At dawn on March 2, 2002, America's first major battle of the 21st century began. Over 200 soldiers of the 101st Airborne and 10th Mountain Division flew into Afghanistan's Shah-i-Kotvalley - and into the mouth of a buzz saw. They were about to pay a bloody price for strategic, high-level miscalculations that underestimated the enemy's strength and willingness to fight.

Investigative journalist Matthew Cole tells the story of the most lauded unit, SEAL Team 6, revealing a troubling pattern of war crimes and the deep moral rot beneath authorized narratives. From their origins in World War II, the SEALs have trained to be specialized killers with short missions. As the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan became the endless War on Terror, their violence spiraled out of control. Code Over Country details the high-level decisions that unleashed the SEALs’ carnage and the coverups that prevented their crimes from coming to light.

In the predawn hours of March 4, 2002, just below the 10,000-foot peak of a mountain in eastern Afghanistan, a fierce battle raged. Outnumbered by Al Qaeda fighters, Air Force Combat Controller John Chapman and a handful of SEALs struggled to take the summit in a desperate bid to find a lost teammate. Chapman, leading the charge, was gravely wounded in the initial assault. Believing he was dead, his SEAL leader ordered a retreat. Chapman regained consciousness, alone with the enemy closing in on three sides, beginning the most difficult and exceptional fight of his life.

Enrique Prado found himself in his first firefight at age seven. The son of a middle-class Cuban family caught in the midst of the Castro Revolution, his family fled their war-torn home for the hope of a better life in America. Fifty years later, the Cuban refugee retired from the Central Intelligence Agency as the CIA equivalent of a two-star general. Black Ops is the story of Ric’s legendary career that spanned two eras, the Cold War and the Age of Terrorism.

In 1984, Michael Vickers took charge of the CIA’s secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. After inheriting a strategy aimed at imposing costs on the Soviets for their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Vickers transformed the covert campaign into an all-out effort to help the Afghan resistance win their war. More than any other American, he was responsible for the outcome in Afghanistan that led to the end of the Cold War. In By All Means Available, Vickers recounts his remarkable career.

Resuming the narrative of his Pulitzer Prize-winning Ghost Wars, best-selling author Steve Coll tells for the first time the epic and enthralling story of America's intelligence, military, and diplomatic efforts to defeat Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 9/11.

From Pulitzer Prize finalist Annie Jacobsen, the untold story of the CIA's secret paramilitary units.

Wanted: Volunteers for Project Delta. Will guarantee you a medal. A body bag. Or both. With this call to arms, Charlie Beckwith revolutionized American armed combat. Beckwith's acclaimed memoir tells the story of Delta Force as only its maverick creator could tell it - from the bloody baptism of Vietnam to the top-secret training grounds of North Carolina to political battles in the upper levels of the Pentagon itself. This is the heart-pounding, first-person insider's view of the missions that made Delta Force legendary.

Delta Force—the US Army’s most elite top-secret strike force. They dominate the modern battlefield, but you won’t hear about their heroics on CNN. No headlines can reveal their top-secret missions, and no book has ever taken readers inside—until now. Here, a founding member of Delta Force takes us behind the veil of secrecy and into the action to reveal the never-before-told story of First Special Forces Operational Detachment-D (Delta Force).

Discover the definitive history of DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Project Agency, in this Pulitzer Prize finalist from the author of the New York Times best seller Area 51. No one has ever written the history of the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful, and most controversial military science R&D agency. In the first-ever history about the organization, New York Times best-selling author Annie Jacobsen draws on inside sources, exclusive interviews, private documents, and declassified memos to paint a picture of DARPA, or "the Pentagon's brain".

Southern Afghanistan was slipping away. That was clear to then-Captain Rusty Bradley as he began his third tour of duty there in 2006. The Taliban and their allies were infiltrating everywhere, poised to reclaim Kandahar Province, their strategically vital onetime capital. To stop them, the NATO coalition launched Operation Medusa, the largest offensive in its history. The battlefield was the Panjwayi Valley, a densely packed warren of walled compounds that doubled neatly as enemy bunkers.

In this unprecedented audiobook, a paramilitary contractor with more than two decades of experience gives us a firsthand look into the secret lives of America's private warriors and their highly covert work around the world. Author Jamie Smith has planned and executed hundreds of missions on behalf of government agencies and private industry in some of the world's most dangerous hot spots - and lived to tell the tale.

For more than half a century, Special Forces and CIA legend Billy Waugh dedicated his life to tracking down and eliminating America's most virulent enemies. Operating from the darkest shadows and most desolate corners of the world, he made his mark in many of the most important operations in the annals of US Spec Ops. He spent seven and a half years behind enemy lines in Vietnam as a member of a covert group of elite commandos.

From the streets of Iraq to the mountaintops of Afghanistan and to the third floor of Osama Bin Laden's compound, operator Mark Owen of the U.S. Naval Special Warfare Development Group - commonly known as SEAL Team Six - has been a part of some of the most memorable special operations in history, as well as countless missions that never made headlines. No Easy Day puts listeners alongside Owen and the other handpicked members of the 24-man team as they train for the biggest mission of their lives.

This dramatic true story reveals the secret mission of the eight members of the CIA’s Team Alpha, the first Americans to be dropped behind enemy lines in Afghanistan after 9/11.

This powerful and inspirational story is as much of a self-help book as it is an edge of your seat military memoir. Warrior's Creed reveals a motivating and mindful approach to overcoming the odds, facing the impossible, and finding mercy and grace in the aftermath.

In April 2021, an urgent call was placed from a Special Forces operator serving overseas. The message was clear: Get Nezam out of Afghanistan now. Nezam was part of the Afghan National Army’s first group of American-trained commandos; he passed through Fort Bragg’s legendary Q course and served alongside the US Special Forces for over a decade. But Afghanistan’s government and army were on the edge of collapse, and Nezam was receiving threatening texts from the Taliban.

We live in the age of disinformation - of organized deception. Spy agencies pour vast resources into hacking, leaking, and forging data, often with the goal of weakening the very foundation of liberal democracy: trust in facts. Thomas Rid, a renowned expert on technology and national security, was one of the first to sound the alarm, even before the 2016 election. But this is not new. The story of modern disinformation begins with the clash between communism and capitalism after the Russian Revolution.

In this fascinating foray into the centuries-old relationship between science and military power, acclaimed astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson and writer-researcher Avis Lang examine how the methods and tools of astrophysics have been enlisted in the service of war. "The overlap is strong, and the knowledge flows in both directions," say the authors, because astrophysicists and military planners care about many of the same things: multi-spectral detection, ranging, tracking, imaging, high ground, nuclear fusion, and access to space. Tyson and Lang call it a "curiously complicit" alliance.

At 5:12 am on April 18, 1906, a 7.9 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco, catching most of the city asleep. For approximately forty-eight seconds, shock waves buckled streets, shattered water mains, collapsed buildings, crushed hundreds of residents to death, and trapped many alive. Matthew Davenport draws on letters, diaries, unpublished memoirs, and previously unearthed archival records, as well as interviews with engineers and geologists, to combine history and science to tell the dramatic true story of one of the greatest disasters in American history.

The USS Cowpens and her crew weren’t your typical heroes. She was a flattop that the US Navy initially didn’t want, with a captain nearly scapegoated for the loss of his last command, pilots who self-trained on the planes they would fly into combat, and sailors that had been in uniform barely longer than the ship had been afloat. Despite their humble origins, Cowpens and her band of second-string reservists and citizen sailors served with distinction, fighting in nearly every major carrier operation from 1943 to 1945, including the Battles of the Philippine Sea and Leyte Gulf.

A stunning memoir from the astronaut who spent a record-breaking year aboard the International Space Station - a candid account of his remarkable voyage, of the journeys off the planet that preceded it, and of his colorful formative years. A natural storyteller and modern-day hero, Kelly has a message of hope for the future that will inspire for generations to come. Here, in his personal story, we see the triumph of the human imagination, the strength of the human will, and the boundless wonder of the galaxy.

The Pax Romana has long been shorthand for the empire’s golden age. Stretching from Caledonia to Arabia, Rome ruled over a quarter of the world’s population. It was the wealthiest and most formidable state in the history of humankind. Pax is a captivating narrative history of Rome at the height of its power. From the gilded capital to realms beyond the frontier, historian Tom Holland shows ancient Rome in all its glory

Spector reassesses US and Japanese strategy and offers some provocative interpretations. He shows that the dual advance across the Pacific by MacArthur and Nimitz was less a product of strategic calculation and more a pragmatic solution to bureaucratic, doctrinal, and public relations problems facing the Army and Navy. He also argues that Japan made its fatal error not in the Midway campaign but in abandoning its offensive strategy after that defeat and allowing itself to be drawn into a war of attrition.

Beginning on August 17, 1942, American heavy bomber crews of the Eighth Air Force took off for combat in the hostile skies over occupied Europe. The final price was staggering. 4,300 B-17s and B-24s failed to return; nearly 21,000 men were taken prisoner or interned in a neutral country, and a further 17,650 made the ultimate sacrifice. Luck of the Draw is more than a war story. It’s the incredible, inspiring story of Frank Murphy, one of the few survivors from the 100th Bombardment Group, who cheated death for months in a German POW camp.

In The Field of Blood, Joanne B. Freeman recovers the long-lost story of physical violence on the floor of the US Congress. Drawing on an extraordinary range of sources, she shows that the Capitol was rife with conflict in the decades before the Civil War. Legislative sessions were often punctuated by mortal threats, canings, flipped desks, and all-out slugfests. When debate broke down, congressmen drew pistols and waved Bowie knives. One representative even killed another in a duel. Many were beaten and bullied in an attempt to intimidate them into compliance, particularly on the issue of slavery.

Founded in London in 1717 as a way of binding men in fellowship, Freemasonry proved so addictive that within two decades it had spread across the globe. Masonic influence became pervasive. Under George Washington, the Craft became a creed for the new American nation. Masonic networks held the British empire together. Under Napoleon, the Craft became a tool of authoritarianism and then a cover for revolutionary conspiracy. Both the Mormon Church and the Sicilian mafia owe their origins to Freemasonry.

An unforgettable firsthand account of a people's response to genocide and what it tells us about humanity. This remarkable audiobook chronicles what has happened in Rwanda and neighboring states since 1994, when the Rwandan government called on everyone in the Hutu majority to murder everyone in the Tutsi minority.

For the last 50 years, the trees of the boreal forest have been moving north. The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming planet from Norway to Siberia, Alaska to Greenland, to meet the scientists, residents, and trees confronting huge geological changes.

The Unexpected Spy is the riveting story of Walder's tenure in the CIA and, later, the FBI. In high-security, steel-walled rooms in Virginia, Walder watched al-Qaeda members with drones as President Bush looked over her shoulder and CIA Director George Tenet brought her donuts. She tracked chemical terrorists and searched the world for Weapons of Mass Destruction. She created a chemical terror chart that someone in the White House altered to convey information she did not have or believe, leading to the Iraq invasion.