“Steve Fainaru tells a story that is at the heart of the war in Iraq: the U.S. military’s unprecedented reliance on mercenaries. It is a dark tale that until now has remained largely untold, and is related brilliantly here. To understand this war, you must read this book.”

— Thomas E. Ricks, senior military correspondent, The Washington Post, and author of Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2003–05.

 

“For this mordant dispatch from one of the Iraq War’s seamiest sides, Pulitzer Prize–winning Washington Post correspondent Fainaru embedded with some of the thousands of “private security contractors” who chauffeur officials, escort convoys and add their own touch of mayhem to the conflict. Exempt from Iraqi law and oversight by the U.S. government, which doesn’t even record their casualties, the mercenaries, Fainaru writes, play by “Big Boy Rules”—which often means no rules at all as they barrel down highways in the wrong direction, firing on any vehicle in their path.

Fainaru’s depiction of the mercenaries’ crassness and callousness is unsparing, but he sympathizes with these often inexperienced, badly equipped hired guns struggling to cope with a dirty war….Fainaru’s vivid reportage makes the mercenary’s dubious motives and chaotic methods a microcosm of a misbegotten war.”

— Publishers Weekly

 

“The book’s strongest sections describe the mercenaries’ cowboy culture and capture scenes at home that reveal the influences shaping their personas. Fainaru takes to heart the old journalistic adage, “show, don’t tell,” as he portrays men seeking to escape difficult personal circumstances, who crave adventure even if it means losing their lives…An informative, dramatic look at a significant, often unexamined, aspect of contemporary military culture.”

— Kirkus Reviews

 

They are "the unwanted, doing the unforgivable, for the ungrateful," according to a tattoo adorning an American private security contractor—one of the tens of thousands of mercenaries who work alongside the understaffed U.S. military in the shadows of the Iraq war. Fainaru, a Washington Post reporter and 2008 Pulitzer Prize winner, was embedded with the mercs of Crescent Security Group—a ragged outfit that "commutes to war" in armored pickup trucks from their Kuwait City villa, braving ambushes and enemy fire to help ferry convoys and cargo along Iraq's perilous highways. Some—like Jonathon Coté, a former paratrooper who plays practical jokes on his comrades and doles out toys to local kids—earn their paychecks and adrenaline rushes with honor. Others are renegade cowboys with AK-47s, issuing pronouncements like "I want to kill somebody today" the way one might propose dinner plans. Punctuated by a kidnapping with awful consequences, Fainaru's harrowing exposé illuminates a $100 billion industry "where death, in many respects, is the cost of doing business."

—Time Magazine

 

“If you read only one book about the war in Iraq, make it this one. What makes Big Boy Rules so special is that it not only captures the horror of the conflict, but also, in focusing on the government’s dependence on hired guns, Fainaru exposes what he calls America’s “original sin”—our outsourcing of the war.”

— Penthouse

 

“If Jeremy Scahill’s provocative Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army (2007) is an eye-opener about the political ties and big finances of one contractor, then Big Boy Rules is another eye opener—and, in the end, a tear-inducer—about the loose ties and loose management of contractors’ employees…”

— Military Times

 

"Big Boy Rules reads more like a novel than a newspaper as it weaves [Jon] Coté's life into the larger story of the shoot-'em-up security contractors.”

— St Louis Post Dispatch

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