When Neil Reynolds was first asked to work as a private military contractor in Iraq, he didn’t even know where it was on the map. But the Border War veteran and former SANDF officer would quickly learn the ins and outs of working and surviving in that war-torn country. It was 2003 and the US-led coalition that had toppled Saddam Hussein was confronted with a savage insurgency.

His candid, unvarnished account tells of the numerous challenges faced by private military contractors in Iraq: from avoiding ambushes on the highways in and around Baghdad to buying guns on the black market and dodging bullets on several hair-raising protection missions. He describes how his team’s low-profile approach allowed them to blend in with the local population and mostly kept them and their clients safe.

Reynolds also tells the tragic story of four South African colleagues who were kidnapped and killed outside Baghdad in 2006.

Detention operations are vital to U.S. military doctrine and crucial to the success of combat and recovery missions. This book shows that the image of abuse from Abu-Ghraib were but one small, harmful element in an overwhelmingly successful detention mission in Iraq. It focuses on the subsequent developments and successes, explaining the standard rule-of-law approach taken by the U.S. military and examining the work in Iraq of such leaders as Major General John D. Gardner and Major General Douglas M. Stone. Overall, the text moves away from the Abu-Ghraib scandal to illuminate a largely unknown successful development in the U.S. detention operations. Following the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2003-2004, the U.S. Department of Defense scrambled to recover its reputation and that of its troops. As the Bush Administration sought to redefine torture, military judge advocates consistently challenged such moves, arguing in favor of the Geneva Conventions' humanitarian practices. By 2006, Department of Defense policy stipulated full respect for and use of the Geneva Conventions. This development was indeed a victory for American support for rule of law in Iraq, as well as an affirmation of standard practices in the detention command, Task Force 134. Pressures of war, however, continued to present their own challenges.