Big Boy Rules
America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq
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5.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $2.99
Publisher Description
A Pulitzer Prize–winning international reporter elucidates the day-to-day lives of modern American mercenaries in Iraq.
Tens of thousands of them are in Iraq. They work for companies with ominous-sounding names, like Crescent Security Group, Triple Canopy, and Blackwater Worldwide. They travel in convoys of multicolored pickups fortified with makeshift armor, belt-fed machine guns, frag grenades, and even shoulder-fired missiles. They protect everything from the U.S. ambassador and American generals to shipments of Frappuccino bound for Baghdad's Green Zone. They kill Iraqis, and Iraqis kill them.
From Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru comes a harrowing journey into Iraq's parallel war. Part Mad Max, part Fight Club, it is a world filled with "private security contractors"—the U.S. government's sanitized name for the modern mercenaries, or mercs, who roam Iraq with impunity, doing jobs that the overstretched, understaffed military can't or won't do. They are part of America's "other" army—some patriotic, some desperate, some just out for cash or adventure. And some who disappear into the void that is Iraq and are never seen again.
Fainaru traveled with a group of these contractors to uncover what motivates them to put their lives in danger every day. He joined them as they made their way through Iraq—heavily armed, dodging not only bombs and insurgents but also their own Iraqi colleagues. Just days after Fainaru left for home, five contractors were kidnapped in broad daylight on Iraq's main highway. How the government and the company responded reveals the dark truths behind the largest private force in the history of American warfare . . . .
With 16 pages of photographs
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For this mordant dispatch from one of the Iraq War's seamiest sides, Pulitzer Prize winning Washington Post correspondent Fainaru embedded with some of the thousands of "private security contractors" who chauffeur officials, escort convoys and add their own touch of mayhem to the conflict. Exempt from Iraqi law and oversight by the U.S. government, which doesn't even record their casualties, the mercenaries, Fainaru writes, play by "Big Boy Rules" which often means no rules at all as they barrel down highways in the wrong direction, firing on any vehicle in their path. (His report on the Blackwater company, infamous for killing Iraqi civilians and getting away with it, is meticulous and chilling.) Fainaru's depiction of the mercenaries' crassness and callousness is unsparing, but he sympathizes with these often inexperienced, badly equipped hired guns struggling to cope with a dirty war. Nor is he immune to the romance of the soldier of fortune, especially in his somewhat bathetic portrait of Jon Cot , Iraq War veteran and lost soul who joined the fly-by-night Crescent Security Group and was kidnapped by insurgents. Fainaru's vivid reportage makes the mercenary's dubious motives and chaotic methods a microcosm of a misbegotten war.
