Paul "Chuck Norris" Yurkin has never been one to give up. A product of the inner city projects, he pulled himself up by the bootstraps and enlisted in the Marine Corps-serving proudly in Desert Storm before beginning a fifteen-year career with the Myrtle Beach police force. But when he saw the efforts of his policing failing to create any positive change, it wasn't long before Yurkin became jaded by the system as a whole. Seeking a new life for himself and his daughters, he met up with a private contracting firm and began training for a trip to sunny Afghanistan, where he would work on training the fledgling Afghan National Police. In the midst of two weeks of training in Virginia, he earned the nickname that would stick with him for years to come-and met three best friends that remained by his side through dangerous missions, misadventures, and the frustrations of being stationed abroad. In Memoirs of a Security Contractor, Yurkin tells the true story of his time as a security contractor in Afghanistan in candid detail-in an eye-opening tale of determination, friendship, and never giving up.

"This is the story of how one person persevered through three decades of technology change, marketplace change, major historic change, and the rise and fall of his multiple careers"--Publisher's description

Provides a behind-the-scenes look at America's civilian contractors in Iraq, following the activities of workers for MPRI and Crescent Security, two contracting firms who provide protection for diplomats, move convoys of precious materials, and help rebuild the infrastructure of the wartorn nation.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Edward Snowden, the man who risked everything to expose the US government’s system of mass surveillance, reveals for the first time the story of his life, including how he helped to build that system and what motivated him to try to bring it down. In 2013, twenty-nine-year-old Edward Snowden shocked the world when he broke with the American intelligence establishment and revealed that the United States government was secretly pursuing the means to collect every single phone call, text message, and email. The result would be an unprecedented system of mass surveillance with the ability to pry into the private lives of every person on earth. Six years later, Snowden reveals for the very first time how he helped to build this system and why he was moved to expose it. Spanning the bucolic Beltway suburbs of his childhood and the clandestine CIA and NSA postings of his adulthood, Permanent Record is the extraordinary account of a bright young man who grew up online—a man who became a spy, a whistleblower, and, in exile, the Internet’s conscience. Written with wit, grace, passion, and an unflinching candor, Permanent Record is a crucial memoir of our digital age and destined to be a classic.

The memoir of Shen, age 12 at the start of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, recounts being complicit in arduous Red Guard activities that directly or indirectly led to several gruesome deaths of political "enemies"--And later falling in love with and marrying the daughter of a man brutally tortured and killed by one of his fellow Red Guards.

Pádraig O'Keeffe joined the elite and secretive French Foreign Legion at the age of twenty, seeking a challenge that would absorb his interests and intensity. He served with the Legion in Cambodia and Bosnia, then returned to civilian life, but military habits would not allow him to settle. His need for intense excitement and extreme danger drove him back to the lifestyle he knew and loved, and using his Legion training, he became a 'hidden soldier' by opting for security missions in Iraq and Haiti. In Iraq he was the sole survivor of an ambush in no man's land between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, the most dangerous place on earth. An intense, exciting and vivid account of extraordinary and sometimes horrific events, Hidden Soldier lifts the veil on the dark and shadowy world of security contractors and what the situation is really like in Iraq as well as other trouble spots. This bestseller also includes photographs taken by Padraig O'Keeffe while he was a Legionnaire and when he was in Iraq.

Simon Chase's life is a maze of burner phones, encrypted emails, secret meetings, and weaponry - all devoted to executing missions too sensitive for government acknowledgement. Working for shadowy British and American organisations, Chase has been on the trail of Bin Laden in Afghanistan, protected allied generals in Iraq, and been part of an operation directly related to the attack in 2012 on the US consulate in Benghazi. Zero Footprint takes us to this dangerous and thrilling world, and tells the true story of a private military contractor whose work forms the foundation for western security abroad, especially when the UK and US military, intelligence agencies, and departments of state need something done that they can't - or won't - do themselves.