Hunters & Shooters
An Oral History of the U.S. Navy SEALs in Vietnam
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- $25.99
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
The U.S. Navy SEALs have long been considered among the finest, most courageous, and professional soldiers in American military history—an elite fighting force trained as parachutists, frogmen, demolition experts, and guerrilla warriors ready for sea, air, and land combat. Born out of a proud naval tradition dating back to World War II, the first SEAL teams were commissioned in the early 1960s. Vietnam was their proving ground.
In this remarkable volume, fifteen former SEALs—most of them original founding team members, or "plankowners"—share their vivid first-person remembrances of action in Vietnam. Here are honest, brutal, and relentlessly thrilling stories of covert missions, ferocious firefights, and red-hot chopper insertions and extractions, revealing astonishing little-known truths that will only add strength to the enduring SEAL legend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This work is based on the recollections of 14 men who served in Vietnam with the U.S. Navy's elite Sea-Air-Land counterguerrilla force. The SEALs built a reputation second to none among U.S. elite forces, combining small-scale raids with clandestine operations. They owed much of their success to their limited size (unlike the Army's Special Forces, the SEALs remained small enough to be highly selective). SEAL achievements ultimately reflected the quality of the personnel. Fawcett (field curator for the UDT/SEAL Museum in Fort Pierce, Fla.) and his associates, Kevin Dockery and S.N. Lewitt, allow the interviewees to speak for themselves. The usual results are matter-of-fact accounts of deeds so extraordinary that the interviews often demand a second reading to reconcile their casual tone with their remarkable contents. Hunters and Shooters is both a series of character studies in the best kind of military professionalism and a tour de force explication of modern small-unit warfare.
