"Goff's career as a soldier in Army Special Operations (Delta Force, Rangers, and Special Forces) took him from the invasions of Vietnam, Grenada, and Haiti, to the training grounds of the Colombian and Peruvian armed forces. He taught Military Science at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, conducted classified missions in El Salvador and Guatemala, and was deployed with the ill-fated Task Force Ranger (of Black Hawk Down fame) to Mogadishu. There are snapshots of those experiences in this book." "But this is not a typical soldier's memoir. Goff engages in neither machismo nor maudlin soul-searching, and he is not content to merely tell stories. He interprets his own experience through years of post-military searching since he left the military, and draws some starkly brutal conclusions about the risks we all face in the dangerous last days of an unstable empire."--Jacket.