They’d been afloat now without food, water, shelter, or sleep for over forty hours. Of the 1,196 crew13 members who’d set sail from Guam three days earlier, probably no more than 600 were still alive....
Looking over to his left, he watches a rocket-propelled grenade race in and blow up one of the M-60 machine-gun positions. Just then he also sees a lone, tall figure, an American, charge the position,...
McCoy, drained and hollow-eyed, couldn't take his eyes off the life vest belonging to the boy who'd slipped away from the group during the night. The empty vest spooked McCoy. All its straps were stil...
On November 5, to kick off the final, coordinated assault on Baluch, Stu Mansfield, positioned with Atta at the warlord’s mountaintop compound, ordered the drop of a bomb called a BLU-82, which Mansfi...
On a training mission, he’d watched as Nightstalker pilots cut their own landing zone using the rotors of the helicopter as giant hedge clippers. They’d been landing in a pine forest and he marveled a...
Ali was horrified and enraged when in March of 2001 the Taliban dynamited the stone Buddhas that had stood watch over the town for centuries. What man had the right to write the future by blowing up t...
. . the sun set . . . with guillotine-like speed this close to the equator.
Accurate data on shark attacks on World War II servicemen may never be known since medical records did not note them. In fact, the navy was sufficiently concerned about loss of morale that it discoura...
Where does a man go when there are no more corners to turn, when he's running out of hope, out of luck, out of time?
Later, Dean would see Atta’s fighters show up carrying AK-47s, and there with them would be their sons, carrying spare magazines. Behind the sons walked even younger sons, carrying nothing. Dean under...
Together, they wanted to return the Middle East to the fourteenth century, into a golden age ruled by Islamic law.
Before their hurried flight from the city two weeks earlier, the Taliban had left the weapons and smeared feces on the walls and windows. Every photograph, every painting, every rosebush had been torn...
For the survivors, the disaster of the Indy is their My Lai massacre or Watergate, a touchstone moment of historic disappointment: the navy put them in harm's way, hundreds of men died violently, and...
Other objects found in shark stomachs include a suit of armor, a barrel of nails, a roll of tar paper, coal, raincoats, shoes, plastic bags, goats, sheep, lizards, snakes, chicken, reindeer, and monke...
The sharks had, in fact, remained a constant presence throughout the men's ordeal, even during the daylight hours. Not long after [navy pilot] Gwinn showed up, a massive shark attack--involving an est...
This was Special Forces’ rule number one: let men experience failure so they never fail again. And by failing, they will learn how to be successful soldiers.