American Mercenary

"An elite Navy SEAL Team 6 operator trained to kill the United States' most dangerous enemies takes readers inside the unadulterated, morally complicated and riveting post-military adventures of a lethal American mercenary. Daniel Corbett is an elite Navy SEAL operator. Or he used to be one: SEAL Teams 5, 6, and 17. It's the only thing he has done his entire adult life. Corbett has, in Liam Neeson's voice, "a very particular set of skills" that the Navy spent millions of dollars developing and imparting. He knows how to sneak, subvert, recruit, disappear, survive, evade, resist, and exert. And of course, he knows how to kill. The Navy saw to that. What the Navy categorically did not see to was Corbett's post-Navy life beyond the usual veteran's benefits. So Daniel took the one option he'd only barely considered: contracting. There were still plenty of bad guys in the world, and the only sin worse than wasting talent in dead-end pursuits is not using it in the first place. The work was reassuringly familiar and fed his malnourished adrenal glands. It also paid well. But then things suddenly changed for Corbett in 2017 after an assignment in Serbia to track a terrorist financier. His work was strictly surveillance, but a simple misunderstanding led to his arrest by local police. When the authorities learned he was a former Navy SEAL, they imagined the worst: that he was there to kill the president of Serbia. They threw Corbett in jail, where he spent the next 18 months making international headlines and awaiting his fate in court. This book echoes the struggle so many veterans now deal with: how to reconcile their service with where they are now. The life of a mercenary wasn't just the best option for Corbett, it felt like the only option. And he learned to embrace it, even after it got him in trouble overseas. The first tell-all of its kind, American Mercenary is an adrenaline-pumping but cautionary memoir that captures all the drama, action, and pathos of wartime, but in the unseen dark corners of these non-wartime conflicts"--