Jim Mattis is the retired four-star Marine Corps general and one-time secretary of defense whose tenure in the Marine Corps is the main subject of this memoir. Mattis joined the Corps at 18 and worked his way up through the years, becoming commander of CENTCOM in 2010. Mattis had a reputation for absolute devotion to the Marine Corps and had the nickname “Warrior Monk” because he never married and worked tirelessly as a soldier. Mattis is known for both his bookishness and his intellectual rigor as well as for his ferocity in battle and his blunt speech when it comes to expressing his views.

Nearly all of Mattis’s war experience as a Marine was in the Middle East, beginning as a battalion commander in the Gulf War. After 9/11 Afghanistan became a primary center of experience as he airdropped his brigade into southern Afghanistan. The Iraq War followed, and then Mattis was involved in a series of conflicts against insurgents, Al Qaeda, Syria, and Iran, in addition to managing the fallout from the Arab Spring. Mattis’s tenure as a Marine commander was marked by success in the battlefield and tension with the administrations he served under.