“They come from across the globe: former special forces soldiers from Britain, the U.S., Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and every country on the European mainland. There are Gurkhas from the Himalayan foothills and Fijians from the South Sea Islands. There are men who learned their skills with the Japanese antiterrorist paramilitaries and many from southern Africa. There was even one guy who’d served in the Chinese People’s Army and Chilean commandos and Sri Lankan antiterrorist experts who joined the mercenary gold rush to Iraq. They don’t share a common ideology or common loyalty, but what they do share is a thirst for adventure and a hunger for big bucks; Iraq is the one place they are certain to find both…”

For the first time a private military contractor delivers a frontline report on life as a hired gun in Iraq.

 

“Anyone entering Iraq must travel the road from Amman to Baghdad along the Fallujah bypass and around the Ramadi Ring Road. It’s the most dangerous trunk route in the world, used as a personal fairground shooting gallery by insurgents and Islamists with rocket-propelled grenades and Kalashnikovs. For newcomers to the country it’s terrifying – but hell only really begins when that first journey ends…”

 

Amidst the ongoing controversy over the widespread employment of private military contractors in Iraq, Highway to Hell is a mercenary’s graphic, first-person exposé of life in “the second biggest army in Iraq.” Not since the days when the East India Company used soldiers of fortune to depose fabulously wealthy maharajas and conquer India for Great Britain, and mercenaries fought George Washington’s Continental Army for King George, has such a large and lethal independent fighting force been assembled. Hired to do everything from securing American bases and supply routes to guarding the thousands of government officials, executives, aid workers, journalists, and other civilians now populating the Middle East’s most notorious target range, today’s clandestine soldiers of fortune earn up to $1,000 a day, while remaining almost entirely immune from government oversight, military authority, or Iraqi law

John Geddes, a former warrant officer in Britain’s elite SAS and veteran of several wars, became a private military contractor in Iraq immediately following President George W. Bush's declaration of the end of hostilities in early May 2003. In Highway to Hell Geddes gives an unsparing account of his harrowing, often bloody, and occasionally absurd adventures in the wild west of Iraq. After a chaotic chase on the Ramadi Ring Road, he takes out insurgents with a sniper rifle (while nursing the mother of all hangovers). He provides security to a cameraman during to a shootout on the rooftop of a Baghdad hotel alongside Kalashnikov-wielding Iraqi waiters (and accepts a marriage proposal that is almost drowned out by RPG fire). He witnesses American contractors shooting and pushing other vehicles off the road first and asking questions later (or, rather, not at all). From rushing a TV crew into the mayhem of a suicide bombing’s aftermath to accompanying an oil executive to a meeting in the heart of darkness of Sadr City, Geddes presents a stunning, chilling inside look at the face of contemporary warfare.

Geddes, a private military contractor, delivers a frontline report on life asa hired gun in Iraq.

I’m a soldier of fortune. I’m a hired gun, a mercenary if you like, and I was trying to keep the other guys alive on the drive from Jordan to Baghdad along the most dangerous road in the world, down the Fallujah bypass and round the Ramadi ring road. It’s a route they call the Highway to Hell.

In the wake of the Blackwater controversy, John Geddes is the first security contractor in Iraq to capture his frontline story in a full-length, first-person book. A chilling account of life in the $100-billion-a-year “second-biggest army in Iraq,” Highway to Hell goes behind the scenes with the clandestine soldiers of fortune–some of whom earn up to $1,000 a day—hired to protect the thousands of executives, aid workers, journalists, and other civilians now populating the Middle East’s deadliest shooting gallery. A veteran of Britain’s elite Special Forces unit, Geddes depicts hair-raising gunfights with insurgents, renegade American contractors who shoot first and ask questions later, and the intricacies of a bloody hostage market. Probing far deeper than the bestseller Blackwater dared to go, Highway to Hell is a riveting account of this forty-five-thousand-strong private, multinational force and its daily duel with anarchy.

Present-day Iraq is a crucible of torture and Islamic terrorism, swamped with insurgents pitched against the mighty US Army and its allies... but there's another wetner army in Iraq that dwarfs the British contingent and is second only in size to the US Army itself.

It's a disparate and anarchic multi-national force gathered from twenty or more countries numbering some 30,000, a mercenary army of men and a few women with guns for hire earning an average of $1,000 dollars a day. They are in Iraq to provide security for the businessmen, surveyors, building contractors, oil experts, aide workers and, of course, the TV crews who have flocked to the country to pick over the carcass of Saddam's regime and help the country rebuild.

Based in London, John Geddes is a principal at Ronin Concepts, Ltd., a private security company. His military career spans more than two decades, including distinguished tours around the world with the Special Air Service.