title: The Wars of the Green Berets: Amazing Stories from Vietnam to the Present
author:  Robin Moore 
description: Moore's 1965 bestseller The Green Berets helped bring the army's special forces to the U.S. collective consciousness; here he collaborates with special ops staff officer Lennon for this disappointing historical that traces the "Shadow Warriors" from their early days in Vietnam to Operation Desert Storm (1991), Somalia (1993), Afghanistan (2001) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003). Each conflict furnishes the setting for a discrete story of special operations units in combat, the stories loosely linked by a handful of recurring characters. Mike Apin, for example, fights as a young draftee at Dak Pek, a besieged special forces camp in Vietnam; he turns up in Afghanistan with the 5th special forces group fighting alongside native tribesmen and surfaces again in Iraq in 2003 with the CIA searching for WMD sites. The episodes are fictionalizations of real anecdotes gathered by Moore and Lennon, but character, plot and dialogue (on Iraq: "This is going to degenerate into an insurgency against us and probably civil war") get short shrift. Readers interested in the exploits of special forces are better served by recent nonfiction accounts like Linda Robinson's Masters of Chaos and Robert Kaplan's Imperial Grunts. <br />Copyright  Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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  Also by Mark Bowden
  
  
  Doctor Dealer
  
  
  Bringing the Heat
  
  
  Black Hawk Down
  
  
  Killing Pablo
  
  
  Finders Keepers
  
  
  Road Work
  
  
  Guests of the Ayatollah
  
  
  The Best Game Ever
  
  
  Worm
  
  
  The Finish
  
  
  The Three Battles of Wanat
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](image/HueTitle1.jpg)
  
  
  A Turning Point of  
  the American War in Vietnam
  
  
  ## Mark  
  Bowden
  
  
  ![](image/V-1.png)
  
  
  Grove Press
  
  
  New York
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Copyright © 2017 by Mark Bowden
  
  
  Postscript © 2018 by Mark Bowden
  
  
  Jacket design by Michael Patrick Dudding
  
  
  Jacket photograph © Rolls Press/Popperfoto/Getty
  
  
  Maps © 2017 by Matthew Ericson
  
  
  An excerpt from “Cheating the Reaper” is reprinted from  
  Praying at the Altar by W. D. Ehrhart, Adastra Press, 2017, by permission of
  the author;  
  “Ballad of the Green Berets,” words and music by Barry Sadler and Robin Moore,  
  copyright © Music Music Music Inc., 1963, 1964 & 1966\. Permission given by
  Lavona Sadler.
  
  
  Photo credits are as follows: Photo 1.1 (Che T