Mercenaries

"Mercenaries have been employed as auxiliaries in war since earliest times but in the post-1945 world they have operated, almost exclusively, in weak third-world countries. From Colombia to the Congo, Angola to Papua New Guinea, Cambodia to Nicaragua, they have appeared: training the drug cartel armies, assisting rebellions or civil wars, acting as the agents of the major powers. In the Congo crisis (1960-65) they earned an especially unsavoury reputation for greed, brutality and racialism; it is a reputation that has stuck to the mercenary and on the whole justly. During the 1990s a new phenomenon has emerged in the form of the mercenary corporations such as Executive Outcomes or Sandline. These corporations offer a range of military expertise and weaponry, have the covert support of governments in the countries from which they come and are rapidly becoming a power to themselves, ultimately far more dangerous than the individual freebooters of the past."--BOOK JACKET.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.