Camp Valor

A young adult thriller from Scott McEwan, the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of American Sniper, and Hof Williams. Valor: great courage in the face of danger When Wyatt gets framed for a friend’s crime, he thinks his life is over. But then a mysterious stranger visits him in jail with an unusual proposal: spend three months in a secret government camp and have a ten-year prison sentence wiped clean. Wyatt agrees, and finds himself in a world beyond his wildest dreams, with teenagers like him flying drones, defusing bombs, and jumping out of helicopters. This is no ordinary camp. Camp Valor is a secret training ground for teenage government agents, filled with juvenile offenders—badasses who don’t play by the rules—who desperately need a second chance. If they can prove themselves over their three month stay and survive Hell Week, they will enter the ranks of the most esteemed soldiers in the United States military. But some enemies of the United States have gotten wind of Camp Valor, and they will do everything in their power to find out its secrets. Suddenly, Wyatt and his friends have to put their training into practice, and find the bravery to protect their country.

The Trigger Mechanism is the second book in the Camp Valor series by the #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of American Sniper, Scott McEwen. When, Jalen, a young gamer, puts on a set of VR goggles and logs into an online video game, he enters a digital world where, as in most games, points are awarded for kills. Only this time, unbeknownst to Jalen, the game has been reengineered by a cyberterrorist known as Encyte so that real human lives are taken with the click of a button. When Jalen logs off, he learns he’s just killed fifty-three innocent people. Wyatt Brewer, Camp Valor’s top camper, is tapped to investigate and see if a link exists between Encyte and The Glowworm Gaming Network, which Wyatt helped dismantle the previous summer. Wyatt is still reeling from the losses inflicted by Glowworm and by the betrayal of his mentor, Sargent Halsey. When Wyatt meets Jalen, he finds a clue, and Julie Chen, a teenage prodigy and gaming superstar known as Hi_Kyto becomes the leading suspect. Wyatt knows he’ll need Jalen’s help if he has any chance of penetrating the gaming world and getting close to Hi_Kyto. And Jalen will need Camp Valor if he’s going to have any chance of rebuilding his life and finding redemption. But as the summer season starts at Valor, the Department of Defense threatens to shut the secret program down. A reclusive billionaire and Camp Valor alum offers a way forward—funded by him but without Valor for protection. Jalen and Wyatt are forced to consider going out on their own if they want bring Halsey to justice and to stop Encyte.

The basis of the film starring Orlando Bloom and Scott Eastwood, The Outpost is the heartbreaking and inspiring story of one of America's deadliest battles during the war in Afghanistan, acclaimed by critics everywhere as a classic. At 5:58 AM on October 3rd, 2009, Combat Outpost Keating, located in frighteningly vulnerable terrain in Afghanistan just 14 miles from the Pakistani border, was viciously attacked. Though the 53 Americans there prevailed against nearly 400 Taliban fighters, their casualties made it the deadliest fight of the war for the U.S. that year. Four months after the battle, a Pentagon review revealed that there was no reason for the troops at Keating to have been there in the first place. In The Outpost, Jake Tapper gives us the powerful saga of COP Keating, from its establishment to eventual destruction, introducing us to an unforgettable cast of soldiers and their families, and to a place and war that has remained profoundly distant to most Americans. A runaway bestseller, it makes a savage war real, and American courage manifest. "The Outpost is a mind-boggling, all-too-true story of heroism, hubris, failed strategy, and heartbreaking sacrifice. If you want to understand how the war in Afghanistan went off the rails, you need to read this book." -- Jon Krakauer

Valor is the magnificent story of a genuine American hero who survived the fall of the Philippines and brutal captivity under the Japanese, from New York Times bestselling author Dan Hampton. Lieutenant William Frederick “Bill” Harris was 25 years old when captured by Japanese forces during the Battle of Corregidor in May 1942. This son of a decorated Marine general escaped from hell on earth by swimming eight hours through a shark-infested bay; but his harrowing ordeal had just begun. Shipwrecked on the southern coast of the Philippines, he was sheltered by a Filipino aristocrat, engaged in guerilla fighting, and eventually set off through hostile waters to China. After 29 days of misadventures and violent storms, Harris and his crew limped into a friendly fishing village in the southern Philippines. Evading and fighting for months, he embarked on another agonizing voyage to Australia, but was betrayed by treacherous islanders and handed over to the Japanese. Held for two years in the notorious Ofuna prisoner-of-war camp outside Yokohama, Harris was continuously starved, tortured, and beaten, but he never surrendered. Teaching himself Japanese, he eavesdropped on the guards and created secret codes to communicate with fellow prisoners. After liberation on August 30, 1945, Bill represented American Marine POWs during the Japanese surrender in Tokyo Bay before joining his father and flying to a home he had not seen in four years. Valor is a riveting new look at the Pacific War. Through military documents, personal photos, and an unpublished memoir provided by his daughter, Harris’ experiences are dramatically revealed through his own words in the expert hands of bestselling author and retired fighter pilot Dan Hampton. This is the stunning and captivating true story of an American hero.

"Alfred Wetzler was a true hero. His escape from Auschwitz, and the report he helped compile, telling for the first time the truth about the camp as a place of mass murder, led directly to saving the lives of 120,000 Jews: the Jews of Budapest who were about to be deported to their deaths. No other single act in the Second World War saved so many Jews from the fate that Hitler and the SS had determined for them. This book tells Wetzler's story." - Sir Martin Gilbert "Wetzler is a master at evoking the universe of Auschwitz, and especially, his and Vrba's harrowing flight to Slovakia. The day-by-day account of the tremendous difficulties the pair faced after the Nazis had called off their search of the camp and its surroundings is both riveting and heart wrenching. ...] Shining vibrantly through the pages of the memoir are the tenacity and valor of two young men, who sought to inform the world about the greatest outrage ever committed by humans against their fellow humans." - From Introduction by Dr Robert Rozett] Together with another young Slovak Jew, both of them deported in 1942, the author succeeded in escaping from the notorious death camp in the spring of 1944. There were some very few successful escapes from Auschwitz during the war, but it was these two who smuggled out the damning evidence - a ground plan of the camp, constructional details of the gas chambers and crematoriums and, most convincingly, a label from a canister of Cyclone gas. The present book is cast in the form of a novel to allow factual information not personally collected by the two fugitives, but provided for them by a handful of reliable friends, to be included. Nothing, however, has been invented. It is a shocking account of Nazi genocide and of the inhuman conditions in the camp, but equally shocking is the initial disbelief the fugitive's revelations met with after their return. Ewald Osers has translated over 150 books and received many translation prizes and honours.

On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing the U.S. military to ban anyone from certain areas of the country, with primary focus on the West Coast. Eventually the order was used to imprison 120,000 people of Japanese descent in incarceration camps such as the Rohwer Relocation Center in remote Desha County, Arkansas. This time of fear and prejudice (the U.S. government formally apologized for the relocations in 1982) and the Arkansas Delta are the setting for Camp Nine. The novel's narrator, Chess Morton, lives in tiny Rook Arkansas. Her days are quiet and secluded until the appearance of a "relocation" center built for what was, in effect, the imprisonment of thousands of Japanese Americans. Chess's life becomes intertwined with those of two young internees and an American soldier mysteriously connected to her mother's past. As Chess watches the struggles and triumphs of these strangers and sees her mother seek justice for the people who briefly and involuntarily came to call the Arkansas Delta their home, she discovers surprising and disturbing truths about her family's painful past.

The fourth book in Tanya Huff's action-packed military sci-fi adventure Confederation series After surviving the perils of the Crucible, the Marine Corps planet where a routine training assignment had taken a deadly twist—Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr returned to Ventris Station just in time to link up with her old platoon and head out to a new war zone, an area of space where the enemy known as the Others appeared to be building up its forces for a preemptive strike. Sent to pull back troops who’d moved up to an indefensible position, Torin was caught in the heaviest fighting just as a devastating air strike reduced the whole area to slag. The Corps concluded that she was dead. But despite irrefutable evidence, neither Torin’s father nor salvager Craig Ryder agreed. And the truth was that Torin had survived. She woke to discover that she was trapped in a series of underground caves that appeared to be an enemy-run POW camp. But everyone knew the Others never took prisoners—or did they? Could Gunnery Sergeant Torin Kerr escape this prison that shouldn’t even exist, taking as many Marines as possible with her? Though she was determined to get herself and her Marines back to the Confederation, Torin had no idea how crucial her attempt could prove, not only to her own well-being, but to the course of the entire war.

Follow America's elite warriors through the military's most grueling training and learn how they survive real special operations. ​ Of the 18 months required to become a Navy SEAL, one week will cause over half of the trainees to quit ("ring the bell"). Only the toughest make it through. In Hell Week and Beyond, Scott McEwen takes the readers to the sands of Coronado Beach in San Diego, where Navy SEALs are put through the most grueling training known to mankind. Grit, commitment, heart, and soul are needed to become a SEAL, because these are the elite forces who go into the toughest battles for America. Many of the most well-known SEAL warriors have been interviewed for this book, providing the stories of what got them through and the humor of those that made it. (Those that make it almost always have one thing in common: humor. Find out why!) Part Top Gun, part Bull Durham, this book delivers that goods for those in the know, as well as general readers who admire the elite forces for all they do.