Sublime

In November 1943, Rear Admiral John Hall took command of the 11th Amphibious Force and assumed the responsibility for depositing the Army’s Fifth Corps on the landing site designated as Omaha Beach—nothing less than the most important operation in American history.

Fresh from the first successful ground reconnaissance in the Central Pacific Theater, General Smith sent forth his VAC Recon Company like the twelve spies into Canaan. At Majuro Atoll, one of the VAC Recon platoon commanders, Lieutenant Harvey Weeks—a former Yale wrestler, former attorney, and former enlisted man—captured the Japanese commander wit

Because the Recon Marines had not yet arrived, the man who read Joy’s order was technically at liberty to do nothing but wait. Yet because the reader was James Doyle—a man as thin as a cadaver and just as warm—he did no such thing.

is Stanley McChrystal’s My Share of the Task (McChrystal 2013).