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James Glasse is a former member of the British Special Forces. After his retirement he was asked to carry out a simple protection job in Iraq, guarding a contractor as he visited vital areas of Iraqi infrastructure at the start of the rebuilding process.
The book traces the way in which a major security firm was build up from a few individuals to a massive operation with hundreds of staff at quite remarkable speed. The firm's main job was to protect key workers as they travelled to and from their worksites and other locations and to protect key parts of the Iraqi infrastructure from attack.
Glasse highlights the different attitudes to former solders serving in security and current soldiers even when they were doing similar jobs (or often doing jobs that the military really should have been doing).
We also get an insiders view of some of the failures in Iraq. The US military is often shown as trigger happy, sometimes arrogant (but also welcome on occasion). There was also a clear failure of priorities, with the military focusing on getting the oil industry working quickly when power, water and law and order should have been their priorities. One gets a clear impression that many American companies believed that they should be getting war bounty, something that comes to the fore at the end of the book when the author's firm was muscled out of the market.
It also becomes clear just how random events could be in Iraq, where survival was sometimes a matter of pure chance (not being in the wrong place at the wrong time), as well as the different between the almost out-of-control Baghdad and the much calmer Kurdish areas.
Chapters
1 - One Last Operation
2 - Back in the Mob
3 - A One-off Job
4 - We Are in Business
5 - Settling In
6 - Spreading Our Wings
7 - Baghdad Cash
8 - Getting Down to Business
9 - The Iraqi Highway Code
10 - Keep on Running
11 - Whose Side Are We On?
12 - Blackout City
13 - Power to the People
14 - Home Comforts
15 - Raising the Stakes
16 - Getting Tougher
17 - Iraqi Roulette
18 - Can It Get Any Worse?
19 - Piggy in the Middle
20 - Pastures New
21 - Nothing is What it Seems
22 - The End Game
Postscript - Still Living the Dream
Author: James Glasse with Andrew Rawson
Edition: Hardcover
Pages: 240
Publisher: Pen & Sword Military
Year: 2013