Uncommon Valor: The Recon Company that Earned Five Medals of Honor and Included America’s Most Decorated Green Beret

Written by:
Stephen L. Moore
Narrated by:
Sean Runnette

Unabridged Audiobook

Ratings
Book
20
Narrator
4
Release Date
February 18, 2020
Duration
15 hours 23 minutes
Summary
Uncommon Valor is a look into the formation and operation of an advanced Special Forces recon company during the Vietnam War.

Code-named the Studies and Observations Group, SOG was the most covert US military unit in its time and contained only volunteers from such elite units as the Army's Green Berets, Navy SEALs, and Air Force Air Commandos. SOG warriors operated in small teams, going behind enemy lines in Laos and Cambodia and along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, tasked with performing special reconnaissance, sabotaging North Vietnamese Army ammunition, attempting to rescue downed US pilots, and other black ops missions.

During that time, Forward Operating Base-2's (FOB-2's) recon company became the most highly decorated unit of the Vietnam War, with five of its men earning the Medal of Honor and eight earning the Distinguished Service Cross-America's second highest military award for valor. Purple Hearts were earned by SOG veterans at a pace unparalleled in American wars of the twentieth century, with casualties at times exceeding 100 percent. One, Bob Howard, was wounded on fourteen different occasions, received eight Purple Hearts, was written up after three different missions for the Medal of Honor, and emerged from Vietnam as the most highly decorated soldier since World War II's Audie Murphy.
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Mark Trevithick

An excellent book with the incredible history of SOG in Vietnam. Getting to know many of the heroes of the Recon Teams was exciting and I was constantly hoping they would survive each mission. Most of the missions in this book are successful and don't deal with the spy back in Saigon which became a huge issue for SOG and the team that finally dealt with him. Those details can be found in the book "SOG - The Secret War of America's Commandos in Vietnam" also available on Audiobooks. The latter book is also excellent and covers that missions that were compromised... Narration was good, and pronunciations of most names was good as well. Some military acronyms and models of weapons were often read rather than pronounced properly. An example is the Colt Automatic Rifle, CAR-15. It is pronounced "Car-15", not CAR-15. The biggest issue I had with narration was his reading cadence. He droned off at the end of every sentence. That said, his reading would never preclude me from listening to this book or any other he narrated.

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Marcus M.

Very detailed look into some of our very best soldiers in Vietnam

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