Vince John John itibaren Aaramoun, Lebanon itibaren Aaramoun, Lebanon

** spoiler alert ** A portrayal of the so-called private security companies operating in Iraq - mostly somber, occasionally grimly funny, sometimes scathing. The author spends most of his time in this memoir at the micro level, with some individual American soldiers-for-hire he got to know pretty well and with some of the encounters between them and the people of Iraq that undermined, and are still undermining, the work of the American military in terms of establishing and maintaining relations with those Iraqi people. As Fainaru explains, there has been a kind of surreal role reversal between the U.S. State Department and the American military there. Especially under General David Petraeus, the military has been trying to get on better terms with the people of Iraq by protecting the non-insurgent populace from the depredations of the many insurgent groups and treating them with respect and humanity, and by showing support and respect for the local political leadership. But while the military's been trying to use a diplomatic strategy, the State Department has hired Blackwater, Triple Canopy, and other mercenary companies, fielding tens of thousands of armed men at a time, and given them immunity from accountability. They are not subject to Iraqi law or to the American military's Uniform Code of Military Justice. No one has authority over them except their own corporate management and the State Department, and those entities have shown no interest in reining in the mercenaries, even when they kill civilians who are simply unlucky enough to be nearby when the mercs come blasting through town shooting at any person or vehicle they consider suspicious. Of course, the Iraqis affected simply see Americans, and the resulting hatred generalizes to a loathing not of Blackwater or Triple Canopy but of all Americans. As a retired Marine, I think this is a despicable state of affairs that should never have been allowed to develop and needs to be ended immediately. This book is more complex than that, though - the author tells the stories of a number of those mercenaries that he spent considerable time with and with whom he formed deep friendships despite his distaste for their jobs; several of those stories are tragic, and at the end, the author is still unable to resolve the ambivalence between his affection for these men as individuals and his conviction that what they are doing is deeply wrong. As he quotes one soldier - not a mercenary - as saying, "You can get away with taking life if your country sends you; you can eventually forgive yourself. But when you do it because you want to buy a house, that's when you really begin to have existential questions." Anyone who wants to understand the history and present status of the war in Iraq should include this book on their reading list.