The Fighting Men Who Made America Great

In this stirring and contrarian modern classic, bestselling author H. W. Crocker III unfolds four hundred years of American military history, revealing how Americans were born Indian fighters whose military prowess carved out first a continental and then a global empire—a Pax Americana that made the modern world.

From the seventeenth century on, he argues, Americans have shown a jealous regard for their freedom—and have backed it up with an unheralded skill in small-unit combat operations, a tradition that includes Rogers’s Rangers, Merrill’s Marauders, and today’s Special Forces.

He shows that Americans were born to the foam, too, with a mastery of naval gunnery and tactics that allowed their navy, even in its infancy, to defeat French and British warships and expand U.S. commerce on the seas.

Most of all, Crocker highlights the courage of the dogface infantry, the fighting leathernecks, and the daring sailors and airmen who have turned the tide of battle again and again.

In Don’t Tread on Me, still forests are suddenly pierced by the Rebel Yell and a surge of grey. Teddy Roosevelt’s spectacles flash in the sunlight as he leads his Rough Riders’ charge up San Juan Hill. Yankee doughboys rip into close-quarters combat against the Germans. Marines drive the Japanese out of their island fortresses with flamethrowers, grenades, and guts. GIs slug their way into Hitler’s Germany. The long twilight struggle against communism is fought in the snows of Korea and the steaming jungles of Vietnam. Navy SEALs and Army Rangers battle Islamist terrorists in the bleak mountains of Afghanistan, just as their forefathers fought Barbary pirates two hundred years ago. And we are reminded of the wisdom of America’s greatest generals: George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Robert E. Lee, Ulysses Grant, John Pershing, George Patton, Douglas MacArthur, and Norman Schwarzkopf.

Fast-paced and riveting—and completely updated from its original 2006 publication—Don’t Tread on Me is a bold look at the history of America at war.