Elite Forces

1972. The Munich Olympics. Palestinian members of the Black September group murder 11 Israeli athletes. Nine hundred million people watch the crisis unfold on television, witnessing a tragedy that inaugurates the modern age of terror.

LRPs were all volunteers. They were in the spine-tingling, brain-twisting, nerve-wracking business of Long Range Patrolling. They varied in age from eighteen to thirty. These men operated in precision movements, like walking through a jungle quietly and being able to tell whether a man or an animal is moving through the brush without seeing the cause of movement. They could sit in an ambush for hours without moving a muscle except to ease the safety off the automatic weapon in their hand at the first sign of trouble. These men were good because they had to be to survive.

The Delta Force is probably the most secretive military unit in existence in the world today. The USA government still denies that they exist. The men who serve in this unit live in the shadows and stay out of the spotlight. These men are true warriors, and only the best of the best get to serve in "The Unit". The Delta Force recruits from within all arms of the US military, and 99 percent comes from other Special Forces units like the Green Berets and Army Rangers. In this book, you will get an inside look into the Delta Force.

In combating terror, America can no longer depend on its conventional military superiority and the use of sophisticated technology. More than ever, we need men like those of the Army Special Forces---the legendary Green Berets. In Chosen Soldier, Dick Couch draws on nearly a year spent at Special Forces training facilities and offers an unprecedented view of the education of these men.

On October 3, 1993, Task Force Ranger was dispatched to seize two high-profile lieutenants of a Somali warlord. Special Forces troops were transported by ground vehicles and helicopters, and the mission was meant to be over within the hour. They quickly found themselves under heavy fire, and two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down. With a hastily organized relief column many hours away, the American troops faced a desperate battle for survival.

From Afghanistan and Pakistan to Yemen, Somalia, and beyond, Scahill speaks to the CIA agents, mercenaries, and elite Special Operations Forces operators who populate the dark side of American war-fighting. He goes deep into al Qaeda-held territory in Yemen and walks the streets of Mogadishu with CIA-backed warlords. We also meet the survivors of US night raids and drone strikes - including families of US citizens targeted for assassination by their own government - who reveal the human consequences of the dirty wars the United States struggles to keep hidden.

Liddell Hart stressed movement, flexibility, surprise. He saw that in most military campaigns dislocation of the enemy's psychological and physical balance is prelude to victory. This dislocation results from a strategic indirect approach. Reflect for a moment on the results of direct confrontation (trench war in World War I) versus indirect dislocation (Blitzkreig in World II). Liddell Hart is also tonic for business and political planning: Just change the vocabulary and his concepts fit.

In a remote enemy-held valley in Afghanistan, a Special Forces team planned to scale a steep mountain to surprise and capture a terrorist leader. But before they found the target, the target found them. The team was caught in a deadly ambush that threatened not only their lives but the entire mission. The elite soldiers fought huddled for hours on a small rock ledge as rocket-propelled grenades and heavy machine-gun fire rained down on them.

Good to Go is Constance's powerful, firsthand account of his three tours of duty as a member of America's most elite, razor-sharp stealth fighting force. It is a breathtaking memoir of harrowing missions and covert special-ops - from the floodplains of the Mekong Delta to the beaches of the South China Sea - that places the listener in the center of bloody ambushes and devastating firefights. But Constance's extraordinary adventure goes even farther - beyond 'Nam.

The selection began with 35 girls. Now, with the group narrowed down to the Elite, the competition to win Prince Maxon's love is fiercer than ever. The closer America gets to the crown, the more she struggles to figure out where her heart truly lies. Each moment she spends with Maxon is like a fairy tale, filled with breathless, glittering romance. But whenever she sees her first love, Aspen, standing guard, she's swept up in longing for the life they'd planned to share.

It is difficult to find another soldier's story to equal Captain Darrell Watt's in terms of time spent on the field of battle and challenges faced. Even by the lofty standards of the SAS and Special Forces, one has to look far to find anyone who can match his record of resilience and valor in the face of such daunting odds and with resources so paltry. In the fight, he showed himself to be a military maestro. After 12 years in the cauldron of war, his cause slipped from beneath him, and Rhodesia gave way to Zimbabwe.

In the late summer of 1944, 80 British Special Air Service (SAS) soldiers undertook a covert commando raid, parachuting behind enemy lines into the Vosges Mountains in occupied France to sabotage Nazi-held roads, railways, and ammo dumps, and assassinate high-ranking German officers, undermining the final stand of Hitler's Third Reich. Despite their successes, more than half the men were captured, tortured, and executed. After the war ended, a top-secret black ops unit was formed to hunt down the SS commanders who had murdered their special forces comrades....

The Navy has the SEALS, and the Army has the Green Berets. They are masters of asymmetrical warfare, trained to immerse themselves in hostile territory, sleeping near their enemies and building relationships with people who may want to kill them. Retired lieutenant colonel Tony Schwalm knows this group well, because he is one of them and he trained them. In The Guerrilla Factory, he provides an unbelievably gripping inside look into the grueling training that every army officer must endure to become one of America's elite Green Berets.

In December of 1943, as Nazi forces sprawled around the world and the future of civilization hung in the balance, a group of highly trained US and Canadian soldiers from humble backgrounds was asked to do the impossible: capture a crucial Nazi stronghold perched atop stunningly steep cliffs. The men were a rough-and-ready group, assembled from towns nested in North America's most unforgiving terrain, where many of them had struggled through the Great Depression relying on canny survival skills and the fearlessness of youth.

Kandahar. The ancient desert crossroads and, as of fall of 2001, ground zero for the Taliban and al-Qa'ida in southern Afghanistan. In the northern part of the country, the US-supported Northern Alliance has made progress on the battlefield, but in the south, the country is still under the Taliban's bloody hold and al-Qa'ida continues to operate there. With no "Southern Alliance" for the US to support, a new strategy is needed if victory is to be achieved. Veteran CIA officer Duane Evans is dispatched to Pakistan to "get something going in the South." Foxtrot in Kandahar is his story.

An updated edition of the blockbuster best-selling leadership book that took America and the world by storm, two US Navy SEAL officers who led the most highly decorated special operations unit of the Iraq War demonstrate how to apply powerful leadership principles from the battlefield to business and life.

St Nazaire, 1.22 a.m. 28th March 1942. HMS Cambeltown, supported by seventeen wooden motor launches, approached the German-held port intending to smash into the lock gates of the largest dock in the world; the Normandie Dock-Operation Chariot was in full swing. Against vicious Nazi gunfire, the commandos stormed the docks, and within half an hour, succeeded in their chief demolition objectives, but in the heat of battle, the Royal Navy had lost nearly all of its small vessels intended to carry them back to England.

In America's new war, the first guns in the fight are special operations forces, including the Navy SEALs, specially trained warriors who operate with precision, swiftness, and lethal force. In the constantly shifting war on terror, SEAL units - small in number, flexible, stealthy, and efficient - are more vital than ever to America's security as they take the battle to an elusive enemy around the globe. This is essential listening for anyone who wants to know what goes into the making of America's best warriors.

On a scorching September day in 1942, the Special Air Service (SAS), a special forces unit of the British Army, pulled off one of the most daring, top-secret ruses of the Second World War. The plan (sanctioned by Churchill): cover a grueling 2,000 miles of the Sahara desert to attack German general Erwin Rommel's seemingly impregnable port fortress in North Africa from the rear to break free and arm more than 30,000 Allied POWs.

Britain's Special Air Service - or SAS - was the brainchild of David Stirling, a young, gadabout aristocrat whose aimlessness in early life belied a remarkable strategic mind. Where most of his colleagues looked at a battlefield map of World War II's African theater and saw a protracted struggle with Rommel's desert forces, Stirling saw an opportunity: Given a small number of elite, well-trained men, he could parachute behind enemy lines and sabotage their airplanes and war matériel.