THE MERCENARY

A thrilling and emotional story about the bonds forged in war and intentions gone wrong from.

As the world slowly come to terms with America's misadventures in Afghanistan, much has been written about the political and military failures there. But The Mercenary is a shorter, more personal book that explores the human side of the conflict, seeing the big picture in micro. As much a literary memoir as a work of reportage, this book belongs in the tradition of Karl Marlantes and Colum McCann's Apeirogon. Using his own experiences and relationships as a war reporter, Stern captures the psychological and emotional tolls as much as its violence and political fallout.

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 The Mercenary, 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, The Mercenary 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.

Jeffrey E. Stern is an award winning journalist and author. Stern has written three books, including The 15:17 to Paris, which was turned into a major motion picture by Clint Eastwood and Warner Brothers, and The Last Thousand, which received honorable mention for best book of the Year by Library Journal. He has reported from Yemen, Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Kashmir, the epicenter of the west African Ebola outbreak, and Oklahoma's death row. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and other outlets. In 2019, he received the Overseas Press Club award for the best human rights reporting in any medium, and the Amnesty International award for foreign reporting.