The Mutiny of the American Foreign Legion - Book Tour and Giveaway

​ They fought America's wars, now they're fighting for their own freedom.  

The Mutiny of the American Foreign Legion
Rebels of the American Hemisphere Book 1
by Neal Alexander
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.


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​After dark, there wasn’t much traffic in Saada. Hugo heard the groaning of a heavy truck on the road behind him, outside the city wall. Then the angrier sound of a faster vehicle coming the other way, then locked wheels scraping against the dirt road. As Hugo turned around to look over the outer parapet, he heard a glooping sound, then saw an Arabian Humvee flip over and down into a ditch full of sewage.

After a shocked split second, Hugo heard shouts from a soldier inside the Humvee. As Hugo ran down the steps to the bottom of the wall, he called over the radio that he was coming to the assistance of the Arabian soldiers. He burst past the policemen, who were edging away from the gate and towards the ditch but were unsure what to do. As he ran in front of the stalled truck, he reached down to his belt and unsheathed his knife. One Arabian soldier was standing at the edge of the ditch, covered in slurry, gazing blankly at the upturned driveshaft of the Humvee.

The head of another soldier was shat up to the surface. Hugo grabbed the arm of the dazed soldier and tried to ask “How many?” in Arabic. The soldier turned his shit-smeared face to Hugo and gradually worked out where he was and what Hugo meant. “One. Driver,” he replied.

Hugo nodded and released the soldier’s arm. He looked at the Humvee again: luckily it was leaning on the passenger side. Then he took a deep breath and dove into the cesspool. He thought back to his training in the Colombian Naval Infantry: imagined he was going into the same pond full of cow shit on the savanna near Bogotá. Cow shit was cleaner somehow. The effluent closed over him as he kicked his legs to swim down along the side of the Humvee. He found the handle to the driver’s door. He didn’t need to force it open, which meant that the inside of the vehicle was already flooded. The driver inside was struggling spastically. Hugo couldn’t pay him any heed now: he had to find the harness that was holding him in. The driver started to grab onto him: his only salvation. Hugo couldn’t lose the knife, so he wrestled free, heedless of the risk of cutting the driver. The struggle was using up Hugo’s air, and he forced himself to stay calm. Now the driver was expiring, flailing aimlessly. Hugo found the harness, cut it, and dragged the driver out. He took a second to check that all the driver’s limbs were free, then kicked back up. On breaking the surface, he snorted out the human waste from his nostrils before gasping for air.
​

 Neal Alexander was born in Newcastle, England, and lived and worked in Nigeria and Papua New Guinea before moving to Colombia in 2004. His 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.

What inspired you to write this book?
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.

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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