Akron Public Library

Jocko Willink is author of Extreme Ownership, a decorated retired Navy SEAL officer, and co-founder of Echelon Front, where he is a leadership instructor, speaker, and executive coach. Jocko spent 20 years in the U.S. Navy SEAL Teams, starting as an enlisted SEAL and rising through the ranks to become a SEAL officer. As commander of SEAL Team Three's Task Unit Bruiser during the battle of Ramadi, he orchestrated SEAL operations that helped the "Ready...

This work is a powerful account of war and homecoming. The author served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. Days and nights he and his team, his brothers, would venture forth in heavily armed convoys from their Forward Operating Base to engage in the nerve-racking yet strangely exhilarating work of either disarming the deadly improvised explosive devices that had been...

The story of a wild dog who befriended Marine Major Brian Dennis in Iraq, and, when they were separated, trekked seventy miles through the desert winter to rejoin his friend.

The author, a Navy SEAL, returned from his star-crossed mission in Afghanistan with his bones shattered and his heart broken. So many had given their lives to save him, and he would have readily done the same for them. As he recuperated, he wondered why he and others, from America's founding to today, had been willing to sacrifice everything, including themselves, for the sake of family, nation, and freedom. In this book, we follow the author to...

Ryan Smithson joined the Army Reserve when he was seventeen. Two years later, he was deployed to Iraq as an Army engineer. In this extraordinary and harrowing memoir, readers march along one GI's tour of duty. Smithson avoids writing either prowar propaganda or an antimilitary polemic, providing instead a fascinating, often humorous-and occasionally devastating-account of the motivations and life of a contemporary soldier.

Over a thirty-five-year career, Daniel Bolger rose through the army infantry to become a three-star general, commanding in both theaters of the U.S. campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan. He participated in meetings with top-level military and civilian players, where strategy was made and managed. At the same time, he regularly carried a rifle alongside rank-and-file soldiers in combat actions, unusual for a general. Now, as a witness to all levels of...

The Dichotomy of Leadership gives insight into the importance that balance plays in leadership, from the perspective of two former U.S Navy Seals.

At age twenty-five, Michael Hastings arrived in Baghdad to cover the war in Iraq for Newsweek. He had at his disposal a little Hemingway romanticism and all the apparatus of a twenty-first-century reporter-cell phones, high-speed Internet access, digital video cameras, fixers, drivers, guards, and translators. In startling detail, he describes the chaos, the violence, the never-ending threats of bomb and mortar attacks, and the front lines that can...

"For nearly a decade Brett Velicovich was at the center of America's new warfare: using unmanned aerial vehicles--drones--to take down the world's deadliest terrorists across the globe. One of an elite handful in the entire military with the authority to select targets and issue death orders, he worked in concert with the full human and technological network of American intelligence--assets, analysts, spies, informants--and the military's elite operatives,...

When Lieutenant Commander Heidi Kraft's twin son and daughter were fifteen months old, she was deployed to Iraq. A clinical psychologist in the US Navy, Kraft's job was to uncover the wounds of war that a surgeon would never see. She put away thoughts of her children back home, acclimated to the sound of incoming rockets, and learned how to listen to the most traumatic stories a war zone has to offer. One of the toughest lessons of her deployment...