Too Secret To Tell

A pseudonymous special ops memoir records tedium and terror in a unit with no name

This is a story of common-soldier counter-terrorism, of the gritty patience of American assassination teams, of the elite but ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-slept donkey work of intelligence operations in dangerous countries. 

It is told by a five-feet-one-inch Egyptian immigrant hyper-achiever who brags about being the shortest man in the U.S. Army. He is an Arabic speaker who sometimes pretended to be Mexican to ease his way through American life. He is now a retired sergeant major with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.

Black ops team. (Photo: XY)

Under a pen-name, “Adam Gamal,” he produced this earnest and sometimes angry autobiography with the help of a lively writer named Kelly Kennedy, herself an Army veteran of the endless wars in the Middle East. Gamal’s real name is a secret, the name of his unit is a secret, his service records are so secret that nowadays the Veterans Administration can’t find them. The book is decorated with black rectangles redacting information that our government found too secret to publish.  

So how do we know that anything here is true?