No one knew how many there were, not even after they formed unions and trade associations like the International Peace Operations Association and the Private Security Company Association of Iraq, with officers and lobbyists who fumed whenever anyone suggested that they were, in fact, mercenaries, fighting the war for money. The estimates ranged from 25,000 to 75,000 or even higher. The Pentagon estimate was 25,000—an entire division of hired guns spread across the battlefield. The GAO estimate was almost twice that: 48,000. Once in Baghdad I met a South African merc who had formed another merc union, the International Contractors Association. His name was Jaco Botes, and his organization’s purpose, he told me, was to bring regulation to an industry that was “changing the whole idea of warfare.” Botes was lean, fair, and eerily composed, especially for someone who had been in-country three years and had been attacked nineteen times. He didn’t talk about it much but at one point he said, “Someone you just spoke to . . . and then like that . . . there’s nothing left of them.” His voice trailed off. “It angers you.” But he insisted he wasn’t a mercenary. He said he was like a Brinks guard. He estimated there were 30,000 to 50,000 people like him in Iraq.

It had started small, a byproduct of all the mistakes at the beginning: not enough troops, ignoring the insurgency, starting the reconstruction prematurely. Soon they were everywhere: guarding the diplomats, the generals, military bases the size of small cities, and thousands of supply convoys filled with guns and ammunition and food. Suddenly no one and no thing could move around Iraq without them. Some human rights groups had mercs. The media had mercs. The International Republican Institute, chaired by John McCain, and the National Democratic Institute, chaired by Madeleine Albright, used mercs to spread democracy. The Iraqi politicians had them full time and the American politicians had them whenever the delegations came through to find out how the war was going. The market was so hot it became known as the “Iraq Bubble.” The demand to be safe never stopped, so neither did the supply. The mercs came from the army, navy, air force, marines, from small-town police departments and the LAPD. And from other nations’ armies: the British SAS, the Australian Defence Forces, the Nepalese Gurkhas. One Peruvian I met swore that there were ex-members of the Shining Path in Iraq, the terrorists who had massacred thousands of peasants during the eighties and early nineties. Terrorists fighting terrorists.

I didn’t really blame most of them, even though a lot of people did, demonizing them and calling them all kinds of names, many much worse than “mercenary.” The lessons of Vietnam were such that no one was about to criticize the troops for the disaster that the government had perpetrated in Iraq. But the mercs were fair game. I met an ex-cop from L.A. who did two years running the Baghdad airport road for perhaps the biggest merc company of them all, Blackwater USA (later Blackwater Worldwide). He was short and friendly, with salt-and-pepper hair, and went by the call sign “Miyagi” because of his resemblance to Pat Morita in The Karate Kid. He had one of the hardest jobs imaginable, driving up and down the most dangerous road in Iraq. Then one day a bomb went off next to him. The shrapnel tore through his thigh and nearly sliced off his dick; he needed three stitches to hold it together. (Afterward the doctor told him, “By the way, your boy is gonna be fine.” To which he replied, predictably, “Since you’re working down there, can I get an enhancement?”) By the time I met him, Miyagi was broke, his marriage finished, and he was trying to find work near the beach in Santa Barbara. It wasn’t easy. “People look at you weird,” he told me, slightly bewildered. “They look at you sort of like you’re a trained killer or something.” But if ever there was a place that needed highly trained killers, it was Iraq. It was basic economics, really, a sudden windfall for the chronically and inexcusably underpaid, like veterans and cops and firefighters. If they had started handing out $20,000-a-month jobs for elementary school teachers in Iraq, they, too, would have turned out by the thousands. For most of them, this was all they knew. Here was an opportunity, fully sanctioned by the United States government, to sell those killing skills at a premium. And you could easily get your dick shot off in this job, or worse. It was the contractors’ war, anyway. Not just the mercs but the janitors and the cooks, the truck drivers and the bomb disposal experts. By 2008, there were an estimated 190,000 contractors of all stripes in Iraq; they outnumbered American troops by 30,000. The total cost of these private contracts since the start of the war was $85 billion, or one-fifth of the U.S. government’s overall spending on the war. It was, in all respects, the largest use of private forces in any major American conflict.

Contractors kept the Iraq war running, so it only figured that they fought it, too. But when it came to the mercs, the government didn’t even have the decency to count them. Maybe because if it did, all the basic barometers that the Pentagon used to measure how the war was going—troop levels, number and frequency of attacks, and, especially, casualties—would have gone out the window. But there were never any statistics, as if mercs exist. They didn’t die or get wounded or engage in combat. They were everywhere and nowhere. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers employed at least a half dozen companies—thousands of armed men—to provide security on the $58 billion reconstruction of Iraq. It was some of the most dangerous, and frequently lethal, work in the country. But when the corps Logistics Directorate began to report casualty figures up the chain of command, the military deleted them, according to Victoria Wayne, who served as deputy director of Logistics until 2006. “It was like there was a major war being fought out there, but we were the only ones who knew about it,” she told me. After a year of protests by Wayne and Logistics Director Jack Holly, a retired marine colonel, the casualty figures—hundreds of mercs and other contractors killed and wounded—were finally included in Army Corps of Engineers reports. But they represented only a fraction of the total—just those who worked for the Corps—and even then were not included in the official body count. Wayne called private security contractors (she and Holly never used the word “mercenary”) “the unsung heroes of the war.”

As the mercs expanded their presence, there was a kind of institutionalized ignorance that pervaded everything about them. It was as if the U.S. government desperately needed them to prosecute its failing war, but wanted to know as little as possible about who they were, what they did, and, especially, who was responsible for their actions.

In the spring of 2005, Bob Bateman, an American infantry major, was traveling through Baghdad in the backseat of an unmarked sedan. As the car approached a congested intersection, a Blackwater convoy came barreling through. The black armored Suburbans and Expeditions bullied cars up onto the sidewalk. At least one Blackwater merc started popping off rounds. Bateman later wrote: “I cannot say if the shots were aimed at us or fired into the sky as a warning. I do know one thing: It enraged me . . . and Blackwater is, at least nominally, on our side.”
Blackwater was not nearly as notorious as it would later become. But the encounter was telling not only for its frivolous brutality but also for the official U.S. government ignorance that it ultimately revealed.

Bateman, a war-fighter/historian/blogger, had written books on the Korean war and conflict in the digital age. His wife, Kate, a liberal Democrat from Maine who spoke Hindi and Urdu, at the time was serving as vice president of her class at Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. Kate began to ask pointed questions about the men who had blasted away at her husband. A few months after the incident, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld came to speak at Johns Hopkins. When the question-and-answer period came around, Kate was ready for him.

“I’m a first-year student here at SAIS,” she began. “There are currently thousands of private military contractors in Iraq. . . . Since the private contractors are operating outside the Uniform Code of Military Justice, can you speak to what law or rules of engagement do govern their behavior?”

Rumsfeld stammered out a suggestion that the mercs fell under Iraqi law. “Iraq’s a sovereign country,” he said, dubiously.

Two months later, the commander-in-chief, George W. Bush, showed up at Hopkins. Kate pressed on: “My question is in regards to private military contractors,” she told the president.

As she unspooled her question, Bush rested his left arm on the podium, his tilted face betraying utter bewilderment.

“I asked your secretary of Defense a couple months ago what law governs their actions,” said Kate.
Bush interrupted her: “I was gonna ask him.”

The crowd laughed as the president then issued a mock plea: “Help!”

“I was hoping your answer might be a little more specific,” Kate deadpanned, the crowd now laughing at the commander-in-chief.

She nervously plowed ahead: “Mr. Rumsfeld answered that Iraq has its own domestic laws, which he assumed applied to those private military contractors. However, Iraq is not currently capable of enforcing its laws, much less over our military contractors.” “Hmm,” said Bush.

“Mr. President, how do you propose to bring private military contractors under a system of law?”

“Yeah, I appreciate that very much,” he responded. “I mean, I wasn’t kidding. I was gonna pick up the phone and say, ‘Mr. Secretary, I’ve got an interesting question.’ That’s what delegation is. I don’t mean to be dodging the question, although it’s kind of convenient in this case [more laughter]. But I really will: I’m gonna call up the secretary and tell him you brought up a really valid question, and what are we doing about it? That’s how I work."

But the answer, of course, was that there was no answer. The law, in reality, was Big Boy Rules.