Ocean State Libraries

Shares firsthand wartime accounts describing the courageous battlefield sacrifices of men and women from every branch and operational specialty of the U.S. military, from the Vietnam War through the present.

This YA military memoir recounts a nineteen-year-old Army engineer's tour of duty in Iraq: "profoundly moving . . . poignant, and often harrowing" (Kirkus, starred review).
Ryan Smithson was an ordinary teenager until he witnessed the devastation of September 11th, 2001. Watching the Twin Towers fall motivated him to enlist in the Army Reserve at the age of seventeen. In Ghosts of War, Ryan vividly chronicles his experience...

Twelve American women serving in the military share their gripping personal stories of combat in Iraq. In Iraq, the front lines are everywhere—and everywhere in Iraq, no matter what their job descriptions say, women in the U.S. military are fighting. More than 155,000 of them have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan since 2003—four times the number of women sent to Desert Storm in 1991. More than 430 have been wounded and over seventy killed—almost...

One of the most acclaimed books of our time—the definitive Vietnam War exposé and the winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.
When he came to Vietnam in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel John Paul Vann was the one clear-sighted participant in an enterprise riddled with arrogance and self-deception, a charismatic soldier who put his life and career on the line in an attempt to convince his superiors that the

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The author describes her time as a soldier in the United States Army where she was raped by a fellow soldier and had to cope with PTSD, isolation, and commanders who did not believe her story. --

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author lends his remarkable narrative skills to the story of the most famous POW this country has known.

In I Am a Soldier, Too, Bragg lets Jessica Lynch tell the story of her capture in the Iraq War in her own words—not the sensationalized ones of the media's initial reports. Here we see how a humble rural upbringing leads to a stint in...

Gardner Botsford's A Life of Privilege tells the fascinating and humorous story of his WWII experiences, from his assignment to the infantry due to a paperwork error to a fearful trans-Atlantic crossing on the Queen Mary, to landing under heavy fire on Omaha Beach and the Liberation of Paris. After the war, he began a distinguished literary career as a long-time editor at the New Yorker, and chronicles the magazine's rise and influence on postwar...

The classic Vietnam war memoir ...and a hard rain fell is the unforgettable story of a veteran's rage and the unflinching portrait of a young soldier's odyssey from the roads of upstate New York to the jungles of Vietnam. Updated for its 20th anniversary with a new afterword on the Iraq War and its parallels to Vietnam, John Ketwig's message is as relevant today as it was twenty years ago.

"Narrative account of how twelve immigrant soldiers became Americans through fighting in World War I"--Provided by publisher.

In 2003, 85 years after the armistice, Rubin managed to find dozens of American veterans of World War I, aged 101 to 113, and interview them. All are gone now. They were the final survivors of the millions who made up the American Expeditionary Forces. Self-reliant, humble, and stoic, they kept their stories to themselves for a lifetime, then shared them at the last possible moment, so that they, and the World War they won, might at last be remembered....