How far would you stick your own neck out on the line to do your job, even if there was no guarantee that you’d make it out alive?

“American Commandos: Memoirs of a Special Operations Operative” is a debut novel released by Joseph C. Miller III, and follows the actions of a highly-trained special forces detachment tasked with stabilizing an embattled nation embroiled by in-fighting and government corruption. Their mission borders on the impossible, and earns them plenty of powerful enemies whose fortunes rely on their actions remaining secretive.

Joseph C. Miller III is not the author’s real name, but it’s the name that a local Rumford man is inhabiting in order to steer clear of any sticky legal situations regarding any connections made between the fictionalized account told within the book, and the very real situations he encountered while deployed as a member of a specialized Army unit in the early 2010s.

Miller was born in Providence, but moved to Phillipsdale in East Providence as a child. He comes from a family steeped in military service.

“I come from a family who served in Afghanistan, Vietnam, World War II, the Civil War, and we go all the way back to the Revolutionary War. My family has been around that long,” he said. “My biological father’s family came over here in the late 1800s. My mom’s family can be traced to relatives that came over on the Mayflower. All through the inception of this country we have served at one point or another. We’ve been serving a long time.”

But also since the time he was a newborn, Miller has faced the reality of death in his life. His biological father passed away shortly after he was born. His stepfather — a Vietnam War veteran who Miller credits with providing him a solid foundation of skills within the trades — passed away in 1997 from complications due to exposure to Agent Orange.

Still, Miller knew he wanted to serve, and he signed up with the Army National Guard in 1998, attending infantry and airborne school. He took a two-year break to earn a college degree in building construction. Shortly after graduating college, his mother passed away due to ALS. Around that same time, he saw a news report that an instructor he had while in airborne school was killed while serving with the 3rd Infantry Division during the Iraq War.

“I said, I have to go back in and serve,” Miller said.

A special mission, specially for him

Once back in the National Guard, he served around five years as an instructor at Camp Varnum in Narragansett, but was getting frustrated at a lack of upward mobility within the post. With the end of his service contract in sight, he considered switching into the Navy Reserves.

That was when an old friend of his came back into his life and offered him a job opportunity that would change the trajectory of the rest of his service, and his life, forever.

“What I’m about to disclose to you goes no further than this room,” the old friend is quoted as saying in the book, making no secret about the sensitive nature of the mission, or its importance.

Without being told too many more details, Miller agreed.

“The mission would end up exposing deep corruption in the heights of the government during the War on Terrorism,” Miller writes in the book.

While much of the book had to be fictionalized — primarily the names of places and players involved — the overarching plot within is based on Miller’s experience over the next few years training with his Special Operations Detachment and deploying to Afghanistan (renamed Troygekistan, in Central Asia, in the book) to be part of a special forces unit that was tasked with providing training to Afghan special forces commandos.

This was back when the United States government was still investing vast amounts of resources into trying to back the democratically-elected Afghan government that had replaced the Taliban, and that included a large investment in trying to train their military to be able to defend itself when the U.S., one day, wouldn’t be around anymore.

Miller found himself right in the middle of that process, with his skills as a contractor and being the owner of his own company lending themselves to be highly effective in that environment.

The book goes into his time earning the respect and trust of the foreign commandos, and his successes catching the attention of higher-ups, who proceeded to place him in charge of a much more tenuous, and much more dangerous mission.

“I was told they just got rid of an officer who was screwing up a program and they want me to take it over. ‘We want you to fix the problems down there. If you can move the ball a little bit, that would be great,’ ” Miller recalled. “And, oh yeah, ‘Don’t get your team killed.’ ”

In case you were wondering, these higher-ups didn’t ask him nicely to take on this responsibility — which Miller felt was far outside of his wheelhouse as a Sergeant — and hope he would say yes.

“In the Army, we call it being ‘volun-told’ ”, Miller said with a smirk.

What he ultimately was tasked with doing was looking into the business affairs of a host nation’s equivalent of The United States Special Operations Command, and finding out why certain financial matters weren’t adding up. This would lead him to investigate brazen acts of financial skimming, smuggling, and fraud occurring within high levels of the host government.

His findings would foreshadow what would ultimately be uncovered as one of the most incredible modern-day stories of government-sanctioned embezzlement — much of which has since been exposed publicly since the Fall of Kabul and the re-establishment of the Taliban’s power in Afghanistan in August of 2021.

Interested? Read the book

A journalistic telling of the book will do no justice to the great attention to detail that Miller takes in authoring this “inspired by true events” novel.

Through his fictionalization of the story, Miller has found a creative way to speak openly about events steeped in deep secrecy, and writes in a compelling and engaging way that will be enjoyable for anyone interested in stories of military conflict, or anyone interested in a good old-fashioned story about exposing government corruption, and how things really go down in an embattled nation.

You can find the book on sale on Amazon in hardcover, in paperback, and digitally for the Kindle.