JOHANNESBURG –  I have few heroes.  Most took their own lives and that’s probably not a good sign but one who has yet to smear a wall is Robert Young Pelton, author of 2006′s Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in The War on Terror.

When he is not busy trading vicious accusations of being a War Tourist with other adventure-journo-types, Pelton specializes in reporting on modern tales of daring-do from pirates to insurgent groups to Mexican bounty hunting.  Perhaps his most notable work is his frequently updated handbook on how going to and surviving the world’s most dangerous places, The World’s Most Dangerous Places.  He has also worked for ABC, National Geographic Adventure Magazine, and Men’s Journal as well as producing his own shows and documentaries and he even has his own knife, Allin.  All this from a Canadian. Whodathunk?

Would you like an episode synopsis of one of his programs?

“Kidnapped” – Pelton intended to be back from vacation to film a show about 9/11 in America but was kidnapped. His footage of the brutal kidnap is interwoven with previous trips to Grozny, Chechnya where he interviews a captured Russian spy Aleksi Galkin, then to Uganda where a young terrorist puts a bomb under Pelton’s table at the Speke’s Hotel seriously injuring a number of patrons. Pelton then spends a long bloody night in Kampala, Uganda at other bomb sites trying to save shattered victims before heading to meet the SPLA in Southern Sudan and finally Peru in which Pelton’s journey inside the drug war is cut short when he is hit and seriously injured by a car while riding his motorcycle on a mountain road.

As I said, Pelton hasn’t killed himself yet but not for lack of trying.

Licensed to Kill is considered by most to be the best tool available for a civilian trying to understand the brave new world of the Private Security Contractor (PSC), its history, and how it relates to (or sometimes straight up is) mercenary work.

The book features Pelton’s interviews with the real deal including 75 year old Billy Waugh, “Special Forces legend, seasoned CIA paramilitary, renowned assassin, covert operator, and world’s longest operating ‘Green Badger’ — or CIA contractor” to the slightly less-than-legit, such as the comedically narcissistic “operator,” Keith “Jack” Idema to the fascinating (and very scary in a oh crap, my tax dollars are going towards this kind of scary) including interviews with Tim Spicer (you remember Tim Spicer, right?) and Blackwater founder Erik Prince.  There is also an updated account of the fallout from The Wonga Coup, most notably Pelton’s continued efforts to free his friend and top shelf mercenary, Nick du Tiot.

The book is perhaps best known for the detailed accounts of daily life for a squad of then yet-to-be-publicly-ridiculed Blackwater Worldwide contractors as they traverse “Route Irish” or “IED Alley,” the deadly highway between the Green Zone and the Baghdad International Airport.

It’s pretty rare to see depictions of these guys as people and it was interesting to see just what sort of person signs on for an operation like Blackwater and their reasons.  There is also a fun section on how to tell what branch of the armed services a Blackwater contractor served in by his sunglasses.

The book spends a good deal of time musing on the ethics involved in the life of a PSC and the other gun-toting, paycheck collecting gents around the world including the introduction of the PSC as a visible, real world device to be implemented by not only governments but corporate entities (File Under Subcategory: Prophetic RoboCop Principle, see: OCP) and what it means when a country like the  U.S. that has been employing CIA “contractors” and “paramilitaries” for decades to fight proxy wars on the down-low (see: Charlie Wilson’s War) suddenly switches to an such an overt use of paid, non-military personnel that will be put in positions where they will be taking and losing lives on The Company Dollar.

Perhaps most importantly, the book tackles the difficult philosophical question: what is the difference between being a Private Security Contractor (PSC) versus a Private Military Contractor (PMC)?

OK, this is very line in the sand and there are really no… whatdoyoucall’em… LAWS to make this separation but, in general terms:

You are a Private SECURITY Contractor is you are strictly defensive, only engaging enemies with gunfire as a means of escape, to remove clients from zones of danger, or to keep enemies from locations you are charged to guard while if you are actively seeking and attacking enemy combatants, you are a Private MILITARY Contractor, synonymous: mercenary