A narrative on the lives of twenty-three First Recon marines who led the attack on Iraq describes their training and the physical and psychological challenges they faced in skirmishes leading to the fall of Baghdad.

They were called a generation without heroes. Then they were called upon to be heroes. Within hours of 9/11, America's war on terrorism fell to those like the twenty-three Marines of the First Recon Battalion, the first generation dispatched into open-ended combat since Vietnam. They were a new breed of American warrior unrecognizable to their forebears—soldiers raised on hip-hop, Internet porn, Marilyn Manson, video games, and The Real World,...

"It struck in the wake of World War II, a mysterious disease that killed almost 90 percent of those infected. A few of the survivors gained extraordinary powers while others were blighted with severe disabilities. Some of those afflicted chose to use their new abilities to help the human race. But some took a different path. In Aces high, it's the 1980s, but a 1980s both like and unlike our own. Now, after centuries of travel through space, an extraterrestrial...