Author Description

In the smoldering aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was handed a plan—an audacious blueprint for victory in the Pacific. The path would be perilous.. It called for the systematic invasion of the Japanese-occupied islands of the South Pacific, culminating in the ultimate assault on Japan itself. But victory would not come without intelligence, without foresight—without men willing to risk everything. Thus, in the shadows of war, a clandestine military unit was born. The Special Forces—an elite band of scholar-athletes, handpicked from the nation’s finest—were sent into the heart of enemy territory. Their mission was to infiltrate each island, gather intelligence on enemy positions, and chart the treacherous weather patterns that could dictate success or catastrophe. Roosevelt agonized over the decision to send these young men into the jaws of danger. He knew they were America’s best—her brightest, her strongest, the very “Cream of the Crop.” Most never returned. Yet their sacrifice ensured that tens of thousands of Marines would live to fight another day. Decades later, in 1975, fate delivered an unexpected revelation. Over a business lunch, the author with his newly hired lawyer, a man that demonstrated extraordinary composure under pressure, the author asked how he developed such an important trait? The answer came like a ghost from the past. The lawyer had once been the top singles player on the UNC tennis team, a master of discipline and determination. But in 1942, he was chosen for something far greater—recruited by the Marines into that same secret Special Forces. For three years his unit secretly landed on Japanese held islands and they spent six weeks gathering intelligence for the invasion. After waking up each day not knowing that this may be his last, no challenge in civil society could shake him. At its core, Cream of the Crop is more than just a wartime chronicle. It examines the f