The true story of Michael Mullen, a soldier killed in Vietnam, and his parents’ quest for the truth from the US government: “Brilliantly done” (The Boston Globe). Drafted into the US Army, Michael Mullen left his family’s Iowa farm in September 1969 to fight for his country in Vietnam. Six months later, he returned home in a casket. Michael wasn’t killed by the North Vietnamese, but by artillery fire from friendly forces. With the government failing to provide the precise circumstances of his death, Mullen’s devastated parents, Peg and Gene, demanded to know the truth. A year later, Peg Mullen was under FBI surveillance. In a riveting narrative that moves from the American heartland to the jungles of Vietnam to the Vietnam Veterans Against the War march in Washington, DC, to an interview with Mullen’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, author C. D. B. Bryan brings to life with brilliant clarity a military mission gone horrifically wrong, a patriotic family’s explosive confrontation with their government, and the tragedy of a nation at war with itself. Originally intended to be an interview for the New Yorker, the story Bryan uncovered proved to be bigger than he expected, and it was serialized in three consecutive issues during February and March 1976, and was eventually published as a book that May. In 1979, Friendly Fire was made into an Emmy Award–winning TV movie, starring Carol Burnett, Ned Beatty, and Sam Waterston. This ebook features an illustrated biography of C. D. B. Bryan, including rare images from the author’s estate.

On April 14, 1994, two U.S. Air Force F-15 fighters accidentally shot down two U.S. Army Black Hawk Helicopters over Northern Iraq, killing all twenty-six peacekeepers onboard. In response to this disaster the complete array of military and civilian investigative and judicial procedures ran their course. After almost two years of investigation with virtually unlimited resources, no culprit emerged, no bad guy showed himself, no smoking gun was found. This book attempts to make sense of this tragedy--a tragedy that on its surface makes no sense at all. With almost twenty years in uniform and a Ph.D. in organizational behavior, Lieutenant Colonel Snook writes from a unique perspective. A victim of friendly fire himself, he develops individual, group, organizational, and cross-level accounts of the accident and applies a rigorous analysis based on behavioral science theory to account for critical links in the causal chain of events. By explaining separate pieces of the puzzle, and analyzing each at a different level, the author removes much of the mystery surrounding the shootdown. Based on a grounded theory analysis, Snook offers a dynamic, cross-level mechanism he calls "practical drift"--the slow, steady uncoupling of practice from written procedure--to complete his explanation. His conclusion is disturbing. This accident happened because, or perhaps in spite of everyone behaving just the way we would expect them to behave, just the way theory would predict. The shootdown was a normal accident in a highly reliable organization.

A seemingly random act of violence leads a rescue specialist to uncover a terrorist conspiracy in this thriller by the New York Times bestselling author. It begins with a shocking act of vengeance. Barista Ethan Falk chases a customer into the parking lot and kills him. He tells police that years ago the older man abducted and tortured him. Then Ethan's story takes an even stranger turn: he says he was rescued by a guy named Scorpion. Of course, there is no record of either the kidnapping or the rescue, because Scorpion--Jonathan Grave--operates outside the law and leaves no evidence. Now Grave must find a way to defend the young man without blowing his cover. And the task takes on new urgency when he learns the dead man was connected to an ongoing terrorist plot against America. It's up to Grave and his team to stop it. But first they must rescue Ethan Falk—a second time.

A highly decorated Israeli military officer, leader, and former director of the internal security service, Shin Bet, sees the light on what his country must do to achieve a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. In this deeply personal journey of discovery, Ami Ayalon seeks input and perspective from Palestinians and Israelis whose experiences differ from his own. As head of the Shin Bet security agency, he gained empathy for ‘the enemy’ and learned that when Israel carries out anti-terrorist operations in a political context of hopelessness, the Palestinian public will support violence, because they have nothing to lose. Researching and writing Friendly Fire, he came to understand that his patriotic life had blinded him to the self-defeating nature of policies that have undermined Israel’s civil society while heaping humiliation upon its Palestinian neighbours. ‘If Israel becomes an Orwellian dystopia,’ Ayalon writes, ‘it won’t be thanks to a handful of theologians dragging us into the dark past. The secular majority will lead us there motivated by fear and propelled by silence.’ Ayalon is a realist, not an idealist, and many who consider themselves Zionists will regard as radical his conclusions about what Israel must do to achieve relative peace and security and to sustain itself as a Jewish homeland and a liberal democracy.

Kathryn Chetkovich's stories detail the lives of women finding their way in a contemporary world where the traditional maps of love, family, and community are no longer particularly reliable. These are women who find themselves in that mysterious zone of existence that separates our expectations from what eventually befalls us. It's a gap between what we want and what's offered, between what we think we're capable of and the gesture that must suffice. Consequently, Chetkovich's characters in Friendly Fire, often to their own consternation, find themselves chasing a dream while simultaneously searching for its opposite. As the title suggests, Friendly Fire is a collection that describes how we are sometimes brought down by those we love, often unintentionally, sometimes through willful acts, and usually under circumstances we soon regret. To these characters, romance is both a mystery and a challenge. Their friendships, fed equally by intimacy, jealousy, and frankness, often possess the intensity of marriage and the bonds that are born of shared pain. Ultimately, it's the mistakes -- the moments when they fail each other through lies, affairs, harsh words, lapses in loyalty -- that provide the sudden openings through which these characters see themselves and recognize each other. Their transgressions help identify who they are and finally bring them closer together.

Friendly Fire, the first collection of short stories from Alaa Al Aswany, acclaimed author of Chicago and The Yacoubian Building, deftly explores the lives of contemporary Egyptians. Here are stories of generational conflict, corruption, repression, infidelity, and the dangerous clashing of western and Arab ideals, all beautifully rendered by Al Aswany, a true modern master and one of Egypt’s “most exciting literary exports” (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

The Christian landsape is littered with the bodies of believers who are victims of "friendly fire": the legalistics, judgemental, or negatively critical words or actions of others believers. Friendly Fire is Mike Warnke's survival guide for believers battered by the religious among us. He offers encourgement and hope for the Church's "walking wounded" in their journey toward healing, restoration, and wholeness. No matter what has happened, no believer is too far gone to come back. God stands ready and willing to heal and restore. With warmth, humor, and insight gained from his own personal experiences, the author provides a soothing balm for believers nursing the wounds inflicted by "friendly fire"