Mercenary mum: my journey from young mother to Baghdad bodyguard. Neryl Joyce. 2014.

Mercenary Mum is the true story of Neryl Joyce, a young single mother who went from working at her local Woolworths to serving as a soldier in the Australian Army’s elite Close Personal ProtectionUnit. She later left the army to become a high-risk security contractor, where she was responsible for protecting high-threat targets from assassination and opportune attack in Iraq.

Vividly and powerfully, Joyce takes us on a journey through the battlefields of Iraq. She suffers the loss of close friends on the infamous Route Irish. She reveals what it’s like to be a woman in a brutal man’s world, and a victim of sexual abuse. And she tells how she survived all this to return home to her son.