This book reveals the intertwined odysseys of four U.S. Marines and a U.S. Navy carrier pilot during World War II; each served in a different part of the war, but their respective duties required every ounce of their courage and strength to defeat an enemy who preferred suicide to surrender.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A brilliant storyteller, a master of sarcasm, and a hallucinatory stylist whose obsession with the impress of the past on the present binds him to Southern literary tradition.”—The Boston Globe 
 
Pat Conroy’s great success as a writer has always been intimately linked with the exploration of his family history. As the oldest of seven children...

A memoir from a Vietnam soldier whose own injuries and the horrors of the war around him cause him to adopt marijuana as an escape mechanism, which in turn leads to an arrest and court martial.

Matt Young joined the Marine Corps at age eighteen. The teenage wasteland he fled followed him to the training bases charged with making him a Marine. Matt survived the training and then not one, not two, but three deployments to Iraq. Visceral, ironic, self-lacerating, and ultimately redemptive, Young's story drops us unarmed into Marine Corps culture and lays bare the absurdism of 21st-century war, the manned-up vulnerability of those on the front...

In this companion book to the HBO series on the war in the Pacific, historian Hugh Ambrose focuses on five American soldiers who each took an active role in the difficult and costly--in terms of lives--campaign to reach the Japanese mainland. Ambrose recounts key battles--Guadalcanal, Midway, Okinawa, and the lesser-known Peleliu--and he provides a soldier's eye view of the events, conveying the great valor and sacrifices of those in uniform.

Not even old enough to drink, Corporal Savannah Cannon is a young enlisted United States Marine deployed to support Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2010. As a tactical data networking specialist, she is sent away from everyone she knows and attached to a Regimental Combat Team where women are not allowed to repair communications. Her experiences over the next few months shed light on the unique and difficult positions women are placed...

"Rob Kugler's A Dog Named Beautiful is an uplifting and unforgettable story of a US Marine, his extraordinary dog, and the road trip of a lifetime."--Provided by publisher.

Although more than 400 Navajos served in the military during World War II as top-secret code talkers, even those fighting shoulder to shoulder with them were not told of their covert function. And, after the war, the Navajos were forbidden to speak of their service until 1968, when the code was finally declassified. Of the original twenty- nine Navajo code talkers, only two are still alive. Chester Nez is one of them. In this memoir, the eighty-nine-year-old...

"A WWII hero's courageous, inspiring true story of survival against all odds after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis"--