'Combines elements of In Cold Blood and Black Hawk Down with Apocalypse Now as it builds towards its terrible climax...Extraordinary' New York Times Iraq's 'Triangle of Death', 2005. A platoon of young soldiers from a U.S. regiment known as 'the Black Heart Brigade' is deployed to a lawless and hyperviolent area just south of Baghdad. Almost immediately, the attacks begin: every day another roadside bomb, another colleague blown to pieces. As the daily violence chips away, and chips away at their sanity, the thirty-five young men of 1st Platoon, Bravo Company descend into a tailspin of poor discipline, substance abuse, and brutality -- with tragic results. Black Hearts is a timeless true story of how modern warfare can make or break a man's character. Told with severe compassion, balanced judgement and the magnetic pace of a thriller, it looks set to become one of the defining books about the Iraq War. 'Black Hearts is the obverse of Band of Brothers, a story not of combat unity but of disharmony and disarray' Chicago Sun-Times 'A riveting picture of life outside the wire in Iraq, where "you tell a guy to go across a bridge, and within five minutes he's dead."' Kirkus Reviews (starred)

A soldier's tale of Iraq.
This autobiographical tale covers one woman's journey through the first wave of Operation Enduring Freedom. Deployed from February 2003 through May 2004 with the 248TH Engineer Company (Combat) (Heavy) out of Norwich, Connecticut, First Lieutenant Works recants some of the most powerful memories of her deployment and military service. Heartfelt and brutally honest, the vignettes and images this author conjures offer the reader a unique look into the combat experiences of our modern troops.

Deborah L. Jaramillo investigates cable news' presentation of the Iraq War in relation to "high concept" filmmaking. High concept films can be reduced to single-sentence summaries and feature pre-sold elements; they were considered financially safe projects that would sustain consumer interest beyond their initial theatrical run. Using high concept as a framework for the analysis of the 2003 coverage of the Iraq War paying close attention to how Fox News and CNN packaged and promoted the U.S. invasion of Iraq Ugly War, Pretty Package offers a new paradigm for understanding how television news reporting shapes our perceptions of events."

The first-person account of how a small band of Green Berets used horses and laser-guided bombs to overthrow the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan after 9/11. They landed in a dust storm so thick the chopper 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. They saved babies and treated fractures, sewed up wounded who'd been transported from the battlefield by donkey. They found their enemy hiding in thick bunkers, dodged bullets from machine-gun-laden pickup trucks, and survived mass rocket attacks from vintage Soviet-era launchers. They battled the Taliban while mediating blood feuds between rival allies. They fought with everything they had, from smart bombs to AK-47s.The men they helped called them brothers. Hollywood called them the Horse Soldiers. They called themselves Green Berets-Special Forces ODA 595.

Dr. Williams identifies the roots of organized crime in post-Ba'athist Iraq in an authoritarian and corrupt state dominated by Saddam Hussein and subject to international sanctions. He also explains the rise of organized crime after the U.S. invasion in terms of two distinct waves: the first wave followed the collapse of the state and was accompanied by the breakdown of social control mechanisms and the development of anomie; the second wave was driven by anarchy, insecurity, political ambition, and the imperatives of resource generation for militias, insurgents, and other groups. This monograph looks in detail at major criminal activities, including the theft, diversion, and smuggling of oil, the kidnapping of both Iraqis and foreigners, extortion, car theft, and the theft and smuggling of antiquities. The author also considers the critical role played by corruption in facilitating and strengthening organized crime. He shows how al-Qaeda in Iraq, Jaish-al-Mahdi, and the Sunni tribes used criminal activities to fund their campaigns of political violence. Dr. Williams also identifies necessary responses to organized crime and corruption in Iraq, including efforts to reduce criminal opportunities, change incentive structures, and more directly target criminal organizations and activities.

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise.

From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In "Women as Weapons of War," Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to "bare" arms is a sign of freedom and progress.

Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence.

When US-led forces invaded Iraq in 2003, they occupied a country that had been at war for 23 years. Yet in their attempts to understand Iraqi society and history, few policy makers, analysts and journalists took into account the profound impact that Iraq's long engagement with war had on the Iraqis' everyday engagement with politics, the business of managing their daily lives, and their cultural imagination. Drawing on government documents and interviews, Dina Rizk Khoury traces the political, social and cultural processes of the normalization of war in Iraq during the last twenty-three years of Ba'thist rule. Khoury argues that war was a form of everyday bureaucratic governance and examines the Iraqi government's policies of creating consent, managing resistance and religious diversity, and shaping public culture. Coming on the tenth anniversary of the US-led invasion of Iraq, this book tells a multilayered story of a society in which war has become the norm.

Powered by a massive Ford V-8 engine, the M4A3 Sherman was the standard tank of the US Army during the later stages of WWII, as well as the Korean War. The M4A3 was also supplied to the Marines during WWII, when the Corps faced a shortage of their preferred M4A2. The M4A3 was used by both services during the Korean War and was supplied in large numbers to Allied nations during the post-WWII rebuilding process. This book chronicles the development and use of these vehicles from concept to combat. This work contains several hundred first class images, many of which are in color.

This is the story of modern Britain, focusing on twelve formative days in the history of the United Kingdom over the last five decades. By describing what happened on those days and the subsequent consequences, Andrew Hindmoor paints a suggestive - and to some perhaps provocative - portrait of what we have become and how we got here. Everyone will have their own list of the truly formative moments in British history over the last five decades. The twelve days selected for this book are: - The 28th of September 1976. The day Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan renounced Keynesian economics. - The 4th of May 1979. The day Margaret Thatcher became Britain's first female prime minister. - The 3rd of March 1985. The day the miners' strike ended. - The 20th of September 1988. The day of Margaret Thatcher's 'Bruges speech'. - The 18th of May 1992. The day the television rights for the Premier League were sold to BskyB. - The 22nd of April 1993. The day that young black teenager Stephen Lawrence was murdered by racist thugs. - The 10th April 1998. The day of the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland. - The 11th of September 2001. The day of the Al Qaeda attacks on the United States. - The 5th of December 2004. The day Chris Cramp and Matthew Roche became the first gay couple in the UK to become civil partners under the Civil Partnership Act. - The 13th of September 2007. The day the BBC reported that the Northern Rock bank was in trouble. - The 8th of May 2009. The day The Daily Telegraph began to publish details of MPs' expense claims. - The 1st of February 2017. The day the House of Commons voted to invoke Article 50 of the Treaty on European Union.

What were the causes of the Iraq War? Who were the main players? How was the war sold to the decision makers? Despite all that has been written on the Iraq war the myriad scholarly, journalistic and polemical works the answers to these questions remain shrouded in an ideological mist. TheRoad to Iraq is an empirical investigation that dispels this fog.
Discover how a small but ideologically coherent and socially cohesive group of determined political agents used the contingency of 9/11 to overwhelm a sceptical foreign policy establishment, military brass and intelligence apparatus.

On General Douglas MacArthur's orders, a force of 12,000 U.S. Marines were marching north to the Yalu river in late November 1950. These three regiments of the 1st Marine Division--strung out along eighty miles of a narrow mountain road--soon found themselves completely surrounded by 60,000 Chinese soldiers. Despite being given up for lost by the military brass, the 1st Marine Division fought its way out of the frozen mountains, miraculously taking thier dead and wounded with them as they ran the gauntlet of unceasing Chinese attacks. This is the gripping story that Martin Russ tells in his extraordinary book. Breakout is an unforgettable portrayal of the terror and courage of men as they face sudden death, making the bloody battles of the Korean hills and valleys come alive as they never have before.

Ever since Eve tempted Adam with her apple, women have been regarded as a corrupting and destructive force. The very idea that women can be used as interrogation tools, as evidenced in the infamous Abu Ghraib torture photos, plays on age-old fears of women as sexually threatening weapons, and therefore the literal explosion of women onto the war scene should come as no surprise.

From the female soldiers involved in Abu Ghraib to Palestinian women suicide bombers, women and their bodies have become powerful weapons in the Afghanistan and Iraq wars. In "Women as Weapons of War," Kelly Oliver reveals how the media and the administration frequently use metaphors of weaponry to describe women and female sexuality and forge a deliberate link between notions of vulnerability and images of violence. Focusing specifically on the U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, Oliver analyzes contemporary discourse surrounding women, sex, and gender and the use of women to justify America's decision to go to war. For example, the administration's call to liberate "women of cover," suggesting a woman's right to "bare" arms is a sign of freedom and progress.

Oliver also considers what forms of cultural meaning, or lack of meaning, could cause both the guiltlessness demonstrated by female soldiers at Abu Ghraib and the profound commitment to death made by suicide bombers. She examines the pleasure taken in violence and the passion for death exhibited by these women and what kind of contexts created them. In conclusion, Oliver diagnoses our cultural fascination with sex, violence, and death and its relationship with live news coverage and embedded reporting, which naturalizes horrific events and stymies critical reflection. This process, she argues, further compromises the borders between fantasy and reality, fueling a kind of paranoid patriotism that results in extreme forms of violence.

The end of World War II did not mean the arrival of peace. The major powers faced social upheaval at home, while anti-colonial wars erupted around the world. American-Soviet relations grew chilly, but the meaning of the rivalry remained disputable. Cold War Crucible "reveals the Korean War as the catalyst for a new postwar order. The conflict led people to believe in the Cold War as a dangerous reality, a belief that would define the fears of two generations.

In the international arena, North Korea s aggression was widely interpreted as the beginning of World War III. At the domestic level, the conflict generated a wartime logic that created dividing lines between us and them, precipitating waves of social purges to stifle dissent. The United States allowed McCarthyism to take root; Britain launched anti-labor initiatives; Japan conducted its Red Purge; and China cracked down on counterrevolutionaries. These attempts to restore domestic tranquility were not a product of the Cold War, Masuda Hajimu shows, but driving forces in creating a mindset for it. Alarmed by the idea of enemies from within and faced with the notion of a bipolar conflict that could quickly go from chilly to nuclear, ordinary people and policymakers created a fantasy of a Cold War world in which global and domestic order was paramount.

In discovering how policymaking and popular opinion combined to establish and propagate the new postwar reality, Cold War Crucible" offers a history that reorients our understanding of what the Cold War really was."

It was the right thing to do. And someone had to do it. Aziz was more than an interpreter for Force Recon Marine Chad Robichaux during Chad's eight deployments to Afghanistan. He was a teammate, brother, and friend. More than once, Aziz saved Chad's life. And then he needed Chad to save his. When President Joe Biden announced in April 2021 that the United States would be making a hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, Robichaux knew he had to get Aziz and his family out before Taliban forces took over the country. As the rescue team he'd pulled together began to go to work, they became aware of thousands more--US citizens, Afghan allies, women, and children--facing persecution or death if they were not saved from the Taliban's terrorist regime. Chad began leading the charge that would go on to rescue 17,000 evacuees within a few short weeks--12,000 of them within the first ten days. This gripping account of two heroes and a daring mission puts human hearts and names alongside the headlines of one of the most harrowing moments in our history, giving you a closer look at: The resilience of Afghanistan and its people Chad's direct interactions with the Taliban The twenty-year war that took place under four presidents Saving Aziz is a story of war and rescue. It is a story of a mission accomplished and work still to be done. It is a story of how looking into a stranger's eyes breaks down prejudice and apathy--and why risking it all is worth it when it comes to loving one another. Praise for Saving Aziz: "Saving Aziz is the story of two warriors...brought together by war and a brotherhood forged through years of battling...for the cause of freedom and captures the heroic efforts of those who took action to not only rescue Aziz and his family in the US withdrawal but thousands of others." --Tim Kennedy, New York Times bestselling author, US Army Special Forces, Sniper, UFC Fighter, Founder of Sheepdog Response, and Co-Founder of Save Our Allies

On February 15, 2003, millions of people around the world demonstrated against the war that the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies were planning to wage in Iraq. Despite this being the largest protest in the history of humankind, the war on Iraq began the next month. That year, the World Tribunal on Iraq (WTI) emerged from the global antiwar movement that had mobilized against the invasion and subsequent occupation. Like the earlier tribunal on Vietnam convened by Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre, the WTI sought to document-and provide grounds for adjudicating-war crimes committed by the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allied forces during the Iraq war. For the Love of Humanity builds on two years of transnational fieldwork within the decentralized network of antiwar activists who constituted the WTI in some twenty cities around the world. Ayca Cubukcu illuminates the tribunal up close, both as an ethnographer and a sympathetic participant. In the process, she situates debates among WTI activists-a group encompassing scholars, lawyers, students, translators, writers, teachers, and more-alongside key jurists, theorists, and critics of global democracy. WTI activists confronted many dilemmas as they conducted their political arguments and actions, often facing interpretations of human rights and international law that, unlike their own, were not grounded in anti-imperialism. Cubukcu approaches this conflict by broadening her lens, incorporating insights into how Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the Iraqi High Tribunal grappled with the realities of Iraq's occupation. Through critical analysis of the global debate surrounding one of the early twenty-first century's most significant world events, For the Love of Humanity addresses the challenges of forging global solidarity against imperialism and makes a case for reevaluating the relationships between law and violence, empire and human rights, and cosmopolitan authority and political autonomy.

In the years immediately following the 2006 "Surge" of American troops in Iraq, observers of America's counterinsurgency war there regarded the defeat of Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) in Anbar Province as one of the strategy's signature victories. With the assistance of American troops, the fractious tribal sheiks in that province united in an "Awakening" that ultimately led to the defeat of the legendarily brutal AQI. The success of the Awakening convinced many that smart, properly resourced counterinsurgency strategies could in fact work. Even more, the episode showed that victory could be snatched from the jaws of defeat. A decade later, the situation in Anbar Province is dramatically different. Beginning in 2014, much of the province fell to the AQI's successor organization, ISIS, which swept through the region with shocking ease. ISIS quickly took Ramadi, the province's main city and the locus of the 2006 Awakening. In The Shadow of Anbar, Carter Malkasian looks at the wreckage to explain why Americans' initial optimism was misplaced and why victory was not sustainable. Malkasian begins by tracing the origins of the Awakening of the sheiks against AQI, which by 2005 dominated the province. Capitalizing on the feuding among traditional sheik leaders, AQI used Islam as a unifying ideology and initiated a reign of terror that cowed opponents into submission. With some help from the US, the sheiks rebounded by unifying against AQI through the Awakening movement. That, coupled with an increased American troop presence beginning in 2006, ultimately led to the defeat of AQI. After chronicling how this transpired, Malkasian turns his attention to what happened in its wake. The US left, and in a naked power play the Shiite government in Baghdad sidelined Sunni leaders throughout the country. AQI, brought back to life by the Syrian civil war as ISIS, expanded into northern and western Iraq in 2014 and quickly found a receptive audience among marginalized Sunnis. In short order, all of the progress that resulted from the Awakening evaporated. Malkasian draws many lessons from what is clearly now a failed experiment at nation building, but a few stand out. US counterinsurgency techniques, no matter how adept, cannot substantially change foreign societies and cultures, particularly ones that have existed for centuries. The American people will not tolerate a long-term US military presence in foreign lands, and what the US builds while there is likely to be temporary. Finally, the debacle reminds us that US military intervention always has a strong potential to generate instability and harm. Ultimately, the US invasion upended society and let sectarian, tribal, and religious dynamics run their course. As The Shadow of Anbar shows, the people of Anbar Province would have been better off if the United States had never invaded Iraq in the first place. Sadly, the residents there are living with the terrible fallout of the 2003 invasion to this day.

After China's November 1950 intervention in the war and the subsequent battle of the Chosin Reservoir, UN forces faced a new onslaught in the spring of 1951 with over 350,000 veteran troops attacking along the Imjin River.The US 3rd Infantry Division took the brunt of the attack along with the attached British 29th Infantry Brigade which included the Gloucestershire Regiment (the "Glosters"). The heroic defence of the American and British forces would pass into legend, most especially the doomed effort of the Glosters, as they sought to buy time for the rest of the UN forces to regroup and organise an effective defence of Seoul, the South Korean capital city. Featuring full colour commissioned artwork, maps and first-hand accounts, this is the compelling story of one of the most epic clashes of the Korean War.

How the US lost its longest war in Afghanistan. .... worth considering that it was America's own choice to jump into the Afghan sand-grave. * The world media's FALSE cry: Pakistan, nominally a US partner in the war, had also been the Afghan Taliban's main patron. Now find the answer below - see the Washington Post of 27th September 2021 with a big caption: PM Imran Khan: Don't blame Pakistan........;

On June 25, 1950, as he was flying back to Washington D.C. to deal with the outbreak of war in Korea, US President Harry Truman thought, "In my generation, this was not the first occasion when the strong had attacked the weak. I recalled some earlier instances: Manchuria, Ethiopia, Austria. I remembered how each time that the democracies failed to act it had encouraged the aggressor to keep going ahead. Communism was acting in Korea just as Hitler, Mussolini, and the Japanese had acted, ten, fifteen, and twenty years earlier... If this was allowed to go unchallenged it would mean a third world war." In response to North Korea's invasion of South Korea, the United Nations sent an urgent plea to its members for military assistance. Sixteen nations answered the call by contributing combat troops. Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie, a stalwart advocate of collective security, dispatched an infantry battalion composed of his Imperial Bodyguard to affirm this principle which had been abandoned in favour of appeasement when the League of Nations (the predecessor to the United Nations) gave Fascist Italy a free-hand to invade Ethiopia in 1935. The unit designated "Kagnew Battalion" was actually successive battalions which rotated yearly and fought as part of the US 32nd Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division. When they arrived, these warriors from an ancient empire were viewed with suspicion by their American allies as they were untested in modern warfare. Their arrival in Korea also coincided with the de-segregation of the US Army. However, the Ethiopians eventually earned the respect of their comrades after countless bloody, often hand-to hand battles, with all three battalions which served during the war earning US Presidential Unit Citations. Remarkably, Kagnew was the only UN contingent which did not lose a single man as prisoner of war or missing in action. Until now, few have heard the story of their stand for collective security and against aggression. The Emperor's Own provides insight into who these men and women were as well as what became of them after the war.

General Douglas MacArthur is one of the towering figures of World War II, and indeed of the twentieth century, but his leadership of the second largest air force in the USAAF is often overlooked. When World War II ended, the three numbered air forces (the Fifth, Thirteenth and Seventh) under his command possessed 4004 combat aircraft, 433 reconnaissance aircraft and 922 transports. After being humbled by the Japanese in the Philippines in 1942, MacArthur and his air chief General George Kenney rebuilt the US aerial presence in the Pacific, helping Allied naval and ground forces to push back the Japanese Air Force, re-take the Philippines, and carry the war north towards the Home Islands. Following the end of World War II, MacArthur was the highest military and political authority in Japan and at the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950 he was named as Commander-in-Chief, United Nations Command. In the ten months of his command, his Far East Air Forces increased dramatically and saw the first aerial combat between jet fighters. Written by award-winning aviation historian Bill Yenne, this engrossing and widely acclaimed book traces the journey of American air forces in the Pacific under General MacArthur's command, from their lowly beginnings to their eventual triumph over Imperial Japan, followed by their entry into the jet age in the skies over Korea.

It was almost exactly 15.00 hours local time, on 25 June 1950, when nine Yakovlev Yak-9P fighters of the North Korea's 'Korean People's Air Force' (KPAF) simultaneously attacked Seoul International Airport and the Kimpo Airfield outside Seoul, the capitol of South Korea. In the course of their attacks, the Yaks shot up ground installations and strafed one of Douglas C-54 transports of the US Air Force involved in evacuation of US citizens from the war-stricken country. The Yaks returned to finish off the C-54 at Kimpo around 19.00. Thus began the aerial component of the Korean War, which was to last until mid-1953. While dozens of accounts about this air war have been published over the time, nearly all of these are concentrating on its most spectacular segment: air combats between jet fighters of two primary belligerents: North American F-86 Sabres of the US Air Force (USAF) and Mikoyan i Gurevich MiG-15s of the Soviet Air Force (V-VS). On the contrary, the story of KPAF's coming into being and its involvement in the Korean War remain entirely unknown. Certainly enough, the small service was virtually wiped out of the skies in a matter of few weeks after the start of that conflict. Therefore, the impression is that it never took part in the Korean War again. Actually, the KPAF - backgrounds of which can be traced back to the times only three months after the Japanese capitulation that ended the World War II - was re-built and even made a come-back: re-equipped with piston-engined fighters of Soviet origin already by the end of 1950, it went a step further and converted to jets just a year later. This is a story of the - often problematic - coming into being of the KPAF. Clearly, building a modern, effective air force was always a daunting undertaking - even in the late 1940s when there was abundance of combat aircraft left over from the World War II. Nevertheless, the communist government of North Korea and its airmen never stopped trying. Surprisingly enough - especially for a military service of a staunchly communist and underdeveloped country of the 1940s - it was greatly bolstered by efforts of a single wealthy man that provided installations necessary for education of future pilots and ground personnel.

Beginning in 1950, the Korean War was a defining moment for the UN and the entirety of the early Cold War, widening the already monumental gulf between the east and west, capitalist and communist. This supplement for Bolt Action expands the rules-set from its World War II roots to this new, and truly modern, conflict. Bolt Action: Korea contains all the rules, Theatre Lists, scenarios, and new and exciting units, never seen in Bolt Action before, to wargame this turbulent period of world history.