Looking for Trouble: Adventures in a Broken World - Softcover

"A fascinating, compelling, and insightful memoir, wonderfully told. Ralph Peters delivers again. A superb book." Major General Sid Shachnow, U.S. Army Special Forces (retd.) Author of the bestseller Hope and Honor

"Every generation produces an adventurer who captures key moments in unexpected places that define the times. Ralph Peters is our generation's man and he nailed it--for those of us who witnessed the end of empire, there isn't a more brilliant, compellingly written memoir on a shelf anywhere." Colonel Tom "The Man Who Would Be Khan" Wilhelm, U.S. Army (retd.)

Sent off to sift the wreckage of other people's conflicts or assigned to investigate strategic crises first-hand, Peters traveled-- alone or in the company of a few remarkable fellow soldiers--to the badlands of Pakistan and darkness-at-noon Burma, into Iraq on foot and down the drug-ravaged streets of Los Angeles. Whether dodging cocaine cowboys in the Andean Ridge or walking alone into fundamentalist-run refugee camps, Peters brings his adventures and misadventures to romping life in a beautifully written book that's also laugh-out-loud funny.

Looking for Trouble's dramatic settings range from a Kremlin basement to safe houses in Mexico, and its driving issues move from the collapse of empires to the fate of our POW/MIAs, but its true subjects are the unforgettable characters that leap to life in these pages: a dangerous narco-general determined to keep the disco era alive; an insanely brave Special Forces officer who sneaks into Taliban-run Afghanistan to play polo; a wistful princess trapped in a lost world; a dashing Hungarian-American Army captain who has a genius for getting into--then back out of--trouble; a happy-go-lucky gangster whose luck runs out just before dawn; doomed Mexican cops and KGB hard-liners; gunmen and militias of various descriptions; an Army major who could be mistaken for a knight arrived by time machine from seventeenth-century Poland; and with guest appearances by the Buddha and Boris Yeltsin.

Sometimes by design, at other times by dumb luck, Ralph Peters was on the spot to see the global storm clouds gathering: the rise of Islamist extremism, the spread of murderous warrior culture, the breakdown of fragile states, and above all, the human stories crushed beneath the headlines.

Fans of Ralph Peters' writing on strategy and military affairs will recognize the sources of his ahead-of-its-time thinking in these pages--but this luminous book is, at heart, a love letter to lost worlds and splendid friends. Above all, it's enormous fun to read.

RALPH PETERS has been a lifelong traveler, in and out of uniform, with experience in 70 countries on six continents--and has a talent for spotting (and enjoying) crises. After rising from the rank of Army private, he retired shortly after his promotion to lieutenant colonel to write with greater freedom. His twenty-three published books, written under his own name and as Owen Parry, include influential works on strategy and security affairs, prize- winning historical novels, and bestselling thrillers. An opinion columnist for the New York Post, Peters has written for a wide range of publications and is a frequent media commentator. Recent travels have taken him back to Israel, throughout Africa, and back to Iraq.