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Full Description
War is one of the most lucrative job markets for an increasingly global workforce. Most of the work on American bases, everything from manning guard towers to cleaning the latrines to more technical engineering and accounting jobs, has been outsourced to private firms that then contract out individual jobs, often to the lowest bidder. An "American" base in Afghanistan or Iraq will be staffed with workers from places like Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines, Turkey, Bosnia, and Nepal: so-called "third-country nationals." Tens of thousands of these workers are now fixtures on American bases. Yet, in the plethora of records kept by the U.S. government, they are unseen and uncounted—their stories untold.
Noah Coburn traces this unseen workforce across seven countries, following the workers' often zigzagging journey to war. He confronts the varied conditions third-country nationals encounter, ranging from near slavery to more mundane forms of exploitation. Visiting a British Imperial training camp in Nepal, U.S. bases in Afghanistan, a café in Tbilisi, offices in Ankara, and human traffickers in Delhi, Coburn seeks out a better understanding of the people who make up this unseen workforce, sharing powerful stories of hope and struggle.
Part memoir, part travelogue, and part retelling of the war in Afghanistan through the eyes of workers, Under Contract unspools a complex global web of how modern wars are fought and supported, narrating war stories unlike any other. Coburn's experience forces readers to reckon with the moral questions of a hidden global war-force and the costs being shouldered by foreign nationals in our name.
Contents
Prologue: No Small War
1. Mercenaries, Contractors, and Other Hired Guns
2. Nepalis at War
3. One Blast, Many Lives
4. Costs and Compensation
5. Manpower
6. Two Hundred Years of Gurkhas
7. "Who Will Be a Gurkha?"
8. Through the Colonial Looking Glass
9. The Labor of War
10. A Protective Government?
11. Of Roses and Revolutions
12. Economic Ottomans
13. Turkish Engineers and Other Heroes of the Intervention
14. Building an Empire?
15. Detained
16. Kidnapped
17. Hom Bahadur
18. The Boredom of Being Trafficked
19. Accountants at Wars
20. Classes and Genders at War
21. Returning Abroad
22. When You Can't Go Home
23. Where the War Went
