Author: James Ashcroft
ISBN No: 1852273119
Review date: 08/12/2025
No of pages: 256
Publisher: Virgin Books
Year of publication: 11/09/2012
Brief:
The private military contractors (PMCs) in Iraq amount to the world’s largest private army for centuries.
An English-speaking force, it is bound to have a UK private security element. It’s adding to the war’s already huge literature, too.
Facts are hard to collect in the chaos of Iraq. No-one can tell how many security contracts in Iraq have paid for UK business start-ups, mortgages and patios. One man who joined the ‘gold rush’ was Capt James Ashcroft, whose memoir is out in hardback. It’s a vivid tale of $500 a day in Baghdad to supplement the United States military, or the ‘boots on the ground’ as the author puts it. It’s authentic; the contractors don’t get out of a vehicle; they ‘de-bus’; they swear; they face heat, danger, and corruption. The author, after a year at Sandhurst, serves in the British Army in Bosnia and Belfast and becomes a lawyer. But when the call comes, he cannot resist the money, even though he is told “you’re replacing some poor sod who got slotted two days ago”. As the writer puts it, he is ‘licensed to kill by the US Department of Defense’. By page 27, escorting an American journalist from the airport (leaving behind the ‘cold, watchful’ eyes of ex-Ghurkas) to the centre of Baghdad, he and his fellows are pinned down by rebel gunfire within sight of a US military gate, and firing back. Small wonder the Security Industry Authority and UK authorities are taking no steps to licence private military companies. Why read this book? because if you had thoughts of taking such a contract in Iraq, you have done so already. It is as well to know UK ex-military men are one year taking such work in Iraq and Afghanistan and the next year doing the UK’s harder security work, such as stamping out copper cabling thieves, for instance. And such work in Iraq is likely to continue. As Ashcroft writes, it’s an unwinnable war. The foreign invaders are hated. Ashcroft ends with respect for the coalition forces but depressed by Iraqis’ ‘daily tales of loss and fear’.
NCO account
If you are more an NCO than officer, Highway to Hell by John Geddes is more for you. Despite a breathless sub-title, ‘an ex-SAS soldier’s account of the extraordinary private army hired to fight in Iraq’, Geddes, a veteran of Goose Green, writes intelligently and well. He is now a trainer to familiarise people before they enter such a war zone. He is indeed a former Parachute Regiment man who saw the world with the SAS. Towards the end of his racy but self-aware book, Geddes suggests the US may hire a mercenary army in the near future. He argues for private armed forces as a better option, morally even, than United Nations peace-keepers. However Geddes’ own story undermines the case. How would you police the contract? He tells of ‘redneck’ US contractors shooting and pushing other vehicles off the road first, and asking questions later – or rather, not even asking. Geddes too is at pains to write authentically. SAS veterans are always ‘blades’; attackers are never shot dead, they are ‘slotted’. It does grate. In passing Geddes recalls work at the top end of an international market – body-guarding VIPs, guarding a wages run to a diamond mine in Africa. So often, you feel, Geddes and his fellows (including his son Kurt, also ex-Paras) are doing (necessary) work in messy places that the civilised world would rather not dwell on.
Highway to Hell by John Geddes, published 2006 by Random House, 230 pages, paperback. ISBN 1-8460-5063-4, £11.99.
