License to Kill Part 1

Recently I have started to read “License To Kill” for school. Let me start with a little bit of background on why I chose this book to read. I have always known growing up I wanted to be a police officer. It started out with a fascination with guns and everything about them. The first time I shot a real gun I knew it was love at first sight. Another thing that turned me onto this book was the whole mystery of the private military contractor industry. When I started to read this book I had little to no knowledge of what these people are paid to do. When I first started reading this book one thing that struck me was the amount of code words that were used. Maybe for someone reading this book on impulse they could find themselves lost in a seemingly foreign language of acronyms. Once you get use to all of them people will find this book to be a page turner for anyone who is interested in the topic. The book starts out with a brief history lesson on the origins of employing private military contracting companies to accomplish tasks during times of war. The book introduces this decorated contractor, Billy Waugh, who helps to explain the original idea of military contracting. The next part of the book transitions and then dives into the jobs from the perspective of the people on the ground employed by these huge private military contracting companies. I wasn’t surprised to find out that most of the people volunteering for these jobs are ex-military or ex-law enforcement. These large contracting companies have been fighting each other for years to get these humungous government funded contracts. The author of this book follows a group of men during a contract in Afghanistan. Pelton does an amazing job describing the tension between all the men to do their own duty and get each other home safely. Sometimes as we later find out in the book this can be the crucial make or break distinction between life and death.