Reply #10: I take your point re: mercenary [View All]

[markses]

I too have thoughht that the word is not quite fit, since - ostensibly - they are not running offensive ops. At the same time, I think "security guard" is a bit off as well, since they are in a war zone, and they are taking a direct side in that war zone, even if it is primarily defensive in nature. "Contractor," while technically correct at a rather high level of abstraction (they are indeed operating under a private contract for pay), is certainly misleading as to specific activities.

But rather than quibble, I think the difficulty of naming their roles precisely should be read productively. I think it indicates a certain newness to this kind of activity. I'm certainly not arguing for an absolute novelty (I'm sure we can find operators doing more or less the same thing in both the recent and distant past), but it does scramble our categories a bit. These guys are not Alden Pyle, but I am reminded of the passage in Michael Herr's Dispatches:

"There had been Ivy league spooks who'd gone mucking around in jeeps and beat-up Citroens, Swedish K's across their knees, literally picnicking along the Cambodian border, buying Chinese made shirts and sandals and umbrellas. There'd been ethnologue spooks who loved with their brains and forced that passion on the locals, whom they'd imitate, squatting in black pajamas, jabbering in Vietnamese. there had been one man who "owned" Long An Province, a Duke of Nha Trang, hundreds of others whose authority was absolute in hamlet complexes where they ran their ops until the winds changed and their ops got run back on them. There were spook deities, like Lou Conein, "Black Luigi, " who (they said) ran it down the middle with the VC, the GVN, the Mission and the Corsican Mafia; and Edward Landsdale himself, still there in '67, his villa a Saigon landmark where he poured tea and whiskey for second-generation spooks who adored him, even now that his batteries were dead. There were executive sppoks who'd turn up at airstrips and jungle clearings sweating like a wheel of cheese in their white suits and neckties; bureau spooks who sat on dead asses in Dalat and Qui Nhon, or out jerking off in some New Life Hamlet; Air America spooks who could take guns or junk or any kind of death at all and make it fly; Special Forces spooks running around in a fury of skill to ice Victor Charlie."

Maybe we need to add a new category to our list...;-)