The Mutiny of the American Foreign Legion
They fought America's wars, now they're fighting for their own freedom.
Genre
Thriller
Hugo Ayala has burned his bridges with the Colombian military by denouncing murders committed by his former officers. After surviving a bloody assignment in Yemen with an American security company, he completes U.S. Army basic training. But he's blocked from becoming a green card soldier by new anti-immigration laws. He stays on as an illegal, and joins the American Foreign Legion, an immigration rights group whose members have fought for the USA.
Meanwhile, Immigration and Customs Enforcement is detaining and deporting thousands of people a day, without due process. But now the communities being targeted include Hugo and others who know how to fight back. The leader of the AFL has his own political backers and doubtful motives. As each side ratchets up the violence, American political unity starts to crack.
This gripping thriller which draws on current events and little-known facts:
- Many non-citizens serve in the US armed forces and as employees of American security contractors. For example, the second US Marine killed in action in the Iraq War was Guatemalan. A recent MIT study of these green card soldiers is subtitled “Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat”.
- Border Patrol agents “have gone from having one of the most obscure jobs in law enforcement to one of the most hated,” according to the New York Times. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deport people without due process, including US Citizens.
- A recent Chicago Tribune op-ed describes how current how the current “struggles over immigration echo the conflict over slavery”. Confrontations in Texas over immigration have been described as “civil war” in the New York Times.
LAPD had closed off the street at both ends of the block, and small crowds were gathering. Some just wanted to see the action, others chanted slogans: “Abolish ICE,” “Deport ICE from California,” “Chinga la migra.” Some of them kept one eye on the livestream on their phones.
There was a service alley behind the unit where Devon was holed up. A third ICE truck slalomed between the dumpsters, skidding through the garbage, and came to a halt by the rear entrance. The alley was too narrow to turn the truck to face the back door, so both officers scrambled out of the passenger-side door and took cover behind the vehicle, one behind the hood and the other behind the rear wheel.
“Stay back,” shouted an AFL voice from inside the building.
Reflexively, each ICE officer strafed the back door with a burst of automatic fire. Some of the rounds hit the checker plate of the door but only left dents. The AFL returned fire from a couple of holes in the wall. One was a round air vent, and another where a brick in the wall was missing.
At the front of the building, one of the ICE officers continued firing toward the AFL gunman on the roof behind the cornice.
“Changing clip.”
“Roger.”
No one on the roof took the chance to return fire.
Out the back, in the alley, the two AFL shooters concentrated their automatic fire on the cab of the ICE truck, which buckled, then shattered in a shower of glass and shrapnel. Now there were knots of people at each end of the alley as well, and they cheered.
In front, the four ICE officers switched from targeting the roof to the window, shredding what was left of the blinds. Now some of the bullets were getting through the shield behind the window and ricocheting inside the unit.
They paused for ten seconds.
“Seems like they’re done.”
“Roger. We’re going to breach.”
Josh went back into the truck and came out again with a door-breaching ram. He hefted it slowly over to the door as Carl walked alongside him with his pistol aimed at the window. The other two agents covered the building with their carbines.
In the back alley, the other ICE agents were no longer under fire either, but they kept their weapons trained on the exit.
When Josh got to the front door, he looked around at the others and they nodded at each other. He swung the ram and the front door gave way.
Carl went through the front door as Josh dropped the ram, drew his pistol, and followed him.
Their eyes adjusted to a dark office space. The only window was beside the door and had been blocked off by three full filing cabinets, one laid horizontally on top of the other two. These had been Devon’s shield. The metal of the cabinets had been ripped apart by ICE gunfire. The paper contents had been blown out and now lay like a layer of confetti on the grubby linoleum. Around the window was a scattering of automatic pistol cartridges.
Further back from the window, there was a man-sized hole in the floor. Carl jerked his head towards it, and both ICE agents approached, guns drawn. A plank of wood lay across the hole with a rope tied around it and going down into blackness.
Neal Alexander was born in Newcastle, England, and lived and worked in Nigeria and Papua New Guinea before moving to Colombia in 2004. He is a founder member of Extraliminal Producciones and took part in the 2006 Cali Festival of Performance Art. He has co-written and produced short films with Extraliminal including two in Ecuador as part of a Wellcome Trust Public Engagement award: El Shupa and Kepa Pajta. In 2024 he published his first novel, The Mutiny of the American Foreign Legion.
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Can you, for those who don't know you already, tell something about yourself and how you became an
author?
I changed my day job to part time, and moved to Cali, Colombia. I co-founded Extraliminal Producciones, and we’ve made several short films from scripts by myself and others. The most recent is called Alfor the Tinker and is about an anthropomorphic animal trying to make his living in the city by recycling. I’ve also written feature screenplays as well as my current novel.
What is something unique/quirky about you?
I’m not an extrovert but sometimes I dive into the deep end, for example in the Cali Festival of Performance Art in 2006. Our piece started with me on stage wearing a flip chart attached to a sandwich board. As I declaimed a manifesto about the democratization of art, my collaborator, Javier Alvarez, ripped pages off the flip chart and pasted them up on stage. Then the two of us headed out of the auditorium. The audience followed us out onto the street where the final sheets were pasted up among the graffiti opposite the building.
Tell us something really interesting that's happened to you!
In 1989, my Avianca flight out of Lima was delayed after a holiday in Peru. This was the first time I had to identify my bag on the asphalt before getting onto the plane. I later learned that the extra security was because Pablo Escobar had blown up another Avianca plane over Colombia. I missed my connection in Bogotá and the airline put me in a hotel. When I turned on the TV news, I saw the security police’s Bogotá HQ in ruins after a car bomb. When I went back to the hotel reception as planned the next morning, they told me that the others in my situation had already left. I got straight into a taxi and, when I reached the airport, was mightily relieved to see that there was still a queue for check-in. I didn’t ever want to go back to Colombia, and never imagined that I'd move there permanently fifteen years later…
Where were you born/grew up at?
I was born in Newcastle in the north of England. When I was still a baby my parents moved to rural southwest Scotland and I grew up there.
What do you do to unwind and relax?
In the municipality of Cali there are more bird species than in all of Europe. There are several places in the hills around the city where you can see many of them up close, and I like to spend a night or two there with my family. Those birds come up quite often on my Instagram.
Describe yourself in 5 words or less!
Thoughtful.
Do you have a favorite movie?
One amazing movie that I reference in my book is Starship Troopers. Now I can hardly believe my eyes when Neil Patrick Harris, aka Doogie Howser MD, appears in a leather trench coat like a Nazi torturer. On first viewing, I thought we were on his side! Only recently did I realize that the enemy “brain bugs” are based on the Ohmu guardians in Nausicaa, the Studio Ghibli eco classic. (Meanwhile, my book references an entirely different strand of the film…)
What literary pilgrimages have you gone on?
I went with my wife to Haworth, which is the village in Yorkshire (England) where the Brontë sisters grew up. My father’s side of the family is from Yorkshire. The three Brontë sisters, and their brother, were children of a clergyman and grew up socially distant from the working class children around them. Sometimes I imagine writing a bathetic version of their childhood, based on me and my sisters in rural Scotland, children of two outsiders, miles from the nearest kids our own age.
I never thought I’d write a thriller, but it seemed the right way to express the overlap between two ideas. The first arose from meeting a friend of a friend who’d been a soldier in the Colombian army and then worked for an American security contractor in Afghanistan. The guy was very genuine and idealistic which, in my ignorance, weren’t characteristics I’d really expected from someone with that background. The second idea was from a history podcast, in which the narrator sometimes makes pointed remarks like “Just as well that couldn’t happen nowadays, huh?” In particular, paying foreign armed groups to solve your security problems, like the Romans with the Goths, the Romano Britons with the Anglo Saxons, and the early French with the Vikings. Those armed groups don’t always want to just melt away again, especially if they haven’t got what they were promised.
What can we expect from you in the future?
On Amazon there’s a space to name your book series. It seemed a pity not to use that, and I chose Rebels of the American Hemisphere. Then, I didn’t want to just leave it behind without coming up with some ideas for the next one. There’s something of a clue to those ideas in Devon’s backstory, which we learn towards the end of the current book. My next book won’t necessarily be in that series, however, because I also have ideas on other themes.
Where did you come up with the names in the story?
There’s an airport in Medellín named Alaya Herrera which is still a bit of a tongue twister for me. However, I find Alaya quite euphonious by itself, so that became my protagonist’s surname. Then, in Spanish, the H in Hugo is silent, making it sound more guttural, suggesting someone very different to the kind of Hugo in Succession, for example.
What did you enjoy most about writing this book?
I like getting into minutiae and I needed a lot for this book. Not just about security contractors but also, for example, how nurses work, and how medical errors happen. As usual, it's not that people are negligent but they're put into an imperfect process with imperfect tools. I spent a lot of time reading about automated drug dispensing machines, dose calculation for cancer meds, and drug-drug interactions.
Who designed your book covers?
David Prendergast. He was patient with me and I’m really happy with how the cover turned out.
If your book was made into a film, who would you like to play the lead?
Michael Mando, who played Nacho in Better Call Saul, could be a good Hugo. He’s got a strong presence for action sequences, but also conveys inner thought and conflict. And his build is how I imagine Hugo. He’d need to be less manicured than Nacho, though.
How did you come up with the name of this book?
I have a weakness for short titles. For this book, for a while I liked “Sekyu,” which is a Filipino slang word for security guard. Maybe it's euphonious but it’s too opaque. Yes, a title should be intriguing, but not too cryptic. With time I found out more about green card soldiers, and the military angle became important. Although the current title is relatively long, I think it's strong and people find it impactful.
Convince us why you feel your book is a must read.
The book plays into the theater of live violence that's been part of California since the televised shootout which wiped out the Symbionese Liberation Army in 1974. In the book, the violence takes place in landmark locations such as Sacramento Tower Bridge and LA City Hall, and is not caused by some random mastermind, but by real issues affecting the current United States, such as conflicts between state and federal forces over immigration.
Did You Know?
Many non-citizens serve in the US armed forces and as employees of American security contractors. For example, the second US Marine to be killed in action in the Iraq War was Guatemalan. A recent MIT study of these green card soldiers is subtitled “Between Model Immigrant and Security Threat”.
Border Patrol agents “have gone from having one of the most obscure jobs in law enforcement to one of the most hated,” according to the New York Times. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deport people without due process, including US citizens.
A recent Chicago Tribune op-ed describes how the current “struggles over immigration echo the conflict over slavery”. Confrontations in Texas over immigration have been described as “civil war” in the New York Times.
Stuff about Writing/ Reading
What are your top 10 favorite books?
Gulliver's Travels
(Jonathan Swift, 1726)
Wuthering Heights
(Emily Brontë, 1847)
Sentimental Education
(Gustave Flaubert, 1848)
The Confidence-Man
(Herman Melville, 1857)
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
(Robert Louis Stevenson, 1886)
Dirty Snow
(Georges Simenon, 1948)
The Black Prince
(Iris Murdoch, 1973)
American Psycho
(Bret Easton Ellis, 1991)
American Pastoral
(Philip Roth, 1997)
My Year of Rest and Relaxation
(Ottessa Moshfegh, 2018)
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