Cdr. Richard Jadick's story is one of the most extraordinary to come out of the war in Iraq. At 38, the last place the Navy doctor was expected to be was on the front lines. He was too old to be called up, but not too old to volunteer. In November 2004, with the military reeling from an acute doctor shortage, Jadick chose to accompany the First Battalion, Eighth Marine Regiment (the "1/8") to Iraq.

Join Air Force veteran Dr. W. Lee Warren as he chronicles his fascinating, heartbreaking, and enlightening experience as a neurosurgeon in an Iraq War combat hospital.

When North Korean forces invaded South Korea on June 25, 1950, Otto Apel was a surgical resident living in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife and three young children. A year later he was chief surgeon of the 8076th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital, constantly near the front lines in Korea. Immediately upon arriving in camp, Apel performed 80 hours of surgery. His feet swelled so badly, he had to cut his boots off, and he saw more surgical cases in those three and a half days than he would have in a year back in Cleveland.

It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it "the surge". "Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences," he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic Army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers.

At 24 years of age, U.S. Army Ranger Sean Parnell was named commander of a forty-man elite infantry platoon - a unit that came to be known as the Outlaws - and was tasked with rooting out Pakistan-based insurgents from a mountain valley along Afghanistan's eastern frontier. Parnell and his men assumed they would be facing a ragtag bunch of civilians, but in May 2006 what started out as a routine patrol through the lower mountains of the Hindu Kush became a brutal ambush.

In the predawn hours of March 4, 2002, just below the 10,000-foot peak of a mountain in eastern Afghanistan, a fierce battle raged. Outnumbered by Al Qaeda fighters, Air Force Combat Controller John Chapman and a handful of SEALs struggled to take the summit in a desperate bid to find a lost teammate. Chapman, leading the charge, was gravely wounded in the initial assault. Believing he was dead, his SEAL leader ordered a retreat. Chapman regained consciousness, alone with the enemy closing in on three sides, beginning the most difficult and exceptional fight of his life.

For more than 25 years, surgeon David Nott has volunteered in some of the world’s most dangerous conflict zones. From Sarajevo under siege in 1993 to clandestine hospitals in rebel-held eastern Aleppo, he has carried out life-saving operations in the most challenging conditions, and with none of the resources of a major metropolitan hospital. War Doctor is his extraordinary story, encompassing his surgeries in nearly every major conflict zone since the end of the Cold War, as well as his struggles to return to a “normal” life and routine after each trip.

Once an Eagle is the story of one special man, a soldier named Sam Damon, and his adversary over a lifetime, fellow officer Courtney Massengale. Damon is a professional who puts duty, honor, and the men he commands above selfinterest. Massengale, however, brilliantly advances his career by making the right connections behind the lines and in Washington’s corridors of power.

The Great War of 1914-1918 burst on the European scene with a brutality to mankind not yet witnessed by the civilized world. Modern warfare was no longer the stuff of chivalry and honor; it was a mutilative, deadly, and humbling exercise to wipe out the very presence of humanity. Suddenly, thousands upon thousands of maimed, beaten, and bleeding men surged into aid stations and hospitals with injuries unimaginable in their scope and destruction. Doctors scrambled to find some way to salvage not only life but limb.

With poignant insight and humor, Frank Vertosick, Jr., MD, describes some of the greatest challenges of his career, including a six-week-old infant with a tumor in her brain, a young man struck down in his prime by paraplegia, and a minister with a .22-caliber bullet lodged in his skull. Told through intimate portraits of Vertosick's patients and unsparing-yet-fascinatingly detailed descriptions of surgical procedures, When the Air Hits Your Brain illuminates both the mysteries of the mind and the realities of the operating room.

Airstrikes rain down, Gatling guns pound, and snipers lurk in the distance - welcome to the combat aid station of a young doctor embedded with the heavily weaponized First Marines Division as the Battle of Fallujah boils over. On the night of April 4, 2004, First Marine Expeditionary Forces launch a major assault on the city of Fallujah.

Brooke King has been asked over and over what it's like to be a woman in combat, but she knows her answer is not what the public wants to hear. The answers people seek lie in the graphic details of war - the sex, death, violence, and reality of it all as she experienced it. In her riveting memoir War Flower, King breaks her silence and reveals the truth about her experience as a soldier in Iraq.

After the first wave, only darkness remains. After the second, only the lucky escape. And after the third, only the unlucky survive. After the fourth wave, only one rule applies: Trust no one. Now, it's the dawn of the fifth wave, and on a lonely stretch of highway, Cassie runs from Them. The beings who only look human, who roam the countryside killing anyone they see. Who have scattered Earth's last survivors. To stay alone is to stay alive, Cassie believes, until she meets Evan Walker.

Decorated Navy SEAL Lieutenant Jason Redman served his country courageously and with distinction in Colombia, Peru, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where he commanded mobility and assault forces. But his journey was not without its supreme challenges. He was critically wounded in 2007 when he was struck by machine-gun fire at point blank range. During his intense recovery period, Redman posted a sign on his door, warning all who entered not to "feel sorry for [his] wounds."

When Nick Patterson signed up for the Navy reserves, he just wanted some money for medical school. He never imagined he’d someday find himself fighting for life and limb in the sands of Iraq. Frustrated by a military bureaucracy he cannot begin to understand and an increasingly pointless war, he doubts why he is there and what he is doing. When the plucky and idealistic MEDIVAC pilot Samantha Brown crashes into his life, he sees another side to the war.

It was the last-chance moment of the war. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new strategy for Iraq. He called it "the surge". "Many listening tonight will ask why this effort will succeed when previous operations to secure Baghdad did not. Well, here are the differences," he told a skeptical nation. Among those listening were the young, optimistic Army infantry soldiers of the 2-16, the battalion nicknamed the Rangers.

Thousands of soldiers die every year to defend their country. United States Army Staff Sergeant Travis Mills was sure that he would become another statistic when, during his third tour of duty in Afghanistan, he was caught in an IED blast four days before his 25th birthday. Against the odds, he lived, but at a severe cost - Travis became one of only five soldiers from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to survive a quadruple amputation.

Every day ordinary young Americans are fighting and dying in Iraq, with the same bravery, honor, and sense of duty that have distinguished American troops throughout history. One of these is Jason Dunham, a 22-year-old Marine corporal from the one-stoplight town of Scio, New York, whose stunning story reporter Michael M. Phillips discovered while he was embedded with a Marine infantry battalion in the Iraqi desert.

Rob had a pretty rough childhood: He was given up for adoption as an infant, brought into a family of highly decorated military men, suffered the loss of his mother to cancer, rebelled, and landed himself in military school. When he finally returns home, he meets Cindy, who quickly becomes his best friend. After graduation the two go off to college at opposite ends of Texas, and their paths diverge.

Decorated Navy SEAL Lieutenant Jason Redman served his country courageously and with distinction in Colombia, Peru, Afghanistan, and Iraq, where he commanded mobility and assault forces. But his journey was not without its supreme challenges. He was critically wounded in 2007 when he was struck by machine-gun fire at point blank range. During his intense recovery period, Redman posted a sign on his door, warning all who entered not to "feel sorry for [his] wounds."

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.

Durant's experience as a prisoner in Somalia grew increasingly bizarre, crystallizing a clash of cultures by turns frightening, melancholy, hilarious, and strangely familiar. Revealing never-before-told stories with the incisive thought and emotion of one who was there, In the Company of Heroes is one man's unforgettable, true story of going to hell and making it back alive.

Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. Days and nights he and his team—his brothers—would venture forth in heavily armed convoys from their Forward Operating Base to engage in the nerve-racking yet strangely exhilarating work of either disarming the deadly improvised explosive devices that had been discovered, or picking up the pieces when the alert came too late.

While serving a portion of his time under the Special Operations Command, Benjamin Sledge fought to keep his humanity amid the killing fields of Iraq and Afghanistan. But war never leaves its participants unscathed. In Where Cowards Go to Die, Sledge reveals an unflinchingly honest portrait of war that few dare to tell.

The 1980s marked a revolution in the field of organ transplants, and Bud Shaw, MD, who studied under Tom Starzl in Pittsburgh, was on the front lines. Now retired from active practice, Dr. Shaw relays gripping moments of anguish and elation, frustration and reward, despair and hope in his struggle to save patients. He reveals harshly intimate moments of his medical career.

No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel shadowed the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous surge, a grueling fifteen-month tour that changed all of them forever. Now Finkel has followed many of those same men as they’ve returned home and struggled to reintegrate - both into their family lives and into American society at large.

In this inspiring memoir, a former female marine platoon leader recalls the wars she has fought - on the playing field and the battlefield and inside her own soul - revealing how overcoming the harrowing circumstances in her life helped her ultimately redefine what it means to be strong and what "perfect" really is.

In Top Dog, Maria Goodavage takes listeners into the life of Lucca K458, a decorated and highly skilled military working dog. An extraordinary bond developed between Lucca and Marine Corps handler Chris Willingham, launching what became a legendary 400-mission career. A Specialized Search Dog, Lucca belongs to an elite group trained to work off-leash at long distances from her handler.

During the peak of the Afghanistan War, a group of soldiers is dropped by helicopter into the remote mountains outside of Kandahar City. Mismanaged and overlooked by command, the squad must rely on each other to survive. Their mission is to train and advise the Afghan National Police and help rebuild the country of Afghanistan. The Afghan Police station they are assigned to live in is falling apart and disease-ridden.

A New York Times number-one best-seller, In an Instant is a heartfelt true account of the tragedy that nearly took the life of ABC news anchor Bob Woodruff - and of the subsequent recovery that proves miracles do exist. Lee and Bob Woodruff themselves tenderly narrate this harrowing, yet ultimately redeeming, journey of devotion and hope.