An elite Navy SEAL Team 6 operator trained to kill the United States’ most dangerous enemies takes readers inside the unadulterated, morally complicated and riveting post-military adventures of a lethal American mercenary. In American Mercenary, Daniel Corbett takes readers on a wild ride through the unadulterated, morally ambiguous, and riveting world of being a hired gun. From Abu Dhabi to Washington, DC, Cairo to San Diego, Belgrade to places that must remain secret, this is a world where money rules, and where adventure, danger, and absurdity often follow. A star high school athlete, Corbett passed on a Division I football career and opted for the US Navy. He began his career at SEAL Team 5 and eventually checked into SEAL Team 6. The navy spent millions teaching him and his fellow Team members how to sneak, subvert, recruit, disappear, survive, resist, and exert. And of course, how to shoot, a discipline at which Corbett excelled. What the navy did not do was prepare these men for post-military lives beyond the usual suite of veterans’ benefits and unimaginative job-training programs. So what does Corbett do? He goes private. There are still plenty of bad men in the world, and the only sin worse than wasting talent in dead-end pursuits is not using it at all. He starts small, but quickly moves up. The work is simultaneously familiar and foreign. The command structure is shady. The clients are dubious. The equipment is subpar. But what the fuck: the pay is good. Then things change in 2017 when Corbett is arrested on a job in Belgrade, Serbia. When the authorities discover he’s a Navy SEAL, they imagine the worst: he’s in Belgrade to assassinate the Serbian president. They throw Corbett in jail, where he spends the next 18 months making international headlines and fighting for his freedom in a kangaroo court. Ultimately, American Mercenary highlights the struggle of many veterans: how to reconcile military service with civilian life. For Corbett, becoming a mercenary isn’t just the best option, it feels like the only option. It’s a lot better than drowning in a bottle or holding a pistol under your chin and pulling the trigger, but is it enough?

Alex is a former US Army Ranger who signs up with private military companies to work government contracts in the war zone. His antagonist, Haider, is a humble Iraqi engineer who has been out of work for a year when he is recruited to make bombs for the fledgling Islamic State. Run the most dangerous roads on earth and kick in doors with Alex, and journey with Haider as his scientific mind struggles with the message from his God. Working the Kill Zone is a unique view into convoy, static, and personal security performed by contractors in Iraq. It is about life and death in the early years of the war as could only be properly told by someone who was there on the cutting edge of this brutal struggle. Told in such vivid detail that you will feel like you are there, here you'll find all the right ingredients: action, romance, brotherhood, and tragedy.

Sean McFate lays bare the opaque world of private military contractors, explaining the economic structure of the industry and showing in detail how firms operate on the ground. As a former paratrooper and private military contractor, McFate provides an unparalleled perspective into the nuts and bolts of the industry, as well as a sobering prognosis for the future of war.

Meet Blackwater USA, the private army that the US government has quietly hired to operate in international war zones and on American soil. Its contacts run from military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House; it has a military base, a fleet of aircraft and 20,000 troops, but since September 2007 the firm has been hit by a series of scandals that, far from damaging the company, have led to an unprecedented period of expansion. This revised and updated edition includes Scahill's continued investigative work into one of the outrages of our time: the privatisation of war.

Mercenaries are more powerful than experts realize, a grave oversight. Those who assume they are cheap imitations of national armed forces invite disaster because for-profit warriors are a wholly different genus and species of fighter. Private military companies such as the Wagner Group are more like heavily armed multinational corporations than the Marine Corps. Their employees are recruited from different countries, and profitability is everything. Patriotism is unimportant, and sometimes a liability. Unsurprisingly, mercenaries do not fight conventionally, and traditional war strategies used against them may backfire.

From Pulitzer Prize - winning Washington Post reporter Steve Fainaru comes an unforgettable journey into Iraq's parallel war - a world filled with tens of thousands of armed men roaming Iraq with impunity, doing jobs the military can't or won't do. Fainaru reveals in gritty and shocking detail what drives these men to do the world's most dangerous work.