The Mercenary: A Story of Brotherhood and Terror in the Afghanistan War

<b>A thrilling and emotional story about the bonds forged in war and intentions gone wrong.</b>

In the early days of the Afghanistan war, Jeff Stern was a young reporter, living abroad and looking to make his name by sending dispatches from Kabul. He rode with a driver named Aimal, who had ambitions of his own: to make money by doing favors for Americans and others who came to his country in those violent and auspicious years.

In <i>The Mercenary</i>, Stern tells the story of his relationship to Aimal, and how it grew and changed as their fortunes did. Stern made enough of a career as a writer to move back to America. Aimal became glamorous and wealthy, his money coming from unseen sources. The two remained friends, forged together by war. Until one day Stern got a call that changed everything. He discovered that Aimal had become an arms dealer, and was ultimately forced to flee the country to protect his family.

Their friendship is a story of how ambitions co-opted good intentions, how plans went wrong, and how money and misunderstandings and violence seeped into everything--in short, a mirror image of everything that happened in the war. As we begin the slow process of understanding this decades-long failure, <i>The Mercenary</i> goes beyond the deaths and the political drama to say something harder to quantify: how wars can warp our humanity and derail our best-laid plans.