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Adopted a policy of attacking a вЂњstrategic triadвЂќ of critical resources вЂ“financial credits, high technology and natural gas вЂ“ essential to Soviet economic survival.

to вЂњneutralizingвЂќ Soviet control over Eastern Europe and authorized covert action and other means to support anti-Soviet groups in the region.

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The result was a series of top-secret national security decision directives that: He directed his top national security team to develop a plan to end the Cold War by winning it. He boldly predicted that вЂњthe march of freedom and democracy вЂ¦ will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history as it has left other tyrannies which stifle the freedom and muzzle the self-expression of the people.вЂќ One month later, in a prophetic address to the British Parliament at Westminster, Reagan said that the Soviet Union was gripped by a вЂњgreat revolutionary crisisвЂќ and that a вЂњglobal campaign for freedomвЂќ would ultimately prevail.

Speaking at his alma mater, Eureka College, he declaredВ that the Soviet empire was вЂњfaltering because rigid centralized control has destroyed incentives for innovation, efficiency, and individual achievement.вЂќ In May 1982 he went public with his assessment of the SovietsвЂ™ systemic weakness. In his first presidential press conference, Reagan stunned official Washington by denouncing the Soviet leadership as still dedicated to вЂњworld revolution and a one-world Socialist-Communist state.вЂќ As he wrote in his official autobiography, вЂњI decided we had to send as powerful a message as we could to the Russians that we werenвЂ™t going to stand by anymore while they armed and financed terrorists and subverted democratic governments.вЂќД«ased on intelligence reports and his life-long study, Reagan concluded that Soviet communism was cracking and ready to crumble. Reagan determined that the time had come for a new strategy: вЂњWe win and they lose.вЂќ Whatever its early success, the policy of containment clearly no longer worked. Yet communism still gripped the Soviet Union, Eastern and Central Europe, China, Cuba, Vietnam and North Korea, and had spread to sub-Saharan Africa, Afghanistan and Nicaragua. and its allies had striven to contain communism through a series of diplomatic, economic and military initiatives that had cost hundreds of billions of dollars and tens of thousands of lives. After enduring what he has endured, can there ever again be such a thing as вЂњnormalвЂќ? The Long Walk will hook you from the very first sentence, and it will stay with you long after its final gripping page has been turned.As Ronald Reagan assumed the presidency, he was greatly troubled by what he saw around the world. His thrilling, heartbreaking, stunningly honest book immerses the reader in two harrowing and simultaneous realities: the terror and excitement and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the enemy within - the haunting memories that will not fade, the survival instincts that will not switch off. When Castner returned home to his wife and family, he began a struggle with a no less insidious foe, an unshakable feeling of fear and confusion and survivorвЂ™s guilt that he terms The Crazy. It is also an unflinching portrayal of the toll war exacts on the men and women who are fighting it. This lethal game of cat and mouse was, and continues to be, the real war within AmericaвЂ™s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.Д«ut The Long Walk is not just about battle itself. They relied on an army of remote-controlled cameras and robots, but if that technology failed, a technician would have to don the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk up to the bomb, and disarm it by hand. Days and nights he and his team - his brothers - would venture forth in heavily armed convoys from their Forward Operating Base to engage in the nerve-racking yet strangely exhilarating work of either disarming the deadly improvised explosive devices that had been discovered, or picking up the pieces when the alert came too late. In the tradition of Michael HerrвЂ™s Dispatches and works by such masters of the memoir as Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, a powerful account of war and homecoming.Д«rian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq.

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