Hope and Honor
A Memoir of a Soldier's Courage and Survival
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5.0 • 6 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Hope and Honor is a powerful and dramatic memoir that shows how the will to live--so painfully refined in the fires of that long-ago death camp--was forged, at last, into truth of soul and wisdom of the heart.
Major General Sid Shachnow was more than a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran--receiving two silver and three bronze stars with V for Valor. He survived a crucible far crueler than the jungles of Vietnam: Nazi occupied Eastern Europe. As a child, he spent three years in the notorious Kovno Concentration Camp.
But his next journey took him to America, where he worked his way through school and eventually enlisted in the US Army. He volunteered for U.S. Special Forces, and served proudly for 32 years. His driving dream was to save others from the indignities he had endured and the deadly fate he so narrowly escaped.
From Vietnam to the Mideast, to the fall of the Berlin Wall, Sid Shachow served in Special Operations. He grew as Special Forces grew, rising to major-general--responsible for American Special Forces everywhere--but the lessons of Kovno stayed with him, wherever he turned, wherever he soldiered.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Part Holocaust memoir and part U.S. Army career narrative, this tale of an extraordinary life begins with young Schaja Shachnowski, a Lithuanian Jew, watching the Nazis march into his town. Taken with his family to a concentration camp, they survived by bribery, quick wits, the help of the Jewish camp police and the occasional assistance of local Lithuanians. Schaja was impressed by American GIs and remembered them after he and his family were eventually admitted to the U.S.: wanting to marry a Christian girl whom his family loathed and also unable to find a decent job, he enlisted in the army in 1955. This began a 40-year career, covered in the book's second half, that ended with him a much decorated major general, having spent most of his career in Special Forces, eventually becoming its commanding general. He served two tours in Vietnam, commanded the Berlin Brigade and fought for an enlarged role for Special Forces. He is also still married to his boyhood love, a remarkably enduring person in her own right. Schachnow's life certainly demonstrates the title qualities, as well as high professional integrity and a ferocious will to survive. His telling of it is not always graceful, but his story comes through clearly and with conviction.
