True War

Today’s follower of Jesus exists at a moment when our desires, longings, and wants are being weaponized against us by cultural, spiritual, and relational forces. “Follow your heart” and “You do you” have become our moment's mantras. The Gift of Thorns, by A. J. Swoboda, addresses the core human problem: What in the world do I do with my desire?

Before Cleopatra, Before Caesar – A Tale of Two Titans Locked in History’s Fiercest Rivalry! Herodotus himself recounts this extraordinary story, set five centuries before Cleopatra’s rise. At its heart lies a breathtaking duel of wills: Queen Tomyris, the indomitable ruler of the nomadic Massagetae, and Cyrus the Great, the legendary King of Kings who sought to conquer the known world. Their fateful clash would echo across the ages, shaping the very foundations of history. Step into an epic of passion, betrayal, and vengeance that redefines the boundaries of courage and ambition. In ...

April 2004: Dan Mills and his platoon of snipers flew into Southern Iraq, part of an infantry battalion sent to win hearts and minds. They were soon fighting for their lives. Back home we were told they were peacekeeping. But there was no peace to keep. Because within days of arriving in theatre, Mills and his men were caught up in the longest, most sustained firefight British troops had faced for over 50 years.

As smoke billows skyward from Pearl Harbor, Japan throws its full military might against the outnumbered and under-equipped Filipino forces. Admiral Hart sends his US Asiatic Fleet south, to the safety of Allied waters. When remnants of PBY Patrol Wing 10 depart with the fleet, Charles Beckner, corpsman for Squadron 102, is left behind with no apparent avenue for escape.

Wilhelm Canaris was appointed by Hitler to head the Abwehr (the German secret service) 18 months after the Nazis came to power. But Canaris turned against the Fuhrer and the Nazi regime, believing that Hitler would start a war Germany could not win. In 1938 he was involved in an attempted coup, undermined by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In 1940 he sabotaged the German plan to invade England, and fed General Franco vital information that helped him keep Spain out of the war.

In June 1952 a woman was murdered by an obsessed colleague in a hotel in the South Kensington district of London. Her name was Christine Granville. That she died young was perhaps unsurprising; that she had survived the Second World War was remarkable. The daughter of a feckless Polish aristocrat and his wealthy Jewish wife, Granville would become one of Britain's most daring and highly decorated special agents.

The scrap of folded paper weighed heavy in Saskia’s pocket. The Nazi guards were patrolling the streets in ever-increasing numbers and every time she passed one on her bicycle she felt herself tense. The note she held told a story of unbelievable courage. The Nazis wanted the prisoners to give up hope inside the camp but Saskia was smuggling letters to them from their loved ones, giving them a reason to survive.

Stolen valor occurs when a person lies about receiving military decorations that he or she has in fact never earned. It has become a major societal problem that has been discussed numerous times in the news and, most recently, by the US Supreme Court. According to The New York Times, the Department of Veterans Affairs paid disability benefits to more than six hundred people falsely claiming to have been POWs in the Vietnam and Persian Gulf wars.

On May 1, 1960, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union just weeks before a peace summit between the two nations. The CIA concocted a cover story for President Eisenhower to deliver, assuring him that no one could have survived a fall from that altitude. But against all odds, pilot Francis Gary Powers emerged from the wreckage and was seized by the KGB. Award-winning journalist Monte Reel reveals how the U-2 spy program, principally devised by four men working in secret, upended the Cold War and carved a new mission for the CIA.

Amid the constant rain of German bombs and the escalating violence of World War II, British parents by the thousands chose to send their children out of the country: the wealthy, independently; the poor, through a government relocation program called CORB. In September 1940, passenger liner SS City of Benares set out in a convoy of 19 ships sailing for Canada. On board were 90 CORB children, chaperones, and crew, along with paying passengers. When the war ships escorting the Benares to safe waters peeled off, a German submarine attacked and torpedoed the Benares.

Known as Fritz to his German spy-handlers and Zig-Zag to the British secret service, Eddie Chapman was a man of many faces. While his early life was rife with petty crime, gang activity and a dishonorable discharge from the British military, Chapman’s unique skills were eventually sought out by Nazi Germany, and after convincing them he could use his criminal contacts to sabotage the English forces, he was quickly recruited.

True stories of pioneer women in Arizona and the West. Featuring: Clara Brown, a freed slave who traveled by wagon train to Colorado and became one of the richest women in the West. Sally Rooke came from Iowa to homestead in New Mexico. Also working as a telephone operator she saved a town from a flash flood. Mary Ann Tewksbury moved with her family to Pleasant Valley, Arizona where her life was changed forever by the Pleasant Valley War, Americas most deadly family feud. Pearl Cromer spent the first seven years of her life in a covered wagon. Peter and Veronica Michelbach immigrated to ...

In the fall of 1961, KGB assassin Bogdan Stashinsky defected to West Germany. After spilling his secrets to the CIA, Stashinsky was put on trial in what would be the most publicized assassination case of the entire Cold War. The publicity stirred up by the Stashinsky case forced the KGB to change its modus operandi abroad and helped end the career of Aleksandr Shelepin, one of the most ambitious and dangerous Soviet leaders.

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was arrested by the Nazis. Along with his 16-year old son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany, where a new concentration camp was being built. It was the beginning of a five-year odyssey almost without parallel. They helped build Buchenwald, young Fritz learning construction skills which would help preserve him from extermination in the coming years. But it was his bond with his father that would ultimately keep them both alive. When the 50-year old Gustav was transferred to Auschwitz - a certain death sentence - Fritz was determined to go with him.

David Burnett takes listeners into a unique world of the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment. His journey starts in a conventional army unit where he feels unfulfilled. This lack of fulfillment drives David to pursue his dream of becoming an MH-47G Chinook helicopter crew chief in the best and most secretive aviation unit in the world. David faces hurdles and set backs trying to achieve, but he is more determined than ever. He is trained and ready to deploy with the 160th, and it is nothing short of intense.

In the spring of 1942, the United States government forced 120,000 Japanese Americans from their homes in California, Oregon, Washington, and Arizona and sent them to incarceration camps across the West. Nearly 14,000 of them landed on the outskirts of Cody, Wyoming, at the base of Heart Mountain. Behind barbed wire fences, they faced racism, cruelty, and frozen winters. Trying to recreate comforts from home, they established Buddhist temples and sumo wrestling pits. Kabuki performances drew hundreds of spectators — yet there was little hope.

On a spring afternoon in 1985 in Gary, Indiana, a fifteen-year-old girl kills an elderly woman in a violent home invasion. In a city with a history of racial tensions and white flight, the girl, Paula Cooper, is Black, and her victim, Ruth Pelke, is white and a beloved Bible teacher. The press swoops in.

At the core of this ancient strategy manual is the understanding that conflict is an inescapable part of human life. Since, as Sun Tzu teaches, aggression and response in kind can lead only to destruction, we must learn to work with conflict in a more profound and effective way. Crucial to this strategic vision is knowledge - especially self-knowledge - and a view of the whole that seeks to bring conflicting views into a larger perspective.

Between October 2014 and November 2016, global terrorism expert Jessica Stern held a series of conversations in a prison cell in The Hague with Radovan Karadzic, a Bosnian Serb former politician who had been indicted for genocide and other war crimes during the Bosnian War. In My War Criminal, Jessica Stern brings to bear her incisive analysis and her own deeply considered reactions to her interactions with Karadzic, while also offering a deeply insightful and sometimes chilling account of the complex and even seductive powers of a magnetic leader.

Maybe It Will Rain follows the harrowing journey of Angel, a Vietnamese refugee, who escapes the devastation of post-war Saigon in 1975. Torn from her family during the fall of Saigon, Angel's traumatic past is marked by the suicide of her father, Dr. Tran, a prominent doctor who succumbed to the pressures of war and the betrayal of the American government. In the chaos of the war’s final days, Angel is separated from her siblings and finds herself alone, navigating a world that has been torn apart by conflict. Relocated to Texas, Angel’s story of survival unfolds as she embarks on a ...