Biography

• Email Patrick K. O'Donnell

His other books include Into the Rising Sun; Operatives, Spies, and Saboteurs; We Were One: Shoulder to Shoulder With the Marines Who Took Fallujah; The Brenner Assignment: The Untold Story of the Most Daring Spy Mission of WWII; They Dared Return; and Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean War’s Greatest Untold Story – The Epic Stand Of The Marines Of George Company, which is his most recent work.

Reviewers from media outlets as diverse as the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Jerusalem Post, the Los Angeles Times, CNN, C-SPAN, and National Public Radio (NPR) have hailed his publications.

In addition, his books have been Main or Alternate selections of the Book-of-the-Month, History, and Military History Book-Clubs.

O'Donnell has appeared as a guest on countless television and radio shows on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and other networks. On his second tour to Iraq, he served as a war correspondent for Men's Journal and Fox News, reporting on the conflict in Iraq from the perspective of the Marines on the ground. He has also written for Military History Quarterly (MHQ) and WWII Magazine and is a frequent contributor to a variety of nationally recognized blogs.

An expert on WWII espionage, special operations, and counter-insurgency on the modern battlefield, the historian has helped with production or writing for numerous documentaries produced by the BBC, the History Channel, and Fox News.

He also provided historical consulting for DreamWorks' award-winning miniseries Band of Brothers, as well as for the billion-dollar Medal of Honor game franchise.

His skills have even been tapped by DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). For the agency, the historian worked on modern weapons systems for urban warfare, looked at historical counter-insurgency, and researched and analyzed German technology from WWII and how it can be applied to the modern battlefield.

O'Donnell has been studying World War II and modern war since he was four years  old. During graduate school, O'Donnell founded the first online oral history project and virtual museum: TheDropZone. Dedicated to preserving the stories of combat veterans for generations to come,
the award-winning web site contains many of the 4,000 oral history interviews O’Donnell has personally conducted over the past twenty years with American combat veterans and their adversaries.

O'Donnell not only writes about combat—he's experienced it firsthand. He served as the only unpaid civilian combat historian to volunteer and spend three months in Iraq documenting the experiences of troops in battle. He literally fought with a Marine rifle platoon in Fallujah, surviving several ambushes and once dragging a mortally wounded Marine from battle (www.wewereone.com).

Because he believes in experiencing the places and people he writes about firsthand, O'Donnell has traveled to nearly all of the battlefields of North America and many of the WWII battlefields in Northern Europe. In addition, each one of his books contains scores, if not hundreds, of oral history interviews he has personally conducted, combined with years of archival research. (The Brenner Assignment, for instance, took 10,000 documents to produce.)

He is currently a resident of the Lone Star state, but considers the entire United States his office. He finds inspiration in the country's history and natural beauty and frequently works on his books while traveling across its wide expanses.

For Media Inquiries please contact:

Lissa Warren
VP, Senior Director of Publicity / Acquiring Editor
The Perseus Books Group