united states

During his yearlong tour of duty, Sergeant Joseph Hickman saw Guantanamo from the inside---the chaotic prisons, the detainee abuse---and stumbled onto a mystery, a secret facility he and his fellow soldiers labeled "Camp No". When three prisoners died on June 9, 2006, they were labeled suicides. But Sergeant Hickman knew that something was seriously wrong. As he searched for the truth, he realized the U.S. government was using Guantanamo not just as a prison, but as a training ground for interrogators to test advanced torture techniques. His book details the inner workings of Camp Delta, the events surrounding the deaths of the three prisoners, the orchestrated cover-up, and the secret facility at the heart of it all.

In 1944, hundreds of Allied soldiers were trapped in POW camps in occupied France. The odds of their survival were not good. The odds of escaping, even worse. But one man had the courage to fight the odds and figure out how to negotiate the release of an unprecedented 149 prisoners.

The horse's Korean name was Ah-Chim-Hai (Flame of the Morning). She was an old chestnut-colored Mongolian racehorse. Once she amazed the racing crowd with her remarkable speed. But when the 1950's Korean War shut down the racetrack, she was sold to an American Marine and trained to carry heavy loads of ammunition across steep hills under a barrage of bullets and bombs. Her new name was Reckless. And she proved to be fearless under fire, exposed to every type of hazard. Sometimes she shielded human reinforcements and soon the Chinese were targeting the horse. But Reckless never shied away from danger and soon the men came to appreciate her not just as a horse but as a fellow Marine. She lived through the war and ended her days as a retired Marine at Camp Pendleton, giving birth to four foals while she was there.

Thousands of Nazis, from concentration camp guards and officers in the Third Reich, came to the United States after World War II and quietly settled into new lives. Many gained entry on their own, as refugees, but thousands had help from the U.S. government. The CIA, the FBI and others all put Hitler's minions to work as spies, intelligence assets, and engineers, whitewashing their histories. Only years later did government prosecutors begin trying to identify them, relying on a trove of newly discovered documents.

The story of the U.S. Navy's most famous aviator duo, Lieutenant Tom Hudner and Ensign Jesse Brown. Tom Hudner was a White New Englander from the country-club scene. Jesse Brown was African American and a sharecropper's son from Mississippi. Tom and Jesse became a team when they joined forces as wingmen in Fighter Squadron 32. Their job was to land their planes on the deck of an aircraft carrier--considered the world's most dangerous job. When the Korean War becomes a reality, Tom and Jesse come to the aid of the Marines cornered in the Chosin Reservoir Battle. When one of them is shot down behind enemy lines, and pinned in his burning plane, the other faces an unthinkable choice: watch his friend die or attempt history's most audacious one-man rescue mission.

The Navy SEALs history stretches back to World War II when US intelligence officials formed a team of special-operation combat swimmers. Under the leadership of Captain Jack Taylor, a California dentist, the Maritime Unit (MU) started training in 1942, learning underwater and covert operation techniques, as it developed an array of James Bond-like new equipment, including the recently invented underwater breathing apparatus, limpet mines, silent electric motors, and a collapsible eight-foot submarine. Finally deployed in 1944, the unit conducted some of the most daring, behind-enemy-lines operations of the war in Italy, where they linked up with fearsome Italian commandos. In one of its greatest coups, they captured the plans--and the architect--of Germany's famed Gothic Line, resulting in the Eighth Army's partial breakthrough. Filled with unforgettable characters, including the unit's charismatic leader, a Hollywood star, and a gritty New York City gas station owner, The First SEALs cinematically narrates one of the greatest untold stories of World War II and links their storied past to today's gloried US Navy SEALs.

Personal histories of war, told through the lives of thirteen ordinary soldiers who fought in the nation's major conflicts, from the American Revolution through Iraq.

The author was on his second World War II mission as a top-turret gunner when his plane was shot down in 1943. He was one of only two men on the plane to escape immediate death or capture. He was able to run from the plane wreck and knock on the door of an isolated farmhouse whose owners, fortunately, had a firm connection to the underground French Resistance group, Morhange, and its founder, Marcel Taillandier. Meyerowitz's escape to freedom was hair-raising and included a masquerade as a deaf-mute, a periolous trek over the Pyrenees, and a voyage aboard a fishing boat with U-boats below and Luftwaffe fighters above.

"... an introduction to maritime communication through nautical flags, along with morse code, the phonetic alphabet, and semaphore signaling"--Amazon.com.

Takes the reader behind the locked and shuttered windows of Philadelphia's State House in the history-making summer of 1787.