Down Range - Navy SEALs in the War on Terrorism

He is the deadliest American sniper ever, called the devil by the enemies he hunted and the legend by his Navy SEAL brothers . . .

From 1999 to 2009, U.S. Navy SEAL Chris Kyle recorded the most career sniper kills in United States military history. The Pentagon has officially confirmed more than 150 of Kyles kills (the previous American record was 109), but it has declined to verify the astonishing total number for this book. Iraqi insurgents feared Kyle so much they named him al-Shaitan (the devil) and placed a bounty on his head. Kyle earned legendary status among his fellow SEALs, Marines, and U.S. Army soldiers, whom he protected with deadly accuracy from rooftops and stealth positions. Gripping and unforgettable, Kyles masterful account of his extraordinary battlefield experiences ranks as one of the great war memoirs of all time.

A native Texan who learned to shoot on childhood hunting trips with his father, Kyle was a champion saddle-bronc rider prior to joining the Navy. After 9/11, he was thrust onto the front lines of the War on Terror, and soon found his calling as a world-class sniper who performed best under fire. He recorded a personal-record 2,100-yard kill shot outside Baghdad; in Fallujah, Kyle braved heavy fire to rescue a group of Marines trapped on a street; in Ramadi, he stared down insurgents with his pistol in close combat. Kyle talks honestly about the pain of war-of twice being shot and experiencing the tragic deaths of two close friends.

American Sniper also honors Kyles fellow warriors, who raised hell on and off the battlefield. And in moving first-person accounts throughout, Kyles wife, Taya, speaks openly about the strains of war on their marriage and children, as well as on Chris.

Adrenaline-charged and deeply personal, American Sniper is a thrilling eyewitness account of war that only one man could tell.

No elite military commando unit since the darkest days of Korea and Vietnam has a more storied history than the U.S. Navy SEALs, a stealth fighting force legendary for its abilities to wage covert war on sea, air, and land. Now former SEAL Command Master Chief Dennis "Snake" Chalker takes us deep inside the celebrated SEAL Team Six for an astonishing, firsthand look at the formation, preparation, and deployment of a crack detachment meticulously trained for an ongoing mission that has become essential to the survival of our nation: counterterrorism.

When Dennis Chalker joined Army Airborne in the early 1970s he was, by his own admission, a fairly typical young man from the Midwest. After his initial tour of duty—and a brief, unsatisfactory stint as a civilian—he volunteered to be a candidate for "the Teams," elite Naval Special Forces units known for their "outside the envelope" approach to warfare and their ability to strike any target, no matter how heavily guarded or impossible to reach.

After enduring BUD/S (Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL) training—the most rigorous selection process ever devised—Chalker rose rapidly through the ranks and was personally chosen by "Rogue Warrior" Richard Marcinko for a leadership role in Red Cell. Together they would push special operations warfare to a level it had never achieved before.

From the Granada action to electrifying events in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia, Chalker now describes in stunning detail previously classified operations in the war against global terrorism. And at the center of his riveting, compelling, and astonishingly honest account is one remarkable covert mission in which daring, timing, skill, and cunning worked in concert to accomplish what in SEALs parlance is known as a "perfect op": one in which enemy territory is successfully penetrated and the objective achieved without any evidence left behind to indicate that the SEALs were even there.

Never before has a book given readers as spellbinding a look at the detailed inner workings of the U.S. Navy SEALs—from a mission's planning and preparation to its successful completion. And never has there been a truer, more intimate portrait of the extraordinary brotherhood of warriors who today are on the front lines of the most devastating conflict of our age, the war that America must win.