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Dispatches from a Mercenary in Iraq
Broadway
August 2008
On Sale: August 12, 2008
288 pages
ISBN: 0767930258
EAN: 9780767930253
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
“They come from across the globe: former special forces
soldiers from Britain, the U.S., Australia, Canada, New
Zealand, and every country on the European mainland. There
are Gurkhas from the Himalayan foothills and Fijians from
the South Sea Islands. There are men who learned their
skills with the Japanese antiterrorist paramilitaries and
many from southern Africa. There was even one guy who’d
served in the Chinese People’s Army and Chilean commandos
and Sri Lankan antiterrorist experts who joined the
mercenary gold rush to Iraq. They don’t share a common
ideology or common loyalty, but what they do share is a
thirst for adventure and a hunger for big bucks; Iraq is
the one place they are certain to find both…” For the first time a private military contractor delivers a
frontline report on life as a hired gun in Iraq.
“Anyone entering Iraq must travel the road from Amman to
Baghdad along the Fallujah bypass and around the Ramadi
Ring Road. It’s the most dangerous trunk route in the
world, used as a personal fairground shooting gallery by
insurgents and Islamists with rocket-propelled grenades and
Kalashnikovs. For newcomers to the country it’s terrifying –
but hell only really begins when that first journey ends…”
Amidst the ongoing controversy over the widespread
employment of private military contractors in Iraq, Highway
to Hell is a mercenary’s graphic, first-person exposé of
life in “the second biggest army in Iraq.” Not since the
days when the East India Company used soldiers of fortune
to depose fabulously wealthy maharajas and conquer India
for Great Britain, and mercenaries fought George
Washington’s Continental Army for King George, has such a
large and lethal independent fighting force been assembled.
Hired to do everything from securing American bases and
supply routes to guarding the thousands of government
officials, executives, aid workers, journalists, and other
civilians now populating the Middle East’s most notorious
target range, today’s clandestine soldiers of fortune earn
up to $1,000 a day, while remaining almost entirely immune
from government oversight, military authority, or Iraqi law John Geddes, a former warrant officer in Britain’s elite
SAS and veteran of several wars, became a private military
contractor in Iraq immediately following President George
W. Bush's declaration of the end of hostilities in early
May 2003. In Highway to Hell Geddes gives an unsparing
account of his harrowing, often bloody, and occasionally
absurd adventures in the wild west of Iraq. After a chaotic
chase on the Ramadi Ring Road, he takes out insurgents with
a sniper rifle (while nursing the mother of all hangovers).
He provides security to a cameraman during to a shootout on
the rooftop of a Baghdad hotel alongside Kalashnikov-
wielding Iraqi waiters (and accepts a marriage proposal
that is almost drowned out by RPG fire). He witnesses
American contractors shooting and pushing other vehicles
off the road first and asking questions later (or, rather,
not at all). From rushing a TV crew into the mayhem of a
suicide bombing’s aftermath to accompanying an oil
executive to a meeting in the heart of darkness of Sadr
City, Geddes presents a stunning, chilling inside look at
the face of contemporary warfare.
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