Rangers Lead the Way, North Africa: Where the Rangers Were Born: A WWII Novel Based on True Events

This audiobook is narrated by a digital voice.

They were the first. Before the Rangers had a legend, a handful of ordinary men had to go out and earn it — in the dark, on foot, with everything to lose.

Jack Miller came to the war to disappear.

A quiet marksman off a hardscrabble farm in the Texas Panhandle, he joined the newborn 1st Ranger Battalion to vanish into something bigger than himself. Instead the Army found the one thing he was good at, reading ground, moving unseen, killing at a distance, and made him the pair of eyes an entire company would come to depend on.

From the freezing hills of Scotland to the black water off Arzew, from a raid deep behind Italian lines to an impossible night climb up a mountain no army was meant to cross, Jack and the men of his company become the sharpest edge the United States has ever fielded. They are needled as glory boys and then leaned on when the leaning counts. They bury their own and keep marching. And between the horror they do the thing that keeps men human, they scheme, they laugh, they raid the Navy blind for stolen ice cream, because a company runs on more than courage.

But being good at a terrible thing has a price. The war doesn't spend the reckless first. It spends the steady ones, the quiet man in the middle who holds everything together and never lets it show. And when it comes for him, it will cost Jack more than a friend. It will cost the company the one thing that made it whole.

Based on the real campaign of Darby's Rangers, the first American special-operations soldiers to face the Axis, North Africa is a novel about the men behind the myth, the brotherhood, the humor, the grief, and the terrible arithmetic of being the ones sent first.

Book One of the Rangers series. For readers of Jeff Shaara, W.E.B. Griffin, and anyone who has ever wondered what it cost the men who led the way.