Mercenaries, Gunslingers and Outlaws

Retired after 12 years in the military, Robert Kurtz had never deployed to war, so when he got the opportunity to deploy to Iraq as a private security contractor, he did not hesitate. The two and a half years he spent in Iraq and the people he met would change his life profoundly.

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Mercenaries, Gunslingers, and Outlaws is the story of 2½ years as a security contractor in Iraq. It’s not just a story about firefights and surviving IEDs while protecting American contractors, although those kinds of stories are there, it shares an account that covers the full spectrum of some of the most profound experiences of his life.

Rather than a chronological account, the book is broken into sections covering an amazingly wide range of experiences and topics. The chapters within each section are relatively short and tell complete stories, much like vignettes, that keep the reader turning the pages. The reader experiences IEDs, high-speed crashes, firefights, run-ins with Iraqi security forces, the stress and uncertainty of being surrounded by locals, any one of whom could be an insurgent or suicide bomber, the tactics used to stay alive on the roads, and the inevitable human cost in lost and destroyed lives.

Some sections tell the stories of the people he met and worked beside: former U.S. Army Green Berets, British Royal Marines, a former Lebanese Christian Militiamen captured by the Syrians when he was 16, British Gurkhas from Nepal, South African counter-terrorist commandos, a former member of the French Foreign Legion, and even a Buddhist monk. There are stories of heroic figures who were larger than life, of outlaws who came to Iraq because they didn’t fit in anywhere else and ended up not fitting in there either, and then there are the Iraqi people who invited the author into their homes.