Steve Fainaru's "Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq"

In a few words: The Bush administration fought the Iraq war on the cheap, managing with mercenaries what it couldn't do with American soldiers, whose numbers never exceeded more than a third of the force used during the first Gulf War. In Big Boy Rules, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Steve Fainaru explores the often corrupt, venal, lawless world of "private security contractors" through the fateful experience of one young ex-soldier in particular. Mercenary ethics proved emblematic of the Bush administration's.

The after-action report of a supply convoy demolished by insurgents describes the killing or disappearance of 13 of its 20 men in a firefight so violent that bodies are mutilated beyond recognition, other bodies are booby-trapped, and, to destroy IEDs (the so-called improvised explosive devices that devastated troops and convoys), an American M-1 tank fires rounds into piles of bodies by roadside.

Contractors and soldiers discuss morbid preferences, should they be abducted: Would you rather be taken by Sunnis, who are into beheading their captives, or Shiites, who like drilling body parts with power tools but generally stay away from beheadings? And there’s always the cyanide pill some carried, ready to crack under a tooth in case of abduction.

Not with the army, but as a mercenary. Or merc (“private security contractor” is the polite term for domestic consumption in the United States).

That’s what Jonathon Coté did. It’s what men and some women, by the tens of thousands, did immediately after the beginning of the Iraq war, usually for a couple of reasons. The job paid obscenely well. Coté left the military making $1,967.70 a month as a sergeant. He made $7,000 a month as a mercenary, as much as a one-star general.

In most cases, there were no rules. Not standard rules of law-abiding behavior, anyway.

In Big Boy Rules: America’s Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq, Steve Fainaru, a reporter for the Washington Post, expands on the series that won him the Pulitzer Prize in 2008 to trace two fatal and delusional trajectories.

Crescent broke Iraqi law with impunity. It hacked up fake IDs so unscreened Iraqis and other employees could make it into American military bases. It scoffed at filing incident reports, let alone forwarding them to the Iraqi Ministry of Interior. It hired and armed as its security director a domestic-offender who’d have been prohibited from carrying a firearm in the United States (or in the military).

That’s the company Coté joined through little more than an on-line transaction, only to end up a hostage, along with four members of his team, while escorting a convoy on a southern Iraqi road--"sucked into the void," Fainaru writes, "the most terrifying fate I could imiimaginen a country where any number of terrifying fates were aimaginable."

Crescent Security had flouted protocol and sent its convoy absurdly lacking in required manpower.

Chancing on Coté, Fainaru was clearly smitten with his “frenetic world” and “megawatt smile.” Plus, “he was great copy. And he made me feel safe.”

What all this has to do with the story Fainaru is reporting isn’t clear and skims close to self-indulgence, if not to the suggestion that Fainaru’s personal story somehow rates a measure of parity with exploding heads and magnetic mercs. But book editors are themselves smitten these days with the first person, likely encouraging their authors to “connect” with readers by wearing their familiarity on their book-sleeves. Sometimes it’s interesting. Most of the time it’s unnecessary padding.

In this case maybe Fainaru’s confessions are meant to frame his unusual personal involvement in the story once Coté is taken hostage in November 2006. It’s the kind of involvement that leads him to investigate much more of the mercenary world than he otherwise might have, to great benefit for the reader: Besides Jeremy Scahill’s “Blackwater,” his 2006 deconstruction of Blackwater Worldwide, and Robert Young Pelston’s “Licensed to Kill,” an uncritical treatment of the merc world, it’s a largely untold story. Fainaru tells it well, using Coté’s vanishing into “the most terrifying fate I could imagine in a country where any number of terrifying fates were imaginable” to broaden his investigation into this particular circle of the Iraqi inferno.