Download or read book Guns Girls and Greed written by Morgan Lerette and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2024-02-06 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Guns, Girls, and Greed is an unvarnished, behind-the-scenes, tell-all account of the scathing and dangerous life of mercenaries at war in Iraq. Experience the world of private contractors conducting high-threat missions for a nascent Iraqi government in the hopes of rebuilding after the fall of Saddam Hussein. With limited support, the men of Blackwater protected US diplomats as the country descended into sectarian violence. It was a hazardous mission complete with rockets, mortars, improvised explosive devices, and not knowing who or where the enemy was. Morgan Lerette’s irreverently honest memoir shows the good and bad of injecting private armies into active combat zones in the name of diplomacy and digs deep into the bonds of brotherhood created by war. With gut-wrenching tragedy, dark humor, and parties that make Animal House seem like a Disney film, this memoir offers a firsthand perspective on how men act and react in war. Lerette, a private contractor employed by the notorious Blackwater in the early days of the Iraq War, pulls no punches in calling out the incompetence of both the US military and the Department of State during the collapse of Iraq. You can decide if the insertion of private contractors in Iraq assisted or detracted from the war effort and if the costs in blood and treasure were worth the carnage.
Download or read book Girls Greed Guns and Gore written by Eric Wald and published by Eros Comics. This book was released on 1997 with total page 100 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Someone's screwing and them killing sex-club owners and it's up to Charlotte and her lover Jaine to find them.
Download or read book Damned Nations written by Samantha Nutt and published by McClelland & Stewart. This book was released on 2011 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary humanitarian Samantha Nutt gives a bracing and uncompromising account of her work in some of the most devastated corners of the world - and a new, provocative vision for changing course on growing militarisation. It is a brilliant distillation of Dr Nutt's observations over the course of 15 years providing hands-on care in some of the world's most violent flashpoints. Combining original research with her personal story, it is a deeply thoughtful meditation on war as it is being waged around the world against millions of civilians.
Download or read book Neurotic Lusciousness written by Chris Marsh and published by iUniverse. This book was released on 2003-04-07 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When you're afraid to think it, think it anyway. When you're too scared to feel it, just let go and feel every excruciating second. When you're so worried what other's are thinking about you, you'll die frozen in fear. If you never say what's on your mind, no one will ever pay attention. Neurotic Lusciousness are the deep-seated X rays of the human experience that keep us up all night in a puddle of our own cold sweat, dialing a lover's number at 3 a.m., questioning our own mortality, self-worth, and ability to love and be loved. They are the jolting flashbacks of perfect grace, grinding pain, warm kisses, broken hearts, desolate souls, and new beginnings that demand to be re-visited over and over at a moment's notice. Let it out!
Download or read book Licensed to Kill written by Robert Young Pelton and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-08-28 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Young Pelton first became aware of the phenomenon of hired guns in the War on Terror when he met a covert team of contractors on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border in the fall of 2003. Pelton soon embarked on a globe-spanning odyssey to penetrate and understand this shadowy world, ultimately delivering stunning insights into the way private soldiers are used. Enter a blood-soaked world of South African mercenaries and tribal fighters backed by ruthless financiers. Drop into Baghdad’s Green Zone, strap on body armor, and take a daily high-speed ride with a doomed crew of security contractors who dodge car bombs and snipers just to get their charges to the airport. Share a drink in a chic hotel bar with wealthy owners of private armies who debate the best way to stay alive in war zones. Licensed to Kill spans four continents and three years, taking us inside the CIA’s dirty wars; the brutal contractor murders in Fallujah and the Alamo-like sieges in Najaf and Al Kut; the Deep South contractor training camps where ex–Special Operations soldiers and even small town cops learn the ropes; the contractor conventions where macho attendees swap bullet-punctuated tales and discuss upcoming gigs; and the grim Central African prison where contractors turned failed mercenaries pay a steep price. The United States has encouraged the use of the private sector in all facets of the War on Terror, placing contractors outside the bounds of functional legal constraints. With the shocking clarity that can come only from firsthand observation, Licensed to Kill painstakingly deconstructs the most controversial events and introduces the pivotal players. Most disturbingly, it shows that there are indeed thousands of contractors—with hundreds more being produced every month—who’ve been given a license to kill, their services available to the highest bidder.
Download or read book Corpsman written by and published by . This book was released on 1968 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Echo in Ramadi written by Scott A. Huesing and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2018-02-20 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2019 Gold Medal Award, Best Military History Memoir, Military Writers Society of America Ranked in the "Top 10 Military Books of 2018" by Military Times. "In war, destruction is everywhere. It eats everything around you. Sometimes it eats at you." —Major Scott Huesing, Echo Company Commander From the winter of 2006 through the spring of 2007, two-hundred-fifty Marines from Echo Company, Second Battalion, Fourth Marine Regiment fought daily in the dangerous, dense city streets of Ramadi, Iraq during the Multi-National Forces Surge ordered by President George W. Bush. The Marines' mission: to kill or capture anti-Iraqi forces. Their experience: like being in Hell. Now Major Scott A. Huesing, the commander who led Echo Company through Ramadi, takes readers back to the streets of Ramadi in a visceral, gripping portrayal of modern urban combat. Bound together by brotherhood, honor, and the horror they faced, Echo's Marines battled day-to-day on the frontline of a totally different kind of war, without rules, built on chaos. In Echo in Ramadi, Huesing brings these resilient, resolute young men to life and shows how the savagery of urban combat left indelible scars on their bodies, psyches, and souls. Like war classics We Were Soldiers, The Yellow Birds, and Generation Kill, Echo in Ramadi is an unforgettable capsule of one company's experience of war that will leave readers stunned.
Download or read book Surprise Kill Vanish written by Annie Jacobsen and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, the untold USA Today bestselling story of the CIA's secret paramilitary units. Surprise . . . your target. Kill . . . your enemy. Vanish . . . without a trace. When diplomacy fails, and war is unwise, the president calls on the CIA's Special Activities Division, a highly-classified branch of the CIA and the most effective, black operations force in the world. Originally known as the president's guerrilla warfare corps, SAD conducts risky and ruthless operations that have evolved over time to defend America from its enemies. Almost every American president since World War II has asked the CIA to conduct sabotage, subversion and, yes, assassination. With unprecedented access to forty-two men and women who proudly and secretly worked on CIA covert operations from the dawn of the Cold War to the present day, along with declassified documents and deep historical research, Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen unveils -- like never before -- a complex world of individuals working in treacherous environments populated with killers, connivers, and saboteurs. Despite Hollywood notions of off-book operations and external secret hires, covert action is actually one piece in a colossal foreign policy machine. Written with the pacing of a thriller, Surprise, Kill, Vanish brings to vivid life the sheer pandemonium and chaos, as well as the unforgettable human will to survive and the intellectual challenge of not giving up hope that define paramilitary and intelligence work. Jacobsen's exclusive interviews -- with members of the CIA's Senior Intelligence Service (equivalent to the Pentagon's generals), its counterterrorism chiefs, targeting officers, and Special Activities Division's Ground Branch operators who conduct today's close-quarters killing operations around the world -- reveal, for the first time, the enormity of this shocking, controversial, and morally complex terrain. Is the CIA's paramilitary army America's weaponized strength, or a liability to its principled standing in the world? Every operation reported in this book, however unsettling, is legal.
Download or read book Civilian Warriors written by Erik Prince and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-28 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The founder of Blackwater offers the gripping true story of the world’s most controversial military contractor. In 1997, former Navy SEAL Erik Prince started a business that would recruit civilians for the riskiest security jobs in the world. As Blackwater’s reputation grew, demand for its services escalated, and its men eventually completed nearly 100,000 missions for both the Bush and Obama administrations. It was a huge success except for one problem: Blackwater was demonized around the world. Its employees were smeared as mercenaries, profiteers, or worse. And because of the secrecy requirements of its contracts with the Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA, Prince was unable to correct false information. But now he’s finally able to tell the full story about some of the biggest controversies of the War on Terror, in a memoir that reads like a thriller.
Download or read book The World Until Yesterday written by Jared Diamond and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-12-31 with total page 727 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bestselling author of Collapse and Guns, Germs and Steel surveys the history of human societies to answer the question: What can we learn from traditional societies that can make the world a better place for all of us? “As he did in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond continues to make us think with his mesmerizing and absorbing new book." Bookpage Most of us take for granted the features of our modern society, from air travel and telecommunications to literacy and obesity. Yet for nearly all of its six million years of existence, human society had none of these things. While the gulf that divides us from our primitive ancestors may seem unbridgeably wide, we can glimpse much of our former lifestyle in those largely traditional societies still or recently in existence. Societies like those of the New Guinea Highlanders remind us that it was only yesterday—in evolutionary time—when everything changed and that we moderns still possess bodies and social practices often better adapted to traditional than to modern conditions.The World Until Yesterday provides a mesmerizing firsthand picture of the human past as it had been for millions of years—a past that has mostly vanished—and considers what the differences between that past and our present mean for our lives today. This is Jared Diamond’s most personal book to date, as he draws extensively from his decades of field work in the Pacific islands, as well as evidence from Inuit, Amazonian Indians, Kalahari San people, and others. Diamond doesn’t romanticize traditional societies—after all, we are shocked by some of their practices—but he finds that their solutions to universal human problems such as child rearing, elder care, dispute resolution, risk, and physical fitness have much to teach us. Provocative, enlightening, and entertaining, The World Until Yesterday is an essential and fascinating read.
Download or read book InSideOut Coaching written by Joe Ehrmann and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2011-08-02 with total page 274 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ehrmann, whom "Parade" calls "the most important coach in America," describes his coaching philosophy and explains how sports can transform lives.
Download or read book Send Me written by Marty Skovlund, Jr. and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2024-05-07 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The extraordinary story of American special operator and trailblazer Shannon Kent, who hunted high value targets on classified missions in the most dangerous locales on earth while trying to balance her life as a wife and mother. Of the 1.3 million active-duty service members in the US military, only a tiny fraction are selected as “operators.” Shannon Kent was one of the first women to serve at this level and was widely recognized as one of the best. Shannon served as a Navy cryptologic technician, responsible for signals intelligence and electronic warfare, but her proficiency with language set her apart. She was assigned to a unit so secretive that its name can’t even be printed here, where she worked clandestinely to hunt the most wanted terrorists in the world. Send Me is Shannon’s heroic life story, revealing the truth of both her work and the challenges she faced while trying to raise a family with her husband Joe, himself a Special Forces soldier. He and Shannon met in a war zone, their love forged during a special operations training course, their dedication spanning multiple combat deployments and the birth of their two boys. It is the legacy of an extraordinary woman who rose to the apex of the military, working with the most elite forces in the world, lifting the veil from the life of a Special Forces family to share their duty, sacrifice, and humanity.
Download or read book King Leopold s Ghost written by Adam Hochschild and published by Picador. This book was released on 2019-05-14 with total page 474 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With an introduction by award-winning novelist Barbara Kingsolver In the late nineteenth century, when the great powers in Europe were tearing Africa apart and seizing ownership of land for themselves, King Leopold of Belgium took hold of the vast and mostly unexplored territory surrounding the Congo River. In his devastatingly barbarous colonization of this area, Leopold stole its rubber and ivory, pummelled its people and set up a ruthless regime that would reduce the population by half. . While he did all this, he carefully constructed an image of himself as a deeply feeling humanitarian. Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize in 1999, King Leopold’s Ghost is the true and haunting account of this man’s brutal regime and its lasting effect on a ruined nation. It is also the inspiring and deeply moving account of a handful of missionaries and other idealists who travelled to Africa and unwittingly found themselves in the middle of a gruesome holocaust. Instead of turning away, these brave few chose to stand up against Leopold. Adam Hochschild brings life to this largely untold story and, crucially, casts blame on those responsible for this atrocity.
Download or read book How Much of These Hills Is Gold written by C Pam Zhang and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2020-04-07 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S FAVORITE BOOKS OF THE YEAR ONE OF NPR'S BEST BOOKS OF 2020 LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 BOOKER PRIZE FINALIST FOR THE 2020 CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE WINNER OF THE ROSENTHAL FAMILY FOUNDATION AWARD, FROM THE AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND LETTERS A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION "5 UNDER 35" HONOREE NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Belongs on a shelf all of its own.” —NPR “Outstanding.” —The Washington Post “Revolutionary . . . A visionary addition to American literature.” —Star Tribune An electric debut novel set against the twilight of the American gold rush, two siblings are on the run in an unforgiving landscape—trying not just to survive but to find a home. Ba dies in the night; Ma is already gone. Newly orphaned children of immigrants, Lucy and Sam are suddenly alone in a land that refutes their existence. Fleeing the threats of their western mining town, they set off to bury their father in the only way that will set them free from their past. Along the way, they encounter giant buffalo bones, tiger paw prints, and the specters of a ravaged landscape as well as family secrets, sibling rivalry, and glimpses of a different kind of future. Both epic and intimate, blending Chinese symbolism and reimagined history with fiercely original language and storytelling, How Much of These Hills Is Gold is a haunting adventure story, an unforgettable sibling story, and the announcement of a stunning new voice in literature. On a broad level, it explores race in an expanding country and the question of where immigrants are allowed to belong. But page by page, it’s about the memories that bind and divide families, and the yearning for home.
Download or read book The Operators written by Michael Hastings and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The inspiration for the Netflix original movie War Machine, starring Brad Pitt, Tilda Swinton, and Ben Kingsley From the author of The Last Magazine, a shocking behind-the-scenes portrait of our military commanders, their high-stake maneuvers, and the politcal firestorm that shook the United States. In the shadow of the hunt for Bin Laden and the United States’ involvement in the Middle East, General Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of international and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was living large. His loyal staff liked to call him a “rock star.” During a spring 2010 trip, journalist Michael Hastings looked on as McChrystal and his staff let off steam, partying and openly bashing the Obama administration. When Hastings’s article appeared in Rolling Stone, it set off a political firestorm: McChrystal was unceremoniously fired. In The Operators, Hastings picks up where his Rolling Stone coup ended. From patrol missions in the Afghan hinterlands to senior military advisors’ late-night bull sessions to hotel bars where spies and expensive hookers participate in nation-building, Hastings presents a shocking behind-the-scenes portrait of what he fears is an unwinnable war. Written in prose that is at once eye-opening and other times uncannily conversational, readers of No Easy Day will take to Hastings’ unyielding first-hand account of the Afghan War and its cast of players.
Download or read book Why Women Rebel written by Alexis Henshaw and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-08 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why Women Rebel presents a global analysis of the extent to which women are engaged in armed, organized rebellions, and why they choose to join such rebellions. Henshaw has collected and analyzed data on women’s participation in over 70 post-Cold War rebel groups. The book provides a theoretical analysis drawing upon both mainstream literature in the social sciences and critical, feminist inquiry on women and political violence to offer a new gendered theory on why women rebel. The book reveals that women are active in over half of all rebel groups sampled and that, while the majority of rebel groups have women serving in support roles away from direct combat, approximately a third of these groups employ women in the conduct of armed attacks, and just over a quarter have women in a leadership capacity. Henshaw reaffirms the idea that women are more likely to be engaged in left-wing political organizations, but does suggest that more conservative or traditional movements may also successfully incorporate women by appealing to concerns about community rights. Addressing several gaps in the current literature on this topic, this book will be of interest to academics in the fields of political science, international relations, security studies, and gender and women’s studies.
Download or read book Greed s Reward written by T. E. Killian and published by Christ Centered Ministries. This book was released on 2016-06-06 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A SUSPENSE AND ACTION-PACKED MYSTERY WITH A TOUCH OF ROMANCE What happens to a sleepy little mountain town when a bear hunt goes deadly wrong? Bear Creek, Arizona is generally a quiet place to live up in the mountains away from all the big city crime. This is about to change as threats are made, people are being shot at, men are murdered, and someone is staying at the old Ghost Town. Is that “someone” the killer/shooter? Blake Thornton along with his older sister, Reggie, and younger brother, Kirby, own a ranch in Bear Creek. In order to pay for the expansion of their herd, they have started a hunting guide service. Most of these clients/hunters want to hunt bear or mountain lion. The Thornton’s have three men coming for a bear hunt. In order to prepare for them, Blake has decided to check the trail for signs of bear. However, someone starts shooting at him. Were they trying to killing him or scare him? Why? Blake didn’t think he had anyone that angry with him. Upon arrival in Bear Creek, the hunters start to cause problems. Blake soon realizes that they are facing even more troubles with these men. The terms and rules of the hunt are given to the hunters and they agree to abide by them. But before the hunt can even get started, one of the hunters is found dead! Was it murder? Was it one of the other hunters who did it? Why? Dixie Gordon runs one of two local bar and grills. Her husband, Dan, disappeared four years ago when their twin daughters were babies. The divorce proceedings will be final in three weeks. Dixie has just received word that her soon to be ex-husband is coming back to Bear Creek. Is he planning to try to stop the divorce, take the girls or try to get the bar? Why is he coming back now? Dan threatens Dixie. The other bar and grill owner is trying to hurt Dixie’s business, but why? They cater to different customers. Dixie is shot at twice. Is the shooter trying to scare her or kill her? Why? Who? Chip Green is investigating the murders and shootings. As more murders are committed, Chip needs help. Since Blake and Kirby are reserve deputies, Chip activates them when the extra help he has requested from the sheriff’s department doesn’t come. Blake tries to protect Dixie and find the killer. Can he keep Dixie and her girls safe? Can he keep himself safe?
