Three years ago, a recently retired Canadian army sergeant named James Davis wrote an interesting and timely exposé of life in the lower ranks of the Canadian armed forces. The Sharp End: A Canadian Soldier’s Story was warmly received by soldiers and veterans alike as an honest memoir from the peacekeeping trenches. Davis has since moved into the world of international security consultancy. I picked up his latest book, Fortune’s Warriors, hoping for the same kind of candour applied to his new shadowy trade.

I have every confidence Davis knows a lot about security consultants: unfortunately, he’s still working as one, and the omertà of his trade prevents him from telling us anything we didn’t already know. Instead he’s given us a book mostly about mercenaries – a job he hasn’t done and seems to know little about. Apparently unaware of the common-sense definition of the concept – a soldier serving in a foreign land, one who feels all conditions of military service are ultimately negotiable – Davis writes his own.

So we read that all soldiers in foreign armies are mercenaries – allowing Davis to include the Foreign Legion, Canadian Vietnam vets, and Spanish Civil War volunteers alongside more traditional soldiers of fortune. And anyone who commits immoral acts, like desertion or rape, can’t be a real “merc”: he is, according to Davis, a “freebooter,” and hence outside the definition. It’s a neat little trick that allows Davis to ignore the inherent problems with mercenarism that Machiavelli, among others, raised.

Much of the history in the book is laughable, from Davis’s claim that mercenaries really won the battle of Waterloo to his bizarre take on Congo’s civil war in the 1960s, which manages to get almost every salient fact wrong. Davis’s international affairs commentary is also problematic. His proposals in this vein, from having small Pacific island countries augment their national income by becoming mercenary bases to handing over UN peacekeeping to contracted mercenary armies, rarely rise above the level of silly.

Sadly, Davis devotes too little space to one subject his recent experiences really do make him an expert on: the current crisis in Sierra Leone. Nowhere is evil more evident in the world today than in that poor country, and Davis’s own outrage at what he has seen there is heartfelt. In a concluding chapter, he provides some sensible-seeming solutions that Western individuals and governments could pursue. His call for a new volunteer legion to assist the Kabbah government might have garnered more support, however, if it had been the focus of his book, rather than buried amid other sub-standard material.