Guardian Angel: Life and Death Adventures with Pararescue, the World's Most Powerful Commando Rescue Force, William F. Sine, USAF (Ret.)

Guardian Angel: Life and Death Adventures with Pararescue, the World's Most Powerful Commando Rescue Force, William F. Sine, USAF (Ret.)

The author of this book served in Pararescue, one of the less familiar American Special Forces. As the name suggests, the unit's members parachute into difficult to reach locations to treat the injured, arrange for their rescue, or on occasions to retrieve the dead. This duty takes them all over the world, and involves an impressively wide range of missions. The standard mission is to parachute to the injured, carry out medical treatment to stabilise them, and then extract them from wherever they are (often behind enemy lines), but all sorts of other rescue missions are also carried out, along with the more mournful task of retrieving dead American servicemen,

This book is nicely structured. We start with the more light hearted material - the normal hardcore training, adventures and practical joking, the overview of Sine's career and so forth, but then move onto more serious missions, not all of which involve Sine (another nice touch). Amongst them was a fairly grim mission in Ethiopia, the first jump into an active combat situation and the aftermath of being caught up in a terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia (there are some rather dramatic photographs of this particular incident).

The author's stated aim is to 'sell' Pararescue to potential future recruits, and I'd say he succeeds in his aim. This is a rather likeable account of life in an extraordinary unit. The normal gung-ho antics come across as more light hearted and more justified than in some similar memoirs. The author is justifiably proud of his unit and its achievements, and this also comes across in the text.

Chapters
1 - Into the Valley
2 - Pararescue Selection
3 - England
4 - Okinawa
5 - Philippines
6 - Ethiopia
7 - Iceland
8 - Khobar Towers
9 - Trouble Comes in Threes
10 - Casualties of War
11 - To Boldly Go
12 - Yemen
13 - Warrior Down
14 - Life after Pararescue

Author: William F. Sine, USAF (Ret.)
Edition: Paperback
Pages: 240
Publisher: Casemate
Year: 2014 edition of 2012 original


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