From the Magazine
April 2014 Issue

The Chaos Company

Wherever governments can’t—or won’t—maintain order, from oil fields in Africa to airports in Britain and nuclear facilities in America, the London-based “global security” behemoth G4S has been filling the void. It is the world’s third-largest private-sector employer and commands a force three times the size of the British military. On-site in South Sudan with G4S ordnance-disposal teams, William Langewiesche learns just how dirty the job can get, and how perilous the company’s control.
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G4S explosive experts at work in South Sudan. From left: Sila Jopa Mathew, Pierre Booyse, and Adrian McKay. With strife all around, the task they face seems endless.

I. Death on the Nile

Late last fall, at the start of the dry season in the new country called South Sudan, a soldier of fortune named Pierre Booyse led a de-mining team westward from the capital city, Juba, intending to spend weeks unarmed in the remote and dangerous bush. Booyse, 49, is an easygoing Afrikaner and ordnance expert who was once the youngest colonel in the South African Army. He has a full gray beard that makes him look quite unlike a military man. After leaving the army he opened a bedding store in Cape Town, where he became the leading Sealy Posturepedic dealer, then opened a sports bar too, before selling both businesses in order to salvage his marriage and provide a better environment for his young daughter. The daughter flourished, the marriage did not. Booyse returned to the work he knew best, and took the first of his private military jobs, traveling to post-Qaddafi Libya to spend six months surveying the munitions depots there, particularly for surface-to-air missiles. It was dangerous work in a chaotic place, as was the next contract, which took him into the conflict zones of eastern Congo. From there he came here to South Sudan to do minefield mapping and battlefield-ordnance disposal for G4S, a far-flung security company engaged by the local United Nations mission to handle these tasks.

G4S is based near London and is traded on the stock exchange there. Though it remains generally unknown to the public, it has operations in 120 countries and more than 620,000 employees. In recent years it has become the third-largest private employer in the world, after Walmart and the Taiwanese manufacturing conglomerate Foxconn. The fact that such a huge private entity is a security company is a symptom of our times. Most G4S employees are lowly guards, but a growing number are military specialists dispatched by the company into what are delicately known as “complex environments” to take on jobs that national armies lack the skill or the will to do. Booyse, for one, did not dwell on the larger meaning. For him, the company amounted to a few expatriates in the Juba headquarters compound, a six-month contract at $10,000 a month, and some tangible fieldwork to be done. He felt he was getting too old to be living in tents and mucking around in the dirt, but he liked G4S and believed, however wearily, in the job. As he set out for the west, his team consisted of seven men—four de-miners, a driver, a community-liaison officer, and a medic. The medic was a Zimbabwean. All the others were soldiers of the Sudan People’s Liberation Army, the S.P.L.A., now seconded to G4S, which paid them well by local standards—about $250 a month. At their disposal they had two old Land Cruisers, one of them configured as an ambulance with a stretcher in the back.

Four miles out of town, Booyse’s car broke down, and Booyse radioed for help. Juba is a dirt grid on the Nile, a mega-village of several hundred thousand. It lacks municipal water, sewers, and electric power. The company’s compound stands near the center. The radioman there once showed up in a pink suit and tie. He informed Booyse that a mechanic would be dispatched to solve the problem. The arrival time was another matter, and Booyse did not ask. For hours he waited with his team beside the road. Then suddenly the radioman called again—this time about a deadly explosion in a local street market said to be littered with dangerous munitions. The United Nations asked G4S to intervene fast. Booyse commandeered the ambulance and rushed back to town.

The market is called Souk Sita. It occupies a junction of footpaths and dirt tracks in a neighborhood known as Khor William—a garbage-strewn district of shacks and mud huts inhabited largely by impoverished soldiers and their families, and centered on decrepit military barracks belonging to the S.P.L.A. Some of the children there—maybe homeless, and certainly wild—spend their days collecting scrap metal to sell to Ugandan dealers, who occasionally show up in a truck to buy the material for penny-on-the-dollar cash, or for ganja, a potent form of marijuana, apparently laced with chemicals. Routinely the scavenged metal includes live ordnance. That morning the Ugandan traders had arrived as usual, and—in the likeliest scenario—a boy perhaps 10 years old had accidentally detonated a medium-size device while trying to dismantle it. The explosion had killed him and three other boys of about the same age, along with one of the Ugandan adults.

Booyse arrived at Souk Sita at 3:30 P.M., five hours after the explosion. By then the bodies had been taken to the morgue, and all that remained of the carnage was a small crater and some bloody shoes. Booyse’s immediate problem was to remove the visible ordnance before dark, only three hours away, because the place was obviously dangerous and could not be cordoned off. Treading softly among the munitions, he counted three 82-millimeter mortar rounds, two 62-millimeter mortar rounds, seven 107-millimeter rocket warheads, one complete 107-millimeter rocket (fuzed and fired and therefore rigged to blow), seven 37-millimeter anti-tank high-explosive incendiary projectiles, a hand grenade with a sheared-off fuze, and a heavily dented rocket-propelled grenade. He instructed his crew to take a thin-skinned metal box from the ambulance and fill it initially with a few inches of sand to create a stabilizing bed for the ordnance. Over the next few hours he gently laid the items into the box, cradling the pieces and snuggling them into periodic supplements of sand. He drove off with the load at dusk, taking care not to jostle the box on Juba’s atrocious streets, and deposited the lot in a purpose-built bunker at a G4S logistics base on the north side of town.

In the morning he returned with his team and continued with the surface cleaning, gathering scrap metal into piles, and finding plenty of small-arms ammunition. Two days later, when I first met him, he was still at it—a bearded figure in sunglasses and bandanna working with one of his de-miners in intense heat while the rest of the crew went door-to-door to ask about other munitions and to try to establish the identities of the victims. Booyse invited me into the work area, saying, “It’s probably safe—just please don’t bang your feet on the ground.” We stood by the crater. He guessed it had been made by a medium-size mortar. His de-miner swept a patch of ground with a detector that squealed loudly. Booyse raked the patch and uncovered a spoon, a nut, a nail, a twisted wire bundle, and several AK-47 rounds. Leaning on the rake and sweating, he said, “Ach, you just get more and more the more you go down.” But the chance of finding anything large was small. The door-to-door search was hardly better. That morning the team had found five pieces of unexploded ordnance, but two had disappeared before they could be collected. Most of the residents questioned had professed ignorance, and a few had demanded cash. With more fatigue than humor Booyse said, “Because, you know, the African five-point plan is ‘What’s in it for me?’ ”

Four days after the accident, the names of the dead remained unknown, and the South Sudanese government could not be roused to care. This was now high on the list of concerns, because for the U.N. no job is finished until the paperwork is complete. With Booyse busy securing the market, G4S managers decided that someone should go to the morgue to see what could be learned directly. For this they enlisted the company’s indispensable man, a typically tall Dinka named Maketh Chol, 34, who first went to war in 1987 at the age of 9, and now—in street clothes, as a serving S.P.L.A. lieutenant—works as the chief liaison officer and fixer for G4S. The Dinka constitute the dominant tribe of South Sudan, whose men are born to rule and taught to disdain menial labor, but Chol is not just one of them—he is also a member of LinkedIn. On his page he lists G4S as a recreational company, but that is merely a mistake. Feel free to contact him directly if you have a good commercial idea. Beyond his duties at the headquarters compound he is an energetic entrepreneur. Among his ventures already, he owns a sewage-trucking company that empties the septic tanks of certain establishments in town and disposes of the waste somewhere somehow. And he would be a good partner in other affairs. He speaks at least four languages. He is reliable. He has a wife and three young children whom he supports in Kenya because the schools are better there. He spent 20 years in a particularly brutal liberation war—two million dead among huge populations uprooted—but he seems not to know that he should be traumatized.

He invited me to accompany him to the morgue. It occupies a small building behind the so-called Juba Teaching Hospital, a facility overwhelmed by needs. We parked our Land Cruiser a short walk away and approached a small group of people waiting somberly on a concrete veranda. An old ambulance waited beside them with its rear doors open, exposing an empty interior and a battered steel floor. Chol quietly got the story. When word of the explosion spread through Juba, it caused no immediate concern, because so many children are wayward now, and in recent memory so many went to war. But after four days without sight of two young cousins, a family in Khor William began to fear the worst and sent two emissaries—an uncle and aunt—on a trip to the morgue. These people were Nuer, traditional adversaries of the Dinka, who had been nominally integrated into the government—some of them as members of the presidential guard—but were increasingly marginalized. The aunt was 20, the uncle somewhat older. At the morgue, the uncle left the aunt outside and went inside alone.

There he found—his nephews lying dead in front of him. He recognized the other boy too. He was a kid from the neighborhood, but the uncle did not know his name. The shredded remains of the fourth boy—the one who apparently triggered the explosion—had been taken away, as had the Ugandan man. The uncle arranged for transport of the remaining three back to the neighborhood for immediate burial. The morgue lacked power and refrigeration, so decomposition had set in fast, and the stench was strong. Chol collected names from the staff. The dead Ugandan was Malau Daniel, maybe 24 years old. The boy who had been shredded and taken away was James Fari Lado, about 10, a Mandari from the cattle country north of town. The two cousins were Garmai Biliu Ngev and Lim Sil Koh, both 13 and from Khor William. The name of the last boy, their friend and neighbor, remained unknown.

A door opened. Workers in surgical masks carried out the dead boys on metal stretchers, and flopped them into the back of the waiting ambulance. The corpses were naked, hunger-thin, and younger-looking than 13. Their blood had smeared the stretchers and dribbled red trails across the ground. They lay loosely intertwined with their mouths stretched open in ghastly screams, their teeth contrasting sharply with the color of their skin. The driver shut the ambulance doors and prepared to leave. The aunt began to sob, her shoulders heaving. The uncle stood by helplessly, holding his hand over his heart. Chol offered them a ride, assisted the aunt into the front seat, and followed the ambulance as it set out through the city traffic. The uncle and I sat in the back on benches along the side. In Khor William, out beyond the S.P.L.A. barracks, the ambulance climbed a hillock and parked in the shade of a tree for the burial; we climbed another hillock to the Nuer encampment. As we arrived at the huts the aunt began to wail. A crowd of women rushed from their households, shrieking and crying around the mothers, who collapsed to the ground.

It was a rough scene. Chol was still missing the name of the cousins’ dead friend. He asked women standing near the grieving crowd. They indicated a cluster of huts a short distance away and said the men there might know. Leaving our vehicle behind, Chol and I walked to the huts, where the men came out to meet us. These were the Nuer presidential guards. Only a few were in uniform, and several were drunk. They were wary of Chol, this Dinka who towered over them asking questions that might have been traps. Finally one of them volunteered that the dead friend was known only as Gafur, and that his mother had been missing for days. That was enough for Chol, and we started back toward the vehicle. The men kept pace with us and the group grew larger. The mood turned ugly, subtly at first, then with accusations that we had allowed the boys to die. Chol calmly kept explaining his role, even as we got into the Land Cruiser and, after several tries, got the engine to start. The men had surrounded the car, but eventually they parted, and we rolled away slowly, down past the S.P.L.A. barracks and toward the center of town.

On a main street we passed a convoy of ambulances moving in the opposite direction. They were carrying victims from villages attacked by insurgents the night before. The insurgents were from a despised group called the Murle, and led by a former political candidate named David Yau Yau, who was angry because he had lost a rigged election. The men under Yau Yau’s command were perhaps less interested in politics than in the chance to capture women, children, and cattle. Merely two years after official independence, South Sudan was fracturing as a country, but the names of the Souk Sita victims could be inserted into the U.N. forms, and for G4S the day had been a success.

II. The Rules

Maps that show the world to be wholly divided among sovereign countries, each with meaningful boundaries and a central government, reflect an organizational model that has never been practical in many places and now seems increasingly obsolete. Globalization, communication, fast transportation, and the easy availability of destructive technologies have something to do with this, as does the fact that all systems eventually tire, and the future cannot be thought up in classrooms. For whatever reason, the world everywhere is getting harder to manage, and governments are increasingly unable to intervene.

Into the void left by governments’ retreat, private-security companies have naturally arrived. The size of the industry is impossible to know, given difficulties with definitions and the thousands of small companies entering the business, but in the United States alone security guards may now number two million, a force larger than all the police forces combined, and during the war in Iraq private military contractors sometimes outnumbered U.S. troops, as they do in Afghanistan today. Globally the private-security market is believed to exceed $200 billion annually, with higher numbers expected in the coming years. A conservative guess is that the industry currently employs about 15 million people. Critics worry about the divisive effects of an industry that isolates the rich from the consequences of greed and at the extreme allows certain multi-national companies, particularly in oil and mining, to run roughshod over the poor. People also object in principle to the industry’s for-profit intent, which does lead to abuses and seems to be an unworthy motivation when compared with the lofty goals ascribed to government. Nonetheless history has amply shown that national governments and aspirants to national power routinely commit abuses far greater than private security could. Furthermore, for the purpose of understanding the industry, the important point is this: the growth of private security is determinedly apolitical. These companies provide a service that people of whatever bent can buy.

G4S stands out primarily because of its size. To place it in perspective, the company fields a force three times larger than the British military (albeit mostly unarmed), and it generates revenues of $12 billion annually. That said, the head offices in England are impressively small. They occupy a boxy building in Crawley, a bland service town near Gatwick Airport, as well as the fifth floor of a modern multi-tenant building in central London, close to Victoria Station. Both locations are brightly lit and tightly controlled, with escorts required beyond the reception areas, apparently because of regular protests that some British activists manage to fit into their busy protest schedules. Currently the main point of contention seems to be the company’s role in Israel, where G4S supplies surveillance equipment to checkpoints and prisons, and in Palestine, where it provides security to supermarkets in the Jewish settlements.

The protesters could not have picked a more difficult target for their concerns. Because it is a public company, G4S is subject to shareholder pressure, but as investors must know, its very reason for being is to stand firm in the face of trouble. Furthermore, this has always been so. The enterprise dates back more than a century, to 1901, when a cloth merchant in Denmark founded a 20-man guard company called Copenhagen-Frederiksberg Nightwatch. Shortly thereafter the company was acquired by its own accountant, a man named Julius Philip-Sörensen, who understood the first of three simple rules that continue to shape the industry today. Rule 1 is that in a business built of low-value-added units (labor consisting of single watchman-nights) it is essential to expand the volume, and this is best done by absorbing existing companies, which come with workers and customers in place.

Subsequent to the founding of the original night-watch company, the story of acquisitions, spin-offs, and name changes is complex but can be reduced to a few essentials. Denmark remained neutral during World War I and prospered by selling to both sides. For Philip-Sörensen, business was good, and it remained so after the war. Two decades later, the fate of the company during the Nazi occupation of Denmark is not clear—the record is blank here. Julius Philip-Sörensen died a wealthy man, in 1956, just as the family moved into the British market by buying up small security ventures there. In 1968 it merged four of the British concerns into an amalgam called Group 4, under an adroit third-generation scion named Jörgen Philip-Sörensen. By following Rule 1 about expansion, Group 4 grew large in a short time, enveloping armored-car and cash-management services, and in the 1980s moving into markets in South Asia and the Americas, among other places. In the early 1990s, while pioneering the private-prison business and prisoner-escort services in Britain, the company suffered some damage to its reputation after eight detainees escaped during the first few weeks of the contract and others rioted in an immigration detention center under the company’s control. For a while, Group 4 was mocked in the press. Years later, having tightened the corporate reins, Jörgen Philip-Sörensen pointed out that, however poorly Group 4 had performed, the British government generally performs worse—with more escapes and riots, and at greater expense. This leads to Rule 2 of the industry: Security is an inherently messy business, but a company need only to perform better than the government to make the case for its offerings.

By 2002, after another merger and now known as Group 4 Falck, the company had 140,000 employees and activities in more than 50 countries, with annual revenues of $2.5 billion. It continued to acquire businesses, such as the American private-prison-and-security company Wackenhut. Then, in July 2004, came the big one—a merger with a British giant named Securicor, which itself had started as a night-watch service in 1935. The resulting conglomerate, called Group 4 Securicor, leapt to the front of the industry, with 340,000 employees working in 108 countries, generating $7.3 billion in annual revenues. The youthful boss of Securicor, Nicholas Buckles, was brought in as the chief executive officer of the new concern. Buckles was 44 at the time—a charismatic man who came from a modest background and drove a Volkswagen bug to work. He had joined Securicor as a project accountant 20 years before and through force of personality had propelled himself to the top. In 2006, after two years of consolidation, and now firmly at the helm, he completed the rebranding of the company as G4S, and accelerated its expansion with no limits in sight: 400,000, 500,000—why not a million employees? Buckles wanted G4S to become the largest private employer in history.

Time would show that he was perhaps overconfident, but the share prices responded to his ambition, making G4S a darling of the London exchange. The company kept growing. Primarily it provided guards—to businesses, government buildings, college campuses, hospitals, gated communities, condominiums, rock concerts, sporting events, factories, mines, oil fields and refineries, airports, shipping ports, nuclear power plants, and nuclear-weapons facilities. But it also provided back-office police support, roving patrols, fast-response squads, emergency medical services, disaster-relief services, intruder- and fire-alarm installation and monitoring, electronic-access control systems (including at the Pentagon), security-software integration, airport-security screening, bus- and train-system security (including fare-evasion monitoring), engineering and construction management, facilities management, prison management (from maximum-security through immigrant and juvenile detention), courtroom prisoner escort, prisoner transport, immigrant repatriation, and the electronic tagging and monitoring of people under house arrest and restraining orders. In addition, it had a global cash-management arm that serviced banks, stores, and automatic-teller machines, provided armored cars and secure buildings where the bills could be held and sorted, and offered international transport security for jewelry as well as cash.

All this, however, was not enough for Buckles. In his drive for expansion he strove to go not just wide but deep. He understood that G4S is in the business of handling risk, and that its low-value-added problem (those single watchman-nights) was due to the fact that it operated primarily in countries that were already tame. It was obvious that a higher-value product could be sold in places where the risks were greater—in Africa, for example, or in the war-torn countries of Southwest Asia and the Middle East. This can be summarized as Rule 3 for the industry: A direct correlation exists between levels of risk and profit. By now the conflict in Afghanistan had been simmering for years, the one in Iraq was nearing its peak, and contractors were reaping fortunes from British and American funds. In 2008, Buckles plunged in with the $85 million purchase of a British enterprise called ArmorGroup, which had started as a high-end personal-security company and had gone early into Baghdad, where it had grown into a full-range armed force, pursuing not just its traditional functions but dangerous activities including convoy escort and base defense. Such companies have little to do with the cartoon image of mercenaries—bands of killer elites raising havoc and toppling regimes—but they have been heavily engaged in combat nonetheless. By the time of the G4S acquisition, 30 ArmorGroup employees had been killed in Iraq.

ArmorGroup had a de-mining and ordnance-disposal division. One of its specialists was a former British Army captain named Damian Walker, who is now a director of business development at G4S in London. Walker, 41, is a compact, good-looking man who never married, because his frequent deployments interrupted every love affair he ever had. He graduated from the University of Manchester with a degree in civil engineering, worked for a period at a customer-service center for Barclaycard, grew bored, joined the British Army, spent two years in training as a Royal Engineer, went into Kosovo with NATO, and spent the first few weeks primarily dealing with dead bodies on the chance—sometimes the case in Northern Ireland—that they were booby-trapped. Over the following years Walker served in Bosnia and Afghanistan between training stints (underwater de-mining, surveillance) back in Britain. Along the way he was awarded the Queen’s Gallantry Medal for a series of actions, including using a Leatherman multi-tool to defuse an unexploded American bomb in a chemical factory in Kosovo, and, at significant risk to himself, neutralizing a German bomb from World War II that was discovered in a suburban backyard in Reading, west of London. He left the army in 2003, went to Australia for a year to work for a friend selling bomb-squad gear and training, and in January 2005 joined ArmorGroup, which sent him to Iraq to manage a program that was destroying seized munitions. The war was heating up then, and Baghdad was unsafe. Walker stayed for 16 months, living in the company’s fortified compound near the Green Zone but venturing out regularly, by preference in discreet soft-skinned cars. Passersby sometimes sprayed gunfire at the compound walls, and one morning an Iraqi man was found dead outside the gate with a knife stuck in him and a note warning those on the inside that they would be next. Walker shrugged it off as a bluff. Like the other ArmorGroup contractors, he carried three weapons: a pistol, an MP5 carbine, and an AK-47. Mostly this guaranteed that he would die rather than be taken prisoner.

In 2005 a peace agreement in Sudan brought the long civil war to an end, and the North began to withdraw its forces, ceding de facto independence to a new country, South Sudan. In 2006 the United Nations awarded a contract to ArmorGroup to go after unexploded ordnance there and start mapping and clearing the minefields. Walker joined another of the company’s top hands to build the Juba operation from scratch.

It was a tough job, living in tents, surrounded by raids and fighting, saddled with former rebel fighters, many of whom seemed to have been picked by the S.P.L.A. for their very undesirability and now had to be sorted out, trained to some sort of standard, and put into the field fast—all this under expatriate contractors, most of whom would have gone elsewhere if they could have. The initial camp stood east of the Nile a short drive outside of town. Conditions were primitive, with meals mostly of beans and rice. Baghdad seemed luxurious by comparison. One morning after a night of gunfire they discovered that a village just up the road had been sacked and burned. The S.P.L.A. claimed implausibly that the attackers were Ugandans from the Lord’s Resistance Army—a standard explanation for South Sudanese disunity. The following night another nearby village was destroyed. Walker decided to relocate. The provisional government obliged by designating ArmorGroup’s employees as internally displaced persons (I.D.P.’s), and qualified them to pitch their tents in a safer area, on a narrow patch of ground sandwiched between a leper colony and a field of bounding mines. For several months it became the home of ArmorGroup in South Sudan, until the company was able to occupy a dilapidated house in town. This was the operation that G4S absorbed in 2008, when Buckles decided to go deep by going to war. Walker had left ArmorGroup by then to consider a safer line of work, but he was persuaded to return, and he headed G4S in South Sudan for the next three years, deploying de-mining machines for the first time, supervising the move into the current headquarters compound, finding ways to shed the worst of the S.P.L.A. soldiers, overseeing the effectiveness of as many as 19 teams in the field, demolishing ordnance, and releasing previously declared hazardous land as effectively de-mined.

III. Headquarters

Juba has changed since Walker first saw it. It is larger now and has some paved streets and new government buildings, including an S.P.L.A. headquarters funded by the United States, a presidential palace, renovated at a cost of $24 million, and a V.I.P. airport terminal that stands across the tarmac from the decrepit public one, with red carpets that can be rolled out to facilitate the movement of dignitaries.

Nonetheless the streets outside the G4S compound are still today hardly more than elongated mud wallows, sculpted by struggling vehicles during the rains, then baked and hardened by the equatorial sun. The compound itself has high cinder-block walls topped by concertina wire; it is narrow and a minute’s walk long. G4S leases the property from a small Lutheran church that abuts it beyond a bamboo fence at its farthest extent. The compound has a dirt parking yard large enough to accommodate a dozen Land Cruisers in a crunch. A sign at the gate imposes a 10-mile-an-hour speed limit, though the space allows for barely half of that. The limit is a London rule, a response to a corporate quest for uniformity. Similarly, health-and-safety managers sometimes fly in to check on standards. The current manager is a woman who does equivalent work for InterContinental Hotels. Some of the men are wary of her, because they relish autonomy, and accept that conditions in the field are neither healthy nor safe.

But the compound seems to pass muster. It has two large generators, which rarely fail together, a private well that delivers relatively clean water, and a septic tank that does not smell. Inside the outer walls, the parking yard is partially bounded by a small, steel-walled radio shack and two large shipping containers converted into offices with desks and computers, and charts on the walls. A satellite dish provides a sluggish Internet connection. The living quarters extend beyond the parking yard on the far side. They consist of a dozen single-occupancy mini-containers and three equally small pre-fabricated houses—all of them set on blocks, covered by wattle shade roofs, and connected by gravel pathways. The rooms have fluorescent lighting and sagging linoleum floors. Each is mostly filled by its furnishings: a narrow bed under mosquito netting, a desk, a chair, a shelf, a small refrigerator, a noisy semi-functional air conditioner, a washbasin, a toilet, and a trickling cold-water shower. I was offered one as a base for my stay in the country. It came with demure nudes on the wall, one of them a Eurasian who was life-size and charmingly shy. The nudes belonged to a previous tenant, a popular young Estonian who intended to marry his girlfriend and move to Los Angeles to study film, but before that signed on for one last year to work for a Danish de-mining concern in Libya, where in 2012 at the age of 31 he was killed by a Chinese-made anti-tank mine—a devilish device equipped with a magnetic proximity fuze that he triggered simply by getting close. Afterward no one at G4S would take his posters down.

On weekdays the compound is usually about half full. On the weekends the population swells as men come in from farther afield for relief for a day or two. When Juba is peaceful and the nights can be braved, a few go looking for distraction in the city’s live-music bars, but most stay inside the wire and take it easy. The compound’s social center is a kitchen under a metal roof, open to the outside high along a bright-yellow wall. There is no company cook, so the men shop and cook more or less collectively. Saturday nights are the special ones, because no work is required on Sundays. Dressed in long sleeves against malarial mosquitoes, glistening with sweat in the infernal heat, the men sit around after dinner drinking Heinekens in the compound’s small open-air bar.

These are serious men, and their casual conversation often involves technical matters in the field, problems in South Sudan, or stories about the deaths and injuries of colleagues—the mistakes that were made, the risks that are never far away. But as the Saturday nights wear on, the men loosen up and begin telling stories at the expense of one another. A particular target when I was there was a young and irrepressible South African named Adrian McKay, fondly known as “Aidy,” who was busily arranging for girls to fall in love with when he went home on leave. One of his targets had asked for college tuition in return, and (after much contemplation) this was a relationship he decided not to pursue. McKay was about 30 years old. He had been a British soldier, and the job for G4S was his first civilian contract. Soon after his arrival he drove with a team across the shoulder of a hill near Uganda and, upon spotting the Nile stretching into the haze below, exclaimed, “Look! I see the sea!” The remark made G4S history. It turned out that McKay did not know that South Sudan is a landlocked country, thought he was in the other Sudan (the one up north), and had had no idea anyway where he was on the map. Booyse said, “Ach, to do this job it probably helps not to be the brightest bulb.” And probably he was right. As measured by ordnance destroyed, McKay was the most productive man in the field.

Later that same night the British at the bar sang bawdy regimental songs. I remember one about a chaplain’s daughter swinging from a chandelier above a garrison party. The good old times. In the Falklands, Iraq, Kurdistan, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Kuwait, Mozambique, Mauritania, Angola, Libya, Lebanon, and Crazy Fucked Up Congo. They call it the circuit. War is not all bad. E.O.D. stands for Explosive Ordnance Disposal. It also stands for EveryOne’s Divorced. Some of the men consort with the local women, which works fine as long as it does not interfere with the job. AIDS is a concern. So is bringing prostitutes back for the night, though only because of theft. On Sunday morning, worshippers at the church next door began chanting “Jesus loves me!” and banging loudly on a drum. Roused from their sleep, the revelers of the night before drank double-strong coffees and did not comment. Their expressions were closed. Some watched a monster-truck exhibition on South African TV. They obviously did not think that Jesus loves them, or that the universe should pay attention to their needs.

This is a characteristic of private soldiering. The job is denuded of delusion. At G4S the men know they cannot return home as heroes, or even expect mention if they die. They will have taken equal risks at lower cost than their counterparts among conventional soldiers—the logic of the business requires it—but there will be no talk of their courage and sacrifice. Far from it: outside of their own little circles, they will be greeted with uncertainty and mistrust. They do not speak about this in South Sudan, but it is unmistakable in their culture. Similarly, though every explosive device they neutralize might otherwise have killed—and disposing of them provides satisfaction—they know that, beyond the job of battlefield clearance, they work in an era when, globally, mines are being planted faster than they can be found. The problem is not just that mines are durable and effective but that they are very good at hiding. In South Sudan alone, the combined efforts of G4S and other de-mining groups working under the U.N. have, after seven years, cleared merely 835 square miles of suspect land, with large tracts remaining to be done. Furthermore, new minefields continue to be planted there—some with mines confiscated by the S.P.L.A. from the de-mining groups themselves. In the face of these realities, and with no grand theme to inspire their work—no Jesus Christ, no national flag—the men of G4S do not strain against history but concentrate on the tangible tasks at hand.

In the highlands near Uganda, one G4S team has been working with de-mining machines for four dry seasons to clear a 7.3-square-mile area of minefields left over from the 1990s and the war between the North and the South. The area is anchored by the ruins of a medical clinic, and it was mined by both sides. An overgrown track once served as the main road to Uganda, but was sown with anti-tank mines, some of which still lurk in the grass just to the side. The track leads to the fast-flowing Aswa River and a demolished bridge. Beside it, a mine that has been uncovered by high waters can be seen in the mud. Back toward the clinic a former community of 2,000 people has completely disappeared. Some locals still brave the vicinity, hunting with bows and spears, fishing, and guarding a riverbank vegetable plot against the depredations of baboons, but the mines lie in wait like ferocious little soldiers who refuse to give up, and the land remains dangerous.

Nationwide the number of victims is difficult to know, though it is obvious that accidents generally go unreported because many of the most vulnerable people are isolated villagers who are actively rebelling against the state. The Aswa clinic, however, is not isolated. It stands near South Sudan’s only paved highway, a two-lane ribbon financed by the United States that connects Juba to the Ugandan border. After two people were killed there by a mine, the U.N. responded by bringing in G4S, which has been using a de-mining machine to clear the land and release it for normal use. De-mining machines are armored bulldozers or tractors that push a heavy chain flail or a rotating tiller and chew up everything in their path to a depth of several inches. They are fast only when compared with the excruciating progress made by human de-miners using handheld minesweepers and kneeling in the dirt with probes.

And 7.3 square miles is 19 million square meters of land. Because each square meter offers about six discrete possibilities for the placement of a small mine, G4S had signed on to clear 114 million potential mine locations—in steaming, undulating, stream-cut, bushy, high-grass, malarial, snake-infested terrain. The trick, therefore, was to refine the map and define the areas where the machines would never need to go. A company manager named John Foran came down to oversee the job. Foran is a kindly Irishman, now 58, who began as an apprentice carpenter and spent 30 years in the British Army, starting as an enlisted man and ending as a major. As a corporal he fought in the Falklands, where he earned the British Military Medal for dragging wounded soldiers from a minefield under enemy fire. Over the subsequent years he worked as a combat engineer in 14 countries and in several conflict zones. Within G4S he was remarkable for his moral authority and intelligence. During the first months of the project in Aswa he watched how the nearby villagers lived and moved, and he walked the land with them, asking himself these questions: Where do they seem happy to go? Where do they hunt freely? Where do they fish? Where have they farmed? Where are they cutting trees now? Also: What would have made sense militarily, and who in the villages was there at the time? What do they remember? Sometimes people were confused, or demanded to be paid, or were unaware of known dangers adjacent to their habitual trails, or falsely claimed the presence of mines because they wanted the machines to till their fields. But by the end of the first season, Foran was able to start writing off large areas as safe—an observational process that, up to now, has allowed for the return of nearly 11 million of the original 19 million square meters, without so much as touching a shovel to the ground. That leaves, however, about eight million square meters, or 48 million potential mine sites, to be handled by mechanical de-mining.

The day base for operations is a dirt yard in front of the Aswa-clinic ruins, with a couple of shade tents and a latrine out back. By the time I arrived, at the start of the fourth and current season, G4S had mechanically cleared three million square meters of the most suspect land—around the clinic and along stream banks and gullies. In the process it had detonated 660 mines and uncovered 231 unexploded munitions. The main de-mining machine was a remote-controlled Mini MineWolf 240, operated from an armored all-terrain troop carrier called a Casper, which followed along behind it carrying a de-mining crew and the MineWolf operator. It was carving an exploratory grid through brush and pushing the pattern forward toward a rocky outcrop in the distance, where a concentration was believed to lie. The man in charge was a taciturn Bosnian named Hajrudin Osmanovic, who at age 43 had been at war nearly all his life, suffering traumas that visibly still haunted him but obviously did not interfere with the job. He worked without respite. He spoke halting English. He gave me the mandatory safety briefing in a manner that meant he apologized. Reading from a checklist, he said, “O.K. (1) Do not run in minefield. (2) Do not pick up anything in minefield. (3) Do not stray. (4) Do not distract de-miners when they are working. (5) In case of explosion, stay where you are. Do not move. Inspect yourself. Stay still. Wait for instruction. (6) In case you are not sure where you are—in cleared area or un-cleared area—stop. Do not move. Wait. Call for help.” He then briefed me on the casualty-evacuation plan. To paraphrase: (1) Stay calm. (2) Exit minefield in Casper. (3) Lie on stretcher in Land Cruiser. (4) Drive to U.N. hospital in Juba. (5) Do not die.

The minefield was extremely hot and required regular retreats even by acclimatized Africans. At night we ate under a tent canopy and slept in a stifling cinder-block barracks left over by a Turkish road-construction crew. Osmanovic spoke at length about his past and mentioned his desire to return for good to Bosnia someday, perhaps to start a business. But he was skeptical about the nature of government there—all of the regulation and corruption—and this held him back. The truth is he was happy enough just staying in Aswa and chipping away at the mines by the clinic. On his Sundays off he often drove through the minefields to the ruined bridge, where he fished in solitude. He never went to Juba if he could help it. He had a largely autonomous existence here in the obscure center of an Africa where few non-Africans go. Perhaps the greatest draw of the private soldier’s life is a culture that leaves men well enough alone.

IV. A Question of Control

Which leads to a final truth about the private-security business, Rule 4: If your company is spread all over the world with hundreds of thousands of employees, and it has grown rapidly through multiple acquisitions, and you are in the business of risk, and you’ve been trying to increase profits by going after high-value jobs with even greater risk, and many of your field operations are remote—well, you will have challenges maintaining control. Fascinated as he was by the multiplying numbers, Nicholas Buckles seems to have come to this understanding late, if at all. A warning arrived in October 2011, when important shareholders blocked his attempt to acquire a giant janitorial-services company for $8.3 billion—a deal that would have transformed G4S into a conglomerate of 1.2 million employees—and began questioning the faith in expansion. Particularly in a business where control would seem to be essential, they wondered if there is such a condition as being too large.

Buckles remained aggressive nonetheless. In 2010, G4S had signed on to provide 2,000 guards for the upcoming 2012 London Olympics—a doable proposition and potentially a boost for the brand. At the end of 2011, however, the British government decided that a greater force would be required, and G4S lunged for it—now on very short notice—by signing a $439 million contract to provide 10,400 guards for the Games. It went without saying that these people would be crisply uniformed, well groomed, well trained, non-discriminatory, upbeat, clean, courteous, healthy, strong, heroic if necessary, ethnically diverse, English-speaking, drug-free, sober, timely, obedient, and possibly churchgoing. How exactly G4S planned to find such people, willing and able to work full-time for only the short duration of the Olympics, was unclear even to G4S. The result was a public spectacle just weeks before the Games, when G4S had to admit that it could provide at most 7,000 guards in time, and the British government responded by bringing in 3,500 soldiers to supplement the security—all this amid howls of outrage in Parliament and the tabloid press. Buckles found himself in the wrong sort of glare, standing before the House of Commons, forced to absorb the insults of grandstanding politicians, to apologize abjectly, and to agree on camera that his security program had turned into “a humiliating shambles.” Between penalties, payouts, and the inability to collect, G4S lost $135 million on the deal.

There have been other failures. Most are simple events, though they have sometimes resulted in death: In Kenya, two G4S armored cars are hijacked with the collaboration of company insiders. In Canada, a recently fired G4S guard robs A.T.M.’s using codes he learned on the job. In Papua New Guinea, off-duty G4S guards at an immigration detention center are accused of getting drunk and harassing local women. In the same facility, a G4S guard supervisor posts a Facebook message reading, “One of these jokers just swallowed a pair of nail clippers. RALMFAO,” for Rolling Around Laughing My Fucking Ass Off. In Tennessee, G4S guards allow three protesters, including an 82-year-old nun, to breach the outer perimeter and wander for two hours inside a nuclear-weapons facility. On numerous other occasions G4S guards throughout the world are caught sleeping. In Britain, G4S staff at an immigration detention center falsify documents to repatriate a man who had a legitimate claim to political asylum. At Heathrow, a man being deported to Angola dies after being restrained by G4S guards on an airliner. And so on. Some of these incidents are more troublesome than others, but all share the well-known theme that guarding, like policing, does not always attract the best people.

Other incidents, however, raise serious questions about inherent limits of control, particularly for a company that fulfills public functions and by its nature invites skepticism and distrust. In Canada, a member of a five-man G4S armored-car crew shoots the other four, killing three, and runs off with the money. In Scotland, a G4S guard on duty at a medical conference kills a delegate by beating her with a fire extinguisher after she complains about having to present her security pass. Even more significant are the incidents that occur within the high-risk areas of private prisons and military operations, because these are precisely the areas where one could presume that operational management would be the tightest.

One of the more worrisome cases occurred in 2009, a year after the company acquired ArmorGroup, when a G4S employee in Baghdad sent an anonymous e-mail to the London office, warning about a former British soldier and civilian contractor named Daniel Fitzsimons, who had just been hired to work in Iraq. The informant wrote that Fitzsimons was unstable, had been fired from a previous job in Iraq after punching a client, was facing firearms and assault charges in Britain, and posed a threat to people around him. It turned out that he had been diagnosed with post-traumatic-stress disorder. According to the BBC, the concerned employee wrote, “I am alarmed that he will shortly be allowed to handle a weapon and be exposed to members of the public. I am speaking out because I feel that people should not be put at risk.” No one at G4S wrote back. On the eve of Fitzsimons’s arrival, the employee sent another e-mail, writing, “Having made you aware of the issues regarding the violent criminal Danny Fitzsimons, it has been noted that you have not taken my advice and still choose to employ him in a position of trust. I have told you that he remains a threat and you have done nothing.” Again he received no reply.

Soon afterward, Fitzsimons got to Baghdad and to the G4S compound, where he was issued a weapon. The next day, after drinking and arguing, he shot and killed two G4S soldiers, a Scotsman and an Australian, and also went after an Iraqi, whom he wounded. Fitzsimons was arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced to 20 years in an Iraqi prison, where he is now. With the mother of the dead Scotsman calling for accountability, G4S provided a maladroit response. A spokesman claimed that the vetting of Fitzsimons “was not completed in line with the company’s procedures,” but then added somewhat contradictorily that the procedures had since been tightened. As for the e-mails, the company was aware of the allegations but said that “no such emails were received by any member of our HR department.” The response seemed to have been crafted by lawyers worried mostly about the consequences in court of statements made in public. But many felt that in this case the company had lost control.

Venturing into war zones is by definition a high-stakes gamble. One of the company’s diciest undertakings is its work for Chevron Oil in Nigeria, in the Niger Delta. Chevron operates there cheek by jowl with rebellious villagers who live amid pollution as the company exports oil and wealth while paying royalties to a corrupt Nigerian government. After the occupation of a refinery by 600 women in 2002, Chevron hired a South African security company called Gray to tighten things up. Gray had previously been acquired by Securicor, which then merged with Group 4 to create G4S. Eventually the contract, which has been lucrative, evolved into a counter-insurgency operation. Today, G4S deploys fast-response patrol boats armed with mounted machine guns, crewed by expatriates, and carrying Nigerian naval personnel to do whatever shooting might be required. Similar arrangements for rapid-reaction squads exist on land. The Nigerian forces involved are technically under government command, but their salaries are paid by G4S. The setup mirrors the one in South Sudan, where active-duty S.P.L.A. soldiers on the G4S payroll are effectively under the company’s control, although in Nigeria the chance of a G4S fiasco is obviously much higher.

There hasn’t been one yet, but doubts remain about the controllability of the situation, and of G4S. Last May, having successfully weathered the Olympics storm, and all the other scandals before and since, Nicholas Buckles resigned after the company issued a profit warning and share values fell by 15 percent. Buckles’s replacement was a buttoned-down outsider named Ashley Almanza, who announced his intention to expand further into Africa and South America. Meanwhile, in October 2013, the South African government took over the running of a G4S maximum-security prison after charges that the guards were so uncontrolled and under-manned that they had taken to torturing prisoners. G4S denied the allegations, but on a higher level some shareholders remain concerned.

V. His Lucky Day

For G4S in South Sudan, these London travails are far away. The men seem to like the company well enough, and they do not worry about its future, because with all the warring in the world they will never lack for jobs. In Juba alone, munitions-clearing teams could work for years without slowing down. Pierre Booyse got a sense of this after he finished cleaning the explosion site at the market, when G4S sent him farther into the Khor William district—out around the barracks and past the dead boys’ huts—to remove whatever unexploded ordnance could be found. Once he started pulling on the threads, it seemed the whole place would unravel. Over a period of days, the team found many unexploded devices. Often they had to be excavated from the ground. Several were mortars embedded in streets and habitually run over by cars. One was a mortar built into the wall of a hut, apparently for decorative reasons. Another was a high-explosive rocket serving to weigh down the lid of a water barrel in a family compound. The worst was an immense trench that was apparently left over from fighting, and deep enough to hide a battle tank. It was enclosed now within a household compound and was used to dispose of all manner of garbage, including human waste, and, the family said, some number of heavy munitions. Booyse was disgusted. He said, “They throw ammo into a latrine and then expect you to come and clean it?” To his chief de-miner he said, “Mark it, report it, recommend it to get filled in. Cap it with concrete. No one’s going to do it, but tell these people not to build on it if it ever gets done. It’s fucking dangerous. I won’t send my people down into that pit, and I’m not here to clean their shit. So kelas! Enough! Leave it as it is!” It was a rare display of impatience. Typically he was courteous to the South Sudanese, concerned about the safety of the community, and diligent on the job.

In return the South Sudanese were noticeably ungrateful. One afternoon at the Souk Sita market a man indicated the pile of debris that Booyse had raked up, and asked if he could take the stuff away. Booyse said, “Take whatever you want. It’s not mine anyway.” The man walked over to the pile, contemplated it for a while, tried to move some objects, came back to Booyse, got a cigarette from him, then cursed him to his face and walked away. Booyse shrugged it off. He said, “The feeling is that we don’t belong here. It’s not about race. It’s about the fact that we’re not South Sudanese.” Alongside a building where Booyse had parked, another man approached carrying a plastic chair and indicated the spot occupied by the car. He said, “I want to sit there.” Booyse understood him to mean it was his country now, and he could do what he pleased. Booyse moved the car.

In December, South Sudan fell into civil war. This was not the standard stuff of rebel raids but a major split between the Dinka and the Nuer that tore the country apart. It started when Nuers within the presidential guard, who had not been paid for months, objected to being disarmed. These were the very soldiers who inhabited the encampment in Khor William—the fathers and uncles of the boys who had died scavenging. The fighting spread rapidly from Khor William to much of Juba and then far beyond. As it metamorphosed from mutinies within the S.P.L.A. into a brutal ethnic conflict, large-scale killing of civilians began, and thousands of refugees fled to U.N. bases for protection. One base was overrun. Seizing the opportunity, a former vice president stepped in to lead the rebellion.

Booyse had predicted the trouble. He had said, “I can’t see into the future, but I can tell you there’s shit coming.” He was an eight-day drive north of Juba, in the town of Bentiu, when civil war erupted in the south. Bentiu is the bedraggled capital of a South Sudanese state called Unity, and is considered important because of oil fields nearby. It has a dirt runway and a small U.N. base protected by Mongolian troops. Booyse’s camp occupied a field by the runway, near a Mongolian outpost consisting of a few soldiers with armored fighting vehicles inside a barbed-wire fence with a gate. As tensions mounted, Booyse decided to break camp and relocate to the outpost, a few hundred yards away. At dusk, with the packing nearly finished, the airport erupted in heavy gunfire. Caught in the open, Booyse and his men sought shelter behind a large fiberglass tank, which offered no protection against shrapnel or bullets but would perhaps help hide them from view. Over at their outpost the Mongolians had disappeared into their armored vehicles and were shooting in apparent confusion, using mounted guns. Night fell. The firing ebbed and flowed, sometimes with mortar and R.P.G.’s being used. In the distance, an ammunition depot began to burn, sending rockets into the sky.

Then, suddenly, four or five soldiers appeared out of the darkness with weapons raised. They seemed to be Nuer, if only because some of Booyse’s de-miners, all of whom were Dinka, began to cry. This was exactly how thousands of people were dying. The leader stuck the muzzle of his rifle up Booyse’s nose and held it there for 20 full seconds, which seemed 60 times that long, and then said in good English, “This is your fucking lucky day,” and took his soldiers away. Booyse had had enough. Determined to reach the relative safety of the Mongolian outpost, he got his men into the team’s two Land Cruisers and, with lights extinguished, drove through the firefight, rolling over bodies and smashing through the outpost’s gates to shelter among the armored vehicles.

That was the worst of it. Later that night, during a lull, they drove in an armored convoy to the U.N. base. Eventually G4S chartered an airplane that evacuated them to Juba. There, they crowded into headquarters with all the others who had come in from the field. Maketh Chol had lost several family members in the killings, but otherwise everyone had escaped unscathed. Khor William was in ruins and littered with ordnance again; 30,000 people, mostly Nuer, were sheltering in Juba in two U.N. refugee camps, one of them the G4S logistics base on the north side of town. A few days later most of the men were flown to Entebbe, and from there to Nairobi and home. A skeletal staff remained in Juba to occupy the compound and anchor G4S for all the business to come.

The men sent home were retained on salary, and told to stand by. They knew that in all likelihood they would return—as indeed they did, in February. Had that not worked out, they would soon have gone to some other post. Enterprises such as G4S are now a part of the international order, more permanent than some nation-states, more wealthy than many, more efficient than most. Indeed, an argument can be made that U.N. peacekeeping forces would be more effective and less expensive if they were constituted from the best private-security companies. Had G4S owned the responsibility in South Sudan, it is unlikely that any U.N. base would have been overrun. This is not about ideology, and it is not intrinsically good or bad. The world is getting harder to manage, and the world is a very big place.