In this book, the author, deadliest sniper in U.S. history tracks down and shoots the ten most important American firearms, from a flintlock rifle to a Colt revolver to the latest high-tech weapon he used as a Navy SEAL. He uses these guns as a window on United States history, making the sweeping argument that the American story has been tied to and shaped by the gun. He revisits turning points in American history, including the single sniper shot...

Autumn 1944. World War II is nearly over in Europe but is escalating in the Pacific, where American soldiers face an opponent who will go to any length to avoid defeat. The Japanese army follows the samurai code of Bushido, stipulating that surrender is a form of dishonor. This book takes readers to the bloody tropical-island battlefields of Peleliu and Iwo Jima and to the embattled Philippines, where General Douglas MacArthur has made a triumphant...

For over 2,500 years, the forbidding territory of Afghanistan has served as a vital crossroads for armies and has witnessed history-shaping clashes between civilizations: Greek, Arab, Mongol, and Tartar, and, in more recent times, British, Russian, and American. When U.S. troops entered Afghanistan in the weeks following September 11, 2001, they overthrew the Afghan Taliban regime and sent the terrorists it harbored on the run. But America's initial...

New York Times best-selling author Rick Atkinson won the Pulitzer Prize for his riveting WWII chronicle An Army at Dawn. In The Day of Battle, he shifts his focus from northern Africa to the southern European front. Beginning with the invasion of Sicily, Allied forces worked their way through fierce fighting, cutting a swath through enemy lines on their way to Rome and victory.

"From a preeminent presidential historian comes a groundbreaking and often surprising saga of America's wartime chief executives Ten years in the research and writing, Presidents of Waris a fresh, magisterial, intimate look at a procession of American leaders as they took the nation into conflict and mobilized their country for victory. It brings us into the room as they make the most difficult decisions that face any President, at times sending hundreds...

The liberation of Europe and the destruction of the Third Reich is an epic story of courage and calamity, of miscalculation and enduring triumph. In this first volume of the Liberation Trilogy, Rick Atkinson shows why no modern reader can understand the ultimate victory of the Allied powers without a grasp of the great drama that unfolded in North Africa in 1942 and 1943. Opening with the daring amphibious invasion in November 1942, An Army at Dawn...

"--This ambitious four-DVD set blends a variety of visuals, including animated maps, film clips, costumed reenactments, period paintings, and location shots, with straightforward narration to examine the origins and outcomes of each conflict"--Container.

When Captain Ken McCoy is asked to leave the Corps after his report on probable North Korean hostilities displeases his superiors, he is hired by the CIA and must join with other veterans to retaliate against Korea's invasion of the 38th parallel.