Deployed and Back Again: A Fobbit's Tale PDF Download

Author: Joshua Heath
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0359730183
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
This memoir tells the story of one soldier's deployment to Iraq and parts of his personal story that led to that deployment. This is not a normal war story. This is a story of a Fobbit, a soldier that never went on missions, that saw nothing of traditional war. Yet, it is a tale that captures the peculiar nature of modern warfare in a way like no other story does.

Author: David Abrams
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 0802194087
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
An Iraq war comedy that “is everything that terrible conflict was not: beautifully planned and perfectly executed; funny and smart and lyrical; a triumph” (Darin Strauss, author of Half a Life). Fobbit ’fä-bit, noun. Definition: A US soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–2011). Pejorative. In the satirical tradition of Catch-22 and M*A*S*H, Fobbit, a New York Times Notable Book, takes us into the chaotic world of Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph. The Forward Operating base, or FOB, is like the back-office of the battlefield—where people eat and sleep, and where a lot of soldiers have what looks suspiciously like a desk job. Male and female soldiers are trying to find an empty Porta Potty in which to get acquainted, grunts are playing Xbox and watching NASCAR between missions, and a lot of the senior staff are more concerned about getting to the chow hall in time for the Friday night all-you-can-eat seafood special than worrying about little things like military strategy. Darkly humorous and based on the author’s own experiences in Iraq, Fobbit is a fantastic debut that shows us a behind-the-scenes portrait of the real Iraq war. “This novel nails the comedy and the pathos, the boredom and the dread, crafting the Iraq War’s answer to Catch-22.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Author: Synne L. Dyvik
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 131743840X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
This book analyses the various ways counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is gendered. The book examines the US led war in Afghanistan from 2001 onwards, including the invasion, the population-centric counterinsurgency operations and the efforts to train a new Afghan military charged with securing the country when the US and NATO withdrew their combat forces in 2014. Through an analysis of key counterinsurgency texts and military memoirs, the book explores how gender and counterinsurgency are co-constitutive in numerous ways. It discusses the multiple military masculinities that counterinsurgency relies on, the discourse of ‘cultural sensitivity’, and the deployment of Female Engagement Teams (FETs). Gendering Counterinsurgency demonstrates how population-centric counterinsurgency doctrine and practice can be captured within a gendered dynamic of ‘killing and caring’ – reliant on physical violence, albeit mediated through ‘armed social work’. This simultaneously contradictory and complementary dynamic cannot be understood without recognising how the legitimation and the practice of this war relied on multiple gendered embodied performances of masculinities and femininities. Developing the concept of ‘embodied performativity’ this book shows how the clues to understanding counterinsurgency, as well as gendering war more broadly are found in war’s everyday gendered manifestations. This book will be of much interest to students of counterinsurgency warfare, gender politics, governmentality, biopolitics, critical war studies, and critical security studies in general.

Author: John Ringo
Publisher: Baen Publishing Enterprises
ISBN: 1618246844
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 556

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Book Description
Centurions were the guardians of Rome. At the height of the Roman Republic there were over five thousand qualified Roman Centurions in the Legions. To be a Centurion required that, in a mostly illiterate society, one be able to read and write clearly, to be able to convey and create orders, to be capable of not only performing every skill of a Roman soldier but teach every skill of a Roman soldier. Becoming a Centurion required intense physical ability, courage beyond the norm, years of sacrifice and a total devotion to the philosophy which was Rome. When Rome fell to barbarian invaders, there were less than five hundred qualified Centurions. Not because Rome had fewer people but because it had fewer willing to make the sacrifices. And the last Centurions left their shields in the heather and took a barbarian bride . . . We are . . . The Last Centurions. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

Author: Owen West
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451655932
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Documents the achievements of a team of reservists and National Guardsmen who built an Iraqi battalion and fought side by side with the first Iraqi soldiers granted independent battle space.

Author: Dick Couch
Publisher: Crown
ISBN: 0307339394
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 434

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Book Description
An unprecedented view of Green Beret training, drawn from the year Dick Couch spent at Special Forces training facilities with the Army’s most elite soldiers. In combating terror, America can no longer depend on its conventional military superiority and the use of sophisticated technology. More than ever, we need men like those of the Army Special Forces–the legendary Green Berets. Following the experiences of one class of soldiers as they endure this physically and mentally exhausting ordeal, Couch spells out in fascinating detail the demanding selection process and grueling field exercises, the high-level technical training and intensive language courses, and the simulated battle problems that test everything from how well SF candidates gather operational intelligence to their skills at negotiating with volatile, often hostile, local leaders. Chosen Soldier paints a vivid portrait of an elite group, and a process that forges America’s smartest, most versatile, and most valuable fighting force.

Author: Chase Madar
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168474X
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
Bradley Manning was arrested, imprisoned in solitary confinement for nine months, and court-martialed for leaking nearly half a million classified government documents, including the infamous "Collateral Murder" gunsight video. He was an intelligence analyst in the US Army's 10th Mountain Division, is twenty-four, and comes from Crescent, Oklahoma. But who is Private First Class Bradley Manning? Why did he commit the largest security breach in American history-and why was it so easy? In this book, the astonishing leaks attributed to Bradley Manning are viewed from many angles, from Tunisia to Guantnamo Bay, from Foggy Bottom to Baghdad to small-town Oklahoma. Around the world, the eloquent act of one young man obliges citizens to ask themselves if they have the right to know what their government is doing.

Author: Chris Mannion
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 0359898793
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Feel the fear of incoming rockets, the sound of helicopter medevacs bringing more "Alpha" patients, the adrenaline of responding to mass casualties, the "Angels" of death. Personally experience how U.S. Navy nurses train for war at the military's premier trauma training center in Los Angeles, California to U.S. Army combat training at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Be at the bedside during poignant nursing encounters with injured U.S. and Coalition heroes, Afghanistan children, and the enemy Taliban in a state of the art trauma hospital in the Kandahar, Afghanistan theatre of war. Eat at Friday's on the boardwalk, dodge more mortar rounds and ride along on a medevac that sends the author to Landstuhl, Germany as a wounded warrior. Join the rehabilitation and return to the war, be at the reunion back stateside, and the chaotic journey forward with PTSD. This gripping, heartbreaking, enlightening, and uplifting story demonstrates, with humor, that no obstacle is too great to tackle and that life is truly a journey.

Author: Sean Parnell
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062066412
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
A riveting story of American fighting men, Outlaw Platoon is Lieutenant Sean Parnell’s stunning personal account of the legendary U.S. Army’s 10th Mountain Division’s heroic stand in the mountains of Afghanistan. Acclaimed for its vivid, poignant, and honest recreation of sixteen brutal months of nearly continuous battle in the deadly Hindu Kesh, Outlaw Platoon is a Band of Brothers or We Were Soldiers Once and Young for the early 21st century—an action-packed, highly emotional true story of enormous sacrifice and bravery. A magnificent account of heroes, renegades, infidels, and brothers, it stands with Sebastian Junger’s War as one of the most important books to yet emerge from the heat, smoke, and fire of America’s War in Afghanistan.

Author: Alvin Townley
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 1250037611
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
50 years ago, the POWs who endured Vietnam's most famous prison came home. A powerful story of survival and triumph. Alvin Townley's Defiant will inspire anyone wondering how courage, faith, and brotherhood can endure even in the darkest of situations. “A riveting tribute to true American heroes.”—Senator John McCain, POW (1967-73) "Defiant is Unbroken meets Band of Brothers—and then some." —Congressman Pete Sessions During the Vietnam War, hundreds of American prisoners-of-war faced years of brutal conditions and horrific torture at the hands of North Vietnamese guards and interrogators who ruthlessly plied them for military intelligence and propaganda. Determined to maintain their Code of Conduct, the POWs developed a powerful underground resistance. To quash it, their captors singled out its eleven leaders, Vietnam's own "dirty dozen," and banished them to an isolated jail that would become known as Alcatraz. None would leave its solitary cells and interrogation rooms unscathed; one would never return. As these eleven men suffered in Hanoi, their wives at home launched an extraordinary campaign that would ultimately spark the nationwide POW/MIA movement. The members of these military families banded together and showed the courage not only to endure years of doubt about the fate of their husbands and fathers, but to bravely fight for their safe return. When the survivors of Alcatraz finally came home in 1973, one veteran would go on to receive the Medal of Honor, another would become a U.S. Senator, and a third served in the U.S. Congress.