American Soldier (Adrenaline Series): Stories of Special Forces from Grenada to Afghanistan FROM THE PUBLISHER
During the past two decades, the aims and the nature of war have changed completely. Today, American soldiers on the ground typically operate in small, self-contained units with well-defined goals that require a high degree of training and risk. This book offers a look at the realities of that warfare, and the lives and deaths of the soldiers who fight it. American Soldier draws upon the extensive literature that has emerged in recent years describing episodes of warfare in places ranging from Somalia, Haiti, and Colombia to Afghanistan and Iraq. Mark Bowden in Black Hawk Down gives a gripping blow-by-blow account of action on the ground in Somalia while Martin Stanton, an officer in the first U.S. army unit to arrive, describes the army's "squalid and puzzling little failure" in Somalia on Five Dollars a Day. CIA agent Robert Baer tells of his twenty-plus years in counter-terrorist espionage in the Middle East in See No Evil. Peter Maas reports from Bosnia on the insanity of modern war in Love Thy Neighbor: A Story of War, and Air Force pilot Scott O'Grady describes the terror of being shot down in Bosnia.
SYNOPSIS
Twelve previously published and articles and book excerpts chronicle experiences of American special force operatives on shady missions around the world. The pieces range from the celebratory to the thoroughly horrifying and include Tim O'Brien's reflection on coming to terms with Vietnam, Stan Goff's protest memoir of being ordered to aid the forces of dictatorship in Haiti, a recounting of CIA-sponsored terrorist training missions in Libya, and portions of Mark Bowden's book Black Hawk Down. Annotation c. Book News, Inc.,Portland, OR
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
In an age of laser bombs and pilotless drones, intimate contact with battle is increasingly the province of elite commandos; this collection of journalism, memoir and fiction about Green Berets and Navy SEALS charts their combat experiences. The material is in reverse chronological order, starting with Robert Pelton's gung-ho account of Green Berets calling in air strikes on the Taliban. The mood darkens with an excerpt from Mark Bowden's report on the disastrous Mogadishu battle, Black Hawk Down, and a look at the torpor of peacekeeping in Haiti from Tracy Kidder. Philip Taubman writes of Green Berets carrying out assassinations and training terrorists in the course of America's clandestine dirty wars of the '70s and '80s. A number of pieces revisit the brutality and moral chaos of Vietnam, including Jeff Stein's noirish account of the murder of a Viet Cong agent and Tim O'Brien's surreal tale of an Ohio high school girl who leads a Green Beret unit into the heart of darkness. Although occasionally marred by soldier-of-fortune braggadocio and sentimentalized scenes of warriors communing with the souls of men they have killed, the selections here are well written and gripping. 16 b&w photos. (Dec.) Copyright 2003 Cahners Business Information.
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