By James Bouklas

I am an American Patriot and an Informed Citizen. I read voraciously. Books, too, but mainly lots of news sources, in print and online. I get all the political cartoons targeted to the policy wonks. I understand the nuances in the debates. And I handle all this information with aplomb, never frightened of knowledge and always maintaining an even keel. At the end of the day, if you are upset by what you seek to learn, then both the journey and the knowledge are rendered meaningless.

With my scrutinizing eye, penchant towards devil's advocacy, and even a hardened heart, I am perpetually unphased by horror, at the personal, national, and international level. And yet, there is at least one piece of knowledge that I sometimes stumble across and it fills me with fear. I cannot dwell upon it for long. I go so far as to not making it past the lede of a New York Times piece, blasphemy for someone with my love of information. It is the topic of American mercenaries: a phenomenon so grossly against the American way of life that it shakes me to the core.

I possessed the knowledge that we employ hired guns in Iraq since the invasion. I have simply not been mentally or emotionally mature to handle it in any respectable way, and so I ignored it. I've ignored this reality for over four years now, as so many of us have, and find myself finally contronting it with the New York Times headline "Hired Gun Fetish", by Paul Krugman.

Read the short commentary by Krugman and honestly tell me that your stomach doesn't turn. You don't have second thoughts about our government. And you don't turn a whiter shade of pale.

There are over 100,000 "private contractors" in Iraq, with over 48,000 of them serving in a military-like capacity, according to a Government Accountability Report. By contrast, there are, with The Surge, an estimated 160,000 American military troops in Iraq. The only differences are that our military men and women are bound to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, they answer to US commanders, and are grossly underpaid compared with their mercenary counterparts.

I challenge you to Google "mercenary" and "Iraq." I haven't had the guts to in a very, very long time. For those of you who do not grasp the immediacy of the situation, allow me to spell it out for you.

Our government is funneling funds to mercenaries. They are not subject to the rules of war. They do not pledge allegiance to our flag. They constitute a shadow military that operates outside of our legitimate armed forces. And their very being threatens the foundation of our democracy.

Should these relatively mild statements of fact not disturb you to the core, then this essay will in no way move you. You have forgotten, either willfully or through neglect, what it means to be an American. And you have my pity.

This nation was founded on the principle that no man is above the law. And yet, in this crisis, we have non-state actors, armed with guns, taking the law into their own hands, without answering to any legitimate authority. I urge you to draw your own parallels here.

I do not ask President Bush to end this practice, for it would be a waste of my breath and my energies. He is too far gone: remember, his dearly held belief that putting sacred governmental responsibilities into the hands of private actors got us in this situation to begin with. Between vetoing children's healthcare, ignoring the advice of his own men in uniform with regard to our ongoing conflicts, and allowing himself to be our leader in name only, George W. Bush has made it painfully obvious that plans to end his presidency in an even less dignified and coherent way than it began. To quote a Letter to the Editor from the New York Times, the president must be the Commander-in-Chief, not the Contractor-in-Chief.

To the second, third, and fourth estates, I leave you with this message: I feel your pain. To face this ugly truth and combat it requires a courage that many men do not possess. It is so shameful a reality that our initial reactions are to ignore it, even when it stares you in the eye. I do not fault you for this, because to truly tackle the issue of American Hessians in Iraq would require the kind of trauma that this nation need not endure.

In the end, the paradigm that allowed the creation of a shadow military, run by private actors masquerading as patriots, will soon be a thing of the past. For in January 2009, when we usher in the president we have deserved all along these past seven years, we can end this policy of outsourcing our military quietly and discreetly, in the best interests of our nation.

Now, more than ever, God Bless America.

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