DANGER CLOSE is story of the nation's Special Forces operators: who they are, what they're like, how they do what they do, and why they remain vitally important to America's continued security. Much of the material Quade gathered during two years of combat missions with Green Berets involved classified operations she could not reveal at the time. Only now, for the first time, has she received clearance to share the nature of the secret missions. Most conventional troops have been recalled from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan that occupied the entire U.S. military for the first decade of the 21st century. But the operators are still there, and in many other hellholes most Americans can't even imagine: monitoring Islamic militants, reporting vital intelligence, providing backbone to allied troops and unacknowledged foreign paramilitaries who handle the dirty work so Americans can remain "uninvolved." And sometimes--when plans made by politicians in Washington and other capitals go awry-the operators man the rifles at the tip of the spear, regardless of official policy. And with U.S. fighter jets now providing much of the muscle in combat operations around the globe-in Syria, Iraq, south Sudan, northern Africa, Afghanistan, the tribal regions of Pakistan, and other regions that remain undisclosed-special ops rough teams such as those Quade spent months with are America's unseen and indispensable frontline troops, assuring that the Pentagon's bombs land where they're supposed to and the battle against terrorists is waged far, far away.