Book Review

One Green Beret: Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and beyond: 15 extraordinary years in the life—1996–2011
By Mark Giaconia
Independently published, May 13, 2018
260 pages

By How Miller

One Green Beret: Bosnia, Kosovo, Iraq, and beyond: 15 extraordinary years in the life—1996–2011 by Mark Giaconia is an amazingly revealing and poignant tale about the career of a unique individual Green Beret NCO who succeeded on dream SF missions and bore the consequences.

Mark’s initial assignment as a Joint Commissioned Observer (JCO) in Bosnia with the 10th SFG (A) utilized all of his talents as a diplomat-warrior and formed the basis for his subsequent successes on the advanced team in northern Iraq before the 2003 invasion. His participation in Viking Hammer to remove the Al Ansar threat to the Kurds, attacking Saddam’s Green Line, and his amazing career developing digital tools for intelligence data analysis are quite unique.

This is told from his personal perspective and is amazingly revealing of his motivations, self-perceived shortcomings (which are actually being brutally honest about his actions), and how the experiences caused challenges to his mental well-being.

The reader is drawn in with the author from the relatively pleasant assignment as a JCO in Bosnia interacting with the civilian population, later experiencing his first combat while embedded with the Russian Spetsnaz in Kosovo, and on to the extremely punishing combat of Operation Viking Hammer, a large-scale assault by the PUK Peshmerga on Ansar al-Islam, an al-Queda affiliated group who needed to be defeated to free the Peshmerga to fight Sadaam Hussein’s troops.

His gung-ho attitude, hungering to get into the fight, eventually morphed into a more mature attitude of “be careful what you wish for,” and he largely taught himself digital skills for his later assignment focusing on utilizing gathered intelligence in a dramatically more efficient and useful way, leading to real-time information updates to what the dismounted operator gets to see.

His dogged persistence and his perceptive focus on the objective allowed Mark to make breakthrough progress in data analysis and easily understood presentation of known facts in a layered “live” (constantly updated) map, ideal for planning troop dispositions and strategy. This was a world of difference from the intel available to them for Viking Hammer, despite a lot of info having been reported to headquarters prior to their arrival.

In this issue of the Sentinel, Mark shares with us an easily relatable chapter from the book about his initiation to combat in Kosovo, part of the SF involvement in 1990s Balkan wars.

We encourage you to buy this book and compare this with our previous coverage of Viking Hammer and Mark Grdovic’s book Those Who Face Death, told from the perspective of the officers that planned and led Operation Viking Hammer. These two books are totally complementary. The authors even mention each other in their books.

Click here to read an excerpt from Those Who Face Death, from the January 2026 Sentinel.