In 1971 former Cold War hard-liner Daniel Ellsberg made history by releasing the Pentagon Papers–a 7,000-page top-secret study of U.S. decision-making in Vietnam–to the New York Times and Washington Post. The document set in motion a chain of events that ended not only the Nixon presidency but the Vietnam War. In this remarkable memoir, Ellsberg describes in dramatic detail the two years he spent in Vietnam as a U.S. State Department observer, and how he came to risk his career and freedom to expose the deceptions and delusions that shaped three decades of American foreign policy. The story of one man’s exploration of conscience, Secrets is also a portrait of America at a perilous crossroad.
Archive for the ‘Military’
Hunting The Jackal: A Special Forces And CIA Soldier’s Fifty Years on the Frontlines of the War Against Terrorism
A much-decorated soldier who has served with the U.S. Army Special Forces and the CIA recounts his half-century career working against American adversaries, including Russian missile operatives, Caribbean drug runners, the infamous terrorist known as Carlos, and Osama bin Laden. Reprint.
Devil at My Heels: A Heroic Olympian’s Astonishing Story of Survival As a Japanese Pow in World War II
A juvenile delinquent, a world-class NCAA miler, a 1936 Olympian, a World War II bombardier: Louis Zamperini had a life fuller than most when it changed in an instant. On May 27, 1943, his B-24 crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Louis and two other survivors found a raft amid the flaming wreckage and waited for rescue. Instead, they drifted two thousand miles for forty-seven days. Their only food: two shark livers and three raw albatross. Their only water: sporadic rainfall. Their only companions: hope and faith — and the ever-present sharks. On the forty-seventh day, mere skeletons close to death, Zamperini and pilot Russell Phillips finally spotted land — and were captured by the Japanese. Thus began more than two years of torture and humiliation as prisoners of war. Zamperini was threatened with beheading, subjected to medical experiments, routinely beaten, hidden in a secret interrogation facility, starved and forced into slave labor, and was the constant victim of a brutal prison guard nicknamed the Bird — a man so vicious that the other guards feared
My Battle of Algiers
A personal account of his experiences as a young officer during the horrors of the Algerian War in the 1950s by a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian details the horrific events of the conflict, which included bombings, assassinations, torture, and other unimaginable barbarities. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.
Just Another Soldier: A Year on the Ground in Iraq
A personal view of the war in Iraq by an infantryman in the Army National Guard puts a human face on the business of war and the military, offering a day-to-day account of his experiences and capturing the boredom, horrors, fears, and exhilaration of war in the trenches. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.
