The Second Shot was an Amazon Prime giveaway, covering mostly Gene Yu's autobiography upto and including the rescue of Evelyn Chang from her kidnappers in the Phillipines. Gene Yu has an interesting background, since very few Asian Americans volunteer for military service, and so I read the book in a few days and enjoyed it.
The start of the story seems almost stereotypically Asian American, with Gene growing up in Massachusetts and surviving childhood bullying by pretending he knew martial arts. His family then moves to Cupertino where instead of being the smart kid in school he was surrounded by kids who are parented in typical Asian hot house environment and realized that he couldn't keep up.
His adventures upon joining West Point are great reading --- his was the last class where the typical hazing by upper class students were still permitted and allowed, and as the school is 1% Asian (and most of those Asians were South Korean!) he seemed particularly singled out. I didn't understand the Green Beret specialty of the US special forces when I started the book, but by the time I finished it's clear that most of the special forces are composed of people who finish the grueling training. I did enjoy the famous story where he ordered pizza during a training mission.
In any case the story of the kidnapping and rescue, while the hook that led me to read this book turned out to be less exciting than a typical action movie. Rather than being deeply involved in the action or going Rambo, Yu coordinated and convinced local special forces to trick the kidnappers into exchanging the victim in exchange for money (which was never found again) and a spiked set of electronic components that were used to track down the terrorists in the future. This is much harder than you can imagine, and Yu had to foist of distractions like his own mother's need to get him a job after he got laid off from Palantir.
I enjoyed the book and think it's very much worth reading.
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