Burlington Public Library

Like the men whose epic stories Jon Krakauer has told in his previous bestsellers, Pat Tillman was an irrepressible individualist and iconoclast. In May 2002, Tillman walked away from his $3.6 million NFL contract to enlist in the United States Army. He was deeply troubled by 9/11, and he felt a strong moral obligation to join the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Two years later, he died on a desolate hillside in southeastern Afghanistan. Though...

"The national bestselling author of The First Wave tells the untold story of four of the most decorated soldiers of World War II-all Medal of Honor recipients-from the beaches of French Morocco to Hitler's own mountaintop fortress As the Allies raced to defeat Hitler, four men, all in the same unit, earned medal after medal for battlefield heroism. Maurice "Footsie" Britt, a former professional football player, became the very first American to receive...

"A riveting firsthand account of American heroism, Colonel Art Shaw's 82 Days on Okinawa delivers an unprecedented soldier's-eye view of the Pacific War's 'bloodiest battle of all' (New York Times)— the climactic final land battle of World War II and a campaign so brutal that it convinced leaders to unleash the atomic bomb. 75 years ago, he was the first officer ashore on Okinawa. It's taken him a lifetime to speak about the 82 days that followed....

Ryan Smithson joined the Army Reserve when he was seventeen. Two years later, he was deployed to Iraq as an Army engineer. In this extraordinary and harrowing memoir, readers march along one GI's tour of duty. Smithson avoids writing either prowar propaganda or an antimilitary polemic, providing instead a fascinating, often humorous-and occasionally devastating-account of the motivations and life of a contemporary soldier.

Counter Sheehan's tragic biography of John Paul Vann is also a sweeping history of America's seduction, entrapment and disillusionment in Vietnam.

A brief biography of the woman who disguised herself as a man and joined the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War.

Ten stories of American heroes who have risked their lives for their country while fighting in the Afghan War.

An English literature major at Harvard with a talent for writing, twenty-one-year-old David Kenyon Webster volunteered for duty in the U.S. Army's parachute infantry in 1943 with the aim of seeing combat firsthand and then describing his experiences. His introduction to warfare came at the invasion of Normandy on D-Day in 1944. Webster went on to see considerable action in the next two years, serving as a combat infantryman in the campaign through...