Military

Title: Tom Clancy Presents: Act of Valor
Author: George Galdorisi and Dick Couch
Genre: Thriller/Mystery
Reviewer: Barbara Peacock

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): B006JSSFPE

Behind the secret missions. Beneath the official stories. Beyond the brotherhood…

The Navy SEALs have been fighting terrorists around the world for more than a decade. And for all that time, the Bandito Platoon from SEAL Team Seven have been on continuous combat rotation. Now they have drawn a shipboard assignment off Central America—an easy day.

But for a Navy SEAL, the only easy day was yesterday.

Act of Valor goes deep into the secret world of today’s most elite and highly trained group of warriors. When the rescue of a kidnapped CIA operative leads to the discovery of a deadly terrorist plot against the United States, a team of SEALs is dispatched on a worldwide manhunt. As the men of Bandito Platoon race to stop a coordinated attack that could kill and wound thousands of American civilians, they must balance their commitments to country, Team, and their families back home.

But each time they accomplish their mission, a new piece of intelligence reveals another shocking twist to the plot, which stretches from Chechnya to the Philippines and from the Ukraine to Somalia. The widening operation sends the SEALs across the globe as they track a terrorist ring to the U.S.-Mexico border—where they engage in an epic firefight with potentially unimaginable consequences for America…

In a powerful story of global anti-terrorism—inspired by real-life missions, Act of Valor combines stunning combat scenes, up-to-the minute battlefield technology, and heart-pumping emotion for the ultimate in action adventure.

Title: DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle
Author: Doug Bradley
Genre: Short Story Collection
Reviewer: Jim Greenwald

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0985338814

DEROS Vietnam: Dispatches from the Air-Conditioned Jungle presents a unique, fictional montage of the war, and postwar, experiences of Vietnam support troops. Structurally based on Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, DEROS Vietnam (the acronym stands for Date Eligible for Return from Over Seas) is a riveting collection of 16 short stories and 16 interlinears about the GIs who battled boredom, racial tensions, the military brass, drugs, alcohol—and occasionally the enemy. From cooks and correspondents to clerks and comptrollers, DEROS Vietnam distills the essence of life for soldiers in the rear during the war and, later, back home in a divided America. Vietnam veteran Doug Bradley, a former Army journalist who served in the air-conditioned jungle at U. S. Army Headquarters near Saigon in 1970-71, tells these compelling stories with wit, intensity, and empathy. In doing so, he provides a gateway to a Vietnam experience that has been largely ignored and whose reverberations still echo across America.

Title: My True Course: Dutch Van Kirk Northumberland to Hiroshima
Author: Suzanne Simon Dietz
Genre: Biography
Reviewer: Charlene Rubush

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0692016767

He looked like the boy next door, a Depression-era kid. The now ninety-year-old gentleman with a remarkable memory and a sharp wit became in 2011 the only living crewman from the Silverplate Boeing B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945.

A debate continued for more than half a century with his former commanding officer, Paul Tibbets, until his death about how Dutch Van Kirk came to navigate the Enola Gay from Tinian to Hiroshima. The answer is part of Dutch's biographical chronicle.

The navigator of the Enola Gay's biography is an authentic "greatest generation" story told through his unedited letters to and from home, Van Kirk's vignettes from his Army Air Corps training through Europe, Africa, and the Pacific to the first atomic strike in history.

Title: Mead's Trek
Author: Tom Gauthier
Genre: Historical Fiction
Reviewer: John Monteith

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 0984663800

Marine Corps Major Amos Mead, a lawyer by education and a Special Agent for the FBI by trade, is recruited as an agent in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in early 1943. His latest mission: Assess the level of cooperation among the factions conducting the war against the Empire of Japan in the Asian Theater of Operations. Known only to a few, additional orders direct Major Mead to seek out a powerful Asian leader and investigate the possibility of the Vice President of the United States being involved in secret negotiations with Vietnamese Communists for a post-war alliance.

En route to his assignment, unexpected life-threatening events befall Mead's team. The mission then takes on a new urgency—one of survival. Mead and his team are forced onto a trek in an enemy infested jungle that will test the limits of their mental toughness and physical endurance.

Title: The Team
Author: David M. Salkin
Genre: Historical Fiction
Reviewer: Terry Shoptaugh

ISBN (links go to the MWSA Amazon store): 1479275247

Enrique Antonio Vega runs one of the largest cocaine cartels in South America, deep in the rain forest of the Tri-Border region. With a tribe of cannibalistic Guarani Natives as his personal army, he operates with impunity. That is, until he takes part in the murder of the U.S. Ambassador. When a small army is needed, but the operation must remain covert, the President calls on The Team—a very special ensemble of Marines, Rangers, SEALs and CIA operatives who make up one of the most lethal fighting forces in the US arsenal. Based loosely on a true operation run in Southeast Asia in the sixties, The Team is guaranteed to keep you turning pages!