In Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army, author Jeremy Scahill outlines the parallel problems that arise in the context of military privatization.
He is the author of Modern Mercenary : Private Armies and What They Mean for the World Order, and his first fictional title, Shadow War: A Tom Locke Novel, a thriller based on his real-life experiences in the private military industry, comes out in May.
But when the Canadian volunteers returned home, they were greeted like mercenaries, according to Tracey Arial, author of "I Volunteered: Canadian Vietnam Vets Remember" (Watson & Dwyer, 1997).
Armstrong's books had lower aims, and, for their author, they were essentially mercenary: a place for him to build a brand and tell his (partly false) side of a contentious story.
"Mercenary" was edited by the same acclaimed author whose 2007 Wired piece about freeing Iranian hostages eventually became the Academy Award-winning fictionalized re-enactment, Argo.
"People I know feel it is very biased and mercenary," said Ms. Schifter, who has not met the authors.
In poems like Német zsoldosdal (Song of the German Mercenaries), historical allusions could not entirely hide the author's revulsion with Nazi thuggery.
Sean McFate is author of the forthcoming book The Modern Mercenary: Private Armies and What They Mean for World Order (Oxford University Press), from which portions of this piece were adapted.
Tim Maurer co-directs the Cyber Policy Initiative at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and is the author of the forthcoming Cambridge University Press book "Cyber Mercenaries". I asked him a series of questions about these dramatic events.
Who they marry is a decision of life-changing importance in a society in which, as the author Francesca Simon puts it, wonderfully, "people despise the mercenary aspect of trade, but are buying and selling their own children".
Bartolomeo Platina (1421 1481), historian, political theorist, and author of a best-selling cookbook, began life as a mercenary soldier and ended it as the head of the Vatican Library.
