A companion to the HBO miniseries focuses on the real-life stories of five U.S. armed servicemen who fought the key battles against Japan during World War II, from Bataan and Midway to Iwo Jima and Okinawa.

Sid Phillips knew he was a long way from his home in Mobile, Alabama, when he plunged into the jungles of Guadalcanal in August 1942. A mortarman with the same company of the 1st Marine Division as Helmet for My Pillow author Robert Leckie, Sid was a seventeen-year-old kid when he entered combat. By the time he returned home some two years later, the island fighting on Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester had turned him into a man and an "Old Timer" by...

November 1950, the Korean Peninsula: After General MacArthur ignores Mao's warnings and pushes his UN forces deep into North Korea, his 10,000 First Division Marines find themselves surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by 100,000 Chinese soldiers near the Chosin Reservoir. Their only chance for survival is to fight their way south through the Toktong Pass, a narrow gorge that will need to be held open at all costs. The mission is handed to Captain...

Chester Nez, the last surviving member of the original twenty-nine code talkers, discusses his life growing up in the Checkerboard Area of the Navajo reservation, and shares the story of how he helped the United States develop and implement a secret military language based on his native language during World War II that became the only unbroken code in modern warfare.

"Combat-decorated Marine officer Stuart Scheller speaks out against the debacle of the Afghan pullout as the culmination of a decades-long and still-ongoing betrayal of military members by top leadership, from generals to the commander in chief, comes tolight"--

This is an eyewitness-and eye-opening-account of some of the most savage and brutal fighting in the war against Japan, told from the perspective of a young Texan who volunteered for the Marine Corps to escape a life as a traveling salesman. R. V. Burgin enlisted at the age of twenty and, with his sharp intelligence and earnest work ethic, climbed the ranks from a green private to a seasoned sergeant. Along the way, he shouldered a rifle as a member...