Hunting Che
How a U.S. Special Forces Team Helped Capture the World's Most Famous Revolutionary
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
The hunt for Ernesto “Che” Guevera was one of the first successful U.S. Special Forces missions in history. Using government reports and documents, as well as eyewitness accounts, Hunting Che tells the untold story of how the infamous revolutionary was captured—a mission later duplicated in Afghanistan and Iraq.
As one of the architects of the Cuban Revolution, Guevera had become famous for supporting and organizing similar insurgencies in Africa and Latin America. When he turned his attention to Bolivia in 1967, the Pentagon made a decision: Che had to be stopped.
Major Ralph “Pappy” Shelton was called upon to lead the mission. Much was unknown about Che’s force in Bolivia, and the stakes were high. With a handpicked team of Green Berets, Shelton turned Bolivian peasants into a trained fighting and intelligence-gathering force.
Hunting Che follows Shelton’s American team and the newly formed Bolivian Rangers through the hunt to Che’s eventual capture and execution. With the White House and the Pentagon monitoring every move, Shelton and his team helped prevent another Communist threat from taking root in the West.
INCLUDES PHOTOS
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The duo behind 2012's No Way Out: A Story of Valor in the Mountains of Afghanistan team up again to recount the capture and execution of America's primary Cold War-era b te noire and the world's most recognizable rebel: Che Guevara. Along with Fidel Castro, Che helped orchestrate the Cuban Revolution and the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista in 1959. His efforts would make him an idol for 1960s left-wing youth. But when Che and his guerillas turned their attention in the mid-'60s to bringing communism to U.S.-backed Bolivia, the United States decided enough was enough. A U.S. military Special Forces team was sent south to guide a battalion of Bolivian soldiers through a four-month-long crash course in fighting the insurrection. Weiss (a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist) and Maurer (coauthor of No Easy Day) focus primarily on the American operation to take down Che, detailing the tactics and personnel involved, as well as the dramatic play-by-play leading up to the rebel's execution. The authors are palpably unsympathetic to Che and his cause, and they take a novelist's license in recreating dialogue and inner thoughts. Fans of by-the-book nonfiction will be skeptical of the docudrama prose, but for more tolerant readers, this offers an entertaining new perspective.
