Veteran's Day Book Display: Non-Fiction

An epic narrative history that chronicles, for the first time, the experience of America's Vietnam veterans who returned home to fight a different kind of war. The courageous Americans who served in Vietnam fought two wars: one on the other side of the world and one when they returned home...

Joe Carroll was an Air Force lieutenant general who chose Vietnamese targets for American bombs. Joe's son James began adulthood by fulfilling his father's abandoned dream of joining the priesthood. But soon a father's hopes for his son--and a son's peace with his father--were ruined, yet another casualty of a war that tore apart so many families along generational lines.

Provides a brief history of Vietnam, a chronology of military and political events during the war years, and five hundred entries on people, battles, weapons, issues, and concepts related to the war.

Drafted in October 1968, John A. Nesser left behind his wife and young son to fight in the controversial Vietnam War. In this stirring memoir, he recalls in detail the exhausting missions in the mountainous jungle, the terror of walking into an ambush, the dull-edged anxiety that filled quiet days, and the steady fear of being shot out of the sky. The accounts are richly illustrated with Nesser's own photographs of the military firebases and aircraft, the landscapes, and the people he encountered.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling coauthor of And the Sea Will Tell comes Hero Found: the incredible but true story of Dieter Dengler, the only pilot to escape captivity from a POW camp in the Laotian jungle during the Vietnam War. This amazing story of triumph over seemingly insurmountable odds has been filmed by Werner Herzog as both a documentary (Little Dieter Needs to Fly) and a motion picture (Rescue Dawn, starring Christian Bale), and now receives its book treatment from Bruce Henderson, who served with Dengler in Vietnam.

This collection of stories tells of the extraordinary incidents that occurred to the ships and men who kept Britain's vital maritime lifeline open in the North Atlantic, the Arctic Seas and other oceans during World War II.

The amazing experiences of Americas proud sailors from the birth of the US Navy to todays operations around the globe From the highly successful Greatest Stories Ever Told series--over 150000 in print

On October 24, 1944, more than two hundred American soldiers realized they were surrounded by German infantry deep in the mountain forest of eastern France. As their dwindling food, ammunition, and medical supplies ran out, the American commanding officer turned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team to achieve what other units had failed to do. Honor Before Glory is the story of the 442nd, a segregated unit of Japanese American citizens, commanded by white officers, that finally rescued the "lost battalion."

The vivid voices that speak from these pages are not those of historians or scholars. They are the voices of ordinary men and women who experienced--and helped to win--the most devastating war in history, in which between 50 and 60 million lives were lost.

With an extraordinary collection of details, Goodwin masterfully weaves together a striking number of story lines--Eleanor and Franklin's marriage and remarkable partnership, Eleanor's life as First Lady, and FDR's White House and its impact on America as well as on a world at war. Goodwin effectively melds these details and stories into an unforgettable and intimate portrait of Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt and of the time during which a new, modern America was born.

These women--whose stories span 1932 to 1945, the last year of the war--served in dangerous roles as spies, medics, journalists, resisters, and saboteurs. Seven of them were captured and imprisoned by the Japanese, enduring brutal conditions. Author Kathryn J. Atwood provides appropriate context and framing for teens 14 and up to grapple with these harsh realities of war. Discussion questions and a guide for further study assist readers and educators in learning about this important and often neglected period of history.

Celebrated historian Winston Groom tells the uniquely American tales of George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and George Marshall, from World War I to World War II.

Drawing on government documents only declassified in 1998 by President Clinton and his personal archives, this is Fritz Kolbe's story.

Seventy-five years ago, he hit Omaha Beach with the first wave. Now Ray Lambert, ninety-eight years old, delivers one of the most remarkable memoirs of our time, a tour-de-force of remembrance evoking his role as a decorated World War II medic who risked his life to save the heroes of D-Day.

"The African-American contribution to winning World War II has never been celebrated as profoundly as in Fighting for America. In this inspirational tribute, the essential part played by black servicemen and servicewomen in that cataclysmic conflict is brought home to twenty-first-century readers."

They were the men of the now-legendary Easy Company. After almost two years of hard training, they parachuted into Normandy on DDay and, later, Operation Market Garden. They fought their way through Belgium, France, and Germany, survived overwhelming odds, liberated concentration camps, and drank a victory toast in April 1945 at Hitler's hideout in the Alps. Here, revealed for the first time, are stories of war, sacrifice and courage as experienced by one of the most revered combat units in military history.

In "On Seas of Glory" the U.S. Navy meets a storyteller worthy of its epic. John Lehman was Ronald Reagan's Secretary of the Navy, and the man most responsible for rejuvenating the service during the 1980s. Lehman here gives a sweeping narrative of the Navy, from the Revolutionary War to the present day, filled with the ships that dominated, equally titanic personalities, and the battles that made history. Lehman profiles naval greats -- from John Paul Jones and David Glasgow Farragut to Commodore George Dewey and FDR -- but also gives credit to the lesser-known sailors who have made the U.S. Navy the mightiest in the world. "On Seas of Glory" uses the diaries, memoirs, and letters of average sailors to reveal naval combat as though firsthand. A powder boy during the War of 1812 recalls running to fetch cartridges through torrents of blood; the letters of the author's own father show what it was like to survive kamikaze attacks off Okinawa at the close of World War II; and the bravery of naval pilot Tim Howard during Grenada proves the spirit of John Paul Jones is not dead. The sweeping narrative also highlights the warships

Buttigieg defied the expectations that came with his pedigree, choosing to return home to Indiana and responding to the ultimate challenge of how to revive a once-great industrial city and help steer its future in the twenty-first century. Elected at twenty-nine as the nation's youngest mayor, Pete Buttigieg immediately recognized that "great cities, and even great nations, are built through attention to the everyday." As Shortest Way Home recalls, the challenges were daunting--whether confronting gun violence, renaming a street in honor of Martin Luther King Jr., or attracting tech companies to a city that had appealed more to junk bond scavengers than serious investors. None of this is underscored more than Buttigieg's audacious campaign to reclaim 1,000 houses, many of them abandoned, in 1,000 days and then, even as a sitting mayor, deploying to serve in Afghanistan as a Navy officer. Yet the most personal challenge still awaited Buttigieg, who came out in a South Bend Tribune editorial, just before being reelected with 78 percent of the vote, and then finding Chasten Glezman, a middle-school teacher, who would become his partner for life.

THE HEART AND THE FIST shares one man's story of extraordinary leadership and service as both a humanitarian and a warrior. In a life lived at the raw edges of the human experience, Greitens has seen what can be accomplished when compassion and courage come together in meaningful service. As a Rhodes Scholar and Navy SEAL, Greitens worked alongside volunteers who taught art to street children in Bolivia and led US Marines who hunted terrorists in Iraq. He's learned from nuns who fed the destitute in one of Mother Teresa's homes for the dying in India, from aid workers who healed orphaned children in Rwanda, and from Navy SEALs who fought in Afghanistan. He excelled at the hardest military training in the world, and today he works with severely wounded and disabledveterans who are rebuilding their lives as community leaders at home. Greitens offers each of us a new way of thinking about living a meaningful life. We learn that to win any war, even those we wage against ourselves; to create and obtain lasting peace; to save a life; and even, simply to live with purpose requires us--every one of us--to be both good and strong.

A Marine Corps combat veteran with twenty years of service describes her professional battle against gender bias in the Marines and the lessons it holds for other arenas. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel Kate Germano arrived at Parris Island convinced that if she expected more of the female recruits just coming into Corps, she could raise historically low standards for female performance and make women better Marines. One year after she took command of the Fourth Recruit Training Battalion, shooting qualifications of the women under her command equaled those of men, injuries had decreased, and unit morale had noticeably improved. Then the Marines fired her. This is the story of Germano's struggle to achieve equality of performance and opportunity for female Marines against an entrenched male-dominated status quo. Germano charges that the men above her in the chain of command were too invested in perpetuating the subordinate role of women in the Corps to allow her to prove that the female Marine can be equal to her male counterpart. She notes that the Marine Corps continues to be the only service where men and women train separately in boot camp or basic training.

In honor of the 75th Anniversary of one of the most critical battles of World War II, the popular primetime Fox News anchor of The Story with Martha MacCallum pays tribute to the heroic men who sacrificed everything at Iwo Jima to defeat the Armed Forces of Emperor Hirohito--among them, a member of her own family, Harry Gray.

On a May afternoon in 1943, an Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean and disappeared, leaving only a spray of debris and a slick of oil, gasoline, and blood. Then, on the ocean surface, a face appeared.

There was a full moon on the evening of September 22, 1943, when Pearl Witherington, age 29, parachuted into France to aid the French Resistance as a special agent for the British Special Operations Executive (SOE). Out of the 400 agents sent to France during the German occupation, 39 were women.

On the 75th anniversary of the bombing of Pearl Harbor comes a harrowing and enlightening look at the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II- from National Book Award finalist Albert Marrin.

Winner of the Pritzker Prize for Military History A New York Times Notable Book From one of our finest military historians, a monumental work that shows us at once the truly global reach of World War II and its deeply personal consequences.

A never-before-told story of Virginia Hall, the American spy who changed the course of World War II.

From the author of the international bestseller A Higher Call comes the riveting World War II story of an American tank gunner's journey into the heart of the Third Reich, where he will meet destiny in an iconic armor duel--and forge an enduring bond with his enemy. When Clarence Smoyer is assigned to the gunner's seat of his Sherman tank, his crewmates discover that the gentle giant from Pennsylvania has a hidden talent: He's a natural-born shooter.

In 1944 the OSS set out to recover more than 500 downed airmen trapped behind enemy lines in Yugoslavia. Classified for over half a century for political reasons, the full account of this unforgettable story of loyalty, self-sacrifice, and bravery is now being told for the first time.

An extraordinary journey behind the scenes of Arlington National Cemetery, Senator Tom Cotton's Sacred Duty offers an intimate and inspiring portrait of "The Old Guard," the revered U.S. Army unit whose mission is to honor our country's fallen heroes on the most hallowed ground in America. Cotton was a platoon leader with the storied 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment--The Old Guard--between combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mary Roach explores the science of keeping human beings intact, awake, sane, uninfected, and uninfested in the bizarre and extreme circumstances of war.

A gritty, no-holds-barred behind-the-scenes memoir of life as one of the world's top snipers.

The former VA secretary describes his fight to save veteran health care from partisan politics and how his efforts were ultimately derailed by a small group of unelected officials appointed by the Trump White House.