Tag Archives: Fiction

Sierra Leone is the same shell game with real chips,” Kinsey said. “Executive Outcomes, two hundred and twenty men, drives the RUF ‘to the point of defeat’ for under forty million dollars. His own footnote three concedes most sources say thirty-five or thirty-six, plus mining concessions that don’t fit cleanly under any dollar sign. Then he sets that against UNAMSIL — eleven thousand troops, ninety million, a peacekeeping and stabilization mandate with a different scale and a different decade entirely. He’s pricing the cost of winning a fight against the cost of keeping the house from burning down afterward. And the war didn’t end when EO left in 1997. It ran on through coups and Sandline and British intervention until a formal close in 2002 — which his own 2000 footnote all but concedes.” Continue reading →

“Ramesses II fought the Battle of Kadesh with Sherden mercenaries in his personal guard — men recruited, by most reconstructions, from what’s now the eastern Mediterranean, fighting for Egypt’s pharaoh for pay, not for pharaoh’s gods. The distinction matters. A conscript fights because the state compels him. A mercenary fights because the state — or a fragment of one — writes a check.” Continue reading →

Two steps behind him, Tim Palast shuffled in like a man carrying the weight of every war he’d ever read about. Rumpled. Tired. The kind of tired that doesn’t sleep off. He’d written the book on private military companies, literally, and he’d spent years trying to warn people that the mercenary was back—just wearing a better tie this time.
They didn’t shake hands. In this business, you saved your grip for the things that mattered. Continue reading →