Military Audiobooks | History

The Hill Fights: The First Battle of Khe Sanh

While the seventy-seven-day siege of Khe Sanh in early 1968 remains one of the most highly publicized clashes of the Vietnam War, scant attention has been paid to the first battle of Khe Sanh, also known as "the Hill Fights." Although this harrowing combat in the spring of 1967 provided a grisly preview of the carnage to come at Khe Sanh, few are aware of the significance of the battles, or even their existence. For more than thirty years, virtually the only people who knew about the Hill Fights were the Marines who fought them. Now, for the first time, the full story has been pieced together by acclaimed Vietnam War historian Edward F. Murphy, whose definitive analysis admirably fills this significant gap in Vietnam War literature. Based on first-hand interviews and documentary research, Murphy's deeply informed narrative history is the only complete account of the battles, their origins, and their aftermath. The Marines at the isolated Khe Sanh Combat Base were tasked with monitoring the strategically vital Ho Chi Minh trail as it wound through the jungles in nearby Laos. Dominated by high hills on all sides, the combat base had to be screened on foot by the Marine infantrymen while crack, battle-hardened NVA units roamed at will through the high grass and set up elaborate defenses on steep, sun-baked overlooks. Murphy traces the bitter account of the U.S. Marines at Khe Sanh from the outset in 1966, revealing misguided decisions and strategies from above, and capturing the chain of hill battles in stark detail. But the Marines themselves supply the real grist of the story; it is their recollections that vividly re-create the atmosphere of desperation, bravery, and relentless horror that characterized their combat. Often outnumbered and outgunned by a hidden enemy-and with buddies lying dead or wounded beside them-these brave young Americans fought on. The story of the Marines at Khe Sanh in early 1967 is a microcosm of the Corps's entire Vietnam War and goes a long way toward explaining why their casualties in Vietnam exceeded, on a Marine-in-combat basis, even the tremendous losses the Leathernecks sustained during their ferocious Pacific island battles of World War II. The Hill Fights is a damning indictment of those responsible for the lives of these heroic Marines. Ultimately, the high command failed them, their tactics failed them, and their rifles failed them. Only the Marines themselves did not fail. Under fire, trapped in a hell of sudden death meted out by unseen enemies, they fought impossible odds with awesome courage and uncommon valor.

Edward F. Murphy (Author), Charles Stransky (Narrator)

Audiobook

Platoon Leader: A Memoir of Command in Combat

A remarkable memoir of small-unit leadership and the coming of age of a young soldier in combat in Vietnam.' 'Using a lean style and a sense of pacing drawn from the tautest of novels, McDonough has produced a gripping account of his first command, a U.S. platoon taking part in the 'strategic hamlet' program. . . . Rather than present a potpourri of combat yarns. . . McDonough has focused a seasoned storyteller’s eye on the details, people, and incidents that best communicate a visceral feel of command under fire. . . . For the author’s honesty and literary craftsmanship, Platoon Leader seems destined to be read for a long time by second lieutenants trying to prepare for the future, veterans trying to remember the past, and civilians trying to understand what the profession of arms is all about.”–Army Times

James R. McDonough (Author), Joel Rooks (Narrator)

Audiobook

Blood on the Risers: An Airborne Soldier's Thirty-five Months in Vietnam

From Dak To to the Tet Offensive, John Leppelman saw it all. In three tours of duty, he made combat jumps, spent months of fruitless effort looking for the enemy, watched as his budies died because of lousy leadership and lousy weapons. He saw the war as few others did, and lives to tell about the valor and sacrifice that outlived the dead.

John Leppelman (Author), Scott Sowers (Narrator)

Audiobook

13 Cent Killers: The 5th Marine Snipers in Vietnam

“It’s not easy to stay alive with a $1,000 bounty on your head.” In 1967, a bullet cost thirteen cents, and no one gave Uncle Sam a bigger bang for his buck than the 5th Marine Regiment Sniper Platoon. So feared were these lethal marksmen that the Viet Cong offered huge rewards for killing them. Now noted Vietnam author John J. Culbertson, a former 5th Marine sniper himself, presents the riveting true stories of young Americans who fought with bolt rifles and bounties on their heads during the fiercest combat of the war, from 1967 through the desperate Tet battle for Hue in early ’68. In spotter/shooter pairs, sniper teams accompanied battle-hardened Marine rifle companies like the 2/5 on patrols and combat missions. Whether fighting their way out of a Viet Cong “kill zone” or battling superior numbers of NVA crack troops, the sniper teams were at the cutting edge in the art of jungle warfare, showing the patience, stealth, combat marksmanship, and raw courage that made the unit the most decorated regimental sniper platoon in the Vietnam War. Harrowing and unforgettable, these accounts pay tribute to the heroes who made the greatest sacrifice of all–and leave no doubt that among 5th Marine snipers uncommon valor was truly a common virtue.

John Culbertson (Author), L.J. Ganser (Narrator)

Audiobook

Whattaya Mean I Can't Kill 'Em?: A Navy SEAL in Vietnam

"We will be in enemy territory, we will be alone, and we will be a long way from help." A tour in Vietnam as a Frog--a member of the navy's Underwater Demolition Team (UDT)--wasn't challenging enough for Rad Miller. So he spent most of 1968 learning to be a SEAL, completing what is arguably the toughest warrior training in the world. By early 1969, he was back in Vietnam, ready to go deep behind enemy lines with a squad of only seven men. In his unvarnished and brutally candid account, Miller shares the raw, bloody, and courageous daily life of SEALs in Vietnam. Here are unbelievable moments in six months of missions--without a single SEAL KIA--during which his platoon ran ninety-four ops, killed forty-three of the enemy, and captured thirty-one. Stealing into hostile villages, gathering intelligence, killing or kidnapping VC officials, and surviving a tropical hell of mud, heat, leeches, and constant, life-threatening peril, Miller and his teammates undeniably earned their pay. . . .

Jr. Rad Miller, Rad Miller, Jr. (Author), Eric Conger (Narrator)

Audiobook

Worth the Fighting For: The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him

In 1999, John McCain wrote one of the most acclaimed and bestselling memoirs of the decade, Faith of My Fathers. That book ended in 1972, with McCain's release from imprisonment in Vietnam. This is the rest of his story, about his great American journey from the U.S. Navy to his electrifying run for the presidency, interwoven with heartfelt portraits of the mavericks who have inspired him through the years-Ted Williams, Theodore Roosevelt, visionary aviation proponent Billy Mitchell, Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata!, and, most indelibly, Robert Jordan. It was Jordan, Hemingway's protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls, who showed McCain the ideals of heroism and sacrifice, stoicism and redemption, and why certain causes, despite the costs, are . . . Worth the Fighting For After five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, naval aviator John McCain returned home a changed man. Regaining his health and flight-eligibility status, he resumed his military career, commanding carrier pilots and serving as the navy's liaison to what is sometimes ironically called the world's most exclusive club, the United States Senate. Accompanying Senators John Tower and Henry "Scoop" Jackson on international trips, McCain began his political education in the company of two masters, leaders whose standards he would strive to maintain upon his election to the U.S. Congress. There, he learned valuable lessons in cooperation from a good-humored congressman from the other party, Morris Udall. In 1986, McCain was elected to the U.S. Senate, inheriting the seat of another role model, Barry Goldwater. During his time in public office, McCain has seen acts of principle and acts of craven self-interest. He describes both ex-tremes in these pages, with his characteristic straight talk and humor. He writes honestly of the lowest point in his career, the Keating Five savings and loan debacle, as well as his triumphant moments-his return to Vietnam and his efforts to normalize relations between the U.S. and Vietnamese governments; his fight for campaign finance reform; and his galvanizing bid for the presidency in 2000. Writes McCain: "A rebel without a cause is just a punk. Whatever you're called-rebel, unorthodox, nonconformist, radical-it's all self-indulgence without a good cause to give your life meaning." This is the story of McCain's causes, the people who made him do it, and the meaning he found. Worth the Fighting For reminds us of what's best in America, and in ourselves.

John McCain, Mark Salter (Author), John McCain (Narrator)

Audiobook

The Cell

In New York City, a a handful of veteran FBI agents, police officers and investigative journalists had known for years that a terrorist event on the scale of 9/11 was likely. Ironically, one of the men who had been most aware of the threat posed by Osama bin Laden had recently left the FBI, where he had been following the movements of bin Laden and al Qaeda, to become Chief of Security at the World Trade Center. John O'Neill died on that awful day. The FBI's O'Neill, along with Neil Herman, reporter John Miller and very few others, had been on bin Laden's trail for years. To them, he had long been considered the most dangerous man on the planet. In The Cell: Inside the 9/11 Plot, and Why the FBI and CIA Failed to Stop It, John Miller, an award-winning journalist and co-anchor of ABC's 20/20, along with veteran reporters Michael Stone and Chris Mitchell, takes us back more than ten years to the birth of the terrorist cell that later metastasized into Qaeda's New York operation. This remarkable audiobook offers a firsthand account of what it is to be a police officer, an FBI agent or a reporter obsessed with a case few people will take seriously. The Cell contains a first-person account of Miller's face-to-face meeting with bin Laden and provides the first complete treatment to piece together what led to the events of 9/11, ultimately delivering the disturbing answer to the question: why, with all the information the intelligence community had, was no one able to stop the September 11 attacks?

John Miller, Michael Stone (Author), John Miller (Narrator)

Audiobook

A Ranger Born: A Memoir of Combat and Valor from Korea to Vietnam

Even as a boy growing up amid the green hills of rural Pennsylvania, Robert W. Black knew he was destined to become a Ranger. With their three-hundred-year history of peerless courage and independence of spirit, Rangers are a uniquely American brand of soldier, one foot in the military, one in the wilderness—and that is what fired Black’s imagination. In this searing, inspiring memoir, Black recounts how he devoted himself, body and soul, to his proud service as an elite U. S. Army Ranger in Korea and Vietnam—and what those years have taught him about himself, his country, and our future. Born at the start of the Great Depression, Black grew up on a farm at a time of great hardship but also tremendous national determination. He was a kid who toughened up fast, who learned the hard way to rely on his strength and his wits, who saw the country go to war with Germany and Japan and wept because he was too young to serve. As soon as the army would take him, Black enlisted. And as soon as he could muscle his way in, he became a Ranger. As a private first class in the 82d Airborne Division headquarters, Black withstood the humiliations of enlisted service in the peacetime brown-shoe army. When the Korean War began, he volunteered and trained to be an Airborne Ranger. In Korea, this young warrior, his mind and body bursting with the lusts of adolescence, grew up fast, literally in the line of fire. In clean, vivid prose, Black describes the hell of giving his all for a country that lacked the political resolve to give its all to a war against the North Koreans and the Chinese. If Korea was frustrating, Vietnam was maddening. The heart of this book is devoted to the years of action that Black saw in Long An Province starting in 1967. Black writes of the perplexity of collaborating with South Vietnamese officers whose culture and motives he never fully understood; he conjures up the sudden shock of the Tet Offensive and the daily horror of seeing fellow soldiers and innocent civilians slaughtered—sometimes by stray bullets, often by carelessness or treachery. Vietnam challenged everything Black had come to believe in and left him totally unprepared for the hostility he would face when he returned to a war-weary America. Written with extraordinary candor and passion, A Ranger Born is the memoir of a man who dedicated the best of his life to everything that is great and enduring about America. At once intimate in its revelations and universal in its themes, it is a book with profound relevance to our own troubled time in history.

Robert W. Black (Author), Charles Stransky (Narrator)

Audiobook

Worth the Fighting For: The Education of an American Maverick, and the Heroes Who Inspired Him

In 1999, John McCain wrote one of the most acclaimed and bestselling memoirs of the decade, Faith of My Fathers. That book ended in 1972, with McCain’s release from imprisonment in Vietnam. This is the rest of his story, about his great American journey from the U.S. Navy to his electrifying run for the presidency, interwoven with heartfelt portraits of the mavericks who have inspired him through the years—Ted Williams, Theodore Roosevelt, visionary aviation proponent Billy Mitchell, Marlon Brando in Viva Zapata!, and, most indelibly, Robert Jordan. It was Jordan, Hemingway’s protagonist in For Whom the Bell Tolls, who showed McCain the ideals of heroism and sacrifice, stoicism and redemption, and why certain causes, despite the costs, are . . . Worth the Fighting For After five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, naval aviator John McCain returned home a changed man. Regaining his health and flight-eligibility status, he resumed his military career, commanding carrier pilots and serving as the navy’s liaison to what is sometimes ironically called the world’s most exclusive club, the United States Senate. Accompanying Senators John Tower and Henry “Scoop” Jackson on international trips, McCain began his political education in the company of two masters, leaders whose standards he would strive to maintain upon his election to the U.S. Congress. There, he learned valuable lessons in cooperation from a good-humored congressman from the other party, Morris Udall. In 1986, McCain was elected to the U.S. Senate, inheriting the seat of another role model, Barry Goldwater. During his time in public office, McCain has seen acts of principle and acts of craven self-interest. He describes both extremes in these pages, with his characteristic straight talk and humor. He writes honestly of the lowest point in his career, the Keating Five savings and loan debacle, as well as his triumphant moments—his return to Vietnam and his efforts to normalize relations between the U.S. and Vietnamese governments; his fight for campaign finance reform; and his galvanizing bid for the presidency in 2000. Writes McCain: “A rebel without a cause is just a punk. Whatever you’re called—rebel, unorthodox, nonconformist, radical—it’s all self-indulgence without a good cause to give your life meaning.” This is the story of McCain’s causes, the people who made him do it, and the meaning he found. Worth the Fighting For reminds us of what’s best in America, and in ourselves.

John McCain, Mark Salter (Author), Dan Cashman (Narrator)

Audiobook

Napoleon

Paul Johnson's book is a refreshing return to a concept whose time has come once again: the Great Man theory of biography. It serves as "the greatest possible refutation of those who hold that events are governed by forces, classes, economics, and geography rather than the powerful wills of men and women". Napoleon truly was the Great Man of his age, a towering and terrible genius who managed to conquer the Continent. In Napoleon's insatiable hunger for power, Johnson sees a pragmatist constrained neither by patriotism nor by ideology, a brilliant opportunist who fulfilled his ambition in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Johnson puts Napoleon in the context of his times, but his effort seems to underline even more profoundly how Napoleon stood out above them.

Paul Johnson (Author), John Lee (Narrator)

Audiobook

Shadow Warriors: Inside the Special Forces

An unconventional war requires unconventional men—the Special Forces. The first two Commanders books, Every Man a Tiger and Into the Storm, provided masterly blends of history, biography, you-are-there narrative, insight into the practice of leadership, and plain old-fashioned storytelling. Shadow Warriors is all of that and more, a book of uncommon timeliness, for, in the words of Lieutenant General Bill Yarborough, “there are itches that only Special Forces can scratch.” Now, Carl Stiner—the second commander of SOCOM, the U.S. Special Operations Command—and Tom Clancy trace the transformation of the Special Forces from the small core of outsiders of the 1950s, through the cauldron of Vietnam, to the rebirth of the SF in the late 1980s and 1990s, and on into the new century as the bearer of the largest, most mixed, and most complex set of missions in the U.S. military. These are the first-hand accounts of soldiers fighting outside the lines: counterterrorism, raids, hostage rescues, reconnaissance, counterinsurgency, and psychological operations—from Vietnam and Laos to Lebanon to Panama, to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq, to the new wars of today…

General Carl Stiner, Tom Clancy (Author), Jonathan Marosz (Narrator)

Audiobook

Rites of Passage: Odyssey of a Grunt

A raw, powerful account of an infantryman's life during wartime- complete with all the horrors and the heroism . . . Robert Peterson arrived in Vietnam in the fall of 1966, a young American ready to serve his country and seize his destiny. What happened in that jungle war would change his life forever. Peterson vividly relives the tense patrols in the Viet Cong-infested Central Highlands, the fierce firefights along the Cambodian border, the ambushes and enemy charges. Daily he and his fellow grunts put their lives on the line, forced to follow orders blindly from higher-ups solely interested in reaping their personal glory. Yet out of the deadly hell of Vietnam came a brotherhood-forged in blood and courage, sacrifice and survival-of men who continuously risked their lives for one another, whatever the odds. Rites of Passage is a shining testament to their valor.

Robert Peterson (Author), Eric Conger (Narrator)

Audiobook

Military Audiobooks in History