Books by Daniel Pace
While all purchases are appreciated, please note that buying directly from the site puts substantially more money in the author's pocket than buying from Amazon.
It Was What It Was: A Tale of the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq (2006-2008)
As the dust settled on the U.S. military's initial victory in Iraq, the Army found itself mired in a difficult campaign to defeat a growing insurgency and rebuild the war-torn country. Untrained for counterinsurgency and without enough troops to secure the population, the Army responded by creating several new brigades specifically to meet these requirements.
It Was What It Was invites readers into the life of a freshly commissioned lieutenant in one of these units. Join him and his comrades as they stand up a new brigade of the 1st Infantry Division, train and equip it, and deploy together to the heart of Baghdad.
Essential reading for aspiring military leaders and a treasure trove for historians and enthusiasts, this book sheds light on the strange and often contradictory difficulties of small unit leadership in 21st century warfare.
It'll Buff Out: A Private's Tales of War with the 10th Mountain Division in Afghanistan 2003-2004
This story started as a couple of anecdotes about life as a private, and it grew into a full story about life in the Army as a lower-enlisted guy.
​
Stepping into the Army as a 21-year-old college graduate was a slap in the face, and it took me a long time to make the transition from dirty drug using student to professional soldier. This book tries to capture that experience and to give the reader a taste of exactly how strange a private's life really is, both in peacetime and in war.
Grey Zone Ethics: A Practitioners Guide to Making Ethically Difficult Decisions
The special operations community has an ethics problem. While forward, operators frequently encounter lose / lose situations, and the community isn't preparing them properly to pick the best option. In part, the problem stems from the difficulty of the situations themselves, but it also stems from the community's treatment of ethics training as an individual task, when in reality it is not - it's a collective task, and it requires as much training as any other special operations skill set. This book presents a training plan to remedy that problem.
While the lessons and methodology presented are tailored to the special operations community and the problem it faces, they are applicable to many organizations that have to prepare their people to navigate ethically difficult terrain.
The Whale and The Kraken
Under the waves, old grudges run deep. Whales hunt krakens. Krakens drown whales. It's the natural order.
​
Or so it has always been.
​
Then fate tosses together Little Jimmy Whale and Carlito Calamari, two young ocean dwellers raised to fear one another. What begins as a comic clash of cultures becomes a story of loyalty, growth, and the hope that even ancient enemies can learn to understand one another.
