town they come from and that he's hated all his life. This is a deeply moving novel about an apparently defeated man finding his manhood - and his home.

On November 25, 1950, during one of the toughest battles of the Korean War, the US Eighth Army Ranger Company seized and held the strategically important Hill 205 overlooking the Chongchon River. Separated by more than a mile from the nearest friendly unit, 51 soldiers fought several hundred Chinese attackers. Their commander, Lieutenant Ralph Puckett, was wounded three times before he was evacuated. For his actions, he received the country's second-highest award for courage on the battlefield and resumed active duty later that year as a living legend.

The Unsubstantial Air is the gripping story of the Americans who fought and died in the aerial battles of World War I. Much more than a traditional military history, it is an account of the excitement of becoming a pilot and flying in combat over the Western Front, told through the voices of the aviators themselves. A World War II pilot himself, the memoirist and critic Samuel Hynes revives the adventurous young men who inspired his own generation to take to the sky.

For this mission, they’ll risk their lives. For each other, they’ll risk their hearts. Buddy Rider's little Cessna spotter aircraft was shot down twice over the jungles of Vietnam, and ten years later he’s flying crop dusters for a living while tinkering with an old WWII transport aircraft. He avoids the painful memories of the war, the bad times, and the loss of friends, until a young woman comes to his aircraft hangar in search of him. Elizabeth Anderson is a lay nun dedicated to aiding the helpless, and her immediate task is to rescue fellow missionaries and orphans trapped in war-...

Since Sept. 11, 2001, just over 30,000 veterans have died by suicide—four times more than the number of US military personnel who have died in combat in both Iraq and Afghanistan. My 83,000-word debut memoir, American Airman, is an unflinching look at one veteran’s life. Like Jake Wood’s Once a Warrior, American Airman is about a transitioning veteran channeling his pain into a new life purpose.

A group of U.S. soldiers emailed their observations and experiences from Iraq and their candid opinions on fighting an insurgency. This book is the result. This startling collection of emails is a thoughtful and compelling narrative that carries the reader from the alleys and city streets to the homes of long-suffering Iraqis, and from the soldiers’ concrete bunkers to the “majestic” army base.

Omar Nelson Bradley was the youngest and last of nine men to earn five-star rank and the only army officer so honored after World War II. This new biography by Steven L. Ossad gives an account of Bradley’s formative years, his decorated career, and his postwar life. Bradley’s decisions shaped the five Northwest European Campaigns from the D-Day landings to VE Day. As the man who successfully led more Americans in battle than any other in our history, his long-term importance would seem assured.