Mercenaries make sympathetic subjects

August 28, 2009|Jim Chiavelli

There are tens of thousands of military contractors - mercenaries - in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the US companies Xe (formerly Blackwater) and Triple Canopy. They’re guarding diplomats and fuel convoys, and attacking opium crops. They are also ungoverned, and some might say ungovernable. In one 2007 instance, Blackwater guards killed 17 civilians and injured 20 in Baghdad.

Last year, then-Senator Hillary Clinton tried to ban their use in Iraq. Now secretary of state, she employs them. In 2007, then-senator Barack Obama wrote to President George W. Bush saying he was “disturbed’’ by the use of military contractors in war zones. Recently, President Obama announced he is taking away Xe’s diplomatic-security contract in Iraq - and replacing it with Triple Canopy, from his hometown, Chicago.

Now comes British journalist Tony Geraghty with “Soldiers of Fortune: A History of the Mercenary in Modern Warfare.’’ A collection of post-World War II vignettes grouped into three sections, this loosely connected narrative focuses almost solely on British companies and their relationship with their government. But unlike other writers in this burgeoning field (Jeremy Scahill in “Blackwater,’’ Robert Young Pelton in “Licensed to Kill,’’ Steve Fainaru in “Big Boy Rules’’), Geraghty makes no bones about his sympathies for the mercenaries, who may today be ex-soldiers looking to pay off the mortgage but decades ago were often idealists fighting communism.

In Africa in the 1960s and ’70s, mercenaries fought on behalf of legitimate governments or against those, like Patrice Lumumba’s in the Republic of the Congo, deemed too close to the Soviet Union. British veteran “Mad’’ Mike Hoare, who created a unit of European ex-soldiers to fight the Simba rebellion (a few years after Lumumba’s assassination), was “an idealist who sought a higher purpose in his work.’’ His men became “popular heroes’’ by rescuing European hostages and supporting the Congolese premier. In other places, like Angola and El Salvador, the CIA recruited British veterans to undercut communist regimes.