Happiness Is a Hired Gun:
Mercenaries

So you did your time in the army and can field strip everything from a Makarov to a Chinese nuclear missile, you can fly an Apache helo or an F117 blindfolded, you could parachute directly into Saddam Hussein's Jacuzzi without tripping the disco light alarms and can speak 145 languages (including tribal dialects) and swear in 89 of them. You have been trained to kill a man just by twitching your ears, can make explosives out of Rice Krispies and list every LIC and Tango group by acronym alphabetically in Russian. You're under 40, fit and ready to go private. Congratulations, you can now work at Home Depot in the plumbing department or seek employment as a mercenary.

Well, we may be getting a little carried away but the bottom line is it won't take long before you start discovering that international security companies are forking over $10,000-$15,000 a month for high level contract soldiering these days. You only have one problem. Uncle Sam would rather see you work as a Burger King manager than sell your precious skills to the highest bidder. Yes, there are U.S. groups like MPRI and DSL who have dull-as-dishwater brochures and who do equally dull things like train foreign armies or write operational manuals in Serbo Croatian.

Any U.S. citizen entering a foreign army without prior approval (in writing) from both the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Defense will forfeit U.S. citizenship, although Congress has ruled that enlistment in a foreign army is not a clear enough declaration of intent to voluntarily renounce citizenship.

The Hague 1907 Convention banned operation on the territory of neutral states of offices for recruitment of soldiers (volunteers or mercenaries) to fight in a country at war. In 1977, part of a supplementary protocol to the 1949 Geneva Convention on the Protection of Civilian Population in Time of War made freelancers liable to court trial as criminals if they are taken POW. If found guilty, they can be simply shot on the spot as criminals.

The U.N. General Assembly reached a consensus in 1989 on recruiting, training, use and financing of mercenaries. If you are interested in volunteering, make sure you understand the laws and penalties that will suddenly apply to you. If you think fighting for money will make you popular and chicks will dig you, think again. On the other hand, if Uncle Sam has spent five years and about half a million dollars turning you into all that you can be, there are employment choices other than flipping burgers or working at Jiffy Lube.

Americans have not always been the ideal volunteers. In fact, the last two great wars showed that the majority of Americans held back until they were pushed into it, But once they were in it, they finished the job. There are two major developments you have to come to terms with.

First, most foreign armies don't want American volunteers. Americans have an image of wanting too much money, complaining too much, and creating too many political overtones when captured or killed. Recently, American mercenaries have fought in Angola, Rhodesia, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Sierra Leone, Myanmar, the Congo, Lebanon, Bosnia and Russia. Many are motivated by religion (black Muslims in the Middle East), background (Croats in Yugoslavia), money (Central America) or a misguided sense of adventure (Angola). The U.S. is not adverse to hiring or supplying mercenaries, starting back when Benjamin Franklin hired the Prussian officer Friedrich von Steuben to instill discipline into the Continental Army, or when Claire Chennault was hired to give China grief with his Flying Tigers. And Americans are not adverse to being mercenaries (we are capitalists after all). In modern times U.S.-hired mercenaries have been as diverse as the Ray-Banned pilots that flew for Air America, the advisors who trained Nung or Montagnard tribes in Vietnam or the doomed Contras in Nicaragua. There have been Americans in the Congo, Sierra Leone, Rhodesia, Myanmar, Israel and as far back as fliers in WWI, advisors to Haile Selaisse in Ethiopia and dozens that fought and died in the Spanish Civil War.

Mercenaries continue to do our dirty, or covert work, but our government does not like the idea of you running off to fight in other people's wars.

The second development is the creation of the International Security Firm. Companies like MPRI, Sandlines and EO are doing a lot of the clean and dirty work countries can't or won't do themselves. For example, Executive Outcomes brochure promises:

• To provide a highly professional and confidential Military Advisory Service to legitimate governments.
• To provide sound military and strategic advice.
• To provide the most professional military training packages currently available to Armed Forces, covering aspects related to sea, air and land warfare.
• To provide advice to Armed Forces on weapon and weapon platform selection.
• To provide a total a-political service based on confidentiality, professionalism and dedication.

Today, those who wish to be wild geese or soldiers of fortune will find few clear career paths. You will need the minimum service and training provided by a Western military power. Special forces members, explosives experts, pilots, and officers with training experience and other specialized skills are in demand.

Although the need for foreign volunteers cannot be predicted, there are certain starting points for employment. The main centers for recruitment of mercenaries (almost always ex-soldiers) are Pretoria, Johannesburg, Istanbul, Bangkok, London, Brussels, Marseille, Washington and Beirut. High level security employers have offices in Washington, New York, Pretoria, London or Paris. They supply men to train troops, provide security and generally do what the local military can't or won't do. Make sure you have a contract and remember even the best laid plans go awry as they did for EO in PNG.

Getting a job in the merc world is a long way from the "Employment with a difference" classified ad placed by Mike Hoare in South Africa when he set out to recruit mercenaries to fight in the Belgian Congo. Having neither the budget nor the time to train men, he put together what he called his "Wild Geese," the name of an ancient Irish band of soldiers for hire. He managed to defeat the Simbas, rescue white women and embarrass the UN. And, he received a book and movie deal later.

Remember, if you find a recruiter in a bar who is looking for "a few good men," they are usually filling grunt and junior-officer levels only for second tier gigs. The players have already cut their deal up at the top, and they need to fill in the holes to get paid. Top level giggers like Executive Outcomes got $20 million for supplying 2000 soldiers and another $20 million for arms and supplies. Not bad, but don't forget they still paid their ground pounders about $2000 a month.

There are also horror stories about hucksters preying on the gullible, as in Angola in the '70s. The U.S. government paid to hire mercenaries out of London in their bid to oust the Cuban supported MPLA. Four groups of 185 men were sent in to fight with the FNLA. It was a disaster from the start. Psychotic officers (like 25-year-old Costas Georgiou, aka "Colonel Callan") executed their own people, few skirmishes were won and when it was over, 13 mercenaries were put on trial and four were executed by a firing squad (one had to propped up on his stretcher to be shot properly). The high hopes, empty talk and wasted time continue today (see IADP: The Wild Goose Chase). Even if you do find someone who has a gig for you, remember that they get paid by the head count, and once in that country you can be turned down, arrested or sent into action on your first day without training, weapons, gear or ammo. The reality is that most experienced mercenaries either use the old boy network or simply fly to the capital city of an emerging war zone and offer their services directly to the military advisors for whichever side they feel is the most desperate. Their services usually include rounding up cannon fodder like you.

There are also a lot of home-grown soldiering that usually leads nowhere. Some like the Falangists and Chamounists in Beirut in the '80s brought in eager French Falangist Party students, but most look for trained, hardened professionals with special skills. Your paycheck is an occasional bad meal and a place in heaven for fighting the good fight. Young Kashmiris are given a few weeks training and humped off across the mountains to Indian Kashmir to raise hell and end up dead in shootouts.There seems to be no age limit. In Africa young Ugandan school boys are rounded up and used as porters for rebel groups, kidnapped young girls become part time pillows and cooks. Isn't war fun?

Because of the old-boy network and need for inside contacts, many soldiers of fortune do not make their money fighting on the ground, but make themselves available for higher level training and transportation contracts. They might source leased aircraft, arrange weapons transfers, organize rescue attempts, or train eager recruits to shoot guns and blow things up. All the while living in air-conditioned comfort complete with CNN.

Today's mercenary is not a cigar-chomping, muscle-bound adventurer with a bandolier of 50mm bullets and grenades hung like Christmas ornaments. He is more likely to be an unemployed soldier 30-35 who can't find work with his specialized skills. The pay is good when you have skills and tepid if you don't (mercenaries make between $2000 and $15,500 a month, depending on skills, rank and type of job, and the benefits), EO takes great pains to provide medivac, health and life insurance as well as long term treatment for wounded. And the chances of getting killed depend on which side you pick. If you are fighting a bush war, your enemy will take great pleasure in torturing you and parading you around like a three headed goat. Americans can also lose their passport or citizenship if they fight in the service of a foreign army. Others will most definitely be jailed and tried for war crimes. Mercs are not accorded prisoner of war status under the Geneva Conventions.

Are there any loopholes? If you are hired to invade another country, destroy property, kill or hurt people, or even to destabilize a democratic or undemocratic government, you are breaking the law. If you do not live in the attacked country, have a foreign citizenship, are on a mission to rescue someone, or you're just hanging around a war zone, you can be shot as a spy or foreign agent. If you are in a country that has declared a state of war, remember it is much easier and cheaper to shoot questionable characters than to fill out the paperwork.

If you want to truly be a volunteer like the German Steiner (the Sudan) or Argentinian Che Guevara (Uganda, Cuba, Bolivia), remember that Steiner was tried, imprisoned and tortured, and Guevera was ventilated by CIA operatives and dumped in a hastily dug Bolivian grave.

There are some gray areas that afford some (but little) protection. Make sure you enlist in a recognized foreign army. Join a foreign legion like the French Foreign Legion; have a civilian work contract for a recognized government. You could fight with a recognized army in a foreign territory (like our army in the Gulf or Vietnam) that is not technically at war but helping someone else win a war.

The skinniest loophole is offering your services for a higher pay rate in a foreign army where you are seconded to another army. Technically, you can join as a regular service member if there are no local troops with comparable experience. Will that stop the opposing side from parading you around like a zoo animal, then doing a flamenco dance on your testicles? No.

Be warned that there are plenty of cheap movies and bad books attempting to add the luster of righteousness and adventure to the mercenary life. These books tend to be short on facts and long on gun talk. They provide hard-to-find tips like "never handle explosives carelessly" (from the Mercenary's Tactical Handbook by Sid Campbell) to "take no unnecessary risks" (from the African Merc Combat Manual from Paladin Press).

There are some good books on this nasty business, most long out of print: The Brother's War by John St. Jorre, Legionnaire by Simon Murray, Mercenary by Mike Hoare, The Last Adventurer by Rolf Steiner, Mercenary Commander by Jerry Puren, and probably the most accurate, well-written and depressing of the bunch, the Whores of War, Mercenaries Today by Wilfred Burchett and Derek Roebuck. Whores, published in 1977, chronicles the misfortunes of 13 American and British mercs in Angola who were captured, tried and executed or imprisoned. Sobering stuff for wannabe's.

Movies like the Dogs of War and The Wild Geese, and TV shows like Soldier of Fortune have some credible origins in real events, and real mercenaries were used as resources to create the scripts as well advise the filmmakers on location. But somehow once the cameras rolled, it all turned into pure gun love complete with sweat, bulging muscles, babes, hand held machine guns and chomping cigars.

Some would-be mercs and real mercs read Soldier of Fortune magazine. To be fair, writers, like yours truly and DP contributors Rob Krott, Jim Hooper and Roddy Scott, have been published in SOF. But in our opinion, SOF adds a little too much macho gun-love salsa to what are typically skanky, sweaty low budget guerilla tours with complicated political backgrounds. So what separates the "pass the cigars and keep feeding me ammo" publications from the real thing? Well we at DP like to think that the real litmus test of a publication's readership is always the quality of the ads. Yes, SOF is read religiously by a large military readership but there are those ads that make you wonder just who is really reading this adventure mag. Here, the terminally tough can order "Combat Babe" posters for $10, buy military medals they never won, learn how to be a private eye and even correspond with "gorgeous" and obviously lonely Russian, Asian and Latin ladies. For those who can read without the need for large pictures, there are articles on "Screw the Bitch, Divorce Tactics," secrets on how to hit a man 11 times in one second or less, or help on where to buy steroids. If you're less of a lover and more of a handyman you can learn how to convert your SKS to full auto or buy a Ferret armored vehicle.

The bottom line is the merc business is about 99 percent bullshit and one percent reality, and the reality part usually sucks. Despite having to buy your own beret, cigars and big knife, you will end up spending time in the most godawful parts of the world, and if a land mine doesn't get you, then the bugs will. If the bugs don't get you, the long arm of the law will.

Any time you leave the apron strings of Uncle Sam's army, you are on your own, and even if you are not in violation of any laws, you will be accused of being a criminal (actually, a criminal has rights-you won't) without any rights and dealt with accordingly.

To be fair, we should inject a little romance and adventure into this much maligned avocation. The true movers and shakers in the mercenary world are the classic megalomaniacs; vicious self-promoters and verbose ex-soldiers who see their role beyond that of a short-term gun toter-as a potential ruler of faraway kingdoms. So our advice, if you are going to get into this nasty business (the retirement program sucks), is to think big, don't take any checks and make sure you remember your hat size when you order your crown.