Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Thirteen Soldiers A Personal History of Americans at War by John McCain McCain's 'Soldiers:' 13 Ordinary People Transformed By Battle. Arizona Senator John McCain had a really good week. When we reached him after the election, he jokingly said he was living the dream, but as Republicans prepare to take control of the Senate, McCain was also cautious. SENATOR JOHN MCCAIN: There's a feeling out there that we're adrift and I would, in fairness, point out that there is not a great deal of approval of Republicans in Congress either, so we're going to have to see if we can find common ground with our Democrat friends on some issues without betraying any of our principles. WERTHEIMER: We didn't spend all our time talking about Republican victory - that's because Senator McCain has a new book out, written with Mark Salter. It's called "Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History Of Americans At War." Thirteen soldiers, one from every war this country has fought, beginning with the revolution, down to the war in Iraq. Senator McCain explains. MCCAIN: We try to, kind of, give a cross-section of people who - the only thing that really bound them together was the fact that they served their country with heroism and sacrifice. WERTHEIMER: You picked a major historic figure to represent Americans at war and the Civil War - no less a person than Oliver Wendell Holmes, who went on to be a justice of the United States. But in your book - and you include a photograph of him - he's a skinny kid at Harvard who's obviously never thought of fighting a battle, he's never even been hunting, but he believed, as many people from his home state of Massachusetts did, that slavery should be abolished. MCCAIN: Not only did he have that, but he also was dramatically changed by the war. He went on to serve, as you mention, as a famous jurist, but he also saw so many of his - not only his own comrades on the union side, but fellow American citizens on the Confederate side die in these incredible conflicts that took place. So he almost lost his life a couple of times. His famous father searched for him among the wounded. So while he said war is horrible and dull, he remembered a man's willingness to sacrifice himself for another made him, quote, "capable of miracles." WERTHEIMER: I was very interested to see that for the soldier of the Korean War, you picked Pete Salter. Now, he is your co-author's father. He seemed, to me, to represent another theme, which goes throughout this book, that ordinary guys go to war and find themselves doing extraordinary things. MCCAIN: It's a story of the first part of the Korean War, which, of course, always fades from our memories. I understand all that, but the first year of that war was a near thing and Pete Salter fought all the way north up next to the Yellow River, the northern most part of North Korea. And it's also a great part of the story, is, of course, a guy named Mitchell Red Cloud, who is a Native American, literally gave up his life to save the others. WERTHEIMER: That was a story that was just - you could practically see it as a movie. Pete Salter, who is this nice-looking kid, he, at Mitchell Red Cloud's request, he tied him to a tree. MCCAIN: Yeah, he was badly wounded and he knew that he wasn't going to make it out and so he asked Pete Salter and his friend to tie him to this tree and the last they heard as they went down the hill was the sound of his BAR, that's an automatic weapon that they had left him with. WERTHEIMER: You also chose two women who served in the most recent wars in the Middle East - a reservist in the quartermaster corps from Desert Storm and Monica Lin Brown, a medic. She served in Afghanistan and I understand that you chose Brown because you know her - you know her story. MCCAIN: It's a remarkable story. And one of the things we tried to point out is the role that medics play in modern warfare. There was a very small chance of being wounded on the battlefield and living, say, in World War II, but we have developed techniques and people and medical capabilities that we are able to save about 90 percent. And it's people like her, highly, highly trained, highly skilled and, by the way, incredibly brave because they go right into fire to help these people. The sight of blood made her sick. She trained as a paratrooper and then, of course, when we asked her why she had exposed herself to enemy fire she responded it's my job. WERTHEIMER: It's really an extraordinary story where she - one of their vehicles runs over an IED and she ran to it, in spite of the fact that all sorts of people were shooting at her. MCCAIN: And she literally shielded the wounded with her own body. I mean, it's just a remarkable story and I think, you know, we've always had this ongoing debate and discussion about women in combat and, frankly, many years ago, I had a very different attitude than I have today because I believe that women have proven themselves in combat and, therefore, they can add an enormous amount, frankly, to our ability to defend the nation. WERTHEIMER: Senator John McCain - his new book is called "Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History Of Americans At War." I probably ought to mention that Senator McCain's own story is not in this book, but, of course, he's written about his personal history at war in other books. Senator McCain, thank you so much for doing this. MCCAIN: Thank you very much. It's great to talk to you. Copyright © 2014 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by Verb8tm, Inc., an NPR contractor, and produced using a proprietary transcription process developed with NPR. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. John McCain enters the 'No Spin Zone' O'REILLY: "Personal Story" segment tonight. Senator John McCain who is a friend to this program has a new book out called "13 Soldiers," a personal history of Americans at war just in time for Veterans Day tomorrow. Last week the senator and I sat down. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) O'REILLY: Senator, a couple of political questions first. You are a big immigration guy. You had a bill that you didn't get passed. Now, President Obama says he may use executive authority's power to legalize some undocumented and the Republican Party in threatening him with Armageddon if he does. How do you see it? SEN. JOHN MCCAIN (R), ARIZONA: Well, I see it a cynical action that means that the President really isn't that interested in comprehensive immigration reform. He is only interested in placating his base and his Hispanic population of our nation because he knows full well that that will cause a huge negative reaction amongst the republicans and frankly most Americans. O'REILLY: Now, he said in his press conference last week that he was willing to work with republicans on the immigration issue. But then he says, if it's not done at the end of the year, he's going to take unilateral action. So, I'm confused. I want you to try to make a prediction here. What do you think he is going to do? MCCAIN: I'm very much afraid that he is going to take unilateral action so he can go back to the democrat Hispanic base, that that have been so very critical of him for not acting and say, see there, we'll blame it all on the republicans in Congress again. O'REILLY: So you think he wants a civil war for political reasons? Is that what you are saying? MCCAIN: I can't say that specifically that that is, his intention. But I can certainly say that that's going to be the effect. And, Bill, this is an issue that we can sit down and resolve. We can work together. O'REILLY: I agree. I think so. MCCAIN: And if we had a legislation started in the House in whatever form a dream act. By something like that. Then we could work in the Senate with him, but for him to unilaterally carpet bomb us here. Then that is going to cause a huge negative reaction. Frankly amongst my constituents. O'REILLY: Last week, the President, it was revealed. He didn't tell us when it was revealed. The President wrote a note to the Mullahs in Iran. Saying, hey, I want you to help a South fighting ISIS, and you objected to that because the Iranians have supported Assad and Syria who are killing the people that were supposed to be allied with, against ISIS and gets pretty complicated. MCCAIN: It gets complicated. But it's immoral. We're now supposedly training about 5,000 or more Syrians who are going to go back in and fight against Bashar Assad. Who is it that's killing them? It is spiral bombs and equipment supplied by the Iranians. It is the Hezbollah, the 5,000 or more of them who are brought in from Lebanon by the Iranians. So, we're supposed to send them in to fight Bashar Assad while we are playing footsy and getting in bed with the Iranians. And for us to somehow believe that we can cooperate with probably our greatest enemy when you look at outright enemies on earth, to me, is both naive, cynical and frankly immoral. O'REILLY: All right. Now, you have a new book out tomorrow "13 Soldiers" on Veterans Day. It's an interesting book because you're profiling guys from the revolutionary war all the way up to modern times. What is the take away from this book? MCCAIN: A depiction of those individuals, most of them very ordinary people, from ordinary walks of life who were engaged personally in conflicts throughout our history and we described those conflicts a bit to some degree. Their feats of heroism, their bravery and the results of that. But they are ordinary citizens who did extraordinary things. O'REILLY: All right. Senator, thanks very much. The book is "13 Soldiers." Great gifts for a Veterans Day. MCCAIN: Thank you, my friend. Content and Programming Copyright 2014 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2014 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content. Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War. As a veteran himself, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a long-time student of history, John McCain brings a distinctive perspective to the experience of war. With Mark Salter, Thirteen Soldiers tells the stories of real soldiers who personify valor, obedience, enterprise, and love. You’ll meet Joseph Plumb Martin, who at the tender age of fifteen fought in the Revolutionary War; Charles Black, a freeborn African American sailor in the War of 1812; and Sam Chamberlain, of the Mexican American War, whose life inspired novelist Cormac McCarthy. Then there’s Oliver Wendell Holmes, an aristocratic idealist disillusioned by the Civil War, and Littleton “Tony” Waller, court-martialed for refusing to massacre Filipino civilians. Each story illustrates a particular aspect of war, such as Mary Rhoads, an Army reservist forever changed by an Iraqi scud missile attack during the Persian Gulf War; Monica Lin Brown, a frontline medic in rural Afghanistan who saved several lives in a convoy ambush; and Michael Monsoor, a Navy SEAL, who smothered a grenade before it could detonate on his men in Iraq. From their acts of self-sacrifice to their astonishing valor in the face of unimaginable danger, these “inspirational accounts of thirteen Americans who fought in various wars…aptly reveal humanizing moments in such theaters of cruelty” (Publishers Weekly). Mere info om lydbogen: Forlag: Simon & Schuster Audio Udgivet: 2014-11-11 Længde: 13T 43M ISBN: 9781442374898. Mere info om e-bogen: Forlag: Simon & Schuster Udgivet: 2015-05-11 ISBN: 9781476759678. Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War. As a veteran himself, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and a long-time student of history, John McCain brings a distinctive perspective to the experience of war. With Mark Salter, Thirteen Soldiers tells the stories of real soldiers who personify valor, obedience, enterprise, and love. You’ll meet Joseph Plumb Martin, who at the tender age of fifteen fought in the Revolutionary War; Charles Black, a freeborn African American sailor in the War of 1812; and Sam Chamberlain, of the Mexican American War, whose life inspired novelist Cormac McCarthy. Then there’s Oliver Wendell Holmes, an aristocratic idealist disillusioned by the Civil War, and Littleton “Tony” Waller, court-martialed for refusing to massacre Filipino civilians. Each story illustrates a particular aspect of war, such as Mary Rhoads, an Army reservist forever changed by an Iraqi scud missile attack during the Persian Gulf War; Monica Lin Brown, a frontline medic in rural Afghanistan who saved several lives in a convoy ambush; and Michael Monsoor, a Navy SEAL, who smothered a grenade before it could detonate on his men in Iraq. From their acts of self-sacrifice to their astonishing valor in the face of unimaginable danger, these “inspirational accounts of thirteen Americans who fought in various wars…aptly reveal humanizing moments in such theaters of cruelty” (Publishers Weekly). :מידע נוסף על הספר המוקלט .תאריך פרסום: 2014-11-11 אורך: 13שעות 43דקות מסת"ב: Simon & Schuster Audio 9781442374898 :הוצאה לאור .מידע נוסף על הספר הדיגיטלי .תאריך פרסום: 2015-05-11 מסת"ב: Simon & Schuster 9781476759678 :הוצאה לאור Sen. John McCain Remembers the Female Vets of the Gulf War. M ilitary service was a tradition in the families who joined the Army Reserve’s 14th Quartermaster Detachment. They came from communities and circumstances that yield more volun​teers for the military than do other parts of our society. They lived in a part of Pennsylvania where so many young people were in the military that “whenever a disaster happens anywhere in the world,” a local re​porter observed, “people around here hold their breath.” They were likely to know some of the casualties in the February 25, 1991, Scud missle attack in Saudi Arabia that killed 28 reservists. Specialist Beverly Sue Clark, 23, was from Indiana County, Pennsylvania. She had joined the Reserves out of high school. She worked as a security guard and as a secretary at a local window and door manufac​turer. She wanted to be a teacher. She was popular and athletic and loved to ski. Her best friend in the 14th Quartermaster Detachment, headquartered in Greensburg, Pennsylva​nia, was Mary Rhoads, a meter maid in California Borough, Pennsylva​nia. Mary joined the Army Reserve in 1974, during the summer between her junior and senior years at Canon- McMillan Senior High, south of Pittsburgh. She didn’t have clear plans for her life after graduation, and she thought a part-time job in the army would let her follow in the family tradition and bring home much needed extra income. In 1979 she transferred from the engineering company to the 1004th General Supply Company, also based at the Army Reserve Cen​ter in Greensburg. Mary and Beverly became friends when Beverly joined the 1004th in 1985. They hit it off right away. Mary, ten years in the Reserves by then, took the younger woman under her wing. When Mary trans​ferred to the 14th Quartermaster Detachment at Greensburg in 1988, Bev followed her. They were close, and thought they always would be. They would watch each other’s kids grow up. Mary’s daughter, Samantha, called Beverly “Aunt Bev” and always pes​tered Mary to pass the phone to Beverly when she called home. Predictions varied about how many dead and wounded the United States would suffer in the war. Most were wildly off the mark. The U.S. Armed Forces were im​measurably better war fighters, better armed and equipped, and better led than the armed forces of the Republic of Iraq. None of the prognosticators realized just how much of a war you could fight from the air over a desert battleground where the enemy parked his tanks and ar​tillery in the glaring sun and sheltered his soldiers in sand berms. Nor did they appreciate just how determined Desert Storm’s commander, General H. Norman Schwarzkopf Jr., was to use the immense force he assembled to keep casualties low. Given the nature of the war—a long air campaign followed by a short ground war and Iraq’s quick capitulation—casualties were far fewer than the most optimistic analyst had expected. But there were ca​sualties: 149 killed in action, a comparable number of noncombat deaths, and eight hundred or so wounded. Three hundred graves over which three hundred families wept and prayed. Many thousands of survivors wept too and bore their own wounds, seen and unseen. It helps none of them to know it could have been worse. In January President Bush authorized the call-up of one million re​servists and national guardsmen for up to two years. The sixty-nine sol​diers of the 14th Quartermaster Detachment had started hearing scuttlebutt back in November that they would eventually deploy to the Gulf. Their order to mobilize came on January 15, 1991, the day before Desert Storm commenced. They left for Saudi Arabia on February 18 and arrived at the air base the next day. They were quartered temporarily in a large corrugated metal warehouse in Al Khobar, a suburb several miles from Dhahran. Of course, they wouldn’t be on the front lines, although to do their jobs they would have to be closer than two hundred miles behind the front in Al Khobar. Some soldiers had premonitions, as soldiers off to war often do. Beverly Clark told her friend Mary Rhoads she had a bad feeling about the whole thing. She also mentioned her apprehension in the journal she kept. Soldiers’ families have premonitions too, especially the mothers. Just before she passed away from pancreatic cancer in November, Rhoads’s mother had told her that something terrible would happen but that Rhoads would be okay. Whatever fears disturbed them, none of the reservists resented their call-up. Eleven of the reservists in the 14th who deployed to Saudi Arabia were women. The Persian Gulf War occasioned the largest single deploy​ment of women to a combat zone in American military history. Forty-one thousand officers and enlisted—one out of every five women in uni​form— deployed. They were pilots, aircrew, doctors, dentists, nurses, military police, truck drivers, communications technicians, intelligence analysts, security experts, administrative clerks, and water purification specialists deployed to a society built on tribalism, Islamic fundamental​ism, and primitive notions of gender inequality. Thirteen of them would be killed, four from enemy fire. Twenty-one were wounded in action and two taken prisoner. They did just about everything the men did, includ​ing flying missions and accepting other assignments that blurred the lines separating women from combat roles. But this was a war where lines were readily blurred. Even the idea of a front line seemed an anachronism in a war where so much of the fighting was in the air and where missiles were fired at targets located far to the rear, even at a country that wasn’t a bel​‐ ligerent. The metaphor “a line in the sand” has come to mean a state​ment of resolve, but it originally indicated something impermanent, something that disappears in the first breeze. That is an apt metaphor for the Persian Gulf War, where the front was, literally and figuratively, a line in the sand. Even two hundred miles in the rear, the front could sud​denly encompass you. For people of an active disposition, the Gulf War, irrespective of its high-tech thrills, its stunning successes and surprising brevity, could have been stultifying to soldiers who weren’t involved in the fighting. Mary Rhoads was bored to tears sitting in that big warehouse, and she hated being bored. She had spent seventeen years in the Army Reserve, half her life. She looked at the kids in the unit as her kids, saw herself as the mother hen. She picked up stuff they liked to eat, things to read, games to play, any​thing that might shorten the days until they were sent forward to do the job they had come to do. She had purchased a Trivial Pursuit game, among other diversions, and it was instantly a favorite entertainment in the barracks. She still felt closest to Clark. They both brought teddy bears with them to war; Clark’s was white and Rhoads’s brown. One night they were both on guard duty on the warehouse roof when Bev noticed a mist forming in the desert. “Look,” she pointed, “the angel of death.” Rhoads would remember that through all the years that followed, wondering if her friend had had another premonition. The Iraqis fired four Scuds the night of February 25. Three of them appeared to break up in the atmosphere. The missile fired at 8:32 p.m. was detected by satellite and its position relayed to Patriot crews in Saudi Arabia. Three batteries tracked it on their radarscopes but didn’t launch their missiles because the Scud was outside their respective sectors. Two batteries, Alpha and Bravo, protected the air base at Dhahran. Bravo was shut down for maintenance that night. Alpha’s crew had been alerted to the Scud traveling in their direction, but their screen was blank. They checked to make sure their equipment was operating properly and were satisfied that it was. Still they saw nothing. They didn’t know their range gate had miscalculated the missile’s whereabouts. No one knew a Scud was plunging to earth at five times the speed of sound above the big metal warehouse where 127 reservists were living. Ten minutes later, driving down the highway toward Dhahran, Rhoads heard the siren. They pulled off the road and watched as the Scud slammed into the barracks and detonated, creating a red and orange inferno that engulfed twisted beams, flying shrapnel, the modest posses​sions and mementos of the dead, and their charred bodies. Twenty-eight people were killed and ninety-nine wounded, grievously wounded in many cases. Among the dead were thirteen reservists in the 14th Quar​termaster Detachment, including Clark. Forty-three of the reservists wounded in the attack were from the 14th, which meant the detachment had suffered in a single attack a casualty rate higher than 80 percent, about as high a rate as any recorded. They had been in Saudi Arabia only six days. Rhoads and her companions raced back to the base. They had to climb a fence to get into the compound, where all was bedlam. Fire trucks and ambulances had raced to the scene, sirens wailing. Blackhawks de​scended from the dark heavens to airlift the most seriously wounded. Rhoads tried to enter the burning building, but one of the rescuers stopped her. “My friends are in there,” she repeated over and over again. “You don’t want to go in there,” he warned her. When the ambulances pulled away, she ran to the other side and entered the building there. The smell of burned flesh, of death, filled her nostrils. She thought they were all dead. A moment later she tripped over a girder, wrenching her knee. A soldier in a transportation unit pulled her back outside and told her to stay there. That was where she saw the bodies. The Vietnam veterans in the unit who survived the attack had retrieved them and lined them up side by side. She recognized Clark right away. She limped over to her friend, embraced her lifeless form, and shrieked at the treacherous night, while a news camera recorded her agony. Everyone who wasn’t badly hurt was quartered that night in a large, convention center–like meeting space, where television sets replayed the disaster on what seemed a continuous loop. Rhoads called her husband to let him know she was alive and reported to a sergeant back at the Re​‐ serve center in Greensburg. Then she and a few others, impatient and wanting to help, commandeered a van and drove first to the warehouse, then to different hospitals to locate the wounded, and then to the morgue to identify the dead. Rhoads identified the bodies of Tony Madison, Frank Keough, and Beverly Clark. Rhoads eventually returned to her job with her leg in a big white brace. She was eager to get going; she wanted her life back. Something was wrong, though. She had frequent nightmares; she lost her temper. She used to shrug off the kids who hassled her and called her names for giving them a parking ticket; now she got into it with them, right in their faces, daring them. She wasn’t herself. She froze once while directing traffic when she heard an emergency vehicle’s siren. Then she started getting really sick. Chronic vaginal bleeding resulted in a hysterectomy. She had her gall bladder removed and her appendix. Stomach ailments, headaches, sinus troubles, and serious difficulty breathing brought her to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, then the hospital in Brownsville, Pennsylvania, the VA hospital in Pittsburgh, then back to Walter Reed and again to Pittsburgh. Doctors discovered precancerous cells in her esophagus. She developed liver disease. These and other ailments were attributed to the mysterious malady that afflicted many Desert Storm veterans, called Persian Gulf War syn​drome. None of the doctors Rhoads saw in Bethesda or Pittsburgh could figure out what was making her so sick. She was becoming almost com​pletely incapacitated. Scott Beveridge and another local reporter, Connie Gore, took a genuine interest in her case and wrote about her often. Her local congressman, Frank Mascara, and his aide, Pam Snyder, got involved and pushed the VA to recognize that whatever its cause, Gulf War syndrome was real, and it was destroying the lives of people who had risked everything to serve their country and who deserved their government’s attention to their service-related illness. Their persistent appeals on her behalf re​sulted in a full disability pension, one of the first awarded to a sufferer of Gulf War syndrome. She gave testimony to the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee in 1991 and traveled to Washington in 1995, while very ill, to testify to President Bill Clinton’s Advisory Commission on Gulf War Illnesses. Congressman Mascara began his statement in a hearing at the House Veterans Committee by invoking her as the poster child for Gulf War syndrome. When word got around about his successful intervention on Rhoads’s behalf, Mascara’s office was swarmed with calls from veterans around the country, who like Rhoads were plagued by numerous illnesses since com​ing home from the Gulf. No one has yet to establish a cause or causes of the disorder that appears to weaken the immune system, making its vic​tims susceptible to multiple illnesses. There are many theories—fumes from the oil well fires, reactions to inoculations, Iraq’s undetected use of chemical weapons, Scud warheads carrying biological agents, combat stress— but none have been proven. Whatever its cause, thousands of Gulf War veterans suffer chronic and multiple illnesses attributed to it. After her testimony to President Clinton’s advisory commission, Rhoads dropped out of public view. Beveridge wrote that he had received “anonymous hate mail” attacking Rhoads for publicizing her suffering and condemning the deployment of women to war theaters. It appears she heard some of the same criticism. She might have been estranged, for a brief time anyway, from a few others in her unit. When asked, she said the 14th was like a family, and like all families, they have their squabbles and then make up. “We love each other,” she maintains. Senator John McCain is a United States Senator and an author, with Mark Salter, of Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War, out today. He served in the U.S. Navy from 1954 until 1981. Mark Salter is the author, with John McCain, of several books, including Faith of My Fathers . He served on Sen. McCain’s staff for 18 years. From Thirteen Soldiers: A Personal History of Americans at War , by John McCain and Mark Salter. Copyright © 2014 by John McCain and Mark Salter. Reprinted by permission of Simon & Schuster, Inc.