Military Veteran

Three brothers. One Great Depression. One dreadful yet righteous war. Their lives shifted from a rural northern Minnesota upbringing to going their separate ways: to California, the skies over Germany, and the jungles of Leyte. Back home, their widowed mother had yet to recover from the loss of the family farm to the Tax Man. Her boys gone, dependent on their income, and haunted by premonitions, she faced the torment of incessant worries.

In May 1999, the Kargil insurgency was still being viewed as a routine affair. No one quite understood the magnitude of the situation. However, it soon emerged that infiltrators had captured high-altitude posts vacated by Indian soldiers during the winter months and thus had a tactical upper hand, while the Indian Army struggled with intelligence.

On the centenary of the Great War, there are now no longer any veterans alive of the six million men who served on the Western Front. Although this means that the Great War as a living history is to all intents and purposes over, the twenty years Richard van Emden spent interviewing and carefully recording the memories of over 270 veterans, makes this extraordinary collection of stories even more poignant.

Nine thousand men of the First British Airborne Division were parachuted into the peaceful countryside that surrounded Arnhem. Their objective was to capture and hold the bridge over the Rhine ahead of the advancing British Second Army. Nine days later, after some of the fiercest street-fighting of the war, 2,000 paratroopers managed to escape to safety.

According to Doss's account in a documentary film titled The Contentious Objector, as he rescued soldiers one-by-one, he breathed into the air with each go-around, "Lord, please help me get one more". The modest man of faith claims to have saved 50 wounded soldiers from certain death. His comrades claim that he saved 100. President Harry S. Truman presented him with the Congressional Medal of Honor upon his return to the United States, for his heroics on Okinawa, and the citation credits him with saving 75 lives, splitting the difference.

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.

He called himself Staff Sergeant Keith, but word around C Troop had it that the spooky guy in tiger suit fatigues wasn't an enlisted man, maybe not even army. Some thought he was from CIA. But the air cavalry troops were told that he had their commander's blessing, so they took him along. C Troop was engaged in its toughest fight of the war, flying South Vietnamese soldiers and supplies across the border into Laos in an audacious attempt, late in the war, to turn the tide of battle, cut American losses, and shorten the war.

An elite British S.A.S. operative on an assassination mission gone wrong. A Jewish New Yorker injured in a Nazi ambush. An 18-year-old Gary Cooper lookalike from Mobile, Alabama. These men and hundreds of other soldiers found themselves in the prisoner-of-war camps off the Atlantic coast of occupied France, fighting brutal conditions and unsympathetic captors. But, miraculously, local villagers were able to smuggle out a message from the camp, one that reached the Allies and sparked a remarkable quest by an unlikely - and truly inspiring - hero.

Someone wanted to overthrow the government of San Sebastian, a country whose tiny army, nonaligned status, and location on the deadly curve of Central America made it ripe for subversion. The first try was an attempted hit on its president on a crowded street in Washington. The second was an invasion from the sea. Both times the Black Berets were there to keep the worst from happening. But how long could five men and one boy hold out against an army of the world’s most skilled assassins? An army with limitless resources—and the patience to keep on killing?

When Lyle Jeremy Rubin first arrived at Marine Officer Candidates School, he was convinced that the “war on terror” was necessary to national security. He also subscribed to a strict code of manhood that military service conjured and perpetuated. Then he began to train and his worldview shattered. Honorably discharged five years later, Rubin returned to the United States with none of his beliefs, about himself or his country, intact.

If Jesus is God, then God is a grunt—the humble, hardy folk placed at the bottom of the social hierarchy who are relied on to accomplish the dirtiest, most difficult (and most thankless) work. This is good news for millions of Christian soldiers and veterans in the U.S. because they have had to make an impossible choice, with no perceivable middle ground, between patriot and pacifist. Author Logan Isaac offers an opportunity for GIs, veterans, and those close to them to read Christian traditions as a soldier would—by and through the lived experiences of military service.

Returning from active duty to find his ranch being dug up by a beautiful stranger isn’t the homecoming navy SEAL Gavin Blake expected. Dr. Layla Harris is convinced there’s buried treasure on his land, and won’t be deterred from the hunt. Gavin begrudgingly lets her proceed with her project, but the only treasure this wealthy rancher wants to uncover is the professor’s secret desires! When Layla unearths family secrets—and mysterious threats—he vows to do whatever it takes to protect her. But will she be there for him when her explosive revelations rock his world to its very foundations?

When placed against the odds in fighting a bloody battle on the small South Pacific island of Peleliu and subsequently moving the fight to Okinawa during the last battle of World War II, Judge Braswell Deen Jr. takes the listener back to a time when he and other United States marines showed great courage and love by offering their lives where the rest of the world might have the chance to be free.

Their second chance was the one that mattered most. When Chance Overstreet left love behind 10 years ago, he never thought it would grace his life again, but when an injury ends his military career, he finds himself back in his hometown of Courage, Colorado. Managing a ski resort comes with its own challenges especially when he finds out his high school sweetheart is his employee.

Newlywed Bev Marshall was following her dream when she married her high school sweetheart. She would earn her English degree in three years and find a teaching job to help send her husband to law school at Ole Miss. After less than two months of married life, Butch, her husband, changed their plans when he signed up to be a pilot in the USAF. In less than two years' time he was headed to Vietnam. Bev was headed back home to live with her parents for the year Butch would be in Southeast Asia.

Parenting book.

Throughout its history, the United States, like most other countries, has faced the challenge of how to properly reward those who have risked, and often given, their lives to defend it. Should they be treated as professionals who were just doing a job? What about those who were drafted, many of whom fought against their own will? Could anyone really pay them for giving up years of their lives for others? If so, how much was enough to pay a man who had left a comfortable home to live in mud and near starvation?

In A Dog's Gift, award-winning journalist and author Bob Drury movingly captures the story of a year in the life of Paws4people and the broken bodies and souls the organization mends. The audiobook follows the journey of pups bred by the organization, from their loving if rigorous early training to an emotional event that Terry and Kyria have christened "the bump", where each individual service dog chooses its new owner through an almost mystical connection that ignites the healing process.

Almost all of us know someone who had been deployed to Vietnam. But most of the veterans don't want to talk about their Vietnam experiences. So, for me, this is the first realistic, packed-with-details account of what daily life was like in Vietnam that I've ever heard. You will enjoy Lost Behind Enemy Lines: A Vietnam Veteran's True Story of Survival and the Revelation of Physical and Spiritual Warfare, a firsthand description of the reality of being in the "infantry boots on the ground" of Danny Clifford, a US Army Ranger Team Leader in Vietnam, on a mission behind enemy lines.

Previous books have promised to describe the combat experience of the World War II GI, but there has never been a book like Patrick O'Donnell's Beyond Valor. Here is the first combat history of the war in Europe in the words of the men themselves, and perhaps the most honest and brutal account of combat possible.