Military Iraq

Cowboys Over Iraq tells the amazing story of leadership, innovation, initiative, and a brotherhood that was forged in the crucible of combat during the invasion of Iraq.

Following the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq in 2003, the SAS launched one of the most intense and secretive operations in its history: Task Force Black. BBC journalist Mark Urban uncovers the sensational story of this operation and the extraordinary men who carried it out.

The American military is a tightly sealed community, and few outsiders have reason to know that a great many senior officers view the Iraq war with incredulity and dismay. But many officers have shared their anger with renowned military reporter Thomas E. Ricks, and in Fiasco, Ricks combines these astonishing on-the-record military accounts with his own extraordinary on-the-ground reportage to create a spellbinding account of an epic disaster.

Kandahar. The ancient desert crossroads and, as of fall of 2001, ground zero for the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in southern Afghanistan. In the northern part of the country, the US-supported Northern Alliance has made progress on the battlefield, but in the south, the country is still under the Taliban's bloody hold and al-Qa'ida continues to operate there. With no "Southern Alliance" for the US to support, a new strategy is needed if victory is to be achieved. Veteran CIA officer Duane Evans is dispatched to Pakistan to "get something going in the South." Foxtrot in Kandahar is his story.

A Night in the Pech Valley is Grant McGarry's account of what it takes to become an Army Ranger and what life is like in the 75th Ranger Regiment. More importantly, it is about an operation in the most dangerous terrain for US forces anywhere in the world. The Pech Valley is surrounded by Taliban-filled mountains on the Pakistan border in the Kunar Province, where the mountain peaks push 10,000 feet.

In 2002, Sam Faddis was named to head a CIA team that would enter Iraq to facilitate the deployment of follow-on conventional military forces numbering more than 40,000 American soldiers. This force, built around the 4th Infantry Division, would, in partnership with Kurdish forces and with the assistance of Turkey, engage Saddam's army in the North as part of a coming invasion. Faddis expected to be on the ground in Iraq within weeks, the entire campaign likely to be over by summer. The 4th Infantry Division never arrived, nor did any other conventional forces in substantial number.

In weeks after the September 11 attacks, 18-year-old Mansoor Adayfi was kidnapped by Afghan militia and sold to US forces for bounty money. After months of interrogations, he was sent to the US military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as one of its first prisoners. Like the nearly 800 other men imprisoned at Guantanamo, Adayfi didn’t know why he was imprisoned or for how long. He had never seen a skyscraper and couldn’t imagine what the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center looked like, much less how they were destroyed.

After being commissioned into the US Air Force, MJ Hegar was selected for pilot training by the Air National Guard, finished at the top of her class, then served three tours in Afghanistan flying combat search and rescue missions, culminating in a harrowing rescue attempt that would earn MJ the Purple Heart as well as the Distinguished Flying Cross with Valor Device. But it was on American soil that Hegar would embark on her greatest challenge - to eliminate the military's Ground Combat Exclusion Policy.

No one is born a leader. But through sheer determination and by confronting life’s challenges, Ant Middleton has come to know the meaning of true leadership. In First Man In, he shares the core lessons he’s learned over the course of his fascinating, exhilarating life. Special forces training is no walk in the park. The rules are strict, and they make sure you learn the hard way, pushing you beyond the limits of what is physically possible. There is no mercy. Even when you are bleeding and broken, to admit defeat is failure.

Selected in 2005 by the army to be the first airborne reconnaissance squadron, 5th Squadron, 73rd Cavalry Regiment, better known as 5-73 CAV, was formed from 3rd Battalion, 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment. The members of the squadron were hand-selected by the squadron command team, Lieutenant Colonel Poppas and Command Sergeant Major Edgar. With just more than 400 paratroopers, they were half the size of a full-strength battalion and the smallest unit in the Panther Brigade.

On 11 September 2001 19 al-Qaeda-inspired jihadists hijacked four aircraft and mounted the deadliest terrorist attack in history. The outrage triggered a chain of events that saw British forces drawn into a lengthy military campaign against a fierce insurgency in Afghanistan. Sergio Miller served in Defence Intelligence in Whitehall throughout the campaign, and Pride and Fall answers the many questions surrounding the conflict. Based on abundant open-source material generated by the war and first-hand testimonies, this is the story of the men and women who served.

They landed in a dust storm so thick the pilot used dead reckoning and a guess to find the ground. Welcomed by a band of heavily armed militiamen, they climbed a mountain on horseback to meet the most ferocious warlord in Asia. They plotted a war of nineteenth-century maneuvers against a twenty-first-century foe. They trekked through minefields, sometimes past the mangled bodies of local tribesmen who'd shared food with them hours before. The men they helped called them brothers. Hollywood called them the Horse Soldiers. They called themselves Green Berets—Special Forces ODA 595.

Prominent military historian Victor Davis Hanson explores the nature of leadership with his usual depth and vivid prose in The Savior Generals, a set of brilliantly executed pocket biographies of five generals (Themistocles, Belisarius, William Tecumseh Sherman, Matthew Ridgway, and David Petraeus) who single-handedly saved their nations from defeat in war. War is rarely a predictable enterprise - it is a mess of luck, chance, and incalculable variables. Today's sure winner can easily become tomorrow's doomed loser.

It takes a tough mind-set to be a successful sniper, to be able to dig in for days on your own as you wait for your target, to stay calm on a battlefield when you yourself have become the target the enemy most wants to take out. Craig Harrison has what it takes, and in November 2009 in Afghanistan, under intense pressure, he saved the lives of his comrades with the longest confirmed sniper kill - 2,475 metres, the length of 25 football pitches.

In the summer of 2007 the British Army's 662 Squadron deployed its most potent weapons system in combat for the very first time - the iconic Apache attack helicopter. This is the definitive story of the aircraft and of the crew who fly her, and of their baptism of fire in the battle for Helmand Province, Afghanistan. Under the call-sign Ugly, four of the Army Air Corps' finest pilots flew a relentless series of missions during their 100-day deployment, stretching the aircraft, and themselves, to the limit. Apache Dawn recounts these operations.

An extraordinary chronicle of Fisk's trademark rigorous journalism, historical analysis and eyewitness reporting. Fully immersed in the Middle East and critical of the West's ongoing interference, Fisk was committed to uncovering complex and uncomfortable truths that rarely featured on the traditional news agenda. With a foreword from fellow Middle East correspondent and former colleague Patrick Cockburn, Night of Power delivers an essential and final account from one of the world's finest journalists, and proves itself timely as ever.

Stirringly evocative, thought provoking, and often jaw dropping, The Operator ranges across SEAL Team Operator Robert O'Neill's awe-inspiring 400-mission career that included his involvement in attempts to rescue "Lone Survivor" Marcus Luttrell and abducted-by-Somali-pirates Captain Richard Phillips and culminated in those famous three shots that dispatched the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden.

In 2006 Doug Beattie was awarded the Military Cross for his part in recapturing the southern Afghan town of Garmsir from the Taliban. He was due to retire from the British Army in 2007, when his CO made a desperate plea: stay on for one more tour. Torn between his love for his wife and children, and an overwhelming sense of duty towards his other family, the Royal Irish Regiment, in March 2008 he returned to Afghanistan. The story of what he endured there makes for gripping listening. If 2006 had been hellish, then 2008 was off the scale.

A captain in 29 Commando, Johnny Mercer served in the army for 12 years. On his third tour of Afghanistan, he was a joint fires controller, with the pressurized job of bringing down artillery and air strikes in close proximity to his own troops. Based in an area of Northern Helmand that was riddled with Taliban leaders, he walked into danger with every patrol, determined to protect them. Then, one morning, in brutal close-quarter combat, everything changed....

The No. 1 Sunday Times bestselling modern classic: A Bravo Two Zero for the Second Gulf War. They were branded as cowards and accused of being the British Special Forces Squadron that ran away from the Iraqis. But nothing could be further from the truth. Ten years on, the story of these sixty men can finally be told. In March 2003 M Squadron - an SBS unit with SAS embeds - was sent 1,000 kilometres behind enemy lines on a true mission impossible, to take the surrender of the 100,000-strong Iraqi Army 5th Corps.