Military Iraq

In this vivid first-person narrative, a Special Operations Joint Terminal Attack Controller (JTAC) and his commanding general give fascinating and detailed accounts of America's fight against one of the most barbaric insurgencies the world has ever seen. In the summer of 2014, three years after America's full troop withdrawal from the Iraq War, President Barack Obama authorized a small task force to push back into Baghdad. Their mission: protect the Iraqi capital and US embassy from a rapidly emerging terrorist threat.

In April 2004, soldiers from the 1st Cavalry Division were on a routine patrol in Sadr City, Iraq, when they came under surprise attack. Eight Americans would be killed and more than 70 wounded. Back home, as news of the attack began filtering in, the families of these same men feared the worst. This intimate portrait of the close-knit community of families Stateside, the unsung heroes of the military, distinguishes The Long Road Home from other stories of modern warfare.

From his humble beginnings as a farmhand working on tribal Iraqi land to becoming the president of Iraq for more than two decades, Saddam Hussein’s life story is nothing short of extraordinary. Transforming Iraq first into a prosperous nation then into a war-ravaged shell of its former self, Hussein is one of the key figures of the late 20th and early 21st century.

Relive six decades of flying helicopters, including an extended tour in Vietnam and the mountains of Afghanistan, with a little Iraq, Kuwait, and National Guard thrown in. This is Minuteman: Two, Three…Go! recounts Wayne Chasson’s times, from the early, young, and dumb days to becoming a more seasoned pilot of Huey and other helicopters in three American wars and the National Guard here at home. Chasson relives it all for us in this gritty and honest memoir — with humility, humor, and gratitude — as he himself is still trying to figure out how he made it through alive.

We March at Midnight is award-winning author Ray McPadden’s chronicle of his experience as a highly decorated Ranger officer leading some of the most dangerous missions during the height of the Iraq and Afghan wars. In 2005, Ray joined the army in search of what he calls “the moment” - a chance to prove to himself and his brothers in arms that he is a true leader. His job is to establish the first outpost in the Korengal, Afghanistan’s deadliest valley, and his decisions and mistakes will have a permanent impact on the men he commands.

Most Americans are now familiar with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and its prevalence among troops. In this groundbreaking new audiobook, David Wood examines the far more pervasive yet less understood experience of those we send to war: moral injury, the violation of our fundamental values of right and wrong that so often occurs in the impossible moral dilemmas of modern conflict.

In November 2006, then-first-lieutenant Thomas Daly arrived as part of the surge in Ramadi to take part in Operation Squeeze Play, a division-size effort to remove al-Qaeda from Anbar province. In this powerful memoir, he describes the successful clearing of Southern Ramadi's Second Officer's district, the Qatana, and the uprising of local citizens against al-Qaeda on the eastern edge of the city (the result of an unlikely alliance between Daly's company and Thawar al Anbar).

Combat veteran and author Hans Halberstadt takes listeners deeper inside the elusive world of snipers than ever before, from recruitment and training to the brutality of the killing fields. Based on hundreds of hours of exclusive interviews, Halberstadt gets inside the sniper mind and shows how snipers think and interact with each other, how missions are planned and executed, how the weapons work, and even what happens when a bullet finally strikes its target.

There are only a few hundred snipers from all the services put together in combat at any one time, making this true inside story a rare and important event.

Dower examines the cultures of war revealed by four powerful events - Pearl Harbor, Hiroshima, 9/11, and the invasion of Iraq in the name of a war on terror. The list of issues examined and themes explored is wide-ranging: failures of intelligence and imagination, wars of choice and "strategic imbecilities", faith-based secular thinking as well as more overtly holy wars, the targeting of noncombatants, and the almost irresistible logic - and allure - of mass destruction.

Plan of Attack is the definitive account of how and why President George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launched a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Bob Woodward's latest landmark account of Washington decision making provides an original, authoritative narrative of behind-the-scenes maneuvering, examining the causes and consequences of the most controversial war since Vietnam.

In The Longest War, Peter Bergen offers a comprehensive history of this war and its evolution, from the strategies devised in the wake of the 9/11 attacks to the fighting in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and beyond. Weaving together internal documents from al-Qaeda and the U.S. offices of counterterrorism, first-person interviews with top-level jihadists and senior Washington officials, along with his own experiences on the ground in the Middle East, Bergen balances the accounts of each side.

In the dark days immediately after 9/11, the CIA turned to Dr. James Mitchell to help craft an interrogation program designed to elicit intelligence from just-captured top al-Qa'ida leaders and terror suspects. A civilian contractor who had spent years training US military members to resist interrogation should they be captured, Mitchell, aware of the urgent need to prevent impending catastrophic attacks, worked with the CIA to implement "enhanced interrogation techniques" - which included waterboarding.

From the earliest days of his dictatorship, Saddam Hussein had vowed to destroy Israel. So, when France sold Iraq a top-of-the-line nuclear reactor in 1975, the Israelis were justifiably concerned, especially when they discovered that Iraqi scientists had already formulated a secret program to extract weapon-grade plutonium from the reactor, a first critical step in creating an atomic bomb.

Experience the sights, smells, and sounds of the Cobra, hanging on tight as you’re hurled into the chaos of night combat operations. Step through an otherwise closed door and explore the emotions, physical danger, and successes that would shape a generation of aviators.

The history of reportage has often depended on outsiders—Ryszard Kapuściński witnessing the fall of the shah in Iran, Frances FitzGerald observing the aftermath of the American war in Vietnam. What would happen if a native son was so estranged from his city by war that he could, in essence, view it as an outsider? What kind of portrait of a war-wracked place and people might he present? A Stranger in Your Own City is award-winning writer Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s vivid, shattering response.

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.

In the summer of 2006, Colour-Sargeant Kailash Limbu's platoon was sent to relieve and occupy a police compound in the town of Now Zad in Helmand. He was told to prepare for a 48-hour operation. In the end, he and his men were under siege for 31 days - one of the longest such sieges in the whole of the Afghan campaign.

When Ian Fritz joined the Air Force at eighteen, he did so out of necessity. He hadn’t been accepted into colleges thanks to an indifferent high school career. He’d too often slept through his classes as he worked long hours at a Chinese restaurant to help pay the bills for his trailer-dwelling family in Lake City, Florida. But the Air Force recognizes his potential and sends him to the elite Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, to learn Dari and Pashto, the main languages of Afghanistan.

James Verini arrived in Iraq in the summer of 2016 to write about life in the Islamic State. He stayed to cover the jihadis' last great stand, the Battle of Mosul, not knowing it would go on for nearly a year, nor that it would become, in the words of the Pentagon, "the most significant urban combat since WWII." They Will Have to Die Now takes the listener into the heart of the conflict against the most lethal insurgency of our time. We see unspeakable violence, improbable humanity, and occasional humor.

Based on previously unavailable documents and interviews with more than 100 key players, including General David Petraeus, The Insurgents unfolds against the backdrop of two wars waged against insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the main insurgency is the one led at home by a new generation of officers - including Petraeus, John Nagl, David Kilcullen, and H. R. McMaster - who were seized with an idea on how to fight these kinds of "small wars" and who adapted their enemies' techniques to overhaul their own army.