On May 11, 1945, McKinney returned fire on the Japanese attacking his unit, using every available weapon-even his fists-standing alone against wave after wave of dedicated Japanese soldiers. At the end, John McKinney was alive-with over forty Japanese bodies before him. This is the story of an extraordinary man whose courage and fortitude in battle saved many American lives, and whose legacy has been sadly forgotten by all but a few. Here, the proud legacy of John McKinney lives on.

    From the debacle in Bataan, to the miracle at Midway and the relentless vortex of Guadalcanal, their solemn oaths to their country later led one to the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot and the others to the coral strongholds of Peleliu, the black terraces of Iwo Jima and the killing fields of Okinawa, until at last the survivors enjoyed a triumphant, yet uneasy, return home. In The Pacific, Hugh Ambrose focuses on the real-life stories of the five men who put their lives on the line for our country. To deepen the story revealed in the miniseries and go beyond it, the book dares to chart a great ocean of enmity known as The Pacific and the brave men who fought. Some considered war a profession, others enlisted as citizen soldiers. Each man served in a different part of the war, but their respective duties required every ounce of their courage and their strength to defeat an enemy who preferred suicide to surrender. The medals for valor which were pinned on three of them came at a shocking price-a price paid in full by all.

    “Knowing these great men—who they were, how they lived, and what they stood for—has changed my life. We can’t let them be forgotten. So read about these amazing men, share their stories, and learn from them as I have. We’ve mourned their deaths. Let’s celebrate their lives.”—Brandon WebbAs a Navy SEAL, Brandon Webb rose to the top of the world’s most elite sniper corps, experiencing years of punishing training and combat missions from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. Among the best of the best, he led the SEALs’ clandestine sniper training program as course manager, instructing a new generation of the world’s top snipers. Along the way, Webb served beside, trained, and supported men he came to know not just as fellow warriors, but as friends and, eventually, as heroes. Among Heroes gives his personal account of these eight extraordinary SEALs, who gave all for their comrades—and their country.Here are the true stories behind the remarkable valor and abiding humanity of those “sheepdogs” (as they call themselves) who protect us from the wolves of the world. Of Matt “Axe” Axelson, who perished on the Lone Survivor mission in Afghanistan. Of Chris Campbell, Heath Robinson, and JT Tumilson, who were among the thirty-eight casualties of Extortion 17, the Chinook helicopter shot down in August 2011. Of Glen Doherty, Webb’s best friend for more than a decade, killed while helping secure the successful rescue and extraction of American CIA and State Department diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11, 2012; and other close friends, classmates, and fellow warriors.In Among Heroes, Webb offers eight intensely personal profiles of uncommon courage—who these men were, what they stood for, and how they came to make the ultimate sacrifice. These are men who left behind powerfully instructive examples of what it means to be alive—and what it truly means to be a hero.INCLUDES PHOTOS

    Then his youngest child, straight out of high school, joined the United States Marine Corps. Written in alternating voices by eighteen-year-old John and his father, Frank, Keeping Faith takes readers in riveting fashion through a family's experience of the Marine Corps: from being broken down and built back up on Parris Island (and being the parent of a child undergoing that experience), to the growth of both father and son and their separate reevaluations of what it means to serve. From Frank's realization that among his fellow soccer dads "the very words ‘boot camp' were pejorative, conjuring up ‘troubled youths at risk'" ("'But aren't they all terribly southern?' asked one parent") to John's learning that "the Marine next to you is more important than you are," Keeping Faith — a New York Times bestseller — is a fascinating and personal examination of issues of class, duty, and patriotism. The fact that John is currently serving in the Middle East only adds to the impact of this wonderfully written, timely, and moving human interest story.

    Army Special Operations Command created Cultural Support Teams, a pilot program to put women on the battlefield alongside Green Berets and Army Rangers on sensitive missions in Afghanistan. The idea was that women could access places and people that had remained out of reach, and could build relationships—woman to woman—in ways that male soldiers in a conservative, traditional country could not. Though officially banned from combat, female soldiers could be “attached” to different teams, and for the first time, women throughout the Army heard the call to try out for this special ops program.In Ashley’s War, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon uses exhaustive firsthand reporting and a finely tuned understanding of the complexities of war to tell the story of CST-2, a unit of women hand-picked from across the Army, and the remarkable hero at its heart: 1st Lt. Ashley White, who would become the first Cultural Support Team member killed in action and the first CST remembered on the Army Special Operations Memorial Wall of Honor alongside the Army Rangers with whom she served.Transporting readers into this little-known world of fierce women bound together by valor, danger, and the desire to serve, Ashley’s War is a riveting combat narrative and a testament to the unbreakable bonds born of war.Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributor to The Atlantic’s Defense One. She is the bestselling author of The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and writes regularly for leading media outlets. A Fulbright scholar and Robert Bosch Fellow, she began reporting from conflict regions during MBA study at the Harvard Business School following nearly a decade covering politics at ABC News.

    But this description barely scratches the surface. Special operations snipers are men with stacked skill sets who have the ability to turn the tide of battles, even when they aren't pulling the trigger. Snipers have played an outsized role in the War on Terror that has earned them the Medal of Honor, Navy Cross, and countless other honors. These are the most experienced warriors on the battlefield, oftentimes the units' best assaulters with years of door-kicking under their belt. These are the men who run ops in small teams across borders, or dress like locals and pull off high-risk vehicle reconnaissance and singleton missions in non-permissive environments.MODERN AMERICAN SNIPERS tells the inside story of some of the most heroic patriots in recent American history by the friends and colleagues who knew them best, including: * The Legend – Chris Kyle, SEAL Team 3 Chief and the most lethal sniper in U.S. military history* The Reaper – Nick Irving, the first African American to serve as a sniper in the 3rd Ranger Battalion, and its deadliest, with 33 confirmed kills * Robert Horrigan, Delta sniper who played a critical role in Operation Anaconda* Don Hollenbaugh, Delta Operator who earned the Distinguished Service Cross while embedded with a Marine platoon in the First Battle of Fallujah* And many more

    It was lost in Washington, D.C." - H. R. McMaster (from the Conclusion) Dereliction Of Duty is a stunning new analysis of how and why the United States became involved in an all-out and disastrous war in Southeast Asia. Fully and convincingly researched, based on recently released transcripts and personal accounts of crucial meetings, confrontations and decisions, it is the only book that fully re-creates what happened and why. It also pinpoints the policies and decisions that got the United States into the morass and reveals who made these decisions and the motives behind them, disproving the published theories of other historians and excuses of the participants.Dereliction Of Duty covers the story in strong narrative fashion, focusing on a fascinating cast of characters: President Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, General Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy and other top aides who deliberately deceived the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the U.S. Congress and the American public.Sure to generate controversy, Dereliction Of Duty is an explosive and authoritative new look at the controversy concerning the United States involvement in Vietnam.

    Col, Iceal E. Hambleton, U.S. Air Force, has been a forgotten hero since 1972. As North Vietnam's hammer was beating out South Vietnam's submission, Hambleton was shot down 12 miles south of the DMZ. He later received the Silver Star and lesser medals. They don't seem enough. For "Bat-21" reveals a military man amidst 12 days of continuous valor, above and beyond other moments of bloody bravery. And it is certainly worth noting that Hambleton, quite out of his element as an airman ducking on the ground, was 53 years old—too ancient for such combat. A navigator aboard an EB-66 radar plane, Hambleton's body was peppered by flak and jolted by ejection after a surface-to-air missile exploded his aircraft. He parachuted, not behind North Vietnamese lines, but into the middle of a major advance. Despite injuries, Hambleton buried himself in a shallow grave while American aircraft ringed his position with gravel, lemon-sized mines to block North Vietnamese searchers. They wanted him. We wanted him. Hambleton's head was stuffed with electronic surveillance secrets. In the literal tug-of-war that followed, with helicopter rescue made impossible by enemy gunfire, Hambleton used his survival radio to call in air strikes against gun emplacements and troop movements in his area. His diet was rainwater and raw corn. He fought pain, infection and eventual dysentery. He survived earth tremors when, for the first time in the history of air search and rescue, a B-52 strike was used to sterilize hostile ground around his hideaway. His movements constantly quarterbacked by a forward air controller orbiting a light plane overhead, Hambleton was eventually ordered to crawl to freedom at night. North Vietnamese were known to be monitoring rescue frequencies, So a code was devised; he was given distances and directions toward freedom that overlaid golf courses he had played. Hazards for Hambleton's deadly 18 holes were a polluted river, leeches, snakes, exhaustion, starvation, dehydration, illness, hallucination and an encounter with a North Vietnamese soldier Hambleton killed in a knife fight. It is a tense, ascending narrative, written capably by Anderson so long after the event. He catches the jargon and humor of airmen. He has no difficulty pegging the depression and euphoria of a man in the middle, the unexpected stamina born of stubbornness and, through it all, the frustration of a 53-year-old man forcing himself to generate the vitality of a 24-year-old."

    He was awarded the Iron Cross by Hitler and an MBE by Britain. To MI5 he was known as Garbo. To the Abwehr, he was Alaric. He also went by Rags the Indian Poet, Mrs Gerbers, Stanley the Welsh Nationalist – and 24 other names. He tricked Hitler over D-Day. He was the greatest double agent in history.But who, exactly, was Juan Pujol? Using his intimate knowledge of Spain and his skills as a crime novelist, Jason Webster tells for the first time the full true story of the character who captured the imagination in Ben Macintyre’s Double Cross. He tells of Pujol’s early life in Spain, his determination to fight totalitarianism ­and his strange journey from German spy to MI5. Working for the British, whom he saw as the exemplars of freedom and democracy, he created a bizarre fictional network of spies – 29 of them – that misled the entire German high command, including Hitler himself. Above all, in Operation Fortitude he diverted German Panzer divisions away from Normandy, playing a crucial role in safeguarding D-Day and ending the war, and securing his reputation as the most successful double agent of the war. Meticulously researched, yet told with the verve of a thriller, The Spy with 29 Names uncovers the truth – far stranger than any fiction – about the spy behind one of recent history’s most important and dramatic events.

    He was also one of the most remarkable double agents Britain has ever produced. Inside the traitor was a man of loyalty; inside the villain was a hero. The problem for Chapman, his spymasters, and his lovers was to know where one persona ended and the other began.In 1941, after training as a German spy in occupied France, Chapman was parachuted into Britain with a revolver, a wireless, and a cyanide pill, with orders from the Abwehr to blow up an airplane factory. Instead, he contacted MI5, the British Secret Service. For the next four years, Chapman worked as a double agent, a lone British spy at the heart of the German Secret Service who at one time volunteered to assassinate Hitler for his countrymen. Crisscrossing Europe under different names, all the while weaving plans, spreading disinformation, and, miraculously, keeping his stories straight under intense interrogation, he even managed to gain some profit and seduce beautiful women along the way.The Nazis feted Chapman as a hero and awarded him the Iron Cross. In Britain, he was pardoned for his crimes, becoming the only wartime agent to be thus rewarded. Both countries provided for the mother of his child and his mistress. Sixty years after the end of the war, and ten years after Chapman’s death, MI5 has now declassified all of Chapman’s files, releasing more than 1,800 pages of top secret material and allowing the full story of Agent Zigzag to be told for the first time.A gripping story of loyalty, love, and treachery, Agent Zigzag offers a unique glimpse into the psychology of espionage, with its thin and shifting line between fidelity and betrayal.

    Submarine Rugged are on a high-stakes, high seas mission.Mediterranean, 1942Britain is at war with Germany.Responsible for protecting British convoys in the Channel in a small Chaser, young Peter Sinclair, R.N., is thrown head-first into the horrors of war.Sent to serve in H.M. Submarine Rugged, defending convoys delivering food and supplies to the besieged island of Malta, Sub-Lieutenant Sinclair finds himself 120 feet beneath the sea, surrounded by deadly mines and just three miles from the enemy’s doorstep.In a bold night raid on a small harbour on the north African coast, the famous ‘Fighting Tenth’ Submarine Flotilla comes under attack by enemy E-boats, whose relentless depth-charging threaten to sink Rugged to the bottom of the ocean.When the Captain of a British submarine is captured, Sinclair, Able Seaman Bill Hawkins and a crack team of Commandos undertake a deadly mission to rescue the officer from a German-controlled prison on an Italian island.But can they outwit a lethal enemy? Or will Sinclair’s first taste of submarine warfare be his last?SUBMARINER SINCLAIR is the first book in the Submariner Sinclair naval thriller series: rip-roaring authentic historical adventures following a British submarine crew during World War II.

    York reminds us of the true meaning of heroism. York's bravery on the battlefield made him famous, but it was his decision to turn down the easy riches of celebrity that secured his position as one of history's greatest Christian patriots. Based on new interviews with all of York's living children, and York's own diaries, this exhaustive biography follows the young soldier from the hills of Tennessee to the battlefields of France, down Broadway in a triumphant ticker-tape parade, and back home to his family farm where he spent the rest of his life in service to his community and his God.

    To his fellow operators he’s a private military contractor. To you or me he’s a mercenary, a soldier of fortune, a gun for hire selling violence to the highest bidder. But to Big Phil it’s all just another chapter in a life spent fighting in the shadows. Abandoned. Run-away. Half-beaten to death. Blown-up. Locked up. And all before the age of twenty. This is the incredible true story of how Phil Campion survived all of that, and went on to complete Commando selection, Para selection, and to join the SAS – before fighting as a mercenary in the world’s toughest war zones. Undertaking deniable operations, freeing hostages and escaping terrorists hell bent on revenge – the dangers and insane risks of life as a private military operator eclipsed even those of waging war in an SAS Sabre Squadron. Big Phil’s story of life on the private military circuit (‘The Circuit’) is a high-octane blend of chasing fast bucks in a Wild West industry, whilst always staying one step ahead of the bad guys.

    Lions of Kandahar is an inside account from the unique perspective of an active-duty U.S. Army Special Forces commander, an unparalled warrior with multiple deployments to the theater who has only recently returned from combat there.Southern Afghanistan was slipping away. That was clear to then-Captain Rusty Bradley as he began his third tour of duty there in 2006. The Taliban and their allies were infiltrating everywhere, poised to reclaim Kandahar Province, their strategically vital onetime capital. To stop them, the NATO coalition launched Operation Medusa, the largest offensive in its history. The battlefield was the Panjwayi Valley, a densely packed warren of walled compounds that doubled neatly as enemy bunkers, lush orchards, and towering marijuana stands, all laced with treacherous irrigation ditches. A mass exodus of civilians heralded the carnage to come.Dispatched as a diversionary force in support of the main coalition attack, Bradley’s Special Forces A-team and two others, along with their longtime Afghan Army allies, watched from across the valley as the NATO force was quickly engulfed in a vicious counterattack. Key to relieving it and calling in effective air strikes was possession of a modest patch of high ground called Sperwan Ghar. Bradley’s small detachment assaulted the hill and, in the midst of a savage and unforgettable firefight, soon learned they were facing nearly a thousand seasoned fighters—from whom they seized an impossible victory.Now Bradley recounts the whole remarkable story as it actually happened. The blistering trek across Afghanistan’s infamous Red Desert. The eerie traces of the elusive Taliban. The close relations with the Afghan people and army, a primary mission focus. Sperwan Ghar itself: unremitting waves of fire from machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades; a targeted truck turned into an inferno; the death trap of a cut-off compound. Most important: the men, Americans and Afghans alike—the “shaky” medic with nerves of steel and a surgeon’s hands in battle; the tireless sergeant who seems to be everywhere at once; the soft-spoken intelligence officer with laser-sharp insight; the diminutive Afghan commander with a Goliath-sized heart; the cool maverick who risks all to rescue a grievously wounded comrade—each unique, all indelible in their everyday exercise of extraordinary heroism.Praise for Lions of Kandahar   “A raw and authentic war story about untamed Green Berets in action.”—Dalton Fury, New York Times bestselling author of Kill Bin Laden   “A powerful and gripping account of a battle that helped shape the war in Afghanistan . . . With crisp writing and page-turning action, Lions of Kandahar is one of the best books written about the conflict.”—Mitch Weiss, Pulitzer Prize–winning investigative journalist and co-author of Tiger Force: A True Story of Men and War   “One of the most important documents to emerge from the war in Afghanistan.”—The Seattle Times   “Powerful . . . a riveting account of a strategic battle that doesn’t glorify war or focus on heroic deeds . . . Make room on your military bookshelf for Lions of Kandahar.”—San Antonio Express-News  “Bradley takes the reader into battle.” —Time