Hidden Soldier: An Irish Legionnaire's Wars from Bosnia to Iraq

Padraig O'Keeffe · Ralph Riegel

avg, 2013 · The O'Brien Press

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Pádraig O'Keeffe joined the elite and secretive French Foreign Legion at the age of twenty, seeking a challenge that would absorb his interests and intensity. He served with the Legion in Cambodia and Bosnia, then returned to civilian life, but military habits would not allow him to settle.

His need for intense excitement and extreme danger drove him back to the lifestyle he knew and loved, and using his Legion training, he became a 'hidden soldier' by opting for security missions in Iraq and Haiti.

In Iraq he was the sole survivor of an ambush in no man's land between Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, the most dangerous place on earth.

An intense, exciting and vivid account of extraordinary and sometimes horrific events, Hidden Soldier lifts the veil on the dark and shadowy world of security contractors and what the situation is really like in Iraq as well as other trouble spots.

This bestseller also includes photographs taken by Padraig O'Keeffe while he was a Legionnaire and when he was in Iraq.

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PÁDRAIG O'KEEFE is from Cobh, Co Cork. A former Legionnaire, he is now a security expert who works in the most dangerous parts of the world.

Ralph Riegel lives in Cork. He has worked as a journalist for several newspapers including The Cork Examiner, The Evening Echo, The Evening Herald and The Sunday Independent and is the southern correspondent for The Irish Independent. He is also a regular contributor to RTE, BBC and TV3 and to British newspapers including the (London) Independent and The Daily Telegraph.