Description:"The Whites of Their Eyes: Close Quarter Combat" by Roger Ford and Tim Ripley is an excellent historical introduction to hand-to-hand combat. This book provides various historical vignettes from the 1900s up to the Mogadishu "Black Hawk down" incident. This book draws on personal accounts from the Germans, Americans, French and the British; from infantryman to special forces operators. I personally enjoyed chapter 4, which covered the evolution in training commandos in World War II to fight in close quarters combat. This chapter thoroughly covered all the personalities of the era from Sykes and Fairbairn to Applegate. Overall, do you want to understand the horrors of close combat and understand the human courage and survival instinct of men in combat, then this is the book for you. Additionally, if you are a student of modern combatives, you will also find this book interesting.