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