General Rick Hillier’s views on leadership evolved over his three decades as a soldier. Early in his career he watched as many of his superiors made bad decisions. Later he learned at the school of hard knocks as the head of emergency rescue operations in Canada and international task forces in eastern Europe and Afghanistan. Never one to be shy with his opinions, Hillier is as frank and straightforward in Leadership as he is in his #1 bestselling memoir, A Soldier First....

In the summer of 2008, General Rick Hillier retired as Chief of the Defence staff of the Canadian Forces. You could almost hear the sigh of relief in Ottawa as Canada’s most popular, and most controversial, military leader since the Second World War left a role in which he’d been as frank, unpredictable and resolutely apolitical as any of his predecessors.Born and raised in Newfoundland, Hillier joined the military as a young man and quickly climbed the ranks. He played a significa...

In 2008, Ryan Flavelle, a reservist in the Canadian Army and a student at the University of Calgary, volunteered to serve in Afghanistan. For seven months, twenty-four-year-old Flavelle, a signaller attached to the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, endured the extreme heat, the long hours and the occasional absurdity of life as a Canadian soldier in this new war so far from home. Flavelle spent much of his time at a Canadian Forward Operating Base (FOB), living among his fellow ...

Many Canadians see the role their country's military plays in Afghanistan as an anomaly. However, this assumption is far from the truth. As U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has commented, "Canadians are fierce fighters." Fortune Favours the Brave certainly proves this point in a collection of essays that showcases the fighting spirit and courage of Canada's military.Daring actions featured in the book include the intrepid assault on the Fortress of Louisbourg and the cat-an...

By every principle of war, every shred of military logic, logistics support to Canada's Task Force Orion in Afghanistan should have collapsed in July 2006. There are few countries that offer a greater challenge to logistics than Afghanistan, and yet Canadian soldiers lived through an enormous test on this deadly international stage - a monumental accomplishment. Canadian combat operations were widespread across southern Afghanistan in 2006, and logistics soldiers worked in quiet desperatio...

Captain Robert Semraus military trial made international headlines—a Canadian soldier serving in Afghanistan arrested for allegedly killing a grievously wounded Taliban soldier in the field. The trial and its outcome are a matter of public record. What you are about to read about the tour of duty that inspired this book is not. What you are about to read is an emotionally draining and mind-snapping firsthand account of war on the ground in Afghanistan. It's raw and explosive. Names have be...

Seven soldiers. Seven military specialties. Seven stories.What was it like to serve in the combat mission in Afghanistan? Journalists’ reports from 2006 to 2011 could only give brief glimpses of the reality on the ground for Canadian soldiers. This book reveals the full story of what happened to seven soldiers, ranking from corporal to captain, who were deployed during Operation ATHENA, Phase 2. The operation became known as “the combat mission” as Canadian battle ...

No Lack of Courage is the story of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's Operation Medusa, the largely Canadian action in Afghanistan from 1 to 17 September 2006, to dislodge a heavily entrenched Taliban force in the Pashmul district of Afghanistans Kandahar Province. At stake, according to senior Afghan politicians and NATO military commanders, was nothing less than the very existence of the reconstituted state of Afghanistan, as well as the NATO alliance itself. In a bitterly...

A controversial psychological examination of how soldiers' willingness to kill has been encouraged and exploited to the detriment of civilian society."An illuminating account of how soldiers learn to kill and how they live with the experience of having killed." — Washington PostPsychologist and US Army Ranger Dave Grossman writes that the vast majority of soldiers are loath to pull the trigger in battle. Unfortunat...

Clearing the Way: Combat Engineers in Kandahar is the story of the men and women of 23 Field Squadron who served with the 1st Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group in Kandahar in 2006. Through the eyes of thirteen Squadron members relive the early days of the war in Kandahar and the coming of age of a group of soldiers recorded in graphic detail. The reader experiences the large scale battles with Taliban fighters during Operation Medusa the building of Route Summit and the construction of ...

Long before she made her first trip to Afghanistan as an embedded reporter for The Globe and Mail, Christie Blatchford was already one of Canada’s most respected and eagerly read journalists. Her vivid prose, her unmistakable voice, her ability to connect emotionally with her subjects and readers, her hard-won and hard-nosed skills as a reporter–these had already established her as a household name. But with her many reports from Afghanistan, and in dozens of interviews with the r...

A remarkable collection of first-hand accounts written by soldiers, doctors and aid workers on the front lines of Canada’s war in Afghanistan.Visceral, intimate and captivating in ways no other telling could be, Outside the Wire features nearly two dozen stories by Canadians on the front lines in Afghanistan, including the previously unpublished letters home of Captain Nichola Goddard, the first female NATO soldier killed in combat, and an introductory reflection b...