Best Military Books

Zonk!

Happy Friday! Here’s a short list of my favorite military books from the last couple years. If you have one that you love that’s not here, please leave it in the comments!

Five Years to Freedom, by James N. Rowe

     This is a classic. It’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It reads like fiction but it’s the stuff that Hollywood scripts wish they were made of. The reader can infer from the title that he eventually gets free from his Vietnam captors, but the extreme torture, fear, and terrible conditions Colonel Rowe must endure before his sensational escape keep you turning pages for hours into the night. Besides giving you an incredible first hand account of what it’s like to be a POW, FY2F provides an objective tone for analyzing the Vietnam War’s broader implications.

Once he gets home, Colonel Rowe helped to write doctrine and create the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) Course at Ft. Bragg that has since helped prepare thousands of Soldiers prepare for the risk of being captured by enemy forces. Unfortunately, all of his combat experience and survival skills couldn’t save him from an ambush in the Phillipines, which took his life at the too early age of 51. You can read about it here, in COL James N. Rowe’s NYT Obituary.

Guests of the Ayatollah, by Mark Bowden

     This is the best book about the Iran Hostage Crisis. Many other books have been written on the topic, but GotA is the most thorough. With exceptional clarity and organization, Bowden provides an intricate development of each of the characters involved while also detailing the broader events that led up to and caused the crisis and many consequences left in its wake.

 

 

Unbroken, by Laura Hillenbrand and Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In by Louis Zamperini

      Both of these books – amazing. Louis Zamperini is a great American hero and a great person. His is a glorious story of redemption, forgiveness, and a simply indomitable spirit. Unbroken’s storyline focuses more on Zamperini’s time in war as a POW under a brutal warden in WW2 Japan while Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In more closely tells Louis’s story after he returns, and chronicles the amazing inspiration he became to his country, family, acquaintances, and the hundreds of young wayward men he helped in the camp for troubled kids he started in California. He sadly passed away in 2014 but he lived an unbelievably full and wonderful life. A real tribute to the power of a positive human spirit and faith.

Lone Survivor, by Marcus Luttrell

       This book was heartbreaking but riveting. SEAL Team 10 gets sent on a recon mission in the mountains of Afghanistan. They encounter an elderly goat herder and two young boys. They were faced with a dreadful decision – kill the goatherders and risk breaking the ROE by killing innocent bystanders or let them go, certain that they would give their position to insurgents. They do the right thing of course and all hell breaks loose, resulting in heavy American casualties, which was the heartbreaking part to read. The riveting part comes next – when, suffering from life-threatening wounds, bloodloss, and dehydration, he crawls right into an Afghanistan village. What happens next is nothing short of miraculous.

 

There you have it! Thanks for stopping by FPM today. Hope you enjoyed some of my favorite military books! Please let me know if you have any suggestions on what to read next!